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

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White Tears/Brown Scars blows open the inconvenient truth that when it comes to race, white entitlement is too often masked by victimhood. Men of all races wrote to say that they either knew all too well what I was talking about, or that I had given them a framework through which to interpret behaviour they had noticed but could not fully explain. In other words, the woman saw a personal attack where there wasn’t one and decided to remind the panellists that as a member of the white majority she ultimately has their fate in her hands. You know Melissa, there have been a lot of tears on our network and across the country and around the world’ Faulkner began quietly but firmly while the other woman closed her eyes and shook her head as if in pain.

Yes, it is true women of color have been the targets of a setup of monumental proportions, something that amounts to nothing short of a covert war against us.I ended up listening to passages of this multiple time as the historical elements and the overall argument were incredibly thought provoking.

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.

Hamad is a rigorous historical reporter and a powerful storyteller, and her work in White Tears/Brown Scars will leave readers appropriately unsettled, enraged, and urged to take action against the Amy Coopers of the world. So when I told her to stop and complained to HR 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 coworker.

For centuries, the West has regurgitated representations of colonized women that came to be accepted as more real than the real. Even before the pandemic, I was becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about growing inequality in Australia.

Hamad’s excoriating examination of the points at which racism and sexism collide can be confronting. 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. But for the first time in my career, and on the piece where I had perhaps least expected it, the positive response tipped the balance and shouted down the very loud, very outraged and very numerous haters. Most devastating is when this happens in interactions with white women, often women they consider friends or at least friendly. But most importantly, there were the testimonials from women of colour, the very people I had written the article for in the first place.

What I did not predict was that the backlash would be global and would even rouse the ire of prominent conservatives, such as Jordan Peterson. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. It is not true to say they were bystanders to the colonial enterprise, and it is certainly not accurate to imply they were victims of comparable standing to the colonised populations.

The furious response was so swift, with an undercurrent so violent, coming from so many directions, that I was unable to keep up with it.