The English started the slave trade

[Annamaria14]

I just saw a black American woman post online,

"The English started the slave trade. They caused all our problems, they hurt generations of people. I will never set foot in that country".

What do you think? I felt a bit guilty, because the English did cause a lot of problems around the world. Have we learned from our past. How can we do better in the future

@waltzingparrot

at around 9.16 she lays the wreath and bows in respect.

She opens the speech in Irish but later talks about how it is impossible to ignore the 'weight of history'. Its many layers - how we must bow to the past but not be bound by it.

She says ' the record over the centuries has not been entirely benign. She talks of heartache and loss. The 'painful legacy' of history. To never forget those who died and suffered as a consequence of our historical past. She alludes to those who have lost loved ones (Mountbatten?)

This line really sums up how much she carried on her shoulders that day, though.

'With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we wish had been done differently or not at all'. (2.27)

Between that and the bow, I think Irish people felt that she had acknowledged them and their past from an Irish perspective and they needed to see that.

Forgiveness for the perpetrators? I don't know. I just noticed that the sharpness towards me had gone. I wasn't being ignored when I queued up for things so much. The tone used towards me changed from scalding to neutral, not warm and friendly but not as dismissive and rude as before.

I still felt the cold but I didn't feel individuals were carrying it and directing it towards me to the same degree.

Let's not talk about Brexit, howwever.

Should white British people feel guilty? Well, although it’s not their fault for what happened

If it's not their fault, why should they feel guilty?

Slavery was big business in the UK it was & sadly still is - are we responsible as a nation for the evil of slavery? Complex - sailors who worked on slave ships, the captains of these ships & the people who directly traded, purchased & sold slaves, people who invested in it - politicians & clergymen & people in power who didn't stand up against it? yes they were responsible - people who profited from slaves who worked on plantations? All of those - but how far forward do we go - how far across the grossly unequal society where British people were abused & used at that time - children working in mills & down mines? We should remember & learn about what happened acknowledge that it along with colonisation & abuse of native people as reprehensible & recognise that there is still unequal treatment & opportunities & do something about that

I think everyone in those colonised countries recognises that the solution lies in looking forward rather than backward but that people need acknowledgement in order to move emotionally forward. Else it lingers and gives rise to dissension in other ways.

@dreamingbohemian

I think there is a move to repatriate photographs of people from collections, isn't there?

As in a photograph (or image) to some people is seen as part of their stolen identity.

A good thing, imv.

We, today, should not look back in anger but should move forward together as brothers and sister, judged not by the colour of our skin but by the content of our characters.

There is much work to be done, and how much hope we can have in a prime minister who once joked about 'piccaninnies with watermelon smiles' is debatable.

Is he a racist? Fuck, yes. Is everyone who voted for his party a racist? No, of course not.

I think it is meaningless for people today to apologise for slavery, they are not responsible. What I would like to see is black/world history taught in school. I am in my 40s and I studied the industrial revolution and Britain’s economic rise but it was all about British invention and nothing about slavery, how the British empire operated, India or the Caribbean etc. My children are a bit more informed and they’ve watched things like roots but I would like to see more.

It was only very recently I had any idea of the level of slavery we had here in the U.K

A couple of people on the thread have talked about slavery "in" the UK. My understanding is that slavery has never been legal in England. British involvement in the slave trade was conducted abroad.

What about the press gangs - half the ship's crew probably didn't want to be involved. They were taken against their will.

I know they were not slaves but still not nice either

Don't people feel guilt on a human level, though?

Even as a child I remember being really troubled by images of famine countries. I felt guilty that I had things and others didn't. I think it can be a human reaction to others' suffering and it is not about relative poverty - rather the knowledge that a person is suffering.

That is something I think we must hold on to - our ability to recognise each other on a human level wherever in the world we are.

The causes of that suffering - geographical, political, circumstantial they too need deconstructing but to frame people within those concepts is, to my mind, to politicise people's suffering in an attempt to isolate and control the outcomes. Maybe that is necessary, I don't know.

Slavery in England was medeval serfdom, which died out after the Black Death when you couldn't get the staff anymore.

A few slaves arrived in Elizabethan England as amusing trinkets, but Bess didn't like it and had them all kicked out.

The legality of slavery turned on the status of a slave as a 'natural person,' in which case if they were, they could not be a slave since there was no law that said they could. If they were not natural persons, then they could be slaves unless there was a law that said they couldn't.

There were a number of court cases which mostly went the way of the abolitionists, and the settled position in the end was that slavery was not legal in Great Britain and never had been.

There is a big difference between having your labour commandeered for a period of time and being a chattel slave, someone else's property

@MockersxxxxxxxSocialDistancing

See, the thing is we should have stopped at that point and said 'hang on'. - that is wrong and not who we are/want to be.

If we look at that statement - the words BJ used, they are terms that are redolent of a past era and way of viewing others that is exactly what we we are/or should be trying to eradicate. This was a politician who said it.

We have become so blase that we can't recognise that the only tools we have are the way we treat people and the language we use but actually they are powerful tools and can make a real difference.

The imported profits of slavery were another matter. All those big Downton Abbey pads weren't funded by honest hard work.

A couple of notable figures are the fictional first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea and the very real Dido Elizabeth Belle:

@MexicanStyle

Remorse is something you feel as a consequence of something you have done. It implies that you are directly involved. How do you expect to compel white Brits to feel that?

@MexicanStyle

Yes. Didn't mean to repeat your sentiment either - I'm just thinking it through as I type.

Medeival serfdom was more than just bonded labour. You were tied to the land and owed your labour to your landlord. If he sold the land, he sold your labour with it. You could not step off the land you were tied to, and certainly couldn't go hunting in the lord's forest killing the lord's deer or you would be terminated along with your employment.

@Annamarie14 jeez really if that make you feel guilty you need to get out more. If you put into google "who started the slave trade" you'll see it was up and running in 3500BC in Mesopotamia! That's not round the corner from the UK.
Have YOU or anyone you know or connected to had anything to do with the slave trade. NO!!! Because people realised it was horrendous and put a stop to it.
Stop apologising for something you had no part in and had nothing to do with.

@BovaryX

You are so precise in this that I think there is a danger in missing the bigger picture as it is viewed from another perspective.

We can acknowledge lost lives. That it is wrong. That we know from historical hindsight (as the Queen said) that we wish things had been done differently in the past, or not at all.

That it is in the precious bonds of ordinary families and friendships that the future lies.

We can say all of this with a common dignity that acknowledges that regardless of the specifics, a sector of out community is carrying a disproportionate weight from the legacy.

We may have to think in more abstract terms to successfully address the abstract sense of whiteness/white privilege that Scott Woods talks about (it's in the oxygen around us) whilst also uncoupling the sense of historical links to a certain past ('Empire') that others hold on to. We could do that easily by situating the Empire within the wider British History and putting the focus elsewhere and realising that the triumphalism of it is misplaced in 2020. But there is plenty else to be proud of - our nature, our coastline, our contributions in other areas - real, tangible things that we can build a national identity out of that includes everyone but sits within a forward facing trajectory.

@MexicanStyle

You are wrong. Remorse refers to a feeling of guilt and regret about a past action. It implies direct involvement. Do you think white Brits are responsible for actions they didn't participate in? That is collective guilt.

The noun remorse has a very vivid origin. It comes from the Latin roots re for "again" and mordere "to bite." So, if you feel remorse, it means that your conscience is working on you, your past actions are biting you back, and making you feel very regretful

Remorse doesn’t have to be from something you’ve done - it’s a natural human feeling

Yes it does.

From the Cambridge English Dictionary:

remorse
noun [ U ]
formal
uk
/rɪˈmɔːs/ us
/rɪˈmɔːrs/
C2
a feeling of sadness and being sorry for something you have done

Nobody alive today can feel 'remorse' for the Atlantic slave trade because they were not involved in it.