Usually, when a new campaign to rectify our national failure to acknowledge black ingenuity in building modern Britain comes along, I support it enthusiastically. I’ve backed the critique of our statues, for example, which promote white supremacists as heroes and ignore people of colour; and of our curriculum, which promotes ignorance about the racialised nature of British history. I’ve seen the need for a museum of empire, and the importance of books such as Washington Black, which told the fictional story of a black inventor erased from the historical record.