In America few were castrated, which is why there are now >40 million descendants there. A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Although the bottom line is that no Black person remembers slavery. BurningEars August 30, 2020 at 3:07 pm Theres a flaw in arguments of the form frankly you should be glad I murdered your sister. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Thats why when the question is raised, I always point out that they owe me lots and lots of money. Pretty much everybody in the West is against slavery. He adds: "The reason Equiano's story, Equiano's voice, is not as well known as it should be, is because we have a long habit in this country of not wanting to talk about slavery. I was uncomfortable using it. Would, say, Huguenot-descended South Africans suing France over the 1572 St. Bartholomews Day massacre, or Cornish people suing HMG for the suppression of the 1497 Rebellion, deserve compensation?. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. and while the responsible state still exists, Theres a fundamental weakness with all theories of universal law or justice, which is that across time and space, the human conception of what is right and just seems to be extremely varied and rarely (to modern Western eyes) pleasant.. The strongest argument I can see for reparations is not that white people bear some kind of ancestral blame. BZZZTT!! That hes able to write this article is because hes living in what is, by historical standards, a remarkably tolerant society. Should black history be taught all year round? Its a replay of the ecology nutters & the trannies. Then a young teenager, he was driven out of his council home, together with his grandmother, mother, two sisters and younger brother, by a sustained campaign of nightly stoning of their windows. Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade is part of the national curriculum, although it is not statutory. Sloane witnessed and later became part of a system ruled by terror. The problem with slavery is that it left us with their descendents and weak minded White populations. Prof Darity and Ms Mullen outline that to eliminate the existing Black-White wealth gap an allocation of between $10 trillion and $12 trillion, or about $800,000 per black household, should be paid. It may have made sense for the SS to starve labourers to death. That was at the least unusual, particularly from a West European perspective bearing in mind the practice of slavery had pretty much fizzled out there. She had no interest in esoteric discussions of the war. I know there are posters on here who see stepping into their opponents perspective as a dangerous and pointless endeavour that gives undue worth to a viewpoint they despise, but purely as a mental exercise theres usually something to be said for examining your opponents strongest argument instead of their weakest. Or anything to do with slavery. As he states, The oral history of 20th-century racial violence has never been collected or collated, but it is thereand it is shocking.. But you need a different approach if you dont think great-grandkids of the Confederacy are still fair game.) ), Who is fundamentally right about reparations for slavery? Peter completed his award-winning PhD, exploring stress and coping in elite sports coaching, at Sheffield Hallam in 2012. Giles Terera, the Olivier award-winning British performer who starred in the popular theatre production Hamilton, has recently staged a play called the Meaning of Zong about the massacre of 132 enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 and the impact it had on Equiano. A fifty quid note in the hand of the first black bloke you encounter. 7 years was the average working lifespan so it is said. My great, great, grandfather was one. Cest de la trs bonne dialectique conomique. Though I dont know where wed get $12 trillion in Confederate currency. He was a prominent figure in the campaign to abolish slavery. Now they do. Ive always agreed that the Africans should pay reparations to the rest of us for dumping all those people they wanted to get rid of on us. Like I need to hand my cash to the next lass of Rus descent I see, lest she remind me of some unlucky slave-girl that may or may not have perished at the hands of my maybe-ancestors? If the alternative was that they were killed? "He was the voice of somebody who wasn't speaking about the past as a historian, but was living it. I know. arguments are pretty weak since relying on a doctrine of virtues of the fathers risks implicitly accepting sins of the fathers.. Intellectually more convincing anyway for practical and political purposes, demolishing a straw-man often makes a better video or audio clip while simultaneously making your opponents position sound stupid. many African tribes kept slaves. They included Josiah Wedgwood (the pottery entrepreneur), Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. Purely speculatively, and as a matter of prediction rather than judging whats best, its hard to imagine large-scale reparations ever being adopted in Blighty because the ratio of losers to winners with the vote (presuming eg British Asians would be ineligible for compensation) is going to remain unfavourable and the cost of reparations across the relevant parts of the old Empire (if youre compensating British Jamaicans, presumably youre going to compensate all the Jamaicans in Jamaica once youve accepted the principle) would be considerable. The world has seen more slavery since its abolition than before. After decades of complaints, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1712 and, Olusoga writes, Independent traders were turned loose upon the shores of Africa. These traders had argued (stone-blind to irony) that the right to enslave Africans was a defining feature of English freedom and that the Royal African Company had breached their status as free-born Englishmen. I am happy with Olusogo paying reparations to himself. No member of my family ever owned slaves. Nor do I think that sugar is worse than cotton. Both groups today, especially the former, could reasonably claim historic persecution has reduced their present income and wealth. Would the good professor really be so different if genealogical records could prove he had African ancestors who owned African slaves? Theres no point pretending Europeans who profited from either the transatlantic slave trade or the use of slave labour in the Americas were somehow doing a favour to the slaves involved. Flyover Americans arent going to take it. A House Through Time returned to BBC Two in May for its third season, and once again is fronted by historian extraordinaire David Olusoga. Indeed in many cases, whose ancestors didnt even live in France or England at the relevant time. But there have been other societies with slavery where slaves had more autonomy and a greater chance of buying their freedom. Shouldnt matter whether some long-dead relative fought long ago for or against (not at all to disparage your ancestors GC, who all sound very sound) in terms of whether somethings your fault. Full text must be online somewhere but theres an extract at https://www.history.co.uk/shows/the-real-vikings/articles/eyewitness-to-the-vikings. Prof Olusoga says statues, such as those of slave traders . Note, hes a renowned economist. It seems absurd to me that anyone should be concerned about what happened 200 or 500 years ago. No? (As the first person to mention the Sokoto Caliphate ahh, forget it.). The exception is Tim Worstall, who is truly the Ron Jeremy of blogging. His choice of subject and his choice of material make that very clear. That someone did something 200 years ago means double ought nothing.. Anti-black riots broke out in Liverpool that year. How does it benefit anyone to make an issue about particular events? White people will take it. We do not know how great the demand for women was. The vast majority of Americans are not guilty. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. You may concede a point here, a point there. We pretend we do not like slavery but actually we do not like slave traders. Id say theres enormous dangers in treating this as if it was some public school debating society gig. MBE, do not entertain these people, not for one second. And I dont think this is what reparations campaigners are calling for either, as I understand it their argument includes systematic legacy issues not just the period of slavery itself, so the harm relates more directly to them not just their ancestors. What has he got to say about that? This is a moral argument. His current research focuses on stress, burnout, and wellbeing in sports, with a particular interest in high-performance environments and elite coaching. Such sources give his writing freshness, originality and compassion. Id agree that attitudes in the UK are approaching that situation, but theres still a long, long way to go yet. at scales that were unusual in the long and varied history of slavery, and levels of brutality that stood out too.. Instead he has become a campaigner working to discredit Britain, the country that has educated him, promoted him and brought him fame and acceptance. Its extraordinary success rested upon the foundation of sympathy laid down during the previous 70 years of abolitionist activity in Britain. Rather the constitution banned the slave trade and so it become economically worth it to make sure slaves lived longer. The best and brightest minds in the UK defended Stalins slavery. Quite possibly slave-raiding Gaels before that. Now sixteen sounds about okay to me if youre going to stick a limit somewhere, but then being British I suppose Im more likely to think the system Im accustomed to is normal and reasonable. Whether they are too stupid to think of that remains to be seen. But its still awful, even on a historical scale. Watching @worstall execute @richardjmurphy is like watching a very, very clever cat slowly killing at ataxic mouse. "They look to history not just for inspiration and comfort, not just for heroes and for glorious chapters; they look for history expecting to find challenging stories, painful stories, dark truths, villains as well as heroes. Indeed, third-century York may have been more ethnically and racially diverse than present-day York. Pretty much everybody in the West is against slavery. Re putting the argument for paedophilia they actually gave Gide the Nobel prize for literature didnt they? (I suppose it makes a point about blame not being distributed homogeneously, or that a certain group of people shouldnt be guilted just because they share the same colour of skin with another bunch of people you do think are guilty. It can be withdrawn. By this logic, we ought to sue the African American community. "This generation has the greatest knowledge-giving tool ever created and they have access to knowledge that I just did not have when I was younger. (and white people was pretty much the British). Oblong, . If someone from Portugal or France wants to explain why their country has done a better job of getting the balance right, Im open to hearing it. Fought to STOP southern independence. The novel became the bestselling book of 19th-century Britain; it was adapted for the theatre and generated mass-produced merchandise playing cards, jigsaws, tableware. Because it isnt about who you are, its about who your ancestors were. He saw how enslaved people who had risen up were burnt to death, castrated or mutilated, punishments he regarded as merited. But its still awful, even on a historical scale.. So he calls himself a Geordie. The thing we British are ancestrally responsible for is beginning and continuing to pursue the extinction of the sordid business of slavery. Not sure how sick this makes me. And the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. At the moment it seems to regarded as a good thing. It is a political campaign, not a contribution to academic history. If you think 14 is the wrong decision for the boundary, a better argument is a rebuttal of the strongest case for 14 rather than a rebuttal of a straw-man version of it. How would Nigeria treat a foreigner like him? David Olusoga, introduces his book Black and British, an exploration of the relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Less flippantly, Western countries are not of one mind when it comes to the age of consent sex with a 14 year-old is legal in some countries, criminal in others (yes yes, paedophilia versus ephebophilia etc, you got me).. No. Women such as Elizabeth Heyrick continued to lobby for the abolition of slavery. The many African-American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, who visited Britain from the 1840s onwards, were well received and, again, thousands of people greeted them and raised money to support their cause. You lost those two. Yet theyre so many centuries and generations removed from the crime, everybody involved with the decision-making is long-dead and while the responsible state still exists, in practice compensation comes from taxes paid by citizens who had no part in it all. 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