A female journalist, writing in The Guardian, states that white women use their “tearful displays” as “a form of emotional and psychological violence” in order to escape accountability for their supposed racist actions.
Ruby Hamad, a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, asserts “’women of colour’ are getting louder and more influential is a testament less to the accommodations made by the dominant white culture and more to their own grit in a society that implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – wants them to fail.”
Hamad quotes various women who claim white women utilized their tears in this cynical way: the editor of Djed Press, Hella Ibrahim, complaining that at a panel on diversity, when a white woman asked the panelists “what they think they have to gain” by insulting people who “want to read their stories,” Ibrahim was piqued. Ibrahim wrote, “I walked out of that panel frustrated. 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.”
Hamad pontificates, “Trauma assails brown and black women from all directions … there is a type of trauma inflicted on women of colour that many of us find among the hardest to disclose, the one that few seem willing to admit really happens because it is so thoroughly normalised most people refuse to see it … it is the trauma caused by the tactic many white women employ to muster sympathy and avoid accountability, by turning the tables and accusing their accuser.”
Hamad cites these tweets:
Hamad shared the tweets on her Facebook page, then asked “brown and black women if this had ever happened to them.” One Arab woman responded:
A WW kept touching my hair. Pulling my curls to watch them bounce back. Rubbing the top. Smelling it. So when I told her to stop and complained to HR 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 coworker.
Hamad quotes blogger Luvver Ajayi:
White women tears are especially potent … because they are attached to the symbol of femininity. These tears are pouring out from 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 women.”
Hamad laments:
As I look back over my adult life a pattern emerges. Often, when I have attempted to speak to or confront a white woman about something she has said or done that has impacted me adversely, I am met with tearful denials and indignant accusations that I am hurting her. My confidence diminished and second-guessing myself, I either flare up in frustration at not being heard (which only seems to prove her point) or I back down immediately, apologising and consoling the very person causing me harm. It is not weakness or guilt that compels me to capitulate. Rather, as I recently wrote, it is the manufactured reputation Arabs have for being threatening and aggressive that follows us everywhere.
She concludes:
Whether angry or calm, shouting or pleading, we are still perceived as the aggressors. Likewise, white women are equally aware their race privileges them as surely as ours condemns us. In this context, their tearful displays are a form of emotional and psychological violence that reinforce the very system of white dominance that many white women claim to oppose.