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

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Sophia 

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.

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.

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.

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

White Tears/Brown Scars quotes

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