Sugar in the Blood Quotes

“we do not appreciate how the arrival of Europeans in the New World precipitated a series of events, most significantly including the capture and transportation of millions of unwilling Africans to cultivate cash crops like tobacco, cotton and sugar. Nor do we appreciate how the racist theories they evolved to justify the abuse and commodification of their charges would continue to shape our communities and our life chances to this day. Over 150 years after slavery was abolished, Africans and the descendants of Africans remain markedly disadvantaged compared to the descendants of those who promoted the trade against them. The pernicious racial thinking that evolved to feed our insatiable hunger for sugar, and was used to justify our transgression of the laws of humanity, continues to influence us all.”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

“understood that migration was a kind of death, in which one’s old self must be buried in order for a new self to be born, and that this move has made me who I am today.”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

“On 4 November 1944, the Barbados Observer wrote: Throughout the history of this island, it has been dominated by a small and selfish clique and it is indeed remarkable that now this clan senses that it has reached a crisis, it has actually had the shamelessness and temerity to publicly appeal to the people of this island and ask them to help them consolidate their weakening status.”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

“William Pitt’s speech on the Proposed Abolition of the Slave Trade 1792, in which the ailing parliamentarian spoke late into the night, was a turning point in the fortunes of the abolitionist movement. Pitt’s views on what to do about “the barbarous traffic in slaves” were unequivocal: “I trust we are now likely to be delivered from the greatest practical evil that has ever afflicted the human race, from the severest and most extensive calamity recorded in the history of the world.”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

“Today we use the term “attachment disorder” to describe the profound impact on children’s emotional and psychological development of being denied a consistent and intimate relationship with a trusted caregiver. We can only guess at how John Stephen and millions like him were affected by being denied the core human experience of a parent–child relationship.”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

“Colonialism was not just an economic and political system, it was also a cultural system. Loyalty to empire was created through language, as well as through the church and the school. Both of these institutions taught the superiority of Europeans, their beliefs and their culture, and the inferiority of Africans, and, for that matter, of all non-British peoples”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

“brutally air-conditioned library”
― Andrea Stuart, Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire