Name: White Tears Brown Scars
Rating: 4.725 (40 reviews)
ISBN: 9781398703100

RUBY. HAMAD

How White Feminism Betrays Women of Colour

White Tears Brown Scars

Ruby Hamad

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

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

Sophia 

This book is so honest and had me highlighting pages! 

Murphy-Ann Craig

Julia Moran 

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.

"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.

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?

Aleena Korell

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.

White Tears Brown Scars How White Feminism Betrays Women of Colour

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