Slaves’ Descendants Don’t Deserve Reparations

A new book fails to make a rational or moral case for reparations

JIMMY NICHOLLS

Lenny Henry is, in all likelihood, a rich man. How rich is hard to say, though if you find the British tabloids even vaguely trustworthy, it’s probable he was trying to shift a house worth £2.3m while parting ways with Dawn French back in 2009. And it’s a rare boomer who hasn’t made some bank out of the British housing market (especially when they worked in TV).

One can therefore only assume Henry should have hired a better divorce lawyer, because he’s now claiming that his ex-wife owes him a few bob. Actually, it turns out I also owe him money, as does anyone in this country who has to reach for the factor 50 during the British summertime. According to Henry, every white Briton should stump up for all the free labour our ancestors forced his ancestors to do on those sugar plantations in Jamaica.

Written alongside journalist Marcus Ryder, The Big Payback is Henry’s attempt to popularise the case for reparations relating to the transatlantic slave trade. What’s the damage, you ask? Well, if like the authors you go by the Brattle Report then Britain’s bill for slavery comes to £18.6tn, or about £365,000 per every one of the 51 million white British that the last census recorded. And the bill is only a start. “Fundamentally, and at its very essence, reparations must be about power and its redistribution,” Henry writes. To fully qualify as reparations and establish true racial equality, he wants his own black-run Lloyd’s of London, a black seat on the UN Security Council, and perhaps even that the Guardian be taken away from white liberals.

At its root, the argument that Henry and Ryder make is an elision between the hardships that black people in Britain today face, and the barbarism of the slave trade that Britain presided over during the early stages of its empire. “If it wasn’t for the transatlantic slave trade, [contemporary white people] wouldn’t even think about discriminating against black people because of our so-called race,” Henry writes.

Much of the book hinges on anecdotes, starting with a genuinely amusing incident at a museum in Dudley, in which local hero Henry finds himself waving the new Black Country flag, which combines the imperial German tricolour with the region’s famous chains. Insult is heaped upon insult when both authors discover they had been paying off Britain’s compensation package to slave-holding families, HM Treasury having foolishly revealed in February 2019 that it had only recently settled debts from the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Intellectual ballast for The Big Payback is supplied through conversations with a host of racial activists, the authors receiving their wisdom with excessive credulity. Slavery is credited with saving the British monarchy, enabling the 1707 Act of Union, fuelling the industrial revolution and generally bringing about modernity. In the same breath, it is blamed for all lacklustre economic development in the Caribbean and Africa, the authors arguing that “the vast majority of black people are only [in the UK] because the legacy of slavery has destroyed the economies of our parents’ countries”.

Nigel Biggar would disagree with the majority of with Lenny Henry and Ryder say. His book, Reparations, could well have been written in direct response to The Big Payback, with Biggar arguing that “the simple equation of British colonialism with slavery … is historically untenable”, with similar shrift given to “the BLM claim that British society today is systemically racist”.

Biggar is of course infamous for arguing that colonialism was not all bad, a theme that he takes up again in his new book. Not that he shies away from Britain’s considerable involvement in trading African slaves, noting that we shipped 3.3 million across the Atlantic, mostly between 1640 and 1807, about a quarter of the figure of combined European empires. Yet unlike his opponents, he places rather more emphasis on the efforts of abolitionists, the subsequent efforts of the British in dismantling slavery, and the complicity of many Africans happy to sell their neighbours off.

Reparations is also far more sceptical about the contributions of slavery to Britain’s economic success and its role in impoverishing former colonies. As Biggar notes, Portugal and Spain traded more slaves, but did not industrialise before Britain. Estimates for slavery’s contribution to British wealth are hard to quantify, but most academics do not see them as decisive in the country’s rise to global dominance. (A recent report from Kristian Niemitz is instructive here.) As for colonies’ post-imperial fate, while Barbados has flourished, Jamaica has suffered — a phenomenon Biggar attributes to the former enjoying stronger local governance, while the latter foundered after direct rule from London was withdrawn.

Much of this is compelling, though Biggar’s later chapters do sometimes drift into personal attacks. The scholarship of Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, is described as “not generally trustworthy”, while the much-cited Brattle Report referenced above is dismissed as the work of those who “did not care to expose their common prejudices to critical testing outside their activist circle”. At one point he speculates “whether the present tendency to rub British noses in exaggerated guilt over slavery and racism is partly Remainer’s revenge for Brexit”.

Such polemical indulgences risk undermining the credibility of the historical analysis — though, granted, they can be funny. Actually, Biggar’s book is more amusing than Henry and Ryder’s, where the conversational tone feels as forced as a set of dad jokes. The inclusion of the phrase “bruv, y’get me” is a cringeworthy and sadly representative aside.

Yet while Biggar’s historical account trumps the lopsided morality tale presented by Henry and Ryder, much of it seems besides the point. Compensation makes sense when the person doing the injuring is paying money to the person injured. So even though The Big Payback supports obscuring any wealth transfers through financial wizardry — a mix of debt cancellation, financial sanctions and taxes on high finance — the bottom line is that the authors want white people to pay black people a flat fee for centuries’ of interaction, some of it good, some of it bad.

Practical objections are legion. Yet the main problem is moral: why should Henry, who has done better than most as a result of Britain’s imperial legacies, expect any kind of compensation from a white 18-year-old stacking shelves in Tesco? The fact he has no doubt experienced racism and discrimination is not a good enough reason, not least because of the growing evidence that the British state has now been discriminating against white people in public jobs, social housing and justice for several years.

Despite its jocular tone, The Big Payback is ultimately a work of ethnic narcissism that fixates on disparate life outcomes between racial groups — and average ones at that — without considering factors beyond discrimination. At one point, Henry speaks to a black former Microsoft CFO for the Eastern and Southern Caribbean who complains that he was paid half the salary of his counterpart in the US. But the US economy is worth 200 times as much as the whole Caribbean — it would be irrational if both these roles were paid the same.

Regarding disparities more broadly, Henry is simply mistaken to say: “If we do not believe people of African descent are somehow inherently inferior to white people […] then these differences must be due to the effects of racism.” In fact you can take almost any two groups and it’s unlikely they will be equally prosperous, however similar they are. History, geography, culture and genetics all contribute to disparate outcomes when comparing different groups, and in the long run of history some of these inputs were very disparate.

Such is the moral confusion of The Big Payback, at times it even unwittingly alludes to blood and soil politics. Discussing Caricom’s reparations plan, Henry describes “the central role Africa plays in black people’s lives”, adding that any reparations merely compensate for “a crime that originates from us being forcibly removed from our homeland – that homeland is Africa”. There are unfortunately an increasing number of European politicians who take the same view of where black people’s homeland is, and they aren’t progressives.

Ironically it is Biggar’s Reparations that takes a more universalist view, beginning with an acknowledgement that slavery has been constant since humans started writing down our history. Romans, Arabs and Africans all practiced it long before the age of European global empire. Slavery or no slavery, hostility to the outgroup is a common feature of human cultures, and it is ironically a legacy of European imperialism and increasingly godless Christianity that racism is repudiated throughout much of the West, to say nothing of the other injuries our ancestors inflicted on one another.

Biggar is surely correct in writing that: “History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world.” It is of course reasonable to expect lucky people to help those who haven’t been so lucky. But reparations, paid by people who didn’t commit the wrong to people who didn’t suffer it, are morally absurd.

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This article (Slaves’ descendants don’t deserve reparations) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Jimmy Nicholls

Featured image: melanmag.com

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