As someone with a particular interest in the history of the slave trade and abolition, I was intrigued by this tweet about a different aspect to the story.
We focus primarily on the trans-Atlantic Slave trade which saw black Africans trafficked to the Americas, Caribbean and Britian. However, there was a history of Europeans being taken captive from Europe, enslaved and mistreated across North Africa and the Mediterranean. The history is important in its own right and needs telling, it contributes to the picture of why slavery is so despicable, wherever and however it manifests itself today.
However, rather than simply highlighting that story and making that point, the poster seemed concerned to employ the story for another agenda. As becomes clear at the end, their problem is not with the slave trade but with campaigns in the United States for reparations for the descendants of slaves.
As it happens, I’m not personally convinced that reparations is a good idea and there are arguments against them but this is not one of them. It is at best a red herring. The tweeter’s implicit argument seems to be that others were at it as well, Black Africans were not the only victims and more Europeans were taken as slaves.
The problems with that approach are first that it is irrelevant as to whether other people groups and countries were perpetrators as well as White Westerners in Europe and North America. It is also irrelevant as to whether there were different victims as well as Black Africans. ~The issue is whether or not the people in your country affected by your country’s slave trade have a right to justice and whether you have a responsibility to give them it.
The second problem is that the poster seems to be seeking to show that the other salve trade was a bigger and more egregious problem by comparing the 1 million plus European slaves with the 400,000 African slaves who went to North America. This however, depends on a rather selective approach to the facts, focusing in on one segment of the trans-Atlantic trade. The reality is that the total number of Black African slaves dwarfs the total number of white Europeans. In any case, this is not a competition about who took the least/most.
What concerned me even more was the way in which others picked up on the original tweet and used it. The primary response seemed to be from other American posters whose mentality seemed to be that they were the victims in all of this. Why was the poor USA singled out and accused of being racist? Why weren’t people demanding reparations from African countries and even from #BlackLivesMatters.
This misses a number of points, first that the people involved in enslaving white Europeans were not the same people whose relatives were taken as slaves to North America. It is concerning that some people seem to just see Africa and African people as a homogenous lump. Secondly, once again, it misses the point that the United States is responsible for its own history and those affected specifically by the United States history will engage with the US. It simply isn’t the case that the US has been singled out. There is a reparations movement in Brazil for example which focuses on land rights and Caribbean countries have focused their grievances on the UK and recently on the Rotal Family.
Thirdly, the reparations movement is not about people saying “my ancestors were mistreated and so I want some money.” Rather, it is about looking at the long term systemic effects rooted in the slave trade. So, I as a white European don’t have a grievance against Algeria or Turkey because people were taken there as slaves. Even if relatives of my ancestors, a Great, Great, Great Uncle or such like were kidnapped, then that would not give me a grievance. If there are people of white European origin living in those countries who continue to experience discrimination, structural racism and unconscious bias today and if that has left them economically deprived, then they may have a claim. In another concerning twist, some people argued that the reason thar you don’t get white claims for reparations is because the Turks castrated their slaves and it was somehow a privilege of living in the US that enabled Black Americans to campaign for their grievances to be heard as though they should be grateful and as though there was a level of moral superiority to the American approach to slavery. It’s worth noting that the “but we treat them well” argument is one of the oldest anti-abolition cards in the book and was long ago refuted by the abolitionists. It’s worth noting too that the abolitions were aware of the wider context of slavery but did not see this as an excuse for Britain to focus on her responsibilities. There also seems to be a level of naivety or possibly intentional ignorance about the USA’s race history. The US took longer to abolish slavery and continued with a form of segregation well into the life times of many people still alive today.
As I said at the top, I’m not convinced that reparations are the solution however, it is important that countries recognise how some sectors of society were privileged by and others disadvantaged by the slave trade and other immoral decisions in the past and that the effects are still experienced today. However they decide to address that impact, they need to take responsibility for their situation and not engage in what-aboutery.
Faithroots 