Race, Colonialism, Resistance and Denial

Abstract

The death of George Floyd in July 2020 shook the world. It brought many people to face to face with the reality of the institutional state violence that is an integral part of the racism that Black communities face in the Western world and sparked Black Lives Matter movements around the world. In the UK, George Floyd’s death sparked demonstrations involving young Black and white activists resulting in direct action that challenged the national historical narrative about Britain’s involvement in slavery and the nature of the British Empire. During a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol in June 2021, the protesters toppled a statue of Edward Colston, a figure presented as a philanthropist and municipal benefactor in Bristol’s history and sank it in the harbour. The reaction from the State was one of fury. The Prime Ministers Officer issued a statement saying that the tearing down of a Bristol statue was a ‘criminal act’ and the people responsible should be ‘held to account’. The Home Secretary responded to a question about the incident in the Parliament stated, ‘What we witnessed yesterday was mob rule, which is completely out of kilter with the rule of law and unacceptable’. There was no acknowledgement in the Government response that the toppling of Colston’s statue was influenced by the fact that from 1669 – 1692, Colston was the Deputy Governor of the Royal Africa Company. During his tenure as deputy governor, he effectively ran the company; an estimated 84,000 African people were transported to the Caribbean and Americas, with an estimated 20,000 deaths during transportations. No echoes of the sentiments expressed by Marvin Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, who said, ‘I can not pretend that the statue is anything but an affront to me. Not just as a Jamaican heritage man but as a human being’. The government response reflected a wellestablished white-washing of British history. A narrative that says that even though Britain was involved in the slave trade, the British were the good guys because they were the first to abolish it. A narrative that barely mentions the period of colonialism and Empire other than promoting the racist view that Britain brought civilisation and values to the world. The desire to ignore the realities of past the has not only emerged in the context of a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Black lives matter protest but in a more sustained attempt by leading British politicians to rehabilitate the Empire over the past two decades. In 2002, former Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated that Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history. He also stated I think we should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it, that we should talk, rightly so, about British values, and called for the ‘great British values’ - freedom, tolerance, civic duty to be admired as some of our most successful exports. Similarly, in 2013 former Prime Minister David Cameron, when visiting the memorial in India to the 1919 Amritsar Massacre where hundreds of Sikh protesters were gunned down by troops under British command, declared, ‘I think there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did and was responsible for – but, of course, there were bad events as well as good. ‘The bad events we should learn from – and the good events we should celebrate’. The State reaction resulting from the toppling of the Colston statue typified this. A feeling of national panic was engendered by the claim that Black Lives matters protesters were likely to topple a statue of Winston Churchill as part of a protest in London. A narrative was constructed that extremists had taken over the Black Lives Matter protests. In a series of tweets in the run-up to the BLM London protest, Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted ‘We cannot now try to edit or censor our past’, ‘We cannot pretend to have a different history’, ‘Those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history and impoverish the education of...