Will we open our eyes to the past and its implications, or drown them outby shouting?The campaign to "protect our [British] history," in other words, is aboutprotecting the past from historians — and protecting the present fromdangerous new ideas about how we got here. Because when an organisationlike the Guardian researches its own historical links to transatlanticslavery — and then apologises and embarks on a substantial project ofrestorative justice— the newspaper is not primarily presenting adifferent past, but its ambition for a different present.The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry bycapitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry,capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, andnormally I will not link to articles that promote it. But I makeexceptions for some articles that I consider particularly important,such as the one linked to above.