White people were creators of racism, says chief librarian
200 British Library staff sign letter declaring racial ‘state of emergency’ over legacy of colonial violence
THE British Library’s chief librarian has claimed “racism is a creation of white people” and backed calls for major cultural change at the institution,
The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. Liz Jolly manages the collection at the UK’s national library, and is supporting changes to displays and collections in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Reforms are being proposed by the “Decolonising Working Group”, which claims the British Library’s London building is an imperialist symbol because it resembles a battleship.
One of the items on display that has caused concern is a portrait of the puppet Mr Punch, which some fear reflects “colonial violence”. The Telegraph has exclusively obtained documents revealing these claims, and a letter signed by 200 employees that declared a racial “state of emergency” at the institution.
An internal report called for the removal of statues of the library’s founding fathers, “Eurocentric” maps to be replaced and a review of collections of Western classical music.
The institution recently faced calls from MPs to be defunded after The Sun
day Telegraph revealed employees had urged colleagues to donate to BLM and back the work of Diane Abbott, the Labour MP.
This newspaper can now reveal that Ms Jolly has encouraged white staff to support the plans to purge the library of perceived racism.
In a video clip, she tells colleagues: “I think, as I have said before, that we need to make sure some white colleagues are involved, because racism is a creation of white people.”
Ms Jolly receives between £120,000 and £125,000 a year as chief librarian, a role she has held since 2018. She has given her support to a broad antiracism project proposed in the wake of BLM protests, and told colleagues “particularly pressing” work was ongoing to review “artworks in the St Pancras building”.
This followed the letter declaring a “state of emergency”; demands that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff review any job cuts that might affect employees with “protected characteristics”; and requests for the BAME Network to have a say in who is employed as head of collections.
To tackle the legacy of “colonial violence”, the letter demands a statue of founder Sir Hans Sloane be removed.
The removal is echoed in a report by the Decolonising Working Group, which claims that the “physical space” of the British Library contains “manifestations of the institution’s racism” by glorifying the British Empire.
The report adds: “This glorification is hard to miss in the structure of the building itself, designed as it is in the form of a battleship, by far the greatest symbol of British imperialism.”
A portrait of Mr Punch is critiqued as a figure “from the heyday of Victorian imperialism who ‘entertained’ through an abuse of women and children that mirrored colonial violence”.
Other recommended actions include reducing the number of European maps on display, being “tools of power”, and reviewing the presence of busts of Beethoven and Mendelssohn whose statues are “part and parcel of Western civilisational supremacy”.
The Decolonising Working Group is part of the library’s BAME Network, which advised colleagues to read Marxist authors and support BLM.
“This says to me that there is something fundamentally wrong with the leadership of the British Library,” said Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP.
“If the chief librarian is so unhappy with British history perhaps they should not be in that job.”
A spokesman for the British Library said: “When our galleries reopen on Tuesday, visitors will see that the busts of Sir Hans Sloane and other historically significant collectors remain in place in the Library’s front hall, with fresh interpretation from our curators that provides information about the contentious aspects of some of their legacy, as well as their achievements.”