White Tears/Brown Scars

Ruby Hamad

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780522875584
• eBook ISBN: 9780522875591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When white people cry foul it is often people of colour who suffer. White tears have a potency that silences racial minorities. White Tears/Brown Scars blows open the inconvenient truth that when it comes to race, white entitlement is too often masked by victimhood. Never is this more obvious than the dealings between women of colour and white women. What happens when racism and sexism collide? Ruby Hamad provides some confronting answers.

Part 1

The set-up

1

When racism and sexism collide

How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation.

Richard Dyer¹

We talk about toxic masculinity, but there is also a toxicity in wielding femininity in this way.

Luvvie Ajayi²

I almost missed the message in my ‘other’ Twitter inbox from a journalist in the United States asking to speak to me about an article I’d published in Guardian Australia three months earlier. The piece had proved to be very popular and very polarising and had resulted in far more global attention than I was used to or felt comfortable with, and, still reeling from it all, I assumed she was messaging me to ask if she could interview me for a story. I cautiously agreed to supply my email but was unprepared for what came next.

Lisa Benson, an Emmy-winning African-American television journalist in Kansas City, was writing to me not to request an interview, but to let me know that shortly after my piece had been published in May 2018, she had shared it to her private Facebook page, where two white female colleagues, Christa Dubill and Jessica McMaster, had seen it. The next day, Dubill and McMaster complained to management and Lisa was suspended immediately for ‘creating a hostile working environment based on race and gender’. Shortly thereafter, her contract was terminated.

A little backstory: Lisa had already sued her television station employer for racial discrimination, alleging her race was used to determine which stories she was assigned. This includes being sent on her own to interview a Ku Klux Klan member in his home, a situation that was uncomfortable and possibly unsafe. A separate lawsuit was brought by another colleague of hers, a male African-American sports anchor who claimed he was routinely passed over for promotions in favour of less qualified white men. Lisa was still working for the organisation while awaiting her court date, and told me she had shared the article in the hope that her colleagues would understand and empathise with her situation. Instead, it appears they used it as a handy justification for getting rid of a ‘problem’ employee who’d inadvertently broke one of white Western society’s unspoken but most binding rules: don’t challenge or even acknowledge implicit racial bias—or if you do, be prepared to suffer the consequences.

The article that apparently cost Lisa her contract and brought us into each other’s orbit was titled ‘How white women use strategic tears to silence women of colour’.³ It was one of hundreds I’ve written over the past decade or so while I’ve been working in the media. This one, however, was a particularly painful and personal column to write, drawing on an emotional and psychological journey during which I had slowly (perhaps too slowly) and devastatingly come to realise that the way society saw me, the way people interpreted and responded to my behaviour and my words, had very little to do with me as a person, my intentions or the situation at hand, but everything to do with their ingrained perceptions of me based on my ethnicity. I highlighted what I had by then come to realise was a pattern so predictable it worked like a blueprint, predetermining how interpersonal conflict between women of colour and white women plays out.

Brown and black women, I wrote, are deeply impacted, often without realising it, by the grind of living in a society that does not recongise, let alone reward, their value. Overwhelmingly disbelieved when they try to shed light on their experiences of gendered racism, the lack of support they receive adds to the initial trauma, leaving them questioning reality as well as themselves. Most devastating is when this happens in interactions with white women, often women they consider friends or at least friendly. Drawing on the notion of what author Luvvie Ajayi has referred to as the weaponisation of white women’s tears, I outlined how, when challenged by a woman of colour, a white woman will often lean into her racial privilege to turn the tables and accuse the other woman of hurting, attacking or bullying her. This process almost always siphons the sympathy and support to the apparently distressed white woman, helping her avoid any accountability that may be due and leaving the woman of colour out in the cold, often with no realistic option—particularly if it is a workplace interaction—but to accept blame and apologise.

At the time of writing the column, I was attempting to make sense of a number of conflicts I’d had that followed this unwritten script and left me wondering why, whenever I tried to approach a white female friend or colleague about something she had said or done that had had a negative impact on me, I somehow always ended up apologising to her even though I was certain I was the one who had been wronged. With diminished confidence and second-guessing my own recollection and interpretation of events, I was left floundering, either angry and unheard, or terrified I would lose a friend or a job if I didn’t back down.

It was the work of black and brown women that helped me dissect what was happening. Women like FeministGriote on Twitter, who wrote a fantastic thread about the experiences of the many black women who have ‘a story about a time in a professional setting where she attempted to have a talk with a WW [white woman] about her behavior & it has ended with the WW crying … The WW wasn’t crying because she felt sorry and was deeply remorseful. The WW was crying because she felt “bullied” and/or that the BW [black woman] was being too harsh with her.’ The end result, due to the potency of white women’s tears, is that the black woman is left with the options of either apologising or risking being ‘blackballed’ or fired. The world doesn’t stop for the tears of black women, FeministGriote concluded, and it is up to white women to stop this destructive behaviour.

I shared these tweets as well as Ajayi’s blog post on my public Facebook page, asking brown and black women if they’d experienced anything similar. The response was so overwhelming that it was clear the phenomenon was not a bug in our society but a feature of it. One Arab woman, Zeina, shared her experiences of being ‘petted’ by older white women, drawn to her thick, curly, waist-length brown hair. One at her workplace ‘kept touching my hair, pulling my curls to watch them bounce back. Rubbing the top. So when I told her to stop and complained to HR [human resources] and my supervisor, she complained that I wasn’t a people person or team member and I had to leave that position for being “threatening” to a co-worker.’

What makes white women’s tears so potent and renders black and brown women so apparently ‘aggressive’? In her blog post, Ayaji explains that white women’s distress is ‘attached to the symbol of femininity … These tears are pouring out of the eyes of the one chosen to be the prototype of womanhood; the woman who has been painted as helpless against the whims of the world. The one who gets the most protection in a world that does a shitty job overall of cherishing woman.’⁴

Ajayi’s words struck a chord with me and led me to look back over my life, forcing me to recognise with some degree of horror that what many people see when they look at me is a generic facsimile of an Arab, someone without their own inner world. As I explained in the column, it was not weakness or guilt that had led me to capitulate to these white women so many times but an awful realisation that I could not win, that there was simply no way I could convince others to see the issue from my perspective. ‘The manufactured reputation Arabs have for being threatening and aggressive follows us everywhere,’ I wrote. ‘In a society that routinely places “wide-eyed, angry and Middle Eastern” people at the scenes of violent crimes they did not commit, having a legitimate grievance is no match for the strategic tears of a white damsel in distress whose innocence is taken for granted … Whether we are angry or calm, shouting or pleading we are always seen as the aggressors.’

Of course, I was nervous about writing all this—so nervous I considered withdrawing the piece. When my editors sat on it for two weeks I was convinced they were aghast I could have even written such a thing, and told myself it was for the best it remained unpublished. This was not because I don’t stand by it—I do. Rather, it was because I knew there would be resistance to its contents and the inconvenient truths it spoke. I knew I would be falsely accused of dividing the feminist movement and of racism against white women. And I knew it would be another mark against my name in the suffocatingly white Australian media space that loves to extol the virtues of ‘diversity’ but had already been slowly marginalising my public presence year after year. Even knowing all this, when the editors finally gave it the green light, asking only for a minor change to update the opening paragraphs, I knew I couldn’t withdraw it and that these kinds of things have to be said precisely because they make people uncomfortable in the best way—the way that forces them to examine their own implicit biases and question their own relative power and privilege.

Even so, I was unprepared for the response. It got off to a slow start because the Northern Hemisphere was still asleep and Australia, as ever, rarely acknowledges the value of anything unless it has an international stamp of approval. By the end of the day, however, the piece had been picked up by The Guardian in the United States and the United Kingdom, and then all hell seemed to break loose. I was already bracing myself for those people I knew would be willing and able to misrepresent my ideas—not just to discredit the column as a piece of writing, but to discredit me as a person—but I had assumed the backlash would be contained to Australia and, within that, mostly to feminist circles, where the audience would at least be familiar with many of the concepts described, such as ‘white tears’, which has gained currency across the internet and in activist spaces as a riff on ‘male tears’. Neither of these concepts mocks legitimate distress: they refer to the fragility with which some individuals who belong to a dominant group respond when their dominance is questioned. More on white fragility in a moment, but suffice to say that what I thought was going to happen both did and did not happen.

I was vilified, but not only by local feminists. It seemed everyone—from overt white supremacists to ‘classical liberals’ to progressives—had something to say about the article, and I was accused of everything from ‘bullying an entire race of women’ to setting back the cause of feminism to being responsible for the election of Donald Trump. What I did not predict was that the backlash would be global and would even rouse the ire of prominent conservatives, such as Jordan Peterson. The furious response was so swift, with an undercurrent so violent, coming from so many directions, that I was unable to keep up with it. Overwhelmed, I impulsively deactivated my Twitter account and wrote a panicked midnight email to The Guardian begging them to take the piece down in the hope it would make it all stop and I could go back to being just another moderately successful Australian media writer and not the contemporary equivalent of Hitler. That is not my hyperbole, by the way—I was literally accused of being as genocidal as the Nazis.

I knew my editors wouldn’t see the email until the morning, so the more pressing question was how to sleep in this anxious state, convinced as I was that my career (and possibly my safety) was surely over. But then my natural stubbornness and self-belief reasserted itself and it struck me that this was precisely the reaction the online mob wanted—for me to be afraid, to be sorry, to try to take it all back, to beg for forgiveness. More importantly, I knew that even if I did apologise and retract the article, it wouldn’t be enough and the mob would never let me live it down. They weren’t acting out of genuine critique and disagreement: they were acting out of an entitlement and fury that I had so publicly challenged their self-ordained superiority. I had taken something that was common knowledge among communities of colour and lobbed it like a grenade into one of the bastions of white liberalism, naming it loudly and clearly in one of the most recognisable mastheads in the Western media. I also knew, from watching women of colour before me who had been publicly humiliated and bullied by thousands of people online, that an apology would not placate the bullies—even if I meant it, which I certainly would not—and would only validate their narcissistic injury. They would use it to attack me again and again, to discredit everything I said and did from that moment on. I fired off another email to my still blissfully sleeping editors, instructing them to ignore the previous one, then reactivated my Twitter account to cheekily let the world know that I definitely was not sorry and wasn’t going anywhere, by posting a link to the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers classic ‘I Won’t Back Down’.

And that’s when the turnaround began. The hate mail and threatening tweets gave way to messages of support and encouragement, again from all across the world. White women told me they had seen this very thing happen too many times; some told me they were ashamed to say that they themselves were guilty of it. Men of all races wrote to say that they either knew all too well what I was talking about, or that I had given them a framework through which to interpret behaviour they had noticed but could not fully explain. But most importantly, there were the testimonials from women of colour, the very people I had written the article for in the first place. There were Arab women, and African-American women, and Indigenous women, and Asian women, and Latina women, and Native women who shared the piece again and again, telling me their own stories, their own tragedies, about their stolen years when they had wondered why this kept happening to them and if they were ‘going crazy’.

It’s become a cliché for writers to note that online haters are far louder than lovers, that detractors can’t wait to tell us exactly what they think of us (not much!) while those who value our work often opt to do it quietly. But for the first time in my career, and on the piece where I had perhaps least expected it, the positive response tipped the balance and shouted down the very loud, very outraged and very numerous haters. My column had reached its rightful audience. It was at that point I realised this was bigger than me. Bigger than my piece.

But what, exactly, is ‘this’?

The term ‘white fragility’ was coined by sociologist Robin DiAngelo to describe the defensiveness into which many white people retreat in any discussion that reminds them of their race. DiAngelo, who is a white American, has worked as a diversity trainer in the United States, crisscrossing the country to run workshops for mostly white people on how they can contribute to a more racially inclusive workplace. In her 2018 book White Fragility, she describes white fragility as a state of stress set off by the discomfort and anxiety white people feel when their internalised sense of racial superiority is challenged:

Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offence. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.⁵

It is crucial to understand what we are talking about when we talk about ‘white tears’. The kind of distress we are analysing may well feel genuine, but it is neither legitimate nor innocent. Rather than denoting weakness, DiAngelo writes, it signals power: ‘Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness … it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.’⁶

DiAngelo explores white fragility in explicitly race-based workplace interactions between women, but the issue goes further back in history and deeper into the present and it is important to look at gendered racial dynamics beyond the professional context. These dynamics also shape and taint interactions between white women and women of colour in social situations. The catalyst need not be explicitly about race: the act of being challenged or politely disagreed with or, heaven forbid, ‘called out’ by a woman of colour about almost anything at all is enough to raise the defences and trigger a reaction based not on the immediate situation but on the mechanisms of white fragility.

Race is not something that can be untethered from everyday life. It is always there, whether acknowledged or not. And until we reckon with it, it will continue to wreak havoc on all our lives. More important—and I can’t emphasis this enough—is the response from onlookers, for it is how they choose to interpret and respond to the conflict unfolding before them that determines the outcome and reinforces the respective behaviours, dooming them to be replayed again and again. When I began this book, my central question was: What happens when racism and sexism collide? My answer requires that we begin with the notion that the extent to which we, as individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds, correspond to the stereotypical features associated with our gender in the minds of others is the decisive factor determining how they perceive us and treat us. It impacts our lives in ways many of us may have never considered. Whatever the intersection—be it gender identity, sexuality, disability, or something else—every experience of marginialisation is made more acute when race is thrown into the mix.

I came to write that original Guardian Australia article through a process of piecing together different interactions with various women over a number of years that always seemed to turn out the same way regardless of how I handled them. Whether I was angry or disappointed, confrontational or apologetic, just the act of critiquing or disagreeing with a white woman was perceived and then punished as though I were a bully.

I need to stress that the interactions I discuss in this book—my own and those involving other women—are all incidents where the woman of colour is responding to the actions or words of the white woman or women. It is not about women ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Author’s note
• Part 1: The set-up
• Part 2: The pay-off
• Conclusion: The turnaround
• Acknowledgements
• Notes