In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement which has swept the globe following the murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, white people are starting to realise the magnitude of the racism which people of colour have had to endure every single day of their lives. Although this realisation is a welcome one, a staggering amount of white people remain totally ignorant of the fact that the racism against which people of colour have been fighting for centuries is a product of colonialism.
In Britain, arguably the most famous coloniser of them all, the majority of British people still have scant knowledge of their country’s colonial history, or, if they do, their knowledge is heavily biased. In a YouGov survey, 43% of British people viewed colonialism as “a good thing”. Perhaps this grossly anachronistic view of our colonial history is to be expected. After all, teaching schoolchildren about colonialism remains non-compulsory on our national curriculum. At no point during my fourteen years in the English state education system did I encounter anything about colonialism, apart from a handful of lessons in Year Eight about the transatlantic slave trade. Despite the government’s claims that the national curriculum allows schools to “have the freedom and flexibility… to teach pupils about the history of Britain and the wider world,” the fact remains that it is much more likely that our colonial history will remain untaught. Teaching about colonialism is perceived by many educators to be too “political” for schoolchildren (even when the parents and grandparents of many children may well have emigrated to Britain from our former colonies). And yet, what is more political than teaching them about the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany- an extremely popular GCSE and A-Level history module? What is more political than teaching them about the First and Second World Wards, or the multiple revolutions which we are so widely taught at GCSE and A-Level? We know that history is always written by the winners, not the losers, so this approach makes sense. Britain loves to perceive itself as the winner, but never as the loser.
Perhaps this warped self-perception explains our ongoing national obsession with the Second World War. Although the war ended seventy-five years ago and those who genuinely experienced it are now in their seventies, eighties and nineties, the Second World War remains a source of intense national pride. The celebrations on the 75th anniversary of VE Day (in the middle of a pandemic!) and our veneration of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and wartime singers such as Dame Vera Lee and Gracie Fields serve as proof. You only have to look to our love for Second World War set films such as “Dunkirk” to further see how strong the obsession still is. The question I have always found myself asking, as a Gen Z-er feeling somewhat detached from this war, was why?
The first, and perhaps the most straightforward, answer is that Britain has always struggled with its national identity. Whereas it always wishes to be perceived as the saviour, and not the oppressor, our tiny island which shot from total obscurity to be a world superpower, Britain must confront the truth. Britain has never been “Great”: it has only become “Great Britain” through its bloody colonial past where white settlers established systems which used violence against and the exploitation of black and brown bodies in colonised territories in order to acquire wealth used to build the Britain of today. When examining our colonial past, it swiftly becomes apparent that we are not “the good guys”, and we never have been. When examining the Second World War, however, it is one of the few instances in our history where our status as “the good guys” is far simpler to define. We defeated the fascist Nazis and stopped them from taking over the world- what is a greater symbol of our imagined status as the world’s saviours? No wonder the few events which we learn about when being taught about the Second World War are Dunkirk, the D-Day Landings and the Blitz. All of these events are deemed to be the pinnacle of our purportedly unique British wartime spirit and underpin our apparent “underdog” status. The role of the other Allies is typically minimised to emphasise this status, while the integral roles played by black and brown soldiers recruited form British colonial territories are erased. I only learned of the importance of soldiers from India, Africa and the West Indies through a BBC documentary last year! These soldiers, without whom Britain would not have won the war, were subjected to appalling racism both during and after the war, and to this day, the British government has still not issued a formal apology to the veterans.
By establishing the national myth that Britain and white British people alone won this war- spearheaded by our veneration of Churchill, whose proven complicity in countless crimes committed by British colonial administrations against local populations is conveniently ignored- we feel that we can absolve ourselves of the collective guilt over the atrocities which constructed the British Empire. We can construct a national identity which focuses upon the idea that Britain is the eternal saviour: our national identity is the epitome of the deeply problematic white saviour narrative.
Meanwhile, the disparities in our national curriculum mean that schoolchildren never learn about crimes committed by British colonial administrations such as the 1950s-1960 Mau Mau Uprising, where we held alarmingly similar views on racial purity to the fascists against whom we had previously fought. White supremacy and racial purity were nothing new when Hitler popularised them, and they had in fact been long held views among British colonial administrations in Africa, India, the Middle East and the West Indies. However, because this does not suit Britain’s self-penned narrative as the saviour of progressive democracies, we conveniently, collectively forget about this dark side of our colonial history. We continue to do so by not learning about being taught about how our complicity in a system which upheld the notion of one race’s supremacy over another merely paved the way for the racism and xenophobia for which the Nazis became so notorious. Britain played a key role in defeating the Nazis and their particularly hideous fascism, but British schoolchildren are never taught that the British Empire (and colonialism in general) played a similarly key role in developing the ideologies of white supremacy and racial purity and building the racialised hierarchies of power which were used by the Nazis.
This is not to say that it is not worth teaching about both the First and Second World Wars: both are indisputably two of the most historically significant wars in history, which have shaped the world we live in today. It also does not mean that we should not celebrate Britain’s victory in both wars, because the world may be an entirely different place had the Allies not won. However, the British national curriculum’s persistent glossing over of our colonial history- especially given its immense historical significance and influence across the world- is symbolic of our collective cognitive dissonance surrounding our national identity. That our schoolchildren leave school with such scant knowledge of our colonial history is both a cause and a symptom of this dissonance.
If we did add Britain’s colonial history to the national curriculum, alongside the First and Second World Wars (and additions to these topics about the black and brown soldiers who fought in these wars and these wars’ consequences for British colonial territories would be immense improvements!), perhaps the colonialist attitudes which remain pervasive in British society would steadily start to dissipate. No one is safe from these attitudes, whether they are our politicians- who prefer to gloss over the violence of British colonialism by claiming that the Commonwealth was forged out of “friendships and partnerships” rather than centuries of oppression, or our celebrities, who partake in annual TV charity appeals like Comic Relief and Sport Relief which are principally driven by white saviour narratives. If we educated future generations on the importance of Britain’s colonial history for the construction of racism as we know it today, we may start to see a different British identity emerge from the ashes of our deeply problematic national identity. As always, change starts with education.
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- A shout-out to this brilliant BIPOC run initiative Fill In The Blanks, which is aiming to get Britain’s colonial history and British civil rights onto the national curriculum! Their Twitter account can be found via this link: https://twitter.com/fillinthblanks?lang=en
A Northern Girl in a Southern World 