Praise and Blame

It would be fair to say that right now, globally, civil rights are having something of a moment. It’s long overdue. All around the world, people are protesting racism en masse, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch all of the right people getting upset.

In a weird moment for me personally, one of the iconic moments of the popular uprising was when the people of Bristol tore down a statue of pioneering slave trader Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour.

I’m from Bristol. I used to tend bar at the exact spot where they threw Colston’s statue in. If I were still in that job I could have watched them do it whilst still pouring beers. I feel like I was the cleaner at the Texas Book Depository until 1962, and I’m now watching the news with a weird sense of both history and familiarity.

Incidentally, in a nice piece of poetic justice that most people haven’t brought up, Colston’s statue is now submerged beneath Pero’s Bridge, a pedestrian bridge across the harbour that is named after a slave.

Colston is under the arrow at the time of writing.

There are plenty of racists who have feigned offence at the Colston statue’s ignominious end, but the truth is that people tried to get that statue taken down for years. There were multiple petitions going back as far as the nineties. I know, I signed some of them. Nothing ever happened. The councils would mumble a few excuses and hope that everyone…