Book Review: “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, written by various contributors

Ever since you learned how it happened, you couldn’t get it out of your mind. People, packed like pencils in a box, tightly next to each other, one by one by one, tier after tier. They couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over or scratch an itch or keep themselves clean on a ship that took them from one terrible thing to another. And in the new book “In Slavery’s Wake,” essays by various contributors, you’ll see what trailed in waves behind those vessels. You don’t need to be told about the horrors of slavery. You’ve grown up knowing about it, reading about it, thinking about everything that’s happened because of it in the past four hundred years. And so have others: in 2014, a committee made of “key staff from several world museums” gathered to discuss “telling the story of racial slavery and colonialism as a world system…” so that together, they could implement a “ten-year road map to expand… our practices of truth telling…” Here, the effects of slavery are compared to the waves left by a moving ship, a wake the story of which some have tried over time to diminish. It’s a tale filled with irony: says...