Member-only story
Reparations: Why Do People Conflate Slave Trade With Slavery?
And why we must never stop making the case for compensation…
The existence of Black folk in the west is a problematic one.
It is an ever present reminder of the atrocities of the past and nothing speaks to the extraordinary resilience of a people than the very presence of the children of Africa in the western hemisphere.
Millions of white folk, regardless of their political instincts —liberal, conservative or radical — would happily claim that racism is a thing of the past, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary around us.
And with an increasing number of Black people connecting the dots, there’s a clear appreciation that much of the world in its current form would not exist if it weren’t for Africans who heavily subsidized the west with their free labour.
And it is against the backdrop of these contrasting viewpoints that the subject of reparations has made its way to the forefront of public life in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America.
And the pushback is as concerted as ever.
The ready made excuse is that ‘African kings’ were complicit in the sale of Africans to the new world as such, the calls for reparations are a complete waste of time.