You can disable Django’s static file handling and allow WhiteNoise to take over simply by passing the --nostatic option to the runserver command, but you need to remember to add this option every time you call runserver. An easier way is to edit your settings.py file and add whitenoise.runserver_nostatic to the top of your INSTALLED_APPS list:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
'whitenoise.runserver_nostatic',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
# ...
]