So The Time Has Come

The BBC reports this week that, from the beginning of the 2008 / 09 academic year, Britain's involvement in the slave trade is to be studied by all secondary pupils in England.

When I began university, I studied a core module in the first year called "Black Atlantic: Slavery and it's Legacies". The title, you may notice, is related to a book by Paul Gilroy, but that's not the point. I came out of the first lecture scared. I was not scared by the horrors of slavery (I guess the MTV generation has become passive to images and tales of gore and suffering), but what troubled me personally was that I had gone through my entire childhood without realising that Britain -- the country of which I had always considered myself but a loyal servant -- committed one of the most terrible crimes of modern civilisation. I knew of the Holocaust, which accounted for the deaths of millions of people because of their religion, but I knew not of fates worse than death bore out by African people over timescales of centuries instead of decades. I felt ignorant and out of touch with a passage of history so gruesome and wrong that I simply began to crave knowledge and understanding on a phenomenal and bewildering scale.

What hurt the most was the sudden realisation that slavery and the slave trade mattered. They mattered as early as the sixteenth century, and they still matter here in the twenty-first.

I studied my degree at the University of Liverpool John Moores: the streets I walked down to get to class were, and still are, named after the slave traders. Under the picture on the BBC web site, the caption reads: "pupils will be urged to look at the long term impacts of slavery". While this simply has to be the case if the learning is to be worthwhile, it is worth remembering that the legacies of slavery are not purely aesthetic in terms of the microcosm of Liverpool. As often as raindrops fall upon Liverpool the city tries to cleanse itself, yet it longs for a cleanliness which seems to forever be out of reach, as the raindrops come laced with the blood of the slaves. The same is true of Bristol. The same is true of London.

The only time I ever came close to touching upon the slave trade was in the sixth form at school, when I was studying A-level government & politics. We learnt of about thirty Supreme Court cases in a single one hour lesson. Dred Scott vs Sandford, 1857 passed by in a single sentence: "no slave could be a citizen of the United States" said the teacher. "Next one, Plessy vs Ferguson, 1897," he continued, "the legalisation of segregation in America. This was overturned in the 50's with the case Brown vs Board of Education." In about thirty seconds we covered the spine of African-American history with regard to the U.S. Supreme Court. I can't recall them being mentioned again in class, but I still remember thinking at the time: "slaves? Segregation? There's no connection there." Thankfully I did my reading and I did my research. Twelve months later, in my first year at university.

Until now, the neglect of the slave trade and slavery from the curriculum sticks out like a sore thumb. To not teach the slave trade and slavery and the legacies of both is to effectively deny that they happened.

There's currently a 'comment' up on the BBC web site simply saying the teaching of slavery should not be compulsory, made by Vic, UK. Hmmm. Should pupils learn the concept of equality? Are people of African descent equal to people of European descent? Should pupils learn that everyone should be judged by the content of their character and not by the colour of their skin? (I am assuming the answer is an unwavering 'yes', there). By making slavery compulsory it makes the civil rights movement easier to contextualise -- I find it hard to believe I read King's speech and discussed it in class without taking slavery and the slave trade into account whatsoever. The philosophy of Malcolm X is so misunderstood in high school history that schools won't touch it with a barge pole. On face value it's an angry black man shouting "the white man is the devil!" He shouts the white man is the devil because the white man enslaved the black man for three hundred years, and even though Lincoln "freed" the slaves in 1865, African-Americans were still not free when he (Malcolm X) was assassinated and were still second-class citizens then, 100 years after "freedom". Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

The election of Barack Obama to the White House will not put an end to racial prejudice, in the same way that racial prejudice did not begin with the slave trade. But the picture is a complex one: racial prejudice, the political career of Barack Obama, and the slave trade are all carefully interwoven. You can't learn about two of them without the third one. In between these three, of course, there are many more important factors which also cannot be ignored...

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

John Howard Griffin’s ‘Black Like Me’: Essential Reading

About twelve months ago now, I went into the Aldham Robarts Library at Liverpool John Moores University and stood in front of a large selection of books. I scanned the titles as quickly as I could, my eyes jumping from one part of the shelf to another. All the books appealed to me. I did not know where to start reading.

I wish I could say this book jumped out at me, but I picked it up at random. I read the title. Black Like Me. I read it over and over in my head. Black Like Me. Black Like Me. The book was a lot smaller than many of the other books. It was the same size as my New Testament. There wasn’t very many pages in it, and it was quite battered. It was ragged, and worn.

I made the assumption this was an educated black academic writer, putting pen to paper and explaining (or at least, trying to explain) what it was like on a day-to-day basis to be a black man.

I was wrong.

I was very, very wrong. This book goes beyond that. It draws attention to the part of American society that officials claim does not exist, but everyone knows that it does. John Howard Griffin first highlighted it, then drew a line underneath it, and then got ten, 4,000 watt light bulbs and pointed them all directly at it. Everyone could see. The problem was clear, and there was no disputing it. It existed, it was real, and it was American: racism. It could not be denied.

But Black Like Me is more. It gets under your skin. It eats into you, though you, and leaves you empty. There is nothing left in you. What remains is a hole. You are incomplete. Your soul is incomplete. How can you be complete when someone tells you that the black man is equal, but he is not? He is just the same; the only thing which is not equal is his relationship to society, and this is different because society treats him as different, but Griffin confirms what educated people already know -- that he is not different. He is just the same. You cannot be complete if you have a soul and you know that people just like you are in trouble. They are the brotherhood of Man. They are my brothers, they are your brothers, they are our brothers.

Some whites will say this is not really it. They will say this is the white man’s experience as a Negro in the south, not the Negro’s. But this is picayunish, and we no longer have time for that. We no longer have time to atomise principles and beg the question. We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues. The Negro. The South. These are the details.

That is John Howard Griffin speaking. In the preface, he abolishes the primary concern of the reader. And he is right. I wish he was wrong. But he was not. He was not wrong in 1959. I doubt he would be wrong in 2007.

Rest at pale evening…
A tall slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

The Problem Of The Twenty-First Century

In his most magnificent of books, the great Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois pronounced: "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." The striking fact, of course, being that he wrote this in 1903, with still 97 years of said century still to run.

I am not so bold. As I write, there are only 93 years of the twenty-first century to appear in the present, before becoming history forever.

He was the greatest educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His work for the immediate social up-lift of the African-American deserves credit of the highest merit. A man who inspired both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr -- leaders closer to our own generation, who spoke a language closer (sometimes eerily so) to that of our own. Oh! what joy we have in knowing he lived through the civil rights era, and to consider his spirit still in our society today!

A man of vision, Du Bois certainly was. It would be easy to categorise his foreseeing of the troubles ahead as in the same bracket of those of a certain Greek mythologist. A bold prediction it was, but the signs and signifiers were all there. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois merely framed them in a sweeping generalisation of a sound bite, which every gentlemen could comprehend.

But should he be alive today, he would have to turn his back on the issue of race when trying to consider the great problem of the next century. The century we shall have to live through. Oh! the pain, for the issue of race did not end in 1999, the second the clock took us into years beginning with '2'. Race will always be in our society, so long as there are always people of different colors, creeds, origins, &c., all jumbled together in the social sphere of Great Britain. And Britain is most certainly Great -- the greatest, one might so far as saying -- for she is the least likely of the Western nations to turn 'race' into 'racism'. A problem, of course, which befell the largest most dominant nation to span this earth. The Empire of the West could only wriggle with the pain of racism, as it threatened (and to a lesser extent did) tear the country in two. And I don't mean the civil war. I mean the 1950's.

The greatest leveller, though, is time. A healer, I have heard it called. Healing, yes, is one of the abilities of time. But it can also bruise. Time has scarred us in a way every man should fear -- indeed, in a way Man should fear. For the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the climate.

The problem is, like racism, sadly embedded in our society, but it isn't one concerning philanthropy. The gentlemen gathered in Paris, with all their PhD's hanging over their heads, and told us what we already new. An act of greater symbolism than of real value -- the problem became official. The problem became real. If we do not change our habits soon, the racism wins. The racists of 1950's America slam down the civil rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X are glorified. Go far enough back and the confederates win the civil war. Go further, and the slave trade cannot be abolished. As you can see, we must act now.

Were all the efforts of the great great men mentioned above in vain? Did they only make society better for less than a century. The debate on race is a healthy one to have, but it will be meaningless if it cannot impact upon the future. For it to do that, we need to make sure we have a future.

I arose this morn to see the bird table, just feet from the window. As the blind went higher, I could see the struggling garage. But beyond that...... nothing. Nothing. Only thick fog forever more. There had been a disaster on an apocalyptic scale, but my habitat remained in tact.

Like looking through the fog of this morn, we cannot say for sure what the future holds for Mankind, but the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of climate. We must act now. The time for talking was yesterday. The time for actions was today. But still our politicians sit in the House of Commons, the House of Representatives, the Senate &c. debating what is to be done.

Fools! All of us! Waiting for a solution. We could be waiting until we slowly burn to death under the heat of God's great sun. We are going about this the wrong way. We need to learn a lesson from the civil rights movement, and we need to learn now! The solution to the problem of the twentieth century was bottom-up. From the ghettos of the Northern cities, and from the densely populated areas of the racist south, they went and marched on Washington, in a show of change, in a show of defiance, in a show of anger, in a show of unity! And why? To force change!

The solution to the problem of the twenty-first century is bottom-up! We need to act now! We need to make the changes. In moments of great crisis, politicians do not make the magnificent gestures of brilliance, the people do! Act now and the future is ours, secured by us.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright.