This is the week Scotland was forced to confront its role in slavery, and say: ‘Yes, that was us’ | Hannah Lavery

Guardian revelations about Edinburgh University’s links to both the practice and theory of the evil trade must now provoke a national reckoning on race

Hannah Lavery is a Scottish poet and playwright

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s a child growing up in Edinburgh, I was taught this was a city built on the genius of the Scottish Enlightenment. That story was sunk deep into our bones and passed between us as our treasured inheritance. It formed our sense of ourselves and our belief in Scotland’s good and worthy contribution to the world.

We walked past statues of David Hume and Adam Smith. We celebrated their intellect and claimed it as our own. Yet no one spoke of what lay beneath that brilliance – of whose labour built their wealth, whose bodies were stolen, dispossessed and abused as a consequence of their “thinking”. Edinburgh was framed not as a city of complicity but of genius. That silence shaped us.