CARICOM’s ten-point plan includes a demand for assistance with what it describes as a public health crisis caused by slavery. The specific claim is that Caribbean populations suffer disproportionately from conditions including hypertension and type 2 diabetes, and that new medical evidence shows these conditions are a direct result of the nutritional experience, physical brutality, and stress profiles associated with 400 years of enslavement. The psychological damage of slavery, the argument goes, has been transmitted across generations and continues to harm Caribbean communities today.
It sounds plausible because the health disparities are real. Caribbean populations do have higher rates of certain chronic conditions. The question is whether slavery is the cause, and whether that causal claim, even if accepted, creates a financial liability in international law.
On the medical question, the evidence is considerably more contested than CARICOM presents it. The field of epigenetics does show that severe trauma can produce heritable biological changes. But the specific claim that conditions prevalent in Caribbean populations today are directly traceable to slavery 200 years ago requires a causal chain that medical science has not established. Higher rates of hypertension in Black populations are found globally, including in African countries with no history of Atlantic slavery, which complicates the simple slavery-causation argument considerably.
On the psychological question, the concept of intergenerational trauma is real and recognised. Communities that have experienced severe collective trauma do show effects across generations. But converting this into a financial claim requires something the reparations campaign has never provided: a methodology for quantifying the harm, attributing it specifically to slavery rather than to subsequent discrimination and disadvantage, and calculating what payment would constitute adequate remedy. None of these things exist.
The more fundamental problem is unfalsifiability. If Caribbean communities are doing badly, that is evidence of slavery’s ongoing harm. But if Caribbean communities are doing well, that is never taken as evidence that the harm has dissipated. The argument is constructed so that no outcome can count against it. That is not how serious claims work.
There is also the question of agency. The implicit suggestion that Caribbean people are still damaged by something that happened to their ancestors is, on reflection, a remarkably low assessment of Caribbean resilience and capability. It treats an entire population as perpetual victims defined entirely by historical suffering. That is not a respectful position, whatever its intentions.
The one-line rebuttal: real health disparities exist but their causes are multiple and contested, and converting contested medical claims into specific financial liability is not possible.
