2020 White Noise Collective Year in Review

It is our annual practice to write and share a “Year in Review” blog, both as part of our own reflection process and as part of our accountability and transparency practices. We usually post this earlier than April, but that apparently wasn’t in the cards this year. Here goes…

Every year is a year like no other, but 2020 certainly outpaced most other years.… Read more

Words on the Wall from WPC Workshops

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 large sheets of paper, to get us collectively thinking about some of the dynamics, tensions, stereotypes and possibilities of this intersection. … Read more

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. … Read more

the april dialogue: understanding our ancestry

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 of the world (something we, as women, have been very effectively trained to do — see the previous blog post for more on this subject).… Read more

Themes to Comment On!

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).… Read more

We Heart Dialogue

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 to see a bigger, systemic picture of ourselves emerge.… Read more