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. Many of us who have read Octavia Butler reflected poignantly on the opportunity (maybe that’s not the right word?) we were given to feel into the non-fiction reality of living as if we were in one of her dystopian novels. And yet, it was not the type of catastrophe many of us had expected. As another core collective member said to me during an outdoor visit, “this is not how I imagined the apocalypse!” Our wilderness survival skills were not what were tested. Rather, it seems we have been tested on our ability to follow consensual community guidelines, to ration and share resources, and to build networks of care you would trust with your life. We have also been tested on our ability to see through the structures of our collective oppression. To see capitalism not as an all-encompassing inevitability, but as a system – a mechanism with parts that can be deconstructed.
Recognizing the ways in which the state is not structured to take care of the most marginalized in our communities, we woke up to what many in those communities already knew. In the words of Miss Major, “Since no one was going to do it for us, we had to do it for ourselves” (link to an interview with her here). We continued developing mutual aid networks on small and large scales. We continued recognizing our interdependence and trying to find some way or another to resist those who would exploit this crisis and profit off tragedy. Most days it all felt like too much, and yet it also never felt like we were doing enough… even as exhausted, lonely, and grief-stricken as we were. But when does anything ever feel like enough? Is enoughness even tangible or achievable in a world distorted by capitalism, exploitation, and artificial scarcity?
2020 was also a year in which we drew from the wisdom of the disability justice community and grew in our ability to visibilize and center their struggles. While so many of us had never felt so many simultaneous layers of loneliness before, we were also frequently reminded that the world has always been this way for many in our community. I recall reading Isabel Abbott’s article, A Letter to My Abled Friends, and reflecting on my privilege. While acknowledging that “comparing suffering as if there is a hierarchy has never seemed that useful,” I appreciated the invitation to reckon “with the ableism that has permeated our entire way of doing and being, and [to] begin to work together to re-imagine and create new ways that do not leave anyone behind.” What will it look like to move forward into a future where we do not so easily leave others behind?
So many questions. Here, in the White Noise Collective, as we have done since we began a decade ago, we continued the work of gathering together in dialogue. Our goal in dialogue is always to explore and challenge internal and external barriers to showing up effectively in the movement for racial justice, and we did our best to meet the questions that arose as we navigated through a pandemic, an uprising, vast wildfires that filled our skies with smoke, and the continued fight against the rise of fascism and white nationalism. As always, we left each dialogue with more questions, living into the uncertainty. Here is a list of our 2020 dialogues, and you can read the full descriptions and notes in our Dialogue Archives:
- February: Disrupting and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex
- March: Mutual Aid in Uncertain Times
- April: Culture, Family, Land and Self: How We Respond in Times of Crisis
- May: Navigating White Saviorism and Urgency in Times of Pandemic: Revisiting Themes of Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” Towards Collective Liberation
- July: Solidarity with Black and Indigenous Resistance, Mass Uprising and Collective Liberation: Rooting and Rising in this Political Moment
- September: Strategizing for November – Building Power in a Fractured Time
In addition to dialogues, we continued to offer workshops, though it did take us some time to start to get the material converted to offer out online. We were able to offer our Difficult Conversations workshop four times from June through October, mostly through partnership with SURJ Bay Area, in addition to offering Antidotes to White Fragility once through SURJ prior to Shelter in Place. One of our collective members also crafted our Antidotes to White Fragility workshop material into a 4-part series that was offered to NorCal Resilience Network, a California-based regional network of grassroots organizations.
Under the miscellaneous section of our offerings, we offered a session in June called “Say Their Names – Moving through Freeze, Numbness and Collapse toward Action.” The focus was on utilizing a somatic, movement-based practice to support our communities in finding the strength, endurance, and inner fortification to center in our deep commitment to racial justice, to turn with clear-mindedness toward, and not away from, the suffering of these times. And a member of our collective joined a panel through CalShakes to speak on the topic of Unlearning White Supremacy. And then we finished the year with lots of work to organize towards election and also post-election possibilities. We also worked to visibilize and shape our expectations of each other as core collective members.
Through our financial accountability practices, our community supported us in gathering and redistributing $874.39 to Sogorea’te Land Trust, $874.39 to Community Ready Corps, $874.39 to Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, $600 to Arab Resource and Organizing Center, $1067.00 to SURJ Bay Area Racial Justice Emergency Relief Fund (money went to Asian Pacific Environmental Network C-19 Emergency Community Stabilization Fund, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, Al Otro Lado, The Village, Causa Justa :: Just Cause (CJ:JC), Disability Justice Culture Club, Community Ready Corps (CRC), Poor Magazine, Sogorea Te, TGIJP, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, LSPC/All of Us or None), $678 to a local reparations effort, $250 to BLM/SayHerName/WomenOfTheBPP Mural in West Oakland, and $649.62 to our fiscal sponsor, Alliance for Global Justice, making our total 2020 financial redistribution $5867.79.
Through all of this, we did our best to hold each other close across distance, to listen to and center the voices of those most impacted, to navigate and find our places within movement ecosystems, both individually and collectively, and to recognize the capacity inside ourselves that was and is still needed to not only survive these crises, but to collectively imagine something else. To make something possible that previously seemed impossible.
As we move into 2021, we are taking a pause to reflect on our last decade and what directions we want to move into in the years ahead.
