By Dr. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Wilfrid Laurier University — The Conversation Canada — 25 January 2021
The 20th anniversary of the 2001 Durban World Conference on Racism provides an opportunity to revisit the question of reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Former Western slave-trading states — the US, UK, Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal — bear collective ethical responsibility for the wrongs their societies committed. Various US presidents have acknowledged the horrors of the slave trade but none has formally apologised. The West could not have developed without the trans-Atlantic trade, while Africa was actively underdeveloped. Former slave-trading countries could fund African museums and historic sites, educational programmes on the slave trade, or a truth commission — material acknowledgements of the harms caused.