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

by Ruby Hamad

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.