ABSTRACT
This chapter draw on experiences of working on The Past is Now and being members of the Museum Detox network to reflect on the challenges faced in active, anti-racism museum work, and will set this work in a larger context of anti-racism activism. Museum Detox is a network of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic museum workers in the UK. One cold winter evening, thirty of scholars sat in a circle in the front room of the Sir John Soane’s Museum in central London to discuss the strange and unusual opportunity to become a state-sponsored museum activist. The inception of Museum Detox in 2014 was explicitly self-centred; our perspective was deliberately inward-looking and self-supporting. By combining the Museum Detox network and the diverse workforce and strong tradition of co-curation at Birmingham Museums scholars aimed to imagine into existence an anti-racist museum context in which to conduct the decolonising experiment.
