Do ‘British values’ favour colonial comeback over multiculturalism? | Middle East Eye

Myriam Francois’s view on removal of colonial symbols. Some valid points, but there are also risks associated with effacing and forgetting the past (‘those who forget history …’):

And yet, the campaigns have been largely met with consternation. For all the talk of the positive value of diversity within our society, such campaigns remain a struggle on the margins, not entirely dismissed, but requiring quiet co-optation through piecemeal concessions designed to quell the disruptive uprisings of those now too close to power to be metaphorically put down.

Indeed, an admission of racism following a decision to use an image of black hands in chains to advertise a drinks poster is surely a meagre victory for a movement of such ambition. And although a similar campaign at Cambridge succeeded in convincing Jesus College to take down and consider the repatriation of a bronze cockerel looted in the 19th century, such critical demands are yet to become audible to a broader audience.

It is not sufficient to eventually recognise the validity of the cries for freedom among oppressed peoples when the tools which served to uphold that domination continue to permeate popular culture and in many cases, justify new variants on imperial exploitation. In the case of Rhodes, to maintain as a central part of our social vocabulary a man who stands as the cultural equivalent of the “N” word, is to fail to recognise that just as language evolves to reflect changing social norms, so must our concrete edifices.

Critics of the decolonial movement have compared the call for the removal of Rhodes to a form of cultural censorship – where would the movement stop exactly, ask those who, in so doing, unwittingly concede the pervasiveness of imperial ideals within our contemporary culture.

If we might term white supremacy a culture which justifies the encroachment of European powers into other continents and lands under the guise of conferring civility upon peoples assumed to be lagging on the developmental scale, then the edifices of that supremacy must be dismantled.

In their place, society must make way for a consensual cultural construction, in which all voices are not a mere addition to a slightly reformed rotten core – the term “people” expanded to include women and ethnic minorities and quotas to guarantee a token visibility of the “other” – but rather serve to forge a new cultural project away from the racially skewed underpinning of the culture of empire. In this, the decolonial movement is the avant-garde of our generation.

Source: Do ‘British values’ favour colonial comeback over multiculturalism? | Middle East Eye