Everyone is invited to our May Dialogue, which will be a Community Reportback from this year’s White Privilege Conference! The White Privilege Conference is an annual event that brings together about 1500 folks to examine the system of white supremacy upon which every aspect of the US culture is built and to develop the tools, support and strategies needed to dismantle it. This year the conference happened March 28-31 in Albuquerque, NM and the theme was “Intersectionality.” Levana and … Continue reading →
It was a joy and honor to share two White Noise Collective workshops at the 13th Annual White Privilege Conference in Albuquerque. This year’s overall theme was “Intersectionality”. Both times we had a full room of wonderfully engaged participants, intergenerational perspectives, fascinating insights and Theater of the Oppressed explorations. As people entered the room, we asked them to write a word or phrase in response to nine questions that were up on the walls on … Continue reading →
Last weekend, I participated in a flash mob in San Francisco targeting the bank Wells Fargo. We met, rehearsed the moves, planned our entrance into the bank lobby (as well as our escape route) and were able to perform in 3 locations – all in one afternoon. The dance, organized by SF Pride at Work, was about 4 minutes long, which meant that we were able to enter the bank, have our impact and depart long … Continue reading →
I am a white woman and moved to North Oakland a little over a year ago. The implications of that fact alone could fill a book. Despite my fear of perpetuating gentrification, I am a proud Oakland resident and I have stood in solidarity with many of the anti-racist, anti-classist movements of late. I am against gang injunctions; against the police brutality that has become the sad norm for many low-income and residents of color in Oakland; … Continue reading →
Protests erupted across the country this Tuesday, October 11, in the wake of a guilty verdict in the case of the Irvine Eleven. On September 23, a California jury found 10 of the eleven Muslim students guilty of disrupting the Israeli ambassador’s university speech about U.S.-Israel relations. The Orange County jury declared 10 of the 11 University of California, Irvine students guilty of two misdemeanors each: conspiring to disrupt a meeting and disruption of a … Continue reading →
Every year at the How Weird St. Faire in San Francisco, several Howard St. blocks transform into a magical sweetly freaky village of dj stages/floats, art in alleys, local designers, mythological realms, fabulous costumes. Streets taken over for public creative expression, dancing on the concrete in the sunlight is a beautiful thing. One of my favorite things. This year, amidst the dazzle of many outfits, I was repeatedly struck by how many people were wearing … Continue reading →
At our second White Noise monthly dialogue, we delved into the topic of ancestry with the intention of looking at how the histories/legacies of our (white/female) ancestors connect to the larger discussion we’ve begun. We began by checking in with affirmations about ourselves and about white women – something we committed previously to doing because we recognize how easy it can be to go instantly into denigrating ourselves and feeling over-responsible for all the problems … Continue reading →
Naming what sucks about white women is really easy and really satisfying. We do it a lot, especially us white women. We get to have the satisfaction of differentiating ourselves from the white female “prototype” ie. a hetero barbie who is a pretty, nice, passive, pure, covertly racist, helpless trophy and (do a really common thing that white women do) compare ourselves and think, “See we know what that is, and we are better than … Continue reading →
These items are the top 50 things named in 526,000 profiles of white women on the dating site, Ok Cupid, as posted on their blog. These are listed in order of the frequency each thing was written. 1. the Red Sox 2. Jodi Picoult 3. boating 4. Nascar 5. mascara 6. Ireland 7. Nicholas Sparks 8. horseback riding 9. bonfires 10. flea markets 11. a country girl 12. Nora Ephron 13. waitress 14. Ray Lamontagne … Continue reading →
So many white people – including the half of us that are female – believe that we have no culture. As a dominant, centered culture, it is often invisible to ourselves. We think we are “normal” and everyone else is cultural or “ethnic”. So recently, the White Noise Collective led an exercise to identify some key components of invisibilized cultural norms for white women, that we often find ourselves either trying to emulate or trying … Continue reading →
Here are the themes that the folks who came to our last dialogue said that they want to explore in future dialogues. Through the help of Beja, they miraculously transformed from notes on poster paper into typed clusters in this blog for people to comment on to collectively figure out what to talk about next (April 12). Let’s see if this works. They are numbered and named for ease of commenting: Here’s a suggested process: … Continue reading →
Founding itself upon love, humility, faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship. – Paulo Freire Last week we had our first initiatory anti-racist white women dialogue – and it was….. freakin awesome. I’m kinda blown-away at how much thoughtfulness everyone brought. It was one of those rare and exciting spaces that felt like we were naming and framing things that we mostly think about in private, and through dialogue we could build on our common experiences … Continue reading →
We did a bunch of workshops – and now we want to host monthly dialogues to dive deeper into some of the topics that have come up for people. This is open to all, whether or not you have participated in a workshop or not, and you can come to as many or as few as you like. Some of the themes that we may potentially dialogue about include: the virtuous victim narrative, …costs/benefits/strategies/patterns of … Continue reading →
Posted in Events |
Tagged dialogue, event |
On “Sh*t White Girls Say…” : Making Microaggressions Conscious
A Youtube tsunami of sh*t all kinds of people say (and birds and wookies and beyond) has been flooding the internet. Ranging from hilarious, brilliant and edgy to somewhat tired at this point, this formula has been a tremendously generative capsule to fill and spread, making us crack up by hearing things we’ve heard so many times with new ears, giving the familiar an anthropological twist. One version of this creative phenomenon, “Sh*t _____ says … Continue reading →