Ruby Hamad

this was a really excellent, and really hard read. i will need to reread it, probably more than once, to both fully understand everything she is saying and to fully absorb and allow myself to see everything (most especially the harm i'm causing) she is saying. this is a powerful book.

it reminded me of when i started activism work around gendered violence, and how everything came back to that, and how people would joke that i was no fun anymore. but that didn't change the fact that everything i was noticing was true. this book is like that. there is so much to see and realize and it pervades everything, every aspect of society, so it's just everywhere. and that's no fun but no less true for it.

there is so much to take from this book if you're open to it. it's an eye-opening read. she is writing as an australian, but she infuses so much understanding into american politics as well. it's amazing how much other people know about our country while we know next to nothing of theirs. her analysis is really interesting and valuable. i took so much from this book.

the many correlations she makes between race and gender and race and sex here are rather stunning. she frames just about everything in a way that i'd never seen before, and so i'm looking at just about everything with a new perspective and a new reference point. the lens she uses to see with has changed the way i'm seeing everything.

"...what makes the distress of while women so powerful is its association with femininity and helplessness."

"White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the oppressed and the oppressor. Women of color are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of color and we are always seen and treated as such."

"The peculiar logic of Eurocentrism was fueled by the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, which regarded true differentiation of the sexes as a status that had only been achieved by the more highly evolved white Europeans. Although brown and black bodies were designated female and male, the science promoted by the American School of Evolution regarded sex difference as a racial characteristic and argued that only white European-derived people had evolved to the point of having distinctly separate male and female brains and dispositions."

"Binary sex is both function and feature of white supremacy."

"...white Europeans colonized the world on the presumption they were 'civilizing' it, but by strictly policing both race and sex, they did everything in their formidable power to ensure nonwhites were never able to penetrate the inner sanctum of white society even if they wanted to."

"White people set the standard for humanity by which they, and only they, could succeed."

"Sex work...was reviled not so much because it implied dubious ethical character as because it allowed white women a degree of independence that most could not access."

"This fiction of a white race unravels as soon as we consider that 'white' is the only racial category where any mixing automatically excludes one from the racial group."

"White people are not united by a shared ethnicity: they are united by access to institutional power."

"Whiteness is more than skin color. It is a system that privileges those racial, cultural, and religious identities that most resemble the typical characteristics associated with the white Western Europeans who created the system in their image. And this system of white supremacy is now so ingrained it can exist without white people."… (més)