Woke History: Impartiality IS Political
“Woke” is a contentious term. At some point in the last few years it replaced “PC gone maaaad” as the term deployed by anyone wanting to shut down a mildly uncomfortable conversation about maybe not calling somebody that anymore, Uncle Steve.
But the “war against woke” has been steadily gathering steam during the last decade of Tory government in the UK, and it’s all coming to a head really. The government has decided to hit people where it hurts – their pockets – and double down on making sure that only “snowflakes” are the ones being offended.
If I sound biased or one-sided, it’s because I am. The idea that we are capable of achieving a perfect neutrality about social and cultural things is, to put it lightly, a load of rubbish, and I simply don’t have enough to lose to try and pretend otherwise. I am oddly fortunate with this; my job security isn’t on the line, the vital funding for a research project isn’t threatened with withdrawal, and I can (and will) happily say that the government is rapidly extending censorship into the cultural sphere with little fallout.
In 2020, the culture secretary warned museums that they could have their funding cut if they removed “controversial” objects, saying that they should strive for “impartiality” instead. This rang alarm bells for many people working in history and culture because, bluntly, choosing impartiality is political.
In much the same way as saying “oh, I’d rather stay out of politics” immediately tells me that your bodily autonomy and right to life hasn’t been challenged by any kind of policies (and that you are therefore probably white, most likely male, and almost definitely not someone I’d enjoy a coffee with), proclaiming that history should be done impartially is only a view that the beneficiaries of history could espouse. To breezily say that you only want to see the nice bits of the past is to prove that your ancestors were the privileged ones.
Studying and writing history is literally telling a story. As much as we’d love there to be one ultimate objective truth, that’s just not really how society or people work. We can make every effort to be diligent and thorough in our work, to not just rely on obvious sources, and to question the assumptions that we might come in with. But we cannot overcome the ultimate subjectivity of ourselves and our sources.
A non-hypothetical example for you: in the 1940s, while the West was at war with Germany, Japan and China were fighting the Second Sino-Japanese War. This is agreed upon by pretty much everybody; the war happened. What isn’t agreed upon is the scale of violence and civilian deaths that occurred in China. Chinese sources record the “Nanjing Massacre” as one of the worst events, estimating 400,000 dead and 20,000 women raped. Accounts from people who experienced the Japanese occupation of Nanjing are horrifying. But ultra-nationalist Japanese scholars maintain that the massacre was simply Chinese propaganda.
So, with “400,000 dead” on one side and “never happened” on the other, what is the neutral, impartial account? Do we go down the middle and say that about 200,000 people died? Do we say that nobody died but 400,000 people were hurt enough that they were halfway dead? Quite clearly, I hope, there isn’t an “impartial” solution.
The actual solution is to investigate further and weigh up the evidence to make our own conclusions. Personally, there is more than enough evidence to convince me that Japanese soldiers were unbelievably brutal to the people of Nanjing. But telling everyone to literally “do their own research” for every historical event ever is a) ridiculous and b) impossible. For one thing, paywalled journals and the requirement for institutional affiliation make actually accessing research and papers incredibly restrictive. Beyond the time and access issues, historians also want to justify their existence! There is a reason that we spend our lives locked up in archives and libraries, and partly it’s so that you don’t have to.
There is a not-insignificant link between the rise of populism and anti-expert rhetoric in politics (think Brexit and Trump campaigners) and the push for undermining the autonomy of researchers. If a museum or a historian says that a particular group of people were the bad guys
Stasiland by Anna Funder is a collection of “stories from behind the Berlin Wall”. Funder, an Australian, lived in reunified Germany in the 1990s and collected the stories of people who worked for the East German State Security (the Stasi) as well as people who were arrested by or escaped from the Stasi. One ex-Stasi worker, Herr von Schnitzler, remained proud of his work in observing and monitoring the people of East Berlin. Funder asked him, “how are you finding it now after 1989, now that you are living in capitalism or, as you say, in imperialism?”. Von Schnitzler replied, “I live among the enemy. … What I can tell you, is that as long as the GDR existed no swine in Bonn would have dared start a war!”. To Funder, and therefore to the reader, von Schnitzler is a man living in the past, and a man whose memories of divided Germany go against the grain.
In Art Spiegelman’s Maus – recently added to a banned books list in Tennessee schools – one page of panels stands out more than most in my mind. Spiegelman, mouse mask tied around his face, sits at his writing desk looking exhausted. He juxtaposes events of the Holocaust with events from his life as he tells his father’s story. “In May 1987 Françoise (Spiegelman’s wife) and I are expecting a baby… Between May 16, 1944 and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in Auschwitz…”. The final panel of the page reveals that Spiegelman’s desk sits on top of the starved, dead bodies of Jews. The visual impact of page 201 is long-lasting. If you haven’t read Maus, please consider it.
The problem with trying to pretend that history was neutral, something that happened without deliberate political choices, is that history happened to real people. Africans were enslaved. Jews were murdered on a horrific scale. Women were assaulted and raped. Precious objects were looted and stolen from where they were created and displayed as exotic things thousands of miles away.
History is not impartial. It is full of uncomfortable truths and we have to reconcile that with ourselves, not by rewriting the awkward bits (the British Empire: famous for trains and nothing else), but by reflecting on it. “PC gone maaad”, “woke”, or whatever the next dismissive term will be, it is vital that we keep being biased.
Further reading:
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder (2003)
The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman (2003)
What is History? E H Carr (1961)
Written by Beth Price
Beth is a writer and researcher based in Edinburgh. She is interested in all things cultural, especially when it comes to gender, LGBTQ+ identity, and media. She is half of Breakdown Education, an education platform and community that champions intersectional, diverse, and accessible knowledge networks.
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