First Carnival of White Noise (Black History Month)

white noise presents: the first carnival of our very own!
As previously trailed, this is a retrospective on Black History Month, February 2008.
What is Black History Month?
In 1926 Carter G Woodson and his organisation (then known as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, later known as the Association [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

The Grunwick strike

in the 1970s, Grunwick photo processing factory in Willesden, London employed mainly Asian women – their workforce was 80-90% Asian and mainly female. This was a deliberate policy on the part of owner George Ward and his management. They preferred female Asian workers because they were cheap, docile, and easily bullied.
In Finding a Voice (see [...]

Mary Seacole

Mary Seacole was born in 1805, in Jamaica, the daughter of a white Scottish man, and army officer, and a black African woman, a freed slave.
The family were by no means poor, although they had few civil rights as black people in a slave society. Mary’s mother was a healer, and made her living running [...]

Reparations for slavery

Since we are honoring Black History Month(s) here at white noise, I want to bring up the idea of governments paying reparations for slavery. I first became convinced of the necessity of doing this in the usa about 5 years ago, when I read this op-ed by Dalton Conley in the New York Times. [...]

Black History Month

One of the things that we can do to help us build better relationships with people of colour is to get some sort of a clue about the history of their struggle, the history of individuals, nations and culture that informs where people of colour are at today. This is more than just general [...]