In the March 26, 2026, edition of The New York Times, Lydia Polgreen wrote that “America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control.”
As white nationalist politicians in the United States alternate between temporary control of state and federal government, they continue trying to impose a narrow ideology on a nation shaped by genocidal European settler colonies, built on stolen African labor and sustained by a story of self-creation rooted in inevitability and dominance. At the country’s semiquincentennial, they are trying once again to cast the U.S. as something other than a product of Europe’s global rise.
Yet as the nation’s population increasingly comes to resemble the world’s nonwhite majority, that story is breaking apart. The strains of nativism, Eurocentrism and racial capitalism have contributed to global instability, desperate efforts to preserve an older order and growing demands from those long subjected to it for a new political settlement.
Against that backdrop, the 19th annual United Nations International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade became a focal point for calls for accountability. John Mahama introduced a resolution on behalf of Africans around the world, calling the trafficking of Africans the greatest crime against humanity and demanding reparations. The measure passed overwhelmingly among member states, while several of the world’s older powers either voted against it or abstained.
The vote laid bare both the hopes and anxieties of the current global order and raised urgent questions about responsibility, memory and repair.
