Name: Sophia 's review of White Tears Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad
Item: White Tears Brown Scars
Rating: 5
Author: Sophia

Ruby Hamad

"Powerful and provocative" - Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist For readers of Layla F. Saad's Me and White Supremacy and Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, White Tears/Brown Scars is an explosive book of history and cultural criticism that reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of colour. White tears possess a potency that is rarely acknowledged or commented upon, but they have long been used as a dangerous and insidious tool against people of colour, weaponised in order to invoke sympathy and divert blame. Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep 'ownership' of their slaves, through centuries of colonialism, when women offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, in which tears serve as a defense to counter accusations of bias and microaggressions, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women's active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long-overdue validation of the experiences of women of colour and an urgent call-to-arms in the need for true intersectionality. A must-read for anyone shocked by the statistic that fifty-two per cent of white women voted for Trump, this compelling and meticulously researched book explores how the division between the innocent white women and the racialised, sexualised woman of colour was created, and demonstrates exactly why these stereotypes are crucial to confront and deconstruct. With rigour and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialised within, a reality that we must all apprehend in order to fight.

White Tears Brown Scars

Called "powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color. 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. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color. Discussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront. Along the way, there are revelatory responses to questions like: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault on women? (See Christine Blasey Ford.) With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialized within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight.

How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

White Tears/Brown Scars

Sophia 

Classwashing is an attempt to absolve and deny the existence of racism at all strata of society by turning the tables to admonish people of color that it is unfair to talk about racism at the polling booth because the white working class is disenfranchised. Or they are uneducated. Or they just don't know any better. We need to hear them out and then we will see their racism will dissolve as soon as their economic needs are met. On and on it goes.

The insidiousness of this strategic White Womanhood is that it masks power. It is power pretending to be powerless.

For hundreds of years, excluding women of color from womanhood has been key to maintaining this racial hierarchy, and white women have been both privileged and subordinated by it.

The sex binary is not purely about biology—it is about assigning character traits according to sex and using these, in turn, to rationalize racism.

Her anger naturally invalidates whatever she is saying or is upset about, since "anger" is just her normal and irrational state. The Angry Brown Woman and Angry Black Woman are dehumanizing, self-fulfilling prophecies that keep brown and black women boxed into the narrowest range of human experiences.

Over the course of centuries, as the proponents and beneficiaries of colonialism, whites have set the standards both for humanity as a whole, embodied in the white man, and for femininity that is designed to complement the white male and so is embodied in the white woman.

anna ˖*°࿐

Aroa Puerta

A really good read. I learned a lot. A must-read for all my white friends and fam. 

March Prompt: An NF book about Intersectional Feminism

This is one of those books that was so validating regarding my own experiences as a woman of color. And it provides a historical breakdown to answer exactly why many marginalized women have these experiences, why they were made to feel like the pet, like the threat, like the oversexualized object. Because race and gender are entwined. White Feminism and White Supremacy are entwined, deeply rooted in colonialism and imperialism. It’s systemic of course! 

Drawing from all different periods in history, from the beginnings of transatlantic slavery all the way to BBQ Becky, Hamad provides a comprehensive look into how white women weaponize their tears and emotions to exercise control over people of color and uphold White Supremacy. She emphasizes how feminism has to be intersectional. It IS intersectional. In order to dismantle these embedded systems of White Supremacy, it is imperative especially for white women to truly read into these histories - in the privileges they have, in the unconscious biases and what led to them. 

This book is a call for accountability, a call for change, a call to stop crying when you get rightfully called out! There's no doubt the content in this book are difficult to accept for many, but Ruby Hamad offers a very valuable gift in her words to continue onwards and move throughout the world more consciously and mindfully. All of us have to be introspective and follow the trail backwards in time to confront the source of our pain and the pain we cause. It’s in doing this that we can collectively heal and move forward as intersectional feminists.

joana ashley

ASATT 2024 Reading Challenge 

March Prompt: An NF book about Intersectional Feminism

CATHARSIS. 

This is one of those books that was so validating regarding my own experiences as a woman of color. And it provides a historical breakdown to answer exactly why many marginalized women have these experiences, why they were made to feel like the pet, like the threat, like the oversexualized object. Because race and gender are entwined. White Feminism and White Supremacy are entwined, deeply rooted in colonialism and imperialism. It’s systemic of course! 

Drawing from all different periods in history, from the beginnings of transatlantic slavery all the way to BBQ Becky, Hamad provides a comprehensive look into how white women weaponize their tears and emotions to exercise control over people of color and uphold White Supremacy. She emphasizes how feminism has to be intersectional. It IS intersectional. In order to dismantle these embedded systems of White Supremacy, it is imperative especially for white women to truly read into these histories - in the privileges they have, in the unconscious biases and what led to them. 

This book is a call for accountability, a call for change, a call to stop crying when you get rightfully called out! There's no doubt the content in this book are difficult to accept for many, but Ruby Hamad offers a very valuable gift in her words to continue onwards and move throughout the world more consciously and mindfully. All of us have to be introspective and follow the trail backwards in time to confront the source of our pain and the pain we cause. It’s in doing this that we can collectively heal and move forward as intersectional feminists.

This book is so honest and had me highlighting pages! 

Murphy-Ann Craig

Julia Moran 

“Will white women choose to keep upholding white supremacy under the guise of ‘equality’ or will they stand with women of color as we edge ever closer to liberation?.. White women can dry their tears and join us, or they can continue on the path of the damsel - a path that leads not toward the light of liberation but only into the dead end of the colonial past.”

A very direct calling out of white women’s complacency in colonialism and oppression. Really hard to get through because it’s so densely written and the style feels very stream-of-consciousness, which also made it that much more triggering because a lot of it felt like reading my own thoughts written on paper. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tiring to read, but also cathartic at times. I’d definitely still call it a must read for those hoping to self-educate on liberation in Western society.

Emilee Keawe Oldroyd

“Will white women choose to keep upholding white supremacy under the guise of ‘equality’ or will they stand with women of color as we edge ever closer to liberation?.. White women can dry their tears and join us, or they can continue on the path of the damsel - a path that leads not toward the light of liberation but only into the dead end of the colonial past.”

A very direct calling out of white women’s complacency in colonialism and oppression. Really hard to get through because it’s so densely written and the style feels very stream-of-consciousness, which also made it that much more triggering because a lot of it felt like reading my own thoughts written on paper. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tiring to read, but also cathartic at times. I’d definitely still call it a must read for those hoping to self-educate on liberation in Western society.

Michela

Libro molto interessante che tratta di temi a me molto cari, un a lettura essenziale per tutte le persone che hanno voglia di imparare.

Angbeen Abbas

this book was pretty good! really easy to finish and pretty accessible. i think the issue is that a lot of it was essentially an intro to cultural studies, and it kind of felt like being back in class. that said, i think it's a great read for people who are semi-familiar with feminism and academic jargon, but also want a fairly simple read about how these issues manifest IRL. giving it 4/5 because even if it sort of felt like stuff i already know, i do think this is a really good and important work of writing.

Livie Casto

An important look at the role white women play in perpetuating racism against women of color. A tough read, but one every woman should reckon with.

Flavia Louise

I obviously did not enjoy this book but it was good. The topic of white feminism hurting women of color has been talked about rarely in popular culture. Only in the last few years has it gained more attention and this book is a great introduction to the topic.

priya

“Concepts like the definition of racism itself, arrived at over generations of painstaking scholarship, research and experience, are stubbornly brushed aside in favour of ‘the dictionary definition’.”

“When we talk about ‘white people’, we are not really talking about skin colour but about those who most benefit from whiteness. When we talk about ‘people of colour’ we talk about those who are excluded. I continue to have misgivings about the terms—due to the proximity of ‘people of colour’ to ‘coloured’ as well as the danger it can collapse the needs and issues of certain marginalised racial groups into others—but the lack of better terms necessitates their use at times.”

“It got off to a slow start because the Northern Hemisphere was still asleep and Australia, as ever, rarely acknowledges the value of anything unless it has an international stamp of approval.”

“White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the oppressed and the oppressor. Women of colour are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of colour and we are always seen and treated as such.”

“The details and severity often differ, but what is common about the experiences of women of colour is an unspoken assumption that we always lack a defining feature of womanhood that white women have by default.”

“Like African women in what was to become the United States, Aboriginal women were blamed for their own victimisation. However, whereas the children of the former were funnelled into the slavery economy, those of the latter were first neglected and denied and then brought by force into white society. In both places, the labelling of black women as ‘easy’ served a double purpose: as well as absolving white men of any shame or wrongdoing by positioning black women as less evolved, animalistic and ruled by their own carnal desires, it differentiated black women from white women, thereby justifying the sexualisation of the former and the sexual repression of the latter.”

“That financially independent and sexually active single women were excluded from the ‘protected’ class indicates that Black Peril was about controlling white women as well as subduing the black population.”

“A popular genre of romantic fiction in the Jim Crow South revolved around the ‘tragedy’ of a white Southern belle or gentleman who discovers on the eve of their wedding day that one of them is ‘black’; the wedding, naturally, has to be called off.”

“The damsel in distress is always white because in order to justify white men’s self-granted right of access to the body of any woman they chose, regardless of how she felt about it, only white women were considered capable of being in distress: of being raped. Think about this for a moment. Rather than consider respecting the bodies of brown and black women, white men and their female accomplices removed them from the concept of womanhood and humanity altogether.”

“These defenders really, really didn’t get it. In this context, Beard’s tears were not a sign of weakness: they were a reminder of her relative power. It is significant that of all the times she has been dragged on Twitter, usually by sexist, racist trolls, this is the first and only time—when her critics were women of colour—that she responded by publicly crying.”

“White women’s racial privilege is predicated on their acceptance of their role of virtue and goodness, which is, ultimately, powerlessness. It is this powerlessness—or, I would argue, this appearance of powerlessness—that governs the nature of White Womanhood.”

“DiAngelo is right, of course: I do put up with a lot more racism than I bother to point out—and I am someone who writes about racism for a living.”

“The system was designed to make it as hard as possible for us, but in such a way that white people can pretend the barriers simply do not exist.”

“The alleged threats made against Dutton are one thing, but using them to whitewash his public record by presenting him as a virtuous father and victim is another. This is how White Womanhood stabilises white society: by turning the tables, downplaying its violence and ensuring power stays firmly in white hands.”

“The Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 that granted white women the vote also explicitly barred Aboriginal people, Asians and Pacific Islanders from voting, with the sole exception of Maoris in the hope that New Zealand, which did not similarly discriminate against its Indigenous population when it came to the vote, would eventually change its mind and join the newly established federation.”

“Because colonised women did not adhere to cultural roles akin to White Womanhood, white women assumed they were oppressed, and this status was used to actually oppress them further.”

“The language of the White Saviour is not one of liberation or sisterhood: it is a language of imperialism.”

“It all leads back to the same place, and that place is the rift that European colonialism deliberately created between women, making white women complicit in the racism they have since been all too eager to blame solely on white men.”

“Does misogynistic violence really not count until it is inflicted on the body of a white woman?”

“People are fond of describing forward-thinking people as ‘ahead of their time’. I think this is a mischaracterisation that feeds a false belief in an inherently linear social progress where change is inevitable, as if people are naturally inclined to change and some of us just happen to change before everyone else. As much as Lorde’s words seem prescient today, it would do her a disservice to describe her this way. No one is really ahead of their time. If anything, such people are exactly of their time because they have the capacity to diagnose the maladies of their era and prescribe the remedies.”

“newspaper reports detailed the ‘poaching’ of Aboriginal women by Japanese pearlers. There was ... outrage that Japanese fisherman were engaging in sexual liaisons with Aboriginal women and paying for the services of Aboriginal sex workers. Apparently keen to preserve the entitlement they felt to the bodies of Aboriginal women, white men accused the Japanese of sexual exploitation and abuse of Aboriginal women, previously the prerogative of white men. ... pointing out the hypocrisy of demonising Japanese men when white men had been doing this ... for decades would only have led to accusations of defending forced prostitution and the abuse of Aboriginal women.”

“Too black or not black enough: colourism does not always directly involve black people, but at its core it is driven by anti-blackness, by the desire to distance oneself from blackness in order to be included in whiteness.”

“The racialisation of slavery and its pecuniary place in American society meant it wasn’t a minor feature but what that society was constructed around.”

“What does it mean to be an Arab when your lands were colonised first by the Arabians, then by the Ottomans, then by the Europeans, and finally by capitalism itself?”

“Those of us who are not African must likewise contend with this history and where we fit into it. It may be the peculiar legacy of Euro-American colonialism and slavery that cemented racism and capitalism in the global consciousness, but our ancestors played a role too. This role lives on in the anti-blackness and colourism that also manifests outside the Western world, and eventually turns itself back on us. Those of us who are non-black and non-Indigenous people of colour cannot divorce the racism inflicted on us in the West by white people from the anti-blackness and colourism that live on in the lands our parents left behind.”

“People of colour have never systematically oppressed white people but this has little meaning to whiteness, which, having never experienced it, regards racism as existing in nothing else but words.”

“Women of colour are in an abusive relationship with whiteness more broadly but especially with white women, who pivot between professing sisterhood and solidarity with us based on gender identification, and silencing and oppressing us by weaponising their White Womanhood to keep us boxed into the binary.”

“Why the Middle East has to suffer for women in the West to ‘rise’ is a question still in need of an answer.”

“What does it mean for the rest of us that white women can be in control of almost all of the weapons belonging to the world’s most powerful country and still claim to be an oppressed group on the same level as other women?”

“White women have a choice. It is a choice they have always had to some degree, but never before have they been in such a strong position to make the right one. Will white women choose to keep upholding white supremacy under the guise of ‘equality’, or will they stand with women of colour as we edge ever closer to liberation?”

Quotes from reread

"White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the oppressed and the oppressor. Women of colour are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of colour and we are always seen and treated as such.

The crimes of white supremacy have not gone unrecorded. They are etched into the bodies of brown and black people the world over. Our scars, past and present, physical and emotional, bear witness to the violence white men and women insisted they were not inflicting. White society marked the bodies of women of colour as a receptacle for its sins so that it could claim innocence for itself and, as the chosen symbol of the innocent perfection of whiteness, the white damsel with her tears of distress functions as both denial of and absolution for this violence.

Does misogynistic violence really not count until it is inflicted on the body of a white woman?

For all the talk about how offensive it is to call someone a racist, it doesn’t seem to do much harm to the career of white people.

What does it mean for the rest of us that white women can be in control of almost all of the weapons belonging to the world’s most powerful country and still claim to be an oppressed group on the same level as other women?

Imane

White Tears/Brown Scars is a scathing indictment of what White Womanhood means, from its weaponisation against people of colour to its role as an enforcer of white supremacy. Throughout various spatial and temporal configurations, white women have in turn acted like the damsels in distress when confronted about their racism and the damsels in defence when the stewards of white male domination were challenged, and it is systematically women of colour who pay the highest price of this teary game of bait-and-switch. It begins with an overview of some of the stereotypes used to dehumanise women of colour, placing them as the foil to what womanhood should represent through the pure, innocent, GOOD white woman, and works its way towards the various layers that have led to and enforced the subordination of women of colour to this day, and the ramifications of racism from the workplace to the environment.

This reading experience was both triggering for me - as a woman of colour who has evolved in overwhelmingly white, Western European academic and professional spaces - and cathartic, with testimonials that I could relate to on-page. It is saddening and enraging that this phenomenon of white female victimhood is so widespread but heartening (in a weird way) to see that our struggles are so interconnected and that we can find strength in our shared experiences. It made me think "at least we have one another". I especially appreciated the emphasis on anti-blackness/colourism and how people of colour are also guilty of perpetuating this particular brand of racism for the sake of proximity to whiteness and all that it entails (increased social status, upward economic mobility at the expense of our own communities, etc.) towards the end, which I think is always an important point to make in order to not present the situation as a simplistic monolith. 

The book itself has a strong throughline with the different chapters being connected in a logical manner and leading up to a well-thought progression. I did feel like chapter 7 was the weakest part, with Hamad's clumsy analysis of class struggles and the erasure of class solidarity - which earned the rather silly moniker of "classwashing" from Hamad and which I do not find useful in any way in terms of structural and materialist analysis - and fumbling to tie it to... rape culture? Not the brightest moment of this book imho, but it didn't particularly throw me off as there still were interesting bits to this chapter.

Overall, I think Hamad did a brilliant job at unpacking the concept of white tears, how it has historically and continues to affect to this day people of colour - with an emphasis on the impact of women of colour, but let us not forget that it was a white woman's false cries that caused the murder of Emmett Till and countless other black children and men, among many other examples and testimonials cited in this book - and most importantly what white woman can do to grow beyond the compulsive, narcissistic appeal of aligning with whiteness rather than their gender to further their own vested interests. What does it matter to the liberation of the oppressed and the disenfranchised that the head of the CIA is a white woman? Why should we cheer for it when the victims of US imperialism are people from the global south? Why should whiteness continue to be the default and why should white women's comfort (aka inability to confront their own racism) be more important than an actual reckoning of their racism? In the godless year of 2021, I think it is time white women answer these questions THEMSELVES and come up with solutions THEMSELVES. I do not care that it is a woman who is allowing the bombing of black and brown people in the Middle East and East Africa. It is not a "win for womanhood", it is a win for Western imperialism. White comfort cannot trump the urgent need for respect and dignity that has been denied to people of colour for so long for the sake of coddling white fragility and enforcing white supremacy.

Hamad concludes the book with a strong point on what women of colour have done up until now to grow their awareness of the limitations imposed upon them. Now, it is up to white women to answer the challenge of decrying a system that has in turn oppressed and utilised them, and with which they continue to align themselves to uphold white supremacy. It's not enough to write "intersectional feminist" in your Twitter bio. It is highly laughable to see white women decry the sins of "mediocre white men" as if they hadn't actively participated in upholding said white mediocrity as a whole. Step the fuck up, or stop crying when people of colour call you out on your bullshit. No more time for white fragility. You have a choice to make: fess up, or keep on being a large part of the problem. 

Tl;dr: "Throughout settler-colonial history, white women have had a choice either to uphold this disorder we call white supremacy and with it their own subordination, or to reach across and take the hands of come of colour in order to work toward the liberation of all. Not only have they, as a group, invariably chosen the former, but they have done so with at least as much gusto as their white male counterparts. [...] Is it more likely that this was coincidental, or that when white women join white men in the ranks for power, whiteness coalesces, hardens, and metastasizes? It's not that the women are any more racist than the men, it's that White Womanhood consolidates white domination." Read the book!

Aleena Korell

When white people cry foul it is often people of colour who suffer. White tears have a potency that silences racial minorities. White Tears/Brown Scars blows open the inconvenient truth that when it comes to race, white entitlement is too often masked by victimhood. Never is this more obvious than the dealings between women of colour and white women. What happens when racism and sexism collide? Ruby Hamad provides some confronting answers.

Ruby Huber

Essential reading! Explores and Explains white feminisms origins and harmful effects, and how those things white women do that we don’t think of as harmful truly are!!!

A great read, it does a really good job at providing examples to demonstrate the points for those who need the "proof" that something occurs. I still can't wrap my head around touching someone's hair but I have heard some stories.

Definitely recommend it, it is nice to read an updated look at where feminism stands and where white women can work to help all women.

Aroa Puerta &
White Tears Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad

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Aroa Puerta &White Tears Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad

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Join the club

Aroa Puerta &
White Tears Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad