White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

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What does it mean for the rest of us that white women can quietly control almost all of the weapons belonging to the world’s most powerful country and still claim to be oppressed in the same way as other women? She is currently a PhD candidate in media and postcolonial studies at the University of New South Wales. Yes, sq*aw has become a slur but it didn't originate as an explicit sexual reference as Hamad suggests. I picked this up after some conversation on TikTok following a trend where white women were fake crying and then "turning it off. One of the panellists, Winnie Dunn, in answering a question about the harm caused by good intentions, had used the words “white people” and “shit” in the same sentence.

The piece had proved to be very popular and very polarising and had resulted in far more global attention than I was used to or felt comfortable with, and, still reeling from it all, I assumed she was messaging me to ask if she could interview me for a story. Mridula Nath Chakraborty in The Sydney Morning Herald commends White Tears/Brown Scars as “a compelling critique of the ways in which the woman of colour is pilloried and crucified at the altar of white fragility”, while Rashida Murphy applauds Hamad for exposing “tough, unpalatable truths” in a review in ArtsHub. My answer requires that we begin with the notion that the extent to which we, as individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds, correspond to the stereotypical features associated with our gender in the minds of others is the decisive factor determining how they perceive us and treat us.

I didn't really like the writing or the absolutist tone but can recognize this book has an important message and opportunity for reflection at its core. Indeed, after Faulkner’s comments two of the other hosts, including Williams, who is a black man, quickly tried to soothe Francis, repeating how much they hated to see her cry. So when I told her to stop and complained to HR [human resources] and my supervisor, she complained that I wasn’t a people person or team member and I had to leave that position for being “threatening” to a co-worker.

We acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which Melbourne University Publishing stands and we pay our respect. This explosive book of history and cultural criticism argues that white feminism has been a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women and all colonized women. And that means severing themselves from their historical and emotional attachment to inherent innocence and goodness.Readers engaged with issues of race and feminism in Western countries will find this a powerful read. A white man raping a white woman is not a threat to white male power, and if it destroys or threatens to destroy the woman’s life, then so be it. I knew I would be falsely accused of dividing the feminist movement and of racism against white women.

Never mind that her own actions came after months of Clinton injecting herself into the 2020 campaign by repeatedly taking swipes at Sanders. Ajayi’s words struck a chord with me and led me to look back over my life, forcing me to recognise with some degree of horror that what many people see when they look at me is a generic facsimile of an Arab, someone without their own inner world.

Hamad is writing from a specific POV as an Arabic, Australian woman, but she does a really wonderful job positioning that and pulling in other experiences. Therefore, their protection, and the subsequent continuation of white supremacy, are part of the same equation.

Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep “ownership” of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression. Reading Ruby Hamad’s White Tears/Brown Scars was a clarifying experience, one that gives voice and vocabulary to the physical, emotional, and generational trauma so many Black people and people of color are enduring today. She argues that the feminist movement can never be equal if the complexity of the experiences of women of colour are not acknowledged. The previous day, US president Donald Trump held a press conference denouncing the Charlottesville riots that ended in tragedy when a white supremacist drove his car through a group of people protesting a far-right rally, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. White women told me they had seen this very thing happen too many times; some told me they were ashamed to say that they themselves were guilty of it.With scholarly but highly engaging prose, Hamad details white women’s roles in oppression across continents, a much–needed history lesson for those inclined to reduce racism to individual behavior . Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. I had taken something that was common knowledge among communities of colour and lobbed it like a grenade into one of the bastions of white liberalism, naming it loudly and clearly in one of the most recognisable mastheads in the Western media. How can there be, when white supremacy has done such a thorough job of setting White Womanhood apart from the rest of us? Despite Christine Blasey Ford’s tearful recollection of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault, he was sworn in.