No, racism isn’t a ‘creation of white people’

I remember that, as a small child, I was told not to talk when my father took me inside the public library in Richmond. Now I find that the British Library has rendered me speechless. With the apparent approval of the chief librarian, Liz Jolly, a review of statues and artworks in the library is under way. Among those who are commemorated by statues in the library and who are being subjected to this inquisition are Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as protagonists of ‘western civilisational supremacy’.

Setting aside for the moment the implication that many of the greatest composers, artists, writers and maybe scientists of the past should be shunned as ‘western’, we should stop short with alarm at the name of Mendelssohn. Of Jewish origin, though baptised as a boy, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy suffered for his ancestry during his lifetime and remained a victim of anti-Semitism after his death. There was a monument to him in Leipzig from 1892 to 1936, when it was thrown away.