In Tears in White, Emmah Mabye crafts a haunting metaphor: tears as a product—packaged, privileged, and weaponized. With chilling precision, the poem dissects the emotional manipulation underlying the myth of white genocide in South Africa. Through the format of a mock product description, Mabye exposes how these "tears" hold power, silence truth, and rewrite history.

This searing critique lands directly in the wake of real-world political theatre. In May 2025, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House where he was dramatically confronted by Donald Trump and several U.S. delegates. Trump reportedly dimmed the lights in the Oval Office and played footage claiming to show mass graves of white farmers in South Africa. The footage was later debunked—sourced from a 2020 memorial protest involving symbolic white crosses, not an actual burial. The episode reignited the long-debunked “white genocide” narrative, which falsely claims that white South Africans are being systematically targeted and murdered.

This dangerous misinformation, amplified by influential figures like Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and right-wing organizations such as AfriForum, has found global traction. Musk’s own platform, X (formerly Twitter), has been criticized for pushing this narrative through its AI tool, Grok. Yet numerous investigations—including a 2025 ruling by a South African court—have determined that no genocide is taking place. The court went so far as to declare the notion of white genocide a myth when it dismissed a legal bequest to a white supremacist group based on that claim.

Tears in White sits at the intersection of poetry and political commentary, articulating how such myths do more than mislead—they erase. By turning a global misinformation campaign into a performative, poetic expose, Mabye reclaims the narrative. The poem resists the sanitization of white supremacy and instead lays bare the generational violence that continues through subtler, institutional means. Tears in White is not just a poem; it’s a poetic truth bomb. It demands that we examine not only what we cry about, but also who gets believed when they cry—and at whose expense.