I recently traveled to Geneva to attend the fifth session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, an advisory body to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. As executive director of JustFaith Ministries, I joined representatives from governments, civil society and international organizations to continue the work of the forum to improve the safety and quality of life and livelihoods of people of African descent.
While the discussions were wide-ranging, one development stood out with particular clarity. On March 25, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement as the gravest crime against humanity.
The resolution is both momentous and deeply revealing. It is momentous because it represents the culmination of decades of sustained work by scholars, activists and leaders of African descent. This work stretches back through the 2001 Durban Declaration and Program of Action and continues through the United Nations’ International Decades for People of African Descent.
Together, these efforts have sought to name the truth of slavery not simply as a tragic chapter in history, but as a defining global system whose consequences remain with us.
The resolution affirms that reality with clarity and force. It recognizes the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity and insists its legacies continue to shape the modern world.
This is not merely symbolic language. It is a moral and legal claim that calls for truth, accountability and repair.
‘Crimes against humanity’
The language “crimes against humanity” matters. It corrects the tendency to treat the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement as historical missteps or unfortunate chapters in an otherwise progressive story. It names them for what they were: Sustained systems of violence, exploitation and dehumanization.
Without that clarity, the scale and intent of what occurred can be softened, making it easier to avoid the demands of justice in the present.
But the resolution is also revealing. It reveals how little attention this moment has received in the United States, even among communities that otherwise express strong commitments to justice. That silence suggests the realities facing people of African descent globally are still treated as peripheral rather than central to our moral and political concerns.
More significantly, the resolution reveals the limits of political will among some of the world’s most powerful nations. The opposition and abstentions from countries such as the United States, Israel, Argentina and several European states are not simply matters of policy disagreement. They point to a deeper reluctance to fully confront historical truth and to accept responsibility for its enduring consequences. This reluctance is not only about the past. It is about the present.
This pattern of resistance cannot be fully understood apart from the enduring force of anti-Blackness. As theologian Kelly Brown Douglas has argued, anti-Blackness is not simply prejudice or bias. It is a deeper moral and social logic that has historically defined Black life as expendable, marginal or outside the full bounds of moral concern.
Inconsistency
That reality helps explain a troubling inconsistency. Reparations and formal acknowledgment of harm have been extended in other cases, including to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese Americans subjected to internment and Native American communities. Yet similar efforts on behalf of people of African descent continue to encounter resistance.
“What distinguishes these cases is how Black suffering has been historically interpreted and valued.”
This disparity raises a difficult but necessary question. What distinguishes these cases is not the severity of harm, but how Black suffering has been historically interpreted and valued.
To acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity is to raise unavoidable questions about repair. It is to ask whether the nations and institutions that benefited from centuries of exploitation are willing to align their power with justice in meaningful ways. When that acknowledgment is resisted, it signals more than caution. It reflects an ongoing attachment to the structures and advantages that slavery helped to create.
The resolution itself makes clear that slavery was not an accidental or informal system. It was deliberately constructed through law, economy and governance. Across empires, Africans were redefined as property, reduced to economic units and incorporated into a global system of extraction. Legal regimes made slavery inheritable, ensuring it would reproduce itself across generations.
This was not simply dehumanization. It was the systematic reordering of the world. That history matters for how we understand the present.
‘Sovereignty trap’
During the forum, Panashe Chigumadzi, professor at Brandeis University in Boston and a leading contributor to the development of the resolution’s intellectual framework, identified what she termed the “sovereignty trap.” Her analysis suggests that resistance to reparations is not simply a matter of moral failure or political hypocrisy. It is rooted in the structure of the modern international legal order itself.
Since the early 20th century, international law has recognized the obligation of states to provide reparations for wrongful acts committed against other sovereign states. However, this framework rarely has been applied to Africa. The reason is not incidental.
Modern sovereignty, as a legal and political concept, was forged during the very period in which the transatlantic slave trade and racialized enslavement were being constructed. The same processes that enabled exploitation also disrupted, denied and in many cases destroyed African sovereignty.
“The very condition required to make a claim is the condition that was historically taken away.”
This creates a structural contradiction. The international system requires that those seeking reparations be recognized as sovereign actors. Yet the crime itself involved the systematic denial and dismantling of that sovereignty. In effect, the very condition required to make a claim is the condition that was historically taken away.
In this sense, the question of reparations is not only moral or economic. It is structural. It challenges the foundations of the modern international order and exposes the limits of a system that was not designed to fully account for the harms it helped to create.
Spiritual dimension
There also is a spiritual dimension to this moment that cannot be ignored. The transatlantic slave trade was not only justified through political and economic systems, but also through religious ones.
The resolution itself names this history directly, recalling papal decrees such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), which authorized the reduction of African people to perpetual slavery. These were not marginal texts. They were authoritative religious pronouncements that helped construct the moral and legal framework for racialized enslavement.
That complicity extended far beyond official decrees. It was embedded in the theological and pastoral life of the church. So-called “Slave Bibles” were produced that removed large portions of Scripture, especially passages related to liberation, while emphasizing texts that could be used to enforce obedience. Slave catechisms were developed to instruct the enslaved in forms of Christianity that affirmed submission rather than dignity.
Across denominations, clergy and theologians appealed to Scripture to defend slavery, shaping a moral imagination in which domination could be understood as divinely sanctioned. This was not incidental. It was a sustained effort to align faith with systems of exploitation, giving spiritual legitimacy to what the resolution now rightly names as a crime against humanity.
Questions for the present
That history raises urgent questions for the present. Were the government representatives who opposed or abstained from this resolution met with clear and sustained rebuke from the churches within their nations? Do religious and spiritual institutions today possess the moral courage to speak truthfully about the transatlantic slave trade and to advocate for reparatory justice, even when doing so places them at odds with state power?
Repentance is not an abstract concept. To repent is to change one’s mind, heart and course. For communities and institutions, repentance requires truth-telling, confession and a willingness to confront our history without evasion. For the church, this means more than acknowledging that slavery was wrong. It requires a sustained and committed reckoning with the reality that Christian theology, institutions and leadership were, in many cases, active participants in constructing and legitimizing one of the gravest crimes against humanity.
It also requires an honest accounting of the ways churches materially benefited from these crimes. Wealth was accumulated. Institutions were built. Missions were funded. All of it, in part, tied to systems that exploited and dehumanized African people and their descendants.
Now is not the time for ignorance or silence. Silence in this moment is not neutrality. It is continuity. For that reason, I am calling on church leaders to read this resolution, to tell the truth about our shared history and to speak with moral clarity about the need for justice and repair.
If the church is to speak with integrity about justice, it must be willing to tell the truth about itself. And if it is to call the world to repair, it must be willing to participate in that repair, even when it is costly.
“Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality. It is a form of participation.”
If slavery is rightly named as one of the gravest crimes against humanity, then the response cannot be left to governments alone. The church, and faith communities more broadly, have a responsibility to engage in that work through truth-telling, repentance and public witness. Too often, that voice has been muted. Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality. It is a form of participation.
The work of justice requires more. As people of faith, we are called not only to hope for justice, but to pursue it. Not only to name what is broken, but to participate in its repair. This includes becoming more attentive to the global dimensions of racial justice and recognizing that local and international struggles are deeply connected.
The resolution adopted in March is an important step. It names the truth with clarity. It affirms the dignity of those who were denied it. It calls the world to account. But it also leaves us with a question that cannot be avoided: Do the nations and institutions that helped to build the modern world have the moral capacity and political will to repair it?
Now, I am not asking whether reparatory justice is right. The biblical and moral case is clear. The deeper question I am grappling with is whether the structures that produced the harm, including the ones we inhabit and, in many ways, sustain, are capable of undoing it. I left the forum in Geneva carrying this question with me. And it is a question this moment now places before us all.
But the calling of the church does not depend on how that question is answered.
We are not called to calculate the likelihood of justice, but to bear witness to it. We are not called to mirror the hesitations of the state, but to speak with moral clarity and conviction.
As Dr. King reminded us, the church must be the conscience of the state, not its servant. That calling requires truth-telling, courage and a willingness to stand in the gap between what is and what ought to be.
If the nations lack the will to repair, then the church must not lack the courage to demand it. If systems resist transformation, then people of faith must refuse to sanctify that resistance. The work of reparative justice may be contested at the level of power, but it must be clear at the level of witness.
The question before us is not only whether reparative justice for people of African descent is possible. It is whether we will be faithful to call for it.
Lewis Brogdon
Lewis Brogdon serves as executive director of Just Faith Ministries in Louisville, Ky.