History – WHITE NOISE COLLECTIVE

2009

Our first workshop

Our first workshop was offered in 2009, before the idea of the White Noise Collective had germinated. It was led by our now-advisor Levana and a colleague, who were invited to co-facilitate a workshop in Theater of the Oppressed. As they didn’t feel comfortable having two white ciswoman facilitators leading a racially diverse group through deeply personal issues of oppression, they decided to create a workshop specifically for those who self-identified as white women. They used the Theater of the Oppressed exercises to look at both internalized oppression and internalized privilege.

2010

Beginnings of White Noise Collective

A monumental number of issues were dredged up through the process of the first workshop, and the participants requested another workshop with more time to explore what came up. For 6 months, a group of people, including Zara, worked to create a 3-day curriculum exploring patterns present in "white female" socialization, historic narratives of white women used to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy, ancestry and histories of resistance. These became the seeds for White Noise.

March 2011

Our first dialogue

Participants in the 2010 workshop requested ongoing monthly dialogues and a website/blog to continue the exploration around complexities of gender oppression and white supremacy. Along with participants of that year's Anne Braden program (through Catalyst Project), our first dialogue generated questions that we continued to examine. It was one of those rare and exciting spaces that felt like we were naming and framing things that we mostly thought about in private, and through dialogue we could build on our common experiences to see a bigger, systemic picture emerge. We have held monthly dialogues ever since, a political practice of connecting lived insight and theory, collective reflection that serves action. Toran was in this first dialogue!

2012

More workshops!

The White Noise Collective continued offering monthly dialogues, expanding our website resources, and also began to develop a gender inclusive curriculum on a variety of themes to counter the patriarchal, cismale-centric and compartmentalized white anti-racism curriculum in prominent use. We chose a popular education approach that starts where people are, invites their whole selves into the room, builds the intra-connections among participants and their experiences and ideas, generates new ideas and actions, and is guided by a love and trust in humanity.

2014

Movement for Black Lives Mobilization

White Noise shows up to the movement for Black lives through organizing white people into political education and direct action spaces, as well as contributing writing and reflection to support principled participation of white people in the movement. Many of our core members and advisors were involved with the Bay Area Solidarity Action Team and in affinity groups taking direct action in support of BLM.

2017

Antidotes to White Fragility

In partnership with Kat Roubos for their Masters thesis at Smith Social Work School, we birthed workshops and curriulum on somatic interventions to white fragility. While we first offered this directly through WNC, we have since partnered with SURJ to offer this workshop more regularly in the SF Bay Area.

today

Since then

Since then, everything we have created and offered has been in direct response to what participants and community have raised and requested. While founded by ciswomen, our group and our core leadership have expanded to include folks who identify as trans, gender non-conforming and genderqueer. We are continuing to evolve our engagement with gender and language. While we continue to interrogate the role of "white womanhood" within systems of oppression, we also look more broadly at the experiences of having both gender(ed) oppression and white or light-skin privilege.