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

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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.… Read more

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.Read more

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.… Read more

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.… Read more

Resources for Understanding and Challenging Islamophobia

ISJ Spr14 COVER“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.… Read more

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.

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

our liberation is intersectionalIn 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.… Read more

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.

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.  … Read more

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...

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

Screen Shot 2014-05-05 at 5.32.16 PMAs 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.… Read more

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.… Read more

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.… Read more

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.… Read more