David Olusoga: Stop demanding racist terms be removed from literature

Telegraph

25-05-2025

Racist language should not be removed from classic books or TV shows and young people should toughen up, David Olusoga has said.
The historian and presenter said it was more useful to confront the language of the past than to censor it.
'The thing I'm very aware of is that I'm from a different generation to the generation that is familiar with trigger warnings. I get their argument that it is good to be told that a book has certain stories or certain words that might come as a shock.
'Where I disagree with the idea is that we should remove those words or remove those books from the syllabus,' he told an audience at the Hay Festival.
Olusoga recently contributed to a documentary about the BBC show The Black and White Minstrel Show that ran until the late 1970s, which featured white performers using blackface.
'We just have to read them'
Olusoga said during an appearance at the Hay Festival: 'To understand how that form of entertainment delivered racism, delivered racial stereotypes and delivered racial language into the British idiom, you have to confront those words. I don't think it is possible to get across just how toxic it is unless you put your hand in the fire.
'Nor is it better to hide from those words and not be able to obtain a proper knowledge of the power of that entertainment.
'I think we need to be tougher. Our ancestors had those words shouted at them; we just have to read them in a book. So I'm afraid I have a much less tolerant attitude with people who, rather than warnings, want words removed.'
Novels that have been edited to remove racist references include the James Bond series. Ian Fleming's books were reissued in 2023 with some language edited after a review by sensitivity readers. Some Agatha Christie mysteries have received the same treatment.
Episodes of Little Britain were edited on BBC iPlayer and The League of Gentlemen was removed from Netflix because of their use of blackface to portray some characters.
Olusoga and Yinka, his sister, last year published a book they wrote together, Black History for Every Day of the Year.
Explaining the theme, Olusoga said: 'It makes black history into normal history, literally everyday history. It turns it from something which is seen as political and specialist into something which is just part of history. These histories of Empire, migration and movement are just normal parts of history.'
Olusoga added that Black History Month is a valid idea but 'it doesn't solve the big problem, which is understanding that this is part of our mainstream history. It, in some way, reinforces the idea that this is a separate channel alongside the mainstream'.
'Any honest, wholehearted telling of Britain's Industrial Revolution has to recognise the key raw material alongside coal was cotton, and that the vast majority of that cotton came from the Deep South, produced by 1.8 million African-Americans who were part of British history, [although] they never set foot on British soil.
'We cannot tell the story of the Industrial Revolution without them, yet that's exactly what we've been doing.'