The Wind Done Gone: The Opening Salvos of the Culture Wars
So, as I raise my head above the parapet of my Coronavirus isolation, I note that, as a friend of mine recently said to me, “it’s kicking off everywhere.” With the brutal killing of George Floyd by police during an arrest in Minneapolis on 25th May, protests against such violence towards black people erupted across the US and internationally. The “Black Lives Matter” movement soon spread into the cultural arena, with protests not merely against present institutional racism, but seemingly an entire past of discrimination and subjugation. In Bristol in the UK, the statue of Edward Colston, who made most of his fortune as a member of the Royal African Company (RAC), which had a monopoly on the West African slave trade and branded slaves (including women and children) with its RAC initials, was torn down by angry protesters and unceremoniously dumped into the docks. At Oriel College in Oxford, the statue of Cecil Rhodes (Victorian imperialist and proponent of white colonial domination), wh...