David Lammy and the anti-Empire racism of religious illiteracy
by Archbishop Cranmer:
When it transpired recently that thousands of black and Asian soldiers who died fighting for the British Empire had been ‘unequally’ commemorated in death, the absence of headstones and other memorials to their service was swiftly attributed to “pervasive racism” and the evils of the British Empire. If tens of thousands of predominantly Indian and African service personnel were not remembered in the same way as the white man, what else could the explanation be, apart from “the entrenched prejudices, preconceptions and pervasive racism of contemporary imperial attitudes”.
According to a report by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (previously the Imperial War Graves Commission), this was emphatically the reason. Their founding principle of equality of treatment in death had been apparently abrogated, if not disdained.
For some, rather than marking their graves individually, as the IWGC would have done in Europe, these men were commemorated collectively on memorials. For others who were missing, their names were recorded in registers rather than in stone..
So their blackness and brownness became a shameful cause of unequal treatment in death, and the CWGC apologised for their institutional racism and manifest failure.
On hearing this news, Labour MP David Lammy shed a tear. He had previously visited Kenya and Tanzania to make a Remembrance Day documentary for Channel 4, where he found mass burial grounds “that put Britain to shame”. He wrote of his experience:
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