They believe in racism; do you really believe in anti-racism?

A few weeks back, a movement colleague—noted anti-racist writer and activist Tim Wise—started making videos about a young white man in Tennessee, Dalton Eatherly, who goes by the online persona of Chud the Builder.

Chud apparently for weeks had been posting on X about his adventures in Nashville and other areas, where he “exercised” his first amendment right to free speech by going around looking for Black people to verbally assault and antagonize by calling them the N-word, spewing racist garbage, and telling them to not chimp out. While engaging in verbal racial assaults, Chud also carried a firearm and hoped to provoke random Black people to violence, in hopes that he could then use his firearm on them.

The initial stories were of interest because my eldest son, who is in his 30s, happens to live in Nashville with his family. I started to recognize some of the locations where Chud was seen filming his antics. The whole thing made my blood boil but I said a prayer that my son never crossed paths with this racist and that no one who crossed paths with this young man was harmed.

On Thursday, May 14 in Clarksville, TN, things did take a turn when Chud crossed paths with Joshua Luvv, a 32-year-old Black military veteran reportedly suffering from PTSD. Things escalated and Chud shot the young man and apparently himself. However, things didn’t quite turn out the way that Chud thought they would, as he was arrested and charged with attempted murder and a host of other felonies, adding to a growing list of charges he has caught in other locations for his antics. Chud’s bail was set at $1.25 million and I have heard an unsubstantiated rumor that should he make bail, he will have to prove where the money came from since it seems that prior to Thursday’s shooting, Chud had a crowdfunding campaign up at GiveSendGo, a nationalist alternative crowdfunding platform for people of his ilk.

At first, this looks like a simple case of a young, foolish, and very racist man who has made poor decisions but really this story is more a revealing look into the underbelly of the racism that is engulfing our country—something that too many well-meaning white folks and others who don’t see themselves as racist are brushing off.

See, last year, Chud lost his job for engaging in racist behavior and set up a page on GiveSendGo. Between November 2025 (when it appears the page was set up according to Chud’s pinned post on X) and May 14 of this year, the campaign had raised $70,000. The median annual individual salary in Tennessee is $54,200 for a full year. Suffice to say that raising $70,000 for six months of bigotry is damn good money. It also meant that rather than looking for a job, Chud realized that in today’s political climate, overt nasty racism could be a career unto itself.

But the real story of Chud’s racist earnings isn’t that he earned $70,000 in six months for using his platforms to spew hate and turn his racist vitriol into a slogan.

Since he was arrested five days ago (as of this writing), his campaign is at $261,247.68. That means in five days, people donated $191,247 to this ignorant and violent young man. Almost $200,000 to support him because he shot a Black man. The thing is, this isn’t an aberration; increasingly when racist white people are caught doing racist things, the money pours in to support them.

Last year, Shiloah Hendrix, a white woman, verbally accosted a young Somali child in Minnesota. The incident was recorded and went viral. Racists using the same GiveSendGo platform raised almost $700,000 to support Hendrix. Sure, a competing crowdfunding campaign was set up for the victimized child and his family, but nowhere near $700,000 was raised. These stories have become the new norm. Racism literally can create financial comfort for these despicable people. In today’s world, fame and fortune are potentially the very real outcomes of overt racism.

At the same time, the federal government has targeted DEI efforts and private companies and organizations are following suit by either reducing or completely limiting such efforts. This is also at the same time that Black unemployment outpaces that of all other groups, especially Black women who were particularly hard hit with the DOGE cuts.

This is when the story gets really personal for me.

In this new political reality, anti-racism and racial justice work is vanishing. It literally isn’t being supported. I know because I am the executive director of a small anti-racism organization, Community Change Inc., that works in Maine and Massachusetts. Fundraising dropped drastically last year—our revenue was less than $260,000 and we have been dipping into our reserves to stay afloat, facing the very real possibility that after 58 years, we may have to shut down this year. In all of this year, we have raised a whopping $13,000 over months. It costs almost $22,000 a month to pay staff and expenses. I literally just had to lay off one of our organizers because we are desperately stretching what we do have.

As we prepare for a full-on fundraising campaign to stay alive, I have had well-meaning white people tell me that times are hard and that we may not be able to raise the $150,000 we need to stay afloat this year. Maybe I would believe that if I didn’t just watch a 28-year-old racist raise almost $200,000 in less than a week.

Increasingly, people tell me they can’t afford to support independent writers and creators but as many of us folks of color have noted, it seems it is only our work and skills that people no longer have the funds for. Heather Cox Ricahardson and other white creators with sizable platforms rarely if ever have to ask their audiences to support their work; they stay on the best of Substack lists, which means people are signing up and paying for their work. Yet, aside from maybe two or three Black and Brown creators, the majority of us are hustling to stay afloat and there are virtually no Black creators with a purple check on Substack. A purple check means that a person has tens of thousands of active paid subscribers, over 10,000 to start.

In the larger racial justice and non-profit worlds in general, small BIPOC-led groups are shutting down as larger, white-led groups increasingly move toward focusing more on electoral politics instead of overtly addressing white supremacy. They are managing to hold their own financially, and doing so while downplaying the need to directly fight racism while Black- and Brown-led groups languish. This is at the same time when almost every Black and Brown organizer and group saw their revenues start to drop sharply in the aftermath of the racial awakening of 2020—something that has only accelerated under the return of Trump.

It’s almost as if not being so loud about the heinous nature of white supremacy in this country might be more attractive to donors. Less tiring and maybe more hopeful to them; more pleasant.

Don’t get me wrong. We do need to focus on removing Trump but did we learn nothing after his first term? We got him out in 2020 but look where we are now. In some ways, we would have been better off having him win in 2020, before he had time to perfect his agenda and partner up with a full consortium of techno-fascists and Christian nationalists. We literally saw the racism of 2016-2020, and we saw George Floyd’s murder and we really thought a change of scenery, oops, leadership would solve all our problems.

I have spent several days watching Chud the Builder’s GiveSendGo grow but more importantly, I have read the messages of support and, well, they gave me pause. The number of people saying they didn’t necessarily have extra cash but they believe in him and his “work,” and how important it was to give what they can because, well, white folks reclaiming a white America is a core value to them. So much so, that they will make the sacrifice to support it.

Reading message after message of similar theme turned my stomach but also made me realize that those who lean left are lacking in their convictions when it comes to racism. It’s almost as white people who claim to be progressive would accept passive racism as long as it isn’t overtly obnoxious.

The majority of public-facing work being done by those who are purportedly aligned with anti-racist values is focused on getting Trump out of office. Too many white people are still laboring under the false belief that if Democrats win the midterms and eventually the White House in 2028, all this [wave of hand] will just magically stop. They think that we will have some kumbaya moment that will end the overt attacks on immigrants, communities of color and others, along with the grift in government.

No, it’s not going to just stop because of a shift in party at the federal level. What this moment reveals is how deeply entrenched racism is in our psyche. It is revealing that for far too many white folks, Black Lives Matter was just an era, not a way of life—and for all the books and content written on anti-racism, for many people being anti-racist isn’t a deeply held value. Most certainly not something where one would create a little discomfort for themself to uphold and affirm that value.

For years, people told me that when the old racists die out, we will see racism fade away. Nope, not happening. Chud the builder is 28 and there are plenty of Chuds out there. Just this week, a mosque in San Diego was targeted by two young men, three people were killed, and the suspects who appear to have taken their own lives were 17 and 18 and reportedly left behind racist messaging.

The same algorithms that keep many left-leaning folks in some silo of false hope are also watering down the reality that exists in the same way that the algorithms are feeding scary false racist narratives to the right. Except on their side those algorithms are backed up by the structural weight and power of a racist administration and complicit techbros who are stealthily ethnically cleansing our country.

Last week, I participated in a panel about the Manosphere. For those not in the know, the manosphere is both the title of a recent documentary on Netflix and it is also the section of social media occupied primarily by young men, the majority of whom are white and where racism and misogyny run rampant and are shaping our young men. I participated in the panel both in my capacity as a writer and executive director because it clear to me that bringing youth and particularly young white men into anti-racism spaces is imperative.

Racism is not just a family affair; it is policy. It is seen regularly in the government propaganda that is put out. The subtle messages of white superiority and the tacit knowledge that when our leaders denigrate everyone who doesn’t fit their narrow view of human or of being a citizen, there are real life consequences. It is in the hordes of primarily young white men who have been hired by this administration to seek out immigrants or anyone that isn’t white.

Anti-racists can’t afford to have such a narrow view of the their role and work that they focus only on elections. In this climate, unpacking whiteness matters because when white people realize this is a long game and stop looking for clear metrics and immediate bullet-point results (a staple feature of the culture of whiteness), they are equipped to stay in the work even when it doesn’t seem like much is being done. They come to realize that a lifelong dedication is needed and progress will be slow.

At the same time, white anti-racists also need to start realizing that they need to risk something. They need to have the same (or stronger) strength of conviction in their beliefs that racists and fascists have in theirs.

In my 12 years as the head of Community Change Inc., it has always surprised me how June to September is a dead zone of work as folks step back to enjoy the all-too-short summers we have in New England. Even now, as I talk with local organizers, everyone is bracing for the lack of volunteers and interested bodies, yet we are all expecting folks to show up again after Labor Day. Friends, no one is saying we don’t have some leisure time, but we aren’t going to change a damn thing if we keep insisting on business as usual, complete with our seasonal breaks.

The day the Big Beautiful Bill passed the Senate last year was on the week of the Fourth of July. I remember it well. I had been at my computer and just needed a break. I went to the seasonal island watering hole which was bustling with people who were literally all tapped out. No one had a clue what had just happened in our country and at that moment, few cared. I remember a few days later watching the annual 4th of July parade on my island, which is very progressive and just feeling untethered as most of the participants didn’t allude to anything in current reality; just a celebration of fun. That bill passing has literally reshaped our country and brought misery upon millions and the week it happened, the average well-meaning person was more likely to be concerned with the festivities of the week and good weather.

Whatever happens moving forward, we have to become honest with ourselves and lean hard into our values, and that means living them all the time. It means accepting discomfort as part of the journey. As I recently told someone, the hard-won gains of the Civil Rights movement that ultimately benefitted many people took many years to happen. People stayed at the work for more than a few months here and there.

As a Black woman, I feel that on a molecular level. Especially when you realize that the victory lap our administration is taking was built on work that the right started decades earlier.

We are fighting authoritarian rule but what upholds it is racism, and if you aren’t fighting racism with as much fervor as you push back on the administration and you are white, what are you really doing? Are you just seeking enough comfort so that your flavor of whiteness can be maintained? This moment requires your full presence and your time, talents and, yes, even some of your treasure.

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PS: If you want to support anti racism work in Maine and MA, you can learn more about my organization here. Don’t forget that as an independent writer, as much as l love your comments and sharing, your financial support is what keeps my writing viable. Become a Substack subscriber today, or if you are interested in my more deeper and personal writing with an anti racism lens, become a Patreon patron. Or if you just want to show your gratitude for this piece, consider Buying Me a Coffee.