Hansard

I thank the minister for holding the debate and I agree whole-heartedly with the motion. I hope that we all share the deep concern and horror that so many feel about continued racial injustice across the world and that we all stand in solidarity with those calling for change, that we all recognise at this time of global pandemic that we must be cognisant of public health issues and that we recognise too the responsibility on us all to identify and dismantle the barriers of structural racism that still exist in our society.

However, it is not the motion that I wish to focus on. Rather, I want to develop the proposal that has been made by many and which is included in the Green amendment: that a slavery museum be established in Scotland. Like many in the chamber, I have watched demonstrations following the death of George Floyd spread from city to city across the US and then across the world and I have read the placards and listened to the speeches of those drawing a direct line through history from the forced abduction and deportation of black Africans for sale and slavery through to the myriad of injustices faced daily by black and minority ethnic people in western culture today, whether that is in Scotland, America, Australia or anywhere else.

I have watched as campaigners have toppled statues and I have listened as professors have argued that instead of tearing them down, we should add context and, in truth, I feel ill-equipped to enter parts of this debate. How can I—not just white but with properly Celtic skin—know what it is like to be the only black face in a room? I cannot and I do not. Yes, I have been abused and othered for being a different type of minority, but I have never had that minority status be the first thing that people notice on first meeting me. I have never had people look at my name on a CV and make an assumption about my ethnicity and I have never been told to go home when I live 2 miles down the road. I do not have that lived experience, so I would prefer to listen to those who do and to their suggestions for what to do next—what practical and, if necessary, legislative changes will make things better—rather than charge in here, in all my whiteness, with some 10-point plan.

However, I believe very strongly in the responsibility on us all to be honest about the path that led us here, even if we ourselves may not be the people to pronounce on the next fork in the road. We need to be clear-eyed about our history, both in the context of the current Black Lives Matter campaign against police violence and in the wider context of our nationhood and what it is built on. We need to be rational enough to recognise that this is not some binary issue but one of immense complexity, with hundreds of strands threading the globe down the years.

It is possible to acknowledge and condemn our country’s part in American slave ownership while recognising that the model of policing in Scotland in 2020 is not the same model of policing that has been adopted in a number of police departments and states and by elected sheriffs across the US. We can do that while still scrutinising stop and search figures and prison population data and investigating deaths in custody.

I am not a historian by any manner of means, but I have always had an interest in history and, although I majored in literature at university, my minor subjects were Scottish and American history. I believe that we have a duty to learn about our past beyond battle dates and kings and queens and that that should include darker periods of human history. I have been to the Cherokee nation reserve; I have walked part of Andrew Jackson’s trail of tears; I have led groups to genocide memorials in Bosnia; and I have reported from massacre sites in Kosovo.

I think that one of the most arresting experiences that I have ever had is visiting Bergen-Belsen with a group of British Army officers when I was a young reporter; the only other people there were German school groups. A number of the pupils, when faced with such horror—horror that was carried out in their community and their country—were visibly upset and I remember the self-consciousness that I felt about being with uniformed personnel, which compounded the pupils’ sense of horror and shame as they tried to process it. It affected me deeply and I have thought about it oftentimes since. I have also thought about how important it is not just that such horror is taught in countries that liberated camps such as Belsen but that blameless German schoolchildren turn their faces to see it, too.

That is why I support the idea of a slavery museum in Scotland. We need to turn our faces to our own history and our own past. Too often, we are ignorant and uninformed. Sometimes, we are taught or we choose to believe a different truth. A strain of opinion has formed that empire was imposed upon Scotland—that it was something that was done to us in someone else’s name, not something that Scots were active participants in and proponents of. If we are to be clear about that line through history and those threads down the decades and across the oceans, we do not get to rewrite our own past and wash away the dark parts.

A third of Jamaican plantations were owned by Scots. Half of the East India Company’s regiments were raised north of the border. As has been said, in Henry Dundas, Scotland produced a politician who was pivotal in delaying abolition. We need to know that history and we need to own it.

Others have mentioned Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor, who for years has been a clear voice on adding context to street names and monuments to tell that history. He says:

“My view is you remove the evidence, you remove the deed”.

As an aside, I point out that he said that in talking to BBC Scotland, which is based at Pacific Quay, as it is now called, or Plantation Quay as it used to be called. To recognise the structural inequalities that still exist, we have to face up honestly to the cruelty that was enacted on an industrial scale, and although that was by individuals, it was with the entire apparatus of nation states behind it.

As I said, I do not have the lived experience of black and ethnic minority Scots who have experienced prejudiced hate and discrimination, and I will listen to and be led by those who have that experience on what practical changes can be enacted to move us forward. However, I can say with confidence that ignorance about our past does not help to challenge and confront some of those structural inequalities that are built into Scotland today. That is why I support a museum of slavery in Scotland. If we ever need some form of cross-party scoping committee to get one started, I will gladly ask the permission of my leader to be considered as our party’s representative.