Recensione : L'irrisolta sofferenza della schiavitù

Ana Lucia Araujo's book, Reparations for slavery and the slave trade. A transnational and comparative history, offers an extremely accurate examination of the various forms of reparations, either symbolic or material, which slaves and their descendents have been requesting for over two centuries for the suffering they experienced on the American Continent, but above all in the United States. Such forms of reparation represent an attempt to overturn the principle by which the freeing of a slave, considered as private property, had almost always led to the payment of a refund to the owner. The author illustrates in an effective manner how the slave trade and the practice of slavery, defined at the 2001 Durban Conference as 'crimes against humanity', has had long-lasting negative consequences for Black people, who are still the object of racial discrimination.

The increasing number of requests for material compensation from representatives of the Black community in the United States, clearly demonstrates the current cronic absence of rights, either objectively or in relative terms, of Afro-Americans. [Publishers' text].