British history is world history - how do we teach it to empower all communities while respecting their sufferings? | Sam Hall
The phrase that aptly describes the scope of the British Empire is that the sun never sets on it. This romanticised vision of sweltering heat, of long summer days spent on the veranda sipping G&Ts (created incidentally to persuade the British to take the anti-malarial drug quinine), is sharply intersected by Indian MP Shashi Tharoor in an Oxford Union debate, who proclaimed that it was because God couldn’t trust the British in the dark.
British history is once again under an assault from the liberal left who are all too quick to act as judge, jury and executioner on large swathes of the muddy waters of the British people. There is no greater example of this than Winston Churchill. Depending on whom you choose to believe, he was either the liberator of Europe or a genocidal imperial monster hellbent on eradicating people of colour in favour of the white elite. The trouble is that his Westminster statue is at the heart of the UK, and we implicitly support him at some level.
How do we progress from the blunt camps that we currently inhibit? By physically defending the statue from Black Lives Matter protesters who would happily tear him down and decant him into the Thames?
This is not a defence of the British Empire, nor is it passing judgement on its totality of good, if any - though that is a controversial enough idea. Instead this is to suggest how we might empower all communities through the medium of history, a privilege thus far mainly afforded to whites. It is time to break the mental chains of oppression that only victimise black and ethnic minority people; the same ones that tell white people to take a knee in apology for the actions of their ancestors. A statue cannot oppress, hurt or harm. The real danger comes from a victimisation mentality.
It is impossible to talk about tackling our legacy without addressing so-called ‘white privilege’. The term, according to the BBC, means that for white people, their skin colour has not made their life harder. The problem with this idea is that the ideas used to support it are often very reductionist and borderline racist, hinting that in fact the problems a community experiences can be boiled down to evil white men who get a kick out of oppressing BAME people. For example, Al Jazeera in 2017 reported that white people are more likely to own their own home; that only 21 per cent of black Africans do in comparison to 68 per cent of white Britons. But in the same article they also acknowledge that white Britons are more likely to rely on social housing compared to Chinese, Indian and Pakistani households. The reality is that white privilege is a term that the left has invented to shut people down when they dare to challenge their political narrative. Like in 2019 when a CNN Analyst tried to shut down David Webb during a radio appearance by playing the white privilege card. Unfortunately for the interviewer, David Webb is black.
Race remains an important part of people’s identity. We celebrate BAME who are the first in their race to, for example, become an MP - a feat that David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre of mixed Indian and European descent achieved in 1841 when he was elected MP for Sudbury, Suffolk. But race cannot and should not define us. You cannot say that all white people have not faced barriers for the colour of their skin any more than you can say that all BAME think the same, a fact that Dominique Samuels, President of Orthodox Conservatives, highlighted to a bemused interviewer who asked if the presence of BAME people in the cabinet would better represent her. Even the fact that society groups black, Asians, and minority ethnic into one convenient acronym implies that at some level we expect them to have the same experiences.
Just as we cannot reduce the experiences of either white or BAME people to a single thread, nor can we reduce their experiences of history to a single thread. However, this is a fact of life for many BAME children in the classroom. The fact that we need Black History Month at all is symptomatic of BAME history still being viewed as an ‘other’ - something exotic for Liberals to use to convince us all that they are indeed liberal. Given that this is not part of the mainstream curriculum, how can we expect stories of empowering BAME figures to be mainstream? This matters because children implicitly look for reference points in their world as to how they should view themselves.
The psychology of this formed a key part of the end of segregation in the United States. The dogma of ‘separate but equal’ clause was smashed when it was concluded that black children as young as three ascribed more positive traits to white dolls than black dolls. Children will not associate people of their race as positive role models unless they have evidence for doing so. But how does this apply to our modern problem? If you spend most of the academic year showing your students white people who did historical deeds worthy of note, then take five minutes to labour the point that black people were once slaves and eventually a white man called Lincoln put a stop to it, you will create a generation of black students who only ever see themselves as victims.
Why would they do otherwise without extra-curricular research? Similarly, why would white students see their black counterparts (implicitly at least), as anything other than political props? ‘Look, I’m not racist. Look at blacks people who see themselves as victims as well as white people who see them as golden opportunities to prove how not racist they are’. If white people have any privilege afforded to us simply because of the colour of their skin, it is that history does not teach them to be victims.
To address this, all communities deserve equal empowerment in the education system. If we teach our children about the British Empire as so many have called for, we must not do it at the expense of white people. White people are already soft targets. Whatever their complaints may be, they are unworthy of even being heard because of ‘white privilege’. Seventy seven per cent of pupils from an Indian background achieved A*-C in English and Maths in 2015/16, according to a Government report, compared to 63 per cent of whites. But at least they have white privilege on their side!
Again, race is an important part of identity and how we see ourselves in the world. But that shouldn’t necessarily extend to drawing conclusions of ‘systemic’ racism because statistics show that your race under achieves compared to another. Often the explanations are far more nuanced than the lazy slur of systemic racism. Instead of putting people down, we must lift everyone up. There are plenty of white figures to inspire white children. People like former Prime Minister John Major, who despite leaving school at 16 and never obtaining a university degree, was Prime Minister for seven years during the late 20th Century. It is time to shine the light on BAME people of inspiration.
During the Second World War, Gurkha Lachhiman Gurung was on guard duty when approximately 200 Japanese soldiers assaulted his position. First he threw back three grenades with the third exploding in his hand, destroying his right hand. Undeterred and with a bolt action rifle designed for a hand he no-longer had, he proceeded to stay at his post for the next four hours. Of the eighty seven dead Japanese, 33 lay directly in front of Lachhiman’s spot. All this he had achieved with a bolt action rifle that was designed for a hand he did not have, all without any pain relief with his right hand in tatters. He received the Victoria Cross.
Garrett Morgan invented what would become the gas mask in 1912 in the U.S.A. He then used it to save the lives of multiple men from a tunnel collapse under Lake Erie. Clearly not content with this feat, he then went on to heavily contribute to the design of the modern traffic light. Harrowingly, many of the original orders from police and fire departments for his ‘safety hood’ were cancelled because he was black. This utterly disgusting behaviour not only typifies attempts made to cancel out the success stories of the BAME community but undoubtedly killed many people of all colours.
Another brilliant example more relevant to the United Kingdom would be the first black police officer in Britain. He was one John Kent. John was the son of a Caribbean slave and joined the Metropolitan Police from 1837. In a time when slavery was still practised in the United States and the testimony of a black man was worth half that of his white counter-part, PC Kent gave evidence against the defendants when an officer was murdered after an election crowd got out of hand in 1841. Given the cruel nickname ‘Black Kent’, his obituaries attach a great deal of respect to the fact that a generation of Carlisle children were brought up to fear him, such was his reputation as an enforcer of the law.
These are the kind of figures that we should be promoting to our children. When I wrote to my former school expressing concern about a recent letter from former pupils, demanding that more emphasis was placed on the British Empire and slavery, I did so out of concern for the next generation of BAME pupils. I refuse to be complicit in raising the next generation of victims, young people who only see their history as beginning and ending with the Atlantic Slave Trade, and being one only of lack of opportunity, crushed by the might of the British Empire.
I’ve only picked a handful of examples, but nonetheless they should reinforce the idea that BAME people do not have common experiences of history. Some of the first historically recorded Africans on these islands were not slaves or servants. They were Roman soldiers. Anyone who has the most basic grasp of evolution will also point out that modern humans began in Africa and spread outwards.
So, although Paul Joseph Watson might whine that ‘I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?’ in relation to the father of a central family in a BBC cartoon who was portrayed as dark-skinned. But in this specific case, the BBC weren’t trying to be politically correct. They were simply being correct. The Roman Empire was heavily internationalised. Soldiers would be fighting wars in Syria, to later be crowned emperor in Gaul (modern France). We know there were sub-Saharan Africans living in the Empire also. The Romans were conscript known to conscript foriegn Auxillia to assume numerous assisting and fighting roles in their legions.
It is very likely that at some point, a Numidian from North Africa found his way to Britannia. Mary Beard, in her cartoon wasn’t portraying complete fantasy, though the normality of such an occurrence (with North Africa and Britannia being opposite frontiers) is one that reason tells us is unlikely to have been commonplace. Even migrations in Europe and Britain as a whole show us that ethnicity has never been rigidly tied to land at all. The Germanic Visigothic tribes settled in Spain for two hundred years, while Germanic Saxons, Angles and Jutes totally displaced Britonnic tribes who had always called the place home, and later the Arabs rapidly expanded across North Africa, Iberia and Anatolia; displacing the Greek and Latin settlers in those locations. This runs in the face of many in the BLM movement and their woke allies who like to think that BAME people and alternative ethnicities simply popped into existence in the Western world when the Atlantic Slave Trade began. But history doesn’t support their case.
Ironically, mainstream history teaching doesn’t deny it either. We feel the need for an entirely separate month for black history, while labouring the idea of victimhood for the other 11 months of the year. Now that some of the statues representing history’s greatest white figures are under attack, we need that inclusion more than ever. Slavery is an important part of BAME history but the extent to which it dominates our teaching of it perpetuates the idea that BAME people have only ever been oppressed and that white people have only ever been the oppressors. This in turns leads to calls for affirmative action, reparations, and white apologists who think that they owe the BAME community for the crimes of their ancestors. It is not to call for BAME communities to ‘get over’ the dark side of their history. It is to say let’s not allow it to dominate. These leftist solutions will not solve racism, and they will not help the problem of historic ignorance any more than taking a knee will.
For decades we have taught our children a genteel version of British history that has mostly excluded the BAME experience, whether positive or negative. If it’s been taught at all, it’s been slavery and servitude, not invention and bravery. Our challenge going forward will be to give our children a version of history that empowers them whatever their race. Let us commemorate the moral evil perpetuated by human beings of all races while not being defined by it. Let us celebrate the Churchills, the Kents and the Gurungs of this world. But to do so we must desegregate history.
British History is not the exclusive preserve of white people any more than our island home is. These rolling hills, these pastures green, these lakes and derelict mills stand on a tapestry that all can enjoy and call their home. Neither Black Lives Matter nor All Lives Matter, but All British History Matters.
There is no greater tool for empowerment than one’s own history.
