Cheap ass presentism. The race obsessed Department of Education goes to considerable lengths to distinguish Caribbeans and West Africans. The enslaved Africans had to wait another five years for their freedom and were not given a penny. Pretty much everybody in the West is against slavery. To me personally, this is the thing. So wherever the wealth came from, it wasnt just slavery (or even mainly), Olusogas an alright presenter but a class A race hustler, Edward Lud August 30, 2020 at 9:12 am We could just cut to the chase, and impose a reparations tax on anyone who is descended from from anyone who did something, er, wrong.. For almost 60 years, there was impasse. Pope Nicholas V gave his blessing, so long as the Vatican benefited. They deliberately bought skewed mostly male gender balance. Thats before you get on to the Khoisan and the Zulus, the Carthaginians and Romans, the Vikings versus pretty much anyone else who lived within raiding distance, Theres a fundamental weakness with all theories of universal law or justice, which is that across time and space, the human conception of what is right and just seems to be extremely varied and rarely (to modern Western eyes) pleasant. Blacks like Mr Olusoga despite endlessly banging on about it seem to overlook the fact that they are in a minority. By David Dabydeen (Photo By Alamy) Nineteen eighty-four was a transformative year for David Olusoga. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxc5ENT8ajg, https://www.history.co.uk/shows/the-real-vikings/articles/eyewitness-to-the-vikings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestmannaeyjar, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/normans-and-slavery-breaking-bonds, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/world-of-domesday/order.htm, Apparently Essay Mills Must Be Made Illegal, Why Oxfam Can Go Boil Their Heads Over Vaccine Patents, The real point about climate change is how cheap the solution is, The excellent Tim Worstall- The Register, Tim Worstall is a darn good economist- Don Boudreaux, Tim Worstall, you pendant- Polly Toynbee, .more sensible than most right wing nutjob bloggersBob Piper. Though I dont know where wed get $12 trillion in Confederate currency. Needless to say they should pay us reparations for this too. To be honest, I was a bit sceptical about the Olympics coming to London, but the atmosphere across the capital was genuinely wonderful . One in which enslaved people suffered and even died from malnutrition, as the economics of the slave trade meant that it was cheaper, at times, to starve people and then replace them than it was to provide them with food. He was Chairman of Moneysupermarket Group from 2014 to 2019 and Senior Independent Director of Close Brothers Group plc from 2006 to 2014 and is a Past President of the Chartered Management Institute. Like I said, as a mental exercise, if I do my best good faith effort to imagine an argument for reparations, I reckon it would concern harms committed by the state (which unlike the slave traders and owners, is still about today) and an argument that it breached some alleged fundamental/universal doctrine of law so that even the states efforts to put the slave industry on a legal footing were null and void. Then the second. Britain should be proud of helping to stop (African to America) slavery, like the Republican Party and unlike the Democrats. Tull played professional football for Northampton but instead of signing up for Glasgow Rangers, he enlisted. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. White communities suffer huge losses from Black crime. When the American Civil War interrupted the supply of cotton, hundreds of thousands of British workers were made destitute, dependent on soup kitchens, and the British economy was dealt a thunderous blow, all because an ocean away the forced labour of four million enslaved black Americans had been disrupted. The historian tells Michael Segalov about getting up early, reading George Orwell, taking his dog George for a walk, playing his guitar Rather that certain western states, still in existence therefore potentially still liable, regulated and indeed encouraged the development of both the transatlantic slave trade and the slave-labour economic systems of the colonies, at scales that were unusual in the long and varied history of slavery, and levels of brutality that stood out too. He is a Cultural Marxist trying to destroy the West. Now they do. "So when black history was missing - the history of empire, the history of slavery - was missing from my history lessons, I didn't have a place to go to discover those missing chapters. Both groups today, especially the former, could reasonably claim historic persecution has reduced their present income and wealth. He was born in Nigeria but arrived in the . Both of these need proof. Fryers book was monumental, inspiring conferences, publications, the setting up of local history groups, the establishment of Black History Month, and radio and television programmes. Over 150 years in America. I assume he is not very bright and Race Hustling is very lucrative. It began to alter (slightly) the history curriculum at university level: the first undergraduate one-year course on black British history and culture was taught at the University of Warwick in 1984. Tim may be wrong about stuff, but ..that, ultimately, makes up for his beating squirrels to death for a hobby, Tim Worstall a horrid man who is anti-minimum wage among other repugnant things Socialist News. The argument isnt whether historical slavery was right or wrong or who should accept responsibility for it. There is no reason to think one system was more or less brutal than the other. Even did something positive. Olusoga has benefited from and added significantly to the work of Fryer and other historians such as James Walvin. P rofessor David Olusoga is reviewing a disorientating year from a familiar place: his white-painted study, the one with the guitars hanging from its walls. In 1986 I came across the book Staying Power by the British journalist Peter Fryer. Prof Darity and Ms Mullen outline that to eliminate the existing Black-White wealth gap an allocation of between $10 trillion and $12 trillion, or about $800,000 per black household, should be paid. They did not pay for them and were going to kill a lot of them anyway. @ Boganboy More than a million copies were sold in Britain cheap pirated versions reached a mass readership. I brought up paedophilia to demonstrate that there are things not worth my time. One person who had a huge impact on Britain was Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved man who bought his freedom and wrote compellingly about his experiences. David Olusoga meets Janice Haber and her family, the descendents of Jewish . (If the likes of SMFS believe Western society will fall apart without a return to traditional Christian-inspired values, I suggest they either don a pessimists crash-helmet or just cling on and enjoy the ride to Hell in their top-gear handcart. Sloane witnessed and later became part of a system ruled by terror. And the transatlantic slave trade? We do not know how great the demand for women was. It isnt happening now. The government has said the "flexibility within the history curriculum means that there is the opportunity for teachers to teach about BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) history across a spectrum of themes and eras" so it did "not believe it was necessary to change the curriculum". David Olusoga Historian, broadcaster and film-maker. Theres an argument about judging people by the standard of their times, though even in the 1500s moral and religious objections to the slave trade had been made and the rationale of crimes against humanity is that some things are so abhorrent they could never truly be legal no matter what moral code the perpetrators justified themselves with. I know there are posters on here who see stepping into their opponents perspective as a dangerous and pointless endeavour that gives undue worth to a viewpoint they despise, but purely as a mental exercise theres usually something to be said for examining your opponents strongest argument instead of their weakest. So he calls himself a Geordie. (At least in our society) Get over it. The following decades were taken up with popular and political rhetoric about immigration and parliamentary acts to limit blacks coming to Britain. 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. His dad met his mom at the city's university in the 1960s. Video, 00:02:30. And the fact youre moved to tears by discovering for the first time a great-great-great-grandmother of yours was a prostitute single-mum with seven kids or a great-x5-uncle you had never heard of was imprisoned for murder, well, your utter lack of knowledge simply reveals how little youve been influenced by them, so youre hardly discovering a new facet of yourself at all. Then the adult men became profitable too. That was a bad experience but he should know that you cannot judge a whole country by what happened when he was young. A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. If more African-Americans started to vote Republican and the Democrats felt they needed something radical to boost their offer, and had enough support from liberal whites and other groups to risk further losses among blue-collar whites, for example. In dealing with the black contribution to the First World War, for example, he cites popular gratitude and admiration for black Britons among them Walter Tull, who fought on the Western Front. Would, say, Huguenot-descended South Africans suing France over the 1572 St. Bartholomews Day massacre, or Cornish people suing HMG for the suppression of the 1497 Rebellion, deserve compensation?. If you think 14 is the wrong decision for the boundary, a better argument is a rebuttal of the strongest case for 14 rather than a rebuttal of a straw-man version of it. Surely the US has already spent much more than that on black Americans. Different people can argue the toss from different viewpoints and perspectives but in many ways their arguments pass each other like ships in the night, because they havent all got nobodys got an absolute frame of reference to judge things with respect to. They included Josiah Wedgwood (the pottery entrepreneur), Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Because it isnt about who you are, its about who your ancestors were. The masses who once supported black freedom now campaigned for the Deep South. As Black British History Month draws to a close, TV historian Prof David Olusoga looks at the impact it's had - and how young people are taking it on. Or anything to do with slavery. And even if you personally disagree with it, what would be the strongest argument for some form of legal settlement? But as someone who is damaged by slavery I have lived in racially mixed communities and I am happy to see Obama and Kamala pay up. All in all your typical West African is far more likely to have ancestral connections to the slave trade than your typical Brit. at scales that were unusual in the long and varied history of slavery, and levels of brutality that stood out too. And they will go looking for parts of the past that aren't on the curriculum, and they evidently do. The point about slave descendants in Georgia being better off than descendants of slave sellers from West Africa is reasonably strong (though look back in everyones ancestry and youre likely to find, far back enough, a mix of slaves, owners and probably traders too). In the system that made Sloane wealthy, black women sought out herbs, plant species that he carefully identified and categorised, and used them to induce abortions, determined as many were not to bring into the world children who would be born items of property and destined to live short, brutalised lives. David then moved with his mother and three siblings in the north-east of the UK. In the case of slavery the answer is clear. Away from the creative arts, the Equiano Project aims to promote race equality and he was mentioned in Parliament during a debate on Black History and Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum. December 2020. That is not true. No. Dr Peter Olusoga is a senior psychology lecturer at Sheffield Hallam university. They may have been turning people they would have killed into a profitable commodity. . 7 years was the average working lifespan so it is said. In that moment, his interest in history overlapped. The publication in 1852 of Uncle Toms Cabin, by the American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, swelled national sympathy for the plight of black slaves. It could not have happened at all unless African traders and kings had offered slaves to the Europeans. As a nation, we still have only a dim understanding of the slave system that funded Sloanes collecting. Olusoga is making an appeal to white guilt. if he wants to be an historian he should present a fair and realistic picture of what happened, Your email address will not be published. Theres no point pretending Europeans who profited from either the transatlantic slave trade or the use of slave labour in the Americas were somehow doing a favour to the slaves involved, even if, as it happens but their owners could not have predicted, their surviving descendants ended up financially better off on average than the counterfactual of remaining in Africa. Their cities, as well as their comfort, will rapidly decay. Nineteen eighty-four affected him in another way: the publication of Peter Fryers groundbreaking Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain introduced him to the scholarship needed to understand his position in Britain. Thats fine, BraveFart. Viking Dublin was a major slave-trading centre (English, Irish, Scots, anyone else they could get their hands on). They organised a boycott of sugar, produced more petitions and hosted meetings. Slavery within West African societies being different again I dont think the places with very high rates of local slavery were anything like the sugar plantations. Required fields are marked *. One issue about Westerners buying slaves via a chain of commerce that often ultimately involved Africans selling other Africans at traditional slave-trading locations (there was some slave-raiding by Europeans directly, but rarer) is that the extra demand distorted the market, led directly to more armed slave-raiding expeditions against rival tribes and so on. While I dont think they persuaded anyone, they did shift perspectives a bit. I dont think the traders can be given a pass on this front either., Just means they werent alone in being in the wrong.. Dr Peter Olusoga is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology. The many African-American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, who visited Britain from the 1840s onwards, were well received and, again, thousands of people greeted them and raised money to support their cause. The problem with slavery is that it left us with their descendents and weak minded White populations. Fought to STOP southern independence. "They look to history not just for inspiration and comfort, not just for heroes and for glorious chapters; they look for history expecting to find challenging stories, painful stories, dark truths, villains as well as heroes. Anybody can do this. I havent said anything about my personal sense of guilt or responsibility. Olusogas stated purpose is to argue that black British history is not about migration and settlement, whether of black servants in the 18th century or black workers in the Windrush era. I am not so sure about that although it is another argument. "Equiano is the most important voice that we have from the British experience of slavery and the slave trade," he said. Women, denied a meaningful role in politics, formed their own organisations, writing tracts, pamphlets and poems, gathering signatures for petitions and fundraising: At certain times and in certain places they were the engine room of the movement.. Women such as Elizabeth Heyrick continued to lobby for the abolition of slavery. In 1796, a bill was defeated by only four votes: a group of abolitionist MPs went to the opera and missed the vote. Once insignificant villages, great cities such as Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow sprang up on the profits of slavery. Whoever has the upper-hand in power political, cultural, economic, military or whatever other form is decisive at that moment. Like I need to hand my cash to the next lass of Rus descent I see, lest she remind me of some unlucky slave-girl that may or may not have perished at the hands of my maybe-ancestors? She wasnt interested in my academic pursuit. Which of those societies does Olusogas ancestry come from? Would also apply even if down a different family line there had been beneficiaries of the slave trade. But any planter who deliberately starved his slaves to death would quickly go bust. Its very noticable how nobodys mentioning that the Spanish Empire were doing this for several centuries before the British got involved. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. "The way history is viewed is changing. David Olusoga, 49, is a television presenter and historian. This is indeed tu quoque. "I don't know why this generation has a different relationship with the past, goes to the past, expecting and looking for different things to earlier generations, but that's really is my observation about them," he says adding the internet has played a huge part. Yet American slave-produced raw cotton continued to feed the 4,500 mills of Lancashire. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. Welsh slave-raids into England continued until early Norman times. My great, great, grandfather was one. The Russians do not have these problems because they are not ashamed. First launched in London in 1987, it aims to highlight and celebrate what black people have achieved in Britain throughout history. Fair point. In America few were castrated, which is why there are now >40 million descendants there. You dont have esoteric discussions with paedophiles any more than you would with serial killers. Hey, we do not even have to go that far. Used to be on a long-dead and much missed forum where the topics of debate ranged far wider than they do here (as did the viewpoints I think it would be useful if us right-wing brexity mob didnt chase off the sensible non-right-wing non-brexity types so much). 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