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 get it is extremely important to remember how bad the transatlantic slave trade was, but I think reparations after two centuries makes no sense. You cannot track responsibility 10 generations separated, you cannot track beneficiaries in a globalized world. Countries not involved in slave trade got indirect benefits through commerce, countries involved are instead not benefiting today from that historic trade. Slavery was common everywhere in the world for millennia. I find it hard to even begin to quantify a reasonable approach to a reparation framework that would work in the context of all the human tragedies in the last 5 centuries.
Instead of throwing up my hands waiting for someone else to ratify a framework, I personally give substantial direct financial support to an African American family, not because I feel personally responsible for what happened 200 years ago, but because I know that what happened 200 years ago didn’t end 200 years ago but continued on and eventually became Jim Crow and eventually became the War on Drugs and all the while has just simmered there as subconscious racism. It affects them all day every day every time someone looks at them, every time they board an elevator.And alltogether it has unfairly advantaged me and disadvantaged them. I can’t even imagine the mental stress of being a black American over the last several years. And the entire 200 years we’ve been abusing and short changing these people, they have paid us back in unique gifts of art, music, and literature (on top of their everyday contributions to science, industry and education like everyone else makes too). I pay because it’s the least I can fucking do to help and say “someone sees, someone cares.” I give because I can, and never had to face what they face. I give because it’s their money.
You do you.
You don’t have to look at everything in terms of individual responsibility. We can clearly see that the injustices caused by transatlantic slavery, and imperialism more broadly, are very much still here. I think it would be nice to try to remedy this.
Of course, it’s non-binding, and the countries that should probably be paying reparations just happen to have all abstained (except for the rogue USA of course, voting against) so I don’t expect anything will happen. But it’s a nice idea.
black people live in slums in my colonial country and many of the exploited african nations.
start by letting them access to at least 20th century amenities and dignified work instead of finding every moral excuse not to.
this thread is full of sensitive westerners born on slave trader countries still rich on the spoils (and sometimes still benefiting from it).
I am a westerner, born in a non slave trader country that never existed before the 1860s. The country before was not a slaver country. The country before that was client state of a slaver country, but just for 20 years! The one before that was not a slaver country. Going event further the country before that was still not a slaver country. Then it was not even a country and still not a slaver one. This until the 1200s when we abolished slavery, so I guess that before then slavery was somewhat ok, but was white people slaves so I do not think that counts.
I think we never became rich on the spoils. We were definitely richer in the 1200s (we were so rich we paid for the slaves to be free!) and for some centuries after that. That was definitely our golden age I would say. Post war recovery after 1960 was also good, but mainly driven by local mechanical industries, not spoils I am afraid.
contradictory so far
your lack of understanding of history does not constitute contradiction
your racism does not constitute understanding of history.
I have said nothing racists, so which part of history is incorrect?
the part where you think black people don’t deserve any kind of help for still being fucked by western racism, with the excuse you can’t keep track of it.
the “you are a white westerner” part was an educated guess based on that opinion.
Never said black people don’t deserve any kind of help. That is just stupid. What I said is:
What I agree is:
I see nothing racist in this opinion, but please enlighten me. The only one talking all the time about black and white is actually you
“educated guess” does not mean what you think it means
I think it would be reasonable to consider reparations for individual descendants of slaves. There are plenty of people alive today that can prove their descendance from a slave.
Reparations to entire countries in Africa seems a bit absurd to me.
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 firmly believed in and propagated a global race based caste system. This itself is a crime against humanity but they put into practice the subjugation of people with darker skin, defining them as less human as justification for their enslavement.
Throughout history many civilizations thought other peoples to be inferior or barbaric. But there has not been a global race based 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 with the end of that movement, we have not seen the end white supremacist ideology.
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 acknowledgment of accountability and an honest teaching of history would be a start in those nations that have been ongoing beneficiaries of these inhumane institutions.
To summarize, I’ll leave you with quotes representative of the worldview of one of the most revered figures in modern colonial/Western history:
"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror."
"I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them… I believe that as the civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations."
Winston Churchill
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.
We can go back and forth about the living and working conditions of various peoples held in bondage through history. I think if we really got down to it we’d find that those subjugated by the transatlantic slave trade had it worse in many ways but I’d like to come back to a few central points.
This was a slave trade on a scale never before seen in human history. 15 to 20% died in transport.
On arrival, people were completely stripped of their identity and personhood. They could not marry, they could not have families. They could not testify in court. They could be killed with a degree of impunity. They were non human property. This is not how slavery was practiced in Greece Rome or in more modern Islamic empires.
The status of being a slave was inherited from one’s parents (also not the norm).
The European colonial powers / slave traders developed a global race based caste system to justify all this. You’re right that it started on a religious basis but that doesn’t justify what it morphed into. We have white supremacists engaging in terrorism today because of this heinous ideology that they chose to normalize.
I think Ghana has a point by bringing this UN resolution to a vote and it’s pretty telling that the US, Israel (and Argentina because of Milei) voted no and every European nation abstained while 123 of 178 countries voted yes. That gives us a good sense of what majority of the world thinks and perhaps where the truth lies, though I understand why the West would want to stay in a bubble / safe space when this discussing this matter.
That resolution is just virtue signaling. It adds non binding untenable principles like an hierarchy of crimes against humanity and reparation across centuries for something that was not an international recognized crime at the time (while we agree it was terrible).
On the countries that voted yes we have:
I do not want to engage in whataboutism, that is not my point. My point is that this vote is full of hypocrisy. We are not voting for change, we are voting for scoring political points on easy propaganda at home (west bad, we good). While I hate the US, I found that the fact they opposed the resolution and the reason why they opposed the resolution was at least honest. None of the countries above that voted yes will do anything in terms of reparation, and they are not required to.
Finally, I have to correct you on something you said: both in the Roman Republic and Greece (Sparta) was legal to kill your slave without justification.
It was legal to kill your slave in America also as long as it was “by accident” and this was justified with biblical passage.
Freeing slaves was much more common in ancient Rome than it was in the transatlantic trade or ancient Greece.
Freed slaves could also qualify for citizenship in ancient Rome while for a century in the US they were either nonpersons or infamously 3/5ths of a “real” person.
As for those that perpetuated slavery in Brazil, it’s well established that Portugese settlers upheld the institution. How did Portugal vote? I wonder why. Now that Brazil is a democracy and those that were subjected to that cruelty have a voice - well that explains why they voted yes, doesn’t it?
I won’t contest any of the dates you’ve brought forward. But I will reiterate that slavery in the Middle East was closer to how slavery was practiced historically. European colonial powers turned slavery into something uniquely and monstrously inhumane so it’s understandable why these nations would prefer to hide from that truth. They created a global race based caste system to justify it, which has been a stain on human morality since then. At least there’s hope in the fact that the majority of the world sees it for what it truly was.
123 nations representative of 75% of the global population agreed with this proposition. It’s convenient to say they all did it to score political points and make a statement. But when representatives of 6.35 billion people say this was uniquely bad (considering all the horrific things that happened in their countries due to colonialism and other tyranical regimes), it may be time to stop and self reflect (for the countries that voted no or abstained).
Sorry, but you totally ignored my points. Did you not understand what I said and why I said it?
Why are you trying to say that the millions of African dead in the Sahara are somewhat to be ignored as slavery in the Arab world was more traditional? You are continuing to dismiss spartan and repubblican Rome slavery as humane when we already established that it was worse in mines and villas (when it was also your right to kill the slave with no need for a workaround?). You are trying to dismiss more than 60 years of free and independent Brazil supporting slavery? Portugal was a kingdom, now is a democracy, why you want to keep today people of Portugal accountable for the actions of kings 20 generation separated by modern Portuguese, but you will not keep accountable descendent from the same people living in Brazil? What is the logic here?
My opinion is that in those 123 nations there are lot of hypocrites that have promoted slavery to the milions of dead in the past but will not pay for the reparation in the preposition nor intend to take responsibility for any wrongdoing of the past. That is my point. Why the double standard? They are just dishonest. If European said “Yes” they would have just lied like all that other nations I cited above lying by saying “Yes”.
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.
What worth remembering is that the transatlantic slave trade was uniquely inhumane because of 1) scale 2) mortality during transport 3) classification as chattel (essentially non-human property) 4) basis in a race based caste system. Other systems of slavery throughout human history did not operate in such an inhuman manner.
Europeans and other monarchy-states are happier still feeding aristocrat and noble pigs, you mean? Yeah, I hear you.
Actually they can easily restitute African countries for the immense damages they were caused.
But restituting the victims of slavery is inconvenient for the empire, while an atrocity like the Holocaust can be abused to fund and raise support for Israel.
That is easy because the Holocaust was between 1941 and 1945 and reparation were between 1952 and 1953. It is the same government, the same people, the same generation. The atrocity is clearly defined in time and space, and can be somewhat measured. Nonetheless, even in a “clear as day” situation, lot of opposition came to be part of this process, with this being a very difficult agreement to reach. Doing that 200 to 600 years apart, across multiple nation, multiple people, multiple culture, is borderline impossible and would settle anything. You cannot make it just for the hebrews with that reparations, you cannot with slave trade either. Same apply to WW2 reparation, Mongol conquest reparation (sound silly just to think about it), or induced famine in China and the Soviet Union.
Transatlantic slavery is easily traceable to the countries which committed it and which suffered from it. The time period is irrelevant. In fact Israelis are primarily the Jews which didn’t suffer from the Holocaust because they went to colonize Palestine instead of staying in Germany. So your argument works against you.
Should today citizen of Portugal (under the 1976 Republic) be accountable for the legal (at the time) actions of the Portuguese Crown? Should the citizen of Benin be accountable for the atrocities committed by Dahomey to secure the slaves from nearby tribes? Are the people of Benin both beneficiary and responsible for that? How much? Should Brazil pay for the action of the Portuguese Crown? Should Italy pay because the Republic of Genoa bankers benefited from the loans and contracts with the Portuguese merchants? How much is an Italian descendent from a Venetian born in today Croatia responsible for the sins of Genoese banker that finances the Portuguese crown to pay the Imbangala people to capture slaves?
Yes they should at least pay some reparations. Now why is Germany sending money to Israel?
reply to the entire question if you can, and bring a reasonable justification about who and how much should pay to who. We have Italian descendent from Dalmatia, we have Brazilian descendent from Portugal, we have people from Angola descendent from Imbangala, Benin people descendent from Dahomey, that needs to pay how much to other people from Angola and Benin?
Countries in Africa are still suffering from the consequences of Western slavery. The entire countries as a whole, not taking into account the people. The only reason Africa is still underdeveloped is because of Western slavery and colonialism.
(Primarily black) communities in the West could also be given restitution funds to make up their deficiency in socio-economic status caused by past discrimination
You are still not saying who should pay. The west? Is Poland, Italy, Germany, Greece, Norway, Finland, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and tens more supposed to pay for the past government of Britain, France, the US, Denmark, the Netherland, Spain and Portugal? Should also Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan pay for the trans-saharan slave trade?
What exactly is “Western” slavery, and how does it differ in your view from other forms of slavery?