Slavery’s toxic legacy
The Tablet
Dr Martin Luther King was once
asked why African Americans had found it difficult to integrate into
United States society, and to prosper as other immigrant groups had
prospered. He explained that the crucial distinction was that the
original black population of America had arrived unwillingly in chains,
whereas the others had come of their own free choice. It was an
intriguing reply, for it implied that the method of migration from one
country to another has a decisive influence on the fate of the migrants’
descendants for many generations after the actual event.
The demolition of the statue in Bristol of Edward Colston and its subsequent undignified tipping into the river has a direct relevance to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the US and elsewhere. They began as a protest against the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and drew their strength from the widespread knowledge that this case was far from unique. Something is wrong with American policing, not just its methods but its culture, and the incidents of unlawful killings of black people in police custody are only the most extreme manifestation of a deeply flawed system.
Edward Colston was a seventeenth-century slave trader who grew to be a rich and generous benefactor to his home city. He was responsible for as many as 100,000 Africans being transported to North America in chains, the very people Martin Luther King had been referring to. The North Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity in which Britain played a major role, profiting from it immensely. The slaves were treated as chattel, a commodity that could be bought and sold and disposed of when no longer useful. The cruelty and degradation they were made to suffer signified that a black slave was considered less than human. His or her life did not matter, except in so far as it had value as someone else’s property.
That this stigma has lingered in the black community down the centuries was half of Martin Luther King’s point. But it survives also in the descendants of those who enslaved them or at least tolerated it: the other half of his point. That is now called racism. Though it is unfortunate that it took an illegal act to remove Colston’s statute from its plinth, the event had a kind of power as an exorcism. It was an act of cleansing or atonement, even a plea for absolution on the part of the people of Bristol, now and then, black, white and mixed heritage.
The British like to see themselves as the “good guys” in the history of slavery. It always was unlawful in Britain itself, and the Abolition Act of 1807 was a notable moral victory, as was the work of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron and the ending of slavery throughout the British empire in 1833. But there is the other, darker side to the story which the statue of Edward Colston attested to and must not be forgotten: Britain as the principal beneficiary of the Atlantic slave trade before its abolition. Truly, “the evil that men do lives after them.”
The demolition of the statue in Bristol of Edward Colston and its subsequent undignified tipping into the river has a direct relevance to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the US and elsewhere. They began as a protest against the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and drew their strength from the widespread knowledge that this case was far from unique. Something is wrong with American policing, not just its methods but its culture, and the incidents of unlawful killings of black people in police custody are only the most extreme manifestation of a deeply flawed system.
Edward Colston was a seventeenth-century slave trader who grew to be a rich and generous benefactor to his home city. He was responsible for as many as 100,000 Africans being transported to North America in chains, the very people Martin Luther King had been referring to. The North Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity in which Britain played a major role, profiting from it immensely. The slaves were treated as chattel, a commodity that could be bought and sold and disposed of when no longer useful. The cruelty and degradation they were made to suffer signified that a black slave was considered less than human. His or her life did not matter, except in so far as it had value as someone else’s property.
That this stigma has lingered in the black community down the centuries was half of Martin Luther King’s point. But it survives also in the descendants of those who enslaved them or at least tolerated it: the other half of his point. That is now called racism. Though it is unfortunate that it took an illegal act to remove Colston’s statute from its plinth, the event had a kind of power as an exorcism. It was an act of cleansing or atonement, even a plea for absolution on the part of the people of Bristol, now and then, black, white and mixed heritage.
The British like to see themselves as the “good guys” in the history of slavery. It always was unlawful in Britain itself, and the Abolition Act of 1807 was a notable moral victory, as was the work of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron and the ending of slavery throughout the British empire in 1833. But there is the other, darker side to the story which the statue of Edward Colston attested to and must not be forgotten: Britain as the principal beneficiary of the Atlantic slave trade before its abolition. Truly, “the evil that men do lives after them.”
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