White Tears Brown Scars
How White Feminism Betrays Women of Colour
-
- 3,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
'Powerful and provocative' - Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the Sunday Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist
'A MUST read for any white women who consider themselves "feminist"' - Scarlett Curtis, author of the Sunday Times bestselling Feminists Don't Wear Pink
'An explosive and revelatory argument for deconstructing and confronting the entrenched notions of white supremacy and superiority that still reign today.' - Mireille Harper
'How is it that we have been so conditioned to privilege the emotional comfort of white people?'
White tears possess a potency that is rarely acknowledged or commented upon, but they have long been used as a dangerous and insidious tool against people of colour, weaponised in order to invoke sympathy and divert blame.
Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep 'ownership' of their slaves, through centuries of colonialism, when women offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, in which tears serve as a defense to counter accusations of bias and micro-aggressions, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women's active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long-overdue validation of the experiences of women of colour and an urgent call-to-arms in the need for true intersectionality.
With rigour and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialised within, a reality that we must all apprehend in order to fight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hamad debuts with a searing and wide-ranging condemnation of "strategic White Womanhood" and "the historical debasement of women of color" in Western culture. Citing her own experiences as an Arab woman working in the "suffocatingly white Australian media space" and those of other "brown and black women" who have been routinely disbelieved, exoticized, or accused of bullying by white women, Hamad contends that the tears of white women are "a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system." She analyzes cultural archetypes, including "the lascivious black Jezebel" and "the submissive China Doll," that inhibit women of color, and compares the actions of "BBQ Beckys" who call the police on Black people for noncrimes to the lynching of Black men for "perceived transgressions against the virtuous bodies of white women." Hamad also documents the exclusion of Black women from the suffrage movement and explains why white women's inroads into white male power structures don't benefit women of color. Skillfully blending autobiography, history, and cultural criticism, Hamad makes a devastating case against white women's complicity in systemic racism. This insistent and incisive call for change belongs in the contemporary feminist canon.
