Last call for the carnival!

We’re working on the first carnival of white noise this weekend, with a Black History theme marking the end of the February 2008 edition of Black History Month. If you have a post you would like to submit (yours or someone else’s) this is your last chance! If you would like to submit, the form [...]

Malcolm X: “Whites who are sincere … “

“Whites who are sincere don’t accomplish anything by joining Negro organizations and making them integrated. Whites who are sincere should organize among themselves and figure out some strategy to break down the prejudice that exists in white communities. This is where they can function more intelligently and more effectively, in the white community itself, and [...]

The look of the future?

Currently there is much outrage at the above racist video. I post it so that you can see it if you wish (blurred to protect the identity of those involved). However, I will warn you right now that it is about white Afrikaaner students feeding urine-soaked food to older black workers. So you probably won’t [...]

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Mississippi in 1917, one of twenty children of a sharecropper family. She began to pick cotton at the age of six and worked in the fields as a plantation timekeeper until 1962, when she lost her job after registering to vote. Hamer, who was the mother of two children, [...]

On claiming sisterhood

White women, especially middle-class white women, are raised to expect isolation from other women, a closed life within a nuclear family. We are raised to compete with other women, especially other middle-class white women who are supposed to be our nearest rivals in the all-important quest for good husbands. When we discover feminism, we discover [...]

“On Being White,” by Marilyn Frye

[B]eing white-skinned means that everything I do will be wrong–at the least an exercise of unwarranted privilege–and I will encounter the reasonable anger of women of color at every turn … as a white person one must never claim not to be racist, but only to be anti-racist. The reasoning is that racism is so [...]

On our “declaring” that we’re white allies

Justice Walks has a new post up that speaks to some of what we’re trying to do here at this blog.  I’ve declared myself “ally,” precisely in this patriarchal context. Thanks, Justice Walks, for pointing that out.  It should have been a no-brainer! But, as I’m learning here, our white privilege has served to blind [...]

Confronting racism: what not to do

I’ve just finished reading Every Light in The House Burning, by Andrea Levy* and the scene from which the excerpt below is taken really struck me. [* Which is excellent in so many different ways - I will definitely be reading more of Levy very soon! My further comments here.] To give you some background, [...]

White mother, light daughter

Who am I? I am a woman, a mother, a white mother, a single mother, and plenty more besides. What I rarely add is that I am not the mother of a white daughter, but of a light one. I have had two important reasons for this silence. One is that my daughter’s identity is [...]

I am a man

Here, James Baldwin talks about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the future of the nation: what must white people do? The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people… whether or not they are [...]