David Olusoga on race and reality: ‘My job is to be a historian. It’s not to make people feel good’

The professor and broadcaster discusses writing black Britishness back into history, the backlash this provokes - and why he's so proud of his heritage

History's purpose isn't to comfort us, says David Olusoga, although many in the UK seem to think it is. History doesn't exist to make us feel good, special, exceptional or magical. History is just history. It is not there as a place of greater safety."

As a historian and broadcaster, Olusoga has been battling this misconception for almost two decades, as the producer or presenter of TV series including Civilisations, The World's War, A House Through Time and the Bafta-winning Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners. His scholarship has been widely recognised: in 2019, he was awarded an OBE and made a professor at the University of Manchester. (He is also on the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group.) Yet apologists for empire, in particular, like to dismiss him as a woke historian" in an attempt to politicise his work or flatly deny the realities that he points out.