Much has been made of the “news” that Kamala Harris is possibly descended from a person who owned slaves in Jamaica. It is not new information at all despite what some media outlets might have you believe.
This dates back to an article published by her father Donald J. Harris in 2018 in which he says that he was descended from one Hamilton Brown “an Irishman who enslaved people in Jamaica”. More on the supposed Irish connection below. The only new element appears to be that Antrim historian Stephen McCracken succeeded in finding Brown’s date of birth in 1776.
Gript reported on this issue several years ago and ironically the first people to use it as a stick with which to beat Harris was the Joe Biden campaign when both were attempting to secure the nomination to contest as the Democratic Party candidate against Donald Trump in 2020.
In fairness, much and all as I would not be a huge fan of Harris, it is hardly a black mark against her that she is descended from such an apparently obnoxious chap.
What sparked my interest, however, was that when this first became news it was at a time when Irish liberal media was happy to ignore any slavery connection to a candidate of their chosen party Stateside, but more than anxious to use such links to push the narrative that Irish people, corporate, bore some of the burden of the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
At the time, I described it as an “insidious lie”, and that description holds. Hamilton Brown himself later replaced his former slaves with indentured servants from among those who worked on his Irish estates. McCracken refers to claims that Brown had been “making slaves of migrants,” an indication of the appalling conditions and little choice that even those “free workers” were faced with.
The attempt to create the Irish slavery narrative was during the heyday of the now discredited and silent Black Lives Matter movement. One of the things inspired by this was the Trinity College Dublin Colonial Legacies Project. Although many were quick to try to frame this within the context of “us all” having benefited from the appalling trade in other humans, one of the leaders of the project, Dr. Ciarán O’Neill told the University Times that “the major confiscation of land that sustained Trinity in its early centuries [was] taken from Ireland, and Irish people … that is the major work of this project.”
All very good but lost of course on those more inclined to Netflix history based on “feelings” and transient “values” than actual research and facts. Among the examples we cited during the height of all that was communist TD Mick Barry’s ludicrous attempt to pin the slavery legacy of the banking La Touche family on us.
The La Touches were 17th century Protestant “refugees” from France who their co-religionists here allowed to join them in wetting their beaks and planting their talons in the stolen land of the Irish people referred to by Ciarán O’Neill. The La Touches received what in the mid-1800s was a massive £6,800 in compensation for the freeing of their slaves in Jamaica following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
There were more than one hundred Irish domiciled beneficiaries of the compensation fund. Far from being “natives” they were almost all recent or second or third generation settlers who had benefitted from the successive plantations that began with the Tudors in the mid-1500s, continued through the Cromwellian attempted genocide of the 1650s and culminated in the Williamite confiscations of the defeated remnants of the Irish and Old English landowners of the 1690s.
One of the slavery related controversies around Trinity – which did not quite descend to the ludicrous Know Nothing campaign waged by Dr. Ebun Joseph against the Nubian statues outside the Shelbourne Hotel – was the pile on against on of the university’s best-known alumni, the idealist philosopher George Berkeley.
In April 2023 the board of TCD decided that the Berkeley Library would be “denamed” because to honour George B would no longer be consistent with its “core values.” Interestingly, they do not appear to have taken onboard Dr. O’Neill’s historical points regarding Trinity’s role within the English colony here as the only reference is to Berkeley’s slave stuff. Nothing at all to Berkeley’s opinion of, and indeed Trinity’s own opinion and attitude towards, “the Irish natives” for several hundred years.
Trinity of was barred to Catholics under the penal laws. The ban on students ended in 1793, but Catholics were only allowed to become fellows in the 1870s. The Catholic Church’s own ban on Catholics attending there was a reaction to that. Most liberals seem to have amnesia regarding the first but enjoy citing the latter as evidence of their own dreadful persecution.
While the February 2022 draft audit from the Colonial Legacies Projects stressed Trinity’s connections to the Empire overseas it does state that the college was at the heart of the colonial project in Ireland itself and that it was central to imposing the English state religion as part of that project. Dr. O’Neill was kind enough to direct me to the latest reports.
Not only that but “Trinity would benefit directly from these colonial activities in the early seventeenth century when the College was awarded extensive landed estates expropriated from native or indigenous landowners as part of the Munster and Ulster Plantations. By the late seventeenth century Trinity held estates totalling approximately 190,000 acres or 1% of the entire country making it one of, if not, the largest landowners in the country
In the meantime, before they decide what to rename the library it will simply be known as “The Library.” What a comment that in itself is on an institution that prides itself on intellectual rigour and standards. The Library. Sounds like something that might have happened to an offensive university in Beijing in 1967.
I suppose the Board can thank themselves fortunate they were not shorn of their flowing locks and spectacles and handed pyjamas before being herded off to help in the Sallynoggin Tofu harvest.
Just for the record, Berkeley considered himself an Englishman, and in The Querist referred to the Irish peasantry as basically lazy ingrates who might have improved themselves if they were not so spoiled or “content in dirt”. He also referred approvingly to children in Dutch workhouses who had to work from the age of four to earn their meals. He thought this might be a good model for those starving during the Irish famine of 1740/1.
Do we all have to don ash cloth for him? Or for Hamilton Brown, or the La Touches? I do not think so.
Interestingly, as an addendum, while there was a similar proposal emanating from Berkeley University in California – which as students of the American Left will know spawned much of the crazy batshit ideology that has infested the western and Irish academy since the 1960s – to not only change the name of the university but of the city of Berkeley itself.
Wiser heads even among the Democratic Woke prevailed it seems. This place of course takes a while to catch up on the errors of their overseas mentors and icons.