Enslaved by self-pity
The idea that black people are 'emotionally scarred' by slavery is borderline racist.
Imagine if I were to blame the problems I face in life on the Irish potato famine. Over 150 years ago "The Great Hunger" swept Ireland, killing around a million people and forcing another million to emigrate. Many of my ancestors, based in the poverty-stricken west of Ireland, starved to death; others fled to America.
Perhaps that horrible experience explains why I sometimes feel stressed out and angry today. Maybe that long-gone famine has left me "emotionally scarred", unable to deal with all the things that modern life throws my way. I wonder if I will one day develop a potato-related eating disorder ...
The notion that I might be shaped and directed by a famine from the 1800s is stark raving mad. And yet today, serious commentators claim that black people in modern Britain are disadvantaged, dejected and "scarred" as a result of the slave trade, which was abolished 200 years ago. Of course, there is no real comparison between the Irish famine (a four-year-long hunger) and the slave trade (a gross historic injustice), yet the idea that any of us is directly made and moulded by an historical event is absurd.
It is narrow-minded and fatalistic, even borderline racist. In the past, some people said blacks were driven by their biology; today, so-called progressives claim blacks are driven by history. Is there really a great difference between biological determinism and historical determinism? Both view black people as wide-eyed children, moved and motivated by forces beyond their control. Young black Britons risk being enslaved by self-pity thanks to the dodgy deterministic arguments of various community workers, commentators and officials.
It seems there is no problem among the black community that cannot be pinned on the slave trade. Ms Dynamite - the singer whose views on the slave trade are, unbelievably, being treated seriously; she even made a documentary for BBC2 - claims "there are things which are the direct result of slavery which still affect us today as black people". Apparently this includes tensions between black men and black women. Ms Dynamite tells us that the slave owners' policy of "divide and rule" helped to "set men against women", and "as black people we are still living that law".
Ms Dynamite says there is "stuff in the family and home which is also a result of slavery". She explains: "Men were not allowed to be fathers but were used to breed to create more slaves. It's something that - not with everyone - is common in the black community, especially in our generation: the fathers are not always there. We're not that far away from slavery and that way of living, where a man is literally just a tool to reproduce."
These are extraordinary claims. Instead of interrogating the problems of poverty and discrimination that might have an impact on how black people relate to each other, and which might harm family integrity and structure, everything is explained as being part of the heavy burden of history.
When Ms Dynamite says black people are "still living that law" - that is, still living by the rules drawn up by slave-owners hundreds of years ago - she effectively writes off contemporary blacks as eternal slaves. Never mind the slave revolts and the great leaps forward made by black rights activists over the past 200 years; apparently blacks are still slavishly chained to the past, unable to escape the prison of history. They might have won numerous freedoms over the past century and more, but they are mental slaves to past events. Black people are depicted as the equivalent of damaged children, haunted by dreams of past abuses.
Guardian writer Joseph Harker goes even further and argues that slavery has determined both blacks' physical and mental make-up today. "For many black men, the only way to endure this historical inhumanity has been by combining physical strength with an aggressive-competitive mentality - Darwin's survival of the fittest, in its most basic form", he writes. Here, the old, discredited arguments about blacks having evolved in a different way to whites are dusted down, given a seemingly radical gloss and re-presented as black people being structured around historical injustices.
And if you are a slave to the past - an apparently incompetent adult whose physicality, mental attitudes and relationships with others are shaped by forces beyond your control - then of course there is only one solution: you need help. You need the authorities to look after you, to care for you, to offer you therapy and recognition. As Harker argues: "If Tony Blair wants to mark the anniversary with a meaningful gesture, he should surely set up a full-scale investigation - on the scale of a Royal Commission - into the causes of the problems which afflict much of Britain's black population, and pledge, with the help of Gordon Brown, to put in the resources to ensure these are fully addressed."
In the past, blacks fought for equality and respect. Even slaves, those most degraded individuals, fought against their oppressors. Today, when the view of blacks as historically determined individuals seems widespread, the assumption is that they need patronage and support; they need to be protected by the authorities from the harm caused by history and from their own potentially self-destructive behaviour.
These arguments about slavery haunting contemporary black communities are becoming increasingly commonplace. Much of the demand for an official apology from Blair is based on the idea that it will help today's blacks to feel more "confident".
Such claims have been doing the rounds in America for more than a decade. There, many black community representatives have demanded financial and emotional reparation for the injustices of slavery. In his book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, Randall Robinson argued: "I don't think that there is very much appreciation in America of the causal relationship between the present condition of the black community and the 246-year crime of American slavery, how it debilitated a whole people psychologically, socially and economically, and how those consequences have stayed with us inter-generationally through the 20th century."
These are degrading and dangerous arguments. They are underpinned by the idea that history makes us rather than we making history. Remembering the attempts by black slaves and subsequent black communities to make their own history is sidelined in favour of putting forward the fatalistic argument that blacks today are shaped and scarred and structured by history. It is a scary snapshot of the narrow-minded view of humans as fragile bundles of genes and historical impacts that passes for progressive politics today, and of the patronising and paternalistic underpinnings of the politics of identity and recognition.
What message does all of this communicate to young blacks? That there is little you can do about your place in the world because it has already been written for you by history. So keep your head down, try not to become too damaged, and let the caring powers-that-be nurse you through life.
Imagine if I were to blame the problems I face in life on the Irish potato famine. Over 150 years ago "The Great Hunger" swept Ireland, killing around a million people and forcing another million to emigrate. Many of my ancestors, based in the poverty-stricken west of Ireland, starved to death; others fled to America.
Perhaps that horrible experience explains why I sometimes feel stressed out and angry today. Maybe that long-gone famine has left me "emotionally scarred", unable to deal with all the things that modern life throws my way. I wonder if I will one day develop a potato-related eating disorder ...
The notion that I might be shaped and directed by a famine from the 1800s is stark raving mad. And yet today, serious commentators claim that black people in modern Britain are disadvantaged, dejected and "scarred" as a result of the slave trade, which was abolished 200 years ago. Of course, there is no real comparison between the Irish famine (a four-year-long hunger) and the slave trade (a gross historic injustice), yet the idea that any of us is directly made and moulded by an historical event is absurd.
It is narrow-minded and fatalistic, even borderline racist. In the past, some people said blacks were driven by their biology; today, so-called progressives claim blacks are driven by history. Is there really a great difference between biological determinism and historical determinism? Both view black people as wide-eyed children, moved and motivated by forces beyond their control. Young black Britons risk being enslaved by self-pity thanks to the dodgy deterministic arguments of various community workers, commentators and officials.
It seems there is no problem among the black community that cannot be pinned on the slave trade. Ms Dynamite - the singer whose views on the slave trade are, unbelievably, being treated seriously; she even made a documentary for BBC2 - claims "there are things which are the direct result of slavery which still affect us today as black people". Apparently this includes tensions between black men and black women. Ms Dynamite tells us that the slave owners' policy of "divide and rule" helped to "set men against women", and "as black people we are still living that law".
Ms Dynamite says there is "stuff in the family and home which is also a result of slavery". She explains: "Men were not allowed to be fathers but were used to breed to create more slaves. It's something that - not with everyone - is common in the black community, especially in our generation: the fathers are not always there. We're not that far away from slavery and that way of living, where a man is literally just a tool to reproduce."
These are extraordinary claims. Instead of interrogating the problems of poverty and discrimination that might have an impact on how black people relate to each other, and which might harm family integrity and structure, everything is explained as being part of the heavy burden of history.
When Ms Dynamite says black people are "still living that law" - that is, still living by the rules drawn up by slave-owners hundreds of years ago - she effectively writes off contemporary blacks as eternal slaves. Never mind the slave revolts and the great leaps forward made by black rights activists over the past 200 years; apparently blacks are still slavishly chained to the past, unable to escape the prison of history. They might have won numerous freedoms over the past century and more, but they are mental slaves to past events. Black people are depicted as the equivalent of damaged children, haunted by dreams of past abuses.
Guardian writer Joseph Harker goes even further and argues that slavery has determined both blacks' physical and mental make-up today. "For many black men, the only way to endure this historical inhumanity has been by combining physical strength with an aggressive-competitive mentality - Darwin's survival of the fittest, in its most basic form", he writes. Here, the old, discredited arguments about blacks having evolved in a different way to whites are dusted down, given a seemingly radical gloss and re-presented as black people being structured around historical injustices.
And if you are a slave to the past - an apparently incompetent adult whose physicality, mental attitudes and relationships with others are shaped by forces beyond your control - then of course there is only one solution: you need help. You need the authorities to look after you, to care for you, to offer you therapy and recognition. As Harker argues: "If Tony Blair wants to mark the anniversary with a meaningful gesture, he should surely set up a full-scale investigation - on the scale of a Royal Commission - into the causes of the problems which afflict much of Britain's black population, and pledge, with the help of Gordon Brown, to put in the resources to ensure these are fully addressed."
In the past, blacks fought for equality and respect. Even slaves, those most degraded individuals, fought against their oppressors. Today, when the view of blacks as historically determined individuals seems widespread, the assumption is that they need patronage and support; they need to be protected by the authorities from the harm caused by history and from their own potentially self-destructive behaviour.
These arguments about slavery haunting contemporary black communities are becoming increasingly commonplace. Much of the demand for an official apology from Blair is based on the idea that it will help today's blacks to feel more "confident".
Such claims have been doing the rounds in America for more than a decade. There, many black community representatives have demanded financial and emotional reparation for the injustices of slavery. In his book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, Randall Robinson argued: "I don't think that there is very much appreciation in America of the causal relationship between the present condition of the black community and the 246-year crime of American slavery, how it debilitated a whole people psychologically, socially and economically, and how those consequences have stayed with us inter-generationally through the 20th century."
These are degrading and dangerous arguments. They are underpinned by the idea that history makes us rather than we making history. Remembering the attempts by black slaves and subsequent black communities to make their own history is sidelined in favour of putting forward the fatalistic argument that blacks today are shaped and scarred and structured by history. It is a scary snapshot of the narrow-minded view of humans as fragile bundles of genes and historical impacts that passes for progressive politics today, and of the patronising and paternalistic underpinnings of the politics of identity and recognition.
What message does all of this communicate to young blacks? That there is little you can do about your place in the world because it has already been written for you by history. So keep your head down, try not to become too damaged, and let the caring powers-that-be nurse you through life.
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