Race equality

Imperatives for Justice

In this article, partisans of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) target local and national issues in America - like black women's homelessness and the "police murder" of a Cincinnati youth - as part of the global need for justice and human rights.

The World Conference Against Racism is occurring as dawn still breaks on the 21st Century, in a world rife with new forms of exploitation, wealth concentration and deadly intra-group strife. Since birth, the United Nations has been severely limited by many factors in its ability to prevent or successfully mediate conflicts among nations and peoples, and in its ability to protect groups from inhumane, discriminatory and intolerant treatment. Not least of those limitations has been its subservience to the domestic and geopolitical concerns of its principal benefactors, the governments of the developed capitalist nations.

UN is valuable forum
Notwithstanding its limitations, the UN has real value, uses and potential. The world is a better place for the advances in international human rights law that the UN's existence has facilitated, including the Race Convention and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. And we have previously cited the value of the forum it provides.

Whose interests served?
But if the big question is who will the UN serve in this new century, the earliest sign of an answer is not encouraging: Secretary-General Kofi Annan has initiated a "Global Compact," whereby UN agencies are urged to "partner" with the corporation of their choice from a list of 50 entities that includes Shell, Nike and Novartis. Shell is well known for environmental destruction and complicity in human rights abuses, such as Nigeria's execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Nike is known for sweatshops, and Novartis is working overtime to force-feed consumers genetically-engineered foods. We salute those human rights, labor rights and environmental justice activists who are focusing their work on the goal of a corporate-free UN and democratic control over corporations.

Goals to pursue
Confronted with the UN's choice, at this stage, not to have its initiatives reflect the spirit of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but instead to have them interface with the Covenant's antithesis -- the agenda of globalized corporate capitalism -- alerts us, again, to the work remaining to be done in the street. Accordingly, the Black Radical Congress will continue, as part of a broad-based collective, to pursue a number of important goals that are essential to justice, worldwide.

First, the Black Radical Congress seeks the cancellation of African debt, and of all debt incurred by underdeveloped nations due to the oppressive policies of European and North American-controlled lending agencies. In the case of Africa, debt cancellation is a critical first step toward compensating African peoples for the ruinous exploitation and pillage of their continent that, over centuries, are wholly implicated in reducing them to the status of debtors.

As a related action, we advocate the establishment of an international reparations agency, with branches in selected nations. This agency would administer the dispensation of funds -- provided by the European and North American powers -- for the development of African-descended peoples in Africa and throughout the American hemisphere. These funds would be earmarked to bolster development in the areas of child and adult education, women's development, health care, mental health, AIDS prevention, literacy, housing, legal services, art and cultural institutions, land reclamation and environmental clean-up and maintenance, among other possible areas.

We will continue our active role in putting international pressure on governments, in Southern Africa and elsewhere, to cease state persecution of gay and lesbian people and replace that persecution with policies and laws protective of same gender loving people's human and civil rights.

US national campaign
In the United States, we will continue our role in demanding that government repair the gaping holes torn in the welfare safety net by "reform" policies that, disproportionately, worsen the impoverishment of Black women -- who are extraordinarily over-represented in urban homeless populations.

We seek immediate abolition of the death penalty, which is yet another aspect of the living legacy of slavery.

We will press forward and intensify our national campaign to: criminalize police brutality under federal law; limit incarceration to violent criminals and establish rehabilitative alternatives for non-violent criminals; shift public funds from expansion of the prison-industrial complex to complete refurbishment of the nation's public school system, and to resist efforts to privatize our public schools.

Uneasy calm
As we write, an uneasy and deceptive calm is settling upon the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, where in the past few weeks our brothers and sisters rose up in righteous anger over the police murder of Timothy Thomas. Nineteen-years-old and unarmed, Thomas became the 16th Black male gunned down by the Cincinnati police since 1995. Long-standing grievances between the Black population and the governing structures of that city mirror the state of relations that prevail in most U.S. cities between people of color and the authorities. Only the names, and the faces and the incidental details differ. We know that in all the "theaters" of U.S. urban struggle, uprisings eventually subside and calm returns. What the various powers-that-be seem not to understand is: Until there is true justice, there will be no real peace.

Win fight for change
In times like these, it may appear that the United Nations and its conferences are entirely irrelevant to the long-term process of uprising, struggle, sacrifice, advocacy, political negotiation and will that is necessary to remedy such grave human rights violations as exist in Cincinnati. But in fact, bearing witness before a small and getting smaller world is part of the process. Let all of us who can, go to Durban. We must tell the world what we have seen, what we know, and how we are determined to win the fight for change.

Source:Communication from National Officers, Black Radical Congress (BRC)
http://www.blackradicalcongress.org