{"id":311377,"date":"2025-08-02T07:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T07:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311377\/"},"modified":"2025-08-02T07:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T07:48:11","slug":"this-is-the-week-scotland-was-forced-to-confront-its-role-in-slavery-and-say-yes-that-was-us-hannah-lavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311377\/","title":{"rendered":"This is the week Scotland was forced to confront its role in slavery, and say: \u2018Yes, that was us\u2019 | Hannah Lavery"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a child growing up in Edinburgh<\/a>, I was taught this was a city built on the genius of the Scottish Enlightenment. That story was sunk deep into our bones and passed between us as our treasured inheritance. It formed our sense of ourselves and our belief in Scotland\u2019s good and worthy contribution to the world.<\/p>\n

We walked past statues of David Hume and Adam Smith. We celebrated their intellect and claimed it as our own. Yet no one spoke of what lay beneath that brilliance \u2013 of whose labour built their wealth, whose bodies were stolen, dispossessed and abused as a consequence of their \u201cthinking\u201d. Edinburgh was framed not as a city of complicity but of genius. That silence shaped us.<\/p>\n

Now, the University of Edinburgh\u2019s review of its legacies of enslavement and colonialism joins a wider reckoning that has been building across Scotland. It confronts the stories we were told \u2013 that we continue to tell. That we love to tell.<\/p>\n

Scotland has long positioned itself as a nation on the margins of empire. We speak of being oppressed, victimised \u2013 or as a benign participant in the British imperial project. But many of us, through our family histories, have always known that\u2019s not the whole truth. It\u2019s a lie of omission. One that has excluded us, exiled us from a national story in which we also have histories to contribute, and in which we have a claim.<\/p>\n

Edinburgh University\u2019s recent inquiry<\/a> into its history is sobering. It focuses on the institution\u2019s financial gains from plantation slavery, its intellectual support of racial pseudoscience and its memorialisation of colonial figures. It names how Enlightenment thinking in Scotland justified racial hierarchies. These aren\u2019t revelations for many Black and Brown Scots, or for those involved with Scotland\u2019s anti-racism movements \u2013 they\u2019re confirmations of truths long lived and denied.<\/p>\n

And still, we are met with denial, minimisation and the defensive recoil of a nation uncomfortable with the truth of itself. There\u2019s a reflex to preserve pride at all costs within our society \u2013 even when the cost is exclusion and erasure of fellow Scots; of their histories and their story of Scotland.<\/p>\n

A sign hangs from the statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, after a Black Lives Matter protest, 7 June 2020. Photograph: Jane Barlow\/PA<\/p>\n

The work of uncovering Scotland\u2019s pivotal role in enslavement and colonialism has been led by individuals such as the academics Geoff Palmer and Stephen Mullen, Zandra Yeaman at the Hunterian Museum, Lisa Williams, founder of the Edinburgh Black History Walk, and the poet Shasta Hanif Ali, who explores the stories of the Indian ayahs who lived and worked in Edinburgh. Their work has helped us understand long-denied histories and given many of us a stronger sense of belonging as a result. The University of Edinburgh\u2019s report adds further weight to their labour. But what comes next?<\/p>\n

Race is a social construct. But we must now confront the fact that it was constructed, in part, here, by so-called \u201cgreat men\u201d \u2013 our great men \u2013 whose legacy continues to shape our country and institutions. And their legacy still causes us harm.<\/p>\n

This harm is not abstract. In 2024 alone, Police Scotland recorded 4,794 hate crimes<\/a> under the new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. Black and minority ethnic people are 60% more likely to live in the most deprived parts of Scotland<\/a> than their white counterparts. Black and minority ethnic workers have poorer outcomes than white workers <\/a>when applying for jobs in our public sector organisations.<\/p>\n

These are reverberations of a legacy born in Enlightenment philosophies that theorised racial hierarchies \u2013 ideas presented as science, later used to justify enslavement and colonialism. These narratives of white supremacy negatively affect us all, and they continue to endanger and blight the lives of Black and Brown people.<\/p>\n

What happens next must therefore go beyond apology and symbolism. It must be structural, sustained and fiercely imaginative. Education is key. Not just to correct the record, but to transform how we imagine and create a better nation. Within our schools, reform is under way \u2013 initiatives such as Education Scotland\u2019s Building Racial Literacy<\/a> programme and collectives such as The Anti-Racist Educator<\/a> provide vital resources and training.<\/p>\n

Such efforts must be scaled, funded and politically backed if they\u2019re to meaningfully reshape how we understand ourselves, how we embed anti-racism within our institutions and how we teach Scotland\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Edinburgh council\u2019s Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review<\/a>, endorsed by councillors in 2022, included a public apology and the creation of an implementation group, chaired by Irene Mosota, to guide reparative action. This included initiatives such as the Disrupting the Narrative project<\/a>, which has formed the main body of my work as Edinburgh makar (the city\u2019s poet laureate). The meetings of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network<\/a>\u2019s writers group at the University of Edinburgh, and the important work of mentorship and support from We Are Here Scotland<\/a> are also living examples of this reparative work. This work is not symbolic \u2013 it is foundational. It allow us to rebuild from the margins, and write ourselves back into the story of Scotland, and into the story we tell.<\/p>\n

This is a live, unfinished conversation \u2013 one that must embrace intersectionality, mobilise solidarity and resist the far right\u2019s weaponisation of pseudoscience and historical denial. Opposition to anti-racism is often framed as resistance to \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d, and calls for decolonisation are frequently mocked or deliberately misunderstood. Silence, however, is complicity.<\/p>\n

History is not settled. Our story is not finished. We are capable of confronting ourselves honestly and critically. We can take pride in our history of social justice movements \u2013 but this pride must also own and acknowledge the truth of what and who built this nation. That means interrogating our past and the reasons for our collective amnesia. It means listening to voices long silenced. The time has come, Scotland. The time has finally come.<\/p>\n