> Without question there's racists in the country (there are in every country on the face of the planet), but to tar a whole nation as racist is incorrect and unfair.
Nope, we're systematically racist, and that's why we're even having a debate about whether a monument to a perpetrator of crimes against humanity is appropriate or not. It shouldn't even be a debate. It's absolutely obvious it's not appropriate.
Let's personalise this a little. Derek lives in Bristol. He used to walk past the Colston statue twice a day, five days a week. Derek's grandparents came from Jamaica in 1948, part of the Windrush generation encouraged by British government in 1948 to come over and fill shortages in the labour market. Derek's parents were both born and raised in England. So was Derek.
Derek's grandparents were in Jamaica in the first place because Colston and others like him forced them out of Africa and put them to work as slaves in a completely different part of the world. Many of those slaves were raped, tortured and murdered alongside being kidnapped, expatriated and subjected to forced labour.
So here's Derek, his ancestors suffering crimes against humanity at Colston's hands, his grandparents coming to England by invitation and being granted citizenship by the UK government, his parents and himself born and raised here, walking twice daily past a monument to the slave trader. What does he make of it? What would you make of it.
What I would make of it is that this country, that I'm a citizen of, has something so seriously against me that it would tolerate that statue standing to that man in the city I've been born and raised in.