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

by Ruby Hamad

When Lisa first reached out to me, I was overcome with intense guilt about what I had done to her, that she had lost her job because of me, that I should have known better. But this reaction is itself internalized racism, scolding people of color for whatever bad thing happens to us, telling us it’s our own fault, keeping us in check by taking away our will to speak. Self-blame is a potent teacher: it can drain your self-belief, make you want to hide, compel you to beg for forgiveness even when you have done nothing to be forgiven for, all in the hope you can somehow undo the abuse, the scorn, the injustice, and go quietly back to where you were before.

where it was born. In his classic critique of Western representations, Orientalism, the late Palestinian American academic Edward Said presents an illuminating account of how the West constructed an image of the Orient that positioned it as the antithesis of Europe: uncivilized, backward, barbaric, carnal, weak, and feminized. The Orient refers to all that which is not the Occident or West, though Said focuses predominantly on the Muslim and Arab-speaking world. The exotic presentation of a mysterious, inscrutable Orient, Said argues, helped Europe to define itself as everything the Orient was not: civilized, progressive, compassionate, chaste, strong, and masculine. This status as the most highly evolved race, the only race that truly saw and honored differences between the sexes by respecting the virtue of women, was all the justification Europeans seemed to need to export with much gusto and little mercy this view of animalistic, oversexed, non-sex-differentiated inferior races to wherever they decided to colonize—which was literally almost everywhere. The only countries to have entirely escaped some form of European control are Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Liberia.

She had a higher opinion of Islam and the Orient than her male contemporaries, claiming that Turkish women she met in the bathhouse were so horrified by the sight of her boned corset they described it as a box in the shape of a woman’s body and felt that English men must be far worse husbands than their own for tying their wives up in such a thing. The presentation of unrestrained Oriental sensuality was not benign. Such representations allowed Western men to project whatever erotic fantasies they had of the “exotic Orient” onto those women, serving as a means of simultaneously desiring and systematically devaluing the Oriental woman and her culture. As historian Hazel Simons puts it, “This domination over the native women was part and parcel of European man’s power and control of her native land.” Flaubert’s Egyptian muse was the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, whom he described as “a beautiful creature,” albeit a “fleshy” one with “slit nostrils.” As she snored in a Cairo bed beside him, he “thought of my nights in Paris brothels and I thought of her dance, of her voice as she sang songs that were for me without meaning and even without distinguishable words.” To Flaubert, Kuchuk was a stand-in for all Near Eastern women, most of whom he would never even see, let alone get to know. In comparing her and them to the brothels of Paris he is essentially categorizing all Oriental women as “prostitutes,” and I do want to stress here that I am not disparaging sex work but highlighting ...

churchyard fire. The Princess Pocahontas myth represents a passive sex symbol, the “Good Indian” who unites the white man and the Native, the civilized and the savage, the past and the future. But—and this is a big but—through her attraction to white men she also affirms the superiority of white society over her own, and so functions as tacit permission for whites to conquer, assimilate, and destroy Native culture. Even her “princess” status was a fabrication (it is not a role that exists in Native cultures) that imbues the Pocahontas legend with gravity and weight, making her enthusiasm for white society all the more meaningful.

Muñoz Martinez estimates at least 232 Mexicans were lynched by vigilantes between 1848 and 1928 in Texas alone, with anywhere from 300 to a few thousand murdered by state-sanctioned forces, including the famed Texas Rangers, between 1910 and 1920. Such killings were justified on the basis the Rangers were protecting the innocent white landowners from the criminal Mexican “bandits.” Incredibly, even though far fewer Mexicans were lynched than blacks would be during the Segregation era, their smaller population meant they were even more likely to be targets of vigilante mob violence. The lynching of Mexicans was driven by the philosophy of manifest destiny: the belief that U.S. settlers were ordained by God to expand across the entire North American continent. To aid this expansion, Mexicans were depicted in newspapers and films as all-around uncouth people. The men were criminals, dim-witted, dirty, and untrustworthy, and the women were singled out—in shades of the Dragon Lady—as sexually manipulative, cunning, promiscuous, and without morals. The 1920s star Lupe Vélez, for example, was described in the American press as a “Mexican Spitfire” and “Just a wild Mexican kitten.” Her response: “I’m not wild! I am just Lupe.” By 1922, the Mexican government had so tired of this degradation they issued an embargo on Hollywood films that contained the crude depictions. That the Mexican government went to the extent of banning U.S. cultural products reveals that the old adage “It’s ...

The Spicy Sexpot is still a fixture on our screens. From Gabrielle (played by Eva Longoria) in Desperate Housewives to Gloria (Sofía Vergara) in Modern Family, she provides an alternative to the ubiquitous Latina maid, although the two tropes appear to come together in the more recent Devious Maids, the title of which probably says it all. This is no shade on those actresses: they are who they are. The problem is when their appearance is used to reduce millions of women of the various races and ethnicities that populate the twenty-one countries that make up Latin America into one hot-blooded sex symbol. Not only does this erase the racial complexity of the region, it leaves real-life Latinas anxious about their looks and their behavior as they struggle to either confound or conform to this archetype.

“It felt as if my anger and passion were taken as a joke because it’s simply an expected part of my personality to be ‘passionate’ like Sofia Vergara [and] ‘angry’ like Michelle Rodriguez in The Fast and the Furious . . . Why can’t I just be a human who happens to be curvy and is passionate, sometimes angry, occasionally loud, and rarely sexy?” The answer is because stereotypes dissolve any requirement to take certain people seriously or to empathize with them. As Richard Dyer said, when it comes to the matter of representation, the way people treat us depends on how they see us. Images gleaned from the news media, movie screens, books, magazines, postcards, advertisements, and anywhere else images can be found combine to give us the false illusion that we can know almost everything there is to know about certain people just by looking at them.

Indeed, although Native women often held positions of prestige and influence within their traditional communities, the hallmark of their depiction on-screen is an abject lack of complexity. When they weren’t Princess Pocahontas, they were the Dumpy Squ*w. Usually nameless and unimportant—in 1980, Lakota/Dakota actress Lois Red Elk revealed that she’d never played a role that actually had a name—the squ*w was a drudge: a sexless, unattractive workhorse who was relegated to the kind of manual work that white women were considered too highly prized for. Native Americans regard the term as a slur and have been lobbying for years to have place names that include it renamed. The word “squ*w,” explained Mohawk woman and Native rights activist Suzan Harjo on The Oprah Winfrey Show back in 1992, comes from the Algonquin word for “vagina,” and “that’ll give you an idea of what the French and British fur trappers were calling all Indian women.”

As Edward Said brought to light, over the centuries, the West fashioned an image of the so-called Middle East that existed more in the imagination of Orientalists than it did in the Orient, and constructed its own flattering self-image in the process. Whatever the East was, the West was not. Through the works of Western travel writers, colonialists, artists, diplomats, and “experts” who positioned Arab and other Eastern cultures as barbaric, backward, violent, animalistic, lewd, and oppressive of women, by default the West became advanced, merciful, civilized, moral, and respectful of women. Here is where it all comes together. For all its assigned savagery, the East was also feminized in the Western imagination—meaning, naturally, that the West was masculine. This is not as contradictory as it may appear. The peculiar logic of Eurocentrism was fueled by the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, which regarded true differentiation of the sexes as a status that had only been achieved by the more highly evolved white Europeans. Although brown and black bodies were designated female and male, the science promoted by the American School of Evolution regarded sex difference as a racial characteristic and argued that only white European-derived people had evolved to the point of having distinctly separate male and female brains and dispositions.

Binary sex is both function and feature of white supremacy. That is not to say that other cultures did not have their own ideas about gender and what constitutes a man or a woman. Nor is it to deny these may have been oppressive in their own right. It is to say that the West imposed its own definitions as a uniform measure, and, unsurprisingly, everyone else came up short. This is why Western representations of Arab and Asian men over the centuries have seemed to contain baffling contradictions—simultaneously depicting them as monstrous and violent and emasculated and androgynous.

The American School of Evolution, explains academic Kyla Schuller, acknowledged that both thinking and feeling—sentiment—were crucial to evolution and civilization; however, too much sentiment led to sentimentality, which could hinder objective thought. To solve this dilemma, evolutionary race scientists effectively split the civilized, a.k.a. white, body in two. To the male half went the higher intellectual faculties of reason, logic, and objectivity, and to the female went excessive sentimental responses and the accompanying tendency to irrationality and impulsivity. Women would take on the role of feeling, of sympathizing, of “letting emotions override the facts,” leaving men to carry on the important work of intellectual endeavors and empire-building. In this way, Western civilization would be secured and stabilized.

Schuller argues—and I agree—that this is the foundation of our modern notions not only of race but of gender. 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.

Even for Western women, higher education (as well as suffrage) was so vehemently opposed by so many white men for so long because any attempts to transgress the man/woman binary was considered not only a threat to white patriarchy but to Western civilization. The binary permitted white men to ruthlessly abuse women of color with no consequence: as civilized men, they were spared any burden of guilt or remorse since it was literally regarded as their rightful role not to feel sympathetic or sentimental. The refrains of “facts, not feelings” and “civility” that dominate our contemporary public discourse are rooted in this racialized and gendered enforcement of white supremacy. These

What Mrs. Cromer did next would not only seal the fate of her lover and that of hundreds of men after him, it would help to cement the construction of the white settler-colonial identity as one of white male ownership of property—which included white women. It also galvanized the white aversion to black male sexuality that shaped the form of political dominance across the imperial world. Mrs. Cromer knew she was in a compromising position. As the significant number of mixed-race children in the colony attested, white men frequently lived with black women as their “concubines” and had them as casual sex partners with no repercussions. Their white female counterparts were afforded no such liberties. In the colonies as well as in Europe, white women were, as the late Australian historian Jock McCulloch notes in Black Peril, White Virtue, “the subordinate members of a dominant race.” In Rhodesia this meant that a white woman who engaged in sexual relations with a black man was subject to a prison sentence and certain ostracism from the white community—an unthinkable consequence for most white women in an already remote landscape. To save herself, Mrs. Cromer used the only get-out-of-jail-free card available to her: she accused her black lover of rape.

Not that fear was a reasonable excuse for such silence. The most important contemporary work on lynching comes from the pioneering black female journalist Ida B. Wells, whose investigative reporting was integral to documenting and spreading word of what was happening in the southern states. Wells was justifiably scathing toward those “men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages,” denouncing them as criminal participants, accomplices, and “accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual law breakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.”

that had been constructed during slavery. As pioneering black feminist academic Hazel V. Carby puts it, “White men used their ownership of the white female as a terrain on which to lynch the black male.” As in other European colonies, only white men were free to cross boundaries with impunity. As white men, they decided they could have sexual access to the bodies of both white and black women and reserved the right to guard this access by terrorizing the black population, all the while projecting their own sexual violence onto their victims. The concept of white women’s virtue is a corollary of white men’s sin: by keeping this false image of impeccable White Womanhood alive, white masculinity was absolved of its terrible crimes and black sexuality could be demonized and mythologized.

man to white women’s treatment of black women. “You white women speak of rights. I speak of wrongs,” she asserted. “I do not believe that giving white women the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of society. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies.” She argued that the condition of the poor white men of the South was a direct consequence of the law favoring rich slave owners: in oppressing enslaved black men, white men also paralyzed the moral strength of the nation and the rights of lower-class whites. Likewise, in the North, white women were turning away when black women, including Harper herself, tried to hail streetcars in great cities such as Philadelphia only to find that the conductor refused to let them ride. “Have women nothing to do with this?” She answered her own question by recounting the story of a conductor who instructed all his passengers to exit the tram when a black woman hopped on. They all—including the white women—complied and the car was sent back to the station. “While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”

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. And this, I believe, is why, despite all our claims, our society still does not take violence against women seriously. When perpetrated by white men, frequently either such violence is ignored or the blame is heaped onto the victim. It is only when white women are violated or even imagined to be violated by nonwhite men that white society suddenly seems to find its moral compass.

White people as a collective still fear sharing power and status. They fear no longer being the special race. The Enlightened race. The civilized and civilizing race. This is likely obvious to anyone watching the trajectory of right-wing “populism,” the alt-right, and the resurgence of the neo-Nazi movement. Perhaps, as many of us racialized folk half-joke, white people fear being treated the way they have long treated the minorities they have subordinated. At the very least, there appears to be a complete denial that the only thing that has made white people “superior” is their own insistence that they are.

I have thought long and hard about what to call this phenomenon, this very dangerous performance of womanhood and innocence. In many ways, as Luvvie Ajayi suggests, this weaponization of white women’s distress seems a corollary of toxic masculinity, and I wondered if it isn’t appropriate to call it simply toxic femininity.

Strategic White Womanhood is a spectacle that permits the actual issue at hand to take a back seat to the emotions of the white woman, with the convenient effect that the status quo continues unabated. White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system. Consequently, we all stay in the same place while whiteness reigns supreme, often unacknowledged and unnamed.

It’s a familiar scenario for Middle Eastern women when it comes to Western foreign policy, this complete lack of empathy and understanding we routinely receive whenever we broach a discussion of our ancestral lands where, for many of us, members of our extended family still reside. Of

In other words, rather than making it absolutely impossible for people of color to slip through, it makes it just hard enough that most of us cannot. That some of us do “make it” is not a testament to the willingness of white society to accept us but to our own often exceptional ability to navigate a rigged system. This is why people of color, and especially women of color, have to be at least twice as capable as white people in order to get half as far. The system was designed to make it as hard as possible for us but in such a way that white people can pretend the barriers simply do not exist.

After a white woman conflicts with a woman of color, her battle is done for the time being. The woman of color is sufficiently chastened and the white woman turns her attention back to invoking a nonexistent sisterhood in order to keep fighting “patriarchy.” But this is a patriarchy they themselves have just ensured will continue, because their weaponized tears are a form and function of it. This kind of behavior is a key way by which whiteness asserts and retains its power. By keeping the old structures in place, white women’s innocence and virtue serve as the front line of white civilization. The insidiousness of this strategic White Womanhood is that it masks power. It is power pretending to be powerless.

We are trying to solve the problem with the natives . . . the only thing I can see would [be] to get the children right away from their parents and teach them good moral, clean habits & right from wrong & also industries that will make them more useful. —Annie Lock, Australian missionary, 1929 No uncivilized people are elevated till the mothers are reached. The civilization must begin in the homes. —“Mrs. Dorchester,” Women’s National Indian Association, 1890

It is true to say white women were subordinated in settler-colonial society. 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 colonized populations. In fact, white women were often among colonialism’s most vociferous proponents. Had Summers widened her scope a little, she would have seen that there was a third role white women played in Europe’s colonies: that of the Great White Mother. It was through harnessing the Great White Mother that white women were able to access a form of limited power through maternalistic intervention into the lives of Aboriginal women.

the Great White Mother!!!!

Focusing on the sixty years from 1880 to 1940, Jacobs uncovers a history of white women far removed from the usual image of steadfast pioneers who were ignorant of the reality of the colonial project. As in other colonial outposts of empire, white women in Australia quickly learned to navigate European colonialism to their advantage, leveraging their status as both a subordinate class and a privileged class to “simultaneously collaborate with and confound colonial aims.” When it came to the removal and institutionalization of Indigenous children, colonialism was “largely a feminine domain, defined primarily around mothering, particularly targeted at Indigenous women, and implemented largely by white women.” White women decided that the removal of Indigenous children was “women’s work for women.”

In other words, Indigenous society did not properly adhere to white notions of sex difference and sex roles. To white women, Indigenous women did not fit the white model of womanhood, and this made them either victims or perpetrators. They had different cultural norms around sex, which made them immoral. They labored outside the home to help provide for their families, which made them enslaved drudges. Ironically, the white response to this perceived oppression was to oppress them. Let’s repeat that. Because colonized women did not adhere to cultural roles akin to White Womanhood, white women assumed they were oppressed, and this status was used to actually oppress them further. One could fairly say that Indigenous cultures were not oppressive enough of women for the liking of white society.

white women. “The Indian child must be placed in school before habits of barbarous life have become fixed,” declared Estelle Reel, who served as superintendent of Indian education for the Office of Indian Affairs from 1898 to 1910, “and there he must be kept until contact with our life has taught him to abandon his savage ways and walk in the path of Christian civilization.” Reel fancied herself such an advocate for the Native American community that she gave herself her own nickname: the Big White Squ*w. Not only did she employ a slur to ingratiate herself as an honorary member of the community she was attempting to destroy, but she threw in an extra insult by alluding to her superior size. Similarly, notorious Australian missionary Annie Lock declared in 1929 that the only hope for the Aboriginal population was to remove their children and put them in service of the white population to transform them into model citizens.

Ingratitude is a common theme in white women’s responses to the resistance of colonized women. Turning the tables and accusing the very Indigenous women they were wronging in a catastrophic way, white women used their more powerful status to silence the other women, essentially gaslighting them into submission. In early 1920s Western Australia, fifteen-year-old Daisy Corunna was taken to work as a servant for Alice Brockman, who later removed Daisy’s own daughter, Gladdie, and placed her in a children’s home at the age of three. Moreton-Robinson quotes from Daisy’s testimony: “What could I do? . . . I wanted to keep her with me, she was all I had, but they didn’t want her there. Alice said she cost too much to feed, said I was ungrateful. She was wantin’ me to give up my own flesh and blood and still be grateful. Aren’t black people allowed to have feelin’s?” Apparently not, and certainly not if those feelings clashed with the goals and aims of the state and the white maternalists. Sometimes,

life. In other words, rather than pressing to end unjust persecution of black men and demonization of black female sex workers, white women navigated the system to keep these racial inequalities entrenched while angling for better status for themselves.

Also petitioning the courts as a means of asserting their rights at the expense of other women were female slaveholders in the United States. In They Were Her Property, Stephanie Jones-Rogers debunks the long-cherished myth that white women were largely shielded from the day-to-day realities of slavery. Jones-Rogers uses the testimony of formerly enslaved people gathered in the 1920s and 1930s and corroborates their accounts with newspaper records, court documents, and written records by white men and women. She uncovers a history not of benevolent mistresses ignorant of slavery’s brutality, but of slave owners who were heavily invested in their “property.” White women, Jones-Rogers discovered, learned from a young age of their future role as mistresses and grew into this role, treating their parents’ slaves as both companions and subordinates. Often when a black woman gave birth, the master and mistress would allow one of their own daughters to “claim” the baby as her future servant. White parents often bequeathed human property to their female children, with land usually passing down to the males. Despite the legal custom of coverture, whereby a woman becomes “covered” by her husband much as a bird covers its young under its wings, theoretically subsuming both her identity and property into his, white women went to great lengths to guard their human property. Legal contracts were drawn up before wedding vows were exchanged, determining that she would have “sole and separ...

White women continue to reap the benefits of the default to innocence they have been granted—but only when this innocence can be used to bolster whiteness as a system of power. “Women for Kavanaugh” demonstrates the pivotal role White Womanhood still plays in the maintenance of this system, but for some white women this privilege comes at a catastrophic cost. Not believing white women like Ford who make allegations—no matter how credible—against white men has its roots in this tragic and unpalatable history: usually, when white women made rape claims against black and brown men they were lying, and white men knew they were lying, because the cry of rape and attempted rape was itself a ruse for justifying white racial violence and fortifying white economic, social, and political domination. Sure, this gave white women a measure of power over black men and over women of color that they lacked in other areas of their lives, but it also ensured they stayed right where they were, sandwiched between white men and men of color in that racial and gendered hierarchy, with women of color lagging below. White men have been socialized by centuries of white supremacy not to believe the sexual allegation claims of white women—unless the accused is a man of color.

children. What did it matter that some children still had living parents when it was their future that was at stake—a future that could be spent as a productive member of white society rather than following in the footsteps of their primitive parents? He was doing it for their own sake, you see. Won’t somebody please think of the children? Well, somebody did. By the 1870s poverty was considered so shameful that poor families were voluntarily surrendering their newborn infants to the wicker cradles set up for this very purpose on the steps of charity organizations across the city. Many pinned heartbreaking notes to their baby’s clothing, promising to return and collect them when they could afford it. Brace’s vision had successfully convinced poor white parents that their poverty-stricken status meant they had forfeited their parental rights to their own children.

darker skin was seen as an indicator of poverty. “There is an incredible amount of shame about being a migrant farmworker,” she told me. “My mom didn’t want us getting prieta—dark-colored or tanned. We would wear a long-sleeved shirt with a long-sleeved dress shirt over that, heavy blue jeans, gloves, a large hat, and sunglasses. And the temperature would be in the hundreds.” Years later, this woman took up waterskiing and her mother would still get upset, just as mine does. “Every time I would visit her, she would make an awful face and say I ‘look so prieta.’” Samra. Prieta. It seems there’s a tacitly derogatory word for it in every language. In India, antipathy toward darker skin is so rife that a recent study found that 70 percent of both male and female respondents wanted to date a fair-skinned partner. According to the research team at Hindustan Unilever, the British-Dutch-founded corporation behind Fair & Lovely, India’s most popular skin-whitening product, “90% of Indian women and girls view skin lightening as a ‘high need’” because “it is aspirational, like losing weight. A fair skin is like education, regarded as a social and economic step up.” But why would so many South Asian women come to think this way? At least part of this yearning to be fairer can be put down to the aggressive marketing of such products. Typical marketing shows potential suitors choosing fairer-skinned partners over their darker rivals, and it doesn’t stop at merely promoting lighter skin.

Mishra argues that pre-colonization India showed no visible prejudice based on skin color, citing the “dark-skinned heroes” of the Rig Veda as evidence. Even after the Muslim Mughal conquest and empire, the status of the lighter-skinned ruling classes was based on their preexisting Arab and Persian ethnicity rather than their skin color: having been persistently ruled by fairer-skinned foreigners for hundreds of years, Indians came to associate lighter skin with status, wealth, and privilege. It was not, however, until European colonization that discrimination according to skin color became discernible, rife, and institutionalized. European colonialism consolidated this by—in contrast to their Mughal predecessors—claiming “themselves to be a ‘superior’ and ‘intelligent’ race; consequently, they were born to rule the ‘inferior’ and ‘black colored’ Indians who were more akin to crude animals than humans.” According to Mishra, Indians became excluded from restaurants and schools, and jobs were distributed to lighter-skinned locals first, essentially founding a segregation system based on Western ideals of beauty and intelligence. The foundations for this system were laid down as far back as the mid 1600s, when the British East India Company founded its Fort St. George settlement. They gave it the name White Town, distinguishing it from the nearby Indian settlement that was named, yes, you guessed it, Black Town. And so the binary was born.

identify as or want others to be identified as.” Once again, I was reminded of Edward Said’s critique of T. E. Lawrence’s adventures in the Middle East: “We are to assume that if an Arab feels joy, if he is sad at the death of his parent or child, if he has a sense of the injustices of political tyranny, then those experiences are necessarily subordinate to the sheer, unadorned, and persistent fact of being an Arab.”

The concept of whiteness and racism as a form of pathological narcissism that manifests in some individual white people has a long research history. In 1980, Carl Bell, a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, outlined how the hallmark symptoms associated with narcissistic personality disorder, such as grandiosity, entitlement, and lack of empathy, apply to individual racists. More recently, in 2016, assistant professor of education Cheryl Matias described whiteness as narcissistic because its emotional nature insists on positioning itself as the center of the discourse, “especially when one is trying to push it to the margins.” What I am adding here is that in order to understand how we got here as a global society and why it is proving so difficult to get us out, we must shift focus from the behavior of individual white people for a moment and recognize that whiteness as a system of power is not based on the logic and rationality that white society claims to embody. Rather, it is scaffolded by delusions and denials that must be cherished and defended so that whiteness does not implode. And that elicit rage toward anyone who dares to point them out. In her book on Dutch “white innocence,” Gloria Wekker concludes that white society is incapable of admitting to its own atrocities so it consistently seeks to exonerate itself by projecting the blame onto its victims, and this often happens at the level of the subconscious.

this paragraph. 🔥🔥🔥

instead. In this tale of good versus evil, colonialism is transformed from a traumatic invasion into a benign settlement that brought the gift of civilization. That same psychologist defined a narcissist to me as “someone whose inner world feels inadequate and so they overcompensate with grand displays of wealth or prowess or kindness. They are overcompensating in the external world to fill in the interior hole, and sometimes that results in exploitation of others.” Narcissism, then, is a misunderstood disorder, for it is not necessarily intentionally malicious nor is it born of true love of the self but almost the complete opposite; it is the ostentatious performance of self-love as a mask for insecurity, shame, and doubt.

Today, we see white women joining white men, and in some cases overtaking them, in the halls of power. U.S. voters may have missed out on a female president in 2016 but since then four of the top five weapons manufacturing firms in the United States appointed white women CEOs. White women head the top three CIA directorates, including director Gina Haspel, who, under the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program during the George W. Bush administration, oversaw a secret prison in Thailand that used torture techniques such as waterboarding to interrogate suspects. White women have senior leadership roles in Homeland Security, National Intelligence, and the FBI. The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, responsible for building and maintaining the country’s nuclear weapons is a white woman. The undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, who oversees billions in U.S. arms sales and negotiates and implements international weapons agreements, is a white woman. In