Everything is about white male privilege, even writing advice it seems

I read a headline saying Why the writing advice 'show, don't tell' is inherently political and thought, well, this should be good. The links ultimately lead to an essay called Let me tell you by one Cecilia Tan.

The author discusses 'show, don't tell' (SdT) entirely in the context of world building, i.e. info dumps about the background of a story. She then argues that SdT relies on a shared cultural background, and thus this writing advice privileges writers who can rely on sharing such a background with their readers, i.e. white males.

Now, first, I would not see anything particularly wrong with this in principle, because why should it only apply to white males? If an Iranian woman wrote a novel for Iranian women, it would work the same.

But more importantly, at least to me, and while I appreciate that I am not an author of novels who has run into that criticism myself, her understanding of SdT totally misses the point. Every single time I have seen people complain about being told instead of being shown by a poor writer it was something like this (if necessary search that page for "show-don't" to find what I mean) or this.

So it is not about world building info dumps at all. It is entirely about being too poor a writer to communicate the abilities and emotions of one's characters. It is about merely stating that your protagonist is a good debater instead of introducing her by winning an argument. It is about thinking that your reader is too stupid to understand that the protagonist is sad when you simply write "Frodo cried" and instead writing something to the effect of "Frodo cried because he was sad, and he was sad because as you may not remember Gandalf had just fallen to his death, see previous page". It is quite simply about poor and lazy writing, in a way that is independent of cultural context except to the degree that some other cultures may not even have a tradition of fiction writing (e.g. if it is a culture without a written language).

But apparently everything has to be about Western privilege all the time; there is nothing in the universe that is not about Western privilege.

It's the same hubris that led the white Western establishment to assume its medicine, science, and values superior to all other cultures. We'll come back to that shortly.

Eh, no. A medicine is superior to other medicines if it heals more reliably, and a scientific methodology is superior to other scientific methodologies if it produces more reproducible and accurate descriptions of reality. There are things that demonstrably work (often including substances found in traditional healing herbs) and there are things that demonstrably don't (including the Western tradition of bloodletting). That is all there is to it, no Western or Eastern or whatever needed.

Also, apparently a story about a protagonist having an impact on the outside world is quite simply "colonialism". What? No, people interacting with each other, helping each other against a dark lord's attempt at world conquest, learning from each other isn't colonialism. Invading with an army and taking over other people's countries to exploit them, that is colonialism. Words have meanings. Or at least they should.