Can You Be an Expert on Another Culture?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I pitched this article to the team at The Everyday back in February. The deadly shooting of eight people, including six East Asian women, in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16th 2021 has since highlighted how we cannot talk about “experts” and expertise in a vacuum.
In October 2020, the author Naomi Novik released advanced reviewer copies of her new book, A Deadly Education. The protagonist of the book, Galadriel or El, is a half-Indian, half-Welsh teenager at a school for magicians where you graduate by surviving. Like Novik’s other books, it’s dark and occasionally mildly harrowing, but there’s great character development, amazing world building, and enough bleak humour to keep you turning the pages.
Novik was accused of racism by some reviewers who read the advance copy. In these advance editions of A Deadly Education, there was a passage about monsters laying eggs in dreadlocked hair which makes sense in the context of the book - long hair is a reasonable target for monsters trying to lay eggs - but was a real miss in, you know, the real world. Novik has since apologised for this passage and retracted it from future copies of the book, so the loc-burrowing bugs were not included in the ebook or paperback. Novik did the right thing by apologising and retracting, but the disconnect between her as a white author (and a presumably largely white publishing team) and the significance of implying dreadlocks are “dirty” or “unhygienic”? The kindest word for it is naïve.
Black people are still openly discriminated against and even fired for wearing their hair in braids and locs. R Matthews explains the pressure to choose between a “good job” and having dreads in his TedX talk from 2019 and the conflict that Naomi Novik missed between being seeing as acceptably professional or styling your hair in a way that reflects your culture. He puts it bluntly, saying: “as I started my junior year of college and began looking for internships, I had to face the question at hand; my hair or a potential job?”
Naomi Novik probably didn’t use dreadlocks in her book about a wizard school because she was thinking about this prejudice. In the fictional world she built where taking a shower means risking your life with monster attacks, it’s a logical detail to mention that long hair is a liability that these monsters would target. Novik didn’t think about the implications of dreadlocks being discriminated against, because that’s completely outside of her experience as a white woman. The question then emerges, should she have even written a non-white lead character with a traditionally Black hairstyle?
To extend that idea, is writing about cultures that are not our own something we need to reconsider? You only need to visit a museum to experience the disconnect between a culture’s artefacts and the way the white “collectors” described them in archives. In the Museum of Auckland in New Zealand, you can walk into Hotunui, a Māori wharenui (meeting house). Every inch of Hotunui is covered in symbols and images of Māori wairua (spirituality). The main pillars have carvings of ancestors and spirits who look to the entrance to protect those who enter. Other pillars and beams tell the story of how Ngāti Awa, a Māori iwi (tribe) travelled to Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand). The tukutuku weavings that cover the walls represent education, ascension, and progress.
But if you only read the Pākehā’s (white New Zealanders and Europeans) description of the carvings and weavings, you don’t get the full story. You don’t hear about the details and rich symbolism, or the complexities of communities Instead, you get stories of the Māori as cannibals, as a comparatively uncultured, even primitive, people who should be shown the more civilised, inherently superior European way of doing things. The best sources on Māori art and architecture are Māori themselves, not outsiders looking in.
The Enlightenment has a lot to answer for when it comes to Western culture’s belief in its own superiority, but Britain is especially terrible at dealing with its own racist and colonialist history. not to mention the ongoing impact that our history has on our political, educational, financial, and social structures. If you craft a national identity that is centred on military and political domination of most of the world, so much so that the single most common national holiday celebrated in the world is independence from you, you might give a few people some pretty significant complexes about, you know, the whole patriotism thing. How then, as a British person through and through, can I reconcile devoting most of my time to studying Chinese culture?
My current research focus is gender in Chinese society in the 20th century. I spend most of my time reading and writing about how advertisements, art, novels, and political campaigns all used women’s bodies in different ways to sell something. Whether it was selling Western products or inciting nationalist sentiment in times of peace and of war, images of East Asian women’s bodies have long been
Can you be an expert from study alone, particularly an expert of a country or culture? Put simply, I don’t know. When it comes to writing my university essays, I have a framework to follow and, most of the time, I’m writing for people who wrestle with the same questions in their own work. In the same vein, there is something very plainly wrong when Asian reporters are being told they’re “too biased” to cover racially targeted shootings. It is laughable to see “diversity panels” with barely any non-white people. These are clear cut, no-discussion-needed examples. But what about on social media? When I share my knowledge and my research about Chinese fashions or traditions, am I shouting over Chinese authors who have a deeper understanding than I do? Is my knowledge authentic because I’ve read a load of books and lived in China for a few months?
Like I said, I don’t know. I do know that it’s a question that needs to be talked about. It’s also a question that requires self-reflection and change. I don’t think I’ll ever think of myself as an expert about anything – I’ve got too much imposter syndrome going on for that. Perhaps the philosophical answer is that there’s no such thing as “an expert” because there is always something new to learn. But in the here and now, where space is so dominated by white people, and wealthy white men in particular, we can’t simply sit back and let them decide who is an expert and whose voice is worth hearing.
References / Further Reading:
Naomi Novik’s apology: https://twitter.com/naominovik/status/1315062787144638465
2 Diversity Baseline Survey 2019 Results: https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/
3 “A black woman lost a job offer because she wouldn’t cut her dreadlocks. Now she wants to go to the Supreme Court”: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17242788/chastity-jones-dreadlock-job-discrimination
4 “Loc’d and Coded: The Politics of Dreadlocks”, R Matthews, TEDxBrandeisUniversity: https://www.ted.com/talks/r_matthews_loc_d_and_coded_the_politics_of_dreadlocks
5 Hotunui meeting house, part of He Taonga Māori, The Museum of Auckland: https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collection/object/am_humanhistory-object-33243
6 “'They've taken a political decision that the British Empire was wicked': Fury as National Trust vows to press on with 'woke' review into colonial past after being cleared of breaking charity law”, The Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9354385/Fury-National-Trust-vows-press-woke-review-colonial-past.html
7 “Flagshagger” definition: “Someone who thinks patriotism can only be extreme nationalism.” The Urban Dictionary: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Flagshagger
8 “Harmony and Hygiene in Menstruation in Modern China”, Lady Science, February 2021: https://www.ladyscience.com/features/harmony-and-hygiene-in-menstruation-china-2021
9 “Asian reporters fluent in Korean who know Atlanta are being told they might be too biased to cover the shootings & I mean who are they, who are these newsroom people telling Asian reporters they'll be too biased to cover an anti-Asian massacre, I just want to talk”, R.O. Kwon, Twitter, March 19th 2021: https://twitter.com/rokwon/status/1372766944139517952
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