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.
Karl Collins and Rochelle Rose in Rockets and Blue Lights at the National Theatre.
Brinkhoff Moegenburg
Black British women have been staging plays in recent years about Britain’s role in slavery, a history the country is too eager to forget.
Duppy Shadow (1993)
Eugene Palmer.
The lie of the land: Britain’s hidden legacies of slavery in Eugene Palmer’s paintings.
The Rolling Stones performing last week in Pittsburgh.
Emily Matthews/AP
Rather than being an act of censorship, The Rolling Stone’s decision to remove Brown Sugar from their set list is a show of artistic freedom.
Sojourner Truth, born in 1797, was an escaped slave who became an abolitionist, civil and women’s rights campaigner, and met with Abraham Lincoln.
Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism/Flickr
Escaping slavery did not result in unconditional freedom.
French Lilian Thuram slips away from Italian player Stefano Fiore during the France vs Italy Final of the Euro 2000 soccer championhips in Rotterdam.
EFE-EPA/Michele Limina
The book reveals an insidious, unthinking form of racial hierarchy.
A man fishes the head of a statue of Queen Victoria from the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg. Her statue and a statue of Queen Elizabeth were toppled and vandalized on Canada Day.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone
Movements that challenge former national icons demonstrate the importance of history-making in an age of racial reconciliation. But ‘history wars’ won’t get us anywhere.
A trade card with printed black type for the domestic slave traders Hill, Ware and Chrisp.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
By the time slavery ended, over 1 million enslaved people had been forcibly moved in the domestic slave trade across state lines. Hundreds of thousands more were bought and sold within states.