U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel
The history of slavery in the United States justifies reparations for African Americans, argues a recent report by a U.N.-affiliated group based in Geneva.
This conclusion was part of a study by the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a body that reports to the international organization’s High Commissioner on Human Rights. The group of experts, which includes leading human rights lawyers from around the world, presented its findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday, pointing to the continuing link between present injustices and the dark chapters of American history.
“In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report stated. “Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”
Citing the past year’s spate of police officers killing unarmed African American men, the panel warned against “impunity for state violence,” which has created, in its words, a “human rights crisis” that “must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”
The panel drew its recommendations, which are nonbinding and unlikely to influence Washington, after a fact-finding mission in the United States in January. At the time, it hailed the strides taken to make the American criminal justice system more equitable but pointed to the corrosive legacy of the past.
“Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today,” it said in a statement. “The dangerous ideology of white supremacy inhibits social cohesion amongst the US population.”
Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, chairwoman of a United Nations working-group for people of African descent, reads findings about institutionalized racism after an official visit to the U.S. (Youtube/UN Human Rights.)
Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, chairwoman of a United Nations working group for people of African descent, reads findings about institutionalized racism after an official visit to the U.S.United Nations working group says U.S. owes reparations for slavery, mass incarceration (Youtube/UN Human Rights)
In its report, it specifically dwells on the extrajudicial murders that were a product of an era of white supremacy:
Lynching was a form of racial terrorism that has contributed to a legacy of racial inequality that the United States must address. Thousands of people of African descent were killed in violent public acts of racial control and domination and the perpetrators were never held accountable.
The reparations could come in a variety of forms, according to the panel, including “a formal apology, health initiatives, educational opportunities … psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and financial support, and debt cancellation.”
Separately, a coalition of Caribbean nations is calling for reparations from their former European imperial powers for the impact of slavery, colonial genocide and the toxic racial laws that shaped life for the past two centuries in these countries. Their efforts are fitful, and so far not so fruitful.
When asked by reporters to comment on the tone of the American presidential election campaign on Monday, the working group’s chairman, Ricardo A. Sunga of the Philippines, expressed concern about “hate speech … xenophobia [and] Afrophobia” that he felt was prevalent in the campaign, although he didn’t specifically call out Republican candidate Donald Trump.
“We are very troubled that these are on the rise,” said Sunga.
Here’s what African Americans have to lose if Trump is elected
To those hurting, I say: What do you have to lose by trying something new? I say it again, what do you have to lose? Look, what do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose? . . .
By contrast, the one thing every item in Hillary Clinton’s agenda has in common is that it takes jobs and opportunities from African American workers. Her support for open borders. Her fierce opposition to school choice. Her plan to massively raise taxes on small businesses. Her opposition to American energy. And her record of giving our jobs away to other countries.
Clinton, of course, is not for open borders nor for “giving our jobs away.”
He continued with his anti-immigrant spiel: “Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to unemployed African American youth in cities like Detroit who have become refugees in their own country.”
By Jennifer Rubin
Where to begin? The 58 percent figure has been debunked previously (the real number is too high but about one-third of what he claims). In July, the unemployment rate for all African Americans was 8.4 percent. So, contrary to Trump’s cockeyed view, more than 91 percent of African Americans looking for work do have jobs. Moreover, not all African Americans live in poverty or go to schools that “are no good.” This does not mean all liberal policies have worked or that policy innovations are not needed, but the real world bears only a slight resemblance to Trump’s dystopia. In making exaggerated and downright false accusations, Trump distracts from solid conservative arguments against liberal policies (e.g., opposition to school choice, Obamacare’s high marginal tax rate on the working poor) that do adversely impact African Americans.
The Clinton campaign put out a statement castigating Trump’s remarks: “Trump painting the entire community as living in poverty with no jobs continues to show he is completely out of touch with the African-American community.”
Trump doesn’t say, for example, if he’d be willing to spend more on worker training, education and other targeted programs that might address youth unemployment; he does, however, favor a tax plan that hugely benefits the rich. Until Friday, he hadn’t talked much about his plans to fight poverty and discrimination and we still don’t know what he would do, for example, to increase the success rate of African Americans in college or increase access to capital for African American entrepreneurs. In the past, he’s said he wants to eliminate the Education Department. Does that mean dispensing with Title I support for schools serving impoverished students? (African American children make up about 28 percent of Title I recipients.)
Let’s, however, return to the question he posed: What do African Americans have to lose by electing Trump? Let’s count the ways.
Trump has championed a strict law-and-order agenda that rejects the suggestion there are legitimate complaints in the African American community about policing. He is a lightning rod for racial animus and tension, falsely accusing cities with large African American populations to be crime havens. With Trump, we’d lack a president who had any conception that there is a problem with policing in minority communities or any desire to bring communities and police together.
This is someone who declines to speak at African American gatherings (e.g., the NAACP). He’s someone who just brought on to lead his campaign the former head of a website pandering to the alt-right — that means white supremacy. Only after prodding and a growing controversy did he figure out that he should denounce David Duke and the KKK. And, of course, this was a man heavily invested in birtherism, asserting the president was born in Africa, not in the United States. It’s ironic that in the very speech asking what minorities have to lose, he pits African Americans against immigrants. And let’s not forget his shout-out at a California rally: “Look at my African American.”
There is a reason Trump is getting in some polls 1 percent of the African American vote. (A number of African American and other minority employees of the Republican National Committee quit rather than work on his campaign, by the way.)
In addition, he may not realize it, but his Muslim ban, support for racial profiling and lies about Muslim Americans’ complicity in terrorism have a particular resonance with African Americans. A 2011 Pew study found: “Among the roughly one-in-five Muslim Americans whose parents also were born in the U.S., 59% are African Americans, including a sizable majority who have converted to Islam (69%). Overall, 13% of U.S. Muslims are African Americans whose parents were born in the United States.” So when Trump demonizes all Muslims, he’s demonizing many African Americans.
Aside from his repugnant rhetoric, Trump’s “solutions” for the country will make life harder for the poorest Americans, of which African Americans are a disproportionate share. In May, CNN reported:
The tariffs would cost the average household $2,200 a year, or 4% of their after-tax income, according to a new study from the non-profit National Foundation for American Policy conducted by David Tuerck, Paul Bachman and Frank Conte, all of Suffolk University. This is largely because imports under Trump’s policy would become more expensive, raising the price of competing American-made goods by 11%. That would effectively levy a consumption tax on purchases and cut into the incomes of shoppers.
“All of the benefits for producers would be extracted from consumers,” said Tuerck, who heads the economics department at Suffolk. “It’s using a blunt sword to do brain surgery. It would cost consumers an awful lot for rather small benefits for U.S. producers.”
Moreover, all voters, African Americans included, stand to lose with a president who fawns over dictators, demonstrates abject ignorance about our nuclear arsenal and undermines NATO. All Americans lose when the president declares he is going to order the military to commit war crimes or clamp down on a free press (banning reporters, threatening revision of labor laws). And all Americans lose when the president plans to add billions to the debt.
As a final note, at first glance it might seem odd for Trump to go to a nearly all-white community to declare how much he cares for African Americans. Well, it is doubtful that he or his advisers think they are going to do much better with African Americans than they are now. But, plainly, his divisiveness and association with racial bigots bother a lot of white voters. They view him as intolerant and hostile to nonwhite Americans. Many are embarrassed to support him for precisely this reason. This is Trump’s way of telling white voters, Look! I’m not so bad! I love African Americans!
In other words, in a campaign built around playing into the fears and resentments of whites, Trump is now trying to assure more sensitive voters that, hey, he’s not a racist after all. African Americans are props for him as he seeks to repair his rotten standing in the polls. It’s far from clear many Americans are going to fall for this.
♦ Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.
Tavis Smiley’s “Black Vote” sham and the Africa-American community
Author and television host, Tavis Smiley.
It is no longer surprising that this author and television host, Tavis Smiley shows up during presidential campaign periods with either a new book on Black votes, or announces an “advocacy tour on poverty”.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, for instance, he took advantage of the campaign period to promote his book “The Covenant with Black America.” Again, just before the 2012 Presidential Election, Smiley felt that, late in 2011 was a good time to bargain his personal interests with the voting public. He then teamed up with another confused activist and a Princeton professor, Cornel West to resume what they called ‘Poverty Tour.’ This project crashed.
This has been the regular trend for Smiley, and so, the present presidential season (2016), is no different. Just a few days ago, Smiley showed up with another “attention-grabber”, in his usual fashion, to intimidate the candidates with a so called “Black Votes” designed to woo them with non-existent demographic theories.
He spoke to Yahoo News and Finance Anchor, Bianna Golodryga about his new book, “50 for Your Future: Lessons from down the Road,” and offered unsubstantiated thoughts about the state of the 2016 presidential campaign, and where the candidates stood with black voters. Among all Presidential candidates, Smiley thinks that Bernie Sanders was the only trusted candidate because he was clear on talking about poverty, income inequality, and economic immobility. Then on President Obama’s legacy in terms of race and Black America, Smiley said, “Historians are going to have a hard time trying to juxtapose this reality – how, in the era of the first black president, the bottom fell out for black America.”
The issues about candidates and the prevalent political landscape are not complicated at all. People are listening. From women, the youth, Hispanics, to other demographic segments, the electorates are watching the candidates and are making decisions based on their specific interests. Therefore, African Americans might not need any middleman or agent to assist them with making their choices about the candidates.
Whereas every individual has a right to his or her communal advocacy, we must be clear in categorizing our roles as community leaders and activists, to ensure that it actually serves public interests, as against selfish interests. Credible community activists always put the community first. This is why famous activists like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Tubman, Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, and thousands of others secured special positions in the Nation’s history of civil rights, social, and political actions.
These days, however, with individuals like Smiley, the practice of community advocacy has been distorted into a bargaining venture for greener pastures. It has become a ground for unscrupulous media opportunists, composing falsehood and instigating uncertainty, while they take advantage of their vulnerable communities to pursue self-centered political careers or business interests. It is appalling to note, that Smiley only goes public with his campaigns to coincide with the general election, and they are usually tagged to either a book launch, or an aimless “poverty” tours.
In the 2008 electioneering season, he had set up web sites and organized discussion forums, claiming that his book, “The Covenant with Black America” was a national plan of action to address the primary concerns of African Americans – from health to housing, from crime to criminal justice, from education to economic parity. In a despicable show of desperation and intoxication for recognition, Smiley tried to use this shambolic setup against a presidential campaign that featured the first African-American presidential nominee by any major party. That wicked plan also failed miserably.
With individuals like Smiley, the practice of community advocacy has been distorted into a bargaining venture for greener pastures. It has become a ground for unscrupulous media opportunists, composing falsehood and instigating uncertainty, while they take advantage of their vulnerable communities to pursue self-centered political careers or business interests.
As if that was not enough, Smiley showed up again just before the 2012 Presidential Election, to resume his President Obama witch-hunting. He teamed up with another confused activist, and a Princeton professor, Cornel West to initiate their so called ‘Poverty Tour.’ Both Smiley and West said they hoped to jump-start a national conversation about poverty and political action in four battleground states before the elections. This tour crashed because it had no significant mission, but was created out of selfishness; to threaten the political landscape with their sham “Black vote” crusade and take advantage of the moment.
The campaign season is here again. The priority for any credible community advocate that is passionate about the African-American communities should be how to inspire the community’s collective civic participation in the socio-political process. Activists and Community advocates should be concerned about preparing their community for massive voter-turnouts. Community Advocates who are genuinely interested in their communities should, most definitely not be taking advantage of voter vulnerability by selling books, or swaging uncorroborated poll theories. The one thing that is crystal clear in this constant, consistent, and predictable display of desperation is that Smiley does not represent anybody or the community he claims to promote. Smiley represents himself alone. Using the concerns of the African American community as a trick to bargain political interests or boost a shaky media career would further cripple his credibility.
