In May 2026, Churnjeet Mahn, Arunima Bhattacharya and I launched a report that emerged from our AHRC-funded project ‘White Thinking’ and the failed promise of diversity in Scottish heritage. The report also discussed the findings of an earlier project on EDI in Scottish Heritage.
The concept of ‘white thinking’ is drawn from the work of Lilian Thuram, the French World Cup winner who, after his retirement, launched a foundation for education against racism. In his book on the operations of racism, White Thinking: Behind the mask of racial identity, Thuram asks:
Who constructed a discourse giving White people pride of place in the hierarchy of humankind? Who is that claims Black people are less competent? […] The answer is racialised White thinking. […] White thinking is not exclusively the product of White people. […] [It] is not a question of skin colour. It’s a way of being in the world.
The project report traces our collaboration with Lilian Thuram in order to try and break the hold of ‘white thinking’ and bring new perspectives into the ongoing work to embed anti-racist practice in Scotland’s heritage sector. It also documents the project’s wider collaboration between academics, activists, anti-racist community organisations (Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights), and Scottish heritage organisations – from large municipal institutions like Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow to much smaller institutions, such as the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum in Blantyre – to integrate a historical understanding of Scottish anti-racist work into their practice.
So, what did our project discover? After the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there was a flurry of work around anti-racism, and a feeling that this was happening for the first time. Yet there has been important anti-racism work in Scotland for over 20 years now. The branding of an initiative as ‘new’ and ‘pioneering’ can add importance and reputational significance to work, allowing it to be marketed to funders and audiences as the first of its kind. Our report argues, however, that we need to move beyond the first steps of anti-racism and create robust, wide-reaching action plans that acknowledge and build on the work of our predecessors.
We also discovered that people genuinely can make a difference. The project sought to fundamentally reinterpret and widen how heritage organisations in Scotland operate, what stories they tell and for whom they tell them. It included many different ways of approaching these histories, many different ways of seeking out new audiences and many different ways of working collaboratively. In the process, it has provided templates and tools for organisations looking to address histories of slavery and empire, and their legacies today. These histories will continue to shape our future. To guide the Scottish heritage sector from white thinking towards inclusion, we must now forge a creative and expansive way forward.
Our project on white thinking in heritage institutions is just a small part of a wider anti-racist struggle to overcome beliefs in white supremacy, which continue to exercise a hold on people’s imaginations with very dangerous consequences for society. Tackling such beliefs is not a task solely for people of colour and their allies but something that must be addressed more widely if we wish to create a better informed, more equal and morally robust society.
The full report is available here
David Murphy is Professor or French and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He has published widely on various aspects of modern and contemporary Francophone West African culture, including the monographs, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (2000) and (with Patrick Williams), Postcolonial African Cinema (2007). He is one of the translators of Lilian Thuram’s White Thinking: Behind the Mask of Racial Identity (2021). He is currently writing a biography of the interwar Senegalese anti-colonial militant, Lamine Senghor.
