As part of our organizational sunsetting process, we lovingly offer selections of our workshop curriculum to you and to your communities. Like dandelion seeds taking flight on the wind, we hope these educational tools serve you and take on new, emergent lives. The workshops below are a handful among many others we offered in the dozen years of White Noise.
Since our decision to sunset the organization in 2023, we have taken a year to reflect with core collective members and close collaborators to integrate this decade-plus experience, distill lessons and lift up valuable movement memory. Most of these conversations have been recorded for our podcast and also live on StoryCorps.
To our friends, comrades and community,
We miss you! And, we have major news to share: after a long, rocky period of deliberation, our core has made the difficult decision to sunset our organization. Ultimately we have determined that we do not have capacity to move forward together in the form of White Noise Collective.
We are big fans of vent diagrams: move from the overlaps – a phenomenal participatory art project, which was started by educator E.M./Elana Eisen-Markowitz and artist Rachel Schragis.
In their words: “We define a “vent diagram” as a diagram of the overlap of two statements that appear to be true and appear to be contradictory.
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.
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
The rallying call to defund the police could not be more clear in this time of rebellion and uprising for Black lives, justice and liberation. For those of us who are thinking about this strategy for the first time, or are new to lineages of abolitionist work, here are some resources to guide and deepen understanding of where this call comes from, what it is, and how to contribute to this movement in the short and long term.
For white folks who have been on this journey of anti-racism and for folks who are joining now, wherever we may be there are always new learning curves, ways to show up, opportunities to grow our capacities to support racial justice movements, inner and outer work to meet the transformative demands of this time.
Here are a range of resources to guide and coordinate action, to align understandings and work in solidarity with humility and accountability. We mourn the stealing of the lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade at the hands of the police and white vigilantes. In mourning, sorrow and anger, we recommit to the lifelong work of ending the 400 year old nightmare of white supremacy.
When Amy Cooper pointed her finger at Chris Cooper saying, with cell phone in her other hand, “I am going to tell them (the police) that an African-American man is threatening my life.”, a crystallization of decades and centuries of ghosts that have haunted this country came into sharp focus. The weaponization of white womanhood is so old.
Within the massive waves of information overwhelm, we compiled these resources to boost our capacity and connection to respond to this crisis. Gratitude to all of the labor by so many amazing people that went into creating these resources to weather this and future storms together.
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.… Read more
A Transcript of an Interview with White Noise Collective on Feminist Magazine Radio Show, July 2, 2019.
We use “white womanhood” as a term to capture the set of cultural messages that are widely spread through media and institutions like churches and schools about how “white women” should look, act, behave, and participate in society. These messages often result in learned behaviors that many people who identify as white women perform, or are expected to perform in order to be accepted.… Read more