By Rosa Boshier Oct. 16, 2020 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
“How is it that we have been so conditioned to privilege the emotional comfort of white people?” Ruby Hamad asks in the introduction to her essay collection “White Tears/Brown Scars,” which tracks the fraught legacy of White womanhood across the globe. Read book review HERE. Read the essay on which it was based below.
How white women use strategic tears to silence women of colour
Ruby Hamad May 7, 2018
At the Sydney writers’ festival on Sunday, editor of Djed Press, Hella Ibrahim, relayed the final minutes of a panel on diversity featuring writers from the western Sydney Sweatshop collective. One of the panellists, Winnie Dunn, in answering a question about the harm caused by good intentions, had used the words “white people” and “shit” in the same sentence. This raised the ire of a self-identified white woman in the audience who interrogated the panellists as to “what they think they have to gain” by insulting people who “want to read their stories.”
In other words, the woman saw a personal attack where there wasn’t one and decided to remind the panellists that as a member of the white majority she ultimately has their fate in her hands.
“I walked out of that panel frustrated,” Ibrahim wrote. “Because yet again, a good convo was derailed, white people centred themselves, and a POC panel was told to police it’s [sic] tone to make their message palatable to a white audience.”
Read the entire article HERE.