There is a bit of a debate raging over whether we should say sorry or not for our part in the slave trade. Before us Brits get carried away with all the back slapping and choruses of what jolly good fellows we are over the abolition of slavery 200 years ago, maybe we should stand down off the moral high ground that we seem to of clambered upon and revisit our behaviour 200 years ago.
52% Percentage of slaves our ships carried taken from Africa.
204 Ships that left England to carry slaves from Africa to the Americas, four ships a week on average.
11m Enslaved people loaded onto transatlantic ships in Africa.
9.6m Enslaved people who survived the voyage to the Americas.
8,300 Voyages made by British ships.
2.2m Slaves taken to the British West Indies.
670,000 Slaves surviving in the region at the time of emancipation in 1838.
34% Slaves that died within three years of arriving in the Caribbean.
1772 Year slavery was banned in Britain itself.
1838 Year Britain banned Slavery in it's empire. 66 years later.
800,000 Slaves throughout the British empire who received their freedom.
£20m Amount plantation owners received as compensation for the loss of their slaves.
£0.00 Amount former slaves received.
So should we say sorry? Hell Yeah!
18 comments:
And that apology will accomplish what?
The apology will not cost anything, and it's owed to the descendents of slaves.
Why? Being a descendent of someone doesn't mean you share their hardship or your pain. I have Cherokee blood.... was I on the Trail of Tears? Does that human rights travesty affect my life or future in any way? I don't think so.
When a society outlaws something, it condemns it. I fail to see why people 8 generations removed are due an apology, or why British people 8 generations removed should feel any culpability.
Besides, I was speaking from a pragmatic point of view. The apology doesn't cost anything because it isn't worth anything. England says "sorry"? Great - that and 7 bucks will get you a taco platter.
If you guys really feel so badly about things in the past that you have absolutely no control over, dig into your collective pockets and up the aid packages instead of putting out a useless apology that only assuages that strange, inexplicable guilt. An apology you can eat is way better than one you can hear.
Or THEIR pain, that is. Share THEIR pain. Yeek.
I've never been hip to this apology industry that's grown up in the last couple of years. There are two things I don't really understand about it:
1. Why people demand them all the time.
2. Why other people, when people demand this sort of apology (even if it's weird and irrational, and on behalf of people who have been dead for hundreds of years) don't just give them one (an apology, I mean) - y'know, just to 'grease the wheels' and make them happy...
I mean. Who really cares?
Then again, I've got a girlfriend, so I'm totally accustomed to apologising for things that are not actually my fault! I do it on a daily basis ;-)
It doesn't hurt a bit!
I agree it doesn't cost anything or mean much, but some are different from others. Obviously a coerced apology is useless, unless MAYBE it has the effect of embarrassing that person and others so as not to do the thing in the future. (Such as when a celebrity or political candidate is hounded for saying a word until they grumble out a sorry.)
An apology by a gov't for a past wrong isn't the same thing in my view. What I think (hope) they are saying is that as far as we have benefitted indirectly from this bad thing that was condoned by the State (then) and done by people long dead to others long dead, and you have indirectly suffered for it, we feel badly about that and (possibly) will try to compensate you. I think that was at the heart of the affirmative action programs in the U.S., and it was a good thing in my view because some of today's blacks are still indirectly affected by what happened, but for whatever weird reason many of the programs were broadened to include other groups and that ruined the idea of the whole thing.
I see both sides.
But I’m with you on this one, Joe.
What’s the true purpose and hoped for outcome of a ceremonial apology serve for actions inherited and not perpetrated? Instead, maybe I should apologize to the guy I cut off in traffic. Or be more tolerant of the noisy, white trash neighbors and the woman with the kid throwing a tantrum in aisle five or forgive whoever left a dent in the car but no note. Kindness and awareness in the here and now would go a longer way to tolerance and unity. To quote Cracker, “If you want to change the word, shut your mouth and start this minute.”
See, my feeling about this is tht apology is somewhat of a misnomer, as no government should apologize to people today for something that happened over 100 or 200 years ago.
That's kind of silly.
However, an "apology" (for lack of a better term) in this instance would be more a formal and official acknowledgment that the government, in the past, screwed the pooch and did some horrible things. Now, it's patently obvious that the current British, American and other governments do not sanction slavery. And there have been tacit and implied feelings of regret for the past. But officially "apologizing" is kind of like an open, unequivocal way for the government to publicy state they recognize the sins of the past, how they benefitted from it, and that it was a shameful part of history.
Why is that bad? I mean, governments routinely pass resolutions acknowledging other much more trivial things.
Ook ook
Of course i understand all your disagreements and i agree that is pointless saying sorry for events that the present day politicians had no control over.
The apology i would like to see is not as a way of saying sorry, we did bad things let's shake hands and be friends.
I would like to see an apology that actually aknowledges what we did was wrong, and state it will never happen again and show real empathy with the victims.
The easiest thing to do would be to shrug our shoulders and say it was nothing to do with us, our great great grandads did it while we continue to use banks, churches and visit stately homes that were built with the money derived directly from the slave trade.
The British Government find it easy to say sorry to the families of WW1 soldiers wrongly shot for desertion and that is small fry compared to the amount of deaths we directly inflicted during the slave trade years.
The victims died two centuries ago. It's way too late for empathy to do them any good. Accepting guilt for your ancestor's actions is nothing more than taking the first step toward a requirement for financial restitution for those ancient wrongs you just accepted the guilt for.
Besides, isn't 200 years too long for this to matter? Just last week Lucy was of the opinion that our Constitution's 2nd Amendment, the right to bear arms, was easily disposable because it was that old. Isn't the responsibility for what happened 200 years ago equally disposable because of its' age?
What is important is that slavery stopped 200 years ago, and no one has the intention of starting it again. The only people making slaves of Africans these days is other Africans. The people attempting genocide against Africans today are.... other Africans. They need help, all right, and they need protection... from their own people.
No apology. The Brits ended their trade (at tremendous cost I might add), and did their best to stop everyone else's.
What harm in an apology? The precedent. First we apologize for slavery. Then we apologize for the equally horrid conditions among indentured servants. Then we apologize for putting children in coal mines a hundred years ago. Pretty soon we end up apologizing for exploiting Chinese factory workers (who, when I was last there, made 68c an hour). Then we move on to trying not to ever do anything that we might someday have to apologize for, and since standards are always shifting, we end up hogtied by our own bleedin' insecurities. Worse yet, following the apology, come the calls for reparations. Will those calls ever go away? Hell no, not if we're always apologizing and dredging up the past.
Humanity needs to grow up and realize that humanity needs to grow up and get over the past. The past was a rotten, rotten place but it cannot be changed. Better than an apology are sincere efforts to pull those people still effected by the slave trade's legacy as partners into the modern world.
Hey, Don, surprise, surprise, slavery still exists bigtime. There are sex slaves and forced labour slaves. It's called human trafficking now, Don.
You make the point that the past was rotten. Do you really think that the present is any better? Human nature never changes. Just the words used to describe it!
Cheers!
I think Don hit the nail squarely on the head with the word repartitions. That is why the word sorry is not forthcoming.
Maybe i have a different view of things with this subject but in my book if a person does something wrong to somebody else, the wrongdoer apologises.
What i do dispute is the portrayal that the Brits are such decent people because we put an end to slavery 200 years ago despite being the major participant in it.
Seems remarkably like being hailed as a hero for stopping punching somebody in the face after you have been battering them for years.
"Maybe i have a different view of things with this subject but in my book if a person does something wrong to somebody else, the wrongdoer apologises."
There is a huge difference in being a wrongdoer and being a DESCENDENT of a wrongdoer. In fact, you're not even certain of that, I'll bet. Do you know that your particular family tree contains slave-owners? Perhaps you simply live in a country that had legal slavery 200 years ago. It would take a whole lot more than either to make me feel guilty. EVERYONE lives in a country where something crappy happened to somebody at some time in history.
As far as the "heroes" thing goes, I only meant that when a society makes something illegal, it effectively "comdemns" it, and doesn't actually need to do a speech every 200 years to "renew the vows."
Daniel, I know there is still slavery. The sex slave trade is happening in every country. I didn't mean to deny that at all, but we were talking about apologies for the African slave trade specifically, as it existed prior to its abolition in 18-whatever (year depends on exactly what element we're talking about).
You raise an interesting point. Since I have only one suspected slave owner in my ancestry, my heritage is ninety-plus percent slavery free; yet I might be asked to be part of the apology / reparation act simply because I am a descendant of 18th Century Americans and Britons. My ancestors in other words were part of a larger system that included slavery.
Today, you and I are also part of a larger system that includes slavery, and will be until we are successful at getting international law enforcement to halt the trafficking of poor women out of the 3rd World and into locked brothels everywhere from Tokyo to London to San Francisco. Will our descendants be asked to issue apologies for that?
I did not mean anything you mentioned in the heroes comment Joe, i meant the British Government that is spinning the whole abolition of slavery thing into what great, humane chaps we were back then to call a stop to it and setting us up as the champions of the people we had been merrily making slaves of before that.
That was the purpose of the post, not the apology itself, it was the back slapping and the way we were relieving oursleves of responsibilty for our previous actions that irked me.
Is that what it's about? What humane chaps they were? Even though it would still be decades before a common English laborer could quit his job without risking gaol for breaking contract? Or before they stopped sending women and children (as young as four) into the coal mines? Yes, what jolly good chaps they were indeed.
Exactly Don.
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