A 'black lives matter' protest in Washington DC in 2014. Cory Clark/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
Slavery has, of late, undergone a bifurcation in political and intellectual discourse. On one side, there are those who assert that thinking about possibilities for radical social change today are pre-empted by an undue focus on the history of racial slavery, the international abolitionist movement, and its post-emancipation cognates throughout the Atlantic world. They claim that the critical sensibilities and political energies of people of conscience have been absorbed by the centuries-long black freedom struggle against racial slavery. Framing our political efforts within this matrix, it is thought, eclipses equally pressing problems arising from distinct but related histories of capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism as well as the diverse movements arrayed against them. Within the professional milieu of the United States at least, entire fields of academic inquiry, journalism, policy-making, and service provision, and much community organizing and activism as well, have for a full generation advocated for an end to ‘the black-white binary’ analysis of race and racism. The call for paradigm shift has become the hallmark of the “post–civil rights era,” only more pronounced post-cold war and post-9/11, in which initiatives for racial justice, immigrant rights, indigenous sovereignty, liberal multiculturalism, and conservative colorblindness operate uneasily—often unwittingly—within a broad-based strategic integration.
On the other side, there are those who assert that the progressive causes to which they have dedicated themselves are, in fact, extensions of the same black freedom struggle otherwise thought to have run its course in the mid-twentieth century and whose residual pride of place continues to obfuscate and distort movements for justice and equality in the present. Indeed, some of those urging us to move beyond “the black-white binary” employ key terms and concepts and not a little of the style, tone and timbre of black movements as they seek to decenter, subordinate, or supersede them. The ‘new abolitionists’ fighting ‘slavery’s global comeback’ a century and half after emancipation proclamations echoed throughout the hemisphere, are surely the most curious, and notorious, of the lot. The new abolitionists, including those working for the United Nations, the US State Department and human rights groups, are worried that interventionist approaches couched in terms of ‘human trafficking’ to ameliorate the condition of some thirty million people in question are euphemizing relations of force that amount to slavery here and now. For this cohort, the problem is not too much talk of slavery, but far too little.
