BLACK GHOST OF EMPIRE

A pointed study of the dissolution of slave economies in emancipation and the exceedingly long tail between so-called freedom and justice.

Tufts University historian Manjapra identifies five categories of emancipation, none of them quite satisfactory inasmuch as “the emancipations—the acts meant to end slavery—only extended the war forward in time.” None ever effectively erased the color line, and then there’s “the ghost line,” an extension of personal ghosting into the social sphere, wherein the “ghostliner” simply ignores the experience of formerly enslaved and currently oppressed peoples and insists on “ ‘unseeing’ the plundered parts, and ‘unhearing’ their historical demands for reparatory justice.” The author, born in the Caribbean of mixed African and Indian heritage, considers the forms of emancipation practiced by the British and French governments that compensated slaveholders for the loss of their putative property. In Colonial New York, this played out in numerous ways. For example, when enslaved people were manumitted, their former owners were required to post a bond for them in case they should ever become public wards, a charge they passed on to the freed people. As such, “they were ‘freed’ into the condition of having to pay their oppressors.” In some instances, enslaved people emancipated themselves, as with the uprising that led to the establishment of Haiti, whose slaveholder class the French government repaid for their losses without considering that reparations were due the formerly enslaved. “In its most banal expression,” Manjapra writes, “white supremacy is merely the wish among groups who benefited from slavery to continue to enjoy its spoils and privileges long after its formal death.” This supremacist stance self-evidently endures nearly 160 years after slavery was formally ended in the U.S., and reparations are still yet to materialize. “The struggle for reparatory justice,” the author concludes meaningfully, “belongs to the history of slavery and emancipation itself.”

A worthy contribution to the controversial discussions around how to compensate for crimes past and present.