I know it can be extremely hard, and I know it can be extremely dangerous. But we need y'all. We literally need white organizers to organize other white people.
— Rukia Lumumba, Co-Director of the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project
Organizing white people out of white supremacy is white people’s work. The Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project and other Black-led organizations across the South have been asking white people to take this on, and movement leaders have been clear that elections are strategic ground for it. This year, that means the midterms.
The elections this November decide who controls Congress, and MAGA’s whole operation for winning them runs on recruiting white people. It doesn’t work without white people who go along with it. In Go Get Your People, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson counts roughly 41 million white people who were eligible to vote in 2024 and didn’t – a bloc bigger than every swing state margin combined. They aren’t lost, she writes, they’re unorganized.
“Elections do not necessarily liberate us. Organized people do,” Rukia Lumumba said. Racism is how the far right wins elections – not a tactic alongside their strategy, but the engine of it. Every white person we move out of that engine shrinks the margin they are counting on, this November and beyond.
In May, Tennessee Republicans dismantled the state’s only majority-Black congressional district and redrew it to take in rural, white, Republican-leaning areas. State Representative Justin Pearson, a Black Democratic politician and community organizer, won the primary anyway and is on the ballot in November. Winning now means winning over white voters in those new areas.
In SURJ’s recent webinar, White People’s Work in the Midterm Election, Justin and Rukia laid out why this work falls to white people, and why it’s antiracist work. “Black people should not have to carry both the burden of surviving white supremacy, and convincing white people to reject it,” Rukia said. “It’s an investment that we will all benefit from,” Justin added. It’s worth your time.
Winning the midterm elections won’t end the fight against white supremacy on its own. But it changes the terrain the rest of our organizing happens on. Every seat we flip is less power for the machinery deporting our neighbors, stripping away healthcare, and criminalizing the people who resist – and more capacity for direct action, mutual aid, and base-building. Imagine where we could focus our energy instead of spending everything we have responding to the next racist attack.
Block by Block is SURJ National’s 2026 campaign to win the midterms, enforce the results, and grow our base along the way. Whatever happens in November, we come out of this with more white people organized, more leaders, and more neighbors in the fight for racial and economic justice.
No one said fighting white supremacy would be easy. Register to join us on September 27th, for hands-on training on organizing white people this election. You will practice real conversations, build skills for possible scenarios we may face in order to defend this election, and leave with concrete next steps. No organizing experience necessary!
In solidarity,
SURJ NYC