karnythia:

I know people will claim that labels like White Woman’s Tears are misogynistic or whatever, but there is a phenomenon that is unique to middle class white women in discussions of race, wherein the moment the conversation gets hard they make it all about them, their feelings, and their tears. And it is so Scarlett O’Hara of them to expect Mammy to drop everything and dry the eyes of weepy white women.They will shed these tears & detail their hurts & then look at the faces of the POC around them expectantly. Because of course we are supposed to feel sympathy, empathy, something like kindness and compassion for them.

And in the beginning? We do. We hug it out & think we are talking it out. But after a while…after a while we notice that the conversation is always about their pain. Never about how we’re hurt. We see that our tears go unnoticed or even unshed because there is no safe place for us to cry them. And we get tired of drying the eyes of white women who claim to care & be so hurt & so sorry, but who never do anything about the pain that they are inflicting on us. So we stop rushing to dry their eyes, and our faces go flat, and we refuse to play the same games anymore. But they don’t stop crying.

No, they cry harder and more often. They are shocked & appalled when they discover Mammy isn’t real & the black woman they’re crying to, doesn’t give a fuck about their tears. And then the conversation is all about how mean we are to them. Never mind the part where they just disrupted an entire conversation (or series of conversations) to center it on their needs because they couldn’t do the work of confronting reality. We’re supposed to make their feelings a priority, and they can’t even see how racist that expectation is, much less how harmful their behavior is to everyone around them. So, they get mad or defensive, and they play the martyr. Newsflash, you’re not a victim. You’re an asshole & your willingness to wield tears as a weapon is just a symptom of the problem.

To add on to that, and certainly not to derail: Is there such a thing as “Asian Woman’s Tears”? I’ve noticed that Asian Americans seem as if we don’t have much say in the dialogue surrounding racism in the US, which is partly because of how we’re supposed to be the model minority and keep quiet while working hard. This is addressed in Pat K. Chew’s article, titled “Asian Americans: The ‘Reticent’ Minority and Their Paradoxes,” which I reblogged here. I think it’s both interesting and necessary to discuss whether “Asian Woman’s Tears” exists, and if it does or doesn’t, the reasons behind it.

(via of-praxis)