Recognition and Redistribution: Colonization Was Not an Accident
Lois Mailou Jones, Two African Hairstyles, 1982. Via Frederic Magazine
In March, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as among the most serious crimes committed against humanity. The initiative, led by African nations with Ghana at the forefront, won broad support, passing with 123 votes in favor. Although the resolution met resistance from countries like the United States, Israel, and Argentina, along with several European states, its passage represents an important political gesture on the global stage.
Still, it’s worth remembering that this non-binding recognition is simply a moral stance, a political recommendation, but it creates no enforceable obligation under international law.
This gap between symbolic recognition and the actual transformation of colonial narratives shows that the problem isn’t just the absence of legal obligations, but also the persistence of an imaginary that continues to legitimize or minimize colonial violence.
Consider a recent case from Spain. During a visit to the exhibition La mitad del mundo. La mujer en el México indígena at Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum, King Felipe VI offered his own take on Spanish colonization in Abya Yala: “There are things that, when we study them through today’s values, obviously can’t make us proud. But they need to be understood in their proper context, not with excessive moral presentism, but with an objective and rigorous analysis.”1 He added: “There was a lot of abuse, and we should also value the fact that, through this knowledge, we’ll come to appreciate each other more.”2
These statements point to the same complex dynamic that lies at the heart of this piece on a social level, when someone apologizes for a specific act, two dynamics tend to kick in. On one hand, whoever receives the apology is implicitly pressured to accept it, as if refusing would be a kind of arrogance or unwillingness to close the conflict—if an apology has already been offered, what more could be asked? On the other hand, the very structure of an apology frames the event in a way that isn’t neutral. Apologizing tends to suggest that what happened was a mistake, a deviation, an unintentional act—something that shouldn’t have happened, that wasn’t part of a system.
And here’s the problem: that logic shifts colonization into the realm of the accidental or the exceptional. As if it were a matter of individual abuses or morally questionable decisions within a framework that, at its core, would otherwise be legitimate. But neither the colonization of Abya Yala nor the transatlantic slave trade was accidental: they were a structured system of political, economic, and racial domination that still underpins the society we live in today.
A system that not only organized the extraction of resources and control over territories, but became, to a large extent, the foundation on which modern capitalism was built. And one that, far from having disappeared, still shapes how wealth, labor, and inequality are distributed today. It's not, then, simply a case of abuse within an otherwise legitimate system—that is, "there was a lot of abuse, and we should also value the fact that, through this knowledge, we'll come to appreciate each other more," as Felipe VI would have it. It's about how that system itself functions: one of its very conditions of possibility.
From this perspective, the problem with certain institutional apologies and symbolic gestures is that they can end up serving as another way of obscuring historical accountability. By reducing colonization and the transatlantic slave trade to a set of “abuses” or “past mistakes,” their structural nature gets diluted, and their connection to today’s inequalities gets erased.
As María Lugones argues, the modern/colonial system cannot be separated from the capitalist system. The two are so intertwined that coloniality isn’t a leftover from the past, but a constitutive element of the present. That’s why, when colonization is presented as something accidental or morally separable, what’s actually being left out is precisely its structural role within the contemporary economic and social order.
In a context shaped by the advance of neoliberal capitalism, the discussion around social justice can’t be limited to the symbolic recognition of inequality. As Nancy Fraser argued back in 1997, struggles for justice require holding together two inseparable dimensions: recognition and redistribution. The first exposes oppression and restores dignity to those who have historically been excluded; the second demands confronting the material structures that produce and reproduce these inequalities.
This is especially relevant when examining the historical consequences of slavery and colonization.
Enslaved populations were exploited, stripped of their land, and denied control over the resources they themselves produced with their own hands, often at the risk of their lives. Their bodies were turned into instruments of accumulation serving the colonial powers. It was enslaved people who worked the plantations, extracted raw materials, and kept running the trade networks that fueled Europe’s economic growth. And yet, the wealth generated by that labor never stayed in their hands.
The inequalities that disproportionately affect Afro-descendant populations today are not, as certain peddlers of misinformation on social media and in the press keep insisting, the result of some supposed lack of effort. They are the historical consequence of a system that turned people into commodities and systematically stripped them of rights and resources.
That’s why reparations policy can’t be reduced to a purely symbolic matter. Institutional apologies and commemorative acts matter, but they fall short if they aren’t backed by material change.
The exhibition A Coruña. Porto Negreiro, on view at La Normal in A Coruña, Galicia in Spain, through September, shows precisely how part of the city’s economic and urban growth was tied to fortunes built on the trade of enslaved people. Shipbuilding, certain financial activities, and a significant share of A Coruña’s architectural heritage all benefited from that colonial accumulation.
If Europe’s wealth was made possible by the systematic extraction of resources and the forced labor of colonized peoples, then demands for reparations can’t be limited to a moral acknowledgment of harm. As Eric Williams argued ([1944] 2011), European capitalist accumulation was built on Atlantic slavery. Reparation, then, needs to be understood as a matter of redistribution and structural justice.
The core question, then, is what kind of reparation is even possible without structural transformation. Repairing within neoliberalism might ease some symptoms; repairing against it means changing the historical conditions that made reparation necessary in the first place.
No historical justice is possible without redistribution. And no real recognition is possible while the structures of material inequality remain intact.
1.Translation by AHUS from original: «Hay cosas que, cuando las estudiamos con nuestros valores de hoy en día, obviamente no pueden hacernos sentir orgullosos. Pero hay que conocerlas en su justo contexto, no con excesivo presentismo moral, sino con un análisis objetivo y riguroso».
2.Translation by AHUS from original: «Hay mucho abuso y también debemos valorar el hecho de que, a partir de ese conocimiento, nos apreciaremos más».
*This piece is a faithful translation of the original, written in Spanish and also published,"Reconocimiento y redistribución: La colonización no fue un accidente”.
References
Williams, Eric ([1944] 2011). Capitalism and Slavery. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Fraser, Nancy (1997). Iustitia Interrupta: Critical Reflections from the Postsocialist Condition. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores.
Lugones, María (2008). “Coloniality and Gender.” Tabula Rasa, no. 9, pp. 73–101.
Vergès, Françoise (2020). A Decolonial Feminism. Barcelona: Virus Editorial.