White Tears/Brown Scars

by Ruby Hamad

I call the bluff of all white women who claim to be above racism—not necessarily because they are consciously and avowedly racist, but because it is simply impossible for any white woman to be genuinely ‘not okay with racism’ when we as a society have not yet reckoned with the fact that White Womanhood is itself a racist concept.

Tokenism, she explained, ‘is not an invitation to join power’ but an empty gesture designed to placate and even silence our demands for more equitable treatment.

‘To allow all women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.’9

Race and racism have always been about power and economics; about identifying, exaggerating and even inventing points of difference in order to justify brute power and economic oppression. Whiteness is and has always been fluid. To be white is less a state of biology and more a state of proximity to formal power: it is access to an exclusive club.

Second, white women have to acknowledge the unfair advantage their race has given them not just in the sense they have white privilege, but in the sense they have participated in a system where their womanhood is itself a privilege and a weapon. Only then can the process of dismantling the archetypes begin.

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.

White settler-colonial society could not bear to face its own history, so it invented an entirely new one instead—one in which colonialism was not a traumatic invasion but a benign settlement that brought the gift of civilisation.

At various points throughout history, it has been somewhat understandable, if deeply regrettable, that white women chose to remain tethered to whiteness. They were isolated in the colonies. They had a lack of legal rights. They were subjected to puritanical Christian morality. This is no longer the case. There is no reasonable excuse that remains for white women to continue to turn their backs on women of colour.

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?

For five centuries white society has forced women of colour to dwell in its shadows. But our true lives are calling us—so bring the sunscreen, because scars turn brown when they are exposed to sunlight and no longer will we be denied our place in the sun. White women can dry their tears and join us, or they can continue on the path of the damsel—a path that leads only to certain destruction for us all.