How Can You Compensate If Slavery Left Someone Better Off?

Obviously not the slave, but the person now.....

So we’ve another attempt at the reparations grift here. Your g grandpappy was mean to my g grandpappy so you owe me money. No, I don’t follow that logic either.

I’ve dealt with a closely related idea here before - that one about if the slave owners got compensated then you owe us as the slaves didn’t:

That’s all even before we really think about what that £20 million was. Not compensation but a bribe. It was easier - and cheaper - to get rid of slavery earlier than near everyone else by simply coughing up that cash. So, we did. We bribed it away. We bought that freedom. Now folk are coming back, hands out, demanding they get some too?

Maties, don’t you realise your ancestors gained that thing of incalculable value, their freedom, as a result of the bribe we paid? If we were actually to try to calculate a correct flow of cash it would be that Caribbeans are paying off some portion of the British National Debt. Which is, when we come to think of it, a thoroughly good idea. Shall we say £205 billion as a starting point?

But if there’s the possibility of a gift then people are going to keep putting their hands out:

Grenada has demanded that the Bank of England pay slavery reparations for its ownership of plantations.

The government of the Caribbean nation has delivered a letter to Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, calling on the institution to atone for its “enslavement of Africans”.

Grenada’s cabinet has insisted that the Bank of England begin negotiating reparations for its involvement in the “atrocious” slave trade.

The Bank owned two plantations and almost 600 slaves on the island in the 18th century.

The appeal to the Bank comes as former Caribbean colonies aim to pivot to seeking reparations from institutions involved in slavery, rather than the UK Government, which has refused to make payments.

Well, that last sentence is hopeful - tho’ who knows what the next lot will say.

But there’s also this:

It continues, stating that “the enslavement of Africans in Caribbean colonies including Grenada was atrocious”, adding: “The work regime, punishments inflicted both physically and psychologically, and the immeasurable suffering endured have multiplier effects on our current populations of African descent.”

Now the slavery, yes, that was appalling. I don’t know whether Grenada was cotton or sugar - and sugar was definitely the worse of the two - but I’m certainly not going to try to pretend, let alone insist, that slavery itself was anything other than the most appalling violence both to man and the rights of man.

But the claim for current payment is that the historical slavery has made them worse off in this present - so pay up. And that isn’t true. As this shows:

Yes, yes, lots of problems with GDP and prices and all that but they will all be the same problems in the different places - we can compare the different countries at the same time that is. Niger is where (some) slaves came from, Ghana many more and Liberia is where many freed slaves were taken. Grenada is doing very much better than any of them (and you can expand this right across West and Central Africa, the places the slave populations were taken from).

Today’s population of African descent in Grenada are better off than those whose ancestors were not transported in chains by the slave trade. Slavery has made those - those alive today - better off.

It’s not just “What fuckin’ compensation?” it’s that it’s not even possible to compensate someone for their having been made better off. So tossery and grift, no more than that.