Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent article in The Atlantic on “The Case for Reparations” has reignited the debate about the politics of American remorse and forgiveness for its treatment of black people. As Coates and many others have pointed out, reparations are not only—arguably not even mostly—about remuneration, but about unequivocally acknowledging the wrongs the state has inflicted on black people. They’re about apologizing.

In this context, Sow’s experience is instructive for what it reveals about international politics, state apologies, and racial discrimination. Social scientists who study these issues argue that apologizing is an essential component of reconciliation between an offending state and its victims. But apologizing on the state level entails real costs, just as it does on the individual level. In both cases, an apology signals a shift in the power dynamic between offender and victim in favor of the latter. Moreover, as Azuolas Bagdonas of Turkey’s Fatih University has written in a paper on the subject, state apologies “require changes in state identity. … [S]tates refuse to apologize when apologizing would significantly disrupt their self-narratives.” Given America’s narrative of freedom, self-determination, and success for all who work hard, apologizing for the intentional suppression of liberty forces the nation to confront the fundamental truth that we weren’t who we thought we were.

Given these costs, Kennedy apologized only because it would have been more costly not to, given U.S. hopes of preserving its position on a Cold War battleground. In other words, the apology to Sow and others came from a calculation of national interests. It did not arise from a sense of moral obligation—which would have mandated an apology to all black Americans, who had suffered far worse.

So what would it take for the U.S. to see an interest in apologizing for slavery?

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The experience of several African countries is instructive here. Many West African nations have now acknowledged the role they played in the enslavement of black people in the Americas. Some have apologized on behalf of members of previous generations, who captured black men, women, and children from neighboring tribes and bartered their lives away to European slave traders. But they have offered or withheld apologies for different reasons.



Nigeria, Ghana, and Benin have taken different approaches to the question of apologizing for slavery. The resulting models reveal what interests might compel, or prevent, a U.S. apology for slavery, and how such an apology could get the buy-in of the American people.

In Nigeria, some tribal leaders have taken the position that since slavery occurred long ago, the perpetrators of the crime own their sins and did not bequeath remorse to their descendants. In 2009, when Nigerian tribal chiefs sought a constitutional amendment formalizing their influential role in the country’s governance, the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, a human-rights organization, encouraged them to apologize for their role in the Atlantic slave trade. These efforts failed—in declining to apologize, one elder told a Nigerian newspaper that his people were “not apologetic about what happened in the past,” explaining that the slave trade was “very very legal” when his forebears were involved in it. Henry Bonsu, a broadcaster researching African apologies for slavery, told The Guardian at the time that among those he interviewed in Nigeria, “People aren't milling around Lagos … moaning about why chiefs don't apologise. They are more concerned about the everyday and why they still have bad governance.” Public opinion polls reflect this concern. The corruption watchdog Transparency International ranks Nigeria among the most corrupt countries worldwide; in 2013, 72 percent of Nigerian respondents to the NGO’s corruption-perception survey reported that the problem was getting much worse.