The call for reparations made by Caribbean governments, organisations and institutions, demanding that their former colonisers make amends for the atrocities they committed during the so-called Transatlantic slave trade– and the extraordinary wealth they amassed as a consequence of it – has mainly been met with a wall of silence in the Global North.  However, to understand the relationship between reparations for slavery and persisting racial inequalities in the here and now, the past should not be conceived as a distant place.  It should instead be viewed as a starting point to understand why the case for reparations is so crucial in the struggle against racism. 

In the 17^th century European nations created laws, which legally classified African people as goods, i.e. items of property.  The implementation of these Acts facilitated the forced migration, subsequent enslavement and appropriation of African labour.  Between 1619 and 1865, enslaved Black labour was the backbone of the agricultural economy in the Caribbean and American mainland.  Millions of people were murdered, raped and mutilated during The Middle Passage from Africa, and also on the plantations in the Americas.  Black bodies were literally worked to death in sugar, cotton and tobacco fields, whereas the capital accumulated from their labour contributed to industrialising America, Britain and other European nation states, whilst undermining the development of social, economic and political infrastructures in Africa and the Caribbean.  Following Emancipation and up until the mid-20^th century, the racial social order in the United States was maintained by replacing enslavement with Jim Crow segregation, the peonage system and the lynch mob.  It was not until after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed that Blacks could to some extent vote without fear of being lynched.  Paradoxically, lynching only became a federal offence in the United States in March 2022, and the maximum penalty for the crime is just 30 years imprisonment.  The rise of anti-racist social movements in the 21^st century, such as Black Lives Matter, suggests that the more things change regarding the prevalence of racism in society, is the more they actually remain the same.  

Maintaining illiteracy amongst the slave workforce was a mechanism used to suppress rebellions, keep slaves ignorant, impoverished and dependent on their masters.  Similarly, the disproportionate school exclusions of Black children in Britain’s contemporary educational sector, constrains their subsequent labour market participation and condemns African Caribbean families to generational poverty.  For hundreds of years European slaveowners commodified the bodies of Black women.  They produced children, for the commercial benefit of their owners, who had the same slave status as their mothers and were forced to labour in the plantation fields alongside them.  In the U.K. today, Black female bodies are still perceived through the lens of their race.  Racism is acknowledged as a major factor in ethnic health inequalities, and evident in the disproportionality of miscarriages and stillbirths between Black and White females.  In comparison to their male peers, increasingly more Black women are accessing occupations in the higher tier professions of the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classifications.  However, women of African heritage are still over-represented in menial low-paid and insecure work, which leaves the majority of them on the periphery of poverty.  

Blacks are more likely than their White counterparts to experience long-term unemployment, debilitating mental illnesses and reside in areas of high social deprivation.  Black males are also overrepresented in the criminal justice systems of Britain and the U.S., formerly the two major slave-owning nations.  The Blackening of the U.S. and U.K. prison populations since the 1980s also suggests that prisons are the new plantations, in which the appropriation and exploitation of Black enslaved labour has been superseded by Black unfree labour.  The negative social and economic experiences of Black people, in the education and labour markets, and also in the housing and health sectors, are not unique to Britain and America.  They are normative features, albeit operating on different levels, in the societies of every former colonial nation.  

What I argue in this blog space is that racism continues to constrain Black life-chances and opportunities.  Moreover, racial inequality, in neoliberal capitalist societies, emanates from historical relationships of power.  The current geo-economic dominance of nation states in the Global North, and poverty and political instability in the Global South, cannot be fully understood without examining the past colonial and imperial footprints left by European nations.  The case for reparations suggests that the West became rich at the expense of the rest, and the enslavement of Africans was instrumental in that process.  The posts I will be uploading here will consist of research, articles, narratives, testaments and other sources of evidence supporting reparations for slavery, and its significance to racial justice.  The aim is to demonstrate how the past provides a window to understand the functions of racism and race inequalities in the present.  I welcome your comments, posts and views on the perpetuity of racism and what forms of structural reformation are needed to achieve an equitable society.  Your views are welcome, even if they disagree with my own.

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