Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

‘You are trying to blame me for what my ancestors did.’ This one usually arises when discussing the particularly sensitive area of Britain’s role in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. ‘I never owned slaves’ or so the strawman logic goes. Well of course, everybody knows that no one alive in Britain today owned an African person, but that does very little to change how significant a role slavery played in Britain’s history.2 Also, as the writer Gary Younge once explained, people in Britain naturally take pride in positive national events they had no direct role in – ‘we won the world cup’, ‘we won the war’ – yet many seem less willing to confront the more negative aspects of our history. People seem rather happy to align themselves with the Dunkirk spirit but rather less interested in even acknowledging the ‘Amritsar spirit’.