A recent article in the Guardian by the historian William Dalrymple calls for the removal of the statue of Robert Clive, once known as ‘Lord Vulture’ for his crimes in India, which stands outside the Foreign Office. Echoing similar thinking elsewhere in the liberal media Dalrymple opines that through ‘…education and atonement…we can finally begin to face up to what we have done and so begin the process of apologising for the many things we need to apologise for. Only then will we properly be able to move on, free from the heavy baggage of our imperial past’.
But to suggest that the removal of statues can free ‘us’ from ‘our’ past is precisely to forget who is pulling them down already and why. When Black Lives Matter protestors pulled down the statue of Edward Colston, when a Black protestor knelt on the neck of the statue for 8 minutes and 46 seconds symbolically recreating the actions of the police officer who murdered George Floyd, when the statue was thrown in the river as so many living breathing Black men women and children were thrown overboard and drowned, this was not enabling ‘us’ to move on from, or even ‘come to terms’ with or ‘face up’ to, Britain’s long murderous history of enslavement of people and colonial plunder. These actions were not about creating a situation where ‘we’ British people (assumed to be white) can be ‘free’ from the past forever, or even as Dalrymple recommends, relegate it to a disturbing, guilt-inducing and cautionary history taught in schools, like that of the Nazis is taught in Germany. On the contrary, these actions are an expression of the knowledge that the violence of racialised imperialism is alive and well, and the resistance to it which has been there from the outset, is entering a new phase.
Just as the pulling down of Confederate statues in the southern US in the midst of protests against police violence is an expression of the continuities between the contemporary racialised police and prison system and racial slavery and is essential to an abolitionist practice for today, the targeting of statues of slave traders and colonial white supremacists in Britain reflects that this wave of protests is connecting the horrors of police racism in North America, the UK and Europe with how the violence of race and white supremacy has been and remains today embedded in global structures of capital accumulation. ‘Race’ – a concept both invented and horrifically real in its effects – and capital were inseparable at their inception and remain so. These protests are about expressing deep pain and also simultaneously about fighting for a different world and this is why they are inspiring others across the world.
