HELP - I AM NOT A VICTIM

 

One of my heroes - William Wilberforce
 (Unfinished portrait by Thomas Lawrence)

It seems today that everybody must be a victim of some sort to have any credibility. The adoption of the word ‘queer’ seems a case in point. God forbid, that straight people like me should accept you as part of the mainstream if you are gay. It is important to feel rejected, to be part of a minority as part of your identity. Hence the – slightly desperate, I believe – adoption of ‘queer’ to show that you a part of you remains unconventional. And here was me thinking that gay people would be accepted if they drank sherry and listened to Radio 4.

 

If it is not sexuality, it is race. Last night I listened in as The Guardian explored its links with slavery. It turns that the paper was set up by people in Manchester, a bug cotton city, some of whom owned slaves and even applied for compensation once they gave up their part in this hideous trade in human beings. It also turns out that the British government did not clear the debts of slave-owner compensation until 2015. The slaves themselves were never compensated and are now complaining loudly and asking for their share of reparations.

 

I, incidentally, am not in favour of paying them for being victims. That does not mean that I defend the trade. However, I tend to take a ‘that was then, this is now’ attitude to injustice. Surely it is more important to see that people who have suffered in the past are treated well in our society than try to pay them back for wrongs which were done in the past and which, by definition, cannot be changed now. Giving them money for what was done centuries ago to their ancestors entails locking them into the ghetto, a phrase I use to glorify victimhood.

Despite the evils of slavery, there were benefits to be had from entry into white society, benefits they would probably not have enjoyed if they had remained in an uncolonized country. We are so determined to be victims that it is virtually impossible to admit that there were upsides as well as downsides to being introduced to western ways, even if they were accompanied by unacceptable attitudes of racial superiority. Remove the superiority and accept equality and previous victims can become leaders - as Obama demonstrated.

 

If you perpetuate victimhood – which reparations for slavery would surely do – you prevent people standing on their own feet and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and other clichés of self-reliance). You can recognise evils done in the past without locking those whose ancestors suffered from them into a perpetual cycle of grievance and victimhood. As, I have said that was then and this is now. Let’s treat people properly today rather than constantly harping back to historical injustices which may hold them back from success.

 

One of my heroes is William Wilberforce, who recognised the fundamental injustice of slavery and campaigned long and hard to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. He was not a particularly left wing man and opposed trade unionism and other means of establishing equality for working men in his society, which earned him the enmity of men like the radical writer William Cobbett, who was notably silent on the evils of slavery and allowed his hatred of Wilberforce to hold him back from opposing them. (See here for more on this.)

 

Wilberforce rather became an evangelical Christian and, thinking that condemning people of a different skin colour to being second class citizens was fundamentally evil, saw it as his duty to oppose and try to abolish it. Hagiographic portraits of him ignore or deny his social conservatism because they want to portray him as fundamentally good, while ignoring his faults. Yet he did more than anyone else to destroy one major evil in our society because he was single-minded in his opposition to it, so we can surely forgive him some other mistakes.

 

Forgiveness does not loom large in the attitudes of many people today. I am highly sceptical of those who think that we have got it right while our ancestors had it wrong. Condemn those who come before you and you will surely be condemned in turn by those who come after. Recognise people in the past as flawed but human and you might be better at gaining respect for them. Wilberforce was able to move beyond the attitude that so many of his contemporaries shared – that slavery was inevitable, necessary and, therefore, acceptable.

 

The list of those who benefited from treating people of colour as second class citizens is long and depressing. George Frederick Handel and James Watt are two otherwise admirable men who profited from slavery. The first was distinctly Christian yet still invested in it and the second was a brilliant engineer who lacked Wilberforce’s stubborn humanity. The church itself profited from the institution and encouraged slaves to be obedient and not rebellious. They now accept their responsibility for supporting the trade in human flesh.

 

While I am not against acknowledging the sins of the past, I think that apologies should be reserved for personal mistakes and sins, which most of us are guilty of. The Guardian has insisted on apologising for what its founders did two hundred years ago and they should be congratulated on owning up to this. However, you cannot properly apologise for what they did unless you can show that you as an individual would have acted differently if you had been in their place. And that is, by definition, impossible to do unless you have a time machine handy.

Like Wilberforce, I am a straight, white male with a decent background and education and have, therefore, little opportunity to be a victim of any sort. I am quite happy with that and limit my apologies to things that I have done wrong personally - there are plenty of those - rather than to things that have been done wrong by people in my position from a similar background. Am I deprived by lacking qualifications to be a victim? Perhaps that is the ultimate deprivation of all.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

COLSTON COMES DOWN

Colston upright

...and coming down

As usual, Shakespeare got it right, not with one quotation but two: “Use every man according to his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping” (Hamlet) and “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”.  The later remark is from Mark Anthony in his famous speech in praise of Julius Caesar in which he expertly whips up a mob against those who had assassinated Caesar.  

We saw, for want of a better word, a mob whipped into a frenzy by the sight of a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol recently.  Colston was a benefactor of Bristol who endowed schools and other institutions there but his money had come from trading in slaves so that put him beyond the pale and down he came, ending up in the River Avon before he was fished out.  After it is restored Colston’s statue will be displayed in a museum in which his misdeeds will be put into context.

These misdeeds had already been highlighted in a plaque attached to the statue.  The people of Bristol had debated what to do about this embarrassing monument, wanting to both acknowledge his generosity towards the city and the terrible trade which had made it possible.  In a good old British compromise they decided to leave Colston standing and to confine their condemnation of slavery to the new plaque.

That was not good enough for the anti-racism campaigners, however, who felt that his slave-trading had put him beyond the pale so down he was pulled and pushed into the harbour by a group of demonstrators who displayed a mixture of self-righteousness and jollity in ridding Bristol of its slaver statue.  The police stood back and allowed the crowd to take the law into their own hands.  This might seem like a sensible move but, if strength of feeling is allowed to override local democracy, what is to stop a group of racists from taking down the statue of the black nurse Mary Seacole outside Saint Thomas’s Hospital and dumping it into the River Thames? 

This is not an argument for leaving every public statue up forever, just for going through a rigorous discussion every time we see that someone had bad aspects to him as well as the good ones that he (usually) is being celebrated for.  This is what Sadiq Khan is proposing for London - a commission to examine statues.  This may be a bit slow and long-winded but it is better than mob rule, no matter how much fun it might have been in Bristol recently.

Cecil Rhodes will probably go next.  Although slavery had long gone by the time he had made his money, he believed in the innate superiority of white people, even if that same money paid for a lot of both black and white students to study at Oxford.  Lord Nelson may stand on top of his column in Trafalgar Square but he too was a keen supporter of slavery.  You had best stand well clear if he comes down.  

Even rugby union is now ‘reviewing’ the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which was written by a slave, Wallace Wills, and became an unofficial anthem for the England team.  Yet singing a song written by a slave is surely not an endorsement of slavery.  It is rather an example of destroying the achievements of an enslaved people in the name of condemning their lack of freedom.  While the civil rights movement adopted the song, the Nazis banned it in 1939.  Which ship do you want to sail in? 

While the institution of slavery was despicable - and sadly still is in some places - individuals almost always have redeemable features.  Even Donald Trump is a good father to his children, if not a very loyal husband to his wives.  A crowd full of righteous anger, however, is not interested in the redeeming aspects of someone’s life and makes judgements based on just one aspect of those lives.  To dredge up another quotation, from Benjamin Franklin: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it.” 

I can imagine it was satisfying to topple Colston.  In the wake of the protests after the terrible killing of George Floyd in the USA, the righteous anger against a white man who did not question the inherent racism that made slavery possible was understandable.  In the words of local writer Philippa Gregory (who once attended a Colston school) slavery was ‘a respectable trade’, the title of her book which may have been inspired by his life.  Respectability does not make it right, however.

But Gregory’s novel was written two hundred years after the period in which it was set and attitudes have changed since then.  “That was then this is now” is what I say to people who want to take down all the statues of people who accepted slavery.  Even William Wilberforce, who opposed - and effectively ended - the trade in human beings had reactionary and what we now consider unacceptable views on the rights of men to organise themselves to campaign for better wages.  He was someone who wanted to preserve the status quo but to reform it and to give it greater humanity. This humanity would always be granted from above and would not be tainted with dangerous ideas like democracy, which allows campaigning for justice from below.

Wilberforce is one of my heroes, even if I disagree with many of his views.  He had the energy and determination to rid Britain of slavery without undermining the society of which he was a privileged member.  In fact, he probably succeeded in his campaign because less enlightened men in power did not see him as a dangerous revolutionary but as a fundamentally sound chap, if a little soft-hearted at times. Wilberforce should be celebrated as a great reformer who achieved a massive advance from a position of white privilege.  

He was also – as he would have been the first to admit – a flawed human being and might not expect to escape whipping if he put forward those some of those views today.  We should honour people for their achievements without forgetting their faults.

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My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner