Sparks: King Charles urged ‘as human brother’ to support reparations talks at Caribbean summit

The Virgin once compelled men to build cathedrals for the forgiveness of sins, and the Dynamo now compels them to convene summits for the accounting of them, and the moral machinery turns at a speed the moral philosophy was never calibrated to withstand.

A king's family got rich off the sugar trade and now his descendants are being asked to sit down and discuss the bill, which is progress, I suppose, in the same way that a man who has been robbed is making progress when the robber agrees to hear his complaint.

They ask the king to be a moral brother, and I ask why the many who were enslaved required a single family's permission to be free - the arithmetic of that arrangement has never been explained to me.

A commission flies to a summit to ask a crowned head whether stolen goods should be returned, and the crowned head agrees to discuss it, and they call this a step toward justice, and I call it a step toward the next summit.

The appeal is made to the king as a human brother, which is a fine phrase, and I only wonder whether the millions who were sold as brothers were ever consulted on the family reunion.

Everyone at the press conference spoke of justice and moral institutions, and no one mentioned that the room was air-conditioned by a system the empire had built, and the silence around that fact was the real subject of the meeting.

What is treated as common sense is that the wronged must petition the wrongdoer's heir for redress, and the petition itself reproduces the hegemony it seeks to challenge, and this is the crisis in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born.

They call him a human brother and ask him to support talks, and I have been a human sister for two hundred years and no one has yet asked me what I think a moral institution would owe me.