White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color
Author: Ruby Hamad
Publisher: Catapult
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
For readers of White Fragility, White Tears/Brown Scars is an explosive book of history and cultural criticism that argues that white feminism, from Australia to Zimbabwe to the United States, has been 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 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 are revelatory responses to questions such as: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault of women? With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority we are socialized in, a reality we must apprehend in order to fight.
TL;DR Review
White Tears/Brown Scars is a thoughtfully researched, convincingly argued, incredibly important book that should be required reading for white people everywhere.
For you if: You are white, especially if you are a white cisgender woman.
Full Review
“The harms caused by the gender binary can and have filled volumes of books on their own. However, rarely has it been explicitly noted that this binary, not only marginalizes those who don’t fall neatly into either category regardless of their race, but is itself one of the ways in which whiteness has maintained its domination.”
First of all, huge thanks to Catapult for providing me with an advanced copy of this book. I will be shoving it into people’s hands for many years.
What I expected from this book was a cultural examination of the way white women use tears to avoid confronting racism. I got that, but I also got so, so much more. This book is a deeply researched account of the history of white womanhood’s role in colonization, racism, and oppression — and its lingering effects today. It reads a little academically, but clearly and convincingly. If you were called to act by Hood Feminism and now want to learn more deeply about the history of the weaponization of white womanhood — this is absolutely the book for you.
Ruby Hamad has written a globally focused book, with most attention paid to the United States and Australia. It focuses on white supremacy in general against people, most often specifically women, of color from all parts of the world — Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Arab, and more. This alone taught me much about the oppression of people of color in places outside the United States (as well as inside it).
There is so much for me to internalize from this book. Right now, I continue to think deeply about Hamad’s revelation that white women hold the power to weaponize their white womanhood against everyone but white men. About the role white women played in false rape and sexual assault claims against men of color — think even of a simple imagined whistle by Emmett Till — and how we have struggled to escape the lingering repercussions of being in cahoots with the white patriarchy in this way, for example with society’s refusal to believe (or act upon) Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh.
This book was a mirror I desperately needed to look into. White women like to think that women are all “on the same side” against sexism and patriarchy — it’s more comfortable for us, a way to feel good about our place in the world. But it’s a lie. It’s been a lie for all of history, and if we keep ignoring it, we will never fix what’s wrong with our attitudes, beliefs, and actions.
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault
Rape
Domestic abuse
Relationship abuse
Physical abuse
Dating violence
Child abuse/pedophilia/incest
Animal cruelty or animal death
Self-harm and suicide
Eating disorders, body hatred, and fat phobia
Kidnapping and abduction
Pregnancy or childbirth
Miscarriages
Abortion
Mental illness
Ableism
Racism and racial slurs
Hateful language directed at religious groups (e.g., Islamophobia, antisemitism)
Transphobia and trans misogyny
Homophobia and heterosexism