Should we blame our ancestors for slavery when we’re equally culpable?

The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore he wants to investigate Britain’s role in slavery — which is a rather odd framing, since his family’s tobacco firm wasn’t started until decades after slavery in British colonies was abolished.

But Thomas Harding apparently only recently learned that slavery happened in the British Empire. He goes as far as to ask: ‘How could I not have known this?’ Well, truly, I don’t know. I don’t recall the time when I wasn’t aware that slavery was the reason that people of African descent live in the Caribbean today. Some of their ancestors were enslaved in territories that belonged to Britain. Yet Harding’s revelation about this issue leads him to think that most of his readers are similarly ignorant, and it is his place to inform us.

For his main subject he has chosen a slave uprising in Demerara that took place in 1823. His narrative draws on contemporary accounts and court records, shaded with novelistic elements (what people thought and smelled and looked like), so that it reads as a continuous chronological narrative. The outcome for the Demerara fighters (Harding calls them ‘abolitionists’) was what happened when enslaved people tried to assert their rights by force elsewhere. The local authorities — in this case the militia and the courts — unleashed brutal reprisals.

But what’s strange is that in between every chapter about Demerara is a shorter chapter about Harding himself. He buttonholes friends in Britain, asking them how they feel about slavery. He visits Guyana and talks to scholars there. He contemplates reparations. He wants us to see how much he is acknowledging his white guilt. He has read Kendi and DiAngelo.