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

As a white working class descendant of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, I object to being called priveliged in comparison to Kwasi Kwarteng, Bim Afolame and any number of other posh people of colour born into privelige and carried by it seamlessly from Eton to Oxbridge to the Tory benches.

Then it is clear you don't understand what 'white privilege' means in our current context.

It does not mean that you are more privileged than every single black person. It means that if someone else were in your exact same position, but was not white, they would almost certainly be even worse off than you are now, because they would also have to deal with various forms of discrimination.

I am also a 'white working class descendant of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry'. Grandparents from Yorkshire. Went to America with the shirts on their backs and worked the mines there. I was born in Harlem and grew up with a single mom, we didn't always have enough food.

I can still understand the concept of white privilege because however hard my family had it, a black family in the same circumstances would have suffered far worse. That is all it means.

Exactly noone is saying (or telling) anyone to bear responsibility for anything that happened in the past. It is acknowledging where we are now and why. We are often more familiar with talking about class and there is no doubt that a majority of people in the past and now who were Eurooean were peasants or working class. Those people may have had very little power or control over what was happening either. That class system was very carefully reproduced in other lands. The Colonists is the English Colonies right from the start were obsessed with "station" just as much as back in England (they enacted sumptuary laws which strictly regulated who had legal access to luxury goods, and allocated a male white citizen's seat in church according to a careful analysis of how much land he held, his property, his profession and how many sons he had); And when encountering people who were very different from Europeans, starting with the native peoples, they were placed at the very bottom of the class system, locked in place eventually by the color of their skin alone.

When slavery ended, whether in the Caribbean or the USA people and their descendants were not compensated for generations of wealth production. They found themselves still at the bottom of a racial social system in which the darker your skin the lower your social status.

It's not surprising therefore that despite incredible gains, people of African descent are still over represented in the USA and UK in the poorer classes.

Just because recent African immigrants from the past 40 years have had the resources and family support to quickly move into the middle and upper classes in the UK and USA does not negate the long-term effects of centuries of a society that has always had a preference for white Europeans, the richer the better.

The discussion on race has to include class, and race has been used since the beginning of capitalism to distract from acknowledging how much poverty is factored to enable such a lavish upper class.

I think for so many white people there hasb

Sorry that suddenly loaded before I had finished!

My god, I had no idea about Leopold II, utterly inhumane and barbaric. I've just seen the photo of the man looking at the severed hand and foot of his 5 year old daughter, she was mutilated because he did not work quick enough, I don't have words to describe the utter revulsion I feel for that man.

This is the thing though, I am starting to feel quite defensive about this now - The UK is one of, if not the most tolerant and diverse nations on the planet yet we get absolutely slated again and again when so many other countries were even more barbaric. Leopold reigned until 1908! I completely support getting rid of these statues (legally, not by mobs) but surely, surely BAME people in this country must have some sense of pride in living in the country which not only banned it but went to great efforts to force everyone else to stop doing it too?

What I worry will happen is all this anti-UK/white people hate is actually going to backfire because we really have done, and are doing a hell of a lot in this country to support and positively discriminate in favour of BAME people.

I was going to say that for many of us, especially those who are white, this is the first time we have even been part of a big open conversation regarding racism. It will be uncomfortable and our assumptions will be challenged. I have to admit I personally get irritated by the world "privilege" because it just feels like a very manufactured word when talking about these issues and not something that flows naturally from me - purely in terms of vocabulary.

However, it is definitely the case that for someone like myself, I have been privileged not to have to think too much about racism. The very fact that I could merrily go on my way and literally ignore the effects of racism shows I do have privilege!

It's optional for me. It's not optional for my cousins who are dark skinned and have African and Indian ancestors which is evident by their appearance.

This is also not a one time occurence, it's each day us being aware that relatively small decisions can have big ramifications when we all are making those daily choices in the millions.

Also, that we can have class solidarity and acknowledge that its only by coming together and demanding change for all that have the least that change can happen.

But just arguing constantly about the nature of enslavement or how many OTHER groups have suffered just as much is offensive at this moment when we are finally having a very frank, honest discussion about racism.

When we talk about the Jewish Holocaust it would be offensive to say "well loads of other people have been historically oppressed" because we know there was a historical moment, building on centuries of anti-Semitism, where it was a policy of the German State to murder every Jewish woman, man and children within their jurisdiction. They suffered a particular focus. As a result, millions of people living today lost all their relatives and communities to torture and murder. They weren't the only ones, but they were the focus and the vast majority.

African people were marked out for enslavement by Europeans. The long term effects were societies founded by Europeans where White Supremacy was a given and black people have had to constantly fight to be seen as just as important.

ohfirefly I honestly don't think we should start from a point of looking around and saying "well we're not as bad as Leopold II" or "we're not as bad as the USA".

For a start our countrymen and their descendants, by the thousands, were directly involved in the torture and enslavement of millions across the world for hundreds of years.

Also, in terms of justice and equity we should be looking to complete equality, not just commending ourselves.

For women, we would never justify less than equality by saying that at least we are not as bad as the Taliban or Saudi Arabia. Or be satisfied if men turned to us and said "why are you complaining about rape statistics or sexual attacks on women, you have the vote and can drive."

I completely support getting rid of these statues

I disagree with this. It is white-washing history (as in lime not race). Pretty much every powerful man on a statue in the uk did bad things as well as sometimes some good. Statues are generally self-aggrandisement for themselves or their powerful families and people know this. Not just statues either; stately homes, museums, churches, monuments, Castles, even stone walls snaking across the Lake District fells, are all memorials to aggression, exploitation, Profiteering and self-interest on the backs of others. Where would you stop with this ‘cleansing’? What is then achieved? Hiding of this history and forgetting it? Forgetting what people have had to overcome? That is surely a worse insult?

They are also works of art, and often grade I or II listed.

The current debate treats them purely as objects of political significance and nothing else. That worries me, as the result could be the removal of a lot of public art that makes public spaces more interesting.

Not many people say that the 1960s redevelopment of town centres in the UK was a success: the consensus is that a lot of heritage was destroyed because of an attitude that it was 'obsolete'. It was generally done by people who had no sort of understanding of any time other than their own.

Their own views are now seen as obsolete, and the jerry-built rubbish they put up largely demolished. Unfortunately, we cannot reinstate what they destroyed.

We should be honest too that while we may pat ourselves on the back for ending our part in the Transatlantic slave trade we were not directly dealing with the consequences of exporting many hundreds of thousands of Africans to a White dominated culture such as the USA. Europeans were not bringing African people in huge numbers to Europe, so our own societies were not facing the reality of a deeply stratified society along racial lines on a daily basis. We also continued to invest in the USA throughout slavery.

London banks directly funded the huge plantations that were carved out of West Alabama when the native population were finally forced off their land there and Alabama became a state in 1819. There was a huge speculative boom in enslaved people, growing and harvesting cotton in the area, all funded from London.

In the meantime the communities of black people that did exist around cities such as Bristol and Liverpool experienced frequent violent attacks from the general population.

When people of African descent who were the descendants of those we were responsible for transporting to the Caribbean did start to emigrate to the UK in larger numbers in the 1950s we know they experienced outrage, anger and unrepentant racism immediately from a large % of the population.

It just seems disingenuous to claim we are so different from the USA when the whole country was founded by British colonists, including introducing slavery based on class. The UK and USA have always been intimately connected especially through investment but obviously through language, law and culture.

The signers of the American Constitution included 2 Englishman, 2 Scottish, 2 Irish, 1 Welsh and 1 Nothern Irishman (than known as Scotch-Irish).

The British Empire was the dominant world power until after WW1, we were not uninvolved in the continued exploitation of people and resources in the USA.

That's a really good point @TomPinch

Us vs UK racism

The more I'm reading the more I'm convinced that we need more education on all past slavery, not just the transatlntic slave trade.

I was taught about the transatlantic slave trade at school, but I had no idea about any of this that was happening just prior to our involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. What a brutal time to be alive for anyone poor, no matter the colour of their skin:

The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast in this way. Professor Robert Davis investigates.

www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml

From your 'all slaves matter' article this is the main point to take. ‘....these examples translate into a probable 7,000 to 9,000 able-bodied British men and women taken into slavery in those years.’ Not sure this really compares to the 12.5M Africans transported to the Americas under the transatlantic slave trade!

I have family in USA and family here. I used to think this country was better than most on race issues but one of my cousins put it to me like this (she'd lived in both UK and US). 'White ppl in America will tell me they hate me to my face and in England it's all under the surface. I prefer their honesty'

Did you read all of it though or just stop when you got to that number, because that's not the main point to take from that article at all.

Not only that, I posted this in response to the thread title 'the English started the slave trade' - which we didn't.

pippitypoppitypoo,

I live in NZ and often notice comments in this forum by British people complaining about the Kiwis' racism.

And while I certainly don't condone racist remarks, I don't think it's any better to keep one's racism secret. I think it also reflects a difference between the UK on the one hand and colonised countries like the US, Australia, NZ on the other. Race was an issue in those countries as soon as whites began arriving and attempts to deal with it - atrocious, bad and good - have been going on since then. Whereas in the UK the effects were more hidden or latent as the population remained pretty much entirely white until only 70 years ago.

Well obvs the English didn't start the slave trade and had debate been confined to just that one narrow question the thread would have finished very quickly! But I don't need to remake any of the points previously made about the prolific involvement from and amazing wealth generated for the English (and other home nations)

That article makes further estimates on 'white slaving' through a lot of basic guesswork that I am not going to waste my time trying to take seriously. On a separate but related point, for some interesting material that debunks some of the Irish slave myths I recommend reading some of what this guy writes about - it's fascinating. twitter.com/limerick1914/status/897801340004560896?s=21 I mean to an extent things like white indentured servitude are really interesting. I just find it quite odd/a red flag when people jump all over it and try and use it as a reason to minimise discussion of black history

Further to AesopFable, if we remove it, we cannot stop it from happening again. Is this the moment to have full discussions about the nature of power and distribution of resources fullstop, at a time when inequality for all of us has increased.
I would be interested in where women's rights intersect with this too, if only because when this kicked off a lot of the talk from women was expressed as being about make-up that blended with one's skin colour. I can believe that was a low-level example, but it's a bit off-putting to those who view a requirement to wear make-up as sexist and a devaluation of women.

That's interesting @tompinch - I hadn't thought about it like that before. I personally love what happened with the Colston statue and wish I could've been there to see it! The very act of removing it and chucking it into the docks, the way many slaves were cast into the sea if they didn't survive the passage is an amazing symbols, and another piece of history that can be recorded and preserved in a way we see fit! and - the guy was clearly a douche. But yes other figures in history e.g. Gandhi being a big old racist - yes we should be careful of cancel culture and mindful of preserving symbols of how we got to where we are. In vast majority of cases yes, we should have a healthy debate and add caveats/explanations in first instance. I hardly think we're headed straight for book burning off the back of the events of the weekend though -ppl are getting into a tizz unnecessarily. Too much time on social media perhaps, losing perspective?

Too much time on social media perhaps, losing perspective? grin

Maybe.. I don't believe we will be faced with groups going round smashing statues, or trying to. I certainly hope not. It would be awful if we ended up with police versus protesters regarding statues, it could spiral out of all proportion.

What's more significant is the reports that many councils are going to review statues with a view to removing ones that depict people associated with slaving. I am not sure what to think about that. It could be a very positive thing: the removal of Colston's statue represents a failure of dialogue (although I also like the symbolism of dumping it in the harbour and I'm relieved that white people were involved), and so if councils are going to front-foot this, so much the better. It could lead to a variety of good outcomes, which depending on the circumstances could be removal, explanations, or some new public art (hopefully of a good standard).

On the other hand, it could go so much wider: the logic behind the protests is that public space should be purified and offensive things effaced. We have been here before. It's why the interior of English cathedrals aren't decorated and why they too are missing lots of statues (of saints). They got smashed in the 1500s and 1600s with even greater zealousness. We have the ruins of monasteries that Henry VIII suppressed.

And while it's true that racists deploy the argument that "its history" or "it's just a statue", the argument remains valid. People too often try to use history as a tool for teaching morals, believing that's it's only purpose, instead of recognising it for what it is: messy, appalling, beautiful, strange, challenging, or just plain boring or interesting. We should be careful about sanitizing our public spaces of it.

I see the statue of Cecil John Rhodes in Oxford is next. I have some Zimbabwean friends. They hate Ian Smith but have no beef with Rhodes, because Rhodes, they say, wanted to provide opportunities for all, despite his imperfections. I was surprised to discover that attitudes to him had ever been favourable among Zimbabweans, but it seems they were.

That is the most moronic thing I've ever heard, it is like suggesting all Germans should be punished and stereotyped as one "awful being" because of the holocaust. It is also like punishing all men going forward because of the struggle of the suffragettes. No you do not fight discrimination with further discrimination. I grew up in England, yet my ancestors did not and grew up in extreme poverty. The colour of my skin is still deemed mostly "white" yet why am I tarnished with the same brush and presumed to be privileged?

The USA is as big as all of Europe. The rural South is so vast and so sparsely populated that some white plantation owners were able to continue the practices of terror and enslavement right into the 1940s, 1950s and even 1960s.

Obviously it wasn't the UK, but this genealogist was able to trace the family tree of a black American family back to Virginia. Virginia was named for the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. The sticky fingers of England are all over the foundation and continuation of enslavement in America.

It's not a matter of guilt but in acknowledging that our "Special Relationship" with the USA is entwined (especially economically) from its foundation. Those racial power relations have influenced our own society, even if they have not played out so dramatically on our own soil.

Genealogist who tracks down modern day slavery practices in the USA.

It is possible to acknowledge both that many white peoples are underprivileged due economic or class factors for eg. AND that across a broad range of categories that black people face even poorer outcomes and discrimination. Why are so many white ppl so sensitive about this fact?

Good post, Alc.

Also I don't demand reparations from Italy which invaded my land when the Romans came here, nor from the French who were the last people to take over the UK and yes their descendants often did have and some still do have more land etc than those they conquered on these shores. Nor do we go around hating the Germans for their racism in WWI for which many of our immediate ancestors in the UK gave their lives in the fight against. However I do remember tales of people just after WII not surprisingly not liking Germans or anything German because of the 6m whom they killed.

If we take down statues and street names do we then move on to books in libraries - do we burn things like the Bible which include passages against homosexuality. Do we go into mosques and burn the Koran because it similar and then do we move to any synagogue which requires women and men to sit separately because that is sexist? no. Instead we can rail against these things in print and on line, we can march without breaking the law when lock downs are over, we can encourage, we can have petitions to remove books from libraries and the like but not break the law. I don't actually support censorship anyway nor changing history or the past.

One of my sons says we will look back on this time in the future and think we were disgusting to kill animals, eat them and the like - those are his (not my) values and he has been vegan for years. I am happy he has his own views but I would not like us in 100 years time to be taking down images or statues of meat eaters who hurt the poor little animals or a picture of a suffragette because she was wearing a piece of fur around her neck in the 1920s.

I hope after this CV19 crisis we can all come together whoever we are and particularly as women and realise we all have difficult things i life from deaths, disease to discrimination, recessions, lack of money and all the rest and just try to treat everyone whoever they are with respect... although even there I will be at odds with my son who would add animals to that list [ and yes I will continue killing flies and spiders in my home......]

but have no beef with Rhodes, because Rhodes, they say, wanted to provide opportunities for all, despite his imperfections. I was surprised to discover that attitudes to him had ever been favourable among Zimbabweans, but it seems they were

@TomPinch

Well said. Furthermore, the shrillest voices in the campaign against Rhodes are some of the most privileged, 0.00001 percent on the planet. Many of them are white. George Orwell nailed the attitude of a certain kind of left winger who hated England a century ago. Many of them were Stalin apologists. There are few historical figures who will pass the 21st century test. Why should a tiny group of people whose political beliefs represent an absence of diversity get to decide the fate of statues which reflect a complex past?