Hello, everyone.
I'm Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, and I'm delighted to welcome you all
to today's special event.
It’s really a great privilege to be joined by two of Britain's most admired public intellectuals,
Mary Beard and David Olusoga.
Mary and David will be well-known to everyone watching, I'm sure.
Mary is a well-known classicist and David is a pioneering public historian of race,
slavery, and empire.
In their award-winning work for the page and the screen, they combine deep scholarship
with compelling storytelling power.
By shedding vivid new light on our past, they offer us new ways to understand ourselves,
each other, and the world around us in the here and now.
So, David, Mary, welcome.
It’s really a special privilege to be joined by such brilliant thinkers to help us make
sense of the moment we’re all living through.
We first had the idea of bringing you together when we spotted an exchange you had on Twitter
a few weeks ago following the Black Lives Matter protest in the UK and the felling of
the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol.
You seem to kind of hold differing views on the statues debate in recent years, but that
exchange led to the kind of sense that you might be moving a bit closer together, or
at least, at least that there’s a kind of compromise position you might be able to hammer
out.
So today we’re giving you a space to try and do that in person.
David, can I start with you?
In the past weeks, there's been a lot of airtime given to you know pretty well-rehearsed arguments
in the debates around statues and the politics of memory.
But even so, it’d be great if you could share again how it felt for you watching the
Colston statue fall that weekend, why it was so significant for you and for the city of
Bristol, and how it compares with previous flashpoint moments in recent years.
I wonder what you think the felling of that statue means for how far as a nation we’ve
come and how far we still have to go?
Well, watching those events was watching an impossibility happen in front of your eyes.
At the end of last year, the debate in Bristol people I know are heavily involved in, and
I was tapped into, was whether or not we might be able to get a contextualization plaque
added to the plinth, the pedestal on which Colston stood, that made mention to the people
who are utterly invisible in this whole memorialization of Colston, which are the tens of thousands
of people who were enslaved by the Royal African Company where Colston was involved and the
probably around 20,000 people who died in the process, either in the middle passage
or in the slave raids or in the other many manifest horrors of the slave trade.
Now, even that quite meager, modest ambition of having the victims of Colston mentioned
on the pedestal was thwarted and it was rebuffed by the people who defended him.
So I presumed that I would never in my lifetime see that statue come down.
So for it to come down instantly overnight in a dramatic way was an incredible experience.
And what I've found was when I spoke to other Black Bristolians- I live in Bristol, lived
here longer than anywhere I've ever lived, so I will give myself the title of Bristolian
without being offered it- I found myself very emotional.
I think what we've learned in the weeks since, is that statues are very important.
People constantly in this debate say, "Oh, you're wasting your time.
Talk about something else.
Why are you debating this issue?
Statues are taking up all the air time."
Well, I think what we discovered was that the removal of that statue was not the end
of the process.
What began was a process of what I've called de-Colstonification.
There are around 20 institutions and street names and other ways in which Colston is remembered
in this city.
Institution after institution found themselves, and the days after that statue is toppling,
able to do things that they were unable to do the week before, which was to disassociate
themselves from a mass killer.
The concert hall had already decided it was going to change its name, but it took its
name off its façade, as did an office block Colston Tower.
A school is now consulting on changing its name.
Another school is consulting on changing its name.
Institution after institution found themselves able to act in a way that they just were incapable
of doing a few days earlier, so that effect was catalytic in a way that I didn't expect.
David, before I bring in Mary, to what extent when you watch that happening in Bristol do
you feel that each of those incidents is one in which the institution is thinking deeply,
reconsidering deeply, learning, or to what extent is it simply that this has now become
a shifted norm?
And woe betide you if you don't respond because you'll be seen to be a racist?
And does that matter actually?
Do you care whether or not people are just doing it because it feels like you have to
do it or they're doing it through a process of thought?
I can't speak for the thought processes and the discussions within organizations that
I'm not privy to.
What I would like to think is that this has gone a bit deeper.
Is that they've looked at the passion.
They've looked at the directness with which those protests have targeted a single statue
in that city.
This wasn't thuggery, which is what the right-wing press would like us to believe.
If that were the case, there's a statue of Edmund Burke nearby.
There's other statues.
All of them were untouched, as was every shop window and shopfront or places that could
have been looted.
It wasn't thuggery.
It was a very targeted political protest.
I think what institutions have looked at is that this isn't just a change in the political
wind.
This is a change of consciousness.
And it's brought about by a generational shift.
And what I hope happened is that the morning after, people woke up and thought, "What have
we been doing defending a mass murderer for all of these years?"
His toppling allowed a clarity of thought that just had been obscured and blurred before
the toppling.
And I'd like to think that people suddenly realized that this wasn't worth it, that this
is drawing a line in the sand over someone who just didn't deserve it, who was not worthy
of this level of defense and protection, was a losing battle.
Not just one that they were going to lose, but one that wasn't worth morally fighting.
Thank you, so much to come back to there.
Mary, I'll turn to you.
You had a pretty clear position on the Cecil Rhodes statue when the campaign for its removal
first began several years ago.
I'm interested in how your views have changed since then if they have.
You said you were happy to see Colston fall.
Yes, I was.
I was delighted.
Tell us about the distinction between Rhodes and Colston.
I think the problem about this for me is that there isn't-- This is where we never get to
agree entirely.
There's no hard and fast rule.
There's no set of criteria which says X falls and Y doesn't.
I felt very much like David that I'd watched much more distantly the debates about Colston
and seen an impasse happening.
I'm extremely keen on the idea of interventions with these old guys standing up there.
Sometimes removal, sometimes additions, sometimes a contextualization.
That seems to me wholly good.
As far as I could see, that had gone on for months if not years.
And in the end, I felt too when I watched it, I felt exhilaration that someone, in the
end, said, "Enough is enough.
We're getting rid of him."
Now, I have all sorts of slightly old lady views about direct action and I worry about
that, but I have to confess, I thought, "Right.
Done it."
Now, I think that, for me, the point is that - I have different views on different statues
and on some I disagree with David - the bottom line is that there isn't a single person in
the world who's not a sociopath of some sort, who thinks that every statue should remain
up.
[chuckles] If we had a statue of Goebbels in the center of Reading, he would not be
there any longer.
It's not a question of saying: to remove any statue is to remove or to erase history.
Sometimes the removal of a statue is the creating of a new history, which I'm very happy to
be part of.
I suppose what I worry about is in a sense where on the spectrum any one statue falls,
how we make our minds up, or even without going to the Trump side, what we might lose
when we lose some of these people in our midst.
And I went back and I looked at the Bristol newspapers in 1895 when Colston's statue was
erected.
Bristol was a Gladstonian town.
I could only guess what the arguments had been behind it.
I looked at the way he was being honored hundreds of years after he died as a philanthropist
by people who I thought were not constitutively blind to slavery but somehow just passively
didn't see it.
They were getting together to celebrate this guy in a late Victorian civic occasion.
I suppose what made me think is my question is, how could they have done it?
When those guys and some women got together and they cheered and they were pleased, what
was going through their minds and why did they?
How was it that they did not see what we see now?
More to the point, I thought, what is it?
He reminds me, and that occasion reminds me, of all the things that we're not seeing about
ourselves and our own morality which will, in one day, be as abominated as that of Colston.
I think that these statues are much more dialogic than people give them credit for.
They are about challenging us.
One thing you can say is they don't have agency.
They're just a piece of metal and we can just pull them down.
We have the power here, not them.
But I think of myself slightly cheering on the removal of Colston's statue with my mobile
phone in my pocket, which was made by child labor that is as close to slavery as anything,
in someplace that I can't see.
I always have this sense that these blokes, now mostly blokes, hardly single one of them
I'd want to sit down and have dinner with, let alone approve of their politics and morality.
They're constantly challenging me to think, what will I look like in 200 years' time?
What am I doing that's going to seem as absolutely outrageous as them?
They're part of the dialogue with the past and the present.
Now, the problem in Bristol was, as David said, the fact that there was no further attempt
to contextualization meant that that dialogue was stopped, but I very much like the idea
of them challenging us about our own selves as much as we want to challenge them.
Look at Charles I outside Charing Cross.
[chuckles] What's he doing?
Well, actually, in some ways, he reminds me that some form of democracy, limited as it
was, won in this country.
[chuckles] We're not sitting there putting reeds in front of his statue.
There's a much more complicated relationship between the statue and our own politics and
morality than I think comes out in the debate.
That said, I was jolly and pleased and cheered and enjoyed a drink when Colston fell.
David, we have an agreement about Colston and that tearing of that statue was not only
welcomed but also important.
In terms of what Mary said, as a historian, in what ways do you want to qualify a kind
of view that anybody of the past who behaved in ways which are clearly unacceptable now,
should as it were that we should not in any sense commemorate them, or that we should
entirely condemn them?
I'm interested in what your view would be of that kind, a view of history I would imagine
you would find reductive.
Absolutely.
I'm not for the removal of all statues and that would be ridiculous, but I'm also not
for the retaining of all statues and everybody, whether they admit it or not, is somewhere
along that spectrum.
It's very easy to think of political, historical figures that anyone would reject a statue
or would want one removed if they could find it.
Everybody's somewhere in this spectrum and nobody is a purist saying all statues should
stand, or all statues should fall.
I think all statues following on, the obvious corollary of that, is that every case should
be taken as an individual case.
Absolutely, I also think that the idea that our age wanting a statue to be removed or
to be contextualized is not us saying that our morals are right.
I've written and thought a lot about, what about this age will future generations find
outrageous about us?
I read documents by people in the 18th century.
And you look at the doublethink about slavery.
Good, decent Christian, incredibly moral people in lots of ways, who were slave traders.
I think our age will have the same contradiction.
I think our relationship with the natural world, our failure to seize this moment to
stop the climate crisis will be condemned by future generations who will live with the
consequences and will rage against our refusal to give up on some of the luxuries that we
have when science was telling us that we had to.
I think our relationship with animals and factory farming will be seen as an abomination
by future generations.
They will judge us the same as we judge people of the past, but the way we judge them and
the arena in which we judge them is through history.
Statues are another thing.
They're about memorialization.
I think this is where this debate gets lost.
Pulling down a statue is not erasing the past because statues aren't about the past.
Statues are about the memorialization of men who at a certain point in their history, 175
years after his death, in the case of Colston, people decided should be memorialized.
This debate about statues has brought out all sorts of hidden histories about where
these statues actually came from.
And Mary’s written about this really well.
What I find fascinating looking at some of the pictures in the American South is that
you have Americans from the baby boomer generation standing out in front of statues, defending
statues of Confederate generals when those statues are younger than many of the protesters.
They're defending them as if they're objective history.
They are younger than most of the people protesting because they were put up in the '60s in the
response to a moment when the version of the Civil War that had been created in reconstruction
in the 1870s was challenged.
This idea that statues represent history when sometimes they're younger than the people
worried about the loss of history, I think, shows the complexities here.
It's not a simple debate, but I think there's an important distinction.
There are people like, say, Nelson.
It's two sides to the ledger on Nelson.
He's one of the greatest naval tacticians the world has ever seen.
He was a brilliant commander and he was someone who had a view on slave trade I wish he hadn't
had, an involvement in the family through marriage with slavery I wish he hadn't had,
but there's two sides.
You can't pretend one of those doesn't exist.
Should Nelson's statue come down?
I don't think it should.
I think when we teach Nelson, we should say he was involved in the Royal Navy that was
also at that point defending the slave trade right up until 1807 when a very small proportion
of the Royal Navy then was deployed condemning and suppressing the slave trade.
It's complicated, but the problem is statues aren't complicated.
They're simple.
They say one thing here-- That's where I disagree with you on the epiphenomenon
but I think in broad terms, I agree with you that I think that for people as citizens in
the urban environment, statues are part of their dialogue with the past, whether you
want to call that history.
It's how they relate to the past.
It's how they think of their own position in relation to both the time the statue was
put up or the era of the person commemorated.
I think that what it raises for me, and this has come out a bit in the debates, but I think
not enough, is that it-- and here I'm absolutely, definitely not sitting down and blaming school
teachers for this.
I'm blaming us all of how we think history, what it's about in this country, and how it's
disseminated.
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that, partly, with the pressure from some governments,
there has been a very strong push to see that the great history of our island story and,
in a sense, to go back to the kind of thing that I learned when I was a kid, which was
almost 60 years ago.
It wasn't till I was about 40 that I realized that Sir Francis Drake was not just a guy
who'd saved Britain from the Spaniards and done a bit of exploring.
I had no clue.
I'm quite interested in that kind of thing, but I still was left with that feeling of
both a White Britain and an Imperial Britain that was always mitigated and without the
nasty bits.
I think one of the saddest things that I saw in the whole era of the statue wars was two
middle-aged-ish Boy Scouts standing guard around the statue of Baden-Powell.
Clearly horrified, outraged, and upset that there should be any kind of opposition to
a person for all their life in the scouts, which looked as if it was well over 20 years,
they had been treating as their Founding Father.
Nobody had ever said to them, "Look, there's all sorts of things you can admire about Baden-Powell
and there's all sorts of things that are problematic."
It was back to the Carlylean view that there are some great heroes of the British nation
out there.
And we don't examine them.
This isn't a question in getting people to talk about history of, in many cases, really
toppling them.
As David said, recognizing that these people are flawed human beings, they think things
that we don't.
They did some things that we're grateful for.
And they did some things of which we fundamentally disapprove, but we don't disseminate.
This is not just schools.
This is in novels and fiction and whatever.
We don't disseminate a complicated view of the past.
We disseminate a simple view of the past.
We're reaping the rewards of that simplistic view, I think.
That's exactly what's happening.
I'm sorry.
Mary and I are doing a very bad job of having a row and disagreeing with each other here.
I entirely agree with Mary- [laughs]
- that statues have become the cipher.
They're problematic in countries that haven't dealt with their history.
Countries that have been creating a single, heroic narrative - they're the nations for
whom this moment and these statues are problematic.
Nelson becomes problematic because we haven't talked about his involvement in slavery.
Baden-Powell becomes a problem because we haven't talked about the, should we say, unfortunate
part of his character and his military record.
It wouldn't be a problem if anyone knew this.
These statues would become a lot less totemic in a country that was confronting the good
and the bad in its history.
This is a very specific problem, I think, with Britain because what I find myself in
public talks a lot saying one of two things must be true.
Either we are the only country that has never done bad things, the only country in history
and we are incredibly fortunate to be citizens of it, that is always been on the right side
of history, or Britain is a country like any other.
It's done good things and bad things.
Just logically, which of those is true?
If you believe in the latter, then both good things and bad things and good people and
bad things, sometimes in the same person, would be manifest in our heritage.
Mary, before you come back in, David said that I'd be disappointed not having a row.
Absolutely not.
You're both very brave in the sense that you're on Twitter and you're both subject to horrible--
not from time to time, you're subject to pretty unpleasant comments.
What is there that we can do in relation to this debate so that it's more like the conversation
that you and Mary are having?
And it's less like the incredibly charged debate, which seems to be going with rage
and judgmentalism.
I don't exaggerate this, but a sense I think that people have, who don't fully get it,
that there's a danger if they say the wrong thing that it will reveal them not to understand
what's going on at all.
Mary, starting with you, what can we do to improve the quality of this discourse?
And in that I don't mean to reduce the emotion from it because the emotion is powerful and
real, as David described, but how do we debate it better?
I don't know.
I think it's interesting that one of-- not the worst, but one of the worst Twitter pile-ins
I had was when I said on television what David has just said that Britain's an ordinary country
and what we should aspire to be is a good ordinary country.
[chuckles] Blimey," "Unpatriotic," and a lot, lot worse than the adjective "unpatriotic."
I think then, it's not clear to me.
I think there is a connection between all the kind of-- There must be.
How could there not be a connection between the kind of social and political movements
that we're seeing now?
And I think that it is too easy.
Because I've suffered.
I suspect, I know that David suffered too.
Probably a lot worse than me.
I am sympathetic to an anxiety about the so-called cancel culture and pile-ins, et cetera, but
I think it's much more complicated than it is being represented to be.
I think one thing for sure is that we're not, however much it would be nice to cast this
as a debate between freedom of speech, baby boomers, and an intolerant woke generation
on the left, it's much, much more complicated and interesting than that.
For a start, the right is perfectly capable of piling in and does and demands people's
resignations and dismissals.
This is not a political thing.
But I think we've got to a point, now that social media is much more embedded in than
it was, when the conversation is both less nuanced because of the medium in which it's
taking place.
Not because people are less nuanced, but because it's hard to be nuanced in 240 characters
if you're on Twitter.
But also, lots of people, thank heavens, are able to join in the conversation, but we don't
know what difference that means.
The British press is terribly, terribly preoccupied with the idea of free speech on campus.
I think there have been some really bad individual issues with people being no-platformed.
I think not as many as it's painted, but you feel uncomfortable.
But I think what they forget, for heaven's sake, is that if you're just thinking in terms
of a university and then you can magnify it, it's very easy to have free speech in a university
when it's all posh White boys from the same schools in the early 20th century.
And when the stakes of their disagreement below because, in a sense, they're all part
of the same club, then we can all disagree and have a glass of claret later.
We're dealing with a way in which we're wanting a conversation that isn't restricted to that,
that is a vast conversation which doesn't yet have-- even now doesn't have very many--
I don't mean literal, I mean implied rules.
What should we be doing on Twitter?
Well, I think we shouldn't be doing quite a lot of things that we are doing and what
people call David and what people call me.
I mean, you think, is this what technological progress was for?
But in a way, there is a widening of the debate and a widening of access to a public forum.
And that is going to be a bit uncomfortable for people like me because, for most of my
life, I've had reasonable access to making my views known.
I don't know that we've got an answer to that yet.
With the people writing to Harper's about cancel culture, I feel some sympathy with
them.
Of course, I feel some sympathy.
They're stating a lot of things in which I fundamentally believe that you need to debate
arguments, not put them on the carpet.
I think just to finish for letting-- not monopolizing this, but I look at my own students now.
And I find it very, very irritating that some of them, not many, but a few will say, "I
don't want to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses because it's about rape."
I want to explain to them and to encourage them that, actually, we have to think about
what Ovid writing endless books about rape meant, how we understand that, what it means
to us, whether we can still read it, et cetera.
Sometimes I try not to lose my temper, but I almost do.
[chuckles] "Are you going to want to understand renaissance
or are you going to read this, mate?"
But then I think, look, these kids are objecting.
One thing they realized, they realized that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is about rape.
When I read it when I was, first of all, at school and then at university, we never mentioned
the word "rape."
We said it was about ravishing and that was all right.
So I think part of the objections - and they're irritating to the old and the old have got
a right to say they're irritated, we don't lose our right to speak just because we're
65, - but we've got to recognize that some of these objections, a lot of them are coming
from the right places.
They're the places that we share in part.
We don't necessarily share the modality, but we share the aspirations.
I think at the moment, it's a real mess.
I follow the example of Professor Olusoga.
I try only to get cross with wit on social media and just try to keep arguing with as
much nuance as you possibly can and not lose people because part of this public debate
is it's the gutter.
It really is the gutter.
David, there's a lot there.
I'm particularly interested in the degree to which you feel that this moment, which
can feel quite febrile as well as passionate, is an important transition as it were to a
point at which the debate has shifted, but yet it can be a debate which everyone can
participate in.
Or whether in a sense we're moving simply to a time when people's passions are so strong
that we're going to have to get used to this kind of tenor of debate.
What's your view of that?
Well, I'm always entertained when I hear on television or in a newspaper column from someone
who's been canceled complaining about their being canceled in a national newspaper column
or a news commentary with no sense of irony.
There's an idea which I find really interesting, which is that we've just lived through the
period of the '90s and the first part of the decade that followed that was an unusual time
of consensus.
A big chunk of our recent lives were in the period that if you compare it to the '70s
or the '60s was actually a quite relaxed period, a period of consensus.
I think if you'd snapped from the 1968s to now, you wouldn't notice much change in the
tenor and how febrile debate is.
I think we had quite an easy time in the '90s and the noughties.
This in some ways is back to normality.
In some ways, the aberrant period was the '90s and the noughties up until the crash
of 2008 when things were quite calm.
Maybe this is the way most of history is and we got used to things being a bit calmer.
Mary's right.
We have new technologies that we're learning how to use.
If you are going to compare this to the pamphlet craze of the Georgian era, I don't think things
being said today online are any more scurrilous or offensive than some of the most exciting
Georgian pamphlets.
It was people using a new technology, which allowed all voices in or many voices, not
all in the case of the pamphlets, though many were privately printed.
That means that here comes everybody.
It's more scurrilous.
It's more aggressive.
And we're trying to work out how to use these technologies.
That means you're going to get voices of people who aren't there to debate ideas, who aren't
there to be reasonable, who don't even really care about the ideas.
They want to send a tweet to someone like Mary to try to offend her.
I should say on Twitter, I think I get my fair share of abuse.
In my observation on Twitter is you have to be one of two things to really get the full
broadside of how violent it can be and that is female and Muslim.
I think, naturally-- Mary, sorry.
If you don't mind, I'd just like to move us on to another topic.
I'm being slightly cheeky and I'd like to come to you first, David.
We at the RSA are reflecting on our own history.
Like a lot of organizations when we talked about our history until actually a few weeks
ago, which shows the incredible power of this moment, we did it in a reasonably unthinkingly
positive way.
We have our Benjamin Franklin Room and we have our Folkestone Room and our Shipley Room.
We say one of the great things about the-- I've often said as the chief executive, I
have said, "One of the great things about the RSA is our history."
Well, I don't think I'll be saying quite that again in quite those terms again.
David, with you first, as we embark, and we're asking our own historian, who's just published
a great book about the RSA's history, to think more deeply about these questions, the ways
in which our history is implicated in relation to slavery, colonialism, or other expressions
of racism, I'm interested in your thoughts about how we should go about that.
What might be the kinds of principles that we should apply to a bit of historical self-examination
like that?
I think there's a bad habit to overcome, which is that we've done-- out of multiple motivations,
we've just edited out the nasty bits.
We've told people's life stories.
Just when it got to a bit we didn't want to talk about it, we haven't mentioned it.
There was a series made by the BBC a few years ago about Gothic literature.
It mentioned William Beckford of Fonthill, every detail of his life, his enormous art
collection, his wealth, the building of a folly in the West Country.
It didn't mention that the money came from 3,000 enslaved human beings.
This habit of just editing out the bits that are discomforting or seeing them as a separate
history that are not worthy of mention in what we might think of as mainstream history
is a habit we need to break out of.
I think there's another way of talking about the history of institutions and nations that
we need to get into.
I was talking to the scientist, Adam Rutherford, recently.
His phrase, which is a great phrase, is we shouldn't, as institutions, be unquestionably
proud of our history, but we can, in most cases, be proud of the trajectory of our history.
I think that's the way we need to be thinking about things.
We are moving most institutions in the right direction and we can be proud of that.
But the history itself, you have to confront where the money came from, what these men--
and they almost always are men, what they did.
I think here, it's much more important to talk about what people did rather than what
they thought.
I'm much more interested in the activities, the financial investment activities, the involvement
in colonialism and slavery than people holding racist ideas because I'm afraid that a lot
of the people who, I would say, were on the right side of those movements, including many
of the abolitionists, held racial ideas.
So, it's much more an audit of people's activities and their investments than their views.
What about reparation and apology, David?
I'm interested in if when we do this history and we discover, as I'm sure we will, those
bad parts and we want to talk about them.
If I'm still chief executive of the RSA when that piece of work is finished, in what way
is it useful for me, for example, to apologize?
Who am I apologizing for?
Is that a tokenistic act or is it a meaningful act?
Also, in terms of reparations, how might we think about that?
I'm not asking you specifically to comment on the RSA, but the general principle.
I think there’s a coming together of history and the consequences of history here, which
I think provide an arena for opportunity.
When organizations look into their past and they discover financial connections to slavery,
which means benefits from slavery or imperialism, that the exploitation of other people historically
is part of the financial DNA that created the wealth of a current organization - well
they have to look at the other legacy of those institutions, slavery or imperialism, which
is that they created ideas and they created normalizations of attitudes, which are still
impacting upon the life chances of our fellow citizens.
So that financial inheritance and that inheritance of ideas and racism and the damage that it
does, to me, they naturally wire together and that I think institutions have a duty,
and I would go as far as to use the word "duty," when they discover these financial investment
connections to think about how they can use some of that money to try to address that
other form of legacy - the legacies that we know by every possible criteria you can imagine,
that people who are the descendants of enslaved people, the people who've come from nations
that have had the enormous discontinuity in the history that is imperialism, that we can
find ways of investing in their futures.
I think Glasgow University's approach here has been a model - that if you discover these
financial connections, then there's a reparation that can be done in terms of improving the
life chances of people who are living with the consequences of the ideas that's flowed
from those historical events.
Thank you.
Mary, we're running out of time sadly, but I wonder what do you want to add anything
to David's advice and how we should go about it?
I think there's two things I want to add.
One is I absolutely agree and I think that there is something which is different about
transatlantic slavery from ancient slavery.
You can see people putting all this together in a single pot.
Now, the difference is, we're not talking about a moral difference here, but the difference
is that transatlantic slavery, the consequences are still with us.
The slavery of the Greeks and Romans, they are only still with us as consequences extremely
indirectly.
So I think there is a real reparation there which you can think about, which is more than
and more meaningful certainly than just atoning for something naughty that you did a long
time ago.
I think that the other important point is, I think, about what people thought.
I think that I feel much less comfortable when I see people having names removed from
buildings or whatever because they are known to have upheld eugenic principles in the late
19th century.
First of all, you think of the scientific community in the late 19th century.
That is what they were arguing about, but more important is the reason now-- this is
your trajectory point or Adam’s trajectory point--
The reason now that we know why eugenics is such an appalling idea is because they went
through it and thought about it and interrogated it and we all came out the other side.
You can't as it were just go back and see individual beliefs or theories, mad or wicked
as they now seem, you can't see them on their own.
They're part of a process in which society for the last 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years has
been interrogating, what is it to have a better community?
Sometimes they went down terrible blind alleys and sometimes they didn't.
I think that comes back to that critical point.
It's about what people did not what they thought.
I didn't care what Cecil Rhodes said about race or about Africans.
I care about what he did.
I care about the militarized police force that was unleashed against the Ndebele.
I think it's a dangerous trap to be channeled down this avenue that it's about what people
said and then you can get quotes from one side or the other.
It's about what people did.
I don't care what Edward Colston’s views on Africans were.
I care about the 19,000 people that died in the holds of the slave ships of the Royal
African Company.
I think that specificity that it's about actions.
The eugenics point, I think, is a perfect case in point.
Lots of people supported eugenics.
But when you get to people who are involved in the T4 Program in Germany, that euthanized
people, that euthanized mixed-race descendants of the African-American soldiers on the Rhineland,
I don't want statues to them, to people who carry these things out.
People who thought what we now know are horrible thoughts, that's a very different matter.
I could carry on, I've had to do virtually no work at all because you've both been so
brilliant.
But unfortunately, we've run out of time.
I think there's going to be a great deal of demand for us to bring you back together again
in the future.
[crosstalk] Find a more incendiary subject.
[crosstalk] [laughs]
Absolutely fascinating.
If you're watching along today, do head over to the RSA website now where you'll find links
to Mary and David's terrific books, including Mary’s Women & Power and David's Black and
British: A Forgotten History, and a reminder that you can catch the landmark Civilisations
series that they co-hosted on BBC iPlayer, where you'll also find a number of David's
powerful documentaries on Black-British history alongside the latest series of the brilliant
A House Through Time.
If you've been inspired by today's discussion, do let us know what you think.
The conversation will continue on Twitter, but politely please, on the #rsabridges, and
across the RSA website, where you can find out more about our research, which includes
a 2020 update of the Heritage Index which maps local heritage assets and activities
nationwide to understand the build, the relationship between people, place, and community power.
And of course, on the website, you'll also find information on how you can get involved
in making change happen as part of our growing global fellowship community.
Finally, thank you again to Mary Beard and David Olusoga, and thank you all for watching.