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.
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.
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.
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
This piece is by longtime educator and social justice practitioner Tilman Smith, published on Dr. Shakti Butler’s World Trust site (a phenomenal resource for racial justice educators). Her articulation of the intersection of whiteness and femaleness deeply resonates with White Noise in this ongoing work to critically examine and courageously shake up the ways in which, as Smith so clearly expresses,
… Read more
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.… Read more
For this Mother’s Day, we wanted to share these inspiring images from the Strong Families campaign at Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
“The image of mothers that is widely celebrated excludes mamas based on their sexual orientation, race, class, immigration status, and more. In particular, mamas who are imprisoned, and mamas whose children are incarcerated do not get to see the beauty and power of their relationships represented in most Mother’s Day cards.”
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.… Read more
As Valentine’s Day approaches (a day that often inspires much activism from women), the White Noise Collective took an opportunity in our February dialogue to reflect on white feminism: What issues are white feminists largely drawn to, how are those issues expressed, in what way is white privilege showing up, and what patterns are helpful to explore?… Read more
While the “social media moment” may have passed, the Zimmerman verdict represents just one of countless examples in an on-going pattern of unrecognized white privilege lending justification to violence against black men. The need remains to continue the conversation about this case, particularly with respect to this pattern. One element of the pattern that is specific to white women is our stereotyped role as virtuous victims who need protection from “bad guys.” Looking at the Zimmerman trial with an eye to this narrative reveals how the verdict was shaped by the white female judge’s decision to frame the case in terms of Zimmerman’s fear, the white female jurors’ description of their key decision as a response to fear, and the significance of the white female neighbor in justifying that fear.… Read more
As we collectively mourn for Trayvon Martin and feel outrage for him, his family and all people who live in fear of a criminal (in)justice system which is designed to entrap and persecute them or their loved ones, we must reflect on the dynamics of racism and fear in our culture that not only allowed, but encouraged, Travon’s murder.… Read more
How does experience of white/female socialization create a brick-wall enclosure, holding in my dream of myself and others? How do my thought patterns, my conceptualizations of relating to myself and others, enforce these bricks?
I feel I’ve made these bricks to model a brick I was handed at birth, collecting more over my lifetime, painstakingly making them in my mind’s workshop, firing them in my heart’s oven.… Read more
Sunday, March 10 – Exploring the Intersection of White Privilege and Gender Oppression in the Work for Racial Justice.
10am-12:30pm, Near 12th St BART in Oakland. $35-50 sliding scale.
To apply for registration, click here.
How have our experiences of gender oppression impacted our work in challenging white supremacy? What patterns are common among people socialized as both white and female?… Read more
They say every moment is a learning opportunity. But I hate when those moments happen when I’m half awake and grumpy. Last week, I was taking my bike onto BART for my ever-so-wonderful and all-to-early morning commute from West Oakland to San Francisco. Though I am one of those pesky bikers that often sneak onto trains just a few minutes before I’m allowed to in order to get to my morning meeting at work on time, on this particular morning I was actually on BART at a legally-allowed time.… Read more
