OPENING UP THE BRITISH MUSEUM

SINCE THE KILLING OF George Floyd last May, there has been an immense amount of discussion and debate, much of it very heated, as to how museums, galleries and public institutions should respond most effectively — and appropriately — to the Black Lives Matter movement. It has not been at all an easy discussion and although everyone has made statements as to how determined they are to change, none was more forceful than the statement issued by Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, on the museum’s blog on 5 June that “The British Museum stands in solidarity with the British Black community, with the African American community, with the Black community throughout the world. We are aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere.”

The British Museum has inevitably been at the forefront of this debate, since its formation, its subject matter and its internationalism, while they have in the past been its greatest strength, are at the same time so obviously connected to the activities and mindset of imperialism over the last 250 years. It has an immensely tricky, if not impossible, task to steer a path between the radical restitutionists, now led by Professor Dan Hicks of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, whose book The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press, £20) is published this month, and those angry journalists, commentators and politicians who believe that any form of response to the criticism is a gross form of political correctness, an indulgence in irresponsible wokeness.

of the views of those people who responded so angrily to the news that Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British