Another year has passed, and white supremacist violence and misogyny is ever-present, from white nationalist mass shootings in El Paso and New Zealand to our president’s twitter account.
Here in our small corner of the world, the White Noise Collective has continued our work to create space to unlearn systems of oppression and build embodied resilience in our movements for racial justice.
Like the little engine that could, White Noise Collective continues to chug away at the things we believe in — in 2019 we offered 9 workshops, including our ever-popular Antidotes to White Fragility, developed in partnership with Kat Roubos and their amazing graduate thesis work at Smith School of Social Work, and Difficult Conversations about Race and Racism. Through these workshops, we raised $2211 for our people of color led movement partners, including $646 for the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and $1565 for the Sogorea Te Land Trust. We also directed $262 towards the Alliance for Global Justice, our fiscal sponsor.
We also continued to offer our monthly community dialogues. Ten years running, these dialogues are a unique offering — a chance to come together and explore in deep and open ways some of the biggest challenges we are facing in our paths toward accountability and racial justice. In 2019, we maintained our commitment to building more leadership within our collective by partnering with multiple long-time collective members to co-facilitate dialogues around topics of their choosing. These partnerships opened up space for powerful topics including Carceral Feminism, Language: Inclusion and Exclusion, Collective Memory and National Narratives, The Use and Misuse of Identity Politics, and Therapy for Whiteness. As a core, we also facilitated dialogues on Finding a Political Home in Frightening Times, Transforming White Fragility Toward Collective Liberation, Reproduction and Nurturing Life, and Pleasure Activism, Climate Chaos and Building the Irresistible Yes. The notes and collected readings and resources from these dialogues are a powerful treasure trove of inquiry and food for thought — they are great stand-alone resources to return to in community or on your own to deepen your exploration of these topics. If you are interested in using these dialogue prompts (and any others from past years) to host similar dialogues in your own community, please reach out and we would be glad to share best practices and support in order to bring that vision to life!
In addition to our dialogues and workshops, White Noise Collective participated in two book clubs to deepen our analysis in 2019, and were featured on two interviews with Feminist Magazine. We hosted our own dialogue about Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump and joined the Healing Justice Podcast’s virtual bookclub to explore Nora Samaran’s Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture. Both are rich and powerful reads!
On the Feminist Magazine radio show, in April we did a preliminary interview exploring the history and purpose of the White Noise Collective, and returned in July to share more about our White Womanhood and Systems of Violence curriculum and to discuss the historic and contemporary roles of white women in upholding systems of state violence. You can read a rough transcript of that interview here!
Excitingly, after years of visioning and scheming up a new website to crack open the geode of the wealth of resources we have been collecting over the years, our new website finally went live in 2019! We are so grateful to the efforts of Hunter Rook at Rowdy Ferret Design for making our biggest website dreams come true! Please explore our new website, full of easy to navigate, powerful resource collections as well as an archive of our ten years of dialogue prompts and notes and our own writings about the contradicting messages of internalized white supremacy and misogyny.
Lastly, in addition to these efforts as the White Noise Collective, we as a collective have also been working to convene various white anti-racist educators and facilitators to create a collective offering of shared resources, curriculum, and facilitation offerings to growing movement partners in 2020 and beyond. Keep an eye out for this new network, tentatively called Training for Anti-Racist Action (TARA), and spread the word!
In 2020, we are looking forward to building more leadership within our collective, expanding our facilitation and offerings to movement partners, supporting new facilitators to learn our curriculum and begin to offer it in their own movement homes and communities, and continuing our bread and butter commitment to racial justice praxis through community dialogues, workshops, and resource redistribution. We hope to see you next year, as we commit to the daily practice of building the more beautiful world we know is possible — one free from the power-over dominance of white supremacy and patriarchy. May it be so.