Systems of Privilege and Oppression – WHITE NOISE COLLECTIVE

our writing on this theme

Creating “Safe” Neighborhoods: A reflection on my neighborhood’s private patrol — and what to do with my disapproval

Privilege Systems, Reflection, State Violence

Creating “Safe” Neighborhoods: A reflection on my neighborhood’s private patrol — and what to do with my disapproval

Like many Oakland progressives, my political alarm went off last year in response to the trend towards middle income and affluent neighborhoods hiring private security guards. For Oakland at least, the private patrol debate is relatively new, but it raises many familiar concerns about racial profiling and the feeding of racialized fears by misrepresenting the dangers of city life. Here I reflect on my learning from engaging in the patrol debate in my own mostly white, mostly home-owning neighborhood.

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.

Narratives of White Women Used to Uphold Racism and Patriarchy: A Partial Timeline

"White Womanhood", Gender Identity, Militarism and Imperialism, Patriarchal Violence, Privilege Systems, Reflection, Saviorism, State Violence

Narratives of White Women Used to Uphold Racism and Patriarchy: A Partial Timeline

This is a timeline we use in White Noise workshops to help make visible dominant representations of white women that have historically served to reinforce, normalize and naturalize forms of racist violence and patriarchal oppression. How do these narratives of white female sexuality and identity (re)appear in the present? How do they continue to live in our imaginations, bodies, dreams, media, collective consciousness, politics? By no means attempting to be some kind of comprehensive history, but rather pulling out some key threads in the unweaving of structures of domination. Here we go: Captivity narratives, stories […]

On Rachel Dolezal, White Privilege, and White Shame

Gender Identity, Labor and Work, Privilege Systems, Problematic Holidays, Reflection

On Rachel Dolezal, White Privilege, and White Shame

Rachel Dolezal Isn’t the Most Important Race Story in Spokane. But she does seem to be an unraveling puzzle that continues to elicit curiosity, outrage, and comment. From Mia McKenzie’s discussion of Blackness and Blackface, to Kai M Green’s willingness to give Rachel a little more benefit of the doubt in discussing the similarities of race and gender constructs, to Lisa Marie Rollins’ explanation of what transracial actually means, plenty has been said already. It is a story with endless complexity. While I find all of this interesting, what interests me specifically about this situation is […]

Curriculum Offerings

"White Womanhood", Allyship and Solidarity, Anti-racism Practice, Cultural Appropriation, Privilege Systems

Curriculum Offerings

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. We have lightly polished them up in the hopes they are available (and legible!) for use for both newer and more seasoned facilitators. We welcome you to adjust and shift what we’ve offered to meet your […]

I Don’t Want to Be an Excuse for Racist Violence Anymore: White women’s passive role in racist attacks like Charleston

This insightful article is cross-posted from New Republic: By Chloe Angyal We cannot talk about the violence that Dylann Roof perpetrated at Emanuel AME last Wednesday night without talking about whiteness, and specifically, about white womanhood and its role in racist violence. We have to talk about those things, because Roof himself did. Per a witness account, we know that he said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.” “Our” women, by whom he meant white women. There is a centuries-old notion that white men must defend, with lethal violence at times, […]

why you should not call the cops

Privilege Systems, Reflection, State Violence

why you should not call the cops

Cross-posted from Catalyst Project: Dear Friends, Trump called himself the ‘law and order candidate’. He’s vocally supported “stop & frisk” policies that target Black and brown communities. His ‘first 100 days’ plan includes expanding federal funding for local police, federal law enforcement, and federal prosecutors. And he’s promised to have the Attorney General investigate Black Lives Matter protestors for criminal charges. Policing under any president is violent and racist, and Trump has little to no control over local police policies. But we also expect that he’ll use whatever power he has to criminalize dissent, expand policing […]

Reaching Out, Calling In, Building Up, Rooting Down

Allyship and Solidarity, Anti-racism Practice, Privilege Systems

Reaching Out, Calling In, Building Up, Rooting Down

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 some incredibly helpful pieces to take in, take to heart, share with other white people, and use as compasses for accountable action, real solidarity, strategic intervention and courageous self-reflection. Dear White People, This is What We Want You to […]

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...

White Women, Patriarchy and White Superiority

"White Womanhood", Labor and Work, Privilege Systems, Reflection

White Women, Patriarchy and White Superiority

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, It is in those moments when I feel most challenged around my oppressed identity as a woman that I call on my areas of internalized superiority. This is an invitation to all white women […]

dialogue notes on this topic

Though many of the themes from the monthly dialogues are represented in our blog posts, those posts rarely include all of what was discussed. Find the notes here from each dialogue raw and uncut. We share them (with names omitted) in an effort to be accountable and transparent to our larger community, accessible for those who are not able to attend, and saved as archive to return to and draw from.

May 2020: Navigating white saviorism and urgency in times of pandemic: revisiting themes of Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” towards collective liberation

Guiding Framing and Questions: Scholar Tema Okun’s article “White Supremacy Culture” makes conscious attitudes and behaviors in organizations and individuals that perpetuate white supremacy. As we as a collective think and feel into this moment, we are called to return to particular themes in her work to better ground us in vision and action. In particular, we are interested in considering 2 themes emerging as patterns in this time: “sense of urgency” and “white saviorism”. Whether or not you are familiar with Okun’s work, or these particular terms, we invite you into dialogue with us. […]

August 2019: The Use and Misuse of Identity Politics

Description: In this time of blatant white supremacy, leftist social movements feel under-resourced, fractured, and on the defensive. While identity politics and identity based organizing have been critical to winning material gains for specific groups since the Civil Rights era, is it time to think beyond identity politics in our organizing and movement spaces? What does (and has) identity politics offer(ed) our social justice movements more broadly, and specifically here in political climate of the Bay Area? In what ways do our identities inform our political engagements, and how have identity politics stifled or ignited […]

June 2019 WNC Dialogue: Transforming White Fragility towards Collective Liberation

Dialogue Description: White Fragility is defined by scholar Robin DiAngelo as “A state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation (2011).” In this dialogue, we would like to grapple with the many questions alive for us about white fragility in this political moment. With the rise of this term ‘white fragility’ in popular consciousness, especially with DiAngelo’s recent book, we […]

July 2018: Desirability Politics, Worthiness and Belonging

Dialogue Description: What does it mean to be attracted to someone or to find someone desirable? How do we know a person is beautiful? How are our attractions, both sexual and otherwise, shaped and influenced? What messages have white supremacy and patriarchy, alongside cisheterosexism, femme-phobia, fat-phobia, ageism and ableism directed at us about worth and belonging in our relationships? How does desirability influence your own sense of worth, your relationship to your body and relationship to others? How are desirability politics playing out for us in this moment of increased violence directed at multiply marginalized communities, especially trans women of color and immigrants? Join us in dialogue as we explore these questions, and others, in an exploration of how race, gender, and desirability impact and complicate our lives.

June 2017: White Feminists and the Use of Intersectionaility: Critiques from Feminists of Color

Dialogue Description: In this movement moment, the term intersectionality has entered increasingly into popular consciousness. In this dialogue, we offer a space to reflect on the histories and ongoing formation of the term, centering Black feminist thought. As a collective focused around questions and complexities we often talk about as ‘the intersections of gendered oppression and white privilege’, we want to investigate our own uses of intersectionality, paying attention to possibilities of co-optation and appropriation. Some key questions: In this time of increasing politicization, with many white feminists utilizing intersectionality as a framework, how can we […]

March 2017: Cross-Class Organizing in the Era of Trump

Dialogue Description: There is so much to dig into around the role of class, race, and gender in the construction of our current political moment. Join us as we begin to ask big questions about class oppression and its role in current and historic social justice movements. What does it mean to engage in cross-class organizing in the Bay Area? How can our movements better support working class leadership in these times, and what are the roles for white working class leadership in dismantling racial, class, and gendered oppression? How might we be re-creating classism […]

June 2016: Intergenerational Feminism

Dialogue Description: The waves of feminism have opened the door to a contemporary dialogue of what it means to simultaneously challenge patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, and other forms of oppression. From call-outs of “white feminism” to growing awareness of intersectionality, how can we hold these conversations in a way that invites intergenerational perspectives? How can we engage feminism in a way that honors the struggles that got us where we are today but also acknowledges the disagreements that surround who should be centered in feminism and who is excluded? How do we bring in discussions of […]

May 2016: The Problem with Work

Join the White Noise Collective in our first ever reading group. At this dialogue we will dive deep into intersectional Marxist feminist Kathi Weeks’ groundbreaking book “The Problem with Work.” If you are unable to read the text, you are still welcome to join us in dialogue as we examine our own relationships towork, problematize the ideas of “work” and “labor”, and critique some of the feminist responses to gendered inequality at work. We’ll also dream big about what Weeks calls “post-work politics”, and ask ourselves what it means for our movement and our lives to have utopian visions of […]

October 2015: Enclosures: Reclaiming our bodies, imaginations and the commons

Dialogue Description: In this dialogue we will explore enclosures and how they manifest in our lives, our bodies and the cities we live in. We will consider many types of enclosures, including historical and present-day enclosures of physical land and common space, as well as mental and emotional enclosures of our creativity and collective imagination. Some questions we might explore in dialogue: How do we think/feel about the commons and enclosures in our daily life? Where do we see the boundaries of the enclosures and how they function? How are they gendered and raced? How […]

June 2015: Hope and Hopelessness

Dialogue Description: In this dialogue we will explore how hope and hopelessness manifest in our struggles for racial justice. Where do our feelings of hope and hopelessness come from? When do they show up, and when do they feel most strong? How does hopelessness create barriers for engaging in long-term racial justice organizing, and how can we cultivate hope even in our lowest moments? While this dialogue will focus largely on our own personal experiences with feelings of hope and hopelessness in our daily lives, interpersonal relationships, and movement organizing, we thought these readings might […]

March 2015: Safety and (Dis)comfort

Dialogue Description: In February, we looked at more external issues related to safety, especially the concepts of violence vs nonviolence, movement tactics, and racialized and gendered expectations as they relate to state violence/protection. In March, we turn our attention to our internal beliefs about safety and particularly tonotions about safety “as the absence of discomfort” that can happen at the intersection of white (or passing) privilege and gender(ed) oppression. How does this socialization affect what we expect in order to feel safe? How does it shape, and sometimes race and gender, safer spaces? How might […]

February 2015: Violence and Safety

Dialogue Description: The past few months have been full of excitement with the building power of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to systematic police brutality and murder of black and brown people. In response, the media, along with individuals and activists alike, are questioning the strategy and tactics of the emergent street mobilizations and organized responses. Throughout this analysis are various opinions about the meaning, role, and position of “violence” in this movement movement. In this WNC Dialogue, we will explore the meaning of violence and safety, especially through the lenses of white […]

December 2014: Difficult Conversations from Ferguson to Palestine

Dialogue Description: After our first Difficult Conversations dialogue a few years back, we decided to make it an annual tradition, to support each other in a little practice and role playing before many of us head back to families and communities of origin for the holiday season. This year, we are challenging ourselves to think about how to talk about some big things with those who may think and believe in vastly different ways about police violence, occupation and racism. Check out these articles to get the conversation started: On Growing Up in Ferguson and […]

November 2014: Relationship to Land

Dialogue Description: Moving from the “horrors of October” to those of November, we will take this time together to examine national mythologies that continue to justify colonization. We will also question our relationships to land, here in the Bay Area, California and beyond. What histories shape the present? How do patterns of displacement repeat at home? What are ways we can support each other to intervene into this holiday, which some are calling to be renamed as a national day of mourning? Suggested reading: The Last Thursday in November Control of Ancestral Remains Dialogue Notes: […]

September 2013: Gentrification

Dialogue Description: On September 17th we invite you to join us again in monthly dialogue–this time examining the theme of gentrification in the Bay Area. From San Francisco (also this, and this) to Oakland and beyond, we’ll analyze deeper trends that influence where we live and why, including “safety,” economics, credibility, and quality of life. After all, gentrification is #73 on the list of Stuff White People Like. And how do race, class, gender and colonial settlement tie into the conversation? For more resources on the intersection of gentrification and July’s dialogue topic of food justice, explore Oakland’s Phat Beet’s statement on […]

August 2013: Virtuous Victim Narrative

Dialogue Description: We’ll spend this evening looking at ways the narratives about white women, such as the virtuous victim narrative, are used to justify violence against men of color. Specifically, we’d like to discuss the ways Zimmerman used his neighbor to justify his murder of Trayvon Martin, how this ties into deeply entrenched histories and brainstorm ways we can counteract this narrative. Dialogue Notes: These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, […]

April 2013: White Privilege Conference Share Out

Dialogue Description: In similar format to last year, this will be a Community Report back from this year’s White Privilege Conference. Our hope is to create an informal space for WPC presenters and participants to reflect on experiences of this year’s conference and to share highlights, insights, take-aways, constructive critiques, struggles, potentials for the future and to distill our experiences for folks who would have wanted to be there but couldn’t. We especially welcome those who could not attend to join us. Dialogue Notes: These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to […]

March 2013: Helping Professions and the Buffer Zone: Maintaining and Challenging the System

Dialogue Description: In response to the theme of this year’s White Privilege Conference, The Color of Money, we will be re-examining what Paul Kivel terms “ the buffer zone,” a range of jobs and occupations that structurally serve to maintain the wealth and power of the ruling class by acting as a buffer between those at the top of the economic pyramid and those at the bottom. With a focus on how people socialized as white and female have occupied and represented this terrain, we will examine historical patterns, iconic images, and our individual participation and insight. […]

June 2012: Psychology of Racism

Dialogue Description: For our June dialogue, we will focus on material that we learned at a workshop on the psychology of racism. We’ll be watching a short video on shame and vulnerability and looking at how shame and other psychological experiences (anxiety, denial, fear, etc) challenge, support and inform our work with oppression and privilege. How can we better understand the psychological motivators of prejudice so that we know how to work with it in ourselves and in others? How can we learn to tolerate the anxiety, shame, guilt and anger that we might feel when […]

May 2011: ”White women’s tears”

Dialogue Notes only: These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes. Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs. Our 3rd White Noise monthly dialogue was focused on “white woman tears” – the phenomenon of white women crying when […]

April 2011: Exploration of Ancestry

Dialogue Notes only: At our second White Noise monthly dialogue, we delved into the topic of ancestry with the intention of looking at how the histories/legacies of our (white/female) ancestors connect to the larger discussion we’ve begun. We began by checking in with affirmations about ourselves and about white women – something we committed previously to doing because we recognize how easy it can be to go instantly into denigrating ourselves and feeling over-responsible for all the problems of the world (something we, as women, have been very effectively trained to do — see the […]

suggested reading

our writing on this theme

dialogue notes on this topic