I think you miss the point I am trying to make. I apologise because I am obviously not explaining it well. He was a share holder in the Royal African Company, for twelve years, the figures I have seen suggest that over that time about sixty thousand persons were transported as slaves, of which perhaps twelve thousand may have died. If you say that he was a bad man because he was involved with something that was evil, there is little for us to learn, he is just dismissed as being a bad man. He did this evil thing because he was evil.
If we move away from defining him as evil, perhaps to say as a normal person. A person like you and I. Then the story becomes something of relevance to us. How did he as a normal person come to be engaged with something of this sort. How can we as normal people avoid being seen as evil by the future?
Just pitching the statue in to the sea, is ignoring the unpleasant fact that slavery still exists. Those who smoked tobacco participated in the slave trade. Tobacco kills eight million people a year. There are people who are shareholders in companies causing many deaths today. Companies whose wealth was based on slavery. Modern day slavery remains a racist process. Perhaps a more important action for the normal people of today to take is to learn from Colston and ask when I invest my money what are the human costs? Is this Asian woman in the nail parlour a slave? Who grows the cannabis I buy? What about the cheap fashion? Where is my pension fund investing? The slave trade is happening now. that is the true evil.
Colston is dead and gone. We cannot know what he thought, whether he was racist, whether he turned a blind eye to the realities of the slave trade. Slavery was not a racist concept. At this time there were galley slaves in the mediterranean. North African slavers devastated the economy of the European Mediterranean coast causing massive depopulation and an economic impact that it took until the mid twentieth century to recover from. North African slavers raided the coast of England and Ireland, 7,000 English people were abducted between 1622-1644. Cromwell notoriously sent thousands of Irish to the Caribbean as indentured servants, as close to slavery as English law would allow. Until the Atlantic slave trade, what the slave trade meant was Europeans being enslaved and transported and sold in Middle East and Africa; hence the term slave. Europeans enslaved Europeans, Africans enslaved Europeans, Europeans enslaved Africans, Africans enslaved Africans. All was evil, but would people at that time have seen slavery as exclusively the right of the white man to inflict upon the African? Was racism a necessary prerequisite for the slave trade or was a racist society a consequence?
I would argue the best use of Colston is not to dismiss him as an evil man from whom we have nothing to learn but a normal human being, what did Colston fail to do? And if we do not want to end up being seen as like him as evil participants in slavery what do we need to do not to be part of the slave trade?
