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Should Charles III Commence His Reign By Acknowledging and Apologizing For Britain’s Past Sins?
Given what is at stake, I believe so…
It was Prince Williams’s staggering ignorance of history during his recent trip to Jamaica that did it for me.
Here’s a young man who had attended some of the very best schools that money can buy in the United Kingdom and yet walked into a meeting with the Jamaican Prime Minister, with less than basic knowledge of his family’s atrocities and history of the last four centuries.
Even if he did have some knowledge, it was certainly not present when he opened up his mouth to speak.
Some will argue that this isn’t by accident but by design.
Millions of young men and women of Williams age will have gone through school learning next to nothing about the true extent of the brutality of the slave trade and colonialism under the British empire.
As with these things, you can only cover them up for so long.
However, in the last eight days, Britain has had to face such an extraordinary reckoning.
It was almost as though people were waiting for Her Majesty to die in order to raise grievances that had been festering for the longest time.
First it was Uju Anya.
Her tweet did send tremors down the establishment in ways that you can hardly imagine.
Not even the jeers of tens of thousands of Irishmen at a football stadium had the same effect as the tweet of one Black woman in far away Pittsburgh.
Not even the New York Times opinion piece criticizing the pomp and pageantry of Her Majesty’s funeral generated as much foaming and anger among the English right wing brigade as what Professor Anya had to say about Queen Elizabeth.
And not even the arrests of those who dared to say that the monarchy should be abolished have garnered as much opprobrium as Black folk who have arisen from…