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  • 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.

Hello, everyone.

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