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 should clarify my prior post in that European colonists were unique in practicing race-based chattel slavery
I am not at all challenging the fact slavery existed in the many societies. Concur with all of your examples but, and this is an important caveat, slavery was not practiced under a further dehumanizing race based caste construct in those societies, it wasn’t industrial on the scale of the transatlantic trade (rather more often based on domestic kinship models), and I would still attribute the perpetuation of slavery in Brazil according to the European colonial model to Portugese settlers. Unfortunately colonialism doesn’t end when colonists leave (as the field of post colonial studies has demonstrated repeatedly).
Even under Shariah (Islamic) law, slaves had the right to be fed and clothed like their masters, the right to marry, and protections against extreme physical abuse. This is not how European colonists practiced slavery via the transatlantic slave trade.
My understanding of your argument is that it boils down to slavery existed elsewhere. I 100% agree that it did. But the way European colonists did it was so much more cruel and inhumane, and I think that’s what the diplomats from 123 of 178 nations are recognizing here, and rightly so.
In short, we need to have some nuance in understanding how slavery is actually practiced. Some forms are more cruel than others. My argument is that the European colonists did it on a scale and with a degree of cruelty (creating a race based caste system on the basis of false science) never before seen in human history.
Their actions created a period where blackness was synonymized with enslavability and the echoes of that vile ideology reverberate into the present day.
That type of global ideological poison, in my view, certainly puts it among the gravest crimes against humanity. Because it’s not just the people they enslaved that were impacted. It changed how people with darker skin were and are perceived even in the present day. It tied a person’s worth to an immutable and plainly visible characteristic, their skin tone. To me, that makes it one of the greatest evils committed upon humanity.
No, they are not. They are asking for reparation, that is the entire point of the resolution. Reparation, it is said so many time in the document it is ridiculous. We want to say that slavery in US plantation was worse because it had a race component? Fine! I agree, but we are playing the game of “which crime against humanity is worse?”. I find it just degrading. Because Ghana does not really care about the life of the US american citizens that descended from the slaves. They want reparation for Ghana. And reparation for losing millions of citizen is the same if you lose them to the Arabs or to the Americans or to your own internal plantations with chattel slavery.
If for you this is not hypocrisy I do not know what to say