Slavery has left an indelible imprint on our nation’s soul. For most black Americans the end of slavery was just the beginning of a long battle for democratic equality, social acceptance, and economic opportunity.  Millions of Americans of African descent languish in societal backwaters with limited opportunities for good jobs, good housing, adequate healthcare, and other basic needs.  We live in a nation with institutional racism that continues to define one’s worth by the color of one’s skin and often reduces people to the modern equivalent of serfdom where they are forever trapped in cycles of poverty, unemployment, crime, and mistreatment.  There is a widening rift between blacks and whites; irrespective of income, education, or geography.  This rift impedes the attainment of civic ideals that are needed to solve key problems like crime, lack of housing, and poverty.  And all of these ills can be traced back to slavery and the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Because slavery is so central to the early history of the United States, it has left in its wake a wide array of legacies.  Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century abolitionist, left us many insights into the long-term consequences of slavery (beyond emancipation).  We see echoes of slavery in stone edifices of grand government and university buildings; in bronze statues (especially those commemorating Confederate soldiers); in musical traditions like jazz, R&B, and Gospel; and in all manner of artistic forms, but these are the obvious and less damaging legacies.  It is the social and economic legacies, embodied in patterns of health and disease, educational attainment, living conditions, and repression (largely driven by systemic racism baked into our very government) that robs generations of Americans from their piece of the American Dream. 

In the United States, we live amidst the aftermath of slavery long after its abolition.  Racial wealth gaps, mass incarceration, election disenfranchisement, racial ideas embedded in medical practice, and overt White Supremacy activities perpetuate the abuses formerly heaped onto slaves to all people of African (and in some cases Mexican, Asian, and Native American) heritage. 

In 1869, Frederick Douglass addressed one of the last annual meetings of the American Antislavery Society, then celebrating the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote for black men (by many seen as a final act of Reconstruction). Douglass left a warning as useful now as it was then to thinking about legacies. He acknowledged all the abolitionists’ victories and the fact that their “opponents” seemed in “full retreat.” “But slavery is not honestly dead … it did not die honestly,” he said. Douglass’s words apply to our current racial and constitutional condition as well as his own. “Had [slavery’s] death come of moral conviction instead of political and military necessity; had it come in obedience to the enlightenment of the American people; had it come at the call of the humanity … of the slaveholder, as well as the rest of our fellow citizens, slavery might be looked upon as honestly dead.”  Almost as soon as the ink dried on the 15^th Amendment, other racist and separatist laws, intended to reinstate the racial supremacy of white Americans (especially in the South) were enacted and a cold war of protest, lawsuits, and in extreme cases violence raged well into the 20^th Century (perhaps even the 21^st).

So far, I have been talking about America but a true discussion of the legacy of slavery is a global discussion since the slave trade was an international activity.  In the developed countries of the West, the legacy of slavery is a huge advantage in national wealth, literally stolen from subjugate peoples in Africa, India, the Americas, and east Asia.  In the nations that provided the slaves, we see quite the opposite.  Social and economic progress in these nations was stalled completely during the slave trade putting these countries (in the case of Africa a whole continent) technologically behind the rest of the world and unable to defend themselves of support their populations.  For example, Haiti in the 18th century was the main economic engine of France; today it is the most economically deprived in the Western world. Haiti’s story is also that of Africa and the African people as a whole. The majority of the homeless, the victims of plaques and epidemics, the refugees of war, and the uneducated in the world still come from communities that were the victims of the slave trade and the plantation.  In the west, as a consequence of that systemic racism that pervades the society, we have a negative perception of Africa and a devaluation of African lives. Massacres and genocide can happen in Africa, as in the case of Rwanda, with the world looking on. African governments can mow down their people and go to bed and sleep soundly as if nothing has happened; politicians who settle political disputes by inciting ethnic cleansing (and counter-ethnic cleansing) can go to sleep with consciences undisturbed by what they have brought about. Any life lost is, of course, horrifying, but we have seen how frantic the world and Africa become if a white European hostage is missing or meets death in Africa. It shows an indifference towards the descendants of slaves and deep concern for the descendants of slave owners.

The West has never properly acknowledged this crime against humanity that was the transatlantic slave trade.  Western nations fail to accept responsibility for the crime and its consequences. It’s easy to shift the blame to the East India Company or American plantations owners, or even the native warlords of Ghana and Nigerian who sold slaves to the traders but these are just the middlemen, the lowest run on a long ladder of genocide and holocaust. 

The world needs to learn from its past. Only by fully acknowledging the crimes committed against those who were enslaved can there be any sort of attainment of the promise “all men are created equal” become a reality.  Recently, Ron DiSantis of Florida (another embarrassment to the GOP and our country’s pride) has begun claiming that slaves benefited from slavery.  Such outlandish and deranged lies are the problem.  Beyond being out and out stupid (clearly, Mr. DeSantis doesn’t want to learn the lessons he claims 19^th Century slaves learned by their captivity), they dehumanize those who are living with the legacy.  We need to fix the problems in our society and the first step is admitting that it is a problem.

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