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, like all endings, will make way for new beginnings, adaptations and extensions of this work.  

Our Origins

White Noise came into being to live into the questions: How is white supremacy, collaboration with it, and resistance to it, gendered? What inherited patterns exist at the intersection of white privilege and (hetero)sexism that are necessary to make conscious, interrupt, transform and heal? What is the specific accountability and solidarity work for white women, femmes, and anyone coded, socialized, or identifying under the umbrella of gender marginalized within a patriarchal system, to consciously transform long histories of white femininity that have been wielded as a weapon of white supremacist patriarchy?

The germinating seeds began as a series of workshops in 2009 to investigate dimensions of what we called at the time “the intersection of whiteness and femaleness”. Nurtured by a ton of labor and love, an all volunteer anti-racist feminist collective and network took root. 

Together we perceived and responded to the needs and desires for white-identified, anti-racist and racial justice practitioners who are femme, non-binary, cis women, trans and gender expansive folks to have a place to bring the gendered dimensions of our lives into our anti-racism work. 

We responded to the continual calls from BIPOC feminists asking white women to seriously reckon with and uproot inherited oppressive patterns so that harmful histories and habits do not inevitably repeat. 

White Noise was also conceived as an antidote to the counter-liberatory pattern of barriers between white anti-racists, often tearing each other down or distancing from each other, made all the more painful with internalized sexism at play. Alchemizing shame has been one of our north stars. 

White Noise Collective became a place to rigorously and compassionately examine contradictions in behavioral conditioning, dominant narratives and subversive potentials at the intersection/interaction of racial privilege and cisheterosexism. The offerings we created were deliberately designed to be spaces to deepen allyship, illuminate and unlearn toxic ideologies of Western (contextualized within the United States) “white womanhood” and revitalize community to counter isolation in this work. 

These labors of love across years built political analysis and grew collective capacity to show up in fuller, braver, more creative, more accountable, conscious and joyful ways to the lifelong work of dismantling dehumanizing systems. Within the powerful and diverse ecosystem of Bay Area white anti-racism organizations, each with their own purpose and approach, we have understood our steady offerings as movement support: regular spaces to deepen reflection, analysis and connection that serve action. 

Our Celebrations

Living these questions as a core constellation, we grew a culture of sharing good food, laughter, radical honesty and support, through all kinds of life transitions, hard times and celebrations. Amidst the perpetual overwhelm and stretched-thin-ness of living in the Bay Area, we met at least 1-2 times a month to reflect, hone, plan and prep.  We honor the rhythms we committed to for these many years, which reflect our praxis and dedication to this work and each other. 

We want to love up the accomplishments that emerged as fruits of our collective labors:

• Hosting over 80 community dialogues, engaging in collective reflection to inform action, connecting the personal and political, and energizing community. Themes ranged from forging an aspirational white identity to white fragility, from cultural appropriation to white saviorism, from therapy for whiteness to carceral feminism, from solidarity and mutual aid to critiques of allyship. For most of WNC’s life, dialogues took place in living rooms around the Bay Area, always with a fabulous potluck, nourishing bodies, minds, and relationships. During the pandemic, zoom dialogues had “potlucks” sharing plants, art or pets. 
• Creating 9 bodies of workshop curriculum, primarily designed for people who at some point in their lives have identified as experiencing both gender(ed) oppression and white privilege, while open to everyone interested. Offerings include: Solidarity or Savior Complex, Difficult Conversations, Antidotes to White Fragility, White Women and Helping Professions in the Buffer Zone, The Role of “White Womanhood” in Systems of Violence, Spiritual and Cultural Appropriation, Exploring & Transforming Internalized Messages of White Privilege and Gendered Oppression. These curricula combine political education and historic context, creative process, personal reflection, dialogue, Theater of the Oppressed, role-plays, skill-building, grounding practices, nervous system regulation and somatic awareness. 
• Generating writings in the forms of blogs, zines, poetry, useful lists, and open letters. Some of our most read pieces have taken on a life of their own, such as Letter to White People Using the Term “Two-Spirit” and Narratives of White Women Used to Uphold Racism and Patriarchy: A Partial Timeline.
• Redistributing $19,519.79 in workshop fees to BIPOC- led, frontline movement formations.
• Creating a fertile ground to mobilize white people in high risk direct action through our affinity groups in the Movement 4 Black Lives, and by offering dialogues that led directly to mobilization, including Stop Urban Shield and Fuck the Curfew. 
• A beloved Facebook page highlighting current events, art, humor, resistance, organizing, and analysis related to the intersections of racial and gender justice. 
• Fostering creative cultural interventions, including a multi-year effort of subversive action in Spirit Halloween and other stores selling mass-produced problematic costumes with the downloadable labels in our Liberate Halloween Action Toolkit!, craft gatherings, flash mobs and Vent Diagrams for white racial justice practitioners. 
• Birthing a brief and beautiful podcast, with interviews on topics of somatics for white racial justice practitioners, Christian hegemony, unfurling shame, herbalism and liberation, and health justice. 
• Hosting collaborative discussions, webinars, public events and deep-dive dialogues examining the practices of white anti-racism more broadly with our comrades in the Bay Area’s rich ecosystem of white anti-racist practitioners, including Standing Together and Nurturing Dissent (STAND), Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Bay Area, Catalyst Project, Bay Area Solidarity Action Team (BASAT), and others. 
• Fostering White Noise chapters in Providence, Rhode Island and New York City who did inspired and powerful work.

Our Transformations

Over the years, this work changed us, and our orientations to the work changed in turn.  Over time we softened in our rigidity across many dimensions, giving ourselves more permission to show up as we are: complex, nuanced, multi-layered and messy.

In the spirit of naming and bowing to our own transformation, we specifically want to lift up some of the big ways we’ve changed over time: 

Our analysis of gender transformed significantly.  We started as a project to explicitly name, address and transform patterns of white supremacy culture expressed by white cisgender women.  Our predominantly cis collective evolved through learning, reflection and feedback from trans, nonbinary and gender expansive comrades who expressed that White Noise lacked clarity about whether the group was a place for those of us who are not cis women. Over time we came to recognize how centering cis women’s experiences of whiteness did not fully align with our political values or intentions, and our offerings and language came to relate to the intersections of gender and race more expansively.  We strived to honor the myriad complexities of our diverse relationships to gender, sexuality, conditioning, and lived experience; while examining how those all show up in our work to end racism. Particularly in this moment, we are proud to claim a feminist lineage in which cis and trans women, alongside gender marginalized people across identity, can build political power together to end white supremacy and all expressions of gender violence.

We grappled with how to navigate the complexities of holding boundaries as an all volunteer collective, while facing the urgency of fighting systemic white supremacy.  Over time, we gained a deeper understanding of disability justice and the ways our sense of worth was tied to our productivity and output.  We learned to discern our own capacities and say yes and no with greater clarity. We have practiced noticing patterns of martyrdom, internalized ableism, and productivism by inviting our work to be joyful, nourishing and playful. We have supported each other to take bold risks and to also honor the ebbs and flows of capacity in our group. 

While our work always involved elements of embodied practice, we dove much deeper into the sea of politicized somatics. Dedicated study, practice, and growing our intimate understandings and capacities as facilitators led to the development of new curriculum. Curriculum that invites people to witness, engage, and build skill to regulate their nervous systems in order to ground, reconnect and expand the realm of choice when activated in charged situations. Our work became more consciously trauma-informed.

Our Open Questions

And even as we grew and changed, in some ways becoming more clear about our purpose and efforts, we continued to hold learning edges and unanswered questions.  We sunset White Noise Collective with these questions still alive and swirling, in different ways for each of us.

Even as we frequently named and created space to discuss our class experiences as they relate to our work to transform racism, we consistently found our community to be predominantly middle-class (including class categories as defined by Class Action in Activist Class Cultures as professional middle class, buffer zone, and voluntarily downwardly class mobile).  This outcome may be the result of many factors and causes, including the economic conditions required for survival in the Bay Area, and we found ourselves asking if this also speaks to the things our work did or did not impact in the external world. Namely, we had more of a focus on reflection, analysis and processing, and less of a focus on changing material conditions. 

We maintained active discussion about our living financial policy of redistribution, continuously exploring what it means as white people across a range of class locations to do this work without material compensation.  For the majority of the collective’s lifespan we did not compensate ourselves for our labor, with occasional exceptions, out of our desire to redistribute maximum funds raised.  Over time we recognized the limitations this approach placed on who could participate in our collective, and with what material conditions. We acknowledged the realities of capitalism; questioning how financially resourcing work could create more capacity.  We learned to listen more closely to what we needed to be able to show up, and honor each other’s needs to the best of our ability, with a shared dedication to working in a cross-class formation.

Throughout our time as a collective formation, and more intensively toward the end of our time together, we grappled with questions of how identity-based organizing can be used as a weapon rather than as a tool for building solidarity and informing action.  At times we found ourselves caught in questions of whether our work was creating more divisions and more anxiety among white folks, rather than empowering white folks with a grounded sense of history and a determination to engage in fights for justice with respect, accountability, and a sense of our own stake in the fight.  We grappled with the neoliberal co-optation of “identity politics”, and the distancing we felt with grounded working-class movements for change.  We continued to hold the duality of knowing that this work transforms people, and not always knowing how those transformations contribute to the bigger, more beautiful world we know is possible.

Our Sunset

As a next step in this ending, we will take a year in a dedicated process of archiving our work to honor the collective labor of this past decade. Our desire is to share gems of wisdom and reflections from this era of work with our communities, through writing, podcasts, curriculum distillation, and finding an archival home for our work. 

We are grateful for all the ways you and so many have shaped us and brought the vehicle of White Noise Collective to life. We want you to be included in this goodbye, and to have this sunsetting be a loving and glorious expression of our collaborative impacts. 

We will share more details in the coming months about what that will look like, and possible ways to engage as we move towards this ending. 

With affection and appreciation,

WNC