Can buildings be racist?

Can a building be racist? Certainly, that seems to be the view of those in the library sector in Wales. Apparently, the problem of racist buildings is so serious that the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) has produced guidance telling Welsh librarians to avoid them.

The guidance has been brought to light by the Telegraph. It insists that when organising anti-racist training sessions, librarians must be ‘mindful’ when booking venues and must always try to ‘not choose a venue that represents a racist legacy’. By this, it is referring to places that have even the vaguest links to colonialism or slavery.

Thankfully, the Welsh government produced a blacklist of all such buildings in the country back in 2021. These range from community centres, schools, streets, statues and pubs that were built with colonial money or are just named after ‘problematic’ historical figures.

The names include Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes and Christopher Columbus. There are also some surprising additions, like Mahatma Gandhi, utopian socialist Robert Owen and a litany of other lesser-known names who may, at some point, have made a few bob directly or indirectly from the slave trade. As a result, what makes a venue ‘tainted’ with racism is so broad that it’s a miracle there’s a single building left in Wales that isn’t on the list.

Fortunately, the audit grades each location with a colour that corresponds to just how evil and the racist the place is supposed to be – red demonstrating ‘definite personal culpability’ of the location’s namesake, orange being ‘personal culpability uncertain’ and green meaning either that the offending building has been removed or that the person it was named after was ‘not culpable’.

One venue flagged by the report is The Buccaneer Inn in Tenby, Pembrokeshire. This pub is designated ‘orange’ because ‘buccaneers were pirates’ who ‘preyed on ships involved in the slave trade among others and sometimes traded in slaves’. The report does note, however, that buccaneers ‘were also known to have racially diverse crews’. It seems the jury is still out on whether racism is inherent to the pirate community.

The report also blacklists an entire village of 4,600 people in Caerphilly, thanks to its namesake. Nelson was named after a nearby pub called the Lord Nelson Inn, which in turn was named after the apparently irredeemable Horatio Nelson. Nelson the village is given an orange rating, so while it’s best avoided by librarians, presumably it’s safe from being razed to the ground for now.

Both the slave-trade audit and the CILIP guide were drawn up in response to the Welsh government’s ‘Anti-racist Wales Action Plan’, devised in 2020 and 2021 during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement. The scheme is designed to make Wales ‘racism free’ by 2030. Government bodies, cultural-heritage sites, schools, nurseries and even trains have been enlisted in the fight against so-called structural racism. CILIP’s anti-racism training is part of a £130,000 project to encourage librarians to challenge ‘the dominant paradigm of whiteness’.

The broader plan similarly involves forcing museums to set ‘the right historic narrative’ when it comes to race. Despite the Welsh population being 94 per cent white as of the most recent Census, official guidance states that all Welsh museums must ‘tell stories through the lens of black, Asian and minority experiences’ and offer a ‘decolonised account of the past’ – wokespeak for rewriting the past to fit ‘progressive’ prejudices.

The Welsh government’s determination to see and fight racism everywhere is plunging it to absurd new depths.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.