The history pendulum will swing back again

I AM all for history education and yet I know I am not alone in hearing alarm bells start ringing when ‘Black History’ crops up and of course we have just had this year’s jamboree that is ‘Black History Month’.

You may remember that Jeremy Corbyn was very keen for ‘Black History’ to be taught in our schools, no doubt because it is a thinly veiled Trojan horse for anti-British history and especially empire bashing (the British Empire was the largest in history), i.e. part of his one-sided and distorted view of our history.

Of course, the negatives of this history need to be acknowledged, though these need to be properly set in the context of their times, and the standards that the people lived by then, in order to understand our past.

All too often ‘Black History’ fails dismally in this basic historical requirement and is more about vilification and indoctrination than true understanding and education, as in the case of Edward Colston in Bristol, whose story has been dumbed down, distorted, and used politically.

And if the negatives of our history are acknowledged, so too should be the many positives – the spread of democracy, law, education, the fight against slavery, the defence of freedom from dictators seeking world domination, technological and scientific advances, the Commonwealth, among others.

Unfortunately, you are less likely to hear of these positives now as our history is increasingly hijacked by those pushing the ‘Black History’ agenda (which gained a lot of traction after the awful killing of George Floyd in the US brought the highly political Black Lives Matter movement to prominence here) – the liberal metropolitan elite running many of our cultural, heritage and religious organisations including the BBC, Church of England, and many of our museums; left-wing politicians, artists, and activists; and last but not least academia (who should know better). Indeed, for many artists, reporters, historians and even philosophers it has become a career path.

Sadly, other voices giving a more rounded view of our history are being marginalised in the face of this at present, though if you know where to look you can find many aspects of ‘Black History’ debunked.

I particularly recommend ‘History Reclaimed’ (easily found online) set up by an independent group of scholars.

In time, the history pendulum will swing back to this more academic and rounded assessment of our history.

Julian Hill Bristol