Slavery museum to offer support to black curators

THE UK’s leading slavery museum will offer mental health support and safe spaces for black curators handling racist historical material.

Staff working with potentially upsetting relics of the transatlantic slave trade and British colonialism will have help dealing with “difficult content”.

National Museums Liverpool, which includes Britain’s leading slavery museum, has said this material is inherently racist and support for curators recounting bleak histories is “essential” after Black Lives Matter protests.

There is particular concern for the welfare of black employees who may feel “expectation” to effectively tackle the subject of slavery following increased interest in the trade and profiteers such as Edward Colston.

The International Slavery Museum, which recently offered to display the toppled statues of slave traders, houses artefacts including shackles used to chain African captives, and hooded robes worn by the Ku Klux Klan.

Museum bosses hope spaces free from difficult material, along with new formal processes to raise mental health concerns and receive support, will ease the strain on staff delving into racism.

Janet Dugdale, head of curatorial teams at the NML, told The Sunday Tel

egraph: “When you think about a museum collecting material that is racist in its intent, to be able to show that, to be able to understand that, that’s hard.

“It can have quite an impact on staff and colleagues that are working in that field. It’s not easy work.

“I think it’s draining. People care, and if you care that can have an impact on your mental health.”

Ms Dugdale has revealed that across the museums in Liverpool new processes for staff to raise mental health concerns and receive support from the organisations will be put in place.

The curatorial expert said that many historical and contemporary subjects are difficult for staff to be continually immersed, but slavery and its inescapably racist remnants were an upsetting area of study.

Black Lives Matter protests which lead to the toppling of slave traders’ statues have only increased the pressure on historically conscious black employees, Ms Dugdale said.

She told The Sunday Telegraph: “For a lot of black colleagues, over the last few weeks, and I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouths, but it is hard if you are black and you are working on subject matter like this. There’s a lot of expectation about how we’re responding.”