I suspect those who study the legacy of slavery in various countries would offer that members of the African diaspora experience it in different ways. However, one of the things about America that likely exacerbates the scars stems from how we approach the topic in schools.
The rise of the modern education system isn't a straight line starting in 1776. Rather, it evolved through a combination of factors that included explicit policy, funding sources, curriculum emphasis, and different philosophies. That said, one constant factor in American education has been the needs of white boys (and sometimes girls) and men (and eventually women) at the center. And part of that means approaching America's history in a way that feels as comfortable as possible to those in the dominiate group; that is, white women teaching white children.
The easiest way to consider how that's made manifest is to compare how chattel slavery is taught in America to how unified Germany has taught World War II. German grammar schools typically use the same history resources and history textbooks, and their books explicitly address the role of the ordinary German citizens in the war. (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention there were differences in how East and West Germany approached the history but they're not germaine.) It wasn't softened for young children but wasn't graphic - just straightforward. It was and is "more than just dealing with the victims of the Holocaust: it includes an examination of the ideological basis of National Socialism, social conditions that were the foundation of the Third Reich and the planning and course of the Second World War."^1 Teachers received training in how to talk about an individual's role in the war, how to design field trips to camps, and the rationale behind the curriculum. As a result, there's been a national conversation about the war for several generations, which means there's a general willingness to address the scars. Parents learned of it in school and accept the responsibility to talk to their children about the war. This isn't to say their approach has been right or without unintended consequences, but rather to demonstrate that the country approached their history with a collective mindset of understanding what happened.
In stark contrast, there are American schools, attended by Black children, named after Civil War generals who were slave-owners. More than a few of these schools were built in the 1940's and 50's, long after the end of the war. America doesn't have a federal education system - which means 50 states with 50 ideas on what should be taught when. Since American schools aren't required to share resources, textbook design has been informed by states that adopted state-wide curriculum, most notably Texas. And as Texas' Board of Education has historically been conservative (and mostly men and mostly white), the Civil War and slavery were treated like a minor event. At different points in the 1970's and 80's, enslaved people were referred to as "workers" or "immigrants" in the Texas standards. This language made their way into textbooks used as recently as 2015. Even states that haven't required textbook adoption by schools, such as New York, haven't historically required instruction about the role of slavery in any meaningful way. As an example, the 1934 US History high school exit exam asked students to write about the economic causes of the Civil War. Acceptable answers allowed the student to receive full credit without mentioning slavery.
For much the late 19th and early 20th century, elementary teachers received little training in American history and their coursework typically focused on the colonial period. As a result, if a teacher was raised believing in the "lost cause" myth and that states-rights was the main cause of the Civil War, that's likely what she would pass onto her students. Meanwhile, teachers would tell stories about happy slaves and kind slave-owners that they were either taught in their preparation program or heard from their own families. Efforts by Black parents and educators to re-center the curriculum on the real harm to Black families has typically not been received well, even in diverse cities like New York City. Finally, teaching was seen as a gentle profession for women. Talk of the cruelty that slavery entailed wasn't something that society was willing to ask young, mostly white, women to do.
This isn't to say that the history of slavery in America isn't taught, rather that, in the absence of a national commitment to helping citizens understand the realities of what it means to build a country's wealth through chattel slavery, most white Americans don't see the scars or understand where they came from. And since most positions of power have been held by white Americans, calls to address the scars through reparations or culturally-competent or Afrocentric curriculum have been historically ignored.
WH countries? Western Hemisphere?
As I understand, we can split countries in America and their experience with slavery of African people in three different major groups: US, Caribbean and Brazil. This distinction is made purely on the fact that more than 90% of African kidnapped in Africa were sent to these regions [1]. From this group, proportion is usually 45% Brazil, 45% Caribbean and less than 10% US, so out of the bat we see a difference in volume and percentage of slave population with respect to native population in the US.
Since the main answer focused on the US, I think the Brazilian point of view will help answering your question. How were racial relations shaped in Brazil after the abolition and how are they today?
As usual, the answer is: it is complicated. Although black citizens were considered full citizens since abolition, their distance in terms of literacy, social conditions and opportunity pretty much assured that, although they represented a huge chuck of the population, their political impact was very, very small. Also, vote was not secret from 1900 to 1932, so white rich landowners could just pick a candidate and vote with their employees, majority black.
From this time (1933), we get the first major sociological work of racial relations in Brazil, Casa Grande e Senzala, from Gilberto Freyre. He argues that Brazil has more mixture and racial additive elements than most countries, and this book (although not explicitly stating) begins the myth of the "Racial Democracy", a state in which color plays no role in political identification. Freyre would himself deny the myth, claiming, in 1956:
I am not claiming that there is no prejudice of race and color attached to prejudice of social status in Brazil. There is, of course. But no one would dare to think in churches that are "white-only". No one would think of laws forbidding inter-racial marriage. No one would think of barring people of color from theaters or residential areas. The spirit of human fraternity is stronger in Brazilians than prejudice of race, color, social status or religion. It is true that racial equality was far from achieved with the abolition of slavery (...). There was racism in Brazilian land-owners, there was a huge social distance between slaves and slave masters, between whites and blacks (...). But few Brazilian aristocrats were strict about racial purity, as were most of aristocrats in the Anglo-Saxon deep south.
After his book, Freyre spent his life explaining his views on Racial Democracy. The discussion is long and many Brazilians will pick holes in my understanding of it; but, from what I can tell from his writings (specially late writing), he argues that our democracy was "Racial" in a way that race played very little role in identity politics. The causes are many, but the main one is the large percentage of black population in the country, which made a larger impact in the formation of the Brazilian culture and notion of nation than it was the case in the US. Miscegenation is easier when half you population is not white, and this mixture prevented many of the scars the US has seen in the last century. Freyre would claim that the unique mixture that became Brazilian culture is the reason, while his critics would simply point to the huge disparity between social status of blacks and white, until today.
American sociologists (like Marvin Harris in 1967) studied comparatively the American and Brazilian racial structures and, seeing no formal segregationist structure, agreed with the Freyrian theory that Brazil was a democracy based on social issues rather than racial, claiming that the difference in status between races was "social inheritance" rather than open racism. This is of course challenged in many fronts by Freyrian critics.
Interestingly, in the 1980 census [2] the Brazilian government decided to ask people what is their color, instead of asking them to choose from a list. A total of 136 different colors were mentioned. Freyriens would claim a sign of absence of race in identity politics, while critics would claim an effect of "systematic whitening" (a form of brain washing to make them forget their African origins) of the population by detaching race and color in Brazilian culture.
It is a complicated subject. 45% of the population declares themselves as "Mixed race", so even racial statistics is near impossible, since the point where "white" ends and "black" begins makes a huge difference when compiling data.
To summarize, Brazilian racial sociology has historically been torn between believing the Freyrian myth of racial democracy or accusing it as a white washed fable that prevents the country from dealing with and healing from scars from its slave-owning (and slave-being) past. By no means racism does not exist in Brazil, it does, but somehow it is hardly part of the public discourse, or political discussion. Most scholars agree that the fact that over half of the Brazilian population is either black or mixed-race is one of the main reasons for this, but all else is up for debate, which rages on.
The answer to this question is two-fold and I hope I don’t have my comment deleted as I don’t have the time to write an essay which this answer truly requires. So here are some reasons why slavery in the US was unique. Lastly, before I begin I will say that the scars of slavery are present all over the Western world the difference being that African-Americans have a larger voice in their country when compared to Black people in Spanish speaking countries as well as Brazil. The Black populations in Latinized countries (except Haiti) have yet to have a Civil Rights Movement and so they are essentially living in conditions similar to African Americans pre 1968.
So on with the program...US Slavery still shows its scars because:
The psychological element of enslavement in the USA
Slavery in the US was not only a physical endeavor but a psychological as the enslaved Africans were forced to let go of their identities and adopt European ones. For instance, if you were a Mandinke man named Dankaran Keita that practiced Ifa, spoke Wolof, and loved to eat Fufu you were now a slave named Toby, that practiced Christianity, spoke English, and loved to eat pig intestines. This had a damaging affect on these people because they were forced to take on a culture that justified their enslavement and demonized everything that made them who they were from their nose to their hair to their body structure and etc. This is not as impactful on the first generation because they have their previous experience in Africa to cling to but by the 3rd or 4th generation they were raising children with no connection to Africa who grew up thinking that they are nothing more than SLAVES. These later generations gained their knowledge of self from their European slave masters and that knowledge was “you are a cotton-picking n-word”.
Post-Slavery Policy
The United States government was not a benevolent entity after the emancipation proclamation as it consistently (in concert with a racist white citizenry) destabilized, stifled, and decimated Black progress at every turn. Starting with the Black codes in the South (1800s)...Black people were unable to vote, own firearms, or be granted citizenship. Even after a civil rights bill was passed, the Democrats still passed more and more laws that disenfranchised the Black populace of the South.
For brevity, I will just state that Black people in the US were not truly “free” until the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. So from circa 1862 (post-slavery) to 1968 the Black populace was economically, politically, and academically disenfranchised by municipal, state, federal, and private institutions. Prior to 1968:
So in summation, since freeing the African slaves, the US Government has done very little to mitigate the long lasting damage it has caused to this populace. It has in fact stifled the African-American’s ability to advance by not allowing them access to good education, the ability to vote, to buy property, open businesses, get loans and in the process of all this it demonized them in the media and passed the war on drugs to justify their mass incarceration. The government then allowed for these incarcerated individuals to be used as cheap labor with inmates earning close to 15 cents a day. Problem is, once tagged with a felony, this same populace that ALREADY had a reduced chance of finding gainful employment was even more at a disadvantage because many of them were convicts another 2nd class citizen in the USA. This led many of them right back to the elements that led them to incarceration in the first place which led Law Enforcement to find them, the Judicial system to convict them, the Prison to house them and profit off of them.
This is the ELI5 version...this topic is very deep and detailed.
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