During a diplomatic visit to Senegal in 2013, President Erdoğan and his wife visited the Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves on the Gorée Island. Located near the coast of Dakar, the Gorée Island is a UNESCO world heritage site known to be a major point of departure in the transatlantic slave export. In this paper, I analyze how the island became a new symbolic site for the condemnation of the West and vindication of the Ottoman past in Africa following the President’s diplomatic visit. As the Movement for Black Lives gained power globally, denying anti-black racism in the past and present of Turkey has become an urgent political necessity. Atlantic slavery was a timely discovery to do just that. It not only served as the ultimate symptom of the racist violence unleashed by the West but helped render anti-black racism a social ill endemic to the Western civilization and alien to the Ottoman-Islamic civilization. Analyzing the historical constructions of European culpability, African suffering and Ottoman innocence, this paper examines the deep connections between commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and systemic denial of Ottoman slavery in Turkey.