This book examines the case for reparations in the context of slavery's enduring harms including persistent social attitudes of Black people as second-class citizens. Its starting point is that despite the undoubted successes of the civil rights struggle and legal recognition of the equality afforded to or due to Black citizens, systemic anti-Black racism is still a fact of life for many in contemporary Western society. Numerous studies and the lived experience of Black citizens provide testimony to the reality that anti-Black racism remains embedded in society. Regrettably, it is also a factor in how policy is implemented and has effect in a number of areas. This is most notable in criminal justice practices, but also exists in areas of social policy, education, housing and in negative perceptions of Black citizens that feed into media representations and perpetuate stereotypes of Black citizens as criminal.

By this point I may already have turned off some potential readers, particularly those unwilling or unable to accept the notion of systemic racism within society. Defensiveness towards the idea of systemic racism is prevalent in the attitudes of many politicians and media commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. Resistance to policy change and unwillingness to carry out detailed examination of society's problems also seems to be common to both the US and UK experience notwithstanding social and political differences between the two countries. The scramble to argue that racial problems are largely a thing of the past or a minor problem in Western societies, and notably the US and UK, borders on the indecent and suggests large-scale denial that the injustices identified in the racial struggles of the 1960s and 1970s have somehow been ‘fixed’. Underlying policy responses to claims that policing has an element of racism or that Black citizens are treated differently is an almost constant refrain of ‘this is not about race’.

Really?

In October 2019 as election campaigns kicked off on both sides of the Atlantic, attitudes towards and the treatment of Black citizens became a topic of debate. Around that time, I explored the topic of slavery reparations in a blog post that set out some of the research being conducted for this book.