suggested reading

Understanding White Nationalist and Supremacist Groups (Historical, Systemic, Current Contexts)​

Ways to Take Action 

our writing on this theme

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Costume Mirrors: Halloween and beyond

Gender Identity, Hate Groups, Problematic Holidays

Costume Mirrors: Halloween and beyond

Halloween continues to haunt, as this recently circulated photo of a “Mexican-themed” Penn State sorority party made national headlines, sparking familiar outrage, calls for the university to take action, and a student group march. While stereotypical representations occur throughout the year, on Halloween these masks, not of ghosts and monsters, but of people and cultures, rear with a truly scary mass acceptability. Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall reminds us that stereotypes are part of the maintenance of the social and symbolic order – they tend to occur where there are gross inequalities of power, and […]
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Reclaiming Mother’s Day

"White Womanhood", Hate Groups, Labor and Work, Parent/Teacher Resources, Problematic Holidays, Reflection

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

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. Harnessing fierce maternal love in all its forms, we offer this blog with a compilation buffet of food for thought and […]

We need to lock arms amidst all of this.

These are just a few of the insights put forth by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush in a recent article on the Huffington Post, What White People Can Do About the Killing of Black Men in America: "There are a lot of events vying to occupy the American mind these days such as Gaza, Iraq, Ukraine, the immigration crisis, hate crimes against Sikhs, Ebola, and Robin Williams' death. But in one way, the ability to switch among these traumas is a white person's 'luxury.'... "Black Americans are rightfully outraged, but it will require all Americans to be mobilized before the racism that undergirds these killings will end and the deaths along with it. White Americans like me have to stop channel surfing all the outrageously bad news from around the world and focus on the death that is happening in our own cities to our fellow Americans...
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Organizing to Challenge White Supremacy

Hate Groups, Reflection

Organizing to Challenge White Supremacy

We want to share the excellent resources compiled by friends at Catalyst Project and Bay Resistance, and add a few others for educators, organizers, artists, and all people who want to take action this weekend and beyond. “We have re-entered a time period when white supremacist groups are not fringe or powerless, but connected to, and supported by, the White House. They must be delegitimized and confronted with every creative tactic in our toolbox. Everyone who is against racism has a place in this struggle, in the streets, supporting those who take to the streets, […]

Police Brutality Action Kit (Created by Showing Up for Racial Justice – SURJ)

Police Brutality Action Kit, cross posted with permission from: showingupforracialjustice.org/archives/2016 Created by Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Click here for a PDF version of this toolkit. By Tes One Artwork used with permission. Showing up for Racial Justice(SURJ) was formed in 2009 by white people from across the US to respond to the significant increase of targeting and violence against people of color in the aftermath of the election of  Barack Obama.  The killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO; Eric Garner on Staten Island, NY; Ezell Ford in Los Angeles, CA; and John Crawford in Beavercreek, […]

From SURJ Bay Area: End-of-the-year solidarity for racial justice

SURJ moves funds and resources to many of the same POC-led organizations as WNC. Please see their end of year donation request and offer what you can! -WNC ——————————————————————— Dear family, friends and comrades, We are all receiving requests for donations for many worthwhile causes.  Please consider how much of your giving goes to people of color-led organizing. You can make a donation today to support 12 local people of color-led grassroots groups on the frontlines of working for racial justice. The Bay Area SURJ chapter is part of a network of white organizers, activists and educators […]

White Women’s Tears and the Men Who Love Them

There has been much critique lately of “white tears.” This term refers to all of the ways, both literally and metaphorically, that white people cry about how hard racism is on us. In my work, I consistently encounter these tears in their various forms, and many writers have provided excellent critiques. Here, I want to address one specific manifestation of white tears: those shed by white women in cross-racial settings.
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Emotional Labor vs. Labor That Evokes Emotions; or the hard work of being human

Disability Justice, Hate Groups, Labor and Work, Reflection, Therapy, Healing, and Whiteness

Emotional Labor vs. Labor That Evokes Emotions; or the hard work of being human

This blog post is written in response to comments and discussion generated at the February 2018 White Noise Collective dialogue, which examined the themes of “Emotional Labor and Difficult Conversations about Race and Gender”.  I am grateful to the participants for their frank, vulnerable, and honest conversation. See our website for the guiding questions and suggested readings for the dialogue. I recently had a friend (a late 20s straight cis-man) divulge to me a dating encounter that he was frustrated about.  To his credit, he asked my permission first before telling me the story (which […]
our liberation is intersectional

Moving into Radical Self-Worth to Better Support our Movements — part 1 in a series

"White Womanhood", Anti-racism Practice, Hate Groups, Labor and Work, Patriarchal Violence, Reflection

Moving into Radical Self-Worth to Better Support our Movements — part 1 in a series

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. The two primary authors of this piece identify as white, queer women (though those labels never seem sufficient), but we recognize that people invested in this conversation […]

Protests Today Over Irvine Eleven Verdict

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. Charges against the eleventh student were dismissed before trial. The defendants were given three years of informal probation (!), […]

Fascism Reading List

As we discussed not too long ago in our January dialogue: Here we are at the start of unpresidented 2017, after the largest inaugural protest in US history, joined by marches around the world. Community organizing and outreach is happening in every state as people prepare for the worst, brace for scary realities on the horizon and work to keep them at bay. This is also a time when many are humbly realizing how much we have to learn from communities around the world about what it means to live resisting fascism. These are a few readings […]
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Five Lessons From the Past and Present of Racial Justice Organizing

Anti-racism Practice, Hate Groups, Labor and Work

Five Lessons From the Past and Present of Racial Justice Organizing

Written by Julie Quiroz, Senior Fellow, Movement Strategy Center. Originally posted for Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity The years of fighting racism have taught us many lessons, perhaps the greatest of which is the recognition that we have to be clear about the type of racism we intend to confront. If we take a narrow view of racism as a set of stereotypes or personal beliefs, then educational efforts aimed at individuals have some impact. But taking on structural racism requires entirely different approaches. As scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asserts, “Social systems and their supports must […]
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Resources for Understanding and Challenging Islamophobia

Hate Groups

Resources for Understanding and Challenging Islamophobia

“Muslim subjects are constructed and judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so they are always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.” – Edward Said, Orientalism Trump’s call for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States, and reference to internment camps sent out waves of shock and horror, catalyzing many non-Muslim groups into action. New and old questions are raised of how to collectively combat anti-Muslim racism, xenophobia, justifications for militarism abroad and domestic repression and surveillance. How can anti-racist educators and activists step up in various ways to […]

dialogue notes on this topic

Though many of the themes from the monthly dialogues are represented in our blog posts, those posts rarely include all of what was discussed.  Find the notes here from each dialogue raw and uncut. We share them (with names omitted) in an effort to be  accountable and transparent to our larger community, accessible for those who are not able to attend, and saved as archive to return to and draw from.

Sept 2020: STRATEGIZING FOR NOVEMBER – BUILDING POWER IN A FRACTURED TIME

these times are beyond words. the loss of so much that is sacred. the seemingly irreparable political divides in our country and world. the brazen abuses of power by the state. and on top of it all, a pandemic virus that makes it dangerous to hold our loved ones dear; to grieve and cry and scheme and strategize and build and push and breath and simply be together. this may sound silly, but i think often of an iron and wine lyric: “they say time may give you more than your poor bones could ever […]

May 2019: Collective Memory and National Narratives

May 2019 WNC Dialogue: Collective Memory and National Narratives Dialogue Description: Collective memory is the memory of a group of people, passed from one generation to the next. Those groups could be families or entire nations. How do these groups form collective memories, and how do collective memories–of an event, a history, or a narrative–form groups? How do these memories shift over time, how are they different from one group to another, and how do these collective memories reflect or reify existing power structures? What action or affective stances do collective memories demand? In this […]

February 2016: Islamophobia and Militarism

Dialogue Description: Given the profound importance and particular challenges of entering into difficult conversations on Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, we are planning to offer a dialogue that will be combined with aspects of our recent workshop. This will include a short presentation on key dimensions of how anti-Muslim racism functions, and will be an opportunity to try out a range of surfacing, scanning, and skill-building strategies in challenging Islamophobic narratives. For reading on Islamophobia before we meet if you have the time, we suggest looking at Paul Kivel’s excellent article in his recent newsletter. Dialogue […]
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