The benefits of slavery have accrued down the generations, so why are we so nervous about the responsibility for the slave trade doing the same?
By Priyamvada Gopal
New Statesman 23 April, 2014
“Should we be responsible for the sins of our fathers?” Any discussion about the deeply polarising topic of reparations for slavery, if it happens at all, takes place in these quasi-religious terms. Unfortunately, the language of the confessional immediately constrains, indeed skews, the debate. Turning a matter of material justice into one of proxy atonement does the question of our demanding relationship to history a profound disservice. It implies, wrongly, that historical events of such vast reach as slavery have no discernible material impact on our present, as though what happened to or was done by our ancestors doesn’t filter down and impact our present. This is a curious belief in a society which believes so passionately in inheritance. How is possible, at one and the same time, to believe deeply in the right to inherit wealth and property acquired by progenitors while insisting that we in the present cannot, in any way, be responsible for the mechanisms of wealth-making in the past? It’s convenient enough: my grandfather’s house is my house but how he came to own is none of my business.
“Say NO to paying for something that happened 100s of years ago,” screamed one meme that was doing the rounds on social media around the time tabloids began to claim that Caribbean nations were “suing” for reparations. They aren’t, strictly speaking, and nor can something which ended only in 1838 be compared, as it often is, with the Viking invasions or Roman conquest. The CARICOM group of nations, led by Barbados , is really calling for a wider dialogue about historical justice. Why should Britain – or any other former slave-trading nation – shy away from it?
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