As the winter solstice passes, we at White Noise Collective are engaged in the beloved tradition of taking stock of our past year, expressing gratitude for what we have made possible given all that we hold, letting go of that which no longer serves us, and making space for new ways to breathe life into our movements for racial and gender justice.

In many ways, this year has been a painful one for those who dream of collective liberation.  However, amidst the chaos, confusion and heartache, we have managed to support the deep, transformational work of praxis — ongoing action and reflection, reflection and action.

In 2018 White Noise Collective hosted seven community dialogues, on themes ranging from Race, Gender and #MeToo to Not Othering Our Ancestors to Emotional Labor and Difficult Conversations about Race and Racism.  In community we made space for simultaneously self-loving and self-critical inquiries, including:

• How can we push to organize beyond exclusively white, middle class cis-women issues and towards intersectional racial justice in our work to end sexual violence?
• As the US grapples and often fails to meaningfully reckon with its history, what does it mean for us to reckon with our own familial and collective histories?
• What messages have white supremacy and patriarchy directed at us about emotional labor in interpersonal relationships?

To see our resources, prompting questions, and notes from all of our dialogues (a treasure trove of resources!) check out the Notes and Descriptions from Monthly Dialogues page on our website.

Many of these dialogues were so juicy and profound that we generated some original writing to share with our broader community.  You can read these reflections from past dialogues, including Disposability, Desirability and #MeToo and Emotional Labor vs. Labor that Evokes Emotions; or the hard work of being human.

In addition to our dialogues, we hosted 9 workshops this year, deepening our partnership with the Bay Area SURJ chapter to offer Difficult Conversations About Race and Racism and Antidotes to White Fragility with regularity in 2018.  We also developed a new and innovative daylong workshop with Partners for Collaborative Change using Theater of the Oppressed to explore and transform the contradictions of internalized messages of white supremacy and gendered oppression.

We expanded our workshop offerings to new places, including the ACLU at their annual conference in Sacramento, two workshops at the University of California Berkeley for undergraduate and graduate students, and traveling to Vancouver, BC to offer our workshop White Females in Food Justice: Maintaining or Challenging the System for the Vancouver and Kamloops Food Policy Councils and the broader food justice movement in BC.

Through these workshops, we’ve raised and redistributed $2138 to the following people of color and indigenous led resistance movements:

• Candi Brings Plenty $75
• Anti Police Terror Project: $200
• Southerners On New Ground: $263
• Black Lives Matter Sacramento: $75
• Ruckus Society: $75
• Community Ready Corps: $75
• Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples: $185
• Family of Nia Wilson: $250
• Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective: $440
• Arab Resource and Organizing Center: $250
• Sogorea Té Land Trust: $250

This financial redistribution was made possible through our fiscal sponsor, the Alliance for Global Justice. to whom we also directed $237.79 in fiscal sponsorship fees.  We are honored and excited to be in orbit with hundreds of amazing fiscally sponsored projects working for collective freedom, some of whom are shown below:

Throughout it all, as an all volunteer collective, we’ve held ourselves and one another with gentleness, love, and reciprocity as we navigate the unending heartbreak of this crumbling world.

In 2019, we look forward to directing more energy to leadership development within our collective, continuing to offer workshops and dialogues that nourish us and our community, developing more original writing, finding new ways to share our resources and analysis with more folks, and as always, committing to the long-haul work of building for collective freedom.

Until we are all free.