It was a joy and honor to share two White Noise Collective workshops at the 13th Annual White Privilege Conference in Albuquerque. This year’s overall theme was “Intersectionality”. Both times we had a full room of wonderfully engaged participants, intergenerational perspectives, fascinating insights and Theater of the Oppressed explorations. As people entered the room, we asked them to write a word or phrase in response to nine questions that were up on the walls on large sheets of paper, to get us collectively thinking about some of the dynamics, tensions, stereotypes and possibilities of this intersection. … Read more
Blog
Upcoming Workshop: Exploring the Intersection of Whiteness and Femaleness in the Work for Racial Justice
On “Sh*t White Girls Say…” : Making Microaggressions Conscious
A Youtube tsunami of sh*t all kinds of people say (and birds and wookies and beyond) has been flooding the internet. Ranging from hilarious, brilliant and edgy to somewhat tired at this point, this formula has been a tremendously generative capsule to fill and spread, making us crack up by hearing things we’ve heard so many times with new ears, giving the familiar an anthropological twist. … Read more
White women heart flashmobs
Last weekend, I participated in a flash mob in San Francisco targeting the bank Wells Fargo. We met, rehearsed the moves, planned our entrance into the bank lobby (as well as our escape route) and were able to perform in 3 locations – all in one afternoon. The dance, organized by SF Pride at Work, was about 4 minutes long, which meant that we were able to enter the bank, have our impact and depart long before the bank or police were able to organize a response.… Read more
A Response to Occupy Oakland (or: My first time getting tear gassed by police)
I am a white woman and moved to North Oakland a little over a year ago. The implications of that fact alone could fill a book. Despite my fear of perpetuating gentrification, I am a proud Oakland resident and I have stood in solidarity with many of the anti-racist, anti-classist movements of late.… 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
“Appreciation or Appropriation?”
Every year at the How Weird St. Faire in San Francisco, several Howard St. blocks transform into a magical sweetly freaky village of dj stages/floats, art in alleys, local designers, mythological realms, fabulous costumes. Streets taken over for public creative expression, dancing on the concrete in the sunlight is a beautiful thing.… Read more
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?… Read more
the april dialogue: understanding our ancestry
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 previous blog post for more on this subject).… Read more
What’s Awesome About White Women?
Naming what sucks about white women is really easy and really satisfying. We do it a lot, especially us white women. We get to have the satisfaction of differentiating ourselves from the white female “prototype” ie. a hetero barbie who is a pretty, nice, passive, pure, covertly racist, helpless trophy and (do a really common thing that white women do) compare ourselves and think, “See we know what that is, and we are better than that”. … Read more
Stuff White Women Like
White Female Culture
So many white people – including the half of us that are female – believe that we have no culture. As a dominant, centered culture, it is often invisible to ourselves. We think we are “normal” and everyone else is cultural or “ethnic”. So recently, the White Noise Collective led an exercise to identify some key components of invisibilized cultural norms for white women, that we often find ourselves either trying to emulate or trying to resist.… Read more
Protests Planned in Response to Guilty Verdict for Irvine Eleven
In Orange County, California, it may have become a crime to be a Muslim and an activist.
On February 8, 2010, eleven Muslim students on the University of California at Irvine campus disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. in protest of his refusal to acknowledge Israel’s war crimes and violations of humanitarian law in the Gaza strip.… Read more
Themes to Comment On!
Here are the themes that the folks who came to our last dialogue said that they want to explore in future dialogues. Through the help of Beja, they miraculously transformed from notes on poster paper into typed clusters in this blog for people to comment on to collectively figure out what to talk about next (April 12).… Read more
We Heart Dialogue
Founding itself upon love, humility, faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship. – Paulo Freire
Last week we had our first initiatory anti-racist white women dialogue – and it was…..
freakin awesome. I’m kinda blown-away at how much thoughtfulness everyone brought. It was one of those rare and exciting spaces that felt like we were naming and framing things that we mostly think about in private, and through dialogue we could build on our common experiences to see a bigger, systemic picture of ourselves emerge.… Read more