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

by Ruby Hamad

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.