 Hello and welcome to this digital event from the British Library. My name is Jonah Albert, and I am one of the library's cultural events producers. This evening we are joined by David Olesoga in conversation with Omar Khan on why Black History matters. I'd like to say welcome to the Living Knowledge Network, a network of libraries across the country who are with us today. Thank you guys for joining us. Welcome. Use the menu above to provide us with feedback. Also to visit the bookshop where you can find a few of David's books and also to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. I would like now to hand over to Omar Khan as we begin this evening's event. Thank you very much. Good evening everyone. My name is Omar Khan. I have the pleasure and honour of chairing today's event, this evening's British Library event, Black History matters, a conversation with David Olesoga. Before we begin I've got a few housekeeping bits. I think most of you are all familiar with Zoom. I think there's 2,000 of you on the Zoom call. That's definitely a record for me, maybe not for David, but let me just give you a few housekeeping notes for this Zoom event. First I want to welcome people from the Living Knowledge Network. They're joining us via the British Library's partnerships with libraries across the UK and obviously one advantage of doing events online is we can do events where people don't just have to come to London. The second thing I want to note is there are captions for this event. It has a live speech to text captioning. It's accessed by a tab below the video if you'd like to use it. Finally at the end there will be an opportunity to ask questions directly of David, but you can start asking those questions immediately. You scroll below the video to fill out a question form and those questions will be posed to David. Obviously he won't be able to answer all of them, but we will do our best to make sure that they are addressed. With those preliminaries out of the way I'm going to quickly introduce David. I'm sure most of you know him. You're here for the event before. Professor David Olesoga is a British Nigerian historian, broadcaster and BAFTA award-winning presenter and filmmaker. He's a professor of public history at the University of Manchester and a regular contributor. His papers including The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman and BBC History magazine. He's the author of several books including Black and British, A Forgotten History and A House Through Time. He was also a contributor to the Oxford Companion to Black British History. In 2019 he was awarded the OBB for services to history and community integration. David's new children book, Black and British, A Short Essential History, has recently been published and I'm looking forward to getting that for my eight-year-old. So welcome David. Hi there, how you doing? Great. So as the event sort of previewed I think one of the reasons we're having this conversation about Black History Matters is it's Black History Month and this arguably this year is a particular context for Black History Month with the murder of George Floyd. Arguably greater recognition in Britain that the issue of racism is still one that matters here in the UK. Have you noticed that this has made any difference in how we think about or talk about Black History for this Black History Month in 2020? Well I think the contrast between the previous Black History Months is even more stark because the last two were enormously overshadowed by the Windrush scandal. I remember the Black History Month of 2018, I gave several talks around the country and I was making a programme at the time about people whose lives have been torn apart by the scandal and I was absolutely furious and everyone was angry, everyone was emotional. So I think we have a real extreme contrast between those two very fraught Black History Months and this year when I think there's more reasons to be hopeful. I don't think there are reasons to be sort of overconfident but I think there are reasons to say that the conversations we've had about race, the changes that we've seen in the national discourse about race, some have been very negative, a lot of them have been incredibly positive. I mean if somebody had told me in January that by the summer there would be weeks and weeks in which half the books in the Sunday Times bestseller list would be books about Black History and race and structural racism I would have thought it was naive if somebody had told me that there'd be demonstrations all over the world in the name of anti-racism. I would have said that sounded far-fetched if somebody had told me back in January that the statue of Edward Colston that it stood for 125 years over the city of Bristol where I'm talking to you from this evening, that that statue would be toppled and that one of the organisations that had defended the reputation of a slave trader for 275 years would disband itself. All of those things sounded utterly naive and implausible in January. All of those things have happened and just acknowledging what has happened, that in itself I think is reason to be more optimistic than we have been or have had reason to be in the previous couple of Black History Months. The way you rightly tell that, I mean obviously there is the link there being made between the history, the evidence of Colston being a slave trader and the present, the attitudes that end up justifying the dehumanisation of George Floyd and all those murdered by the police. I mean do you think we're getting there? We're getting to that conversation because with Windrush I still feel that there's a resistance to unpicking that history in terms of explaining the injustice that happened in the present. Yeah well I think the ignorance of history is one of the reasons why the Windrush scandal happened. I think if you read the lessons learned review commissioned by Savage Jadw, to everyone when he's Home Secretary and carried out by Wendy Williams, that report comes very close to saying that the Home Office was institutionally racist. It doesn't actually say it, but it comes close to saying it and what it what it recounts is people not understanding the history. They don't understand the history of the empire. They don't understand the role of the place of the Caribbean and the people of the Caribbean in the story of empire and they certainly didn't understand and this is what I find most shocking. They don't understand the history of immigration law since 1948 and the passing of the Nationality Act. So it was an inability to really understand who these people were, what their place in Britain's story was, that was one of the engines for the Windrush scandal. So this disconnect between the history and the present, this disconnect between the historical engines that generated the racial thinking and the stereotypes that disfigure our society and the existence of those stereotypes and distortions. I think some of that has been reconnected this year. I mean it was amazing when Colston's statue was toppled because I did interviews for newspapers and for television channels all over the world in Europe and America and the thing that surprised people was not that the statue had been toppled but that it had been there in the first place and the question, I think a lot of people had bought the image that we had sent out to the world at the beginning of the Olympics in 2012 of this young dynamic, tolerant multicultural country that was in love with its own self-image of tolerance, inclusiveness and creativity and that sat very badly with the fact that a man who was the deputy governor of the Royal African Company, the company that transported more people than a slave even in any in British history had been not just put up in a British city, it had been kept up and it had been defended resolutely by five organisations who've created a cult, a cult of worship of a mass murderer. People just couldn't understand how we could not see this. It was something embarrassing to be, it was slightly odd position for me to be in her trying to feeling defensive about Britain when I've been calling for that statue to come down for years but it was a really powerful moment because it was a realisation that more people were understanding this history and these links. You had a group of young people at a moment when black people were suffering more than any other group in the pandemic in a city that has a deep division and residential segregation, a city that has been, in report after report, said to disadvantage the lives of black and brown people, targeting somebody who was responsible for the industry that generated those racial ideas in the first place. So it was layers of history and symmetry and poetry, it was a remarkable event. It gives light to the sort of, what I would almost call a straw man argument that we're trying to erase history by taking down coasting because that is about excavating the ideas that continue. I mean I don't know if you want to say anything in response to that kind of criticism. Here is a professional historian, a professor saying that we should take down statues and erase history. What would you say in response to that? Well I mean the answer is easy. It's the thing I've sort of said for years on platform after platform is statues aren't history and the people who are talking about what we should do with these statues tend to be historians. They tend to be people who spent their entire professional lives generating history, writing books, going to archives, uncovering documents, producing television programmes. It's a very old way to destroy history. If I'm really opposed to history I could think of more destructive ways of taking my vengeance out on history than writing history books and making history programmes. Monuments and statues are not history. They're about memorialisation and they're about validation. They say that this man and it almost always is a man. Remember there are more statues of Queen Victoria than all other women put together in this country. There are more statues of nymphs and fairies than real actual historical women in this country. That statues say this is a great man and Edward Costin wasn't a great man. He was a killer. He was a slave trader. He just gave a lot of money to Bristol and it's so easy to show that that statue was not history because if you'd stood in front of that statue before the 7th of June it would have told you almost nothing about Edward Costin. What could you have learnt from that statue? Well he died in 1721. The statue was put up in 1895. We have no idea what he looked like. There's not even a likeness of him, not even a depiction of him. It says on the plinth that he was a wise and virtuous son of the city. Well it doesn't say he spent most of his life in London, that most of his slave trading activities were in London. Wise, virtuous, he was a slave trader. He was a killer. He wasn't virtuous. But it also says it was put up by public subscription. Now that's not inaccurate. That's actually false. It was not put up by public subscription. The public subscription failed and we think a member of the Bristol elite, James Aresmith, paid himself for most of the money to put up that statue because they wanted to create a cult of Colston which justified them members of the same merchant elite having huge power in the city. None of that, none of that is visible. None of that could be learnable from that statue and the other thing that statue said nothing about is the source of the money. It said nothing about the 80,000 plus people transported into slavery during the time he was involved in the Royal African Company and nothing about the 19,000 that we estimated died as a result, died in the middle passage as a result of his activities. All of that history, that actual history that you can learn through books and documents and television programmes and going to heritage sites, none of that is visible in the statue because that's not the function of statues. They are about validation, memorialisation. They cannot tell us history because history is fluid. It moves and it changes. We learn new things. We understand the significance of things that we didn't previously understand and history evolves and changes. Statues are literally set in stone. They're literally cast into bronze. They are immobile by their very nature. They cannot do the job of history which is to evolve because that is not their function. They have nothing to do with history. They have to do with powerful elites, choosing members of their inner circle and making them into figures for validation, making them into figures that justify the perpetuation of their rule and their power. It's got nothing to do with history. I think you've pretty extensively proven that facts are not the site of dispute here really. The site of dispute is arguably who we are as a people and as a nation. I don't know if you want to respond to that sort of provocation but basically maybe the reason that people were so agitated was not in fact because they're interested in history about what really happened. They're rather interested in what it says about who we are as a people and they feel that what you just described is somehow tarnishing or self-flagellating and is offering a negative portrait of Britain. That seems to be a more plausible account of why they're so agitated then. They just really want to get the history, especially when they're getting it so wrong. I think there's more sympathy for that argument. I think it is very difficult for people who have been taught the history that we were all taught at school and who believe it and who have normalised it to cope with the fact that historians are coming along and activists and other people are coming along and saying, actually a lot of this stuff has not been taught. There's another side to this story. It's much more complicated and it's a lot less celebratory than we were taught at school. It's a real challenge and I think people are also being encouraged to think that this process of reexamining history is somehow an attack rather than the function of history. When historians are accused of rewriting history the answer is yes, that is actually literally the job of historians. They sit there and they look at the evidence that we have and they write new versions of it and they reassess it and they look at documents we didn't have before or assessments or understandings we didn't have again and they rewrite history. Nobody comes upon a historical subject and goes, well it's written and we can't do it again. Nobody thinks there's no reason to write new books on the tutors because that would be to rewrite history. That is the function of historians but I think if we have been fed a generation for generation of the generation at schools into the heritage industry I think also through television at times a version of our past in which history is a safe space. It's a place we go to to feel good about ourselves. Now not all countries have that relationship with their past. Some countries see history as a place you go for good and bad to learn nice stories about your past and your heritage and your people and your country but also caution retails. I mean obviously Germany has a very relationship, very different relationship with its past. At this point I have to, I don't know why I waste my time to say I'm not comparing German history to British history, I'm comparing the way Germany has dealt with its history to the way that Britain has dealt with its history. I've said that every time I've ever said that and that hasn't stopped the Daily Mail accusing me of comparing with German and British history. That provides out the way for a complete waste of time because they'll write what they want. Not all countries have this relationship with their past and if you want history to be this soft play area where you can go and gallivant and feel good about yourselves and think you're a unique special exceptional country you need to take out of that soft play area all of the sharp objects and the sharp objects are the chapters of our past that aren't glorious, that aren't wonderful, that isn't populated by heroes and angels but that are tragic and shameful and and and brutal and within that tends to be the bits of history that explain the family stories and the back stories of the 14% of the population who are not white. If you don't, if you want history to be a soft play area you don't want the history of the Royal Navy coming into Lagos and bombing my ancestors or going to the village my family's from in the 1890s with maximum guns. You don't want the story of Amritsa, you don't want the story of the Indian Mutiny and the violence that followed it. You don't want slavery, you don't want all of these stories that are the back stories that explain how our country's population came to look the way it does. So you reject it and then when it all emerges and your soft play area is suddenly full of sharp objects there's a there's a reaction, there's a quite aggressive reaction, a search for scapegoats and a search to delegitimize this form of history and one of the classic ways is to say that it's exaggerated or to compare it to other countries whenever we talk about empire someone will say well it's not as bad as the Belgian Congo, it's not as bad as example X or example Y or they will say that it is a form of self-flagilation and that the people who are into this history hate the country all of these contrivances everything other than accepting that Britain like every other nation that ever existed did some good things and some bad things that basic obvious fundamental facts anything to get away from just having to accept that obvious reality. Yeah I mean I think um it's a it's a key argument obviously in your book that we should understand black history not just as a sort of I think you said this the first time I met you as a minor tributary to the main river of British but as as part of of British history so that black history is British history I mean you care to expand on that because I think it's an argument that that really needs stating and especially in the context of what you've just said I mean arguably it's one of the reasons people resist that that that claim that they want they would prefer to see they would prefer to say yeah well you're right those things happen but they're kind of a minor bit of the story of who we are they're not really fundamental to the story of Britain um how would you yeah well how would you respond to that it's a it's a powerful reflex to to want to believe that that's um it's one of the many devices used to push this history away and disown it now geography conspires in this because slavery took place for the most part in the plantations of the new world obviously that's where enslaved people were profitable um there were of course enslaved people living in Britain living in as servants in houses wearing collars being beaten we know that because there's a great legal case over their status but the fact that most of it takes place over there is helps people distance themselves um from from this from this history but I think it's it's it's it's more than that the we don't want to come to terms with this history and the idea that it says anything about us and we will find as I said any contrivance to allow us to do that and geography and distance does that but also so does focusing on the histories of other countries um we are much more interested in african-american history than black british history when black history emerged in Britain which is really in the sort of 60s 70s and the 80s I think what we did is we took an american concept african-american history and we try to apply it to britain and african-american history understandably is about the the lives and the development of communities of black people in america from 1619 when the first african-american slaves uh uh bought africa to the to the present day and it takes place on the continental united states for the most part black british history can't just be that because it is like almost every other aspect of our history it is imperial it takes place in britain but it also takes place in africa it also takes place in the colonies in the americas and in the new world it also takes place at sea because we're a vast maritime power so this history is is is global and there's a form of black british history which I think some people are much more comfortable with which is about biographies of people who lived in britain it's about black people and the word that's always used is contribution now there's nothing wrong with that that's absolutely fine my books are full of those stories of those black people and those communities that lived in britain and lived their lives in britain but that cannot encompass the role of africans and africa in the story of britain because it's far far bigger than that the example that I always use is that is that the one thing I wasn't taught at school about the industrial revolution I was taught every detail about it the one detail I wasn't told was the four and a half thousand mills in Lancashire that produced the cotton clothing that was britain's biggest export by the middle of the 19th century the economist magazine estimated that one in five of the entire population 20% were to some extent involved in the cotton trade or the ancillary trades I was taught every detail of that trade except for where the raw cotton came from the raw cotton is produced on 80 000 plantations in the mississippi valley in the deep south 80 000 and on those 80 000 plantations are 1.8 million african americans half of the four million african americans living in chains in the 18 in the 1850s now that industry sends the great bulk of its cotton to Liverpool to be processed in the four and a half thousand mills in Lancashire those 1.8 million african americans who are servicing the biggest industry in victorian britain the industry at the center of the industrial revolution the industry that we are taught at school we're all taught every other detail have waterframes and spinning jennies and arcrides and the rest of them but we're not taught that those 1.8 million african americans who live their lives in chains they are the missing persons of that's that version of that aspect of british history now that doesn't come under the definition of black british history about contributions and communities because they never live here but they're absolutely fundamental to the story of britain and everybody everybody lives in a country that was enriched by their stolen labour everybody lives in a country where the railway systems if we were living in a easier time i would be with you you know you are my tonight at the british museum and i would have come to london from my home in Bristol on the great western line from the temple meets to Paddington a line that we know had money invested in it from the compensation paid at the end of slavery to the 47 000 slave owners and i would have benefited from that historic injection of wealth into the into the country all of us are affected by this country's exploitation of africans whether it was through slavery whether it was through imperialism it is encoded in the financial dna of our country it's encoded in our language in our culture in our food and it is far bigger than can be encompassed with the traditional restrictive slightly myopic version of black british history because we are in imperial power and all i ever really do is in a story is i i go to every subject that i encounter and i try to see it through the prism of empire my book on the first world war is really a history of the first world war understood through empire and my my version of black british history is to try to make it imperial because the american template just cannot function and i think it's very noticeable that politicians are much more comfortable with that version of black british history because that really misses out what happens on the plantations that misses the punitive rains in africa in there in during the scramble for africa that misses out so much of the stuff that we are really uncomfortable talking about yeah i i couldn't agree more i mean as originally as an american i am always struck by the sort of the usefulness of the analogy but also the limitations of it and i think you know one thing that strikes me as you're speaking about empire there is the inequalities of rights and of status are so obvious in the united states because as you say they're geographically continuous but because the inequalities of rights and of status were sort of geographically dissipated we don't spot that that's just what the british state was it was a state of unequal rights um and privileges and i think that's what's in some ways i i i know you're not a subversive as such but it is quite subversive notion of what britain is your claim that you know you're not just reclaiming black history you're actually reformulating how we ought to think about britain we ought to think about britain fundamentally as an imperial power there's there's a speech i'm i'm very interested in that um enoc pal gave in 1961 and it's not the speech you're thinking about it's seven years earlier he gave a speech on st george's day and it's an incredible delusion of a speech what he talks about in the speech is how the age of empire has come to an end and that britain and it's a very interesting um um phrase that he used to use about the end of empire and it's a phrase that has re-emerged into our public discourse he used to talk about a clean break from empire we need to have a clean break rather like we need a clean break from europe now we're told and in this speech he argues that those those centuries of being an empire builder and an imperial power had unaffected not affected britain that the rest of the world it could be caught under the spell of britain but britain and i think the phrase he uses has somehow unaffected by the great structure built around it and now it was all over and what he called the strange races had gone that britain could return to its true self and he he has this eulogy this beautiful piece of writing is you know backward travels our gaze to the pikeman of the of the the 17th century back through the i think it's the the brash materialism of the tutors and there we find them our true english ancestors this idea that you had to travel back in time for centuries to before the middle of the 16th century before before the tutor dynasty in the earliest of the tutor dynasty to engage with our true well he really meant englishness not britishness and that nothing that had happened between then and the 1960s had had any imprint on who the brit the british were was it it it shows the intellectual contortions you need to get to to edit the imperial story out of britain and it's just the the strange thing about it is it's so palpably nonsense and yet actually it's so effective the imprints of imperialism the imprints of slavery are absolutely everywhere they're just that our society drips with them and we almost don't see them they are almost invisible right in front of us i mean one of the examples as a west africum that i'm interested in is um the victorian cult of cleanliness cleanliness is next to godliness the victorian cult of the soap you know soaps produced with palm oil palm oil is absolutely fundamental to the colonisation of africa it's one of the reasons for the colonisation of africa it's one of the reasons that the anti-slave trade suppression squadrons of the royal navy merge into the early days of imperial conquest it's the reason the economic reason that british power expands northwards in the latter half of the 19th century and encounters my ancestors in ijabwde in or in in in in nigeria because this product this commodity is then shipped to places like port sunlight in liverpool to make the soap that is fundamental to the story of the victorians that people who are fighting the squalor of the slums creating this kind of this cult of cleanliness which we all had to relearn because we wash our hands properly for the first time in our lives you can't have that without empire you can't have tea without empire you can't have when i was a child my favourite sweets were were highland toffees and it was only when i was 16 and i started reading about slavery that i worked out that this whole scottish thing about toffees and sugars and biscuits and the sweet tooth of the scots is entirely a reflection of the fact that scotland was deeply deeply involved in sugar slavery in jamaica but also tobacco slavery slavery in virginia it was up to its neck in it and you know it's called highland toffee as if the sugar cane is being grown in the grampian highlands in some sort of oddly warm valley or some sort of beside some lock that somehow heats it it's there in in in plain sight i mean that the i remember realising that when i read about scottish involvement i'm not picking on the scots here but it's just a good story the population the proportion of the population that is scottish in the population of britain in the 18th centuries about what it is now it's about eight nine percent but the scots because they for all sorts of reasons the scots were more heavily involved in the imperial project than than many other groups the scots really were enthusiastic about about empire and there was a lot of scottish involvement in sugar slavery in jamaica so around a third of the plantation owners in jamaica were scottish and that means about a third of the enslaved people owned by scottish plantation owners and like all spot plantation owners in the british empire they gave those enslaved people their family names and i remember realising that it was right in front of me and i'd never noticed it my favourite band when i was a kid was the original whalers not bob marley and the whalers the original whalers think of the names of the three black guys in that band bob marley robert nester marley he's actually mixed race his father is scottish but the others bunny livingston and peter mckintosh mckintosh livingston marley three black guys from jamaica who like a third of jamaicans have ancestors were owned by scottish plantations it's right in front of you it's just it's everywhere the sweets i was eating the the the music i was listening to the imprint of empire is everywhere yet it is almost almost kind of physically invisible to us and people can't why i mean there seems to be an emotional resistance as much as an intellectual one in resisting that because as you say these are just their facts and it's actually quite surprising that you know it's taken so long for example even to unearth i mean the excellent ucl project on the legacies of British slavery but those that evidence has been there since since it was first put in the archive yeah it's been there since 1830 how do we i think there's there's an issue there um and you and i've talked about this until recently this year i was the director of the running me trust which is a race equality think tank and i i struggled often to have conversations in public on race not because the people would turn it into some sort of either what we now call a culture war but also frivolous and emotive kinds of reactions to it unwillingness to sort of accept that i'm talking here about racial discrimination because there's evidence of it i mean how do we use history i suppose to to excavate those stories to make people feel is it possible to make people feel more comfortable with this history because clearly that's partly what's going on here right when people are are shouting back at you and and resisting what is as you say plain and and and there's no shortage of evidence for it well i mean to quote one of one of your reports is that to the 2016 racial attitudes reports it said 74 percent of people um saw themselves as not not prejudice which means that one percent saw themselves as very prejudiced and 20 let me do the maths 23 percent were somewhat prejudice i think from that you'd have to guess there's quite a lot of people that you can't reach and i think they are armored with devices to dismiss people like myself so i hate white people i hate Britain it's much easier to say people like me are horrible who i mean my mother's white my partner's white if i hate white people i'm doing it very badly but forgetting facts if you're in a fact free zone maybe that will wash maybe i hate Britain i'm told that i'm interested in the history because of the racism i suffered as a child or that i'm burdened with some sort of sense of victimhood i consider myself extraordinarily fortunate um but these arguments are all much easier than actually confronting the idea that our history isn't what we were told at school and i have lots of sympathy because it's really difficult to to confront the idea that we've only been telling partial truths about our past that we've been airbrushing out the difficult and the inglorious chapters that we're not a special magical country that the rest of the world wants to wants to re-embrace and and enter into empire 2.0 hand in hand um it's a really sort of difficult argument and i do i do lots of strategising i mean one thing that i do is when i present television i'm quite smiley when there are positive chapters i'll make sure that we tell them as well as the darker chapters i'm very well aware of the angry black guy trap that you know any any expression even the vagus hint of a frown and the whole there's a whole kind of armory of of racial stereotypes to to dismiss me so even more so black women and so i'm very very careful about that sort of stuff but you know some people just are never going to accept the idea that our understandings of ourself is partial and is the result of a centuries-long process of airbrushing and so one of the arguments my last ditch argument is i think it's actively dangerous and against our national self-interests to convince ourselves that the rest of the world sees us the way we see ourselves and these debates about empire and race they are they're not dialogues they're monologs and they're solipsistic we talk about we carry out surveys was the empire a force for good or bad as if we get to decide as if we in this island can sit down and then say to the rest of the world well we had a big meeting and we decided it's all fine it was all okay in the end that's that's the end of the story they have their memories they have their views they have their disputes with this history and this is what's happening in india with historians like Shashi Tharoor who's an enormous figure in india there's a generation of young indians i think for good good reasons and bad reasons who are interested in this history who who understand the argument that india was one of the richest countries in the world when the british arrived and one of the poorest when the british left the rest of the world have their own memories of britain the chinese have their memories of the opium wars the destruction of the summer palace there was a vast museum outside beijing or the site of the summer palace destroyed by the british new french forces during the um second opium war in the 1860s that museum's on the biggest museums in the world officers in the people's army go to that museum as part of their education they have their own memories one of the phrases that's been used since 2016 in the brexit vote about our place in the world is that we should rediscover our buccaneering spirit the buccaneers were pirates is that honestly sensibly realistically the relationship we imagine we can have with the rest of the world in the 21st century in a world in which china is a superpower it's it's just damaging it's damaging to us it it makes us look silly and i don't think it's in our national self interest and i think a lot of these arguments you know i mean i'd love as a sort of lefty to sort of you know have a more moral argument i think it's actually it's banned for us financially it's banned for us economically and sorry it's sort of moving a bit practically to the curriculum because obviously it's black history month and you've done a lot of work in public education on on television i mean how would you like to see the british curriculum decolonized or better taught in schools whether that's at university or i'm here as i can do school i mean what is what is your understanding of how we teach it now and how we might better do it and maybe i'd love to give them practical thoughts there as well well i mean we know that i mean the 59 history modules produced by the three big exam boards and we know that 12 of them deal with any form of black history though some of them in some cases that's actually african-american history so we know that around 11 percent of students who study history at GCSE get any sense of of black british history of black history and i think in some ways all that is is a reflection of the curriculum reflecting the background attitudes of society of not wanting to engage with these ideas um but there's other problems you know how unpopular history is as a subject with black britain's it's one of the most popular subjects with white students going to university one of the least popular with with black children and as a result there are a tiny number of black students doing phd's which means that there's a no pipeline or a very weak trickle of a pipeline of black people becoming historians in universities and writing books and so black people young black kids don't see themselves reflected in history therefore they think it's not for them therefore they don't study and it becomes a feedback loop so there's a fundamental practical reason that if we want to we want our history to be something like we'd want everything to be something everyone feels has a place for them that they could be involved in i think we're really failing from from day one we're failing at the curriculum level because young black kids don't choose to study history at day level and that's a real a real crisis um i think it's very powerful that the campaign to effect change in this area is being like read by young black women in the organisation black curriculum i don't see much movement from governments and to in a certain extent this government's no different than any other history's always been a political football unlike i mean nobody my my older sister's phd is in the report that led to the 1870 education act the act that brought in compulsory education and you know she's shown me those reports and when it comes to history it's all about how we can use history for some political outcome and we can use it to undermine class identity and increase national identity how we can use it to bring the four nations together nobody's thinking about how can we use chemistry to create a desirable political outcome how can we deploy physics to to strengthen the union so histories by its nature political um but i also think we can't rely on the curriculum there's a long tradition in this country in post war britain of black self education of sunday schools of pan africanist sunday schools and i think that's really necessary i think there's more books now than there's ever been and i think the publishing industry i hope television i hope this tradition of black self education is helping fill the gap but the problem with that is i think it's just as important that the white kids in the class get to hear this history as well as the black kids who might hear it at home because it's just as important to them to understand why their class looks the way it does why their city looks the way it does and when i was a kid i was asked at school you know why you hear you know what you're doing here and i didn't have the answer because they'd never heard of the empire we didn't teach the empire in school that kind of natural question is why do we live in this society why are 14% of the population not white projection to be maybe 30% um you know by the middle of by the middle of the century if we don't teach a history that tells that that very basic question um has no answer and i think that's damaging for everybody not just black and brown kids yeah no i agree i'm going to move to some questions because we've got some coming through and i might um so i've got one here from um rosy beach uh via lkn so do you think that recent events have brought more people to an understanding of the phrase decolonizing the curriculum and a realisation of how much of our history is is not taught well i'm going to annoy people here i think one of the problems we have is that phrases like decolonize the curriculum or make lots and lots of sense on campuses any people that do critical studies it's a nightmare in the tabloids it's just so easy to um to dismiss and to mischaracterize that phrase and i do you think we'd have to say that people who care about these subjects some of our phraseology is a hostage to fortune i mean defund the police mean something very different from what people can say defund the police means and it's very easy for them to say that decolonize the curriculum sounds like a very unreasonable demand in there when putting the mouths of some people um whereas make the curriculum tell everyone's stories make the english literature curriculum have some books written by people who were female and and and not white is a much is actually what you're saying so some of these phrases you know in the with the bad faith actors that were out there these phrases are really dangerous and i worry we've we've we've put swords in the hands of people who want to use them um against it so i don't think that phrase has really got much traction i don't think many people understand it um because it's been delivered to them um in a sort of hostile way through hostile news outlets the phrases i think the ideas that have really landed this year i think people more people understand the concept of being anti-racist rather than just not racist i think the idea that the battle against racism is an action it's an active process rather than a passive it's what you do rather than what than what you're not doing i think that idea has has caught the imagination of you know many of the people who bought books this summer i think that's got somewhere i think the idea of structural racism has got somewhere to a certain extent but i feel decolonisation hasn't and at this point it would be great if i could come up with a brilliant phrase that say if we only reset this sadly i don't have that brilliant phrase and it is very easy to criticise phrases when you haven't got the answers but i just observe that these these this terminology is very easily spun round and used against us i mean although i suppose we can't as you say there's so many people of bad faith they're going to object to any term that we would use i mean i i i thought that institutional structural racism would be helpful for getting people away from feeling that when you using the term racism they feel personally affronted to your blaming them because you're not talking about individuals you're talking about structures yeah but even that now is i i mean i think it's not very specific i was told that if i use the term institutional racism that i'll get people's backs up and stop stop using that phrase because it's began because of bad faith actors um it's become when when you say structural racism or structural inequality what people think you're saying is that the entire country and everything about it is kind of hyper racist they think it's just kind of like racism double plus and that's the way it's being spun in some ways you know structural racism i think explains the anomaly between the attitude and studies that you commissioned when you were running the running me trust that show this generation by generation decade by decade decline in open prejudice i think it shows that the the contradiction between those attitudes and the fact that we live in a society in which we know in all sorts of arenas of life um black people and other minorities um their lives are enormously shaped and their life chances limited by race the the mismatch between the decline in open prejudice and the resilience of outcomes in life outcomes shaped by race and some of the structural races is the answer to that it explains it was deeper it's more structured it's more embedded in our society we do it subconsciously we're all imbibed we were we were sort of um raised in this sort of this this this racialized kind of broth in our society and it's it's wormed our way into i thinking all of us black and white in some ways it's a sort of um i think it's a very positive idea it explains why just being anti-racist what you're already doing most people isn't working and that we need to do something else but it has been spun as a as a as if it is a sort of um yet another attack it is a it is a um a claim of a sort of extreme form of racism rather than an analytical understanding of the way racism operates so i don't understand any phrase we come up with can be twisted no i i i agree with you i mean how else do you explain why the racist stereotypes are always the same and always predictable it's not where people picking them up from they're not sort of creatively coming up with them in their heads it's coming from our um yeah the as you say the sort of structural nature of racism in our society can i say something about that i think we underestimate how much effort was put into creating this stuff yeah the part of racism some aspects of it are fueled by the the slave owning and slave trading lobbies in the 17th 18th 19th centuries this was the richest most politically embedded lobby in british history this is the west india interest they pulled the equivalent of billions of pounds into propaganda campaigns that built these stereotypes they could hire the best hack journalists they could hire the best cartoonist like like like uh george cruikshank to bring these ideas to life the idea of african savagery the idea the converse and somehow contradictory attitude of african childishness all of these ideas huge amounts of effort decades and decades of money and thinking and planning and strategising were pumped into creating this stuff so i think we need to understand just how how how intentional this was and how much effort and money went into it how it became embedded in popular culture it in i mean minstrosy blackface minstrosy is the biggest entertainment form in the late 19th century it's it's what rock and roll was in the 50s and 60s um those songs those deeply racist horrific songs sung by white men in black face those stereotypes in all of those um those routines that generations of people knew every every night in victorian britain that racist poison was being pumped into people's minds i'm i'm making a program about this at the moment with my my company and we did i asked the researchers to just do an exercise and just choose a saturday night in the 1850s a random saturday night and list for me all of the places in britain where there's a minstrosy act performing and there's an amazing website that allows you to do this and some of the you know very often we know what the songs were we know the name of the troop where they were performing and what you get is a list of dozens and dozens and dozens of venues in every city in britain in which men in blackface are singing songs racialized songs about the stereotypes of black people with horrific loaded with racial language saturated with hatred that is a random saturday night in victorian london this stuff was poured in to our society for centuries of course it's structural of course it's ingrained and of course it's wormed its way into the ether of our minds into our subconsciousness and of course it's going to take just as much effort to deconstruct it as was put into constructing it so i think i think we sometimes imagine that this stuff evolved naturally you know this was a powerful propaganda campaign one of the best funded and best organized in all of history yeah i mean it does remind me also of sort of James Baldwin saying there's something anti-human about racist thinking that sort of also deprives the white racist of his humanity by you know and there's a huge structure there that's i think you're right to to to warp yeah meboldon's absolutely incredible about that you know and i think i think Conrad um says something similar about in in um in Burmese days and i think obviously Fanon and the idea of white white masks and black masks this idea that this is damaging for everybody um i mean just just reads um read all well about you know just just sorry i mean all will not come and read all well about his he's someone who came back from the dark basically who saw through this and saw who he was never quite as much as i would like him to but you know all well's ancestors are on the register of slave owners his father worked for the opium department of the british um government of india openly called the opium department because they were state sanctioned drugs pushers pushing opium into china his family were absolutely up to their necks in the imperial project for generations and jojo what was on the road he was a colonial policeman in Burma and he sort of came back and saw was able to see himself and see through the mask and see the mask he was wearing and he's kind of this one of these rare figures he was capable of this act of of self analysis um i'm sorry i'm just going to interrupt because there's a few questions we don't know i just want to make sure that we have quite a few i've just tried to get you three more questions at least um we're obviously speaking at the british library here on on zoom but um what do you think museums and heritage organizations can do now do better to make history more inclusive and help continue the momentum there there is at the moment around black british history so you know what is the role here of museums and heritage organizations and obviously this is also quite uh politically charged issue right now as well yeah i think we need to rethink what museums are for i think we need to understand that museums are part of the colonial project and that has become normalized the idea that the art and the culture and the artifacts of other peoples and sometimes the human remains of other peoples are objects of study that it is legitimate for the art of people who are part of empires who are conquered to exist only in western museums that's a horrific idea and it's been normalized to the extent that we we can't even notice it um there's a thing which i always think is a great thing that british people should do is if you go to the um the rags museum in the rags museum is the stern piece of the the royal the royal jaw which was one of the battleships taken during the second third anglo-dutch war from chatham and it is there with a lion and a unicorn and it is it's a kind of british thing taken from britain in a foreign museum and i think whenever it appears british people in amazon they should go and stand and just it feels a bit weird and then remember that half the world feel that in the british museum so another one as it's black history month as well um you know and this is i think a long-standing issue but going forward from 2020 uh should we continue with black history month or should we make more of a commitment to marking a last ever black history month in the future to because what we need to do is ensure that everybody's learning about world history and british history which includes everyone's history you know the whole year round so i don't think it's a duality um i was reading in the summer a very good book about the jewish presence in brit and that's jewish history but it's also british history and you can write books about black british history and you could write books that integrate that history into the wider story i think you can have both um i don't think anybody feels that they shouldn't be reading a book about the holocaust or teaching children about the holocaust because it's not holocaust um um remembrance day there's lots of i mean these i think these are useful devices they are and increasingly it's becoming a celebration i think that's really really positive it's becoming much more british and much less american and it's becoming celebratory the way the pride is celebratory nothing when people say we want black history you know 12 months of the year well nothing's stopping us you know you don't have the book ripped out of your hand on the first of november and you're going to stop that for another year we can do that but i think it's perfectly useful to have a month in which we celebrate things because it does it does a really important thing and i think if you work in journalism or in media you understand this it gives people a reason to say why now why why should we do this now that's one of the questions an editor or commissioning editor will always ask you there's lots of stuff that you can do why now that leads quite nicely to another question from julie which is where are the biggest bottlenecks in communicating and learning about black history is it in the curriculum or is it instead with publishers and what they choose to publish or is it on print and on screen and obviously as someone who's chosen to use tv is a medium i mean what what do you think are the biggest bottlenecks there in terms of communicating black i think the the bottleneck doesn't lie in any one sector it it lies in the capacity of people in different places within the historical ecosystem to blame each other so television is full of people who say well there's no black historians on television because well they don't get the universities aren't promoting them or they'll say the publishers aren't publishing their books therefore what could we possibly do there are people running festivals who will have no black people appearing in those festivals and they'll say well you know it's the fault of the publishers it's the fault of the promoters everyone is blaming somebody else in the history ecosystem now fundamentally there's a problem at o level at gcse and there's a problem at a level there's a problem getting black kids to want to study this at university but something can be your not your fault but it's still your problem and these excuses these this this capacity to say well we could do our bit if only they were doing there but everyone passes the buck so i don't blame anyone industry publishing television universities no one's got to i'm going to squeeze in one more question also because i've noticed your tilt on social media where you've started uh rebutting people sometimes quite elegantly but it's uh i mean there's a question here that social media algorithms have radicalized many more people and i think it's it is true it's something i observe too it happens to me on social media uh that increased white supremacy rhetoric and racist tropes are making money however by feeding these algorithms and that bots are making the most racist comments online you know what do you she's asking for your views on that but i'll push you a bit further i mean are you not feeding the troll and making things worse by rebutting what is either bodysh or white supremacist nonsense in which people are yep it's sorry yeah it's making it worse rather than better well the vast majority of time when people say it's a bot it's not um and we've done some investigations in that and it you know it's not and even if it is a bot that's still a racist robot that somebody has programmed and i don't find that very comforting people say it like i should be come comforted yes i think it's fine to and i think of the right thing to do is to rebut this nonsense this nonsense because it is nonsense what i think would be wrong is to engage in an argument of name calling and aggression and anger i think trying to make fun of it trying to point out how ludicrous this is trying to link things to articles i mean there's nothing a noise somebody who's got a racist meme than you linking them to an academic paper and saying oh you should read this it's more complicated and i think you'll find you're wrong there's nothing a noise them more than that because the big thing that i discover with all of these these attacks is that the one thing people will not do is any research or reading they will say the most awful things they will alienate and people online they'll they'll involve in you know hate speeches on the verge of being illegal anything other than reading a book that is the last thing the last resort the one place they won't go so some of this stuff is this paper thin nonsense and i think it's important i think it also quickly does another function is black people are constantly told that racism is not as bad as they think it is and that they're making it up and they're being oversensitive and what i find is when i retreat what people feel it is okay to say to me behind anonymity on a social media platform that lots of people say i didn't know that stuff was there i think it's important i think there's a function as long as you aren't shouting as long as you're trying to use facts and you know when you can humor i think it plays a function but you know maybe i'm wrong you know it's my strategy it's what i've tried to do yeah final question i think from the audience here is what steps do you think our society needs to take in order to begin to consider the complete picture of our past so a big one to end there but what are the next steps that you know we need to take as a as a society to give them more complete picture that you've provided in your books and in your programs i think in some ways it's going to happen generation they i don't think it's a step that can take i mean we if we look at the the anecdotal studies we have young people are far less likely to believe these racist tropes they're far less likely to be upset by the idea that britain did bad things as well as good things and i think it will organically happen by itself the big threat to that is as you said earlier as the algorithms um which have the capacity to divide us the capacity to take away a shared space and even shared realities more than any technology i think that's ever existed and i think we need to be really frightened of the capacity of algorithms which are there as you say to make money to make money for the people who've who've designed them and destroyed the societies or wrecked the societies that um that they've embedded themselves in and of course it's not just social media action but things action on the streets in terms of things like face recognition software etc yeah okay i think we've got one minute left i i believe the british library wanted me to play a final video uh to to thank you all it leaves it to me unless david you have any final words you wanted to to end on otherwise i'll i'll just thank you for for this evening and thank you everyone for watching yes and obviously it's been a huge audience it's been a real privilege for me to speak to to david like this for an hour but it's it's been made possible by so many of you being interested in this topic and i think it speaks to the fact that um you know the power of david's voice but also of the argument um that black history is british history um and it's great to have that conversation in this stuff this month i just wanted to thank again the living knowledge network for their help and thank the british library for organizing this and i'm now going to close the event and i believe there will be a short video thanking you again and good night thank you very much david and oma for being with us this evening and thank you very much our lovely audience special thank you to those of you who joined us via the living knowledge network please donate if you can to find out more about our events program to visit our website thank you guys and good night