Not a mother or a wife. WHITE TEARS BROWN SCARS out now!! Aust/NZ bookstores or online:
www.mup.com.au/books/white-tearsbrown-scars-paperback-softback
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Articles by Ruby Hamad
Essential reading and listening for 2025
IDS staff and students have put together an essential reading and listening list for the year so far. These books and podcasts cover a whole range of topical themes within development studies including: Democracy Gender Digital Technology Economics Food and Nutrition All are thought-provoking, not only looking to the past, but also examining issues that will impact development in the future.
How Singham Again Retells The Ramayana In Troubling Ways
Singham Again, the latest installment in Rohit Shetty’s Cop Universe, opens with breathtaking shots of Kashmir’s sprawling mountains and pristine lakes—the new posting of the titular protagonist, police deputy commissioner Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn).
The Gaza Doctrine In Lebanon
As soon as Israel turned its attention to Lebanon, the news obediently followed suit. All of a sudden, we were back to geopolitics, regional tensions, and “spectacular” Israeli attacks, with little attention given to the cost in human lives. The escalation between Israel and Iran threatens to shift our collective gaze further away from both Lebanon and Gaza.
How Kamala Harris Is Using Meme Culture To Woo Gen-Z Voters
Kamala HQ’s TikTok page is a perfect example of running a Presidential campaign page in a world driven by the attention economy — quick, snappy posts with bite-sized explanations of some of the Vice President’s policy proposals, edits of Kamala Harris on the campaign trail to trending sounds, and frequent memes deriding former President Trump’s incompetence and emphasizing Harris’ qualifications.
Monday Reads
Photo by Kate Williams on Unsplash Happy Monday! Here are some fine reads from around the web, plus what you might have missed from the newsletter and elsewhere this week. Jill Filipovic is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Young women are the most progressive group in American history.
Imane Khelif and Western delusions of white innocence
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif appears determined not to be browbeaten by the global controversy over her gender, defeating Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng on Wednesday to cruise to the gold medal bout at the Paris Olympics. Khelif exploded into the global spotlight when her Italian opponent Angela Carini withdrew just 46 seconds into their match. Carini promptly burst into tears, citing a punch to the nose harder than she had ever experienced in her life.
A Curve Is a Broken Line
When an artist’s full body of work is gathered for the first time, underlying themes or preoccupations driving that artist become explicit and undeniable. A Curve Is a Broken Line, the first solo exhibition of documentary photographer and visual artist Hoda Afshar, brings together a decade of the Iranian Australian’s photographs and videos.
Director Alethea Jones
Alethea Jones’s path to her burgeoning Hollywood career was far from conventional. In fact, it almost didn’t happen. In 2001, when she was 21 and fresh out of acting school, her sister Matina was killed in a car accident. “It was like losing a limb,” she tells me. “A sibling is such a part of your identity.
Author and journalist Angela Saini
Profile Award-winning science writer Angela Saini challenges some shibboleths of contemporary feminism in her latest book, The Patriarchs. By Ruby Hamad. Angela Saini worries that the term “patriarchy” has been conflated to encompass things it cannot explain. “It’s got so abstract that it becomes almost fatalistic,” she says. “Anytime anything unfair happens to women – ‘that’s the patriarchy!’ Well, who is actually doing it? And what is behind it?
Actor Cessalee Stovall
Is it possible that – in an era so restrictive that women could not even play themselves on stage – a brown-skinned, Italian–Moroccan, probably Jewish woman could be the true genius behind the most celebrated playwright of all time? English playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s award-winning play Emilia, a fierce comic portrayal of Elizabethan poet Emilia Bassano Lanier, certainly suggests so. The historian A. L.
Sydney Film Festival director Nashen Moodley
“When you go into a cinema, you have to go in with a feeling of optimism,” says Nashen Moodley, long-time director of the Sydney Film Festival. “When you start a film that’s a potential to be in the selection, you have to be thinking, ‘This is going to be great, I’m going to see something wonderful.’ And I still have that feeling, it’s never diminished.” Moodley’s approach to his work may best be described as the unabashed love of a true cinephile tempered with a deep sense of directorial duty.
City of Gold
It would be easy to label actor and debut playwright Meyne Wyatt’s City of Gold – now in a new production for Sydney Theatre Company – as a play about racism and police brutality. It certainly covers those issues, but this categorisation also demonstrates part of the problem Wyatt tackles: the inescapability of stereotyping that dehumanises even when packaged as a desire to be “educated” about racism.
Auē
When Ari’s teenage brother drops him off at Aunty Kat’s farm, the eight-year-old persuades himself that Taukiri will be back soon. In the meantime, he just needs an endless supply of Band-Aids to cover up all the places that hurt, including his heart. As Ari holds on to his old life, “... my real life – not this one that felt like something I might wake up from”, Taukiri tries to forget. But the traumas that have long haunted the family won’t abandon him as easily he did Ari.
Encanto
This review contains spoilers. “It’s all about giving back to the community where you live,” Logan resident Usman Chaudhry told reporters when his Ahmadiyya Muslim community rallied to assist victims of the recent devastating floods. Also dubbed “true community heroes” by journalists were “recently settled Pacific Islander seasonal workers” in Lismore who came out “in droves to assist the country they now call home.
WHITE TEARS/BROWN SCARS
Iranian-American narrator Mozhan Marno delivers a powerful message in this audiobook on what it means to be a woman of color in a world in which white emotions frequently create roadblocks to important tactics in the fight against racism. The material covers a wealth of concerns ranging from sexualization and caricatured pop-culture depictions to lose-lose situations wherein women of color are depicted poorly.
Annette
This review contains spoilers. Leos Carax’s new musical film Annette begins with the director’s voice over the opening credits. He asks that the audience not “sing, laugh, clap, cry, yawn, boo or fart”. He also requests that we remain still until the movie is over. It’s a cheeky introduction, raising our expectation that the spectacle we are about to see will literally leave us breathless. The opening sequence seems to justify that self-confident dare.
A faithful reflection » Witness Performance
Sex, Drugs & Pork Rolls, an unflinching new production, that premiered at the Riverside Theatre last week for the Sydney Festival, triumphantly affirms that we are in the midst of a powerful new era in the Australian arts. Directed by Helpman Award-winner S.Shakthidharan (Counting and Cracking), the production is a theatre-film hybrid, consisting of four pre-filmed monologues shot in Sydney’s Western suburbs and screened on four large screens that surround the socially distanced audience.
Amerikkkan Bloodlust
In 1967, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael commented, “When you see an individual white boy, you are not afraid of that individual white boy.
Fed-Up Teens Are Outing Their Rapists on TikTok
Column Social media may feel like some women’s only route to justice Photo: Peter Dazeley/The Image Bank/Getty Images Since Covid-19 hit, I’ve become a bit of a TikTok addict. The social media app offers entertaining, quick content that makes me feel connected to what young people are up to, an algorithm that’s proven remarkably mindful of my interests: dog videos, mom humor, and — of course — feminism.
We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by White Women’s Complicity
The damsel in distress so often turns into the damsel in defense of white supremacy Placards from the 2017 Women’s March. Photo: Dominic Lipinski/PA Images/Getty Images Remember 2016? When more white women voted for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton, many feminists reacted with shock and anger at this perceived flagrant betrayal of the “sisterhood.” An outpouring of emotion from liberal white women blasted Trump’s female voters as gender-traitors and “foot soldiers” for the patriarchy.
Review | Ruby Hamad’s essay about White women’s tears went viral. ‘White Tears/Brown Scars’ delves deeper into performative victimhood.
“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. Catalyzed by Hamad’s viral 2018 Guardian article, “How white women use strategic tears to silence women of colour,” “White Tears/Brown Scars” posits that White women’s tears signal power not weakness.
Pets or Threats
Culture October 13, 2020 • An excerpt from Ruby Hamad’s White Tears/Brown Scars White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color BY Ruby Hamad. Catapult. 304 pages. $15. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon “White people still run almost everything,” The New York Times’ Australian bureau intoned in 2018 in a devastatingly brutal report on cultural diversity in Australia’s workplaces. The whiteness above is noticed by workers below.
Trump and Biden Showcased Radically Different Approaches To Addition at the Debate
America has a major substance abuse problem. Biden showed one path forward. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images In a painful-to-follow presidential debate marked mostly by insults, interruptions, and dog whistles, one exchange stood out. Trump disparaged Biden over his son Hunter’s cocaine addiction, and Biden showed us something the president never could: empathy. “Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged,” President Trump thundered. “For cocaine use.
Projected Darkness
Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. Bubbles: Covid and Its Metaphors Desmond Manderson and Lorenzo Veracini
White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women Of Color By Ruby Hamad
You know all those videos of white women weaponizing their tears as they call the police on Black people for doing mundane things in public? Amy Cooper? BBQ Becky? Carolyn Bryant Donham? White feminism has been a murderous weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous people for centuries.
50 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall
The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews We talk to Christopher Rice about the legacy of his late mother, Ann Rice, and the pair's collaboration on the novel The Reign of Osiris. subscribe
Best Books of 2020: Black Life in America
The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews Author and illustrator Kristen Radtke's Seek You investigates America's loneliness pandemic. subscribe
Sydney Writers' Festival - Remembering Christchurch
On Friday 15 March 2019, an Australian-born white supremacist entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and massacred 51 Muslims peacefully conducting their sacred Friday prayers. One year after the Christchurch attacks, Muslim writers in Australia and around the world have confronted such heinous crimes with the most powerful tool at their disposal: the pen.
11 Books You Really Should’ve Read By Now
The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews The Philip Roth Redux: how biographer Blake Bailey captured the life and times of America's most provocative literary legend. subscribe
WHITE TEARS/BROWN SCARS
Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism. In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a “white supremacist country.” The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as “one of the most defining forces” in her life.
2020's Best Books for Progressives
The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews The 100 best nonfiction and 100 best YA books of the year, plus our regular December 1 issue. subscribe
Black Lives Matter: Anti-racism resources
Posted by NFWI on 05 Jun 2020. On Tuesday 2 June, the WI participated in #BlackOutTuesday, a social media campaign in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The WI stands in solidarity with Black communities around the world, who face injustice and violence. There is no place for racism in our society and we must work harder to educate ourselves, challenge other people and take action to eradicate inequality.
Amy Cooper Leveraged Racial Power and Failed - The New York Times
Historically speaking, when white people are afraid, it is usually people of color who get hurt. By Ruby Hamad Ms. Hamad is the author of “White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color.” May 27, 2020 The symbolism is almost too much to bear. The antagonist stares down the barrel of the camera, removing her surgical face mask at the same moment she takes off her figurative mask and offers the audience a glimpse into what lies beneath.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: a magical blend of comedy, tragedy, earnestness and irony
On 1 April, Rachel Bloom, the star, co-creator, co-writer and co-songwriter of musical comedy series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (CXG) revealed she’d given birth to her first child. It was, she said on Instagram, an intense thing to experience – especially during a pandemic that had landed “a dear friend in the ICU”. That dear friend was musician and producer Adam Schlesinger, who died from Covid-19 the same day.
Sydney Writers' Festival - Remembering Christchurch
On Friday 15 March 2019, an Australian-born white supremacist entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and massacred 51 Muslims peacefully conducting their sacred Friday prayers. One year after the Christchurch attacks, Muslim writers in Australia and around the world have confronted such heinous crimes with the most powerful tool at their disposal: the pen.
Hood Feminism
Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot Narrated by: Mikki Kendall Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins 4.8 out of 5 stars 4.8 (2,776 ratings) Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity. Please try again later Please try again later Please try again later Please try again Please try again Please try again Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial. Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Twitter, Tears and Strategic Powerlessness — Kill Your Darlings
Mary Beard is no stranger to social media storms. The Cambridge professor, or ‘Britain’s best-known classicist’, has said she regards a prolific online presence is part of her responsibility as an academic. This means she has frequently drawn the ire of Twitter’s troll patrols.
Shelf Reflection: Ruby Hamad — Kill Your Darlings
Books & Publishing Shelf Reflection: Ruby Hamad By Ruby Hamad 11th Oct, 2019 Shelf Reflection is a monthly series where we explore the bookshelves and reading habits of our featured First Book Club authors. This month’s reflection is from Ruby Hamad, whose book White Tears/Brown Scars (MUP) is our October pick. Read Ellen Cregan’s review, and stay tuned for more throughout the month! What are you currently reading? Transcription by Kate Atkinson.
Triple trouble | Inside Story
White Tears/Brown Scars By Ruby Hamad | Melbourne University Press | $34.99 | 232 pages Ruby Hamad is a writer of Lebanese-Syrian descent who has written about range of social issues in print and online. One article in particular set fire to the Twittersphere. Published in the Guardian in 2018, it focused on the seemingly uncontroversial fact that any recent gains for women have been unevenly distributed.
how the idea of the 'white damsel' has been used to sell racism
White society hinged on the myth of 'protecting' white women from rape but, in reality, what they were really 'protected' from was their own liberation and any capacity to form meaningful relationships with people of colour. (Image: Wikimedia Commons/Henry Moses) Such was the absurd imagination of the white man when it came to black sexuality, wrote the psychiatrist and cultural theorist Frantz Fanon in 1952, that "no longer do we see a black man; we see a penis: the black man has been occulted.
Ben Simmons and racism as a form of emotional abuse
People of colour, even famous and successful ones held up as proof of what a tolerant and equal society we have become, are expected not only to be exceptional, but to keep their heads down, to serve, to soothe, to entertain. When they don’t, the backlash is so swift and so vicious it can be dizzying. NBA star Ben Simmons attends a Melbourne Demons AFL game. (Image: AAP/Daniel Pockett) How much more is there to be written? Another incident of alleged racial profiling.
How Do You Solve A Problem Like White Terrorists? Name Them.
After Australian Brenton Tarrant allegedly killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern won many hearts by vowing his name would not pass her lips. "He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless,” Ardern said.
why the powerful like to play the victim
Scroll to top Email address or username Remember me Speaking truth to power is difficult enough. But as human rights lawyer Diana Sayed discovered on Q&A this week, when power plays the victim card it becomes practically impossible. Diana Sayed and Senator Penny Wong on Q&A There is an Arab saying, Darabne wa baka, wa saba’ane wa shtaka, that translates literally to "He hit me and cried. Then he beat me to the complaint" (trust that it’s far more poetic in Arabic).
The Indie Next List Playlist on Libro.fm
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue By V. E. Schwab Narrated by Julia Whelan / 17 hours 9 minutes The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue “Schwab has a masterpiece on her hands with this title. I loved it from the beginning, and that love grew until the very end. Addie needed to find a way to escape the life she is supposed to live as a woman in France, 1714.
Folau's Fall Is A Story Of Whiteness
In March 1996, three US servicemen stationed in Okinawa were convicted of the abduction and sexual assault of a 12-year-old Japanese girl. It was the first time the US military prosecuted any of its soldiers since they first occupied the island in the 1940s. This is despite the fact that Japanese activists had protested both the occupation itself, and the apparent impunity of the servicemen since one of them raped a six-year-old girl in 1955.
Aladdin: A whole new world for diversity in Hollywood
The 1001 Arabian Nights are, despite the title, not a collection of Arab stories but a compilation of Arab, Persian, and other regional folk tales compiled in the Arabic language during the so-called Islamic Golden Age. Several of the most famous of these, including Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor, are now thought not to be in the original Arabic but to have been inserted by European translators such as Antoine Gallad in the 18th century.
Eurovision: Material Girl Madonna shuns Palestine solidarity
SBS, a publicly-funded television station has been broadcasting the spectacle every year since 1983. And although Eurovision has never been my deal, I also see no value in trashing it without a good reason. Why criticise something that brings others joy? We could certainly all use some, especially if that joy is more or less harmless. But this year is a different story: This year it isn't harmless.
the call is coming from inside the house
A white supremacist killer has again shown us the violent hatred that lurks inside us. Don’t turn away without acknowledging it.
will we ever get deeper debate about women in politics?
Scroll to top Email address or username Remember me With everyone continuing to follow their talking points, we're taking a deep dive into a shallow pool. Jacqueline Maley in conversation with Julia Banks, Linda Burney, Julie Bishop and Sarah Hanson-Young (Image: All About Women/Prudence Upton). On paper it had all the makings of an explosive session.
Rami Malek's win is a victory for us all, Arab, Copt, Egyptian al
The American-born child of immigrant parents was, despite nearing the end of his 30s, clearly only just beginning to embrace his heritage. Like so many of his peers from that part of the world, Malek had been constrained and limited by western perceptions of Arabs and the Middle East region informed by decades of films, television programmes and news stories of swarthy terrorists, religious hordes, and double-crossing agents.
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