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

@BovaryX

Yes - evidence is the right word.

It's also something else, I think - it puts in physical form the memory and the inherited trauma of that time so that the present Irish people don't have to carry it around in respect to their ancestors. It parks it - but in a respectful, dignified way so that people can move on from such a traumatic part of history with a clear conscience. They haven't whitewashed away their ancestors or forgotten their past - it is there, in its painful brutality and I think it is important that at a time of change in Ireland they had that. They also have statues of dockers on the quayside so they although the city is changing they have kept alive a memory of their past.

There is a little bridge I know of in a country town - the local school children are brought over it to look at the river and learn about river life. They can see herons and salmon, etc. The walls and floor of the bridge are opaque glass and etched on are words from elderly parishioners - sentiments like 'I remember walking over the bridge to school and seeing the herons'.

It is a very simple way of linking generations and finding commonality through change and marking the wisdom and presence of the elderly in a community. There are ways of doing things.

The stolpensteine in Holland are another. www.stolpersteine.eu/en/

These things put the presence of people back in to society and, in my mind, say very loudly to others -'You cannot wipe us out'.

to construct something requires labour, but to destroy takes minutes.

So completely true.

www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g186605-d216537-i61650482-The_Famine_Sculptures-Dublin_County_Dublin.html

c8.alamy.com/compde/atb6yg/skulptur-des-matrosen-ziehen-seil-am-fluss-liffey-dublin-irland-atb6yg.jpg

Bovary you are using the word refugee loosely. Legally a refugee is someone displaced outside their country, and the link you posted shows that a few hundred thousand Iraqis were refugees following the Iraq invasion.

If you are displaced inside your own country, then you are an Internally Displaced Person. This is what the 4 million figure refers to.

These numbers are appalling, sadly they are not the worst catastrophe since the Second World War as you stated, but they are truly appalling.

The US invasion of Iraq was an international crime and I think those who perpetrated it are war criminals. They bear responsibility as well for the atrocities committed by Islamic State more recently.

It is possible to care about more than one injustice. I care deeply about what the US has done to Iraq and would argue with anyone who tries to minimise it. That doesn't mean I can't care about what we are talking about here.

And they are all connected! Powerful nations exploiting and murdering innocent people for their own self-interest. All of it is wrong.

But we need to be able to talk about specific instances of wrongdoing without being accused of not caring about all the rest. That's all.

Dhalmeup, I suspect you won’t receive many replies. What you’ve written is an inconvenient truth.

It would be pedantic to quibble about the fact that historically slavery has existed throughout history. The fact that the particular form of slavery which existed in the USA began and took root in the English Colonies is indisputable. It's a fact. The men who wrote the US Constitution considered themselves English citizens who had rebelled and many of them where slave holders. Slavery was written into the Constitution. To try and distract from this with arguments about all the forms that slavery has taken in the history of the world is not what this discussion is about. Before African people, the English Colonists had enslaved native peoples in North America, so already those with brown skin were being marked as uncivilized and less than human, suitable as those to be placed at the very bottom of the class system imported to the Colonies from England and permanently enslaved.

John Locke, the political philosopher whose ideas were so influential in the Colonists rebelling from the Crown wrote: "Every Freeman in Carolina shall have ABSOLUTE POWER AND AUTHORITY over his Negro Slaves" in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina which he wrote in 1669. Not surprising, as he was a founding member and the third-largest stockholder of the Royal African Company, which secured a monopoly over the British slave trade in that time period.

Dhalmeup I respect what you are saying and I know a lot of people both in the US and UK would agree with you. I'm sorry you've felt ignored with your opinions. I can imagine it's very frustrating.

Post like this make me so cross
The world was A very different place and lots were involved in the Slave trade even a few of the natives from the countries involved , like now people exploit others
Why should I personally feel guilty for something that happened years before I was born and is totally out of my control
Funny I have friends from Many different t countries and they don't all hate the English ,seems strange you only have ever encountered these people
The whole world was in on it at the time and we can't change what happened
We can control how we behave now and that is what is important
My great nan had to work in a workhouse as a child someone exploited her but I'm not going to track down the ancestors and expect them to feel guilty for something they have no control over .
The slave trade also ( mostly ) ended due to people standing up against it

Thank you @MiddleMonth and @dreamingbohemian, you are the first people to reply on all of my social media platforms!

Except for my white ex colleague who wrote to abuse me and removed me from her Facebook for being a ‘enabler of racism’

Wilberforce, an English man, got slavey abolished in the colonies, not before time. Not mentioned yet I see. Lots of BAMEs from ex colonies chose to come and live here. Please tell me why if it is so bad? They could have stayed and built their country up or come over here to get an education and gone back to rebuild their country, please google Marcus Garvey, Back to Africa movement.

@Dhalmeup well said this is the thing it seems to almost be divinising people more
Lots of atrocious things happened years ok that was considered ok and normal that we would obviously be horrified at today , which is surely in some ways a good thing as it means we are learning And we don't consider these things normal

John Locke, the political philosopher whose ideas were so influential in the Colonists rebelling from the Crown wrote: "Every Freeman in Carolina shall have ABSOLUTE POWER AND AUTHORITY over his Negro Slaves"

reminds me that the Bible is quite happy about slavery too. As I recall some of the commandments are quite specific about how you treat your slaves (with a rather unpleasant distinction between male and female slaves).

Dhalmeup would you consider starting your own thread here on MN? You might get a good discussion going, and find other people who agree with you.

I don't see anyone asking anyone else to feel guilty about anything. We are just stating historical fact. There is no doubt that American and British national wealth grew as a result of the slave trade. British banks and investors were intricately involved in financing that trade and to this day we are still the country with the biggest financial investment in the USA.

This doesn't mean we don't also have a class system in which many others also suffered and that there are rare stories of rebellion and push back. It's just a fact that the power of our state (our government, law, finance, navy, military etc.) made the transatlantic slave trade possible. We were not the only country doing that, but our focus in this discussion from the OP is the relationship between Britain and the USA.

At the same time from the very beginning of the British colonies there were poor, landless white people of British and Irish descent. They always existed and they still exist. They were called "trash" and "waste" from the beginning. Their descendants (such as Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton etc.) are still a significant percentage of the American population, still mocked or self-mocking as Hillbillies, Rednecks etc. Our class system was therefore also exported from the start. At this time we are focusing on the descendants of those of African descent who were enslaved below those of European descent in that class system. Acknowledging reality doesn't mean we are apportioning blame. Instead we are asking, how did we get here? How did such a racist power system evolve?

Dhalmeup, thanks for this. You are the only who who can say it though as any white person who says it gets flamed.

Great post, Wishingstarr

@wishingstar the op stated about feeling guilty hence why people replied to that and about a women claiming the English were all responsible ans therefore she wouldn't step foot here but lives in the USA , we may still have problems here but we are not like America and it was not just the English as she claims so should she of maybe stated other countries too

@Stay123 that is so true

If we can acknowledge the existence of people mocked as "white trash" then we can also acknowledge racism. We realise how hard it would be for a poor white child whose culture and tastes are considered "uneducated" and "low class" and who doesn't feel comfortable in a middle class or upper class environment and whose family might be derided, could struggle against the odds to move into a higher place in the class system. We understand it could be a much greater struggle for them to become a doctor for example, if they are from a family where noone has been to college than for someone who came from a comfortable suburban home and whose parents were both college graduates and professionals.

There are also plenty of middle and upper class black people in the USA. Yet, there may always be another element where people question if they should be in an upper class environment. Like the black student at Yale who fell asleep while studying in a common area and had the police called on her, or Armaud Arbery who was just jogging through his own suburban neighborhood. It's just a fact that something like that is highly unlikely to happen to a white person from a lower class family.

How class and race have become comingled in this way is due to historical factors. Now I know we also like to believe we are less racist in the UK. That is not for me to say as a person with white skin, but my cousin who grew up with brown skin in London was chased down the street and knifed in the back because of what he looked like. Hopefully these things happen less and less but we need to acknowledge this happens so we can keep our eyes and minds open. There is a tendency when something doesn't affect us personally to say it just doesn't exist.

Like men who tell women that we should feel sorry for them because Feminism and the MeToo movement has made their lives harder. We know they are unlikely to have been sexually harassed or that people feel free to judge them on their appearance. They don't notice that although we are more than 50% of the population hardly any power structures reflect that. It doesn't affect them so they are usually oblivious to it.

This is such a ridiculous discussion. Does no one know how far back the evidence of slavery goes? Since long before there were English people as such.

However the English have not covered themselves in glory.

I apologize for skim reading and not realizing that arguments around "guilt" were part of the discussion. I didn't read the whole thread before posting.

Dhalmeup
Yes, UK is not like the USA in the treatment of Black citizens.
Yes, for sure, some Black citizens will ‘jump on a bandwagon’ to claim everything that is wrong in their life is because of race discrimination
Yes, there are other section of society widely discriminated against that do not attract the same attention (such as people with disabilities)

None of that detracts from the fact that there is blatant and subtle discrimination of BEM people.

A more enlightened country would have removed the statues of renowned slave owners and replaced them with abolitionists or citizens more worthy of recognition years ago. Proactive and positive action.

It’s not about rewriting history - it’s about making public statements of what we should proudly stand for as a multicultural society in 2021.

Collective responsibility is not about correcting the past, it’s about shaping the future. A collective duty steered by government and city officials.

I don’t feel guilty for anything my great great great great grandparents did, why should white people? This bitterness is not the way to end predjudice.

Exactly - my white (English) ancestors were illiterate and didn't have a vote - tell me again how the slave trade and the potato famine were their fault?

Not seeking to diminish or deny the evils of British colonialism or the slave trade, but it's something I have zero control over - and as it happens neither did my ancestors.

^I do not believe this is how we end racism, I believe this is how we entrench those views.
Smashing statues and blaming the English for the creation of the slave trade (when our own ancestors were doing it to each other long before white people turned up) does nothing^

@Dhalmeup

I agree. There is zero comparison between policing in the UK and the US. The fact that George Floyd's death in Minnesota is being used as a justification to seriously injure cops in London? To chuck bikes at horses and smash statues? This is orchestrated, the talking points are designed to obliterate the significant policing differences between the US and the UK, to encourage people to confront London cops as if they are guilty of killing GeorgeFloyd. What insanity is this? This is deliberately intended to entrench division, as you state. This is being stoked by people who want violence to ignite. And those that want violence don't give a toss about George Floyd's death, David Dorn's death or ending racism. They want to smash things up. And burn things down.

@Hingeandbracket

Exactly - my white (English) ancestors were illiterate and didn't have a vote - tell me again how the slave trade and the potato famine were their fault?

I guess that for a lot of people they are sick of trusting that people won't make offensive comments so they just get the politics in first as a self protective measure. I think if you felt continuously looked down upon or treated as second class by people then you become vigilant to that and although you can't say that every individual person is like that, enough may be to make you feel exhausted.

I don't believe you are responsible for your ancestors actions, particularly as you say many couldn't vote/ were second class within their own country, too but as someone else pointed out we can recognise both injustices. There does seem to be conflict around this comingling of white working class and black middle class - as though they are being set up against each other in a battle of who has it the worst.

Who positions these things this way, I wonder? In whose interest is it to have us all fighting amongst ourselves?