June 27th, 2024: White tears/ brown scars (Ruby Hamad)
We discussed the following quotes by Ruby Hamad at the Western University encampments. Personal stories that evidenced these quotes were shared, along with feelings of fundamental invisibility; we rejoiced in knowing that our experiences - sometimes deeply-rooted, painful, unexplainable, and persistent - were witnessed so clearly in Hamad’s analyses. We laughed, sharing stories in a space where their validity would not be interrogated to death. The mood was one of fierce, joyful, almost gleeful, empowerment.
““This is a common strategy of white feminism: to align with women of colour when it suits, to trumpet a non-existent sisterhood in order to appropriate our work and advance the myth of a better world run by women.” ~ Ruby Hamad”
“White settler-colonial society could not bear to face its own history, so it invented an entirely new one instead - one in which colonialism was not a traumatic invasion but a benign settlement that brought the gift of civilization. That same psychologist defined a narcissist to me as “someone whose inner world feels inadequate and so they overcompensate with grand displays of wealth or prowess or kindness. They are overcompensating in the external world to fill in the interior hole, and sometimes that results in exploitation of others.” Is this not white fragility? And how can there not be an inadequate inner world at the core of white society when white people have bene lying to themselves as well as to us for so long? How, when white identity is based on a false construct that emerged from colonization and that instilled in white people the mass delusion that they are innately superior and completely innocent, despite their legacy of oppression and denial of the humanity of people of colour? Are white people alone in having a history of violence? Not at all. But they do seem uniquely incapable of admitting to it. And while other cultures and civilizations have also engaged in war and conquest, none has done so in such a way as to span the entire globe and become so dominant that their entire identity, as both a society and as individuals, hinged on perpetuating the divide between themselves and those they have conquered. ”
“Despite all its complexity, everything in the world is presented to us filtered and interpreted through the reductive lens of the white imaginary, which was designed and implemented to benefit white people. This is why, as I wrote, “whether angry or calm, shouting or pleading, [women of colour] are always perceived as the aggressors.” Until these constructions and archetypes are brought crashing down nothing will change, because white people filter reality thought this less, whether or not they realize they are doing so. More troubling still is when people of colour buy into it. Any change has to start with two things. First, women of colour must become consciously aware of the limitations forced on them, that these limitations are designed to keep us on the lowest rung of the hierarchy, and that we need to collectivize to bring them down. ”
“White society is all about constructions. The facade. The image. The words. The pretence. There is no tangible distinction made between reality as a physical, sensory experience, and white society’s representation, saying something is the same as doing it - even worse if what is said is detrimental to the facade that white society has constructed and fervently tells itself is true. People of colour have never systematically oppressed white people but this has little meaning to whiteness, which, having never experienced it, regards racism as existing in nothing else but words. This is how white people can accuse people of colour of anti-white racism with a straight face: the actual deeds of a racist society, the power imbalance, dispossession, physical and sexual abuse, incarceration, enslavement, discrimination, and so on - all of that is irrelevant. It’s only what is said that counts.”
