For years, African and African American activists have been demanding that the transatlantic slave trade be recognized as a crime against humanity and that reparations be considered. Last week, Ghana proposed a resolution on this grievance and had it adopted at the United Nations. While 123 nations supported the resolution, the U.S. and Israel remain adamantly opposed to it, and this comes as no surprise. 52 other nations abstained. To some degree, the vote is a decisive step but nonbinding.
We agree with Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University, that the resolution is the furthest the United Nations has gone in recognizing the issue. “I cannot overemphasize how large a step that is,” he said.
Even so, it’s a long way from the demand for reparations and getting more states to apologize for the inhumanity of slavery and how that oppression continues in significant ways. In the summer of 2009, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for what it determined was “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery.” Racial segregation was included in the resolution; however, it explicitly stated that it cannot be used for “restitution claims.” And therein lies the rub, and the ongoing struggle waged by Black activists here and a few abroad.
Voicing his opposition to the resolution, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Dan Negrea, said the U.S. “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred. He also expressed an objection to the “cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims.” This position is consistent with the U.S.’s resistance to providing restitution to victims of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921.
Few participants in this debate have been as passionate and insightful as Dr. James Counts Early, a former Smithsonian Institution assistant secretary for education and public service. In a statement to the Ghanaian Ministry of Culture he noted in his response to Ghana’s proposal that it be “framed with a historical rationale in order to provide public education. And I recommend-propose that the initiative outline meaningful progressive legal and material preparatory global and country-specific policy actions that could and should evolve from the initiative of…President [John] Mahama.”
He is currently expanding his discussion on this critical issue.
As for the next steps in this matter, it may take some time, but it’s good to know that António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, is insisting on “bolder action” by more member states to “confront historical injustices.”
To date, only the Netherlands, among European nations, has issued a formal apology for the role it played in the slave trade.