I read the article about how at the University of Manchester the students painted over the Kipling mural and replaced it with a Maya Angelou poem (Report, 20 July). How disappointing. It seems England is following the same path as the US where our 19th- and early 20th-century racist past is concerned. We cannot go back and undo what was done but we can learn from them. Whitewashing the past, pretending it did not happen is not how we learn.
In the US we are also selective in what monuments etc we tear down. Statues of Robert E Lee and other southerners must be torn down immediately, but the golden statue of a northern general in New York’s Central Park must not be touched, even though William T Sherman turned to the same scorched-earth policies against the Native Americans after the civil war in one of our most shameful periods of racism. Then I ask the question why Maya Angelou? Was there not an English poet who would better represent England, or maybe an Indian poet from the same generation as Kipling?
Sonia Romaih
San Diego, California, USA
I applaud the brave work of Manchester progressives in defacing the art of a famous man on the grounds that his – at the time popular – views are now out of date, ruining its enjoyment for everybody else who doesn’t mind. I am especially impressed by how If, the poem at issue, contains not a single racist line, but was incriminated by its author. But this must be carried further if the students are to purge racism from the campus. They must obliterate from the curriculum, for example, all of the work of Karl Marx: he was a virulent Russophobe, self-hating Jew and sometime racist.
Hot on his tail must follow the novels of that homophobe and reactionary snitch George Orwell, as well as the overtly racist Mark Twain, whose voluminous anti-imperialist writings can never redeem him for using the n-word a handful of times in his books.
All art, clearly, is impossible to view either in context or on fair balance in this “woke” new world, and the standards of today are the only ones that were ever acceptable. Therefore, I look happily forward to the day that Manchester university students have burned every book published prior to the dawn of third-wave feminism, especially the Marxist ones.
Michael Bradshaw
Warwick
There was a very nasty side to Kipling, but to paint over his poem If on the grounds that he “dehumanised people of colour” is simply wrong. No one reading Kim, or his great short story The Bridge Builders, or his poem The Road to Mandalay with any attention could reach such a conclusion. As a writer, if not as a public man, he went to great pains to humanise, for a self-satisfied imperialist readership, both people of colour and the rude licentious soldiery.
Bill Myers
Leicester
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