I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians, who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.
It is a deeply uneasy feeling to know that one of my
