My issue with the removal of the statues outside the #shelbournehotel is the fact that it conflates the unique barbarity and enduring legacy of the trans Atlantic slave trade with other forms of slavery. Funnily enough this false equivalency is a common devise of racists !

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CHATTEL slavery of the transatlantic world differed from other forms of slavery in that it reimagined people as PROPERTY, commodities to be bought and sold, whose descendants would be owned in perpetuity

The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is the apparatus of race as we understand it today and the racial injustice that has us out in the streets chanting Black Lives Matter

If you do want to take action against other forms of slavery let’s have some proper legislation regulating the fast fashion industry

If the decision about the statues is linked to a wider convo about wealth acquisition, Empire and Ireland I’m totally here for it ! But that argument needs to be made explicitly.

The hotel simply saying “they were removed because of the Black Lives Matter movement and the legacy of slavery” collapses important distinctions