Much of the world is implicated in the crime and the coverup. Britain couldn’t have become “Great” without their work camps in Jamaica, but British schools don’t spend a lot of time teaching about the violence the British Empire wrought in its colonies. In 2005, the French government tried to pass legislation that urged schools to emphasize the “positive role of colonialism,” while schools glossed over the Black rebellion that ended French enslavement in Haiti. Brazil sweeps its history of anti-Black ethnic cleansing under the rug of “racial democracy,” suggesting that the same country that once ran the world’s largest slave market now has little to no racism. In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) surveyed students from one thousand high schools in the U.S. and found that fewer than half of them had ever heard of the Middle Passage.
My point is that complicity in this atrocity is as widespread as the denial. The many nations who’ve benefited so much from the Maafa lack the moral courage to confess that the breaking of Black bodies is a central part of their stories. They’re unwilling to appraise the damage or to make whatever reparations are possible, making the suffering of the marginalized of their societies inevitable and invisible to those who have no desire to see it.
From “All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope – And Hard Pills to Swallow – About Making Black Lives Matter” By Andre Henry