Melanated People

16 w

THATS HOW THEY RESPECT US!
For decades, Oxford academics at Worcester College toasted empire with a human skull. 🍷

Fashioned into a silver-rimmed chalice, the skull—believed to have belonged to an enslaved Caribbean woman—was used at formal dinners until 2015. At first, it held wine. Later, when it began to leak, chocolates. The grotesque ritual unfolded in candlelit dining halls beneath the trappings of privilege and tradition. 🕯️

The cup’s origins are laid bare in Every Monument Will Fall, a new book by Professor Dan Hicks, curator of world archaeology at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Donated in 1946 by George Pitt-Rivers—a known eugenicist and Nazi sympathizer—the skull came to Oxford via a sordid chain of colonial collectors. It was first auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1884, complete with silver trim and a wooden base inlaid with a Queen Victoria shilling. 📚

Carbon dating pegs the skull at around 225 years old. Though her name was erased, circumstantial evidence suggests the woman was enslaved. The vessel became part of Oxford’s rituals—used, passed, and polished like fine china. Not as a curiosity, but as tableware. 🧠

Hicks calls it “some sick variety of tableware.” Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy calls it “sickening.” The college quietly shelved the skull in 2015, storing it in archives with no access, no plaque, no answers. 🗝️

This wasn’t an anomaly. It was a system—one that turned human lives into artifacts and buried the names of the colonized under silver and tradition. 🪦