On March 26, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution promoted by Ghana and the African Union, designating the European Transatlantic Slave Trade and the chattel enslavement of Africans and African Americans as the “gravest crime against humanity.” Opponents, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, took semantic issue with the word “gravest,” arguing the “superlative” language creates a hierarchy of oppressions—though an “enduring injustice.”
But when African bodies, shackled together in pairs, were stacked on slave ships like the Jesus of Lübeck to maximize profits during the Middle Passage, what else should we call it then? When human beings are treated as cargo, as inventory, as tool, as object?
When their skin was branded as a sign of ownership, which doubled as an escape deterrent? When their thoughts and feet were tracked by overseers and “pattyrollers”? Two hundred and forty-six years in captivity, nearly two and a half centuries, what kind of time is that if not grave?
How else would you describe the period when African and African American bodies, minds, and souls went to hell and back at the hands of their oppressors, who preached to them and whipped them on Sundays? “He waited until Sunday morning to whip his slaves,” Elias Thomas, a former slave from North Carolina, said in My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery.
Which adjective would you prefer to describe the testimony of Mary Armstrong? She was interviewed when she was 91 years old and her memories were included in When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection.
She said:
Old Polly, she was a Polly devil if ever there was one and she whipped my little sister, what was only nine months old and just a baby, to death. She come and took the diaper offen my little sister and whipped till the blood just ran— just ‘cause she cry like all babies do and it kilt my sister.
How shall we hear them—if colonizing countries get to determine how they describe their oppressed condition? When their only position should be to listen, to apologize, and to make repair?
To be clear, the resolution does not rank human suffering. Instead, it identifies chattel slavery—which completely commodified African and African American bodies, which used their bodies as collateral, as pawns, as assets and treated them as livestock, which ensured they had no legal rights and stripped them of personhood, which maintained this servitude as not only lifelong but hereditary—as the source of continued global economic imbalance and injustice.
With country-founding economic gains made through chattel slavery, these countries’ achievements are exaggerated. All self- determined claims of superiority through the subjugation of other human beings mask deep-seated insecurities. Further, their histories are self-congratulatory, which should be read with suspicion as they fuel narrative myths of colonialism and exceptionalism, disguising injustice to present current power dynamics and structures as natural.
Chattel slavery was a forced labor economy that created intergenerational inequalities regarding material resources, systematically enriching European Americans racialized as white while exploiting African and African Americans racialized as black. In America, in particular, it persisted even after its abolition through the Black Codes, the racial terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, race massacres, Jim and Jane Crow laws, redlining, segregation, mass incarceration, and police brutality.
The weight of chattel slavery and colonialism persists in countries like Haiti, where its citizens were forced to pay France 90 million dollars to compensate for the planters’ loss of enslaved labor. The country was threatened with a reinvasion and saddled with a “double debt” that they didn’t pay off until 1947, crippling the economy and preventing development.
Capitalism evolved out of chattel slavery, which commodified racial identity and explains the racialized stratification of labor, with the global working class being “non-white” in this false binarized reality, as well as their overrepresentation in the prison-industrial complex. Known as racial capitalism, as capitalism materialized alongside European colonialism and the European Transatlantic Slave Trade, chattel slavery is the reason for unequal access to material resources and why many institutions are extractive, which widens the gap between the privileged class and marginalized people.
Yes, it all goes back to chattel slavery. It’s been called America’s “original sin,” its founding contradiction, but “gravest” just wasn’t the right word to describe it? They just couldn’t get on board with the resolution until they refined the phrasing.
Gravest, in the case of a mistake, which chattel slavery was not, means “the most serious, severe, or consequential error a person can make, often resulting in severe, long- lasting, or irreversible damage.” It originates in the late 15th century from the French word grave or the Latin word gravis, meaning “heavy or serious.” Its synonyms include “crucial,” “dangerous,” “acute” and “pressing.”
But this linguistic exercise of getting the wording just right is a tactic of narcissists, who demand exact phrasing to control the narrative, enforce compliance, and invalidate your reality. This demand for scripted language ensures they avoid responsibility for their behavior, which these countries have a low tolerance for, as the resolution also calls for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”
The demand for exact words, specific phrasing, and its adjacent tool, tone policing, is all about performance. It is the expectation that one participates in a contrived reality that is more amenable to the offender or in this case, the oppressor. Narcissists have a high need for control, and colonizers are no different, as white-body supremacy is an expression of narcissism.
To be sure, you can repeat the pre-selected words verbatim and the narcissist would still twist them. Because the goal is not effective communication but manipulation so as to hold the tongue of the speaker, to control the discussion on this topic, and ultimately, to stop the conversation.
But the resolution passed and chattel slavery is the “gravest crime against humanity.” Now, how should we describe its perpetrators?
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.