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

by Ruby Hamad

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...