Kelsey Grammer said Tuesday that no one alive today owes reparations for slavery, pointing to the Civil War as settled history and denouncing the current reparations movement as “a scheme” designed to exploit racial guilt rather than MLK’s “dream” of equality.
On Piers Morgan Uncensored, the topic came up and the Frasier star put it in plain terms.
“I don’t have to apologize for my parents. I don’t have to apologize for my grandparents,” Grammer said. “My grandparents were extraordinary people. They survived the Depression. They fought World War II. My grandfather was away from home for 28 months in the South Pacific. This is not a man who has to apologize for who he is.”
“He stood up for this country,” Grammer said, “even against his will.” The man “understood that this country was the best shot we have. We may fall short sometimes, but we aim high.”
He then asked questions the reparations industry never considers.
“Do the people who have ancestors who were killed in the Civil War owe reparations? Do the Italians who came after the Civil War owe money? Do the Irish who came through Ellis Island owe money?”
“We’re just going to throw more money and more money and more money at the fact that, yeah, there was a dark chapter in our past. But we fought a war over it. That did happen,” Grammer further stated, adding that the “I Have a Dream” speech now sounds, in too many mouths, like “I have a scheme.”
“I think it’s just a dodge,” grammar urged.
That dodge is now official business on both sides of the Atlantic.
Jamaica’s culture minister, Olivia Grange, is in London this week with a petition asking King Charles — still Jamaica’s head of state — to send three questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: whether the enslavement of Africans in Jamaica was legal under English law, whether it broke international law, and whether Britain now has a legal duty to provide redress.
Grange has insisted the filing is “not focused on monetary value at this time.” Then she pointed straight at the cheque. “Up to 2015, Britain was paying the slave masters, because we were being considered property,” she said. “The question really should be: if in modern times we’re still paying back the slave masters… then why shouldn’t we be pursuing some remedy at this time?”
The 2015 date is real. After abolition in 1833, the Treasury paid about £20 million to registered owners — roughly 40 percent of annual government spending — and financed it with gilts. The last of those instruments was redeemed when the portfolio was modernised in 2015. Campaigners treat that as a taunt. It is also the receipt for the largest state-funded dismantling of slavery any European power ever undertook.
Buckingham Palace said Charles “has on many occasions expressed his personal and wholehearted commitment to promoting greater understanding around the issue of slavery and finding ways to address historic wrongs for the benefit of communities today.”
The King has no personal say on whether the questions go to the court. The political point of the exercise is obvious: turn a moral campaign into a legal foothold, then talk about “next steps.”