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Last week, for the first time in months, the burning eye of the outrage industry pivoted westwards and came to rest upon the city of Bristol. On Friday, the statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last June during a Black Lives Matter protest, was put on display. To the fury of some, it was not returned triumphantly to its pedestal in the centre of the city, but exhibited in Bristols M Shed museum.

The debate around Colston in the summer of 2020 was largely conducted in a fact-free zone. So it is surely disconcerting for those determined to defend the memorialisation of a mass murderer that in this new setting Colstons bronze effigy is surrounded by displays that give a detailed history of the slave traders grim career and the strange story that explains why, in the 19th century, a cult was created around him and the statue erected.

For most of the 300 years since his death in 1721, Colston was little known outside Bristol. Few would have imagined that his statue would become the totemic image for Britains 21st-century history wars. Still, the professionally outraged have never allowed Colstons relative obscurity to stand in their way as they rushed to his defence, having first looked him up on Wikipedia.

Yet as Colston appeared on display last week, carefully preserved and presented by conscientious curators, it was not obvious what the source of offence would be. The statue has, after all, been retained and with so much actual history included in the exhibit, there was a danger that those sent to report on Colstons second coming might have to write about the suffering of his victims.

Luckily, two petty grievances were found. The first is that the statue is being displayed at an inappropriate angle. Perhaps there is a perfect angle, as yet unknown to museum professionals, for the public display of mass murderers at which their crimes become more acceptable, perhaps even quaint? The second grievance: that the statue still carries the graffiti sprayed on it during the demonstration of last June.

What the Bristol curators appreciated is what curators anywhere would appreciate that the graffiti is now an integral part of its story, like the graffiti carved into Stonehenge and the pyramids or daubed on the walls inside the Reichstag by soldiers of the Red Army in 1945. Would those who argue that Colston should have been cleaned also advocate that we chip away the historic signatures and poetry of Julia Balbilla carved into the monuments of Egypt? Should we sandblast the graffiti off the hundreds of slabs of the Berlin Wall that now stand in museums and parks across the world? The historical significance of the blood-red paint on Colstons bronze hands will become greater with each passing year.

The art critic Alastair Sooke, who last week compared Colston, a man complicit in the deaths of an estimated 19,000 people, to a disgraced celebrity, concluded that not removing the graffiti was a calculated insult. Colston, not the thousands whose lives he helped snuff out, Sooke felt, was the real victim here. Have we stumbled upon a murder scene? he asked. The answer, of course, is yes and Colston was the perpetrator, not the victim.

London art critics who casually portray mass murderers as victims, like Westminster politicians who fan the flames of cultural conflict, do so from a safe distance and in a consequence-free environment. Since Colstons fall, those of us who call Bristol home have been disturbed by the way that the city has become targeted by those from outside who seek to deepen divisions rather than heal them. At the time, I wrote of the dangers and distractions of the moment. But as a public historian, rather than a public servant, the task of trying to actually defuse those dangers fell to others.

Those fraught weeks of last summer are the subject of a new BBC documentary, Statue Wars: One Summer in Bristol (declaration: I am one of the executive producers). Filmed over the summer of 2020, it is a classic fly-on-the wall documentary, made by the Bristol film-maker Francis Welch. It follows what happened in City Hall as the worlds media, the London artist Marc Quinn and agitators from outside all focused on Bristol.

From the moment BLM went global and statues in the US began to fall, Bristol, a city that has struggled more than many to acknowledge its slave-trading history, was always destined to face difficulties. What made it all the more significant is that it also happens to be the first city in Europe to be run by an elected mayor who is a descendent of enslaved people, Marvin Rees, who has just been re-elected.

The confected battle lines of our confected culture war run through both Bristol and its mayor. Mixed-race, with a working-class, white mother and Jamaican father, Rees was brought up in one of Bristols poorest districts. For him, as for many black people, myself included, the white working class do not belong to a rival group but are family members, friends and members of the same communities.

What comes across in the documentary are the dangers of the road we are currently walking down and the nightmare of division and distraction confronting local leaders.

The culture wars look very different from behind the desk of a city mayor than on the pages of the tabloids or in our social media feed. Not for the mayor the easy gesture: he has to work through solutions, try to balance competing interests, particularly the interplay of class and race.

Anyone thinking of a future in politics might well watch Statue Wars and change their mind. Anyone unconcerned by the dangers of this moment might rethink their complacency.

Statue Wars: One Summer in Bristol will air on BBC Two at 9pm on Thursday, 10 June

David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster

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A year on, the battered and graffitied Colston is finally a potent memorial to our past - The Guardian