It looks like the government is preparing to acquire the legal authority to veto the toppling of statuary that offends the sensibilities of the warriors for ‘social justice’. A report in the

_Sunday Telegraph _earlier this month had it that the Home Secretary is to be given the final decision on formal applications to dismantle statues and other monuments (“War on woke:

ministers to get powers to protect controversial statues”, 11 October).  I hope that happens, but if it does, it could have one perverse effect. It might tempt Oxford University’s Oriel

College commission of inquiry into whether its statue of Cecil Rhodes should stand or fall, to signal its ‘social justice’ virtue by giving Rhodes the thumbs-down. That way the commission

Rhodes has only become an issue because of the significance that some students and citizens attach to it. For them Rhodes signifies ‘colonialism’, understood as essentially racist and

finding its purest expression in slavery. What is more, as they see it, the significance of Rhodes’s statue is not merely historical, but current. This is because the fact that his statue

stands in a public place means that he is celebrated today and therefore shamelessly expresses the racist mentality that continues to prevail among us. For these reasons the statue of Rhodes

excites deep passions among those who view it in these terms. However, depth of passion is no measure of what is true and just. To take an extreme example, the fact that a Nazi feels a

visceral, passionate loathing for Jews tells us nothing true about Jews or about just treatment of them. The Nazi passion is based on a distorted perception. So, we cannot take deeply felt

passion at face value—no matter who feels it. We are obliged to test the perception on which it rests. That is true for everybody, but above all for academics in a university. The perception

of the significance of Rhodes and his statue, which grounds the passionate calls for his being toppled, is radically distorted. First, there is the misperception of ‘colonialism’. The

essentialising of ‘colonialism’ into racism and slavery is just not rationally sustainable in the British case. Worse, it perpetrates a grave injustice upon the reputations of many dead and

some still living. Although slavery is a grim part of the history of the British Empire, the more recent history is the 150 years of persistent, imperial _anti-_slavery—suppressing the trade

and the institution across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. And all in the name of the basic equality of races. Whatever racism persists among us now

does not have continuous, unbroken roots in the period of slavery that ended 200 years ago. As the historian of slavery, John Stauffer has commented of the 19th century: “Almost every United

States black who travelled in the British Isles acknowledged the comparative dearth of racism there. Frederick Douglass noted after arriving in England in 1845: ‘I saw in every man a

recognition of my manhood, and an absence, a perfect absence, of everything like that disgusting hate with which we are pursued in [the United States]’”.  Second, there is the misperception

of Rhodes. The view propagated during the first Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) agitation in 2015-16 that Rhodes was ‘South Africa’s Hitler’ was backed up by an alleged quotation that had Rhodes say:

“I prefer land to niggers … the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism … one should kill as many niggers as possible”. Research has revealed that this was taken

verbatim from either a 2010 essay or an earlier 2006 book review by Adekeye Adebajo, a former Rhodes Scholar, and that the ‘quotation’ is, in fact, made up from quotations from three

different sources. The first was lifted from an 1897 novel by Olive Schreiner, who oscillated violently between worshipping Rhodes and loathing him: it’s fiction. The second was misleadingly

torn from its proper context. And the third was a mixture of distortion and fabrication. (For a full explanation, see my March 2016 article in _Standpoint_, “Rhodes, Race, and the Abuse of

History”). A related claim is the one made by an RMF protester earlier this year, and reported in the _Guardian_, namely, that Rhodes was a _genocidaire _(“Protesters rally in Oxford for

removal of Cecil Rhodes statue”, 9 June)_. _Again, there are no good grounds for this. In 1893 and 1896 Rhodes was involved in fighting Ndebele (and in the second case, Shona) during wars

unconstrained by international law, in which several thousand Africans were killed. (The estimates of lethal casualties vary dramatically.) The killing of very large numbers of people does

not amount to ‘genocide’, however, unless the killing intends to annihilate a whole people. There is no evidence at all of genocidal intention on Rhodes’ part. Moreover, the Ndebele survived

Rhodes sufficiently to salute him at his burial and to promise to tend his grave, which they did for decades afterwards.    Nor was Rhodes a racist. Yes, he believed in the scientific,

technological, commercial, etc. superiority of British civilisation relative to Bantu culture at the end of the 19th century, but that’s difficult for sensible people to quarrel with. While

he could be patronising about Africans, referring to them as “children”, he could be equally patronising about the fellows of Oriel College when calling them “children” in financial

management. His _hauteur _was racially indiscriminate. The evidence is that Rhodes had good relations with individual Africans and did not view them with the kind of contempt that, say, many

graduate Remainers view working-class Brexiteers. The weight of evidence also favours a reading of the terms of eligibility for Rhodes’ scholarships as intentionally race-blind.  Therefore,

insofar as racism continues to infect attitudes and institutions in Oxford and the UK, that cannot be laid at the feet either of Rhodes, who was not racist, or of British colonialism, which

was never _essentially_ racist. So if Oriel wants to combat racism or promote racial equality, Rhodes’s statue is the wrong target and taking it down would make no substantial difference to

the real problem.     Instead, Oriel should seek to do something more serious, less unjust to the past, and more constructive in the present. All Souls College provides a model: rather than

erase the name ‘Codrington’ from their library, because of the benefactor’s ownership of a slave plantation in Barbados, it decided to make a donation to Codrington College in Barbados

(which has also retained the name) and to fund scholarships for students from the West Indies. If Oriel wants to exercise virtue, and not merely signal it, it should do something analogous.