Talking about bigotry in the UK without mentioning colonialism is a bit like talking about racism in the USA without mentioning slavery. Different history, diff

Talking about bigotry in the UK without mentioning colonialism is a bit like talking about racism in the USA without mentioning slavery. Different history, different consequences, different present, different context. A few weeks back historian John Dolan pointed out that all the iconoclasm recently occurring in Britain was targeting statues of people who had participated in the Atlantic slave trade. This is curious, because while some British were involved in the Atlantic slave trade it ranks pretty low on the list of Horrible Things the British Empire Did. The fact that Cecil Rhodes statues weren't getting dumped in rivers says about all you need to know on this subject. Rhodes was a monster. Look him up. Yet his statue continues to stand at Oxford. There is a movement to get it and other statues to Rhodes torn down, check out #RhodesMustFall on Twitter for example. But by and large British society refuses to engage with their genocidal past.