Barbados may give energy to reparations case

...which is as much about politics as money

Slaves cutting sugarcane on the island of Antigua, 1823. Photo by British Library on Unsplash

I was reminded of a Financial Times piece on reparations (paywall) when I heard that the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, will be delivering a keynote address on reparations at next month’s State of the Black World Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. ( Click here to read my 2014 National piece on reparations for the Caribbean.)

The FT piece, by Stephen Bush, used an heirloom — a silver tea set from the family farm in South Africa — as a metaphor for the whole testy issue of who should pay for historical injustice.

The unanswerable moral argument for reparations, Mr Bush noted, is that “on average, the family with the silver tea set is going to be richer and more successful than the family that mined the silver. No amount of hard work or good luck is going to close the gap — only some form of redistributive action is going to cut it”.

True.

This is likely to be the focus of the conference, w…