The attempt to topple the Scottish Enlightenment

It’s not just America that is in the process of rewriting its history and casting itself as patriarchal and oppressive – a similar process is taking place in Scotland. Giants of the Enlightenment such as David Hume are being reimagined as the architects of slavery and the fathers of modern racism.

Scotland’s first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer, exemplified the new way of thinking in an astonishing talk I heard him give recently at Dundee University. He spoke about the horror of George Floyd’s murder and told the audience that when he watches the footage of the strangulation: ‘All I can see is David Hume.’

The attempt to topple the Scottish Enlightenment began in September 2020 when a group of students demanded that Edinburgh University’s David Hume Tower be renamed. Hume’s crime was to have described black Africans as inferior to white people in a footnote in his 1748 essay Of National Characters.