'We are still living in the long tail of the slave trade.’ Photo: shackles used in the Middle Passage slave route
Are reparations Quaker business? Fred Ashmore reports
‘The first step is to understand we are all brainwashed.’
The answer is really simple. It’s a ‘no-brainer’ according to our main speaker, Richard Reddie, the director of Justice and Inclusion for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. His answer came at the end of a powerful exposition to some forty London Friends on the subject of reparations. Richard has written several books on this subject. He has also worked with Quakers in several ecumenical bodies, and told us he had noticed how willing we were to talk about the ‘good stuff’ of abolition support but much less eager to talk about the participation of some Quakers in the ocean of darkness that was the slave trade. He reminded us of the Quaker shipmasters who transported enslaved Africans from Jamaica to Philadelphia, and the enslaver status of William Penn. Two days before he spoke to us we heard a profound apology from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for profiting from slave labour.
Richard’s talk was followed by a response from Helen Minnis of Glasgow Meeting. Helen is one of a tiny handful of black female professors in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. She is a member of Glasgow’s History of Slavery Committee, which is trying to make real reparations for the £20 million the University of Glasgow made from the slave trade. I want to quote what Helen said, which to me has great authority: ‘We are still living in the long tail of the transatlantic slave trade… It is not history. Many Quakers are gradually beginning to realise, although it’s a painful realisation, that the whiteness of Quakers tends to mean there is a bit of an echo chamber. And because we tend to regard ourselves as radical people, many Quakers I’ve met believe themselves not to be racist. For me, the first step in reparations is to understand we are all brainwashed by the fact that Britain and other European countries started this process of getting free or cheap labour from black and brown people. If we understand that, we realise it speaks to all our testimonies.’
We then had a challenging Q&A session, and breakout rooms challenged us to respond. A closing plenary left us all feeling seriously confronted.
One of the many nuggets from Richard’s talk was a link to the University of the West Indies Caricom reparations plan. Quakers would do well to educate themselves about the case being put to all European governments. Many of us are just beginning to grasp the extent and wickedness of the slave trade and the attitudes around it.
So what next? Yearly Meeting will address ‘living equality and truth in a time of crisis’. I hope the themes of this meeting will be prominent. I also hope Friends feel minded to create a recognised Quaker body to help all of us learn more deeply about these issues.
