Contemporary activists in the United States frequently describe themselves as part of a ‘new abolitionist movement,’ which is said to represent a direct extension of the original struggle to end slavery. According to this popular formula, activists today are continuing the pioneering historical examples of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sojourner Truth. Despite these historical allusions, this new abolitionist movement suffers from a profound ignorance when it comes to what the original abolitionists were actually up against, what they believed, what they accomplished, and where they fell short. As a result, these new abolitionists have failed to adequately recognise the overriding importance of plantation slavery in American history, its long-term consequences in the aftermath of its legal abolition, and its profound significance for African Americans living today. This is reflected in an obstinate form of racial blindness, which has in turn translated into a consistent disinterest in addressing the vicious racial and economic legacies of plantation slavery that African Americans and other non-white peoples continue to struggle against, both in the United States and more broadly.
When today’s activists refer to the ‘new global slavery’, they frequently fail to recognise that African Americans live with agonising memories of plantation slavery and its enduring contemporary legacies. These have far-reaching ramifications in relation to fundamental themes such as poverty and inequality, incarceration and policing, and education and opportunity. Historians have documented beyond all question the central contribution of slavery to the economic and political development of the United States. Politically engaged African Americans have repeatedly made clear that their moral and historical claims to the problem of slavery are no less overriding are those of the Holocaust for Jews the world over. Given this history, what has been the ‘new abolitionist’ response? Check the websites of every major US Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) and in nearly every case all you will find is silence.
This silence extends to many different topics, including militarised policing, ‘black lives matter’, the prison industrial complex, the ‘achievement gap’, and structural racism. Though eager to remedy the long-term damage to survivors of all kinds of contemporary abuses, this concern does not extend to repairing the historical wrongs endured by African Americans. Could it be that a nation that once enslaved 4,000,000 African Americans is again practicing slavery when it contains the world’s highest percentage of incarcerated people, overwhelmingly non-white, from whose all-but-unpaid labor privatised prisons wring enormous profits? Again, silence. In the face of this obstinate racial blindness it’s hardly surprising that African American participation in the new abolitionist movement has been all but non-existent.
