The gap between who CARICOM is actually targeting and who bears genuine historical liability is wide and telling. CARICOM seeks payment from the British government, which means from all British taxpayers. The argument for this rests on treating all white British people as beneficiaries of slavery’s proceeds and therefore liable for its remediation.
But the actual beneficiaries were a specific class, not a race. The actual perpetrators were specific companies, specific individuals, specific families, not an entire ethnic group. Liability for historical wrongs, in any coherent moral or legal framework, attaches to specific actors and their specific successors, not to racial groups.
CARICOM’s proposal is not targeted at those specific actors and successors. It is targeted at a nation-state and therefore at all its citizens. That targeting is based on national and, implicitly, racial identity rather than on historical responsibility. It is not a serious legal or moral accounting. It is a political demand dressed in the language of justice.
