Written by White Noise Collective core member Jay Tzvia Helfand, for the recently published anthology There is Nothing So Whole As A Broken Heart: Mending the World As Jewish Anarchists, edited by Cindy Milstein.
… Read moreThrough stories at once poetic and poignant, There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart offers a powerful elixir for all who rebel against systemic violence and injustice.
Check out the upcoming Sins Invalid show, happening October 14-16 in San Francisco!!
In our recent September dialogue, we set out to explore concepts and practices of disability justice in our lives and movements. Below are the resources we compiled for the dialogue, some background, and the questions we explored. … Read more
In our struggles to take down white supremacy and patriarchy, we must each heal the ways we have internalized these systems of oppression. Otherwise, we end up recreating them — even in our liberation movements. This healing means different things to different people. We write this piece in particular for those of us who identify at what we often call the intersection of race privilege and gender(ed) oppression.… Read more
As Mother’s Day approaches, the White Noise Collective is once again faced with more questions than answers about this national holiday with a rich but forgotten history. We all agree that the current mainstream celebration of Mother’s Day — adorned with endless plastic, fuzzy and floral ways to express your annual appreciation to your mother — are at best a capitalist co-optation of a holiday that was originally meant for a completely different purpose.… Read more
As the White Privilege Conference launches in Madison this week, the White Noise Collective is reflecting on all of the amazing and difficult learning that happened for us last year at WPC 14 in Seattle. We continue to explore ways in which we can end up perpetuating the same white supremacist mentalities we aim to bring awareness to and disrupt.… Read more
They’re ba-ack! (shudder) With Halloween quickly approaching, and costume shops like Spirit Halloween opening their doors, many of us are cringing at the thought of another Halloween full of racism, sexism, heterosexism and the full range of offensive apparel we annually witness.
In response, we offer up a toolkit to those who wish to be a part of resisting the dominant paradigms that plague this season.… Read more
While the “social media moment” may have passed, the Zimmerman verdict represents just one of countless examples in an on-going pattern of unrecognized white privilege lending justification to violence against black men. The need remains to continue the conversation about this case, particularly with respect to this pattern. One element of the pattern that is specific to white women is our stereotyped role as virtuous victims who need protection from “bad guys.” Looking at the Zimmerman trial with an eye to this narrative reveals how the verdict was shaped by the white female judge’s decision to frame the case in terms of Zimmerman’s fear, the white female jurors’ description of their key decision as a response to fear, and the significance of the white female neighbor in justifying that fear.… Read more
How does experience of white/female socialization create a brick-wall enclosure, holding in my dream of myself and others? How do my thought patterns, my conceptualizations of relating to myself and others, enforce these bricks?
I feel I’ve made these bricks to model a brick I was handed at birth, collecting more over my lifetime, painstakingly making them in my mind’s workshop, firing them in my heart’s oven.… Read more
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 meeting.… Read more
In Orange County, California, it may have become a crime to be a Muslim and an activist.
On February 8, 2010, eleven Muslim students on the University of California at Irvine campus disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. in protest of his refusal to acknowledge Israel’s war crimes and violations of humanitarian law in the Gaza strip.… Read more