On 25 March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Resolution, spearheaded by Ghana and supported by the African Union in the context of the 2026-2036 Decade of Reparations, which declares the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.
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This Declaration passed with 123 votes in favour, 3 against (Argentina, Israel and the United States), and 52 abstentions, including all European Union (EU) member states as well as candidate countries to the EU. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the votes illustrated the divide between those who stand on opposite sides of history of this crime against humanity.
The collective decision of EU member states to abstain can appear puzzling, especially considering that on 17 March 2026, mere days before the UN vote, the EU officially launched its first Anti-Racism Strategy for 2026-2030 stating its commitment to tackle structural racism. This contrast rightly raises questions, as the two moves appear difficult to reconcile.
However, what seems at first glance contradictory ceases being so once we read the EU's actions through the prism of White Ignorance conceptualised by the Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills. Through this concept, Mills brings attention to the epistemological ideas and practices that perpetuate a deeply entrenched white ignorance about the history of racialised chattel enslavement of Africans, colonialism and the ongoing structural racisms inherited from this history. The concept is particularly helpful to shed light on how ignorance is enabled and reproduced at different levels of society, frustrating any efforts to reckon with the enduring global consequences of the enslavement of Africans and the need to repair the harms, which continue to affect Africans and people of African descent today.
Ignorance as a tool of protection for dominant group's interests
"Imagine an ignorance that resists. Imagine an ignorance that fights back. Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly - not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge"
(Charles Mills, White Ignorance [1997] 2007)
Charles Mills describes white ignorance as "an ignorance, a non-knowing, that is not contingent, but in which race - white racism and/or white racial domination and their ramifications - play a crucial role". Through this concept, Mills brings attention to the ways in which race affect perception, conception, memory, testimony, and motivational group interest. He explains that "interests [...] shape cognition, influencing what and how we see, what we and society choose to remember, whose testimony is solicited and whose is not, and which facts and frameworks are sought out and accepted". More precisely, he argues that white group interests is one of the "central causal factor in generating and sustaining white ignorance", standing in the way of any concrete action which would lead to taking accountability for the past and its legacy in the present to eliminate white privilege and achieve racial justice.
Ignorance at the highest levels of the land
Reading the EU's decision to abstain from the UN vote through the lens of white ignorance helps explain the discrepancy between its discourse and its actions. The EU's explanation of vote serves as an illuminating illustration of some of the features and dynamics of white ignorance described by Mills at play, notably strategic colour-blindness and the rejection of any knowledge standing outside of white epistemic authority.
From race to racelessness: colour-blindness as a mean to maintain the status quo
Mills explains that Europe's gradual rise to global domination, through the capitalist-colonial-enslavement project dating back to 1492 entrenched eurocentrism, leading to various theories of innate European superiority to the rest of the world. He, however, argues that this original belief in innate white superiority has ceded the way to a more subtle form of white normativity grounded in strategic colour-blindness, which silences the very existence of race as an inherited social signifier. Rather than explicitly upholding racial hierarchy, this framework denies the continuing significance of race in determining individuals' living conditions. In this way, whiteness is transformed from a racially superior position to racelessness, i.e a supposedly neutral and universal standpoint. This manifests in a categorical "refusal to recognize the long history of structural discrimination that has left white [people] with the differential resources they have today, and all of its consequent advantages in negotiating opportunity structures". Colour-blindness therefore rejects the need to address the structural inequalities inherited from slavery and colonialism while framing any demands to confront historical injustices as divisive or unnecessary.
The EU's explanation perfectly illustrates this use of strategic colour-blindness. Indeed, the EU starts its statement by affirming its commitment and listing its actions to date to shed light on the history of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade but frames it in the language of "collective responsibility", never naming relevant EU member states as perpetrators of said atrocities. It then expresses that one of the reasons the EU decided to abstain is that the text of the Resolution "risks creating divisions when unity is both necessary and achievable". It finally underlines that the EU was prepared to "support a text that emphasises the scale of the atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade, the importance of remembrance [...]". In essence, the EU envisioned a text which would have maintained the status quo by placing the atrocities committed firmly in the past, without acknowledging their continuing consequences in the present.
Dismissal of knowledge that challenges the status quo
Another tool which serves to maintain white ignorance particularly visible in the EU's explanation is the rejection of knowledge which stands outside of white epistemic authority. Indeed, Mills explains that the denial operated through colour-blindness is in part made possible by systematic discrediting of testimony and knowledge which doesn't inscribe themselves within pre-defined systems of knowledge sanctioned by the dominant group. To illustrate this point, he notably cites Kant's infamous line about a "Negro carpenter's" views in which the former stated that "And it might be, that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.". As such, presumed racial inferiority undermines any claim to knowledge which isn't backed up by white epistemic authority.
In its explanation, the EU rejects any claim for reparations arguing that "it lacks a sound legal basis". This assessment completely discards the argument made in the resolution based on African jurisprudence, such as the Kouroukan Fouga (Manden Charter) of 1235, which notably establishes the sovereignty of life over property, as well the fundamental principle that "a crime does not rot", reflected across African legal and moral traditions.
Through these elements, the EU explanation provides a compelling illustration of the discourse which participates in sustaining and reproducing white ignorance. The explanation notably concludes with "repeating our strongest condemnation of the slave trade and reaffirming our genuine commitment that we have demonstrated through concrete domestic and international action, we are compelled to ABSTAIN, solely out of the profound respect for the subject matter and its complexities", demonstrating Mills assertion that white ignorance is not confined to the illiterate but rather permeates the highest levels of the land and presents itself as knowledge. More particularly as knowledge which takes precedence over any articulations made by the affected group themselves. By framing the complexity of the subject as a valid reason to abstain, the EU implicitly questions the Declaration's proponents' understanding of the topic.
Contrary to the EU's claim that it has "demonstrated through concrete domestic and international action" its commitment to address the historical legacy of the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel slavery, dehumanisation is not merely a phenomenon of the past in Europe. The consequences of slavery, colonization, and the dehumanisation of Africans and people of African descent remain deeply entrenched within the economic and social fabrics of European societies. Racial inequalities inherited enslavement and colonialism are omnipresent features of European Union (EU) member states' societies today.
Anti-Black racism is one of the dominant expressions of European racism, as evidenced by the persisting high rate of discrimination experienced by people of African descent across EU member states. In its "Being Black in the EU" report released in 2023 and updated in 2024, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) found that almost half (45%) of people of African descent, surveyed across 13 EU member states, experience racial discrimination in key areas of their lives. This manifests in systemic inequalities constraining their access to education, employment, housing, and healthcare. Racism in the EU is structural, it's at the borders, it kills.
The UN Declaration inscribes itself within a wider global movement for reparations which is increasingly gaining steam. A reckoning with the legacies of slavery and colonialism is underway and the EU will have to confront it. Mills notably explains that white ignorance continues to flourish because "a white epistemology of ignorance has safeguarded it against the dangers of an illuminating blackness [...]". It is, however, not indefeasible but rather a socially and politically reproduced cognitive tendency that can be overcome. We need to continuously expose the mechanisms of white ignorance at play if we are to have any hope to overcome it.
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