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

Product Information

These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. How can there be, when white supremacy has done such a thorough job of setting White Womanhood apart from the rest of us? I wanted to understand what it was like to face poverty, to need assistance, and how today’s welfare system treats those most in need. Women of color are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of color and we are always seen and treated as such. 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.

Even knowing all this, when the editors finally gave it the green light, asking only for a minor change to update the opening paragraphs, I knew I couldn’t withdraw it and that these kinds of things have to be said precisely because they make people uncomfortable in the best way—the way that forces them to examine their own implicit biases and question their own relative power and privilege. And while her attempts at intersectionality at often successful, there were moments I wished we had a bit more of that depth.

For all I thought I knew of white supremacy and its female co-conspirators, I learned so much from reading this book — from settler-colonial theory to maternal colonialism to the unforgotten accounts of white women disguising themselves as feminists while remaining complicit in causing irreparable harm to women of color and maiming entire generations of peoples under the pretense of harmless femininity. 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. 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. If you’re a person of color, this book will make you feel seen and if you are not a person of color, this book will make you uncomfortable. 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.

Greetings and welcome to the publisher’s office for a brief visit into the world of Penguin Classics where our editorial team shares some insight into our daily lives through classics. Frances Harper’s challenge rings as clear in its truth now as ever, whether white women are ready to face it or not. This raised the ire of a self-identified white woman in the audience who interrogated the panellists as to “what they think they have to gain” by insulting people who “want to read their stories. 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. After she points out the multiple white women who take leadership positions in the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security organizations, she asks: “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?This is how whiteness reasserts itself: through a white feminist movement that aligns itself with diversity and inclusion to get white women through the door but then slams it shut in brown and black women’s faces.

Even before the pandemic, I was becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about growing inequality in Australia. Skillfully blending autobiography, history, and cultural criticism, Hamad makes a devastating case against white women's complicity in systemic racism. Often, when I have attempted to speak to or confront a white woman about something she has said or done that has impacted me adversely, I am met with tearful denials and indignant accusations that I am hurting her.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. 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. These dynamics also shape and taint interactions between white women and women of colour in social situations.

When the book began, I felt like I knew a lot of the information and the book would be more of a way to feel seen than to learn more about the world and I was so wrong! She further notes, "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 then my natural stubbornness and self-belief reasserted itself and it struck me that this was precisely the reaction the online mob wanted—for me to be afraid, to be sorry, to try to take it all back, to beg for forgiveness. On a whole, these items undermine the veracity of Hamad's examples to backup her claims, especially since most of her claims are bold and inflammatory. Brown and black women, I wrote, are deeply impacted, often without realising it, by the grind of living in a society that does not recongise, let alone reward, their value.

This book encompasses racism and stereotypes of all people of color: African Americans, Asians, Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, Latinx, people of Arab descent.