Not only does this moral relativism fail on its own erroneous terms, it implies that Black Lives Did Not Matter. The only thing “erased” by merely taking into account the voices of slavery’s millions of victims, are the deeply rooted myths borne of imperial and colonial hubris. https://twitter.com/SimonClarkeMP/status/1270326461422088194

We could make the mistake of disproving his revisionist slaver argument by quoting anti-slavery thought from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, but that would be a misguided endeavour that would obscure the root of the problem.

Historical sympathy is an essential approach to understanding the past, but it must be applied to the oppressed as well as to the oppressor. To the slaver trader and to the enslaved. “It was normal back then” is the enslaver’s narrative.

From the moment the transatlantic slave trade began, there was always opposition, always resistance. For them, this was never “normal” or morally neutral but a hell on earth, which many resisted, in many ways, whenever possible.

Approximately 400 cases of slave revolts on slave vessels have been documented so far & the true number is likely much higher. But for the moral relativist/apologist this history is discounted, just a detail w/ zero recognition of the individual lives of the Africans on board.

You see in the histories and national myths handed down through the generations, it was not until a British politician or philanthropist said it was immoral, that it suddenly became immoral.

The enslaved were not presented as persons with agency (or thoughts or feelings or identities of their own) in these tales, but rather a dehumanised object of concern, phasing in and out of a narrative whose primary concern was to comfort the reader.

Those days are over.

“Trying to impose today’s morality on people from a different era, does not bring enlightenment.”

Gambia (1735):

“To nations accustomed to hearing only comforting myths of exceptionalism, simple, irrefutable historical fact can sound like slander.” - @DavidOlusoga https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/24/cultural-warriors-attacking-woke-history-care-little-for-truth-its-all-political-theatre