 Welcome to Global Perspectives on Race, Justice and Equity. I'm Abhi Williams, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership and Professor of the Practice of International Politics, at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The Apparatory Justice Movement has gained new impetus with the global protests against systemic racism and racial injustice. Our guest today is Sahil Rebekuls, Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He's a distinguished historian, International Thought Leader, Chairman of the Carycom Preparations Committee, Commission and a global public activist in the field of Social Justice and Minority Empowerment. We're going to have a conversation today on reparations. Sahil Rebekuls, in Kingston, Jamaica, welcome to Global Perspectives. You've said that Reparatory Justice begins with understanding the jet stream of the consequences of slavery. What do you mean by this? Well, tremendous pleasure and honor, Professor Williams, to be with you and your colleagues at Tufts and, of course, our audience. Wonderful to be a part of this conversation. Well, we begin with an understanding that fundamental crimes against humanity were committed within the context of the colonization and the construction of what we know called the Americas. This Atlantic world that is now at the core of what we call the West. But in the construction of this modernity, of this Western complex of business and democracy and politics, resided some fundamental crimes against humanity. And it has taken a pretty long time to deal with these issues. It required a tremendous shift in the balance of power to be able to discuss these matters. And let us take a sequential typology in that regard. It took all of the 19th century to eradicate chattel slavery from our Americas. Beginning first with the Haitians, when they declared the Republican 1804, then through to the European powers to end chattel slavery in the Caribbean colonies. The Americans went to war, brutal bloody civil war to get rid of it. Then through to Brazil and Cuba at the end of the 19th century. It took an entire century to uproot this evil from the modern world. Then it took us all of the 20th century to deal with some of the consequences of that, to achieve recognition of human rights, civil rights, the right to vote, the right to have the right to have the right to have democratic participation. It took all of the 20th century, a heroic 20th century struggle to root these developments that we now enjoy partially today. Now we are in the third phase of this process, the third phase, the 21st century. And we are looking forward to a 21st century that is quite different from any other before. We're looking forward to a 21st century of fulfillment of justice, of equality for all. We're looking forward to the full blossoming of democracy and justice in this 21st century. But to prepare for it, we have to repair what took place in prior centuries. So this grand preparation, this grand preparation for this magnificent 21st century that we are crafting and laying the foundations for, the preparations requires reparations. And that is the subject of which I spoke at the quotation which you iterated. You've said that we need to repair for the crimes, heinous crimes which were committed in earlier centuries. And recently some major British institutions and companies have issued public statements of regret for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. For example, the Church of England says its links to the slave trade are a source of shame. How important is apology in reparatory justice and how important is it in repairing and atoning for these crimes which you mentioned? Well, it's important I believe to have an accurate concept that depicts the concept of apology. It's important to know what's it actually mean, because we tend to use it loosely, but we must also use that concept technically. An apology is to be distinguished from a statement of regret. You can issue a statement of regret for something that you have done of a criminal unethical in moral nature and you can walk away from it. And that is the understanding. An apology however is to be distinguished from a statement of regret. An apology is a three part concept in which you say I do regret what I have done. That's the first part of it. The second part of it is that I take responsibility for the consequences of what I have done. And the third part of it is that I will make all kinds of assurances to persuade you that I will not do this again. If the three elements are not there, it is not an apology. I mean, let me give you an example. If you were walking in the subway and you stepped on someone's foot with your big boots, and that person coincidentally happens to be diabetic and develop an injury and the injury will not heal. You can issue a statement of regret. You can say I'm very sorry for what I've done. Now, I wish you all the best. Thank you, goodbye. That's a statement of regret. An apology says, I'm very sorry for what I have done. I take responsibility for the consequences of my actions and I will try to help you the best I can to return as close as possible to your normal function. I want to help you to regain some of your mobility and so on. So an apology is a statement of engagement, of participating and this is why it is seen as a prerequisite for the concept of repair. I will help you to repair best I can, best I can, within the context of helping you to have a normal function. So this is why the apology as distinct from the statement of regret is so very important and most of the European countries and institutions, in fact, most of the beneficiary governments from the US, Canada, across to Europe, most of these countries have issued statements of regret but they have not as yet made a profound statement of apology using the concept of apology technically characterized by three phases of engagement. And why do you think these governments, both as you say, Britain, European governments, the Canadian government are resistant to issuing apologies? Simply because we have not reached a stage just yet of taking responsibility. These beneficiary countries, these countries that have extracted the wealth out of millions of African peoples, native peoples, colonized them into chattel slavery, deny them their human identity, plundered and extracted them for the wealth which they have accumulated. That process of leaving an indigenous population and an African population crippled, now seeking, healing by themselves, for themselves, always looking to self empowerment but without the support of those who have extracted the wealth and dehumanized them, they isn't as yet. This movement of philosophical and epistemic responsibility for consequences. There is a willingness to reflect upon the action and to say that was really awful and terrible. But when it moves to the second phase of taking responsibility and participating in the repair of the harm that has been done then there is this reluctance. And because many of these countries they have a battery of lawyers who are giving them advice. You know, the moment you issue an apology you are committing yourself to responsibility. Don't take responsibility. Deal with this at the moral level. Deal with this at the philosophical level. Do not deal with it at the practical everyday level of helping people to repair the harm that you have done. This is where we are at and I suspect this is clearly why and of course we do know, we don't have to suspect because we have spoken to the leaders of so many of these institutions and they come to the water's edge. They come to the water's edge of sorrow but they don't step into the water to deal with the healing and this is where we are. We're all at the water's edge looking at each other and not willing to put our feet in the water and burst each other. And almost in that kind of Christian evangelical we have a baptism together to begin a new life. So we're at the water's edge. The Church of England, classically so. You know, I was born on the island of Barbados which was the first slave society or the first society in which Africans were the majority in this entire hemisphere. And I was born and raised about five miles away from two sugar plantations that were owned by the Church of England. The Church of England was one of the largest enslavers on the island. They had two sugar plantations. They had hundreds of enslaved Africans. They imported enslaved Africans. They would brand the enslaved Africans on the shoulder with the letter C of E, Church of England, branded on the shoulder. This is what the Church of England did for 100 years to African peoples in the Caribbean. They went to the harbor, they bought the slaves off the slave ships, took them to the estates and they ran these plantations as a business. It was for them a business because the Church of England needed to build provincial churches across the country and they needed a funding to build in each town in each village or Church of England. So they needed the capital. The quickest way to get this capital, African enslavement, they're participated. Now they have given their statement of regret. We have said to them, we have said to the bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury, let us have a conversation about the apology and how we can go forward. What do you think will be required for them? Both say the Church of England, there are also companies, I know Lloyds of London also issued a statement of regret. What will be required in order to get them to take this next step towards responsibility? Is it action by civil society? Is it pressure from governments that has been happening in the case of the Caribbean? What would be required to move them beyond the water's edge, as you say? First of all, we have to make a determination. And this determination as to whether there is goodwill that needs to be activated and strategies that are mutually respected could be brought to the table for adjudication. In other words, do we in the reparations movement, do we have an obligation and a duty to create models of healing, models and concepts and principles to bring to the table that will enable everyone to be comfortable in that discussion. Is it out of a duty? Or whether in fact there is no goodwill, there is no open mind, there remains the traditional strategy of if we can tough this out, we can get through it. If we can find methods of resistance to how sophisticated we can get through this without participating. So we have to make that determination and bear in mind, Prof, that in the three to 400 years we are dealing with, there was always in many of these enslavement communities, there were always people and movements that stood against this kind of behavior in Europe and the Americas. There were always people who were saying what we are doing is wrong. It's morally wrong. It is criminal. It is sinful. And you could use as many of those concepts as you can but they were packaged into a resistance culture. Slave trading, slavery, it is wrong. Legally wrong, morally wrong. It's not Christian. It's sinful. We must stop it. We must not allow this to take root. Now there were always people like that. There were always institutions and people who stood the ground against this criminal behavior. But there was always another voice that said, this activity, this institution, we have defined it to be in the national interest. And therefore all of you who are standing against this business enterprise of slavery who are standing against this social enterprise of racism, all of you who are standing in opposition are standing against the national interest. And therefore you will be silenced. So what you're saying over this history is that there were always moments when the state and the corporate investor came together to define the national interests, to constitute slavery as in the national interest. This is the corporate investors and the state supporters and relevant major institutions came together to constitute the national interest. And those of us and those who have gone in the past in England, in France, in Germany and the Americas who stood against it were brushed aside. Now, they were brushed aside in the 17th century, they were brushed aside in the 18th century and they're being brushed aside today. So when we see today in our cities and our towns and our universities and our streets, we see people standing up for reparations, standing up for justice and saying, this is right. This is the right thing to do. We still have that alliance of state and corporate interests consolidating themselves into a powerful force to say reparations is not in the national interest. It is not the way to go. This is how the European governments have said it. This is how the American government have said it. This approach is not in the national interest. So what you're saying today is the same calculation that was made in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century. We are saying it again today and we have to ask the question, what is different? I am really impressed with all of the people in the world who are standing up for reparations as I was impressed by those in the 18th century and the 19th century when people like Wordsworth, the poets like Wordsworth, wrote beautifully against the evil of slavery, wrote beautifully poetically and supported Toussaint Louverture for end in slavery. There were always people like that as there are today. What is important, I think for us to ask, therefore, when these major corporate institutions and civic society institutions, when they make their statement of regret, how serious really are they? Is there integrity in what they are saying? If there is integrity, then we can come to the table to work this through. We could say, for example, we have no difficulty with the theological pedagogy of the Church of England. We have no major interests or concern with how Lawyers of London participates in the global financial world. We do not wish to see these institutions fall. We do not wish to see them crumbled. We do not wish to see them diminished. And therefore we are not the enemy. We are here just to discuss how we can mutually come together to clean up the mess that has been created, the mess that has been created, which is now damaging social life in the 21st century. It is not for the victims alone to be involved in cleaning this mess up. It's for everyone to sit to the table. So in a nutshell then, my answer to your complex question would be, if there is integrity in these apologies, it would be a relatively simple matter for Reparatory Justice Forces to sit in a mutual discussion and to work through methodologies of repair that are acceptable to the consciousness of this time. If there is no integrity, then there will be no conversation because you cannot have a conversation before mutual integrity. So the world has to decide whether it is ready for that conversation. But as I said in my title to this presentation, the majority of citizens in the world, the jury, the vast majority of humanity, the jury of the world have said, let's just go forward and have that conversation that we have deliberated. The world has deliberated. The judge now has a statement. The judge, no doubt, will be the governments of the world, the major corporations of the world. They're the ones who now need to say, we've heard the jury, let us sit down, let us decide how much and when. These are the issues, I think, where we are today. You've said the jury has deliberated and come to the conclusion that reparations are needed. What kinds of reparations would you like to see and what sort of guidance would you give to the judge about the nature of reparations? Well, I have listened to Reparatory Justice conversations on a global basis. I've listened to those in the Caribbean, I'm a part of that movement. I've listened to those in Europe and North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa. I've listened, I traveled, I've met the leaders, I've met the participants, I met the academics who are providing research guidance. So I have a pretty good sense of what is the global temperature and the mood. And I would say that there is a convergence around the concept of development that many of the societies, the countries and the communities that have suffered the consequences of these crimes have been left with economic structures, with community structures, with individual human consciousness that continue to show the effects, the lingering harm and the lingering damage. So those who say, well, it was all a long time ago, no, it was not a long time ago, it is still today. It is still today. It is still at the individual level about detachment from their civilization and culture. It's about the experiences they have had then, their parents, their four parents, and now they're also having. It's about your village and your town and your city and what has happened to it as a result of being from a different race. These are all major issues. And I think that there is a convergence around the concept of development, reparations as development. Now, of course, we know that on the other side, those who have benefited from the enrichment and who would wish to deny that or to say, well, it has nothing to do with me because it was my four parents. You have all of that kind of story, but the evidence shows this is not true. You can benefit from the enrichment of your four parents in your own time. You take that enrichment which you've inherited, you take it for granted, the privileges of your life you take for granted without realizing that these privileges have been historically accumulated and handed down to you as your legacy. And on the other side, those people, like ourselves, black people, have also had something handed down. We've had handed down many damaging and painful and crippling legacies that we are struggling with every day to resolve because the world is in need of repair. So development. In the case of the Caribbean, for example, the governments of the region have established a reparations commission to not only investigate the historical evidence and the evidentiary basis for Reparatory Justice, but also to recommend methodologies of the cure and the repair. And the methodology has focused around the concept of economic and social development. These are items and countries in the Caribbean that have had 500 years of massive extraction of wealth, leaving endemic poverty. We now need to rebuild institutional basis for development. So there's a perspective that focuses around the issue. You need economic development. What kind of support do you need for economic development? You take a simple issue such as these countries moving from colonial status to nationhood, the Europeans walked away and left them with crippled economies, poor infrastructure, ill-massive illiteracy, massive public health. These new countries have said, well, okay, you know, you have extracted the wealth. You had 200 years of free labor from 10 million black people. Imagine 200 years of free labor from 10 million people. The wealth that constitutes, you need to return a part of that to build schools, to build hospitals, to build civic society institutions like museums to help to eradicate illiteracy, to deal with issues of early childhood education. You need to make an investment in these infrastructures to allow for economic and social development and justice. This is how the Caribbean world has looked at it. This is how we interpret reparations as a development strategy for infrastructure to promote economic and social development and social justice. Now, in the USA, I think there's also a fair amount of that, but there's also perspective that says, in our context in the USA, deep into the 20th century, long after slavery into the 20th century, there was still the plunder of the black community. I mean, the Tulsa massacre. This is just our grandparents away who had their wealth taken from them, who were not able to pass on to their children their entrepreneurial accumulation. It was taken through plunder with the support of the state. So in some societies, the damage is so absolutely immediately in front of you that there are people walking the streets who are poor because their parents' wealth was taken from them and racist acts of exploitation. And those circumstances, those are people who say, we have by a right to have our domestic circumstance repaired. So individuals and individuals' families who can demonstrate this plunder of their accumulative wealth have a right to be repaired at the individual and the family level. That is not the approach we are adopting in the Caribbean, but it is a legitimate approach in the context of America. What we are talking about in the Caribbean is a broad economic development model in which we speak about a martial plan for these islands to bring them out of poverty and to have those who extracted that wealth bring back a share of this. So the conversation, therefore, about reparations, this notion which we have heard in some places, oh, reparations is about black people standing around on street corners, not helping themselves, not helping themselves, but waiting for a handout. This is how they have defined it. We have never defined it that way. And I think that particular approach has been discredited. This is about a serious strategy. And I will end the segment with this statement. We were approached by persons in the city of London who have said to us in the Carrie Kong Reparations Commission, you are now pushing against an open door. We've heard you. And we believe that the Caribbean is in need of reparations. We did treat these islands very, very poorly with the way in which we went about the 200 years of free labor and extractions and wealth. And we admit our balance sheets have shown how we have become enriched like many other institutions from drinking, from the well of slavery. But why don't you formulate a strategy that we can talk about? And one of our consultants have said, we need to create an investment development fund. An investment development fund is really a corporate instrument which is floated by a respected institution, let us say the IMF, the World Bank or even the United Nations. And you put this investment development fund there and institutions, individuals, governments that wished to place funds in this IDF are free to do so and they'll be invited to do so so that you avoid the shame of having your company identified with slavery. Oh my God, companies are trying to protect their reputations from that imagery. But they might wish to have a conversation that is civil and human and future looking. And they might wish to put a major corporation, might wish to put 500 million pounds or dollars into this fund because the fund is dedicated to a cause. Building schools, building hospitals, creating museums, building online capacity for primary school children across the region helping to repair the harm. And an IDF can be used as an instrument and they have said, why don't you do that so that these major corporations could invest in the IDF and the IDF can roll out those resources for development. So the focus I think is of repair is really fundamentally about inclusive development, development of social justice. You've covered a number of important points in that segment. First of course, two of the standard arguments against reparations by those who object to reparations. Oh, this happened a long time ago, happened with my forebears, has nothing to do with me. Black people want handouts from white people. There's usually another third argument which I wonder how you'd react to it before we get back to the Caribbean approach to reparations and the American approach. And the third argument is usually, well, talking about reparations is divisive. It's divisive at this point in time thinking about what happened in the past. How would you react to that argument? Well, you begin by stating that reparations historically has always been about power and power relations. It is those who have benefited from the crimes who are defining what is called the timeline. It is in the past. It might be in the past, in the construct of these beneficial nations. Now, the nations that have extracted the wealth and built their development agenda, there are the ones who wish to define for the rest of us what is the meaning of time. For them, the notion of being in the past is a serious argument. But it is really just a discourse. It is not an argument. It's a discursive response to not wish to engage. If you don't wish to engage, you need to find a strategy to exit yourself from the conversation. So the notion of, oh, it was a long time ago is a discursive strategy of exiting the conversation. It's not a point. It's not an argument because, you know, I mean, let me give you an example of this. Who is my absolute favorite actor? Probably today, out of England. I would probably say, Benedict Cumberbatch, out of the UK. Very talented, very impressive, and apparently a man of high moral purpose. But I was raised as a child in the plantation complex that was owned by his family. His family, the Cumberbatches, came into Barbados in the 1730s and owned slave plantations. And after slavery, continued to own plantations exploiting the Trojan and the grandchildren of the enslaved into the middle of the 20th century. Okay? Now, on my maternal line, on my maternal side, we are the Cumberbatches. So I carry the same maternal name as Benedict because my grandparents and great grandparents worked on his parents and grandparents' plantation. Now, the plantation, therefore, the Cumberbatch plantation has yielded an academic and an actor. After 200 years, I do not know if we are cousins. I do not know, we have the same name, but I don't know if we are cousins. My people work for his people and my people have the same name as his people, but I don't know if we are because what slavery does is to rip you apart at the blood. It denies you your ancestry. It denies you access to your family. You are cut adrift of family because you cannot reconstruct who you are in a holistic way because ancestry has been severed. So I don't know. And each time I see him on television, I wonder, are we cousins? I do not know. I do not know. We do not know. He would not know, and I would not know, but maybe my great-grandmother does. Maybe my great-great-grandmother did know how it was that we have the same family name, but all of that is mystery. The issue of a long time ago is nonsense. We are living it today. It is all around us. The evidence is all around us. The symbols are around us. And not only are the symbols of the history around us today, the symbols are within our blood. It is within us and around us. You cannot detach from it. We are all gripped by the nature and the legacy of this history. So we live it every day. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we wake up. We are living this. It is alive and it is present. So we dismissed the notion of distance. It is an irrelevant argument that has no standing in a serious conversation. So I once heard the conversation in the British House of Commons in 2007, when they were discussing the bicentenary of the abolition of their slave trade. And the consensus in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in 2007 was, we admit that we have committed this horrendous crime and the consequences are dire and all around us. But you know what? There's nothing we can do about it. The crime and the consequences are so large that we cannot begin the issue of even thinking of how best to litigate this matter, because it is too large. We wouldn't know where to begin. And the best thing to do, therefore, is to brush it under the carpet and let us move on. This was the decision of the British Parliament that crime is too large and the consequences are too large to even begin to think about it from the point of view of policy of repair. So the best thing to do, brush it under the carpet and let us all move on. I sat there in that parliament listening to this and I was in a state of shock. Eh, because I know that there is no carpet on the planet that is big enough to cover over these crimes. There is no carpet big enough to brush this under. And secondly, within my own imagination, I was quite willing to propose to them a way to proceed. So if they believe that they have reached a cul-de-sac, they have moved against a wall and they cannot see beyond the wall. And since you cannot see beyond the wall, you turn back. I was willing to say, we can show you a way to reach the other side. But because they were not willing to listen to our side of the argument and their own blindness, they assume that darkness was the norm. And we were quite ready and prepared to illuminate a path for the future so that we can get to the other side. You've emphasized, I want to go back to the point you made about the Caribbean approach and your approach to the nature of reparations, the emphasis on socioeconomic development. I want, perhaps this might be a point for me to raise a question. One of our students got in touch with me knowing that I was going to have this conversation with you and wanted me to ask the following. And the question was, is access to education a viable measure for reparations? If so, what are the challenges and merits associated with it? Well, okay, let us place on the table some very simple statistics. When most of the countries of the Caribbean became independent, demanded to remove themselves from the tyranny of history, from the tyranny of empire. I mean, they could have stayed within the empire. The Europeans were not in a hurry to get rid of them. They were in a hurry to distance themselves and to detach themselves from the tyranny of colonization. But at the moment of that detachment, you're dealing with massive illiteracy. Take, for example, beautiful Jamaica, magnificent beautiful country, Jamaica. Britain took possession of that colony in 1655, took it from the Spanish in 1655 and ruled it until 1962. 307 years of colonization. And at the end of that process, Jamaica entered into independence with 80% of the black people classified as functionally illiterate. So 80% of the black people functionally illiterate after 300 years. And then because there are about 90% of the population, they're told now to go and develop, go away and develop. So the leadership of the country now had to imagine a development strategy with a massive population that has been locked out of the educational system by Britain because the colonizer, the British government, had no interest in promoting education in their colonies. The purpose of having a colony is to extract wealth from it. It's not to educate the people. And so you could not therefore imagine transformation, economic development, social justice without a massive investment in education from primary to tertiary. But guess what? Because the people of the Caribbean have been so committed, the African people in this region, because they have been so committed to self-help because self-help is so built into the pedagogy and the cosmology of African people, self-help because of that, the people of the Caribbean started out to take responsibility for themselves. But then taking responsibility for yourself and pushing hard and converting a colony into a nation, converting a colony into a nation without the help of those who colonize because they were told to go away, these countries have had to clean up the mess that they have in heritage. One of the areas that they have not been effective and clean enough is access to education after all of these years. And so the Caribbean now has the lowest enrollment and higher education, education in general, but higher education, higher education in particular in our entire American hemisphere. Only about 15% of the entire population has had access to higher education. North America, you're speaking about 70, 80% of young people, the age cohorts, 18 to 35, you are close to 80% North America, higher education, post-secondary, post-school, technical training, professional development, academic training. Latin America is now 45% and rising and in between North America and South America, the Caribbean is trapped at less than 15%. The issue is that we all know from every model of economic development that a country's potential for economic growth and transformation is an expression of the number of its people who have had skills training, professional development and academic training. And if you are at the bottom of that ladder, then you are at the bottom of the potential for economic growth and social development. And this is where the Caribbean is stranded at the moment because of its colonial inheritance. So a Reparatory Justice Program for a region such as this should have to target as a central issue the issue of the massive investment in education at all levels to bring those people to a level of competitiveness. So it stands to reason therefore that access to education, higher education, especially because of course if the plumbing is broken in the basement and your primary school kids are having a rough time of access as they are now post-COVID, then you can see how this cascades up to high school, up to university, and numbers getting smaller the higher you go, the smaller the numbers are. So you could see therefore that education will be a principal instrument for Reparatory Justice. As you know Sahil, Reparatory Justice is not just a Caribbean issue or an African issue or an issue for the United States. It's a global issue. Is it feasible to pursue a global strategy for Reparatory Justice or do you think it will be better, more effective to move at the regional or even national level? It is our capacity to differentiate and at the same time to integrate. It is our intellectual ability to think strategically that while there are some measures that are of a specific local nature, when you take a perspective of your local problem, then you come to realize that it is indeed part of a regional and a global challenge. So where in blinkers might deliver upon certain objectives, yes I do agree, but where in blinkers is not what this 21st century is about. The issue of the indigenous genocide, the issue of the conquistadors of the West, taking their military apparatus into the world to conquer indigenous people with this, with their more robust military technology, taking their land away from them, taking their culture and incarcerating them into reservations or slave ships. I mean that became a global phenomenon. That became a global phenomenon. It finds manifestation in specific areas. When I engaged the Maori of New Zealand to hear their response to what the British did to them, came and took their land and imprisoned them and enslaved them, drove them into marginal spaces there to suffer and die. I mean, when you think of what has happened to the African people, the military arrival of slave corporations in West Africa, driving small African states into a situation of resist and be eliminated or partner and survive, and then you have the dialectics of that, that one minute you might partner to survive and then the next minute you'll fight into survive because it is about survival. And when you think of all of that, this is a global issue. So African enslavement, for example, was globalized. Indigenous genocides was global. And therefore, the way to proceed is with a global organization, global vision, global planning. But simultaneously, recognizing that in each local space, the manifestations of these crimes and their legacies will require specific local adjudication. The issue, for example, in the US, where families express an interest in having their domestic circumstance repaired by the states for the plunder of their communities and the enterprises, we in the Caribbean fully support that. We are in full support of that strategy, which is, as I say, a part of a bigger picture. The Democratic Party of the United States have said that they will push HR-14 through their Congress because they wish to see what role the federal government can play having researched this matter, having studied this matter, to emerge with a methodology of repair that might vary from state to state based on the relationships of each state. All of these divergences are reasonable. So it is ultimately for the victims to make that determination as to how they wish to have their circumstance repaired. It is not for the beneficiaries of slavery and genocide to make that decision, how they are going to repair the crime that they have created and its consequences. So if you listen to the voices of indigenous and African peoples around the world, if you listen to their voices, I think their voices should be at the center of how they wish their legacy to be dealt with. You're an academic and a vice chancellor of a university, and we are at Tufts and many of the members of the audience are students and members of faculty. What do you think is the role of universities in reparatory justice and in confronting the consequences and the legacies of slavery and colonialism? Okay, I will build my response up from the personal to the pedagogical. There were many voices in the Caribbean years ago when I was asked to take up this position as vice chancellor of the number one university in the Caribbean that a person such as myself who is deeply embedded in the reparatory justice movement should not be the vice chancellor of the university. That the vice chancellor of the university ought to be a person who will go to the big corporations and beg for funds and so on and so forth. And therefore I face a significant headman. But the fact of the matter is I was fully aware that here is a very prestigious university and our campuses were built on slave plantations. I am here in Jamaica at our first ancestral, our main campus, our largest campus, the Mona campus in Kingston, which was built in 1948. But it was built on a slave plantation. It is called the Mona campus because it was built on the Mona plantation. This was a slave plantation, a sugar plantation. A few years ago, we were building a magnificent state of the art medical faculty complex, massive project, given respect to how the campus started. The campus started as a medical school. It started in 1948 as a medical school because the British government had determined that the public health of the black people in its Caribbean empire was the worst in all parts of the empire. And therefore, in the context of pandemics of various diseases that were afflicting the poor people of the Caribbean, the British government determined to build a small campus, a small medical college with about 50 students to study medicine, to help with the issues of polio, diphtheria, cholera, and all of these diseases that were ripping through the poor black community in their empire. So they started with a medical faculty. It has forwarded 50 years, and we are now one of the largest medical schools in the world, and we are building a structure to reflect our future plans. The bulldozers came in to dig up the foundation to lay the structure down. And when the soil was being turned over, what began to emerge was absolutely horrific. The bones of the Africans came up from the ground because it was a cemetery site. It was the site of the plantation cemetery where the slaves, when they died, their bodies were just thrown into shallow graves and unmarked, and hundreds of enslaved Africans, their bodies were just thrown into shallow graves and covered over. That information had disappeared from knowledge, and so in the middle of our campus was an unmarked grave of enslaved Africans, which then brought home to us emotionally and spiritually the power of history within our immediate environment. So therefore, as a vice chancellor, we then had to deal with that, and we are still dealing with that. We are still negotiating around how to think of a university to enlightenment built upon a cemetery of enslaved peoples. Now, then you move, I reflected back to England because I'm a product of the English university system. And as a product of the English university system, then I had to ask the other questions. What role did these British universities in particular play in creating the context that I am dealing with every day in my university? So the connection between the role of British universities and creating this slavery complex that I am treating with as a leader of a university today where we have 20,000 students who are the descendants of these people who are in shallow graves and whose bones have been brought up as if the bones have come back to speak to us as if the ancestors have come back to say, this is the 21st century we know and there is development all around we know, but how about us is as if the bones were speaking to us or ancestors speaking from the beyond. What about us and the bones were speaking to us? We then go across to the UK who were the owners of this plantation, who did this. They are the ones who did this. They managed it, they were responsible for it. They put those people in shallow graves, no markers of identity. The connection therefore became systemic and is obvious. So we looked at the history and we discovered that the university sector was a critical architect and the development of the slavery system and its legitimacy and its management and that interaction is now something that we have to negotiate. For example, when I was an undergraduate in philosophy in my first semester, we were pouring through the writings of John Locke on liberty and all of those interest in concepts. But when I became a graduate student, I realized that the John Locke theoretician, finest philosopher in Europe, arguably, was a slave owner in the Caribbean. How then does a slave owner write impressive treaties on the concept of human liberty? And he explained that it was no contradiction because the black people that he owned, the black people that he was slave trading, he said were not humans. So therefore he's not writing about them, they're not human, they are subhuman and therefore outside of his theoretical construct. But while he was writing this, he was professor of philosophy at Oxford. Now, move beyond the slavery construction because slavery was an economic system. Those persons who wrote about the economics of managing slavery because you don't bring 20 million people across an ocean unless it made economic business sense. So someone had to theorize the economics of the investment profile, the investment you're shipping people, you're capturing people, you're shipping them across an ocean, you're extracting labor and at the end of the process you have to give a return to the investor. All of this had to make perfect business sense. Who framed the economics of this? Who developed the fiscal concepts? Who developed the financial concepts and allowed all of this to work over 400 years? The professors of money, finance and management and universities. So who said you can take a human being, convert that human being into a property asset, use that as the basis of contracts? The professors of law in British universities were the jurisprudence of the conversion of the human to property. So the professors in the academe were the ones in partnership with the investors who created a culture of sustainability that allowed slavery to go on for 4 to 500 years. 4 to 500 years is a very, very long time. Even when the system is about to come to its second phase, it was Adam Smith and his magnificent book, The Wealth of Nations, who laid the foundation for poor slavery and his book, The Wealth of Nations. And when he wrote that book, it was published 1776, he was professor of economics at the University of Glasgow. And basically what are you saying is this, the slave has become an expensive proposition. It is now more profitable to shut down the slavery system, convert the slave into a wage worker. So you create an emancipation concept, convert the slave into a wage laborer, and you will pay them on a weekly basis a wage. You will then discover that it is cheaper to maintain the labor input in the formula of the wage laborer than it is to maintain the laborer as a slave. The slave is now more expensive than the laborer. So advice to the governments, transition from the slave to the wage laborer, and you will find that your profits will increase, your wealth accumulation will increase, and he gave the slave owners the magic formula for emancipation as the pathway for another 100 years of extraction. He was a professor of economics. So the university sector played a critical role, not only in structuring and sustaining the slavery system, but also in structuring the emancipation legislation in order to sustain another 100 years of extraction. So the university system is embedded in the slavery and colonization agenda, and I can say to you that on both sides of the Atlantic, on both sides of the conversation, whether you are managing a university, such as in my context, I'm managing a university built on the slave plantation with the immediacy of it, but at the same time, I was educated in the British university system that helped to create the product of slavery and colonization. So we are up to our neck in the university system, in the history and legacy of slavery. Sahil Rebecca, it's been a pleasure to have you on Global Perspectives. It's been a fascinating and illuminating conversation, and thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Willems. It's an honor to be with you to share this moment and with all of your students and faculty and other participants. Thank you very much for your generosity and listening to this voice from the Caribbean. Thank you.