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

by Ruby Hamad

This becomes even more pertinent given we still see this kind of exclusion and appropriation of the work of women of color by white feminists today—perhaps most glaringly when white women adopt a self-serving “intersectional feminist” identity, both as a shield against criticism from women of color and as a weapon with which to silence us by claiming we are causing division in the sisterhood by raising issues of racism within feminism, as though they are intrinsically incapable of it.

mainstream Western feminism cannot be anything more than another iteration of white supremacy.

making white women complicit in the racism they have since been all too eager to blame solely on white men. Because, as Stephanie Jones-Rogers reminds us, white women were not passive bystanders to the racial crimes of white men: “They were co-conspirators.”

lauding the program’s vision of a bleak, bloody future that might happen to women.