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

by Ruby Hamad

As Edward Said brought to light, over the centuries, the West fashioned an image of the so-called Middle East that existed more in the imagination of Orientalists than it did in the Orient, and constructed its own flattering self-image in the process. Whatever the East was, the West was not. Through the works of Western travel writers, colonialists, artists, diplomats, and “experts” who positioned Arab and other Eastern cultures as barbaric, backward, violent, animalistic, lewd, and oppressive of women, by default the West became advanced, merciful, civilized, moral, and respectful of women. Here is where it all comes together. For all its assigned savagery, the East was also feminized in the Western imagination—meaning, naturally, that the West was masculine. This is not as contradictory as it may appear. The peculiar logic of Eurocentrism was fueled by the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, which regarded true differentiation of the sexes as a status that had only been achieved by the more highly evolved white Europeans. Although brown and black bodies were designated female and male, the science promoted by the American School of Evolution regarded sex difference as a racial characteristic and argued that only white European-derived people had evolved to the point of having distinctly separate male and female brains and dispositions.