Black History Month — House of Commons, 2020-10-20
Topic: Civil Rights
Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch (Conservative, Centre-right): I am afraid that I am not giving way. I have only three minutes left, and I have more than three minutes of content The hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) said that she hoped I would learn something from her. Now it is time for me to give her a couple of lessons too, although I do not believe that she is in her place. She said that we need to look at history and improve it. Lesson No. 1: we cannot improve history; we can only learn from it. What we can improve is the future, and that is what this Government have been doing over the past 10 years. I am not going to reel off statistics, in the interests of time, because other Government Members have already done so Lesson No. 2: black history is not the history of institutional racism. Listening to some Members across the House, it is quite clear that they do not know the difference. It is not true, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) said, that African history was interrupted by slavery. It also shows an ignorance of geography, because west African history is different from African history. As probably the only Member of this House who actually grew up and went to school in Africa, I can tell the House that that is not what we are taught. Much more is taught about the history of black slave traders who existed before and after the transatlantic slave trade In fact, the most notable statue in the city of Lagos, where I grew up, is that of Madam Tinubu. It is the biggest one in the equivalent of Trafalgar Square. She was a slave trader, but she was also a freedom fighter and a much loved icon. Her slave trading is not celebrated, but her fight against colonisers is. In Nigeria, she is recognised as a complex character, as all historical figures are—and heaven help anyone who would try to pull her statue down. There is much that we can learn from Nigeria about how to handle the issue of statues Why does this issue mean so much to me? It is not just because I am a first-generation immigrant. It is because my daughter came home from school this month and said to me, "We’re learning Black History Month because every other month is about white history." That is wrong and it is not what our children should be picking up. Those are not the values that I have taught her. They are yet another sign of the pernicious identity politics that look at individuals primarily as groups of biological characteristics. People often do not realise when that has taken hold, and I know that many of them are well meaning I wanted to finish with the story of Tom Molineaux, a black boxer who freed himself from slavery in the US and moved to England in 1809. I would have said so much more about him, but I am almost out of time History tells us that this is a country that welcomes people, and that black people from all over the world have found this to be a great and welcoming country. As a black woman, these are the values that I am teaching my black daughter. We must never take that for granted. In this Black History Month, let us celebrate the black talent that we are blessed with, the progress we have made in accepting one another and the contribution that black people have made in making us who we are as a nation.