In the face of the Black Lives Matter protests, some detractors are insisting that we celebrate the British government for abolishing slavery. Here's why that is ridiculous:
1) It was actually the Haitians that first abolished slavery, in 1804. Britain didn't get around to it until *three decades later*, and then only reluctantly, under sustained pressure from slave revolts and radical social movements (to whom the real credit belongs).
2) The Abolition Act of 1833 was not progressive but rather explicitly racist, declaring that enslaved persons were not humans but property, that therefore abolition amounted to expropriation, and that slave owners must therefore be compensated for their loss.
3) Not only did the British government pay an extraordinary sum to slave owners in a perverse act of reverse reparations, it required that slaves pay for their own freedom by working unpaid for a further 8 years after abolition ("apprenticeship", they called it).
4) Britain continued to openly countenance and profit from slavery in its colonies for more than a century after the Abolition Act, liberating slaves in Nigeria only in 1916, in Sierra Leone only in 1923, and in the West Indian colonies and the Cape colony only in 1938.
5) Britain engaged in state-sponsored trafficking of black people for more than 200 years. To claim credit for abolition is like a serial killer expecting praise for being made to stop murdering. Call not for praise but for remembrance and reparations.
6) And yet the British defense *against* reparations claims is to argue, ironically, that slavery was legal at the time. But you can't have it both ways. It is contradictory to invoke the legality of slavery and expect praise for ending it in the same breath.
