Slave Restitution

The "W" Word 163 Comments

I admit some remorse after reading this column in the Torstar;

“I’m not certain the truth about history will do much to enhance the cultural esteem of white students, though perhaps ultimately, that’s what we need is for black people feel [sic] a little better about themselves and for white people to feel a little worse.”

Mostly for the 45 seconds I’ll never get back, but as badly as it’s penned, it does ask a question that I’ve struggled with most of my adult life. Why can’t I feel worse?
I live in a modern western society, blessed with wealth I’m told was extracted at a cost of centuries of pain and exploitation. But try as I might, I cannot bring myself to share this essential white burden.
While my melanin content is a product of my birth, “guilt” does not come easily to me. Call it a flaw in character, but my guilt has always been partnered with “consequence” – consequence for my transgressions – not my mother’s, nor my grandfather’s three times removed.
I cannot feel their pangs of conscience. Their remorse eludes me.
And even in those rare moments during quiet reflection, when I push back the force of reason and allow quivers of 18th century slave-trading shame to wash over my 21st century privilege… I have no place to put it.
Scotland was never known for its cotton.
While I’m sure many Scots grew fat trading in human bondage, I can’t count my rooming house ancestors among them.
And there withers the root of my spiritual failure. Like the African hyphenated people of today, my cultural history is lacking completeness. Their ancestors were robbed of their liberty – my ancestors were deprived of their slaves.
History has never fully reconciled my people, haunted as we are by a record of slavelessness.
Our society, our governments, must reach out to support our search for worse feelings, recognize and answer for our diminished angst.
I know there’s no turning back the clock. No government can compensate my ancestors – men and women who toiled their own soil, tended their own flocks, washed their own laundry. No program of today could provide the restitution that might fulfill my ancestral guilt – a slave of my own.
But they could pay for a maid.

163 Replies to “Slave Restitution”

  1. How about me? My German ancestors were enslaved by the Romans.
    I want compensation – two weeks all expenses paid on the Amalfi coast would barely start to repair the damage.
    Who do I call at the Italian Embassy?

  4. I believe in reparation for slavery.
    I think it should come in the form of a one-way airline ticket to Africa.

  5. Weren’t the Scots persecuted, driven off their lands, or was that just the Irish? I’ve got a healthy dose of both in me, but, just like Kate can’t feel generational guilt, I can’t feel generational victimization. I just hope that the Irish didn’t drive out the Scots, or vica-versa, because then I would really be conflicted.
    If Kate does manage to feel “down” about her heritage, she might want to try the following book:
    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

  7. Slavery is a reality amongst all peoples, which the Toronto Star, sublime in its ignorance, ignores.
    As pointed out above, slavery was a reality in every part of the world. Without exception. It’s an economic mode and has many types, including whole tribes enslaved, or people caputured in raids, or women, or children, or ethnic groups.
    It was a reality amongst the Greeks and Romans. Oh, and heck, amongst black peoples too. Among the Arab Islamic nations. Still is – eg, in Mauritania, in Niger. It’s widespread, now, in the ‘developing’ countries. It was the West who first moved out of this economic mode, by freeing people into the market rather than dependence economy.
    Of course, the left won’t acknowledge any of this. But, transforming young black students, who have no parental or great, great grand parental history of slavery, into victims-of-slavery is one of the most pernicious and malicious things one can do to these young people.
    Rather than focusing them on themselves, developing their skills, insisting that they are responsible for themselves, this Victimology is inserting a deep sense of injustice, a sense of failure due to others not to themselves, a sense of entitlement and a tactic of always ‘passing the blame’ and ‘passing the responsibility’ on to others.
    It’s amazing how the left can so readily destroy people and things!

  8. What a load of rascist tripe written.
    This is why I hate Toronto with a passion.
    They have produced the Leafs.
    They have produced the Toronto Star.
    They have produced this rascist douchebag that seeks to blame me and my child for all the ills created by her mushy thinking.
    There was no slavery in Canada, except as practiced by native bands.
    Our ancestors all had a tough time of it. Racsist twits like that are making it worse for her descendants.

  9. “As a black critic I want people to see that blackness is everything”
    Nurse
    Those kids are screwed.
    Because of the conversational nature of the interviews, they also reflect Nurse’s critical practice–as when, in a group interview with Andre Alexis, Nalo Hopkinson, and Djanet Sears, she notes that, “As a black critic I want people to see that blackness is everything”

  11. Hard to imagine – a major Canadian newspaper publishing an opinion that people should feel ‘worse’ about themselves if they are racially classified as ‘white’.
    If we want to establish who is going to ‘feel worse’ because of their race maybe we just tool up right now and get it on with a race-based civil war? That’s the only way I can think of to make white people really ‘feel worse’ if they don’t want to voluntarily ‘feel worse’. Nothing beats the bayonet if you really want to make people ‘feel worse’.

  12. I wonder if I could sue the Italians for how many British and French ancestors were treated in the Roman days, and I also wonder if I could sue the Russians for how they treated my Ukrainian ancestors as well.

  13. Slavery was abolished by Christian nations over 140 years ago.
    My grandparents came to the US from Poland in 1901.
    My family has never had Anything to do with slavery. I refuse to feel the slightest bit of shame for something I had Nothing to do with.
    However, islam owes the world reparations for 1400 years of slavery, which is still going on today. That includes the enslavement of at least two million white Europeans, from the 1600s to the 1800s.

  14. Signs outside Toronto hotels 100 years ago proclaimed “NO DOGS OR IRISH”.
    Media articles to this day still refer to police vans as “Paddy Wagons”.
    My feelings are hurt and someone should feel guilty. When will I see a reparation cheque?

  17. Good point, Kate. I refuse to feel collective guilt for any historic wrong committed by some members of my race/ethnic group generations back. I’m not a believer in the concept of original sin nor that guilt gets carried forward to persons yet unborn. I didn’t own slaves and I wasn’t a Nazi. If Southerners were enforcing separate water fountains 40 years ago, it wasn’t my mother doing it. And, even if my mother was doing it, I wasn’t.
    I wonder if the black history courses will mention that whites themselves ended the slave trade, that the purveyors of slaves in Africa were blacks themselves and almost as many soldiers died(46,000 to 51,000)on the battlefield at Gettysburg in three days than in all of our years in Vietnam and that white taxpayers in the US initiated and supported the largest transfer of wealth to a designated group in our history 40 years ago with entitlements that still continue to this day.

  18. “This is why I hate Toronto with a passion.”
    I understand the anger, but I listen to toronto call-in shows and hear countless callers who oppose black schools and all the stupidity that goes along with them. And a lot of the callers are black.
    Can’t disagree about the Leafs, though.

  19. You cannot feel guilt about something that you are not guilty of, it’s as simple as that.

  20. Further to otter’s comments and to penny’s comments in her last paragraph:
    This history written by Canadian Christian missionary Don Richardson in 1996 on the source of Western slavery and the cause of its termination.
    http://www.fishhouseministries.com/pdf/IslamReviewed.pdf#page=110
    Some excerpts below:

    ABOUT four years ago CNNs Larry King, on Larry King Live, interviewed
    Louis Farrakhan, head of The Nation of Islam. King asked Farrakhan why
    he advises Christian Afro-Americans to turn from Christianity to Islam.
    Fharrakan replied that Christianity is the religion of those who enslaved
    Africans. Islam, he said, has always championed the black race, and thus
    deserves the loyalty of Afro-Americans.
    …
    Meanwhile more and more Muslim teachers worldwide are
    spreading a triumphal claim that a majority of black people in America
    have already converted to Islam. Descendants of the very people
    Christians took to America as slaves, they assert, have by Allah’s mercy
    become the means whereby America is at last being drawn to Islam.
    …
    Millions of black people in America have long regarded Abraham
    Lincoln, a Christian, as a virtual saint – a deliverer of the black race.
    Louis Farrakhan is not pleased to hear a Christian thus commended. In
    his address carried nationwide by CNN on the occasion of “The Million
    Man March” in Washington, D. C., Farrakhan sneeringly referred to
    Abraham Lincoln as our supposed deliverer.
    …
    Christians in Europe thus unwittingly granted Islam a 1000-year
    head start in altering the destiny of subSaharan Africans. Yet Muslim
    missionaries, by siding with Muslim slavers instead of opposing them,
    forfeited the enviable advantage that 1000-year head start afforded. Had
    they opposed slavery instead of condoning it, Muslim missionaries could
    have spread Islam all the way from the Sahara to Africa’s southern tip.
    Teaching the Koran, building Mosques and founding Islamic schools with
    not a hint of contest from Christians, they could have Islamicized an
    entire continent.
    …
    Why do Muslim nations renounce slavery nominally and then
    deny its existence when it persists? Quite obviously they are disinterested
    in the moral issue. Two persuasions have proved effective: 1. Muslim
    governments sensitive to international peer pressure from predominantly
    Christian nations in Europe and the Americas had to end slavery, at
    least on paper, or be viewed as barbarian. 2. Muslim nations indifferent
    to world opinion still may have a reason given in an item boxed with The
    Economist article quoted above: “To appease western aid donors”!
    What caused many Christians, on the other hand, to refuse to own
    slaves even when other Christians justified their crime? What caused
    slavery-opposing Christians to take the lead in mounting a determined
    effort to see all slaves set free?

    It is a good read.

  22. Ok, so you wrote this specifically to get reported to a human rights tribunal, didn’t you?
    If you want to feel some real guilt, you don’t have to fret over what one group of dead people did to another group of dead people. All you have to do is look at your nearest Indian reserve. Frozen babies, childhood addiction, and communities living with rampant violence are something that we all bear responsibility for until we are prepared to make the hard choices necessary to end or fix the Indian Act and the reserve system which creates those conditions.

  23. Jeez, if we’re to feel guilt for the transgressions of our ancestors, I should really, really feel guilty. Mine were Vikings from Norway. We invaded & occupied Ireland, most of Britain, the Norman coast of France and were “invited” to rule Russia. We discovered Iceland and Greenland. We were the first, not those damned Italians, to discover America 500 years before they did. Horrors, we were the ones trading white “slavs” with the Caliphates in the Mediterranean area. Vikings were the Hells Angels of the 8-10th centuries and our “Hogs” were fast, shallow draft Draken (dragon) boats. We even had an all expense paid clubhouse on the Med, for summer vacations in the Byzantine Empire as personal bodyguards to the local Muslim Big Shot (slave trader) , because we could whup just about anybodies a** at the time. We were “heathens”, Pagan whorshippers, then we changed to Christianity and it all feel apart. Drat! Now no more raidin’ and killin’ and pillagin’. (sigh) Now all that’s left of us is a socialist, fish eating, caring sharing country, with OIL. Send us a bill.

  24. You are a hard woman, Kate. Me, I don’t feel any remorse for slavery either, but that is because I spend all my waking hours feeling guilty about the Crusades.

  25. SO I wonder if the black Africans who captured and sold their fellow black Africans as slaves need to feel white guilt as well ??
    They who prospered by slavery, according to the column, should all feel guilt.
    Wonder how slavery restitution would be determined by the SoC if a case of the Aboriginals on Canada’s west coast operating a slave trade for centuries ??
    Probably a split decision.

  26. My English ancestors kicked the stuffing out of my Scottish ancestors at Culloden. How do you think that makes me feel? Talk about conflicted!
    There’s never a Social Worker around when you need one.

  28. I do feel guilt about most things my ancestors did.
    Because of that, any time my parents or grandparents get a speeding ticket, I demand that the government send me one, too. Reparations, and all that.
    By the way, I also challenge the members of the African community in Toronto to do the same thing. Next time one of your community shoots an innocent bystander or gets caught dealing drugs, the entire family should get the sentence given to the perpetrator. It’s only fair.

  29. my ancestors were booted from Olduvai gorge by the same bunch that feel so slighted now . We had to migrate all the way to Europe. on the way, because of lack of sunlight we lost our colour.
    years latter in yorkshire , we were so poor we couldnt afford slaves but were treated as such.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

  30. I love the whole notion of reparations–payment by those who didn’t do the wrong to those who didn’t suffer it.

  31. Slavery reparations were paid years ago – not in money but in blood. The liberals on both sides of the 49th should apply their logic about wasted lives and altered futures to the dead of America’s Civil War. If it were possible, I would love to see Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton confront the Union dead at Arlington and tell them that a high enough price has yet to be paid for the sin of slavery. Then they could move on to the dead from places with names like the Marne, Argonne, Iwo, Normandy, Anzio, Pusan, Khe San, and tell all of them that they have not yet paid a price high enough for their freedom. This isn’t about “paying for slavery.” Its only extortion and assuaging white liberal guilt. When liberals want us to forgive THEIR sins, they chant, “Move on!” Yeah, lets.

  32. There,I just did my 45 seconds of ‘guilt’ I sure feel better now!What an absolute load of horse dung,but not unexpected from that rag.

  33. scottish mill workers made cotton thread that was sold world-wide. many lost their jobs during the american civil war due to the cotton famine, a shortage created by confederate states in order to draw england and france into the civil war on the south’s behalf.
    so you see kate, perhaps your ancestors were displaced mill workers who were forced to leave bonnie scotland to seek employment in the new world.enslaved cotton labourers employed your ancestors. you may not feel any guilt but you can’t escape the connection.

  35. Signs outside Toronto hotels 100 years ago proclaimed “NO DOGS OR IRISH”.
    do they let dogs in now.?

  36. jeff [sic] while you’re at it, please tell us all about the Bush family control of the Scottish slave trade cabal.
    Friggin leftard.

  38. Hey, jeff, just exactly how did “enslaved cotton labourers” come up with the cash to put Kate’s ancestors on their payroll? Slaves on cotton plantations hiring and bankrolling indigent Scottish mill workers, wow, that connection sounds so stupid that it can’t be that stupid and must therefore be a trick statement of extreme brilliance.

  40. The article written by Nurse seems to have certain lightness to it. The ‘feeling’ is lighter than air.
    It is written in newspeak no doubt. It may be from courses possibly a university anywhere in Canada, that teach newspeak as a major in many instances.
    No reality based argument required.

  41. oh yes, the “NO IRISH” analogy doesn’t work. you may have been denied admittance to the local hotel for being irish in canada at one time but you certainly weren’t hung up on a tree for trying.

  42. Let’s face it, white Westerners didn’t invent slavery and never had a monopoly on it. It’s as old as man himself and has existed on every continent. Rather than feeling guilty for once practising it, we should feel pride in having given it up, of our own accord, without being forced to.
    Evil exists and has existed everywhere, but where has most of what’s good come from, in art, science, and human relations? From Western civilization, in my opinion. Be proud.

  43. For the sake of comparison, let’s change a few words in this woman’s speech to illustrate just how crazy her ideas really are:
    “I am very grateful that white students in Little Rock may soon have the option of attending Eurocentric schools….
    When it came time for high school, I placed my daughter at the Jefferson Davis Confederate Academy, which is considered a white school….
    In short order, my daughter’s spirits improved, along with her marks. She was placed on the Honour Roll. For Grade 12, she asked for permission to return to the public system.
    In a stroke of luck, she landed at a southern school that boasts respect for white culture. She joined the yearbook committee, the European Canadian Club…and hopes to attend Stonewall Jackson College.
    Attending a white school did not separate my daughter from the wider community; it gave her the confidence she needed to take her place in it….
    I do believe white-focused schools are an excellent option for students like my daughter, although I think the word Eurocentric is a slippery term….
    For me, white-focused schools are important because they will offer white children a more complete and truthful history of people of European descent – Europe being the common denominator.”

  44. “If you want to feel some real guilt, you don’t have to fret over what one group of dead people did to another group of dead people. All you have to do is look at your nearest Indian reserve. Frozen babies, childhood addiction, and communities living with rampant violence are something that we all bear responsibility for until we are prepared to make the hard choices necessary to end or fix the Indian Act and the reserve system which creates those conditions.”
    I created neither the act nor the system.. I don’t feel guilty, don’t lose any sleep over either..much like the Liberal enablers who perpetuate the Indian industry for profit, much to the detriment of the native population.
    Don’t they contribute to the continued and current enslavement of these people, to the economic and physical bondage of the reserves?

  45. ET hits the right note, as far as I’m concerned. Slavery in the past, and especially today, is farther reaching than whites on blacks. Doesn’t matter though; all that counts is making sure white Anglo-Saxons develop a healthy self-hatred for the sins of their ancestors.

  46. Jeff Davidson..how many blacks were lynched in Canada compared to the United States?
    Different conditions, different circumstances
    Apples and boots…

  47. I agree about a lack of personal guilt, but it is interesting that there *were* black slaves in what is now Canada until the British parliament freed all slaves in the British Empire in 1833.
    For some discussion of this see, for example:
    http://www.mcmaster.ca/mjtm/1-5.htm
    St. Georges Church in Halifax once had a “slaves gallery” above the second gallery that is now there.

  49. sorry, the only guilt I feel about slavery is not having the opportunity to repatriate all these former slaves (hmmm … when was slavery abolished? I thought it was over 140 years ago) back to Africa. I’m STILL willing to donate to one way tickets in exchange for giving up any claim on citizenship! And I think that’s going way beyond, since nobody in my heritage ever participated in slavery, and nobody I know ever was a slave. Except those of us forced to pay taxes to support useless welfare queens.
    And as far as “real guilt” over the poor, poor pitiful natives and their plight on the reservation … well, I lived in Inuvik for 3 years and saw what life was like for them. All I have to say is that I agree we are guilty for their current way of life. We need to stop enabling them and force them to become full citizens of the country. We need to stop coddling them – providing housing, food, education, health care and anything else provided by taxes … until they get off their fat, lazy, useless a$$es and become citizens and not wards of the state.

  50. Slavery still exists as a lucerative enterprise in most of the world, but we don’t talk about it because it is not driven and patronized by “white people” these days.
    I empathize with Kate’s position, it’s 2008 time for historical victim groups to take ownership of their own problems and welfare…it’s your problem not mine, and no amount of historic revisionist crap can tweek even a modicum of “guilt” in me.
    The only thing I feel “guilt” over is allowing over indulgent minority self-pity to become such a strain on the national budget and political agenda.
    “I turn on the tube and what do I see
    A whole lotta people cryin’ ’don’t blame me’
    They point their crooked little fingers at everybody else
    Spend all their time feelin’ sorry for themselves
    Victim of this, victim of that
    Your momma’s too thin; your daddy’s too fat
    Get over it
    Get over it
    All this whinin’ and cryin’ and pitchin’ a fit
    Get over it, get over it”
    (Don Henley)

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