White Tears

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore the rhetorical deployment of White tears, tears that are circulated within narratives of interracial conflict as evidence for the rightness of White supremacist norms. More specifically, White tears are those that are framed as deictic indicators of a White victim versus a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) threat. These presumed relations of cause and effect are made possible within an emotional context that assumes a baseline White rationality as the norm; distress signals the threat of non-White aggression. Analysis of several prominent cases of crying demonstrates how tears can be marshaled as evidence for the legitimacy of White bodies at the expense of those of color. Although considering the rhetorical force of affect and emotion is important for critical rhetorical analyses, such work needs to contend with how scripts for emotional engagement are already inclined toward or against certain bodies. It then becomes possible to develop alternative, subversive framings.

KEYWORDS:

• Deixis
• embodiment
• emotion
• race
• tears

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Fortunately, the list of scholars invested in analyzing race through rhetorical scholarship continues to grow. My own thinking is indebted to several, including Lisa Corrigan, Lisa Flores, Matthew Houdek, V. Jo Hsu, Jerry Lee, Aja Martinez, Leilani Nishime, Malea Powell, Robert Topinka, Anjali Vats, Shui-Yin Sharon Yam, among many others.

² The responses to Rittenhouse’s tears remind us of the prioritization of White western masculine feelings in media (Lista), and indeed, there has been a range of prominent White men in the spotlight for crying. Yet the calling out of “White womens’ tears” and various Karens and Beckys who cry indicates that gender is not the sole factor in whose tears get taken up in media coverage and cultural consciousness. The messiness of embodiment means that the effect of gender on how tears are received is pertinent, and I discuss some of the intersectional differences in later sections.

³ Researchers of medical bias, for example, find notable disparities in how Black patients’ pain is attended to in comparison with White patients because of implicit beliefs about racially different experiences of pain and sensation.

⁴ In 2015, a short clip from the Oscars awards ceremony of the actor Chris Pine showed him crying in response to John Legend and the rapper Common performing their song “Glory” from the soundtrack for the movie Selma. The actual view of Pine’s tears was just a few seconds long, but the clip nevertheless inspired a rash of follow-up pieces dedicated to commemorating Pine’s “single, beautiful tear” (Golembewski par. 1). Pine was not even in the movie. See Ryan Shepard’s “Confronting Gender Bias, Finding a Voice: Hillary Clinton and the New Hampshire Crying Incident” for a discussion of how Clinton’s tears were viewed as evidence of her authenticity.

⁵ After Boehner cried at Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s portrait unveiling, Australian political commentator Nick Adams tweeted that Boehner “is a beta feminist loser who most likely drinks soy lattes and avoids Hooters at all costs” (14 December 2022).

⁶ It should also be remembered that Ford received several death threats during and after the case for daring to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

⁷ As an Asian woman myself, I do not wish to retread the idea that Asians are, as Cathy Park Hong puts it, “next in line” to be White. Rather, I am emphasizing how the deictic potential of emotion provides an avenue for people of non-White origin to attempt to perform Whiteness through tears.

⁸ In an op-ed for The Grio, Monique Judge drew an explicit parallel between Comrie’s tears and the threat to Black lives: “We really should be calling these women ‘Carolyn’ or ‘Carolyns’ since the behavior they are emulating when they pull these stunts is akin to that of Carolyn Bryant, the woman whose lie got Emmett Till lynched. This type of behavior is dangerous and can lead to physical harm or even death for Black people, and we need to be calling it out every time we see it, but I digress” (“Accountability” par. 2). The potential for harm often comes in addition to the structural elevation of the White “victim.” A GoFundMe for Comrie, set up by a relative, received $100,000 in donations in less than two weeks.

⁹ In Nakayama and Krizek’s survey of their students’ understanding of Whiteness, some chose “majority” and “status” as appropriate synonyms (298). In other words, their students responded to a question about racial hierarchies with an acknowledgment of affective enticement.