Spoke to a family member today. Talked about how I’m gonna write a student thesis on Wu Zetian, the only female emperor of China. Was promptly met with “but why not write about women like Margaret Thatcher? So many more references and much more recent!”
Cue me asking why I should study a known European figure rather than somebody more unknown (and more interesting imo) overseas? Family member goes on to tell me how “easy it was for medieval women overseas to gain power, they just had to marry their emperor husband!”, and how European history is so much more interesting and tragic and worth analysing because everything is so complex in Europe compared to those “primitive cultures.” Family member then jumps to how Europeans have invented EVERYTHING and how everybody else copies us (clothes, music, science) and Europe is the sole inventor of everything apparently. I get up and leave.
Apologies for the rant. Do y’all have any supporting words or advice on how to speak to these individuals? I thought I could post this here because I appreciate y’all’s anti-colonialist attitude, but do feel free to remove if it’s appropriate.
Well, everyone else has covered good serious answers so I’ll give you less serious ones that would still be really fun to do. It is good and noble to antagonize your racist relatives. Also, “Shut the fuck up, you don’t know jack shit and have lost your right to talk” is a fun thing to say to people, gets them really upset. Why should you treat someone spewing colonialist fascist propaganda with respect? Hurt their feelings. Make them ashamed.
That person’s analysis is racist as hell, just call it what it is to their face.
It’s also categorically false. By how our sick societies typically measure “civilization” (sidenote it’s a pretty fucked up way that accepts colonialist industrialist racist assumptions as fact) China was far more civilized and advanced than Europe. China had vast empires while Europe was still in the so-called “Dark Ages”. Not that Empire is good but you see my point.
Unrelated but have you read Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao? It’s at like the intersection of sci fi and fantasy and is directly inspired by Wu Zetian. I also think it’s a book all leftists should love because it’s very much a revolutionary story that rejects every bullshit defanging and subversion that Western revolutionary stories put in to sabotage revolution (For more on those sabotaging tropes: https://redsails.org/the-swerve). If you haven’t read it I cannot recommend it enough. It’s so damn good.
You can tell them you have a policy of not writing about people who are destined for Hell, like Margaret Thatcher.
You can tell them that you would rather write about someone cool like an empress rather than someone pathetic who only ever rose to the ranks of Prime Minister. If Margaret Thatcher had been half the woman with half the ambition of Empress Wu Zetian, she would have done a coup d’etat the queen of England, ripped the crown off her corpse, and reinstated absolute monarchy in England. Instead she meekly settled for Prime Minister. Pathetic.
I know I shouldn’t recommend
but reddit’s /r/AskHistorians is full of threads about how Europe was this dark backwater with no civilization while all over the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and in the Americas, vast advanced civilizations fluorished and did great things. If you wanted to be petty you could look for those, compile the best examples, and send them to this family member, because they sound like they really need to learn that West is not best, it’s the worst and is the latecomer to the stage of global civilizations.
You could tell them you think you’ll get a better grade writing a respectful paper about what a bad removed girlboss Wu Zetian was than if you write a long diatribe of an essay outlining every single way that Maggie Thatcher was a fetid steaming pile of shit.
I lol’d at this, especially keeping in mind that this family member of mine thought Margaret Thatcher was so iconic to have risen to power in a patriarchal world (like Wu didn’t do the exact same thing).
My friend actually introduced this book to me after I told her I’d be studying Wu! Strongly considering reading it now that you vouch for it, too.