The Audacity of Whiteness: A White British Woman Demands Africa PAY Britain Reparations for Slavery.

Whiteness is so bold and so audacious.

In another episode of Whiteness is Audacious,

a white British woman named Hillary Fordwich demands Africans pay Britain reparation for slavery.

In an exchange with Don Lemon ( that I wrote about here), Hillary proudly proclaims,

I don’t know may be the descendants of the [two thousand naval British men] who died in the high seas trying to stop slavery, the descendants of those families, should receive something from Africans

The audacity.

The audacity of whiteness.

The audacity of Britain, the country that stole trillions from Africa, demanding reparations from Africa. The audacity of a white Brit claiming that the country that enslaved Africans for centuries deserves reparations from Africans.

The audacity that the country that created its wealth from the exploitation of enslaved Africans and from looting of Africa demanding reparations from Africa.

The audacity of Whiteness.

Whiteness is audacious. And Hillary Fordwich here has a lot of Whiteness.

Hillary wants to make it look like the British ended slavery that they had never participated in. That the British role in slavery was just fighting against it, nothing else.

In reality, the British spent more of their history buying, selling, abusing, and exploiting African slaves than they did fighting to end slavery.

The Brits were major slave traders from the 17th century to early 19th century. The British bought and sold Africans for centuries. They abused Africans in their slave ships for centuries.

For CENTURIES, The British brutalized and tortured Africans on BRITISH slave ships. On BRITISH slave ships, African women and children were raped and sodomized. On British slave ships, Africans were branded with hot iron. On British slave ships, Africans were denied even the dignity of dying to escape the torture of the Middle Passage. Read his excerpt from PBS’s teaching resource website

Faced with the nightmarish conditions of the voyage and the unknown future that lay beyond, many Africans preferred to die. But even the choice of suicide was taken away from these persons. From the captain’s point of view, his human cargo was extremely valuable and had to be kept alive and, if possible, uninjured. A slave who tried to starve him or herself was tortured. If torture didn’t work, the slave was force fed.

For centuries, BRITISH slave traders drowned millions of Africans in the Atlantic ocean.

The British were not just slave traders, though. They were also brutal slave owners.

For centuries, the British slave owners in the Americas bought shackled and branded Africans and exploted them in their plantations. For centuries, British slave owners physically and emotionally abused slaves in their plantations.

But Hillary and other white Brits want you to ignore this part of British history. They want you to forget Britain’s long long history of buying and selling Africans in the Transatlantic slavery. They want you to forget the British long history of abusing Africans in slave ships and plantations. They want you to forget their long history of exploiting African in the Americas.

And, if they can’t get you to ignore their brutal slavery history, then they want you to make a moral equivalency between the two thousand white Brits killed fighting to “stop” slavery and the millions of Africans they enslaved in the Americas.

They want you to make m seeoral equivalency between the crime of drowning millions of African children, women, and men in the Atlantic ocean and the killing of two thousand British SOLDIERS by other white people. They want you to make moral equivalency between abusing millions of Africans in their slave ships and in their plantations and the killing of two thousand British men who died trying too keep African labor in Africa so that the British Empire can exploit it there.

In fact, she and many white people don’t even believe there is a moral equivalency. They actually believe the lives of “two thousand” Brits matter more than the millions of African slaves. They believe that the descendants of the two thousand Brits deserve reparation, but not the descendants the millions of Africans enslaved, exploited and abused by British

The audacity of Hillary and many white Brits shouldn’t shock us. Whiteness is based on the premises that any attack on white people is an unforgivable crime. But genocidal crimes against Black people are silly mistakes that are justified.

Hillary also made it look like the African kings were forcing British merchants to buy slaves from them. She took away all responsibility from the British who who bought slaves from Africans and put it all on the Africans selling slaves.

Africans didn’t force the British slave traders to sail their slave ships to coasts of Africa. African kings didn’t force the British to buy slaves from Africa. Africans didn’t force British plantation owners to exploit slave labor in their plantations.

But Hillary blaming Africans for what the brutal British slave traders and owners shouldn’t surprise us. Infantalizing white people and not holding them accountable for their own action is part and parcel of whiteness. Blaming Black people for white people’s crime is how Whiteness operates.

Let’s for once and all kill the idea that the Brits were the first to end slavery. They were not. Like, Pamela and Bri put it here, it was the Haitians who ended slavery FIRST.

The British didn’t end SLAVERY first. They half-heartdly ended slave TRADE “first”. And, as Marika Sherwood explains in her book (After Abolition), the British “ended” slave trade only on paper.

Marika talks about how the British authorities still allowed ships with slave transportation equipment like chains and shackles to deck in their ports. British authorities looked the other way when British ships transported slaves using ports in Spain and other European countries.

So, not only was Hillary audacious in her demand for reparation from the same continent her country looted and impoverished, her claims about her country’s anti-slavery history were just fabrications.