Confederate monuments have always baffled me. Never mind why they did it. What matters is that they did it. They fought, and in many cases they died fighting, against the United States. And yes, Abraham Lincoln was also a racist. Among other things, he wanted to transport the blacks to American colonies that were to have been created for the purpose in Africa.
Lincoln's popular cult was never going to survive the entry of African-American or Native American voices into the official discourse, just as that of Winston Churchill was never going to survive the emergence into the official discourse of working-class voices, or of the voices of the children of Empire. But Churchill really did lead Britain in the Second World War. And Lincoln really did lead the Union in the American Civil War. He certainly did not take up arms against it.
Those who claim that slavery and colonialism are widely taught in British schools need look no further than the fact that statues of slave-traders have until recent days stood in the centres of British towns and cities. If anything like the broad mass of the inhabitants had had any idea whose monuments those were, then they would have come down a very long time ago.
Such monuments are therefore failures in their own terms, and the teaching of History routinely skips from the fall of the Stuarts, or even from the death of Elizabeth I, straight to the First World War. If the slave trade is taught at all, then it is often in the form of the execrable claim that Britain's main or only contribution to it was to end it.
Well, the statues are down now, or they very soon will be. It is time to move on to the harder work. Reforming the curriculum is part of that. As is the implementation of the hundreds of recommendations that have already been made by a series of reviews of racial inequality over the last 30 years.
As is justice, including compensation, for the victims of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. As is the end of deliberately racist policies such as "the hostile environment", "no recourse to public funds", and the whipping up of hallucinations about "health tourism". As is the closure of the detention centres. And as is an independent inquiry into the staggering number of BAME deaths from Covid-19.
Covid-19 has exposed for all to see the racial and class inequalities that have been worsened by the economic order that began in Britain with the Budget of 1976, and which has since been extended over most of the world. That extension has included wars as brutal as the slave trade ever was, and the war in Libya has restored black slave markets to the Mediterranean coast of Africa.
Yet such people as turn out to oppose demolitions, mostly by "guarding" statues that no one had proposed to pull down and which depicted figures of whom they had never heard, actively support such wars of ideological expansion.
As long as there were an acceptable Brexit, although most of them would accept anything that Boris Johnson chose to call a Brexit, then they would change nothing else about the Britain that had existed on the day before Edward Colston's statue had gone into the harbour, or at least on the day before the lockdown had come into effect.
On the contrary, they see themselves as the guardians of that Britain against Islam, and increasingly also against the black churches. More and more, that means all of the churches. Those whose fairly recent ancestors were converted are bringing to these shores the varieties of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Methodism and so on that grew in the soil of, especially, Africa from the seeds that had been planted by the missionaries.
The struggle continues.
Lincoln's popular cult was never going to survive the entry of African-American or Native American voices into the official discourse, just as that of Winston Churchill was never going to survive the emergence into the official discourse of working-class voices, or of the voices of the children of Empire. But Churchill really did lead Britain in the Second World War. And Lincoln really did lead the Union in the American Civil War. He certainly did not take up arms against it.
Those who claim that slavery and colonialism are widely taught in British schools need look no further than the fact that statues of slave-traders have until recent days stood in the centres of British towns and cities. If anything like the broad mass of the inhabitants had had any idea whose monuments those were, then they would have come down a very long time ago.
Such monuments are therefore failures in their own terms, and the teaching of History routinely skips from the fall of the Stuarts, or even from the death of Elizabeth I, straight to the First World War. If the slave trade is taught at all, then it is often in the form of the execrable claim that Britain's main or only contribution to it was to end it.
Well, the statues are down now, or they very soon will be. It is time to move on to the harder work. Reforming the curriculum is part of that. As is the implementation of the hundreds of recommendations that have already been made by a series of reviews of racial inequality over the last 30 years.
As is justice, including compensation, for the victims of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. As is the end of deliberately racist policies such as "the hostile environment", "no recourse to public funds", and the whipping up of hallucinations about "health tourism". As is the closure of the detention centres. And as is an independent inquiry into the staggering number of BAME deaths from Covid-19.
Covid-19 has exposed for all to see the racial and class inequalities that have been worsened by the economic order that began in Britain with the Budget of 1976, and which has since been extended over most of the world. That extension has included wars as brutal as the slave trade ever was, and the war in Libya has restored black slave markets to the Mediterranean coast of Africa.
Yet such people as turn out to oppose demolitions, mostly by "guarding" statues that no one had proposed to pull down and which depicted figures of whom they had never heard, actively support such wars of ideological expansion.
As long as there were an acceptable Brexit, although most of them would accept anything that Boris Johnson chose to call a Brexit, then they would change nothing else about the Britain that had existed on the day before Edward Colston's statue had gone into the harbour, or at least on the day before the lockdown had come into effect.
On the contrary, they see themselves as the guardians of that Britain against Islam, and increasingly also against the black churches. More and more, that means all of the churches. Those whose fairly recent ancestors were converted are bringing to these shores the varieties of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Methodism and so on that grew in the soil of, especially, Africa from the seeds that had been planted by the missionaries.
The struggle continues.
Then you understand precisely nothing about America. The Union was built on a compromise: in return for accepting federal rule, the states were allowed to keep a significant degree of independence along with memorials to their fallen. It’s that uneasy compromise between states rights-tester in the civil rights legislation of the 60’s-that keeps the United States together.
ReplyDeleteMany Confederate heroes such as Robert E Lee later reluctantly supported the Union.
No, they were defeated in a war. All states have the same level of autonomy. And most of those monuments were put up in the twentieth century.
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