The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.
The resolution - proposed by Ghana - called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund. It does not mention a specific amount of money.
The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against - the United States, Israel and Argentina.
Countries like the UK have long rejected calls to pay reparations, saying today’s institutions cannot be held responsible for past wrongs.
I agree there are challenges with economic reparations but I do want to point out that the transatlantic slave trade was different from slavery as practiced throughout human history.
It was more cruel than even slavery practiced in ancient Greece and Rome (civilizations which Western nations like to harken back to).
European colonial powers, in modern history, firmly believed in and propagated a global race based caste system. This itself is a crime against humanity but they took it as far as to define people with darker skin as less human, justifying their subjugation and slavery.
Throughout history many civilizations thought other peoples to be inferior or barbaric. But it wasn’t a caste system based on complexion as colonial era Europeans practiced it.
Entire fields of false science such as phrenology and eugenics sprung from this dogmatic belief in skin tone defining ones worth. The culmination of this vile ‘purity’ ideology was Nazi Germany and even the end of that movement has not ended white supremacy in this world.
This is a very unique problem that still has horrific reverberations to this day. I would not be so quick to absolve European colonial powers and their descendant nation states who still benefit from neocolonialism today. Reparations is a complex issue but I think verbal acknieledgment of accountability and an honest teaching of history would be a start in those nations that have had ongoing benefits from these inhumane institutions.
The only reason they didn’t have an Atlantic slave trade earlier was that they didn’t have the technology to do so earlier, there was virtually no transatlantic trade beforehand.
I don’t think it was a particularly cruel time. My ancestors didn’t have transatlantic trade, but they were among the cruelest people on Earth of any time. They certainly would have been Atlantic slave traders if they were able to, no doubt.
While I agree in part with the sentiment, I think is totally unfair to consider ancient slavery in Greece or Rome as less cruel. It was not less cruel depending on the slave in question. Slaves in mines and agricultural estates were in worse conditions then anything in American south. But if you were an educated slave then your life was indeed better. That also means that was common for slaves in ancient Rome to be able to buy freedom. Slavery was everywhere in society, so the comparison is really hard to make.
There is indeed a racial component in colonial slavery that was not present in ancient Roman slavery. A slave could be from Germany or from Syria and there was no difference in treatment.
I would say that both late trans-atlantic slavery and nazism share a philosophical root in the eugenetic movement, but both grew in parallel with different motives: in one case a justification for economic exploitation, in the other an ideological tool to enforce unity in nationalism.
The transatlantic slave trade started before the concept of race and the eugenetic movement. During the 15th century the justification was more routed in religion and the idea of having prisoner of war being better then to kill the enemy. Still and excuse for economic exploitation, but maybe more akin to what the greeks and romans were doing.