Allyship and Solidarity – WHITE NOISE COLLECTIVE

our writing on this theme

What could be an Iraq War Memorial?

15 years ago began the US invasion of Iraq. What could an Iraq War Memorial be? How to represent a scale of loss and devastation beyond what individual hearts can hold, what could do (im)possible justice, what would be small, real steps of reparations? How do we learn from other countries, peoples, communities about memory as a practice of becoming more human, a practice of resistance against amnesia as a tool of Empire – with our particular United Statian default settings of tuning out war and often fragmented attention spans? What war memorial do we […]

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Hearts Heavy and on Fire: Resources to Support White Accountability & Solidarity

Allyship and Solidarity, State Violence

Hearts Heavy and on Fire: Resources to Support White Accountability & Solidarity

Here are a range of resources to guide and coordinate action, to align understandings and work in solidarity with humility and accountability. We mourn the stealing of the lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade at the hands of the police and white vigilantes. In mourning, sorrow and anger, we recommit to the lifelong work of ending the 400 year old nightmare of white supremacy. From SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) national director Erin Heaney: “White folks – you’re probably waking up this morning, turning on the news, full of […]

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 […]

Defund the Police: Resources

Allyship and Solidarity, State Violence

Defund the Police: Resources

The rallying call to defund the police could not be more clear in this time of rebellion and uprising for Black lives, justice and liberation. For those of us who are thinking about this strategy for the first time, or are new to lineages of abolitionist work, here are some resources to guide and deepen understanding of where this call comes from, what it is, and how to contribute to this movement in the short and long term. These protests that have reverberated around the world have put to rest the “bad apple” myth of […]

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 […]

White Noise Collective Is Sunsetting After 12 Years of Love & Praxis

"White Womanhood", Allyship and Solidarity, Anti-racism Practice, Gender Identity, Monthly Dialogues, Reflection

White Noise Collective Is Sunsetting After 12 Years of Love & Praxis

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. We trust that this vehicle of White Noise over the past twelve years has been a part of the collective work to break the spells of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. As we reflect on this formal ending, we acknowledge that it, […]

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.

December 2021: Generating liberatory belonging in white anti-racist cultural spaces

Description/Guiding Questions: “If America is to grow out of white-body supremacy, the transformation must largely be led by white Americans. This transformation cannot rely primarily on new laws, policies, procedures, standards, and strategies. We’ve already seen how these are no match for culture. For genuine transformation to take place, white Americans must acknowledge their racialized trauma, move through clean pain, and grow up.” ~Resmaa Menakem, “Whiteness without White Supremacy” from My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, p. 262 “White people in this country have quite enough to […]

March 2021: Reflect, Recalibrate, Recommit

While 2021 is racing out of the gates, let’s take a moment to pause. What are the lessons we want to learn from 2020, from the past 4 years of 45, from Freedom Summer, the fight to defend our decaying democracy, the many ways we’ve adapted to pandemic living, grieving and loving, what is (im)possible, dreamable, doable? Let’s take time to gather together to support critical and compassionate reflection on how we are finding our ground in shifting political landscapes, the relationship between inner and outer work, and what fortifies us for the ongoing work […]

July 2020: Solidarity with Black and Indigenous Resistance, Mass Uprising and Collective Liberation: Rooting and Rising in this Political Moment

Guiding Questions: What is unimaginable one day becomes imaginable the next, and mandatory the next. These last many months have proved that change is not only possible, but can be swift and unrelenting, including in our movements for liberation. We have demonstrated that when there is a mass will or need, major shifts are possible. We have witnessed this in recent months, with huge victories in the Movement for Black Lives, and in Indigenous organizing. It is within the realm of possibility to stop all evictions, to shut down the factories that are directly causing […]

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. […]

March 2020: Mutual Aid in Uncertain Times

Guiding Questions: What is unimaginable one day becomes imaginable the next, and mandatory the next. We have demonstrated that when there is a mass will or need, major shifts are possible. It is within the realm of possibility to stop all evictions, to shut down the factories that are directly causing polluted cities. Whose will and whose imagination will be enacted? What forces are shaping our imaginations right now? Beyond the next three weeks, what are our notions of “normal”? What does it mean to “get back” to a “normal” that has already been disastrous? […]

February 2020: Disrupting and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex

This dialogue will include a presentation on the historic roots of the MIC which has given rise to the racialized medical ableism we currently face. We’ll also discuss the HJC’s current work, including its launch of the US’s 1st national Medical Abuse Hotline and Know Your Medical Rights campaign. The presentation will be followed by open discussion and resource sharing to connect people with ways to support the revolutionary work for health justice, especially at the intersections of disability and climate justice. Questions we will explore together: How do we define medical abuse, medical injustice […]

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 […]

April 2019 WNC Dialogue: Words We Use & Words That Use Us

Dialogue Description: Language is a form of power. It can create inclusion and exclusion, shared understandings and alienating activist insularity, dehumanize and (re)humanize, be used to “other” people and used as part of self-determination and self-naming. Language, whether drawing on common terms to mobilize people, subverting and reappropriating words and labels, or creating new words to name new meanings, identities and realities, is always an integral force of social change efforts. In this dialogue we will marinate in the power, liberating potentials and dangers of words we use and words that use us. What do new terms help make possible? What language are people and movements creating? What issues or discomfort arise? How do we strive to keep social justice terms alive in their meanings to connect and uplift and reframe, and work against them becoming empty or alienating jargon? Join us in dialogue as we explore these questions for ourselves individually and collectively. Some prompts for thought: I Prefer That You Say I'm "Disabled" Why you should stop saying "all lives matter" explained in 9 different ways

February 2019: Finding a Political Home in Frightening Times

Dialogue Description: How do we navigate the sense of existential dread and overwhelming despair of these times? How can we begin to think strategically about what is needed in this moment, and specifically from us given our positions in the worlds we navigate, when nothing feels like enough? Where are the political spaces that make our yearning for freedom and wellness come to life? If they don’t exist, how can we create them? For some prompting resources, check out: 8 Lessons from The Future of Solidarity: How White People can support the Movement for Black […]

October 2018 WNC Dialogue: Joyful Militancy Book Club

Join us for our October dialogue, our annual book club, this year focusing on the new, visionary and creative analysis of Nick Montgomery and carla bargman in JoyfulMilitancy: “A basic premise of this book is that resistance and transformation are always in the making at the margins, while Empire is always adapting and reacting (25). …No matter what, things can be otherwise — there is always wiggle room. Uncertainty is where we need to begin, because experimentation and curiosity is part of what has been stolen from us (33).” Our dialogue will be guided by the following questions from Joyful Militancy: What […]

April 2018: Solidarity, Survival, Risk and Privilege

Dialogue Description: What does solidarity look like when our racial justice movement leaders are being labeled as terrorists and targeted by the FBI as “Black Identity Extremists” – in a way that hearkens back to the vilification and oppression of the Black Panther Party and other movement leaders? What does “security” and “community defense” really look like in an era of doxing, gun violence, increasingly militarized police, surveillance, and the arming of teachers? How do we continue to stay engaged in the struggle and cultivate resilience (as opposed to fragility and fear) in ourselves, our communities, and […]

January 2018: Race, Gender and #MeToo

Dialogue Description: #MeToo has galvanized millions of people globally to name and explore issues of sexual violence over these past months. Founded by Tarana Burke, #MeToo has also visibilized long-standing dynamics about whose narratives of victimhood and survivorhood are believed, and whose are challenged. How do we mobilize in this movement moment to address gendered violence, building for accountability and collective liberation? 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? How do we hold complexity and recognize possibility in decentralized, online campaigns […]

October 2017: Building a Culture of Resistance to State Repression

Dialogue Description: In this time of increased surveillance and state repression of dissent, how can we prepare and protect ourselves, our communities, and our movements while maintaining and fortifying our resistance? What can we learn from historic precedents of state repression to inform how we act today? What patterns common to folks socialized as white and female/genderqueer/trans/queer may make us and our movements more vulnerable to state repression, and how we can interrupt these patterns? Join us to explore principles and best practices for racial justice activists in the face of state repression. Suggested readings/resources: […]

May 2017: “Ethics of All-White Racial Justice Spaces” with SF SURJ and STAND

Joint dialogue with SF Bay Area SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and STAND (Standing Together and Nurturing Dissent) White Men for Racial, Gender and Economic Justice Dialogue Description: We know that part of overcoming white supremacy is doing away with binaries and the right/wrong dichotomy. And, still, it can feel challenging to do this and to know how to stay accountable to what can sometimes feel like opposing guidelines from the people of color and frontline movement organizers that we try to center as white- or light-skinned activists fighting for racial justice. In this […]

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 […]

February 2017: Building an Intersectional Feminist Movement beyond the Pink Hat

Dialogue Description: In this movement moment when millions of white cis-women are becoming mobilized and radicalized in opposition to Trump, how can we push the movement to organize beyond white middle class cis-women issues and towards racial justice? What common and historical patterns of white feminism should we make conscious and disrupt — now and for the long haul? As a collective, we have particularly investigated how “white womanhood” is used to justify systems and patterns of harm especially against POC, while also holding space for our queer and TGNC experiences in that conversation. How […]

August 2016: Race, Gender and Workplace Power

Dialogue Description: Guided by many motivating questions, our August dialogue will explore our struggles for racial and gender justice in our workplace settings. Whether we work at an explicit racialjustice organization, a largely white, “a-racial” institution, or somewhere in between, we want to use this dialogue to examine the unique challenge of managing workplace relationships and institutional power while also struggling for workplace justice. What roles do we hold in our workplaces, and what barriers do we face to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy within our institutions? How do the real risks of losing or […]

January 2016: Ally Theater

Dialogue Description: In our first dialogue of 2016, WNC will be discussing the complex dynamics of Ally Theater, as described by Black Girl Dangerous bloggers Princess Harmony Rodriguez and Mia McKenzie, asking when do our attempts at allyship become on display in public forums, and how does this impact the nature of our allyship? For inspiration and an exploration of the concepts of Ally Theater, check out Princess Harmony Rodriguez’s Caitlin Jenner, Social Media, and Violent Solidarity as well as Mia McKenzie’s How to Tell the Difference Between Real Solidarity and Ally Theater. Dialogue Notes: These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken […]

September 2015: #BLM: A Hundred Ways to Show Up

Dialogue Description: For the theme of this dialogue, we will discuss the Black Lives Matter movement. Specifically, we want to make space to discuss the varied ways we are each showing up – let’s talk about everything we’re doing, from integrating BLM material into curriculum to pushing policy change, from confronting our internalized white superiority to doorknockingin our neighborhoods, from conversations across difference to marching and locking down during direct action. Where are we feeling change, hope, and success? Where are we feeling barriers? How are we responding to challenges (including All Lives Matter rhetoric […]

May 2015: Internalized Worthlessness, Radical Self Love and How to Not Throw Each Other Under the Bus

Dialogue Description: In this dialogue we will explore the internalized feelings we may have around our white identity, specifically looking at senses of shame, worthlessness, harmfulness, awkwardness, etc alone, together or in mixed race spaces. How do we let go of the binary between being the good or bad white person? How do we tell the difference between discomfort that comes from sitting with our white privileges and self-hate for our white identity? What are the pathways to radical self-love that can better serve us and anti-racist movements? Finally we will explore how we may […]

July 2014: Visioning the Future

Dialogue Description: In our next dialogue coming up in July, we are excited to continue and evolve the discussion from June (but you are welcome to come if you were not at that dialogue!) that looked at our visions for the abolition of racism, white supremacy, sexism, and heterosexism, by looking next at WHO is visioning the world into being. As artists, writers, activists, movie directors, narrative and meme spreaders, designers and communications professionals share potential future visions that have a powerful impact on what futures are created, we want to ask, who are these […]

March 2014: Allyship: Critiques, Potentials and Practices

Dialogue Description: Challenges to the concept of “alliance” keep arising, in particular with regards to white antiracists. We’ll familiarize ourselves with common criticisms, dive into our own growth edges and practices, and examine the limits and possibilities of this model. We will try to balance theory and lived experience in this dialogue, so please think of a recent experience wherein you felt challenged by your role as an ally to share and possibly work through together. We’ll use a few recent blogs to inspire our discussion: GradientLair’s I Don’t Want Tim Wise As An Ally Jamie Utt’s So You […]

February 2014: Love, Rage and V-Day: What’s going on with white feminists?

Dialogue Description: What issues are white feminists largely drawn to, how are those issues expressed, in what ways is white privilege showing up, and what patterns are helpful to explore? Here are links to a number of pieces that relate to this month’s theme, diving into patterns, concerns, critiques, and questions of white feminists and feminism. We offer these not to be overwhelming, but thought that one or two might stir your interest before we meet in person: Beyond Eve Ensler: What Should Organizing Against Gender Violence Look Like? One Billion Rising: Eve Ensler’s White […]

December 2012: Difficult Conversations (Holidays, Family and Beyond)

Dialogue Description: What communication patterns do we notice in ourselves? How does white female socialization (and other forms of socialization, cultural values, etc) factor into these patterns and how does it affect our ability to engage in meaningful and often difficult conversations with friends, family and folks with different perspectives? We will discuss these themes as well as learn and practice strategic non-defensive communication – so that as we head home for the holidays, we can make this year the one when we don’t just grit our teeth and ignore the racist or otherwise marginalizing […]

November 2011 Dialogue: Occupy Movement

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. Reflections on whiteness and gender in the Occupy Movement Opening Check-in Question: Name, preferred gender pronoun, relationship to occupy movement, […]

suggested reading

Reparations

our writing on this theme

dialogue notes on this topic