How do we teach the painful history of transatlantic slavery? As a series of distinct facts relating to the past? Or, to paraphrase the great Toni Morrison, as a weight working itself out in our lives? The former has, we are slowly coming to admit, led to collective amnesia. In this forgetting, the families, institutions, cities and countries that grew rich through the enslavement of Africans could perform a neat excision of this diseased part of themselves.
When, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, protesters pulled down the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, something else broke too: the neat lens through which history is understood as events that occurred in another time whose reverberations are dimmed in the present and which we have no power to redress.
