Royal commentator says that African descendants of past kings should pay reparations for slavery

[cocococococococo]

😳
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-jr-fordwich-slave-trade-reparations-b2171510.html

I didn't say he'd traced them back to the 1600s. I said he could trace them back to slave times which is the 1800s. After slavery there are birth/death/marriage certificates, records when they left the island, before that there are records on the plantation books where slaves were recorded just like other stock. They are historic documents and I suppose it depends on local practice but in his case they were available.

His GF was born in the 1870s or 80s I think and he knew alot of the family oral history, name of plantation etc.

I have met people from Africa in healthcare working 7-14 days on site - not allowed to leave for £14 an hour! Meanwhile other British nurses and Doctors are earning 3-4 times that an hour

British nurses earning £56 per hour? 🤔

Because the slave owners took the money and ran.
Most of the aristocracy had plantations in the Caribbean and other places, parliament voted this massive payout in the 1830s, most MPs benefited directly from that payout. Their names are recorded, some are available but most have not been released, a surprising amount of information about plantations is available online, right back to the mid 1600s, a lot more in archives not yet digitized.
Slaves were valuable and “breeding” records were carefully kept, just like cattle, odious but a fact of life at the time.

Many ordinary people owned slaves, or part owned. It's not as simple as upper and lower classes.

The commonly held belief that Vikings stole British women is largely found to be incorrect. There is very little British DNA in scandinavia, so actually it is thought some vikings may have raped/ had relationships with British women in the UK but they did not take them back home.

If you were not around when slavery took place and do not want hear about reparations. Why pay slavers up until 2015 - your taxes paid for this. Why didn't you complain then?

Thomas Sowell (a black american economist) has some interesting videos on Youtube on the subject of slavery.

According to him, it was ubiquitous throughout history, in almost every civilisation in every part of the world, slavery was a normal thing.

It almost never had anything to do with race, across history as a whole most slaves looked like their owners. (Even though prisoners-of-war was one of the most common ways of creating new slaves.)

Thomas More's "Utopia" envisaged that there would be slaves in Utopia! Among his rules for more humane slavery were that only prisoners-of-war and serious criminals could be enslaved, and the children of slaves would not be slaves. (But apparently Utopia was a satire, so not sure if we should take this seriously.)

Sowell says that 19th century European imperialists did in fact make a unique contribution to the history of slavery - by deciding to end it. The British made the biggest contribution, once they decided slavery was wrong they sent (or threatend to send) warships to many places to end it, including in countries that weren't part of the British empire. But it wasn't just the British, the French and some other European countries also got involved in ending it. He claims this is the first time in human history that it became widely accepted that slavery was wrong. (Although my own googling found that one Chinese emperor banned it a thousand years ago, but it returned after his death.)

With regard to black American disadvantage being a legacy of slavery, I don't remember the details, but he claims that the discrepancies people blame on slavery only came into existence after the American welfare state was founded, a long time after the end of slavery. (I think he was focusing on single parenthood, which only became more prevalent among black Americans than among whites in the 1960's.) (I may not have got the details in this paragraph right, please refer to YouTube if this matters to you!)

I always wonder to what extent people who say things like this are basically using a "taste of their own medicine" strategy.

What he's suggesting makes as much sense as most of the suggestions for reparations from people like Ibram Kendi. You could probably equally reasonably call from the descendants of these people to pay the descendants of the people who were sold off.

Of course in every instance it's pretty much totally impractical to do any of these things and won't solve a damn thing.

I tend to think it's a kind of upper middle class distraction technique to stop people thinking about the degree to which most of us depend on the exploitation of people in non-western countries right now.

I think his take on your last paragraph would be somewhat more complicated. Though he does see a lot of poverty among the poor and the black poor in particular today as stemming from the precipitous drop in two parent families in the 60s and 70s.

We didn’t pay slavers until 2015. See above

Not in the uK they didn’t.

Yes, I'm afraid they did. Looking at the list of owners, many people of lower levels in society owned slaves, or part-owned.
Not slaves in the UK, obviously.

Tax the rich more. There are your reparations. There’s not a rich person alive who isn’t linked to something nefarious.

For goodness sake, there isn't a poor person who isn't linked with something nefarious either.
And do tell how you would define rich. I imagine about £5000 pa better off than you.
And who would you pay it to?

Me too

Frankly as a working class descendant of working class ancestors the Crown Jewels make bigger all difference to me and I’d happily surrender all the jewels in the U.K. who’s acquisition dates to colonial times.

Because it makes bugger all difference to me, just to emphasise that again.

I do wonder though if any of the foreign aid and health care and genuine charity work provided by Britain and the British over the years is going to be offset against some reparation claims?

And if not, why not?

(and ‘bigger’ in first paragraph should have been ‘bugger’. I have a well-brought-up autocorrect).

‘Up until 2015 we were paying back the slave owners via our taxes. Why wasn't any of that money paid to the enslaved?’

Exactly. All slave owners were extremely generously compensated when slavery was abolished. Their descendants live in the life of luxury. Meanwhile the actual slaves got nothing and their descendants therefore inherited nothing and suffered from the impacts of discrimination based on the fact they are the descendants of slaves.

Can you imagine an alternate reality where the Nazi’s had been compensated for losing the war and their descendants became rich and respected and the Jews were ‘freed’ from concentration camps, got nothing, had nothing to pass on to their children, suffered discrimination from state institutions all because they were despised for having ‘no history’ apart from being held in concentration camps?

The descendants of those who received compensation for having ‘their’ slaves taken away and are pictured in Tatler sitting in homes in Mayfair or The Hamptons should be charged a percentage to be given to Caribbean countries, African American institutions and South American African institutions. Alternatively, all Caribbean countries should have their debts cancelled. They do not owe European countries or America a brass tack. It’s they who are owed.

Article on the financial disparity between those families who owned slaves and those who were slaves. Mitch McConnnel is one. Lording it over people due to his ancestors crimes against humanity.
www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1028031

The commonly held belief that Vikings stole British women is largely found to be incorrect. There is very little British DNA in scandinavia, so actually it is thought some vikings may have raped/ had relationships with British women in the UK but they did not take them back home.

Or the kids did not survive the ill treatment meted out to their mothers at the time. Or some combination of both. DNA is not absolute.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade is the only one where the slave owners received compensation.

The British government paid 20 million pounds – the equivalent of around 17 billion pounds today – to compensate slave owners for the lost capital associated with freeing slaves. This payout was a massive 40% of the government's budget and required many bonds to slave owners to effectuate the law. Their descendants are some of the wealthiest people on the world.

The government didn’t finish paying off the debt until 2015, hundreds of years after slavery was abolished. So if the slave owners descendants were still getting paid a monthly cheque into their bank account until less than 10 years ago, the argument that it happened hundreds of years ago and thus the descendants shouldn’t get anything doesn’t hold up.

They can state their opinion, but it's not going to happen. Working in the legal area, concepts of reparations and fairness and fraught with difficult. And generally, if you are the "winner", you get away with almost anything when you add in a longer time scale and cross-border legal systems.

We (and other empires in the past) regularly sent our armies abroad to invade, exploit, murder, rape. Most people think that was "bad", we don't do it so much these days, our victims will never get appropriate compensation.

From working with victims of serious crime (rape, abuse), it's an awful realisation that many of them encounter during the process, what is done is done, and there is no going back. Many continue in the legal process to hopefully make thing easier/better for others in the future.

If you are interested in a related current case, you could consider reading this:

www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/14/the-last-colony-by-philippe-sands-review-britains-chagos-islands-shame

Yesterday I read about a 19th century woman, a slave, who married a white man. They moved from the USA to Antwerp because it was difficult for a mixed race couple to live together in the States at the time.
While in the USA they made money by renting out their two slaves by the day.
So would her descendants get reparations?
Plus it's very naive to think that only people who are rich today benefited from this.

Stop this nonsense and sort out modern slavery

One more for your list:

"Will the Irish pay reparations for the people they took from Great Britain as slaves?"

St Patrick is the most famous slave, but not the first or the last.

I agree with you that reparations isn't the answer and neither is white guilt.

Yes they did, it's incredibly well documented. Many ordinary people inherited slaves in the same way they inhertied Uncle Albert's rocking chair, or 1/100th of Auntie Doris's estate.