My ancestors didn’t own SLAVES

I didn't say they had been gifted freedom I said they'd been freed and we the working class had footed the bill. Your right they shouldn't have been sold to European and Arabic slavers by neighbouring African tribes and taken across the Atlantic to work, just like my great great granddad shouldn't have been working down a pit at 8 years old to feather the nest of some rich fat probably Tory land owning arsehole. But I'm fed up to the back teeth of the media and BAME organisation saying I should feel guilty and be ashamed of my country it was at least 200 years ago FFS, if these campaigners want something to campaign about complain about those nice rich Islamic types in the middle East who still practice the art of slavery and slave trading as a nice little side line to oil production.

 

I wonder if they branded their initials on the chest of the slave as Colston is reputed to have done. Personal responsibility doesn’t come into it, we can’t rewrite history.

The British Empire was good for some, but oppressive to millions of others. The beginning of the empire was built on slavery, later on there were other factors. A good number of the stately homes that I for one enjoy visiting were built on money made from the slave trade. There is a great deal of denial about the evil face of the empire.

Maybe the removal of statues is the start of the healing process. I for one was glad to see that statue go, it should have happened in 2017 when a petition of 10000 names asked for it to be removed. I can’t understand the argument for keeping it when it was offensive to so many.

 

In the early 1500s you would have had about 2 million direct ancestors. Must have taken you an awful long time to establish that they were all working class and your family tree is completely clean of slavery...

 

We probably share a lot of ancestors, I'm eternally thankful for how far descendants can diverge.

 

For what it's worth i agree with a lot of that.
I don't think there are many saying we should feel guilty though, just that we shouldn't celebrate it.
It's a difficult line to tread.
Pointing the finger at those who are still trying to achieve equal treatment under the law for the descendants of those slaves though is well on the wrong side of that line.

 

and it took you even longer to try and find one, so try a bit harder and when and if you do find one please let me know

 

No idea what you're trying to say, but it's basically a mathematical certainty that at least one of your direct ancestors will have owned slaves

 

Actually I'll apologise and accept that there is some merit to the post. The rural peasant of 1600 had become the working class urbanite of 1750. Men women and children were now working the mines and factories. They were beaten often and readily lost their lives and limbs. I doubt if these people owned slaves abroad. Indeed it wasn't until the mid 19th century that the first ever legislation was introduced that protected children and recognized they weren't free agents under the Factory Act.

 

You’re creating your own straw man.

no one in this thread is asking you to feel guilty. You’re just inventing yourself something to feel angry about. Cheer up fella, it’s nearly beer o clock

 

The amount of guilt I feel for white people in general having slaves is zero.
The amount of guilt I feel for British people having slaves is zero.
The amount of guilt I feel for my own ancestors having slaves (if they did) is zero.
This is because I am not them and they are not me. I feel no guilt for the actions of someone else.

But the amount of sympathy for anyone who was a slave or who's family have been slaves or are otherwise affected by it and the amount of hatred I have for those who had slaves and for the whole idea of slavery is off the chart. It was wrong. end of.

Whether it's our ancestors or not we can and should still all condemn slavery. We shouldn't be saying yeah but it wasn't my great great great grandad. I couldn't care less if it was to be honest. I'm still not them. If someone puts Schindler's list on TV I don't say it doesnt matter, it wasn't awful, because my grandad wasn't running Auschwitz. I watch it and feel it's absolutely horrible what happened and can never happen again

 

i've spent 7 years researching my ancestry, not only on the site ancestry but also through various archives and have come across no mention of slaves, statistics may point in the direction that 'at least one of my ancestors will have owned a slave' , but thats statistics for you, they offer zero proof or evidence

you are right on one thing tho,my family tree is not free from slavery as i have ancestors below the age of 10 working in coal mines and these are the types of slaves nudger refers to,

 

Pointing the finger or stating the facts, it's a matter of opinions.

 

It has to be said that people refer to slavery, they always refer to the whites enslaving blacks, which overlooks the facts that whites enslaved whites , blacks enslaved other blacks and so on.
In fact I think Africa is the centre of modern day slavery

 

Not if you're from Sheffield it's not. Because of how inbred they are you probably only have about 100 ancestors

 

I don’t know if my ancestors owned slaves or not but if they did they were a bunch of lovely people, however, I will not apologise on behalf of people I never met and who don’t represent my values. All people in this country should be given the same opportunities and that should also include northerners.

 

You maybe right about people in this thread not asking me to feel guilty but many in the media and certain members of the BAME community are saying we should feel guilty and ashamed of this countries past.

 

I think you're mixing up direct and indirect ancestors.

"Direct lineage on your family tree is just that – you – your parents – your grandparents – great grandparents – great great grandparents, etc. You do not count aunts, uncles, cousins as direct ancestors but rather as extended family line".

Oh hang on - i get what you mean - you mean coming up rather than going down.

silly me

 

The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”. If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed.

 

I don't think it was West Indian cotton, as far as I know it wasn't grown there until the
20th c.....more likely to be US cotton....still slave cultivated of course.

 

gutted he missed me off!