Black Tot Day and Statues

On the 9th of June, 2020, a statue of Robert Milligan was removed from its podium near to the West India Docks where it had stood for over 200 years. The West India Docks were a series of warehouses built in London by West Indian plantation owners with the profits from forced labour. These warehouses allowed them to consolidate their control over the sugarcane industry, and were part of the British Empire’s broader strategy of extracting as much resources as possible from their colonies, ultimately leaving them underdeveloped.

While this statue was being taken down in England, a debate was reignited in Barbados over a statue of Admiral Nelson. Eventually, that statue was defaced the day after Barbados removed Queen Elizabeth as the Head of State, and then removed a few weeks later. These were not isolated incidents, they were part of a global reassessment of racism and history in 2020 that resulted in hundreds of monuments and memorials being removed.

Critics of these removals argued that the statues don’t cause racism, and removing them won’t stop it without wider societal change. They also said that reminders of an unfortunate past are helpful in ensuring that the same mistakes are not made again. Even these critics who wanted the statues to stay accepted that some of what those statues represented, should no longer be celebrated; Especially in 2020.

This was not the case in the Caribbean Rum Industry when they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Black Tot Day on the 31st of July, 2020.

Black Tot Day is the anniversary of the day that the British Navy received their rum ration for the final time. Rum enthusiasts in Europe and North America celebrate Black Tot Day by honoring the drinking traditions of the British Navy; The same British Navy that spent more than a century protecting the slave trade in the Atlantic. The British Navy also protected the East India Company as they forcibly removed rulers and government officials, forged documents, and flooded local markets with cheap foreign goods to destroy local industry and agriculture while colonizing Asia. After slavery ended, the British Navy then worked alongside the Colonial Police in suppressing struggles for fair treatment and human rights in the Caribbean. Modern problems like police brutality and unjust military intervention both originated in the practices of the British Navy in the Caribbean.

Black Tot Day also pays homage to the legacy of the West India Docks. These immense warehouses were used by slaveowners to store the wealth taken from the canefields of the Caribbean as part of the British Empire’s strategy to extract as much wealth as possible, ultimately contributing to underdevelopment in the region. In celebrating the legacy of the West India Docks, Black Tot Day celebrates wealth stolen from the Caribbean, and an institution built by slaveowners.

While the rest of the world reassessed their relationship to figures like Milligan and Nelson, the Caribbean rum industry celebrated their legacy with no concern.

Images Sources; Wikipedia and Flickr