A segregation sign in a restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, from 1938.
Digital Image Library | Alamy
As a political tool with a long history and dubious boundaries, whiteness – by its very fluidity – fosters violence.
Britain’s Prince William speaks during the unveiling of the National Windrush Monument on June 22, 2022.
John SibleyPOOL/AFP via Getty Images
The legacy of racism in both the United States and the United Kingdom has impacted the ability of Blacks and other ethnic groups to accumulate wealth.
DRC President Felix Tshisekedi and Belgian King Philippe toast at an official banquet in Kinshasa.
Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga/AFP via Getty Images
For relations with the DRC to truly improve, the Belgian state must acknowledge its historical responsibility more strongly.
Daniel Boyd, Sir No Beard, 2007. Oil on canvas 183.5 x 121.5 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, gift of Clinton Ng 2012, donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 378.2012.
Image: AGNSW, Felicity Jenkins © Daniel Boyd
Daniel Boyd’s solo exhibition Treasure Island, now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a deeply political and personal interrogation of Australia’s colonial history.
A Pacific island woman with a child planting sugar cane in a field, Bingara, Queensland, c 1897.
John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
In 1881, a Pacific Islander woman brought here to work on a sugar cane plantation ran away. She was violently retrieved by her employer. Her story sheds moving light on a dark history of exploitation.
The Haitian revolution was the first by a former slave colony and was to inspire other emancipation movements across the New World.
In this photo from Aug. 20, 1922, Gene Kemp and Mary ‘Teddie’ Kemp, at left, are seen with two friends.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn
If Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had his way, the state’s past of lynching Blacks would be taught as an exception rather than the rule. History tells a different story.
UN peacekeepers on patrol.
Sia Kambou/AFP via Getty Images
Peacekeeping missions grab the headlines when they’re associated with tragedy and death – but that isn’t their full story.
Most of us love chocolates, but child labor has been found involved in some of the production.
Jupiterimages/The Image Bank via Getty Images
An anthropologist writes that despite best efforts, there is no guarantee that children may not have been exploited in the production process of chocolate.
Paul Lovelace / Alamy Stock Photo
An expert on the royal family’s finances explains how they still benefit from historical connections to slavery and empire.
Buhle Ngaba as The Student holds Shaun Oelf as The Dancer.
Yazeed Kamaldien/What Remains
Winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize, What Happens was inspired by the discovery of a slave burial site.
English Quakers on a Barbados plantation.
Image courtesy of New York Public Library
Eighteenth-century Quakers attempted to align their religious beliefs with what they purchased. These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.
Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback, from The Catalan Atlas, 1375.
Attributed to Abraham Cresques/Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons
Born in Blackness by Howard W. French is a towering work. It argues that, because of gold and slavery, Africa is central to creating the modern world.
Harvesting on a Louisiana sugar plantation, 1875.
Alfred R. Waud/Library of Congress
Sugar has deep links with slavery in the US, but Black workers weren’t the only ones affected. In post-Civil War Louisiana, Chinese workers also toiled cutting and processing cane.
Bernice A. King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, at a recent press conference preview the King Holiday observance in Atlanta, Georgia.
EPA-EFE/Erik S. Lesser
King saw parallels between the anti-colonial movement in Africa and the civil rights struggle in the US.
The enslaved people who produced sugar before the Civil War did dangerous and grueling work.
The Print Collector/Getty Images
Before the Civil War, US activists sought to combat slavery through sugar boycotts. Instead, consumption grew.
SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Stock Phot
The west has long defined racism as a function of colonial domination and discrimination. But in a changing world this definition must be challenged.
People carry out a “die in” to protest the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in Portland last week. The Rittenhouse case highlights the fluidity of white privilege.
(AP Photo/Andrew Selsky)
The lionization of Rittenhouse by the right proves that even skin colour is not enough to protect white people who support anti-racism movements.
Hulu’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 4 envisions escapes to Canada that draw on 19th century abolitionist narratives, yet the show doesn’t acknowledge race.
(Hulu/YouTube)
Myths of Canada’s moral superiority in contrast to the United States can be a barrier to acknowledging and addressing racism in Canada.
The Gidan Makama national museum in Kano, Nigeria.
Aminu Abubakar/AFP/Getty
Nigerian museums continue to present colonised versions of history. This harms local communities.