The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Slavery Reparations Push

So much of the Left’s justification for various social justice programs relies on its ability to erase and rewrite history. In one area, this problem is particularly acute: slavery reparations.

A recent story out of the U.K. highlights this problem in the most ironic way.

According to GB News, the Green Party’s Global Majority Greens chief “reparations officer”—yes, they have one of those—is not only the child of a billionaire but a direct descendant of prolific slave traders.

Antoinette Fernandez, who is originally from Nigeria and is currently running for office, has reportedly campaigned on the idea that British subjects should pay for the injustice of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The far-Left Green Party has been making huge gains in the U.K., so the reparations idea is a bit more “serious” than it used to be.

Fernandez wrote in January that politicians who oppose slavery reparations are guilty of “appalling arrogance and inhumane dismissal of human rights.”

Fernandez is no run-of-the-mill Nigerian immigrant. She’s the daughter of literal royalty.

“The Green Party hopeful is the daughter of the Queen Mother of Lagos, and has been given the title ‘princess’ by the Nigerian press,” GB News reported. That’s not all. Her father was a billionaire, “who is said to have made his money in oil, gas, and mining, and his reported net worth was £6.5 billion when he died in 2015.”

According to historians, GB News reported, “one of her ancient relatives owned 1,400 slaves, and a second brought back slaves that had been sent to Brazil to build houses in Lagos.”

Think about that.

A literal princess and daughter of one of the most fantastically wealthy people in the world—whose family benefitted directly from the slave trade—wants British taxpayers to pay up. Talk about arrogance.

This revelation drew a fair bit of commentary on X.

Reform UK member Chris Rose wrote that this was the “most Green Party story I’ve ever read.”

And social media sleuths even uncovered an old, deleted post from Fernandez that really completes this story.

“My great, great maternal grandfather was the Oba (king) of Lagos in 1861 and was forced -under threat of military bombardment – aka to avoid a massacre of the people – to cede Lagos over to the British. Lest we forget,” she wrote in 2024

How mean, those British bullies!

Oh wait, there’s a bit of context here.

A community note explained that the reason the British bombarded and annexed Lagos was because of the U.K.’s widespread campaign to suppress the slave trade.

Once upon a time, Lagos was a major slave trade hub. The British shut it down almost as fast as Fernandez shut down her X account. It turns out history is a fair bit more complicated—and quite a bit less favorable to simplistic woke narratives—than what the slop produced by modern Hollywood would lead you to believe.

The Green Party responded, according to the Daily Mail, that even covering Fernandez’ background is “racist” and a “bad-faith attempt to undermine the case for reparative justice.”

Its so-called reparative justice is what’s being peddled in bad faith.

This whole story highlights how much of the Left’s modern political project works. Its coalition is essentially various grievance groups (whether their claims be real or imagined) who look to grab power and then extract various benefits from Western societies. Those benefits can be money or a political office or a job or simply a higher status.

It works because far too many—typically white—Westerners are conditioned to feel guilty for the world’s problems. The truth is that crimes of history are many, and the West has done far more than rest to rectify them. 

In March, I wrote about the absurdity of West African nations like Ghana demanding reparations for slavery at the U.N., given their role in the international slave trade. Those nations never offer to pay anything, even though they are just as or even more guilty of fueling the trans-Atlantic slave trade as those supposedly awful European colonizers.

Why is it the responsibility of nations like the U.K. to pay, but African nations that got rich off the slave trade and did their best to keep it going get off the hook? If anything, England deserves a great deal of credit for its instrumental role in extinguishing slavery around the globe.

Why aren’t Arab, Middle Eastern nations asked to pay for their ancestors’ engagement in the Mediterranean and trans-Saharan slave trade for centuries?

We hear nary a peep about that whole business.

The answer to these questions is that the reparations push is mostly a scam. They won’t solve the injustices of history. They won’t make the world a better place. The whole idea is based on shaky history at best and an even worse ideology.