That the voices of "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.
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."
Trauma assails brown and black women from all directions. There is the initial pain of being subjected to gendered racism and discrimination, there is the additional distress of not being believed or supported, and of having your words and your braveryseemingly credited to others.
And then 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 what that writers' festival audience member was demonstrating, and what blogger and author Luvvie Ajayi called the "weary weaponising of white women's tears".
To put it less poetically, 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.
Almost every BW (black woman) I know has a story about a time in a professional setting in which she attempted to have a talk with a WW about her behavior & it has ended with the WW (white woman) crying," one black woman wrote on Twitter. "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 was being too harsh with her."
When I shared these tweets on my Facebook page asking brown and black women if this had ever happened to them, I was taken by how deeply this resonated, prompting one Arab woman to share this story:
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."
For the doubters, here is a mild version of this sleight-of-hand in action:
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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...n-use-strategic-tears-to-avoid-accountability
