ABSTRACT

The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them” Recognition of difference and conflictual social relationships constitutes the methodological starting point of anti-oppression theorists. Nikhil Pal Singh suggests that while there are important exceptions, “thinkers in the Marxist tradition have largely failed to give sustained and sympathetic attention to this issue. Angela Davis would have people construe slavery as the most extreme form of un-freedom, the reality rather than the metaphor, slave ownership rather than the "slavery of wage labor". Atlantic slavery was the cornerstone of capitalist exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession over centuries. Frederick Douglass took some small amount of consolation in the fact that America was so young, in 1852, since youth inspires the hope if not the promise of maturation and mutual recognition in the trenches if not also reconciliation and redemption at the mountaintop.