Big Stinkus

The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.

The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.

Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)

It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!

It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.

In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.

And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.

For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).

As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.

The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.

Here's some additional screenshots from the show that I think further illustrates my point (every single person in each if these pictures is a trans woman on the show)

Gilbert Baker added a 9th stripe shortly before his death, with the new stripe representing diversity. He added this stripe in reaction to the 2016 US election. It’s unfortunately not as well known as the 8 and 6 striped versions.

Here’s an image of him sewing together the 9 striped rainbow flag.

we called them musk-ox because we thought they must be some kind of cow thing, but they are actually a goat thing; this is to a normal wild goat what a woolly mammoth is to a normal elephant, only these things survived.

and i absolutely cannot help myself because of the tizzy my brain goes into over the twin facts of

1: ice-age megafauna that is still alive! and

2: EIGHT HUNDRED POUND GOAT

you can see the goatishness a little more in their babies

i just, i am crazy over the fact that these guys are still alive on our planet

But there was one moment that really upset me.

My friend has respiratory issues, and this guy from the warhammer crowd was standing in the doorway smoking while talking on his phone, letting all the cigarette smoke drift straight inside the store. It immediately started making her cough. She very politely asked if he could maybe move out of the doorway a little, and instead of just being decent about it, he started lecturing her about “how to properly speak to people,” saying she should introduce herself first before “demanding” things.

Meanwhile she was literally struggling to breathe.

You could see her shrinking into herself while he kept talking down to her, and honestly it made my blood boil. So I stepped in and defended her, because nobody deserves to be treated like that for asking someone not to blow smoke into a doorway.

Afterwards though… she got really emotional.

Later that day she quietly asked if she could have a hug, and the second I said yes she just clung to me. She held onto me for almost two whole minutes and wouldn’t let go, and while she was holding me she admitted nobody had really defended her before. She talked about how alone she’s felt for so long, how weak and anxious she always feels around people, and how me standing up for her made her feel safe enough to actually be herself around me.

And then she said something that genuinely broke my heart a little.

She told me that when she’s with me, she feels like she doesn’t have to stress or constantly be on guard anymore. That she really likes being around me, and that in that moment she never wanted to let go.