Here's my take on this matter:
The claim that slavery was once “legal,” and therefore not a crime, is one of the most shameless, gutless, morally hollow arguments ever uttered by a modern state. To hear the United States—a nation built on stolen Indigenous land and centuries of enslaved African labor—reach for that excuse is revolting. It is historical gaslighting on a civilizational scale.
This is not merely ignorance. This is not merely bad faith. This is a deliberate attempt to launder atrocity.
Because if “it was legal” becomes the measure of innocence, then every tyrant, every colonizer, every architect of genocide is suddenly absolved. Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws were legal. Apartheid in South Africa was legal. Colonial land theft across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa was legal. The lynching of Black people in the South flourished under the protection of legal indifference.
Legality is a weapon. Legality is a mask. Legality is the language power uses to justify its own savagery.
And nobody knows this better than the Western empires who wrote the laws that declared Africans property, who wrote the maritime codes that enabled the Middle Passage, who wrote the colonial charters that turned continents into plantations. These were not neutral frameworks—they were hand-crafted instruments of racial domination.
So when the U.S., Argentina, Israel, and the shield-wall of NATO vote against calling slavery a crime against humanity, what they’re really doing is protecting their own historical profits. Their museums overflow with African artifacts ripped from communities. Their banks and corporations still thrive on the generational wealth slavery created. Their political power was born from the womb of that violence.
And they have the audacity to stand before the world and say: “It was legal.”
As if legality ever excused barbarity. As if legality ever softened the crack of the whip. As if legality ever erased the chains, the auctions, the screams, the bodies thrown overboard to feed sharks following the ships.
Their argument is not only morally bankrupt—it is a confession. A confession that they have no intention of reckoning with their own architecture of oppression. A confession that they cling to the old colonial logic: if we wrote the rules, we cannot be guilty.
The world is not fooled. History is not fooled. And justice will not be fooled.
Slavery was a crime against humanity the moment the first African was shackled. No vote can change that. No cowardly appeal to “legality” can wash away the blood.
And anyone who stands against naming that truth stands with the legacy of the crime itself.
