As I write this the TV is showing pictures of the demonstrations in London, the cameras hunting about for outbreaks of violence and destruction that they can show on the news later. This is in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a cop in Minneapolis three weeks ago and here in Britain the toppling and proposed removal of several statues of notable men deemed to have been racist and Not OK in various other ways.
That black lives matter I take as obvious, self-evident, a no-brainer. Of course they matter, as all lives do, but some black writers are saying things like “If I hear one more white person say ‘Black Lives Matter’ I think my head will explode,” * so I won’t bang on about my own patchy white-bred credentials in this regard, though I hope one day to be able tell you about my experiences when helping to run an adventure playground in Notting Hill in the 1970s and 1980s, which proved to be a very practical education in racial tensions and much more complex than I’d ever imagined.
Have things changed since then? Check out this song from 1971, with a new video made last year, here.
About the statues I was undecided at first. I understand the argument that removing them can be seen as erasing history, destroying our heritage etc., but I also understand that some people find them very offensive, and I personally don’t particularly want to gaze on the features of Cecil Rhodes or Edward Colston — though one of my fondest memories is of bunking off school to go to a concert by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra at the Colston Hall in Bristol — an event fraught with ironies in retrospect. Maybe they can change the name and keep the hall.
I live most of the time in London but at the moment I’m taking a break in Dorset after two months of lockdown, and a couple of miles down the road there’s been a kerfuffle about the statue of Baden-Powell that stands on Poole Quay. It’s there because Brownsea Island is just offshore in the harbour, and this is where Baden-Powell (B-P) took twenty boys camping in 1907 and thereby started the Boy Scout movement. I was a Boy Scout myself once, and apart from the marching I greatly enjoyed it and have always regarded the Scout movement as broadly speaking a pretty good thing. I can still tie several different kinds of knots. I never knew much about B-P but have learned a lot more about him in the last few days as the local and indeed national media have argued his merits and demerits to and fro, and think that he’s not quite as bad as some people have painted him.
But I’ve decided that I don’t care much about statues, unless they’re by Michelangelo or Bernini or Rodin. They are just lumps of metal and stone and if people want them removed that’s fine with me, though I hope it can be done without violence. The important thing is to get beyond the symbolism and try to deal much better with the reality. I hope that the politicians will soon stop pontificating about the violence and see the point: that things need to change, which amongst other things means that we honkies have to get more involved with our local communities, and if that’s not possible we can make a donation to one of the organizations that are trying to change things for the better. Here are a few:
- Joseph Harker in The Guardian, 11th June 2020.
Perhaps a better way of dealing with time-challenged and reputation-fluid statues is for their respective Local Authorities to arrange to surround them with rings of truths – display boards containing an objective summary of the person’s life, deeds, and context. There should be enough reliable local scholars in their Universities, Museums, Local History Societies to commission a program of updating (or initiating) public knowledge of the plinthed past celebrities. It might boost their tourist industry if a map and itinerary were available to guide people through the area’s real history.
Two days later: the tv cameras are showing Colston’s name being removed from the walls of the hall in Bristol. Good. Boris Johnson is saying there is “much more that we need to do to tackle racism” and announcing a new commission to look at all “aspects of inequality”. Another one.