Why the Fight for Racial Justice is a Human Rights Issue

The U.S. led efforts to create the UN human rights system after World War II, including drafting the UDHR, but the country has struggled to follow through with its commitments. In the last seven decades, the U.S. has undermined the UDHR’s impact and failed to fully adopt human rights as a part of its domestic laws and policies; neglecting its obligations at home and abroad in a principled and consistent way.

One significant area the U.S. has been criticized for failing to fulfill its human rights obligations is on racial and reparatory justice for Black diasporic communities, especially by hindering progress on forming a commission to study the system of enslavement. During enslavement, Black people were forced to labor for the enrichment of the burgeoning U.S. After slavery was abolished, Jim Crow laws, Black Codes in the South, and de facto segregation inflicted violent exploitation and repression on a so-called emancipated populace. Slavery’s legacy meant many African Americans faced the physical and psychological consequences of state-sanctioned violence, including widespread lynchings and targeted massacres. These crimes and injustices were part of a pervasive campaign of deliberate terror and oppression inflicted upon Black diasporic communities in the U.S.

In 1989, the late Congressman John Conyers of Michigan originally introduced H.R. 40 to establish a commission dedicated to studying and developing reparations proposals, including addressing the government’s reneged promise of providing every newly-freed person with a mule and 40 acres of land during Reconstruction. Congress opposed the bill for nearly three decades, but the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas reintroduced H.R. 40 in 2021 and again in January 2023. Subsequently, Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri introduced a resolution in May 2023 in support of H.R. 40 to forcefully assert why the U.S. government has a responsibility to provide reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans.

Though several attempts to codify H.R. 40 have gained traction in Congress, the bill has never been considered before the full House of Representatives and continues to die in-chamber. Furthermore, despite President Joe Biden’s commitment to racial equity and engagement with several human rights bodies that have raised the issue, he, too, has failed to create a presidential commission on the study of reparations. These continued efforts to delay legislative progress toward reparatory justice, combined with decades-long inaction from Congress to pursue the study of reparations, deepen the nation’s failure to confront its past of anti-black violence and perpetuate the federal government’s evasion of responsibility for the legacies of enslavement and racial terror.