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.
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