There are still Brits "who don't think slavery was really a bad thing" and misunderstand colonialism as about helping people out, an author has said.
During a debate about the whitewashing of Britain's history on Thursday's Question Time, Bernardine Evaristo praised protesters who removed Bristol's Edward Colston statue.
Taking the "law into your own hands" in order to highlight the "relics of Britain's murky past" is "really important", she said.
Multiple Black Lives Matter demonstrations have taken place across the UK since the death of George Floyd in the United States.
Some protesters have turned their anger on longstanding structures considered offensive to people of colour, such as those of slave traders like Colston.
Also speaking on the BBC programme, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland had said he disagreed with protesters' actions in Bristol last Sunday.
While he supported "being honest" and "using democratic processes" in considering certain aspects of Britain's history, he found the removal "disturbing" due to a lack of a "sense of order".
It was pointed out on the programme that there had been protests against the Colston statue - including at the very least the adding of a plaque to contextualise it - for decades but they'd fallen on deaf ears.
Ms Evaristo - the 2019 Booker Prize winner and first woman of colour to top the UK paperback fiction charts - argued "history is a construction".
"Okay, events happened. We have a past, and then historians contextualise that past and interrogate it," she continued.
"And what's happened in this country, historically - that has been done by elite white men who have been the historians who have set the framework for the events of the past."
Instead, she said history "needs to be challenged and re-interrogated and revised constantly".
The removal of the statue, Ms Evaristo said, gives "power to the people who really object to a symbol of their historical slavery".
She added that history has a tendency to exclude women, the working classes and members of the LGBTQ+ community - while many Brits still "don't understand" colonial history.
"Or they understand it through a certain prism where they feel that Britain went and travelled all the over the world in order to help people.
"There are still a section of society who don't think slavery was a really bad thing," she said.
"I think it's really important that we interrogate history and when you have to take the law into your own hands and remove a statue, I mean, God, nobody died, it’s just this little tin statue whatever it was that was thrown into the river and then led to this conversation we’re having now about the rest of the relics of Britain’s murky past, I think it’s really important," she added.
MP for South Swindon Mr Buckland said "applying today's standards" to the past "is a difficult concept" and said we shouldn't be "using the language of blame and apology".
Referring to the Colston statue, he said: "Use the democratic process to a proper decision to decide what to do with that particular memorial or statue."
When asked by host Fiona Bruce if he thought protesters in Bristol were wrong to tear down the monument, he said: "I think they were.
"While I absolutely get and understand the huge strength of feeling that's been engendered as a result of that appalling incident in Minneapolis and the fact that many people have just had enough, and I get that utterly, I do think that we all owe it to each other to respect the rule of law and within that to work for greater equality.
"I think the scenes that we saw in Bristol were disturbing in the sense that there didn't seem to be that sense of order."