Slavery in America is often spoken of as if it belongs to a distant, sealed-off past—something confined to textbooks, museums, and commemorations. But for many of us, it is not remote history. It is memory.

My great-grandmother was born into slavery. She entered the world before 1865, before the end of the Civil War, before emancipation was more than a promise. When I was a child, my mother made sure we visited her during trips to Jacksonville, Florida, where she lived with her daughter. We called her Granny Rosa. She lived to be over one hundred years old. Her life bridged two Americas—one defined by bondage and another still struggling to define freedom. That distance between slavery and the present collapses when you realize that someone who held you as a child had once been held as property.

This is not ancient history. It is living history.

Consider the timeline. Slavery in what became the United States lasted approximately 246 years—from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 until its formal abolition in 1865. That is not a brief chapter; it is a defining era. And the end of slavery did not usher in freedom so much as it inaugurated a new system of control. Jim Crow oppression extended for another century, well into the 1960s, enforcing racial hierarchy through law, violence, and exclusion. Taken together, nearly three and a half centuries of structured subjugation shape the foundation of modern America. To suggest that this past is too distant to warrant concern is not only inaccurate—it adds insult to injury.

Yet America has a persistent problem confronting inconvenient truths. Increasingly, there is resistance not only to reckoning with the past, but even to exposing younger generations to historical realities that might make them uncomfortable. Legislative efforts such as Florida’s so-called “Stop WOKE Act” reflect this impulse—to sanitize history in the name of protecting sensibilities. In this environment, discomfort itself has been elevated to the level of injury in the minds of some Americans.

The consequences of this mindset extend beyond the classroom. When a society becomes unwilling to face painful truths, its moral reflexes begin to dull. The bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, which killed more than 120 young students, should have provoked widespread outrage and moral clarity. Instead, it passed with only fleeting attention in the American press. The muted response is telling. Willful amnesia—whether about distant atrocities or recent tragedies—erodes a society’s capacity for empathy, and without empathy, there can be no meaningful repair.

This same tension is visible on the global stage. The recent United Nations vote to formally recognize the transatlantic slave trade as one of the gravest crimes against humanity represents a long-overdue attempt to establish moral clarity. Yet the United States, along with a handful of other nations, voted against the resolution, while several European countries central to the trade chose abstention. These decisions reflect an enduring reluctance to fully confront the past.

Ghana’s president, in sponsoring the resolution, articulated what is at stake: not simply symbolic recognition, but an acknowledgment of history’s enduring consequences. For the first time, a global body has taken a step—however incomplete—toward framing slavery as a crime of such magnitude that it demands ongoing moral and political consideration.

The question of reparations, long debated in the Americas, takes on new weight in this context. While calls for redress have persisted for generations, this international recognition introduces a broader framework—one that implicates not only nations, but the global order that benefited from slavery. It underscores what has long been unresolved: a moral debt that remains unpaid, not only materially but historically.

Critics who quibble over whether the transatlantic slave trade was the gravest or merely one of the gravest crimes against humanity miss the point entirely. This is a distinction without meaning.

In a previous essay, The Mis-Education of America, I explored how the distortion of history—now increasingly evident in contemporary political discourse, particularly within the Trump administration—further erodes our collective understanding. When history is softened or selectively told, it becomes easier to deny its relevance. And when its relevance is denied, its consequences are allowed to persist.

Which brings us to a familiar warning: those who forget their history are destined to repeat it.

But the issue is not simply forgetting. It is choosing what to remember, what to obscure, and what to deny.

Slavery was closer than we think—not only in time, but in consequence. And until that truth is fully confronted, the distance we imagine between past and present will remain an illusion.