University of the West Indies history Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles spoke about reparations for chattel slavery in the postcolonial Americas at a Tuesday event sponsored by Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Beckles spoke about the long history and continuing aftermath of chattel slavery, the practice by which European empires sent African slaves to the Americas for grueling agricultural labor.
At the beginning of the lecture, Beckles recounted a scene from his childhood: At the age of six, he brought lunch to his grandfather, who worked on a sugar plantation, and saw a young white boy on a horse driving dozens of black laborers like his grandfather to work.
“I knew there and then that there was something fundamentally wrong with that image,” Beckles said.
Beckles distinguished chattel slavery from the general practice of slavery, defining chattel slavery by the legislative dehumanization of African slaves, the designation of any child born to an enslaved mother as also enslaved and the use of slaves as personal property.
At the event, Beckles spoke about his research and writings.
“All of them focus on one thing: the wrongness of human exploitation of other humans and the inequity of access to resources for decency,” Beckles said. “I came to understand, eventually, that my entire academic discourse was about injustice.”
Beckles said that chattel slavery began when European empires first brought African slaves to their New World territories.
Even after New World countries abolished slavery and gained their independence from Europe, he said, they were broken nations reeling from colonialism’s impact.
“Nation-building is really cleaning up the colonial mess,” Beckles said. “You come back to the source of this crime, and you come back to clean up this mess that you’ve made.”
Beckles said that reparations movements, in which slaves demanded government compensation for their abuses, existed as early as there were freed slaves.
However, Beckles said the postcolonial reparations of the 1800s didn’t go to slaves. Instead, he said, compensation was given to former slave owners or was paid to their former colonizers. This happened in Haiti, when the nation was required to pay reparations to compensate for France’s loss of Haitian slave labor.
“It was an interesting perspective,” said McCormick senior Douglas Aris, who attended the event.
Aris also expressed appreciation for how Beckles provided historical context for Haiti’s reparations to France.
“That (the Haitian compensation to France) was the first reparations he talked about … as opposed to what we came in here thinking about, paying for the crimes of slavery,” Aris said.
Beckles’ lecture was part of NU’s newly-formed partnership with UWI, expanding on preexisting opportunities and research at UWI.
“Right now, we have students embedded, doing journalism on Montserrat (and) volcanic seismic activity,” said event co-sponsor and anthropology Prof. Mark Hauser. “There’s already stuff going on: research activities with existing faculty, and really trying to seek out interesting partnerships”
Looking to the future, Beckles said reparations are a prerequisite to ensure justice and a truly democratic society in the wake of the totalitarianism of chattel slavery and the injustices it left behind.
“Every achievement that builds sophistication and decency into human behavior has to be struggled for,” Beckles said. “Injustices must be recognized and confronted.”
Email: stephenwalsh2028@u.northwestern.edu
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