This past Monday, The United Nations affiliated panel released it’s report which was part of the conclusion of a study by the U.N.’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. The body concluded that African Americans are owed reparations for the history of racial terrorism in this country – which continues to this day with the grotesque and dastardly spate of police shootings of unarmed black men and killings of unarmed black women.
When the panel, comprised from an international group of human rights lawyers and experts, presented their findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council this week they were able to make a clear link between present day racial problems and a history of slavery and inequality.
According to The Washington Post:
“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.”
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