The Debt, and Who Repays It.

By Torraine Walker

On March 25, the United Nations adopted a resolution introduced by Ghana recognizing the Transatlantic Slave Trade as “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparative justice for its victims and their descendants. The resolution passed in the UN General Assembly with 123 votes in favor, and 52 abstentions - mostly European nations - and 3 “no” votes cast by the United States, Israel, and Argentina. The resolution gives official documentation to an atrocity with repercussions still affecting the lives of billions around the world. This day was long coming and while not legally binding, the resolution adds the weight of a global political body for previously established work to build on.

The modern push for international recognition of the injustices of Black chattel slavery goes back to the We Charge Genocide petition submitted to the United Nations in Paris by Black American civil rights activists in 1951. Along with laying out a plan of domestic political action, Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech of 1964 also made a case for connecting the Black American civil rights struggle to the human rights struggles of oppressed populations worldwide. His push coincided with the revolutions and independence movements erupting across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean mostly in former colonial territories of European nations. While both the Genocide petition and Malcolm’s statements carried significant social power, they were met with official indifference by Western political bodies.

There is power in acknowledging history. The impact of the slave trade on the African diaspora was monstrous. The horrific conditions of the Middle Passage, the rape and sexual violence perpetrated by slaveowners on Black women and Black men, and the backbreaking physical labor and dehumanization inflicted on Black Americans were repeated on every continent a ship containing Black slaves docked; the denial and whitewashing of these practices were standardized as well.

The failure to grapple with the legacy of slavery has allowed governments to distance themselves from their active involvement in the trade and allowed white supremacists to promote theories that the generational poverty, ignorance and violence in the third world is the result of some genetic defect in people of African descent, instead of the result of resource extraction and exploitation of human beings based in slavery, colonialism and neo colonialism for the benefit of Europe and America.

A great wrong demands great recompense.

For most people recompense means reparations; financial restitution paid to the victims of the slave trade, but the harm done encompassed far more than unpaid labor. The abuse, forced denial of culture and humanity the slave economy demanded of its victims were arguably more monstrous than its physical toll. Research has shown that trauma can be passed down to the descendants of the people who experience it, but what does full recompense for those horrors look like? Will it be financial compensation? Trials in the Hague? Apologies and documentation of the atrocities of each government responsible like post-apartheid South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or a combination of all three?

Opponents of financial compensation often overlook the historical precedents a case could be built on. Survivors of the Holocaust have received financial compensation from nations and corporations that benefitted from their slave labor, deportation and attempted extermination. In 1990, Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps in the United States during the Second World War were financially compensated for the loss of their liberty and livelihood. European economies and American businesses grew fabulously wealthy due to their trafficking in human cargo.

Black Americans victimized by lynching, Jim Crow, systemic economic disenfranchisement and mass incarceration still deal with the aftermath of those practices long after the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act were supposed to resolve them.

Another question is if the debt is to be paid, who’s responsible for compensation and who’s doing the dividing? If Europe and the United States must pay, will African countries also be responsible? A line frequently used to deny European and American responsibility for the trade is that Africans sold other Africans into slavery, and as uncomfortable as that statement is, it’s true. But current African national borders are arbitrary, drawn up by European colonial powers and cutting across tribal lines. Will current African nations bear responsibility for the crimes committed by the tribes in their borders?

These issues are centuries old, complex, ugly, and won’t be resolved in one day or one year. Like any other serious traumatic injury there will be a lot of pain and passionate debate about the best courses of action to take but something must be done if the collective patient is to survive.

In African and Black American culture, storytelling is a time honored method of passing history down from one generation to the next. The Black diaspora didn’t need a piece of paper to tell us what our ancestors already shared with us. However, legal documentation is the language of the modern world and this UN resolution makes what we knew concrete and clear. But it’s only a milestone, not the end of the journey. What it does is acknowledge that the crime of Black chattel slavery happened and is undeniable. On whatever day it happens, in whatever form it takes, the full measure of justice for that crime will be undeniable as well.

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