Grant Shapps, slavery, racism, 'remembering' and 'forgetting.' (Part 1).

On 'Any Questions' on June 5th, the Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps, asserted that Britain had 'abolished' slavery in its colonies in 1807. The other members of the panel were too polite to point out that, as a matter of fact, he was wrong. The Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807. Slavery itself in the British colonial plantations was not abolished until 1833. After that, the owners of enslaved persons were handsomely compensated, and former enslaved people led mostly wretched lives. My point here is not just, as the American politician and intellectual Daniel Patrick Moynihan said years ago, that everybody has a right to their own opinions but not to their own facts, but to the context in which he made these remarks. Shapps was deploying his version of history to bolster his contention that Britain was in some way 'less racist' that the United States, that it had led the way in anti-racist advocacy.

As a matter of fact, at the time, it did not necessarily follow that a belief in racial equality followed from an antislavery position. Advocates of the abolition of slavery in the United States in the mid-19th century argued that former enslaved persons would not have the intellectual or moral capacity to compete in the labour market against white men, and so therefore whites had nothing to fear from abolition (See Eric Foner, 'Free soil, free labor, free men' ; George Fredrickson, 'The black image in the white mind.')

An essential precondition to begin to tackle racism in all its many forms in the present is to confront its past honestly, and not to resort to comforting myths. A nation whose public discourse prides itself on its 'anti racism', while at the same time thinking it appropriate that statues of imperialists (e.g. Cecil Rhodes) are in public spaces as a mark of supposedly consensual public respect rather than in a museum, is in a state of deep denial about its past.