Category Archives: Society

Arts, Culture, Government, History, Society

The West must deal with the legacy of slavery. Apologies are not enough

DEALING WITH HISTORIC SLAVERY

Intro: It is time Western governments started to talk seriously about reparations

ON December 19, 2022, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, announced his country’s apology for participating in and profiting from the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. This is the first time a Western nation has formally apologised for its role in slavery, an indictment on others who should similarly take the stand and show genuine remorse.

Speaking at the National Archives in The Hague, Mr Rutte said the role of the Netherlands in slavery was “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful”.

“For hundreds of years, people were made merchandise, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state,” Rutte said. “For that, I offer the apologies of the Dutch government.”

That the Dutch government found the courage to fully acknowledge and officially apologise for its role in “abetting, stimulating, preserving and profiting from centuries of slave trading” is highly commendable and liberating.

However, the paths to reconciliation and healing suggested by the government are equally underwhelming.  

In his apology, Rutte admitted that “centuries of oppression and exploitation still have an effect to this very day” and talked about “doing justice to the past and healing in the present”.

To start this healing process, the Dutch PM said, his government will work to “enhance knowledge of the history of slavery” and to “ensure more awareness, acknowledgement and understanding”. To facilitate this, Mr Rutte announced the creation of a $216m fund to tackle the legacy of slavery and boost education.

Yet, nowhere in his landmark apology did Rutte express an intention to take the one action descendants of enslaved people have repeatedly said would make the biggest difference in righting the wrongs of the past: by paying reparations.

The Netherlands, like most Western nations, owes the immense economic prosperity it is experiencing today in large part to the profits it made from slavery.

In 2019, a five-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council, entitled “Slaves, commodities and logistics” concluded that “economic activities related to the slave trade between Europe, Africa and America made a significant contribution to Dutch prosperity in the second half of the eighteenth century”.

According to the study, in the year 1770 some 5.2 per cent of the Dutch gross domestic product (GDP) was based on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people – a contribution that is equivalent to the entire port of Rotterdam today. Rutte did not mention any of this in his carefully curated speech.

Despite offering a historic official apology for slavery, the Dutch government clearly still has no intention to return to the descendants of enslaved people what it stole from them.

Regrettably, the Netherlands is not alone among countries that benefited from slavery in refusing to pay. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and others are remaining stubbornly silent in the face of increasingly louder calls for reparations.

The basic premise and defence of governments’ refusal to pay up always offer the same tired arguments when it comes to addressing racial injustice of the past. They claim that “no one alive today is directly benefitting or suffering from slavery”, that it is “a thing of the past”, and that “it would be impossible to determine who deserves to be paid”. Such arguments, of course, do not stand even the most basic of scrutiny. For one thing, people are still clearly benefitting and suffering from slavery.

In the United States, the Brookings Institution estimates that the average white family has around 10-times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. In the United Kingdom, too, people from Black African backgrounds typically hold the least wealth, which equates to around one-tenth of the wealth held by white Britons.

Such inequalities, compounded by systemic racism in all areas of life and society – from health and housing to education and law enforcement – are direct, modern-day consequences of slavery affecting millions of people.

And slavery is hardly just a “thing of the past”. In countries shaped by and built around it, such as in Suriname – one of the smallest countries in South America – where direct descendants of people enslaved by the Dutch were brought to work in plantations now make up most of the population.

In Africa, the immense wealth lost to slavery cannot simply be ignored or forgotten, since its return of what’s owed would resolve most of the continent’s fundamental problems almost overnight.

The question of who should receive reparations is not necessarily complicated either. After the abolishment of slavery, the Netherlands, the US, France, Denmark and the UK all moved to compensate former slavers for so-called “loss of property”. The UK government only finished paying the debts it acquired to pay former slavers in 2015. But all this time, none of the former slave-holding countries paid a single penny to formerly enslaved people or their descendants.

It is therefore high time for compensation to be paid not to those who “made people into merchandise” but to those who continue to carry the pain and the scars of their ancestors.

The Caribbean Community, a grouping of 15 Caribbean countries whose populations are dominated by descendants of formerly enslaved people, created a 10-point plan for reparatory justice for European governments.

The group wants, among other things, a full formal apology, repatriation opportunities, debt cancellation, the transfer of technology, psychological rehabilitation, and African knowledge programmes.

This 10-point plan would be a good starting point for governments truly willing to confront the past and start a healing process.

Any form of economic redress cannot merely assuage the collective conscience of white people in the West: it must be unapologetically substantive and enduring, despite the high costs of financial restitution.

Some 160 years after the abolition of slavery in Europe and the US, Western countries, quite evidently, have an obligation not only to apologise, but also to commit to reparations and by embarking on comprehensive social justice programmes.

Apologies are commendable. But descendants of enslaved people also need proper indemnity and social change.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

UK Government Policy is anti-family

SOCIETY

THE Observer’s editorial, on Sunday January 15, the sister newspaper of the Guardian, concerns how hostile the UK has become in families having children. The editor points to how parents are being forced to bring up their offspring in conditions that will have grave repercussions for society.

According to the old proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That will have little meaning for many parents today, but the proper place for institutions outside the family in the birth and upbringing of our children is a pressing matter indeed. Recent evidence suggests that government is grievously failing parents in many ways.

Alarmingly, it starts even before birth. A report released last week from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), highlighted a worrying decline in women’s experiences of NHS maternity services in England. The trend comes in the wake of several inquiries into the very poor maternity care on offer in some hospital trusts, with more than 1,000 babies dying or who are left with severe injuries each year as a result of something having gone wrong during labour. The CQC has found four in ten maternity services are providing unacceptable levels of care. This goes well beyond the general resourcing and staffing issues within the NHS that have created a national crisis; it reflects more directly a cultural under-prioritisation of the care of women and their babies that has not been adequately addressed by successive UK governments.

Government policy, too, has a marked influence on the context within which parents bring up their children: the expense in having a child, the level of support on offer when things go wrong, and the difficulties of juggling childcare with maintaining a career. Political decisions made over the last decade has, undoubtedly, resulted in Britain becoming a more hostile place to bring up a family.

The cost-of-living crisis has pushed up the already high cost of raising a child to the age of 18 even further. An estimate provided by the Child Poverty Action suggest the average figure is now £160,000 for couples and £200,000 for lone parents. Even if both parents work full-time at the minimum wage, it is forecast they will fall more than £1,700 a year short of the income needed to attain a basic minimum standard of living. This reflects the fact that as wages have stagnated over the last decade, the cost of living – including housing, food and energy – has increased, and government support for low-paid parents has been significantly scaled back since 2010 through austerity.

Successive Conservative chancellors have reduced tax credits and benefits for low-income families with children while introducing generous tax cuts that have benefited the better off: a redistribution not just from the less to the more affluent, but from families with children to those without. This has undermined the financial safety net that was put in place for families by the last Labour government. It was a provision in recognition of the fact that Britain has too many jobs that simply do not pay enough for parents to be able to provide for their children. It should come as no surprise, then, that child poverty rates have risen since 2010, with almost one in three children in the UK living in poverty.

Long-term issues in the housing market have also introduced much greater uncertainty in relation to raising children. Rising house prices mean more parents will never be able to afford to buy their own home: one in five households now live in privately rented accommodation, up from one in 10, 20 years ago. This trend will continue to rise, with more children being brought up in rented homes. This not only has a huge impact on living standards – Britain has the most expensive rents in Europe – but on safety and security. More than a quarter of homes in the private rented sector do not meet the government’s minimum “decent homes” criteria. Also, a vast number of renters remain vulnerable to short-term tenancy agreements, at the end of which they can be evicted through no fault of their own. The law in England, in particular, has much to do to protect tenants from the uncertainties they face. The growing numbers of parents who rent property deserve to be able to achieve much greater stability for their children through controlled rents and long-term tenancies.

The other pressing factor for parents is childcare, a huge financial outlay, particularly for young children not yet at school. Recently released data shows that Britain now has the joint-highest childcare costs of any OECD country. Government support with these costs is generally erratic and it is harder still to access quality nursery provision in the least affluent areas. Yet, as studies have shown, high-quality childcare provision is associated with better educational outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, higher levels of parental wellbeing and better economic outcomes for women. Modelling by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggests that investing in universal free childcare for the under-fives would boost economic growth and result in a higher tax take.

The anti-family sheen of government policy and neglect mean that many parents cannot give their children the level of security they aspire to, affecting the rest of their lives. It will also put some people off having children, with wider consequences for the whole of society given the higher tax burden that Britain’s low birth rate will impose on future generations.

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Arts, Culture, Human Rights, Politics, Society

Book banning in the US is inspiring educational censorship elsewhere

CENSORSHIP

BOOK BANNING is spreading at an alarming rate in school districts across the United States. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 books that have been banned stemming across 32 different states during the 2021-22 academic year.

These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.

Demands to ban books in American schools is not new. But book banning now has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining the freedom to learn.

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. Equally worrying, however, is the fact that these patterns of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the UK, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools – an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern – to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors have described as a mood ‘shift’ in the UK – a budding ‘culture war’ that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books – again with LGBTQ+ content – and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory.

The book banning movement has also gained the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

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