The recently designed flag of the Black Country achieved its most prominent national coverage yet on Wednesday at prime minister’s questions when Theresa May came to its defence following the newly elected MP for Wolverhampton South West’s expression of “serious concerns” about its “racist connotations”. That a row ostensibly about local heritage had reached the attention of the highest office in the land says a great deal about the way in which our collective memory is coloured by the social impacts of deindustrialisation and our amnesia over the legacies of slavery and imperialism.

Created by a local 12-year-old schoolgirl to represent the area’s industrial heritage, with the shape of a white glassmaking chimney and three linked chains, it was chosen by public vote in 2012 as the “official” flag of the region. The chimney is flanked by black and red panels inspired by Elihu Burritt’s famous description of the area as “black by day and red by night”.

What gives the Black Country its strong and unique identity is, and always has been, its people

Eleanor Smith, the constituency’s first black representative, asked people to “understand that it can be seen as offensive” for the local flag to include those three colours and prominent chains and called for an “intelligent conversation” about the design, stating that she would “look to have it changed”. In a reprise of a similar row in 2015, the local Express & Star newspaper seized on Smith’s comments, claiming that she had described the flag as “racist”, while Smith used her maiden speech in the Commons to highlight their “misrepresentation” of her. An online poll from the publication attracted 30,000 respondents, of whom 95% disagreed that the flag is “racist”.

The Black Country was central to the birth of the Industrial Revolution and defines itself proudly as a working class area with a distinctive dialect and culture. The flag’s representation of industrial heritage is an opportunity to celebrate global historic significance and also to re-establish some of the pride eroded in decades of deindustrialisation and economic stagnation. As a result, it has been adopted widely and enthusiastically and has worked effectively to establish a recognisable and positive brand for an often overlooked region.

It is, however, a historical fact that the Black Country was a key provider of metalworked goods to the slave trade and plantation economies of the Americas and throughout the British Empire. Scholars have consistently demonstrated the inherently interlinked nature of industrial development in all areas of the UK and imperial expansion, whether directly by trading British goods for people, using slave-produced raw materials, or the sale and use of British-made goods in slave or colonial economies. Although much awareness has been raised in recent decades, there remains a general sense that Britons have not absorbed the full details of our imperial past or its continuing implications.

Herein lies much of the difficulty. The local press and social media have reacted vehemently to defend local pride, cultivated through an emphasis on industries which were directly or indirectly linked to less than glorious aspects of national and global history. Also, the perception that a claim of “racism” has been used to sully the area’s reputation is highly charged, considering that such accusations have regularly been seen as being levelled at those who have voiced concerns about immigration and wider cultural change.

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Local and national identities often coalesce around a collectively perceived moment when the “original” culture or traditions that should be preserved were “pure”. In the case of the Black Country, we are perhaps thinking about the pre-1960s era of full male employment and homogenous working class communities rooted in values like heavy industrial labour, communal responsibility, and mass trade unionism – and common social theatres such as the pub, club and factory. But as economic decline and the breakdown of traditional working class communities from the late-1960s onwards also coincided with the onset of mass migration, this cultural dreamtime can at times look predominantly or wholly white in complexion.

An effort to create a truly inclusive local identity requires a less defensive stance than the one demonstrated by the local press in recent days – one that is at the very least open to listening to and trying to understand the experiences and historical viewpoints of others, and takes into account the interlinked context of industrialisation and empire and the deindustrialisation and immigration that has generated today’s community.

What gives the Black Country its strong and unique identity is, and always has been, its people – and the flag possesses great symbolic power in representing the struggles of striking chainmakers and the strong community ties and traditions created by working class people. Yet the stories of enslaved and colonised people who endured a painful path through the birth of modern capitalism, often through intimate use of the products made by the Black Country’s workers, are also part of an overall narrative that seems to have been lost in this week’s controversy.