The chief librarian of the British Library said “racism is a creation of white people” while pushing for “decolonisation” of the Library as Black Lives Matter activists continue their long march through British institutions.
Liz Jolly, the chief librarian, is backing a so-called “Anti-Racism Project” to develop and deliver “major cultural change” within the taxpayer-funded institution in order to reflect the “diversity” of modern Britain.
In a video recording obtained by The Telegraph, Jolly said called for white staff members to join in on the leftist purge, saying: “I think, as I have said before, that we need to make sure some white colleagues are involved because racism is a creation of white people.”
The Library has created a “Decolonising Working Group” that has encouraged staff members to support the radical Black Lives Matter movement and to read Marxist literature.
In the effort to “decolonise” the British Library, an internal report demanded that statues honouring the founders of the library be removed, including Sir Hans Sloane.
They also called for the bust of Sir Joseph Banks, a British botanist and co-founder of the Library, to be removed, and that even the statue of King George III should be reviewed for possible removal.
The group said that “colour blindness” is, in fact, a manifestation “covert white supremacy”, and that the Library building itself is a symbol of imperialism because it looks like a battleship.
“This glorification is hard to miss in the structure of the building itself, designed as it is in the form of a battleship, by far the greatest symbol of British imperialism,” the report claimed.
The report went on to call for removing “Eurocentric” maps and to review its collection of classical music, deemed to represent an “outdated notion” of Western civilization, saying that busts commemorating Beethoven and Mendelssohn are indicative of “Western civilizational supremacy”.
The Decolonising Working Group also called for every empty hall in the library to be devoted to the cause of so-called “anti-racism”.
They went on to say that the Library is tainted by its links to the “ongoing settler-colonisation of Palestine” by Jewish people.
London Assembly member Peter Whittle responded to the report by saying: “This is utterly chilling and [its] importance cannot be overstated. The British Library is the very spine of British Culture. It is being systematically attacked from within by the people who lead it. They hate our history and call Western civilization ‘outdated’.”
“They should resign,” Whittle said.
Iranian Australian columnist Rita Panahi added: “How can the British Library chief be so pig-ignorant? ‘Racism is a creation of white people’?! Say that in Asia or the Middle East and they’ll laugh at you.”
Conservative Pary MP Ben Bradley said that “there is something fundamentally wrong with the leadership of the British Library.”
“If the Chief Librarian is so unhappy with British history perhaps they should not be in that job,” he said.
“The very suggestion that racism only applies in one direction, by white people towards BAME people, is categorically false, inflammatory and divisive,” Bradley concluded.
The British Library is the largest library in the world by the number of objects housed, which is estimated to be around 200 million. The collection includes two copies of the Magna Carta, the 1215 charter that laid the groundwork for many liberal rights enshrined in throughout Western countries, notably the American Constitution.
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