YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Renton

lines on the record: 36
first: 2021-06-29
most recent: 2021-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is actually going to die off quite soon, which on the ground, you know, that was her point of view. But we have the youth and we have the future on our side. And I think I feel inspired, actually, particularly when I get into conversations like this.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep learning or keep unlearning. It's quite a good way to put it. Read, read, read, as lots of people, as Evan puts it, read Emma's book. I think, I mean, just to answer the person who talked about George Floyd and after that, I think as a member of the Britons white ruling class, though somewhat lapsed, I think a lot of people are underwear just how huge that has been for we who run the place. People are terrified. And however annoying and horrifying the push the pushback has been and how racist it is from Jeremy Clarkson's comments through to our dear Prime Minister's remarks, that shows how the ruling class is scared and that means things can happen, things are happening. So plus, as my 15-year-old daughter put it the other day, well, aren't all the rest?”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could extract from, but also to buy British goods at a captive market. And then allowed them to come and fight in our wars in Europe and then apparently didn't put any memorials to them. I keep saying that, to people who died.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely right. And one of the things about people say things to me educated white liberal people that they wouldn't dare to say to anyone of color. And the things that they say, well, they won't amaze you, Emma, because you know all this, but there's the same or what a battery that we hear wherever. What about the pharaohs? Why aren't the Italians apologizing to us for what the Romans did? And you go, you really think that's a serious question when you can't see that this is about something going on in our society today? And the other water battery they use, which is probably more the most appalling of all, is this endless book we gave the countries their independence. There was a letter, the letter by Robert Lacey, the Queen's biographer in The Times yesterday, but we gave them their independence. We set them up, you're quite right as”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a 10-point plan. It's a 10-point plan. It's a really good plan. And it's other echoes in history, not least what happened in Germany after the war. I mean, it's very doable.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of people have called me I've had a lot of abuse over the book but you know not least from readers of the times where bits of it were written but I don't get the abuse that people of colour who write on these subjects get I mean I can tell you this is abuse for immediates they don't attack me because of my skin colour as well so I'm quite you know I but my family The bulk of them, my mother who went from being pretty defensive to going, you know, this has changed the way I look at my history and my family, but I'm glad you've done it. So I'm pleased with her. She helped me transcribe some of the documents too.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a good one and could have benefits. That was one. On my family, I mean, my family, you know, they reflect White Britain, I'm afraid. I mean, many of them have welcomed the book and said better that this is out, better to shed light on things. Let's hope we can some good can come of it. Some others have gone have called me a traitor.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One can do, I think, is say the inherited privilege we have from that time gives us unique, unusual tools to try and address what's unfair and unequal and racist in society today, and also to look at how we can be a better post-colonial relationship with the Caribbean, which involves actually not taking all their nurses and doctors and not recompensing them, but instead trying in some way to help them to help them to develop, to become as rich as we've managed to be. We could start giving them some COVID vaccines to begin with. So reparation can't be done in a very real sense, but also the task of trying to repair reparative, pursue reparative justice.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So thanks very much for the interest. I think there is no money in the world that can repay for three and a half quarter million Africans and or their uncounted descendants enslaved and then the havoc, the neglect that we left the freed enslaved people in for the next hundred years in the Caribbean colonies, it cannot be done. I can try and audit the damage my family, my ancestors did, and you come up with impossible figures. I get from the records, but I can't begin to count their descendants. I don't even know their names because we stole them and gave them comedy names out of Shakespeare like Othello instead. So all...”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here up here, where we're a little more progressive than the English, we might be able to do something about it. But my view is that I'm getting a pleasing number of people who are writing to me since the book came out saying what should I do. I kind of want to pass. It is because they then have to start acknowledging things, and you can then lead them gently forward to the notion that actually the systems that support racism and inequality in this country now need, that's what they really have to work at.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generosity and forgiveness as well not for me necessarily but for white society and white colonialism. But of course everyone's interested in reparations and I think a lot of people made the point here the reparations call from CARICOM has been grossly and willfully misinterpreted particularly by the British press. It is about starting to talk about practical ways to bring about acknowledgement more reconciliation friendship for the future. It's an inspiring and wonderful idea and I'm deeply ashamed. Emma also says guilt's useless shame a little less so but I'm deeply ashamed that my government and I am a part of it, I'm part of Britain's elite my father was a Tory MP has laughed in the face of the Caribbean nations who want to talk about reparations and reconciliation. As a Scot I'm hoping that”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I have to say, some members of my family and I are giving to charities since we've discovered in Jamaica and in Britain since we discovered this history because it makes us feel a little bit better. There is no point, in fact, you may be doing harm by just being charitable and an ally if you're not also working to change the systems. And Emma says that with such frank, you know, that's the bit, those are the bits I underlined most of all in the book. And it's why we need to read it. On reparations, I mean, one of the things I'm well aware, and again, the best bit of writing this book was going to Jamaica and Tobago, something my ancestors and my family since failed to do more or less, and asking people what they thought and what they thought I should do and hearing and getting some having some wonderful conversations and hearing a lot of kindness.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't say MS book is enjoyable for someone like me it made my flesh cruel at sometimes because it pictures me and many people like me and there's a chapter on white saviourism And the problems with it, I mean, I was familiar with the phrase already, but which just made me, you know, just want to punch my head really. I'd worked for Oxfam for four years in East Asia. I have been a professional white saviour. And I'm aware of some of the problems. But I think what Emma says very clearly and became more and more, I've learnt a lot, you know, I started this book four years ago. I have learnt a lot, obviously. One of the things you make the point very well, Eric Williams makes the point very well that this is a story about capitalism. And capitalism will exploit people whenever it can and will find systems and moral justifications for doing so. It does it today. It did it 250 years ago. As someone who has worked for charities,”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serving up of propaganda and educated people who are in white people who are interested in this subject and I go, okay, right, so you're really on it. When was British slavery ended? When did British slavery in the Caribbean end? And then I go, and how many Africans do you think the British transported enslaved across the Atlantic? And literally one in ten will get even 1830s. And if you ask them, was it 300,000 or 3.25 million? Most of them will say 300,000. We are so ignorant, so ignorant.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I was until five years ago. I mean, I have to confess it. I mean, I ask educated people here, but I'm going to say air quotes around educated as well, because when I look at my education, I go, why was it called that, frankly?”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“today. They all said colorism This absurd gradation of skin tone impairing your life or giving you more possibilities in life and it really rankles and again as an ignorant ignorant white person and a descendant of all this I didn't know this I'm ashamed I didn't know this But it's directly from what we did, directly from the systems we used”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is mulatto and creole in the adverts. Yes, a Creole means you were born in Jamaica, not in Africa. So yes, I mean, part of his preferred status in that, you know, he was allowed to earn money, he was a vet and he would have done some doctoring work as well. That's a perfect example of it. But it's also part of the British system, colonial system, sowing division among people of African heritage because quite clearly you get to the 1830s and emancipation comes around and people then legally called colored, I'm using the quotes, have a higher status and get better jobs and so they have an interest in trying to keep the people of darker skin down and everyone I met in Tobago and Jamaica when I visited to go and see the sites of our plantations who I said to whom I said what about slavery most affects you?”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they allowed mulatto people to work in the fields in Haiti before the revolution there. And of course the British thought that was a disgusting thing to do to somebody who had some white blood in them because it was the worst work. So the mixed race children got to work in the houses. But they were still sold because they were still property.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly, am I talking about whiteness and this sort of edification of whiteness? It's really interesting because you can see in the plantation records that a lot of mixed-race children were born there and they would all have been because no children were ever born. We would all have been the children of the white workers and who exploiting the black enslaved women. And it's quite significant that you see these what they call mulatto children immediately get better jobs because the very fact that there is no white blood in them means they're slightly less to be treated as slaves than people who are only of African heritage. And one of the things I came across was the disgust of the British who thought the French were barbarian.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what it says to me again is that my honorable Member of Parliament, man who would have found others' view of him and his honour very important to him, could give his word to a black man and that was of no meaning whatsoever. He could betray him without a second thought. And that's what he did. And it's not a story of plantation cruelty, and there are lots of those, I'm afraid, in the book, or of rapes and the selling of people's children from their arms, but it's a story of an act of total immorality in terms of how human beings should treat each other when mercy and justice is asked for. For a man who was a lawyer himself. So it struck me that story. I just wanted to say, could I very”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was no longer a slave, of course, in Britain in the 1780s. He was a free man. But my uncle, he wrote rather proudly, rather pleased with himself, managed to persuade Augustus Thompson to return to Jamaica, where his life was definitely at risk as a runaway and go back to his wife and family in the plantation with a promise that his complaint had been heard and that no punishment would be exerted on him. But as soon as Augustus Thompson was back on the ship, my great uncle, an honorable man, a man who talks an awful lot in his letters about a man's duty and honour and what the upper classes should do morally, wrote to the manager of the plantation and said, actually do what you like with him. It's a dreadful story and the story doesn't end well at all for Augustus Thompson or obviously his enslaved family.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ahistoric, which is the word you use, and that we really deeply need, one of the reasons for doing my book is realizing that the great historical gap, particularly because of the bad education system in my country, better in Ireland, I think you say, is we don't this the context of why you need to be anti-racist just isn't there and we do need to learn it. We really do.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Briefly, I mean, one of Emma's book is a fantastic piece of work. I told her I've been recommending it all. You can see all my notes in the back. One of the points, picking up on what you just said, one of the points you really expressed very well for me, and I hadn't really thought about it before, was exactly that, about the nature of whiteness and that whiteness can only come into being because the enslavers and their like insisted upon making this distinction. And once you'd invented blackness as whatever it was, the less than human culture, you then whiteness then had to emerge. And it is, of course, incredibly important. And I think, but the point you make in the book is, because you talk about the history of anti-racism and the problems with anti-racism as a movement, especially when espoused by white people, is that it is so...”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1800 and now were not so very different. So we have to, people like me have to stop reaching for these excuses. And this is old history is one of the most ridiculous of them, you know.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slave owners weren't necessarily frothing psychos as we see in the movies. But then I realized that my educated liberal ancestors were in many ways far worse than the uneducated brutal white men that come through in movies about slavery because they knew they had the same value systems as I do, as I grew up with. So it all became more and more relevant and one of the most frustrating things I'll stop going on in a moment is when again and again I get told by people, but you're judging your ancestors by the standards of today, how ridiculous. And you go, no, I'm not. They were people like me. I could have been them. That's the awful thing. And not only that, but half a million people, including their own friends and fellow MPs, were campaigning against the abolition of slavery at the same time as they were deciding to continue with it. Standards then...”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was well known as a philanthropist. There is a monument to him, but he built churches and schools for the poor in Lothian and Ayrshire did not a single thing for the hundred ninety eight people who were essentially abandoned on the plantation after they were given their freedom, as the expression used. So that racist-based ignorance of among the highly moral people who were considered highly moral for their time continues right through into what is clearly the modern age. And the other thing that struck me very from the beginning reading the letters is naively I thought this is going to be interesting because I empathize with these people in the sense that I understand their language and their culture, I get their jokes. They don't feel so different from me. So I'm going to show that”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's quite clear to me from his letters, he suddenly conflicted. There were a confusing message in his letters, but it's quite clear that as a Christian and a believer in the rights of man and a friend of Adam Smith, the economist and so on, he considered the Africans less than human. He couldn't have done as a liberal good man of his time. He couldn't have done what he did without doing that. It's also clear that because we own the plantation in Jamaica till 1875, so right through the abolition of slavery itself, his descendants, my great-great, great-grandfather, Sir Charles Dalrymple, Ferguson, a member of the Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a man educating the sciences and also a lawyer, he who got nearly over a million pounds in compensation for the £198 people enslaved on the plantation in Jamaica in 1836 was a”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His grand house in Scotland writing orders as a Christian, including again and again instructions to buy more girls and young women so that they can take advantage of the rise in prices due to the abolition of the So you draw some pretty stark conclusions from that, and they have a lot to say about race in Britain today, I think.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started reading his letters to see how you see quite clearly what he felt about the Africans that he bought and enslaved and to all intents and purposes murdered given that their lives were on average four years on his plantations. That's the key of it. What is also in the papers, and in a way because my intention really is to try and tell the vast number of complacent middle class white Britons here who discount or are ignorant as I was of this history just what it really meant and the papers brilliantly allow you to do that because one of my great-great, great, great uncles went to Tobago and bought land and Africans and worked it, the MP Sir Adam Ferguson sits in Westminster, in Edinburgh or in his...”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things better? Well, do you want to give us a little bit of an overview of who your family was and the role that they played in the British slave trade, specifically a Scots? Yes, so the Fergusons, my mother's family, were highly educated, influential Scots from the elite. They were lawyers and soldiers over 400 and members of Parliament as well. And significantly when they got into the slavery industries in the mid-18th century, rather late compared with some of their neighbors and friends, they were Enlightenment Scots. So the principal ancestor, Sir Adam Ferguson was an MP for the Whig Party. He knew Hume. He was a philosopher. He'd done the grand tour. He'd had the best education known to white Europeans of the era. And he was considered a liberal. So it seemed to me really significant when I”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“400 years of family history and realized an awful lot of them to do with Jamaica and Tobago, I thought I've got to have a look. But the point was not, I'm not a historian and it wasn't to write a history. It was to write about what this history Meant today and what it could be used for in the sense of making”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm 60 years old. I had one of those expensive educations that the elite in Britain get and it turns out to have been, especially when the empire is concerned largely to have been cover-up and propaganda. And I also, as a journalist, I was lucky enough for a few years to travel around what you might see as the ruins left by some of my ancestors, who many of them imperial governors and generals and admirals from Africa to the Middle East and so on in the sense of I saw firsthand but from a white privileged journalist point of view just how badly the empire had done and what and the mess, the ongoing mess it had left. So when I stumbled across a pile of papers in my grandfather's basement going back covering a hundred years”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we'll be getting into that architecture of race in a moment. I want to go to Alex so you can tell us a little bit about your book, which is A Family History. And your ancestors had a lot of paperwork, which became the primary research source for your research. In the book, there was an interesting line at the beginning where you pose a question, Alex. You say, how could I, a stereotype of a white liberal ripe with post-imperial guilt best exploit my privilege and my access to these papers? What did you mean by that?”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both written books that look at the legacy of slavery and how it impacts the world we live in today. But they're very different books, both in terms of style and content. Emma, let's start with yours. It's an extended essay, and the title is pretty stark, as I said, what white people can do next. Is it meant to be a provocation?”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And his latest book I've got here as well is Blood Legacy, Reckoning with a Family Story of Slavery. It dives into his own family history and explores the role that his ancestors played in the slave trade. So Emma and Alex, welcome.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And welcome to this intelligence squared event on race reckoning and what everyone can do next. I'm Farajasat. I'm a journalist and head of podcast at Intelligence Squared and I'll be your host this evening. So tonight I'm delighted to be joined by two fantastic guests. We have Emma Dabery, an academic, activist and broadcaster. She's a teaching fellow at SOAS University of London. She's the author of Don't Touch My Hair and her most recent bestseller, What White People Can Do Next from Allyship to Coalition, is a fascinating essay where she deconstructs the myth of race and challenges ideas of allyship in the current liberal anti-racist movement. Our second guest is Alex Renton. He's a journalist, author and campaigner. He's won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, war reporting and food writing. He's the author of stiff upper lip, which uncovered sexual abuse within the British private school system.”
2021-06-29 · Intelligence Squared · Emma Dabiri and Alex Renton on Race, Reckoning and What We Can Do Next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source