Alpha Steppa & Sista Awa - Whip Lash Crack (ft. Ras Tinny)

Out Now! 💚 Alpha Steppa & Awa Fall - What a Joy (Full Album)
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We filmed this video by the beautiful Bristol Harbourside, it's beautiful but this place has a serious history. Bristol played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade, known then as the 'slave capital' of Britain, due to the relative volume of owners in the port city, for a time it was the biggest slaving port. Not so long ago merchants would sail from here to Africa in order to trade goods for enslaved Africans, they then travelled across the Atlantic to the American colonies where the Africans were sold for sugar, tobacco, cotton and other produce. The goods were then transported back to Europe. The slave trade galvanised the industrial revolution and profits were used to build a rich and prosperous Europe; the UK's financial industries, including banks such as Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and the Bank of England, the steam engine and the railway network, Oxford's famous Codrington library, tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate, the UK's cultural institutions, the legacies of the slave trade are impossible to avoid.

The British school system teaches us to have pride in the scientific, political and industrial revolutions, but fail to mention that all of this was only made possible because of the blood, sweat, tears and bounty exploited from nations across the globe where people had darker skin. Slavery was eventually abolished, but the amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act to compensate slave owners was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade, which also means that descendants of slaves (who never got any compensation) have been paying for the compensation paid to slave owners. It is fallacy to believe that the impact of slavery ended with emancipation. Descendants of enslaved Africans in the west are still subject to racial inequalities in every area of social life and are even far more likely to be incarcerated or killed by the very state that is supposed to protect them. As professor Kehinde Andrews puts it - "it is time we admitted that society currently works to benefit the few, and a rethink of how wealth is distributed more generally is long overdue. A factory reset of the political and economic consensus, in the form of reparations, would lead to a radically different and potentially fairer world for all."