White Nonsense Roundup

Started in 2015, White Nonsense Roundup (WNR) is a volunteer-run effort active on Facebook and Twitter (now X) that is meant to take some of the burden of counterspeaking – especially in response to people who claim they aren’t racist – from people of color. As Terri Kempton, one of the project’s founders, said: 

If someone is tired of explaining yet again why a certain statement is racist or why it's problematic to say “all lives matter” or to be colorblind and claim that you don’t see color, what a great thing that we can do some of that work...It should be white people engaging in a lot of the labor and work of tackling our own skinfolks to figure this out. So there is the person-by-person conversation-by-conversation, getting involved, and speaking the truth to problematic or overtly racist people.

WNR tries to recruit more counterspeakers by asserting that it is white people’s duty to counterspeak to racism, and therefore they don’t respond to requests from them. A pinned Tweet on their page reads, “Welcome new followers. A note to White followers: please don't tag us. We are here to serve People of Color who are experiencing race-related abuse from White folks, and would like us to intervene. Consider it your personal responsibility to fight racism when you see it.

When a person of color tags WNR in a post, a volunteer reads through the thread and then figures out the best way to respond. Although WNR sometimes seeks to change the behavior of an author of racist speech with counterspeech, they say, they always seek to reach the audience of other people reading the exchange. 

As one of the WNR founders noted, “If no one says anything, and it’s just this racist comment left sitting there, what are we supposed to think? That all white people agree with that? So it’s important to counter that. Also, if there is someone else silently reading the conversation – they may learn something.”

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