A key adviser in the Labour mission to make Wales “anti-racist” has claimed that racism is when “white people hold negative views” of other ethnicities (Telegraph).
‘Anti-racism’ is the Critical Race Theory-inspired idea that it isn’t enough for white people to not be racist, and that they must instead be actively ‘anti-racist’; that is, rooting out unconscious racial bias in themselves and other white folk, and 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.
The devolved Government has pledged to make Wales anti-racist by 2030, with public bodies – including libraries, galleries, museums – now obliged to present the “right historic narrative” in their displays.
Taxpayer’s money will fund work which ensures the mandated narrative, and cash has gone to the “Re:Collections” project, which takes a leading role in this work by instructing Welsh museums on how to become “anti-racist organisations”.
The project has provided a “resource” which sets out a definition of racism.
Written by Maya Sharma, a “strategic adviser” for the programme, it claims that: “Racism is, fundamentally, the belief that white people and their ways of thinking, culture, political systems and histories are superior to that of other ‘races’.”
She has claimed in a set of resources for the Re:Collections project to make Welsh museums anti-racist that racism as a whole is based on a power imbalance, wherein “white people, institutes and nations hold far larger amounts of power”.
The overview of what racism is, and how to mitigate it in the museum sector, makes it clear that there are both “interpersonal” and “institutional” variants of racism.
“Most commonly recognised is interpersonal racism,” the document explains. This is where “white people hold negative, stereotypical or discriminatory beliefs about people from other ethnicities”.
Unconscious bias is “a less overt aspect of interpersonal racism”, but still results in racist actions “where we act or make judgements based on our subconscious and ingrained biases, assumptions or interpretations”.
Microaggressions are another “common form of interpersonal racism” mentioned in the guide. These are acts or interactions that to some appear innocuous or well meaning “but embody racism in seemingly subtle ways”. Examples cited include: “repeatedly mispronouncing someone’s name despite correction, or telling a person of colour wearing non-western clothes they look ‘exotic’”.
Sharma goes on to define institutional racism as “an institution having policies and practices that work better for white people”.
The writings are presented online as a resource which curators can use to help their work in making museums anti-racist, whether based in Wales or not.
It states that diverse histories can be relevant to many communities, and “a country often thought of as ‘white’ both in terms of its history and population, has a wealth of fascinating international stories to tell”.
Sharma works with the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust in Manchester, which focuses on the study of race and anti-racist activism and has worked with the Re:Collections project.
The Re:Collections project was launched by the Association of Independent Museums in 2022 to help Welsh attractions meet the demands of the Government’s Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan (‘Action Plan’).
Announced in 2022 by the then Deputy Minister for Arts and Sport, Dawn Boden, the Action Plan was proposed in response to Black Lives Matter protests. It formed part of a £4.5 million drive to ensure councils promote a “decolonised account of the past, one that recognises both historical injustices and the positive impact of ethnic minority communities”.
Re:Collections, which aims to provide “bespoke consultancy” on making museums anti-racist, has received government funding to support projects which transform cultural attractions, altering how history is presented to it into alignment with the propositions of radical identity politics.
With little more than five years to go until the Welsh Government’s Year Zero date, the pace of the Welsh cultural revolution is starting to accelerate.
Amgueddfa Lloyd George Museum in Llanystumdwy, which describes itself as “dedicated to the life and times of David Lloyd George”, recently consulted with Re:Collections on how to “decolonise” the former prime minister’s childhood cottage. According to the museums service for Plaid Cymru-run Gwynedd council, which operates the site, this project involved staff undergoing taxpayer funded “anti-racist” training.
Thanks to proposals that form part of a wider £135,000 grant drawn down from the Action Plan’s funding stream, a project called ‘Anti-Racist Library Collections’ has begun instructing Welsh librarians on how to align with “anti-racist principles” via new staff training sessions on “critical whiteness studies” and overcoming the “dominant paradigm of whiteness”.
Earlier this year, it emerged that “decolonisation training experts” tasked with delivering this project have stipulated that training sessions for library staff should not take place in buildings with a “racist” past.
Helpfully for Welsh librarians, the 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, 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 with alleged links to the British Empire, the African slave trade and/or colonialism more generally.
