The United States was one of just three nations to vote Wednesday against a United Nations resolution to call the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and support reparations as a means to address “historical wrongs.”
The no votes by the Trump administration, alongside allied governments in Israel and Argentina, underscored the stubborn resistance from some nations’ leaders against reckoning with the history of chattel slavery and its lingering effects.
The resolution was introduced by Ghanaian President Jonathan Mahama. On Tuesday, just one day before formally introducing the resolution for a vote, Mahama spoke at a U.N. event where he rebuked efforts in the U.S., by Donald Trump and others, to whitewash or ignore the history of chattel slavery. (Trump, for example, complained last summer that the National Museum of African American History and Culture focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”)
“These policies are becoming a template for other governments, as well as some private institutions,” Mahama said. “At the very least, they are slowly normalizing the erasure.”
Mahama echoed that sentiment during a speech to U.N. members on Wednesday, when he spoke about the importance of teaching about the history of slavery in schools and museums: Today marks the international day of remembrance of the victims of slavery in the transatlantic slave trade. It is a day on which we honor the memory of the approximately 13 million African men, women, and children who were enslaved over the course of several centuries. Remember them through articles, oral histories, true broadcast programs, books, music, visits to museums, monuments and memorials, such as the Ark of Return located right here at the visitors plaza of the United Nations headquarters. Through these activities, we do more than remember. We document and educate — we gain greater perspective. We find a delicate balance of learning from history so that we do not repeat it, while leaving our pain behind. The Trump administration’s response exhibited the ignorance and arrogance one might expect from a regime that has pursued historical revisionism and racist policies. U.S. Ambassador Dan Negrea, while opening his remarks by acknowledging slave trade as “historical wrongs,” called the resolution “highly problematic in countless respects,” going on to say the U.S. “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
