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

by Ruby Hamad

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,