Now watching the @britishlibrary live stream where @DavidOlusoga is in conversation with @omaromalleykhan

Black History Month was 'enormously overshadowed' by the Windrush scandal in 2018 and 2019. 2020 feels different.

'There are more reasons to be hopeful about the conversations on race' - some of them are negative but many of them have been positive.

"Ignorance of history was one of the reasons that the Windrush scandal happened", says Olusoga, citing Wendy Williams review.

'It was the inability to understand who these people were, & their place in Britain's story' + lack of knowledge of history of immigration & immig rules

'Statues are not history - they do not tell us history - they are about memorialisation',

'History is fluid. Statues are literally set in stone - they are immobile by nature, they can not do the job of history, which is to evolve, because that is not their function'

'There are more statues of Queen Victoria in Britain than of all other women put together' says David Olusoga, discussing who we have honoured.

There are more statues of nymphs and fairies than real women.

Britain in TV/film has sometimes seen "history as a safe space - a place we go to feel good about ourselves"

"If you want history to be a soft play area, you have to remove all the sharp objects of the past" but those are the backstories of how Britain has the population it has

"The American template of Black History can not really function in Britain". It leaves out too much of the British story as an Imperial Power, says David Olusoga.

Olusoga says fascinated by Enoch Powell's 1961 St George's Day lecture. Theme: England has been unaffected by four centuries of imperial wandering + can return to its true Tudor self. This rewriting of history requires enormous 'intellectual contortions'
http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/StGeorg*.html 

"Rewriting history is literally the job of historians" says Olusoga. To look at the evidence, to examine new sources, to write new versions. Nobody says that you can't write any more about the Tudors now, because that's been put down, he says.

"Phrases like 'decolonise the curriculum' can be a hostage to fortune, says David Olusoga. 'I don't think that phrase has much traction' + puts swords in the hands of bad faith actors, he says.

'Make the curriculum tell everyone's stories' is actually what you're saying.

Olusoga says those pursuing these causes should think harder about how the ideas are received off campus. Notes 'defund the police' as another example.

Thinks being anti-racist, not just not racist, has made progress.

Interesting discussion of the gap between the inter-generational progress in attitudes (against overt prejudice) and persistence of unequal outcomes. This may be a way to explain why institutional/structural racism is useful lens, he suggests (though its understood differently)

As @omaromalleykhan asks whether should aim to celebrate last Black History Month, DO says nothing stop 11 other months

"You don't have the book ripped out of your hand on 1st Nov. Nobody thinks you can't read a book about the holocaust because its not Holocaust Memorial Day"

And @omaromalleykhan asks @DavidOlusoga about risk of feeding the trolls/bots on social media

DO defends rebutting nonsense. Thinks responding with humour rather than anger can work.

Highlighting what some people think its OK to say often leads people to say 'I didn't realise'

Enoch Powell in 1961, arguing that England had been essentially unaffected and "uninvolved" by 4 centuries of links with "distant connections and strange races" so could, post-Empire, return to her pre-Tudor essence. I hope there will be a major @DavidOlusoga lecture on Enoch

As one of Powell's biographers wrote, the end of Empire and loss of India was experienced by Powell as a "spiritual amputation" from which he never recovered. ("I feel as Indian as I do British" he wrote to his parents in 1942, a generation before 1968)
http://www.britishfuture.org/articles/commentary/powell-more-prophet-than-politician/

I think @DavidOlusoga right to highlight importance of Powell's St George's 1961 Day speech. (It features prominently in Marquand's Britain after 1918). A most audacious effort to "rewrite" history & to "erase" four centuries of Empire + Commonwealth (250 of Union) as irrelevant

The adventurism of the Elizabethans and the "hard materialism of the Tudors" are also cast as a diversion, betrayal & denial of the 'true' pre-Tudor essence of England (nb, not Britain) which is now to be rediscovered and reinstated in the 1960s & the late 20th century.

Powell's attempt to erase four centuries is a history which would imagine England without tea & India without cricket. The effort to forget + deny Empire, with England "uninvolved", founds his later case that a million Commonwealth migrants here by 1968 should be asked to leave.

That was my 2011 Bristol lecture on Britain, India and the legacy of Enoch Powell for how we talk about immigration http://www.britishfuture.org/articles/commentary/powell-more-prophet-than-politician/