Friday 5 pm – 7:30 pm
Join this workshop to honestly and openly engage with the ways in which white femininity contributes to reproducing and maintaining white supremacy.
We will look at how this takes place within leftist groups and communities.
In this workshop, facilitated by a woman of colour and a white woman, we will use a variety of methods to:
- learn about and discuss how white tears are toxic. Reproduced through centuries of colonialism white tears demonstrate how white people are seen as fragile, sensitive, refined, soft, to be protected whilst people of colour are depicted as animalistic, savages, brutish, ugly, aggressive, loud, violent, dirty. We will discuss how white tears are used to always make people of colour into the aggressors and how that relates to racist tropes, to always delegitimise pain of colour, making pain into a privilege – who gets to hurt in public and who doesn’t We question how white queer people use queerness as a shield from whiteness by thinking being queer lessens whiteness and increases how radical people are (it doesn’t). we will discuss how white people analysing structures through a queer lens but not a racialised queer lens is white supremacy and white queer people thinking of themselves as oppressed queer people and not powerful white people enforces a white victim complex.
- unpack and challenge white people’s self conceptions as fragile and entitled to emotions and how this results in women of colour being depicted as angry and violent. We will discuss how important it is to root this in the failure of white people to racialise themselves or view themselves as part of a racialised dynamic that they are responsible for. In this way, white people choose to depict women of colour as aggressive.
- examine and critique how women of colour are tokenized in our movements and to consider how we address these tendencies. Women of colour’s emotions such as anger and pain are used to build communities but then those same people are punished when those emotions threaten white self conceptions of niceness, softness, respectability.