Atop a 150 foot tall pillar in the centre of Edinburgh stands a statue of a man whose amendment to an abolition bill delayed the end of the Atlantic slave trade by 15 years, time enough for another 600,000 people from Africa to be kidnapped, transported and enslaved.
The University of Cambridge has a memorial window for Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, a notoriously racist eugenicist. And let’s not even get started on London: everywhere you look, reminders of colonisation (Charles James Napier; Robert Clive) and genocide in India (Winston Churchill) are placed on pedestals; monuments to Britain’s gobsmacking ability to whitewash history.
Modern, industrialised Britain was built on the enslavement of Black people and the subjugation of the people whose countries it colonised, but too often the persecutors are commemorated as noble men and philanthropists. Want to see how widespread it is? There’s a map for that.
ToppleTheRacists.org is a newly launched map that aims to highlight the backstory of every racist statue in the nation. From Golspie in Scotland to Cornwall, these effigies are everywhere; now, you have the perfect guide to figure out which ones to focus on for any anti-racism protests in future.
The fate of Bristol’s statue of proud slave trader Edward Colston at the weekend (she very much is a wet, watery bitch now) has led to calls for the removal of racist statues up and down the country. Of course, this isn’t a new thing: many people have been forcefully advocating for this for decades. But with news that the public are now taking direct action following years of inaction from local councils and government, the ToppleTheRacists map offers a blueprint for which statues should come down next. Sayonara, racists.