What the U.S. withdrawal from the UN means for Black America

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The Trump administration’s withdrawal from 66 international organizations and 31 United Nations agencies, and its promotion of a “putting America first” policy, hasn’t surprised Black advocacy groups in the United States or in the diaspora.

Trump’s administration is notably withdrawing from agencies that work for racial justice, human rights, and global development, such as the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (which the U.S. has actually never funded); UN Women (to which the U.S. tends to give $15 million a year); UN Population Fund (to which the U.S. cut $377 million of funding in 2025); and the UN Human Rights Council (to which the U.S. gave $35 million in 2024).

This country’s exit from these agencies is a slap at the decades of racial justice progress made by Black Americans in the international arena. “America has traditionally provided a lot of funding for human rights through the UN,” said Conrad Bryan of the Association of Mixed Race Irish. “It affects people of African descent, but it also affects the whole human rights infrastructure and the way protection mechanisms work.”

African Americans helped shape the United Nations

Since its founding, African Americans have been a part of the UN. When representatives from 50 nations met in San Francisco in 1945, just after the end of World War II, to draft the UN Charter, NAACP leaders W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Walter White were in attendance, serving as consultants to the U.S. delegation. The three were vocal advocates for human rights and anti-colonial efforts, particularly in Africa.

Once it was established, activists frequently turned to the United Nations to point out how U.S. civil rights problems violated international human rights. In 1947, Du Bois wrote in “An Appeal to the World” that “[W]e American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action. No nation is so great that the world can afford to let it continue to be deliberately unjust, cruel and unfair toward its own citizens.”

In 1951, activists William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Du Bois, and more turned in the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the UN. The petition claimed that the lynchings and Jim Crow laws used in the United States effectively impoverished all races of people in the country. “History has shown that the racist theory of government of the U.S.A. is not the private affair of Americans,” the petition stated, “but the concern of mankind everywhere.”

Greater grassroots self-reliance

Today’s generation of Black activists has built on past Black activism at the UN. Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor and elected member of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, said he is not surprised at the political pushback progressive work at the UN is getting.

“The Permanent Forum is making progress, and we’re meeting our goals and helping people throughout the Black world, and people who don’t want to help people throughout the Black world are mad about it” Hansford said. “I’m not surprised by that; that’s almost inevitable, right? It’s pretty much inevitable that when you’re really making a difference, people who don’t like that difference seeing the light of day will try to stop it.

“But it’s out of our hands,” he continued. “It’s a situation where you have a billion people in the Black world, and progress is being made, not just through official channels but through relationships being built, allies being created, and new organizations being started. It’s like you plant a seed, and it grows into a tree that plants more seeds, releases more seeds, and more trees grow. It’s not easy to stop that process on a dime — it’s not a situation that’s going to be reversible because it’s not completely about the system. This is bigger than that, and in many ways, it’s bigger than the official platform. It’s now a movement. We’re talking about events where more than 1,000 Black people worldwide gather to make plans, share ideas, support one another, and build relationships. This is much bigger than an official platform.”

The Trump administration’s inclusion of the Permanent Forum in its withdrawal list was labeled “racist clickbait” by Desirée Cormier Smith, former U.S. Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice. She pointed out that the move was largely symbolic since the U.S. was not a formal member and provided no dedicated funding. “There was no need to withdraw,” she said, suggesting the move was designed to disparage Afrodescendant rights for political gain.

The loss of UN partnerships could devastate local community programs. Rev. Shavon Arline-Bradley, president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) said the Trump administration’s UN withdrawal will have an impact. “It will affect us because what we are finding is that these withdrawals … can’t stop our intended work,” she said, “but it can stop our ability to be able to have more entree. Right now, we will still be able to engage in advocacy, but the challenge is if we want to provide service, we want to help promote clean water, we want to help bring federal aid to these countries that our affiliates and those that we want to serve are in. The president’s decisions actually stand in the way of the appropriate aid that needs to get there. We do not want to see this administration not only undercut and underfund, but also redirect resources to places that are not advancing the UN’s goals and mission.”

International human rights activist and scholar Rosemari Mealy told the AmNews that many local organizations received grants from UN agencies to deal with gaps in healthcare and food security. Now, Democratic Party-led states are finding ways to fill these gaps, Mealy pointed out: “I was wondering how we would respond to issues of health, especially global emergency responses, now? And I think what’s so positive is that, particularly in the states where you have Democratic governors, these are states that have aligned themselves with other types of organizations that exist.”

Illinois, California, and New York are all signing up to align with the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, which won’t have the funding the United States could have provided, but is at least a reputable source of global disease monitoring.

Despite the federal government’s retreat from UN support, advocates say that progress on racial justice is no longer solely dependent on UN sources. Dr. Amara Enyia, co-executive director of the Movement for Black Lives, emphasized that the current crisis is a prompt for greater self-reliance. “Now that the UN has been in the crosshairs … we are leaning into the infrastructure that we’ve built,” Enyia said. “We cannot rely on the state or on foundations and philanthropy because philanthropy can be fickle. They change their priorities, and the next year, that funding disappears, or many of them are targeted by the Trump administration.

“For me, it means we have to have serious conversations amongst ourselves about how we fund ourselves. We’ve got to get creative about whether it’s membership dues or other ways we can generate resources among us to build and sustain the institutions we’re trying to build, because we cannot rely on the state.” Enyia said that philanthropy would not be dependable, either, but there are other examples throughout the diaspora.

“I look to what’s happening, for example, in Burkina Faso, where they’re raising money from each other. Economically, those folks have been through it; they’ve been under French control for however many generations, but they are starting to establish a fund, putting whatever they can afford into it to support their security. There are places where it’s happening. I think we just have to — it’s challenging, but we have to. If self-determination is a value, it means we’ve got to invest in resources ourselves so that we can do what we want and need to do.”