Britons are widely ignorant of the scale and legacy of Britain’s involvement in slavery and colonialism, a survey has found, with the vast majority unaware how many people were enslaved, how long the trade went on for, or for how long UK taxpayers were paying off a government loan to “compensate” enslavers after abolition.
The poll, released to coincide with Tuesday’s UN International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, was commissioned by the Repair Campaign, which is working with Caricom to secure reparatory justice for member states through health, education and infrastructure projects.
The sample of more than 2,000 people representative of the UK population found 85% did not know that more than 3 million people had been forcibly shipped from Africa to the Caribbean by British enslavers.
It was covered a bit when I was in school. Although the main focus was “yeah we did some bad slavery stuff. But we got rid of slavery much sooner than America and some other countries did!”
So it wasn’t exactly done in the best of ways. Although at the risk of repeating that same approach, as someone else here mentioned I think that’s the case with pretty much every country that enslaved or abused people.
Also I was never taught about our museums hoarding stolen objects from the places we went and acted like total assholes, and which they still won’t give back in most cases. Some of them have great religious or cultural value and the peoples they were stolen from have asked for them back. :/
Yeah, I was definitely not taught about that!