Emancipation Day

DJ Khaled and Rick Ross were coming through the speakers when Pastor Steve Greene invited a ginger former Anglican priest onto an Emancipation Day stage.

There are easier ways to enter a room without drawing attention to the fact that you are white.

It was the summer of 2023 at the W.E.A.N. Community Centre in London, Ontario. I began by acknowledging the obvious. Nothing about my skin colour, my gender or anything I had accomplished entitled me to that platform.

I was there because Steve had invited me.

It remains one of the most gracious invitations I have ever received.

I called the address “God Did.”

The truth was that I had been struggling to say those words. Before I went any further, I asked the people in the room to help me.

God did.

They answered.

I asked again.

They answered louder.

Then I told a familiar story about a man who falls into a hole. The walls are too steep for him to climb. A doctor passes and throws down a prescription. A priest passes and throws down a prayer. Then a friend arrives, jumps into the hole and shows him the way out.

In my telling, that friend was Steve.

Where God goes first, I said, Steve tends to follow.

At the time, I was working with the Toronto Community Crisis Service. We went to mental-health and addiction calls that once would have brought police alone. That mattered because police had not arrived as safety in every neighbourhood or for every person.

I was one of very few white men on my team.

In the speech, I acknowledged that the people most willing to enter the hole with me had often been Black.

Black colleagues. Black supervisors. Black pastors. Black friends.

They did not wait for me to become respectable. They did not stand at a safe distance offering sympathetic language. When I was struggling, they came closer.

That was true in 2023.

It remains true now.

But watching the recording three years later, from Scotland, I hear something I could not hear clearly from the stage.

A white man speaking at an Emancipation Day celebration about what Black people had done for him was still a white man speaking about himself.

The people I named were not supporting characters in my story. They were building ministries, services and communities with purposes far larger than rescuing me. I had been generously welcomed into some of that work.

Being invited once proved nothing about me.

The invitation gave me a responsibility.

In the speech, I said that white Western Christianity likes to imagine itself as David.

Too often, it has been Goliath.

That sentence has followed me home.

To get from Glasgow Central to Queen Street, I walk along Gordon Street and cross Buchanan Street. Until recently, those names were simply directions on my phone. I have passed through Glassford Street, Ingram Street and Jamaica Street as well, photographing buildings and writing about what it means to come home.

The names were there long before I understood what they carried.

Glasgow did not merely observe the British Empire from a safe distance. Its merchants, institutions and civic leaders accumulated wealth through tobacco, sugar and cotton produced by enslaved people. Its prosperity crossed the Atlantic while the people whose labour created it remained in bondage.

The evidence is written into the city map.

In 2022, Glasgow City Council accepted the findings of an extensive historical audit, acknowledged the city’s significant involvement in chattel slavery and issued an unreserved apology. The city is now developing a Slavery and Colonial Legacy Trail around many of the streets, statues and buildings people encounter every day.

Scotland has often preferred a cleaner version of its history.

We remember the abolitionists. We are less enthusiastic about remembering the fortunes, universities and churches sustained by slavery.

If I want to claim Scotland as home, I do not get to inherit only its landscape, humour, music and belonging. I inherit the responsibility to know what built it.

Home is not only what comforts us.

Home is also what implicates us.

The Slavery Abolition Act took effect across most of the British Empire on August 1, 1834. Emancipation was immediate in what is now Canada. In much of the Caribbean, however, formerly enslaved people were forced into a further period of compulsory “apprenticeship” before full legal freedom arrived in 1838.

The British government paid £20 million to compensate enslavers for the loss of what the law had treated as their property.

The people who had been enslaved received nothing.

Black communities understood that a legal declaration was not the end of the struggle. Across Canada, August First gatherings became occasions for worship, food, music, speeches and celebration—but also for organising against American slavery, Canadian segregation and continuing racial inequality. Emancipation Day celebrations were acts of joy and resistance at the same time.

The Church must confront its place in this history as well.

In May 2026, the Church of Scotland formally apologised for having contributed to and benefited from the enslavement of people of African descent. It acknowledged that Christians had offered theological justifications for treating human beings as property and committed itself to pursuing repentance, justice and reconciliation.

Those words matter.

But a church should know that confession is meant to change what follows.

Near the end of my 2023 address, I made a promise.

I told the people gathered there that they were not always going to win. Life had been hard and would continue to be hard. I said I wanted to stand beside them—and to stand in front when the rocks came.

Watching that now, I cannot treat the speech as evidence that the promise has been kept.

The measure is what happened after the microphone was switched off: whether I listened when I was not speaking, believed Black people when their accounts made institutions uncomfortable and remained present when there was nothing in it for me.

Those questions belong to me.

Emancipation Day does not.

The day belongs first to Black communities: to remembrance, resistance, survival, excellence and joy. My responsibility is not to insert myself into that history. It is to tell the truth about the countries, churches and institutions that formed me—and to refuse the comforting mythology of an innocent Scotland or an innocent Canada.

We built economies around stolen labour. We constructed theologies that blessed domination. We raised beautiful buildings with money that carried human suffering across the Atlantic.

We compensated enslavers and gave nothing to the people they had enslaved.

Faith does not permit us to hide those sentences in the passive voice.

I did not build these streets. But I have chosen to call this place home.

That means I cannot inherit only its beauty.

In 2023, I asked the people in attendance to help me say two words because I was having trouble saying them.

God did.

They answered.

Scotland’s history requires another confession:

We did.

Three years later, I am home.

The promise came with me.