The Impossibility of Closure
"...These deaths, that shipping, ought never to have happened....but even if those Africans who were in those holds, who left something of their prior selves in those rooms as a trace to be discovered, and who passed through the doors of no return, did not survive the holding and the sea, they like us are alive in hydrogen, in oxygen, in carbon, in phosorus and iron, in sodium and chlorine. This is what we know about those Africans, thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in middle passage. They are with us still..." -Christina Sharpe
What does reparation mean when the injury is ongoing?
On the 25th March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognise the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The resolution, proposed by Ghana, was adopted by 123 votes. Three countries voted against it, the United States, Israel, and Argentina, and 52 abstained, among them the United Kingdom.
“The UK is firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities. No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another. There is equally no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law.” -Ambassador James Kariuki, UK Chargé d’Affaires to the UN.
“Historical acts” presumes a yesterday. It presumes an ending, a clean break between then and now, across which blame cannot travel. But chattel slavery cannot be consigned to the past because its logics are constitutive of the present.Saidiya Hartman describes this as the “afterlife of slavery”, a time in which the enslaved are legally dead yet socially alive, and their descendants live within the structures of that death.
“How does one mourn the interminable event? How does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives which are unfolding still. How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” -Christina Sharpe
Naming a crime matters, but naming can also close, it can offer the comfort of a line drawn. There’s a risk that this resolution becomes a symbolic line in the sand: something has been done, the arc of justice is bending, history is, at last, accounted for. But recognition alone is not enough, it cannot substitute for the structural work still required.
We must refuse to place slavery in the past tense. We are still living it, still within it, still tending it, still making life otherwise inside its ruins. The everyday practices of Black survival are not the overcoming of slavery’s legacy, they are the negotiation of its persistence.
The plantation lives on in the prison, the auction block in the labour market, the spectacle of Black suffering is still public consumption. The hold of slavery persists in everyday life, shaping healthcare inequities, law, policing, education, and the premature death that haunts our communities. Blackness inhabits not only the condition of social death, but also its endless repetition across time.
Mourning, too, is unsettled. Traditional mourning depends on an ending. It presupposes a before and an after, a move (however slowly) toward closure.
Even the language of “reckoning” carries within it the assumption that there is something to reckon with, something that has now, at last, come to a close. But how do we mourn the unending? How do we grieve the everyday?
There will be more votes. More abstentions. More careful language in high rooms about the distance between past and present. But we have our own temporality, our own accounting. The resolution changes nothing about what we already know, already carry, already do. We will continue, alone if necessary, defending the dead and attending to Black life in the midst of its precarity.