Decolonisation training experts are urging librarians to avoid holding meetings in “racist” buildings, as part of Welsh Labour’s commitment to “eradicate” systemic racism.
Across Wales, libraries have been given the task of promoting “anti-racism” in line with the devolved Labour government’s pledge to make 2030 the Year Zero moment when systemic racism is entirely “eradicated” from society and a new Black Lives Matter inspired culture of race equity and racial justice emerges.
In a training guide part-funded by the Welsh government and developed for the country’s library sector by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip) in Wales, library staff are assisted “in their journey towards creating anti-racist libraries”.
The guide, entitled Inclusive Futures: A guide for anti-racist library collections in Wales, includes advice on developing anti-racist acquisition policies, anti-racist methodologies, anti-racist stock and collections, anti-racist stock evaluation, anti-racist library practices, anti-racist book clubs, anti-racist cataloguing and classification practices, anti-racist community engagement, and anti-racist template letters for anti-racist correspondence with local community groups.
Across the 120-page document, the phrase “anti-racist” features a total of 273 times.
Anti-racism is the Critical Race Theory-inspired idea that it isn’t enough for white people to not be racist. They must instead be actively anti-racist, rooting out unconscious racial bias in themselves and other white folk, reinterpreting their supposedly hard-won individual achievements and successes in light of the ‘white privilege’ that centuries of colonial brutality and exploitation has afforded them, battling the fragility prompted by threats to their ‘white privilege’ from ‘oppressed’ people of colour, and reporting to HR any colleagues who fail to incant all the workplace approved EDI mantras with sufficiently devout and unthinking fervour.
With little more than five years to go until 2030, the pace of the Welsh cultural revolution is accelerating.
Thanks to proposals that form part of a wider £135,000 publicly funded project, ‘Anti-Racist Library Collections’, Welsh libraries will soon be instructed on how to align with “anti-racist principles” via new staff training sessions on “critical whiteness studies” and overcoming the “dominant paradigm of whiteness”.
However, decolonisation practitioners tasked with delivering this project have now stipulated that the planned training sessions for library staff should not take place in buildings with a “racist” past.
As per the warning in a “venue booking” guide created by Cilip in Wales, trainers must: “Be mindful of the venue and if you have a choice, do not choose a venue that represents a racist legacy.”
The booking guide also makes provision in case avoiding buildings with a “racist” past is not possible, stating: “If you have to use a venue that has a racist past, acknowledge this as early as possible to demonstrate your commitment to systemic issues.”
Training materials should also be checked for “harmful” content, the new guidance adds, before helpfully advising that providing “vegetarian and vegan options only can be used to support any decarbonisation or net zero goals of your organisation”.
Cilip’s guide is part of a wider effort across the cultural sector in Wales to comply with the Labour government’s Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan 2022, which arrogated to itself the power to set the “right historical narrative” following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Helpfully for Welsh librarians, this Action Plan has already yielded a user-friendly blacklist of buildings in the country likely to be thick with the sort of spectral miasma of toxic whiteness that anti-racism trainers would no doubt wish to avoid.
In it 2021 report, The Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration in Wales (‘Slave Trade’), the devolved government scrutinised a total of 57 monuments. 93 public buildings and places, and 442 street names for their linguistic connections to 203 famous British historical figures enemies of the Revolution with alleged links to the British Empire, the African slave trade and/or colonialism more generally.
In a novel take of Mao Zedong’s ‘Five Black Categories’ and ‘Five Red Categories’ status system, the audit includes a traffic light rating system to indicate the level of deplorability each location possesses.
Red demonstrates “definite personal culpability” of the location’s namesake, orange suggests “personal culpability uncertain”, while green signifies that the location has either already been forced to undergo self-transformation by the forces of progress, or has been interrogated and found not guilty of commemorating the individual(s) in question.
The entire 4,600-person village of Nelson in Caerphilly – which was itself named after a nearby pub called the Lord Nelson Inn – is flagged for a struggle session thanks to its namesake, Admiral Nelson.
The one-storey Picton Community centre in Haverfordwest also features in the report over its suspected connection with imperialist running-dog Sir Thomas Picton.
Sir Thomas was the highest-ranking allied casualty at Waterloo and one of two MPs to be killed during the battle. Although badly wounded at the Battle of Quatre Bras, he kept his condition secret and led the 5th Division at Waterloo two days later, when he was shot dead.
Or, as the Welsh Government’s Slave Trade report grimly remarks, he “was clearly culpable as an owner of enslaved people and a cruel governor of Trinidad who implemented or permitted legalised atrocities”.
Along with the Picton Community centre, four other buildings across Wales were found to have allied themselves with counterrevolutionary forces and trespassed onto the wrong side of history thanks to their association with Sir Thomas.
Members of the intellectual classes – Mao’s ‘Stinking Old Ninth’ – also feature on the blacklist. The Goronwy Owen primary school in Anglesey, named after one of the most notable Welsh-language poets of the 18th century was charged with crimes against racial equity on the basis that he “kept slaves at his home in Williamsburg, Virginia”.
The Wellington Community Centre in Rhyl, along with 12 other buildings named after Arther Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, also attract the attention of the Red Guards.
Although the Iron Duke commanded his most celebrated campaigns in the Napoleonic Wars, with final victory at Waterloo 1815, the report complains that “he was a high conservative in his views and was considered by the emancipationists to be strongly sympathetic to the West India interest”.
Columbus House in Longstone, Newport, a government building which is the base for Newport Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, also met with disapproval, following the report’s claim that the 15th century explorer was partially responsible “for all that happened after him”, including “the devastation of the native populations of the Americas, European colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slae-trade”.
Don’t Divide Us, the campaign group that seeks to promote a commonsense approach to race issues in the UK, criticised the provisions made for anti-racist training.
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, the group’s founder and education expert, said: “Libraries are places associated with rationality, enlightened thinking and public service for the general public.
“They are not the playthings of those whose preferred radical politics means that librarians have to assent to false and wholly negative beliefs about the country in which they live, and by extension, also about its people.
“This is the opposite of public service,” she added. “Even if systemic racism was a problem, it wouldn’t be ameliorated by fake confessions or choosing venues according to their alleged sinfulness by past associations. Unless we want to go back to pre-modern cultural standards.”
