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

by Ruby Hamad

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.”