“White Womanhood” & White Feminism

our writing on this theme

Calling In: Questions we have for the One Billion Rising campaign

As Valentine’s Day approaches (a day that often inspires much activism from women), the White Noise Collective took an opportunity in our February dialogue to reflect on white feminism: What issues are white feminists largely drawn to, how are those issues expressed, in what way is white privilege showing up, and what patterns are helpful to explore? What better place to start this inquiry than with One Billion Rising, founded by white feminist Vagina Monologues writer and founder of V-Day Eve Ensler? In 2013, One Billion Rising claimed to be the biggest mass rising in human […]

A Visual Response

"White Womanhood", Labor and Work, Reflection

A Visual Response

How does experience of white/female socialization create a brick-wall enclosure, holding in my dream of myself and others? How do my thought patterns, my conceptualizations of relating to myself and others, enforce these bricks? I feel I’ve made these bricks to model a brick I was handed at birth, collecting more over my lifetime, painstakingly making them in my mind’s workshop, firing them in my heart’s oven. The momentum in my life of white suprematicist privilege and body/beauty norm, nationality, literacy, class privilege overlapping with my experiences of gender, sexuality, and ability oppression create complexities […]

I Am Not Trayvon Martin, but I sure look like the jury. Reflections on racism, the Zimmerman verdict and white women jurors.

"White Womanhood", Anti-racism Practice, Reflection, State Violence

I Am Not Trayvon Martin, but I sure look like the jury. Reflections on racism, the Zimmerman verdict and white women jurors.

As we collectively mourn for Trayvon Martin and feel outrage for him, his family and all people who live in fear of a criminal (in)justice system which is designed to entrap and persecute them or their loved ones, we must reflect on the dynamics of racism and fear in our culture that not only allowed, but encouraged, Travon’s murder. From the We Are Not Trayvon Martin tumblr: The Trayvon Martin case isn’t about an isolated incident but about a pattern of behavior. It’s assumed that racism some how magically ended in the 1960’s. Instead, we’ve slapped a […]

Join us for our next Workshop!

"White Womanhood", Anti-racism Practice

Join us for our next Workshop!

Sunday, March 10 – Exploring the Intersection of White Privilege and Gender Oppression in the Work for Racial Justice. 10am-12:30pm, Near 12th St BART in Oakland. $35-50 sliding scale. To apply for registration, click here. How have our experiences of gender oppression impacted our work in challenging white supremacy? What patterns are common among people socialized as both white and female? How do they show up or limit our anti-racist work? In this highly interactive workshop, led by members of the White Noise Collective, we will explore how internalized sexism and heterosexism influences our work […]

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 […]

Stuff White Women Like

These items are the top 50 things named in 526,000 profiles of white women on the dating site, Ok Cupid, as posted on their blog. These are listed in order of the frequency each thing was written. 1. the Red Sox 2. Jodi Picoult 3. boating 4. Nascar 5. mascara 6. Ireland 7. Nicholas Sparks 8. horseback riding 9. bonfires 10. flea markets 11. a country girl 12. Nora Ephron 13. waitress 14. Ray Lamontagne 15. I’m blond 16. Yankees 17. Kenny Chesney 18. decorating 19. getting dressed up 20. skiing 21. When Harry met […]

Love for All Mamas

"White Womanhood", Parent/Teacher Resources, Reflection

Love for All Mamas

For this Mother’s Day, we wanted to share these inspiring images from the Strong Families campaign at Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “The image of mothers that is widely celebrated excludes mamas based on their sexual orientation, race, class, immigration status, and more. In particular, mamas who are imprisoned, and mamas whose children are incarcerated do not get to see the beauty and power of their relationships represented in most Mother’s Day cards.”

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, […]

Taking up space (or: the things we learn on BART)

"White Womanhood", Gender Identity, Patriarchal Violence, Reflection

Taking up space (or: the things we learn on BART)

They say every moment is a learning opportunity. But I hate when those moments happen when I’m half awake and grumpy. Last week, I was taking my bike onto BART for my ever-so-wonderful and all-to-early morning commute from West Oakland to San Francisco. Though I am one of those pesky bikers that often sneak onto trains just a few minutes before I’m allowed to in order to get to my morning meeting at work on time, on this particular morning I was actually on BART at a legally-allowed time. So, onto BART I go, through […]

Reflections on White Women by White Women in Light of the Zimmerman Verdict.

"White Womanhood", Reflection, State Violence

Reflections on White Women by White Women in Light of the Zimmerman Verdict.

While the “social media moment” may have passed, the Zimmerman verdict represents just one of countless examples in an on-going pattern of unrecognized white privilege lending justification to violence against black men. The need remains to continue the conversation about this case, particularly with respect to this pattern. One element of the pattern that is specific to white women is our stereotyped role as virtuous victims who need protection from “bad guys.” Looking at the Zimmerman trial with an eye to this narrative reveals how the verdict was shaped by the white female judge’s decision to frame […]

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White Women, What is (y)ours to do?

"White Womanhood", Reflection, State Violence

White Women, What is (y)ours to do?

When Amy Cooper pointed her finger at Chris Cooper saying, with cell phone in her other hand, “I am going to tell them (the police) that an African-American man is threatening my life.”, a crystallization of decades and centuries of ghosts that have haunted this country came into sharp focus. The weaponization of white womanhood is so old. By both white women and white men. The “virtuous victim narrative“, that while largely created by white men, has been internalized and wielded by white women for so long against men of color. It was forged in […]

White Womanhood and Systems of Violence

A Transcript of an Interview with White Noise Collective on Feminist Magazine Radio Show, July 2, 2019. How would you define White Womanhood – and what separates it from womanhood in general? Why must we make this distinction? We use “white womanhood” as a term to capture the set of cultural messages that are widely spread through media and institutions like churches and schools about how “white women” should look, act, behave, and participate in society. These messages often result in learned behaviors that many people who identify as white women perform, or are expected […]

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. Here’s what came up from a group of 30 white women from a broad spectrum of class backgrounds, […]

Disposability, Desirablity, and #MeToo

"White Womanhood", Patriarchal Violence, Problematic Holidays, Reflection

Disposability, Desirablity, and #MeToo

This blog post is written in response to comments and discussion generated at the January 2018 White Noise Collective dialogue, which examined the themes of “Race, Gender and #MeToo”. I am grateful to the participants for their frank, vulnerable, and honest conversation. See our website for the guiding questions and suggested readings for the dialogue. The following two articles were additional excellent ruminations for this piece: Consenting to Normal by Hyejin Shin and The Female Price of Male Pleasure by Lili Loofbourow. ————– As someone with very limited social media exposure, I’ve been largely distant […]

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”. In our workshops we spend a lot of time naming what the white female prototype is in an effort […]

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

"White Womanhood", Hate Groups, Labor and Work, Parent/Teacher Resources, Problematic Holidays, Reflection

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

As Mother’s Day approaches, the White Noise Collective is once again faced with more questions than answers about this national holiday with a rich but forgotten history. We all agree that the current mainstream celebration of Mother’s Day — adorned with endless plastic, fuzzy and floral ways to express your annual appreciation to your mother — are at best a capitalist co-optation of a holiday that was originally meant for a completely different purpose. Harnessing fierce maternal love in all its forms, we offer this blog with a compilation buffet of food for thought and […]

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 […]

Moving into Radical Self-Worth to Better Support our Movements — part 1 in a series

"White Womanhood", Anti-racism Practice, Hate Groups, Labor and Work, Patriarchal Violence, Reflection

Moving into Radical Self-Worth to Better Support our Movements — part 1 in a series

In our struggles to take down white supremacy and patriarchy, we must each heal the ways we have internalized these systems of oppression. Otherwise, we end up recreating them — even in our liberation movements. This healing means different things to different people. We write this piece in particular for those of us who identify at what we often call the intersection of race privilege and gender(ed) oppression. The two primary authors of this piece identify as white, queer women (though those labels never seem sufficient), but we recognize that people invested in this conversation […]

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.

March 2019 WNC Dialogue: Carceral Feminism — Whiteness, Gender Violence and the Rise of the Prison System

From the murder of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin to Dylan Roof who, when opening fire on a Charleston Black church said, “Y’all are raping our white women. Y’all are taking over the world”, how has “white women’s” sexual purity been weaponized to criminalize Black men? How has the rise of the #MeToo movement bolstered the prison system in the name of stopping sexual violence? How does this racist protectionism encompass or exclude different white women, including fat, disabled, poor, neurodivergent, transwomen or gender nonconforming people? What are the consequences on the lives of targeted […]

October 2016: Haunting and the Ghosts of Colonialism

Dialogue Description: We originally designed this dialogue to be a reading/book group for the book Ghostly Matters. However, after we started to dig in, we decided to shift away from a specific focus on the book (actually a very challenging read) to a wider discussion about the ways US culture (and beyond) is haunted by the ghosts of slavery and colonialism (which to us includes racism, capitalism, sexism, ableism…). How do we, those alive today, interact with and reckon with the violence, the terror, the loss, the repressions, and the shadows of the past as […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

January 2015: Dialogue for organizers & movement workers

Dialogue Description: While we will continue our community dialogues, which include monthly themes, more active facilitation and which serve as an open, educational and exploratory space for folks with a wide range of experience facing issues of racism, sexism and movement work, in 2015 we seek to develop a new container that nourishes and challenges us not just as individuals but as racial justice movement activists/organizers. This space will not be for action planning or organizing. It will be specifically geared to support us in deeply examining the ways our socialization as both white and as […]

September 2014: Cultural Appropriation of Yoga and Buddhist Traditions

Dialogue Description: While cultural appropriation was a term originally used in response to the cultural theft of Native traditions that was happening in the (land called) US as part of settler colonialism, the term is increasingly being applied to any instance of a dominant group (usually white, western) practicing, wearing or profiting off of the traditions of a more marginalized or exploited cultural group. We’d like to ask ourselves: How is the practice of yoga and Buddhism by members of dominant white/western culture a form of cultural appropriation? What are the impacts of practicing these […]

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 […]

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, […]

July 2013: Food Justice

Dialogue Description: The topic of white women in the food justice movement has surfaced in many previous dialogues, so this month we’ve decided to dedicate an entire dialogue to it. What space have white women taken and/or created in the food justice movement, especially in the SF Bay Area? How do race, gender and class influence definitions of and relationship with “good food” and the larger arena of food politics? How does white female socialization influence how we eat, what we eat, and how we build and form relationships around food? We will discuss how […]

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. […]

October 2012: Witches

Dialogue Description: In honor of Halloween and the time of spirits close among us, our October Dialogue will look at the long history of political repression related to witchcraft and the demonization of the independent, earth-based feminine that lives into today. How are modern and historical characterizations and treatment of witches influenced by legacies of oppression? What are the implications and effects of the past witch hunts as well as the ones that continue today across the globe (both overt and covert versions)? How do we build resiliency in our communities of dissent while maintaining awareness of the […]

February 2012: White Women in Helping Professions

Dialogue Description: What images come to mind when we think of a teacher? social worker? fundraiser? therapist? midwife? What representations and histories shape the large demographics of white females in what are seen as “helping” and “care-taking” professions? How does white privilege, “the white man’s burden“, and structural racism play into all of this? How do notions of “feminine labor” shape our understandings, expectations and life experiences? Whose work is in the spotlight, whose is made invisible? How are white women socialized to draw them into care-taking and helping professions? How does the disproportionate number […]

January 2012: Motherhood, Parenting and “White Moms”

Dialogue Description: Relationships with white moms, parenting identities, social scripts and subversion. 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, 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. Big list of questions/topics of interest: White offspring: Can […]

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 […]