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<title type="text">Defining Racial Groups</title>
<subtitle type="text">This site addresses race and racism in the law with a specific focus on the United States of America.</subtitle>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org"/>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents</id>
<updated>2025-03-16T01:20:14-04:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Race, Racism and the Law</name>
</author>
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<entry>
<title>A Past Forgotten: A Look at Governmental Efforts to Recover and Restore Historic African American Cemeteries</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/12435-a-past-forgotten"/>
<published>2025-01-06T08:22:52-05:00</published>
<updated>2025-01-06T08:22:52-05:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/12435-a-past-forgotten</id>
<author>
<name>Anyah Barber and Terry Brock</name>
</author>
<summary type="html"><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 18pt;">Abstract<br /></span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;"></span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;">Excerpted From: Anyah Barber and Terry Brock, A Past Forgotten: A Look at Governmental Efforts to Recover and Restore Historic African American Cemeteries, 59 Wake Forest Law Review 835 (2024) (92 Footnotes) (<a href="https://www.wakeforestlawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Barber.pdf" target="_parent">Full Document</a>)</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/BarberBrock.jpg" alt="BarberBrock" width="396" height="283" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />For many people, death care begins far before the death of an individual. However, the penultimate milestone in death care is the funeral. The funeral:</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Helps confirm the reality and finality of death.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Provides a climate for mourning and the expression of grief.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Allows the sorrows of one to become the sorrows of many.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Is one of the few times love is given and not expected in return.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Is a vehicle for the community to pay its respects.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Encourages the affirmation of religious faith.&nbsp;<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Is a declaration that a life that has been lived as well as a<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">sociological statement that a death has occurred.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">But what happens after the funeral? The committal is performed, usually at a cemetery, and then it is followed by a reception. Days, weeks, and months pass, but then what? For many, the grieving process may include visiting the cemetery where their loved ones are buried, but eventually the grief passes, and they visit less and less often. As this cycle continues, burial plots, and eventually the cemetery itself, fall into disarray as development increases, the ground shifts, trees grow, headstones fall, and a number of other environmental factors transpire.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">While some cemeteries are well maintained, others go neglected for years to the point where they are unrecognizable or lost entirely. All too often, this is the reality of African American families and the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. Across the United States, remains of African Americans have been found in unofficial cemeteries or unmarked graves, and there is no official count of how many similar sites may be in existence. “In contrast with law's solicitous treatment of cemeteries generally, ... the history of legal treatment of slave and other long-standing African-American burial grounds has been one of neglect or outright disregard.” To some, neglected cemeteries may be just that, but to many African Americans, “the neglect of [African American] burial grounds is an extension of the racism Black people experience while living.” Although the United States has grown significantly since the time of slavery, African Americans, and many other minority populations, still face many challenges even in the twenty-first century, not only while living, but even in death.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Unmarked documentary chronicles the rise in preservation and restoration efforts of African American cemeteries. Focused on the South, Unmarked chronicles the stories of various families who are descendants of slaves and their efforts to recover the historic cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. The documentary highlights that restoration efforts of African American cemeteries have largely been organized by community groups and families. The federal government, along with several state and local governments, have begun passing legislation that aims to preserve and restore African American cemeteries in an effort to combat the systemic struggles of African Americans. Although many preservation and restoration efforts are in the early stages, this progress brings hope to many families, communities, and cities working to preserve history.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">This Essay will take an in-depth review of the current state of preservation and restoration efforts in the United States. Part I explores the federal African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act and compares it with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Part II will look at the efforts of some of the Southern states, with a focus on North Carolina and Preservation Forsyth's Unmarked Initiative. Finally, Part III will reflect on the thoughts of North Carolina lawmakers as well as other individuals involved in the preservation and restoration efforts within the state. “Without history, you have no beings of who you are, where you're from, and how you got to where you are today.” The widespread effort to preserve and restore African American cemeteries is a testament to the rich history African Americans provide to the United States that is worthy of remembrance.</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">As discussed in Part I, and as seconded by Melissa Timo, the most prominent next step for historic African American cemeteries is having federal legislation that resembles the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. “Cemeteries aren't just places, they have emotions and trauma attached to them.” As such, they should be treated with the dignity and respect that the African American community deserves. There is a long history of mistreatment of African Americans in the United States, and this mistreatment is tenfold in the South, but in death there is dignity, and our historic African American cemeteries deserve the time and dedication for appropriate preservation and restoration.</span></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Anyah Barber</span>,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"></span>J.D. 2024, Wake Forest University School of Law; B.A. 2021, Mathematics and Secondary Education, Clemson University; Associate Attorney at Boykin &amp; Davis, LLC.<br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Terry Brock,</span>&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span>Part-Time Assistant Professor and Research Associate of African American Studies, Research Associate with Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, Manager of Archaeology at the Wake Forest Historical Museum, and Director of the Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Research Group at Wake Forest University. <br /></span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></summary>
<content type="html"><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 18pt;">Abstract<br /></span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;"></span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;">Excerpted From: Anyah Barber and Terry Brock, A Past Forgotten: A Look at Governmental Efforts to Recover and Restore Historic African American Cemeteries, 59 Wake Forest Law Review 835 (2024) (92 Footnotes) (<a href="https://www.wakeforestlawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Barber.pdf" target="_parent">Full Document</a>)</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/BarberBrock.jpg" alt="BarberBrock" width="396" height="283" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />For many people, death care begins far before the death of an individual. However, the penultimate milestone in death care is the funeral. The funeral:</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Helps confirm the reality and finality of death.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Provides a climate for mourning and the expression of grief.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Allows the sorrows of one to become the sorrows of many.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Is one of the few times love is given and not expected in return.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Is a vehicle for the community to pay its respects.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Encourages the affirmation of religious faith.&nbsp;<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Is a declaration that a life that has been lived as well as a<br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">sociological statement that a death has occurred.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">But what happens after the funeral? The committal is performed, usually at a cemetery, and then it is followed by a reception. Days, weeks, and months pass, but then what? For many, the grieving process may include visiting the cemetery where their loved ones are buried, but eventually the grief passes, and they visit less and less often. As this cycle continues, burial plots, and eventually the cemetery itself, fall into disarray as development increases, the ground shifts, trees grow, headstones fall, and a number of other environmental factors transpire.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">While some cemeteries are well maintained, others go neglected for years to the point where they are unrecognizable or lost entirely. All too often, this is the reality of African American families and the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. Across the United States, remains of African Americans have been found in unofficial cemeteries or unmarked graves, and there is no official count of how many similar sites may be in existence. “In contrast with law's solicitous treatment of cemeteries generally, ... the history of legal treatment of slave and other long-standing African-American burial grounds has been one of neglect or outright disregard.” To some, neglected cemeteries may be just that, but to many African Americans, “the neglect of [African American] burial grounds is an extension of the racism Black people experience while living.” Although the United States has grown significantly since the time of slavery, African Americans, and many other minority populations, still face many challenges even in the twenty-first century, not only while living, but even in death.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Unmarked documentary chronicles the rise in preservation and restoration efforts of African American cemeteries. Focused on the South, Unmarked chronicles the stories of various families who are descendants of slaves and their efforts to recover the historic cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. The documentary highlights that restoration efforts of African American cemeteries have largely been organized by community groups and families. The federal government, along with several state and local governments, have begun passing legislation that aims to preserve and restore African American cemeteries in an effort to combat the systemic struggles of African Americans. Although many preservation and restoration efforts are in the early stages, this progress brings hope to many families, communities, and cities working to preserve history.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">This Essay will take an in-depth review of the current state of preservation and restoration efforts in the United States. Part I explores the federal African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act and compares it with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Part II will look at the efforts of some of the Southern states, with a focus on North Carolina and Preservation Forsyth's Unmarked Initiative. Finally, Part III will reflect on the thoughts of North Carolina lawmakers as well as other individuals involved in the preservation and restoration efforts within the state. “Without history, you have no beings of who you are, where you're from, and how you got to where you are today.” The widespread effort to preserve and restore African American cemeteries is a testament to the rich history African Americans provide to the United States that is worthy of remembrance.</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">As discussed in Part I, and as seconded by Melissa Timo, the most prominent next step for historic African American cemeteries is having federal legislation that resembles the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. “Cemeteries aren't just places, they have emotions and trauma attached to them.” As such, they should be treated with the dignity and respect that the African American community deserves. There is a long history of mistreatment of African Americans in the United States, and this mistreatment is tenfold in the South, but in death there is dignity, and our historic African American cemeteries deserve the time and dedication for appropriate preservation and restoration.</span></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Anyah Barber</span>,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"></span>J.D. 2024, Wake Forest University School of Law; B.A. 2021, Mathematics and Secondary Education, Clemson University; Associate Attorney at Boykin &amp; Davis, LLC.<br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Terry Brock,</span>&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span>Part-Time Assistant Professor and Research Associate of African American Studies, Research Associate with Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, Manager of Archaeology at the Wake Forest Historical Museum, and Director of the Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Research Group at Wake Forest University. <br /></span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Black Americans, Racism and Legal Scholarship (Searchable Database)</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/8213-black-american-and-legal"/>
<published>2020-01-04T19:31:06-05:00</published>
<updated>2020-01-04T19:31:06-05:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/8213-black-american-and-legal</id>
<author>
<name>Vernellia Randall</name>
</author>
<summary type="html"><p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #534a43; background-color: initial;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Images/Blackcommunity.jpg" alt="Blackcommunity" width="493" height="335" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" /></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #534a43; background-color: initial;">This searchable database includes&nbsp; 2500+ law review articles on Black Americans including Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS).&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #534a43; background-color: initial;"><strong>In January, 2025, 89 articles were added for 2024</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #534a43; font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt; background-color: inherit; caret-color: auto;">Documents were gathered through an electronic database search using the following search terms: <span style="color: #534a43; font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt; background-color: inherit; caret-color: auto;"> in the Title,&nbsp;</span>("African American" or Afro or black or colored or negro or enslaved or slaves or "Jim Crow").</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #534a43; font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><em>The documents were not reviewed and may only be tangentially related to the topic</em>.&nbsp;Furthermore, it is possible that an inappropriate article is included in the database. If you think an article is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic or otherwise inappropriate,&nbsp; please&nbsp;<a href="https://udayton.edu/_udayton/php/forms/contact_form.php?cmsId=3fed79790a480e59010e921d477907a8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">email</a> with&nbsp;the (1) name of the database and (2) the complete name of the article.</span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Patrons can get an&nbsp;abstract of an article placed on the website.&nbsp;</strong></span><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Go&nbsp;<a href="http://patreon.com/profvrandall/">Patreon.com</a>, signup as a patron and then submit your request for the article.&nbsp;</strong></span></p>
<hr />
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>{idbbee width="1280" src="//thyme.dbbee.com/u/O390T8IKKZ/BlackLegalScholarshipqbdsl.wbsp" height="7500" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" border="0" frameborder="0" align="Middle" name="dbBeeIFrame" id="dbBeeIFrame"}</p></summary>
<content type="html"><p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #534a43; background-color: initial;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Images/Blackcommunity.jpg" alt="Blackcommunity" width="493" height="335" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" /></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #534a43; background-color: initial;">This searchable database includes&nbsp; 2500+ law review articles on Black Americans including Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS).&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #534a43; background-color: initial;"><strong>In January, 2025, 89 articles were added for 2024</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #534a43; font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt; background-color: inherit; caret-color: auto;">Documents were gathered through an electronic database search using the following search terms: <span style="color: #534a43; font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt; background-color: inherit; caret-color: auto;"> in the Title,&nbsp;</span>("African American" or Afro or black or colored or negro or enslaved or slaves or "Jim Crow").</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #534a43; font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><em>The documents were not reviewed and may only be tangentially related to the topic</em>.&nbsp;Furthermore, it is possible that an inappropriate article is included in the database. If you think an article is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic or otherwise inappropriate,&nbsp; please&nbsp;<a href="https://udayton.edu/_udayton/php/forms/contact_form.php?cmsId=3fed79790a480e59010e921d477907a8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">email</a> with&nbsp;the (1) name of the database and (2) the complete name of the article.</span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Patrons can get an&nbsp;abstract of an article placed on the website.&nbsp;</strong></span><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Go&nbsp;<a href="http://patreon.com/profvrandall/">Patreon.com</a>, signup as a patron and then submit your request for the article.&nbsp;</strong></span></p>
<hr />
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>{idbbee width="1280" src="//thyme.dbbee.com/u/O390T8IKKZ/BlackLegalScholarshipqbdsl.wbsp" height="7500" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" border="0" frameborder="0" align="Middle" name="dbBeeIFrame" id="dbBeeIFrame"}</p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>A Black Existential Perspective on Afrofuturity and the Law</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/12304-a-black-existential"/>
<published>2024-10-10T06:00:40-04:00</published>
<updated>2024-10-10T06:00:40-04:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/12304-a-black-existential</id>
<author>
<name>Lewis R. Gordon</name>
</author>
<summary type="html"><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 18pt;">Abstract<br /></span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;"></span></strong></span></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;">Excerpted From: Lewis R. Gordon, A Black Existential Perspective on Afrofuturity and the Law, 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1409 (June, 2024) (132 Footnotes) (<a href="https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2024/09/Gordon_BlackExistential.pdf" target="_parent">Full Document</a>)</span></span></strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/GordonLewis.jpg" alt="GordonLewis" width="200" height="239" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />A guiding principle of Afrofuturism is that another world is possible. This possibility is linked to an unusual amount of weight on the imagination, since “possible” in Afrofuturistic literature often means thinkable. This imaginative recourse emerges from understandings that accompanied the Euromodern transformation of African peoples into “blacks.” In this context, there is a double move, for as there have been--and continue to be--many kinds of blacks, the focus here is on Afro-blacks, those concomitant with the rise of the African diaspora. Euromodern societies mark such blacks in specific moments and movements of their history, most of which distinguish those in the “New World” on one side of the Atlantic from those on the “Dark Continent” on the other, with the Indian Ocean on the continent's other side and the Mediterranean to its north. Yet even this demarcation needs elaboration and added complexity, for the diasporic elements outside of Africa have different markers than those within the continent. Even more, the varieties of Euromodern imperial efforts to subjugate Africans also transformed their subjugators. Thus, carried along are multiple converging forces of cosmological, legal, philosophical, and political reflections. The cosmological asks: How did the world or worlds emerge and what world is this? The legal asks: What kind of regulations of power are at play in this or these worlds? The philosophical asks: How do we make sense of what has happened in this or these worlds and how do we evaluate it? And the political, in a nutshell, asks: What is to be done for the health, legitimacy, maintenance, or transformation of this and any other world?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Because it focuses on worlds produced by racialized African peoples and their diaspora, Afrofuturist thought is a species of Africana or African diasporic thought. Africana thought is not identical to Black thought, although it includes elements of it. Black thought focuses on blackness or the circumstances and conditions of people whom Euromodern, Middle Eastern, and Southwest Asian societies “blackened,” and the questions that phenomenon poses. Blacks are, after all, not the same everywhere, although in most places, everyday people and theoreticians often commit the error of thinking their blacks are the blacks. North American blacks, for example, have similar and different histories from blacks in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa, and we should also consider black peoples in South Asia and Oceania. And in some instances, blackness is made so specific that whole continents of black peoples--as is evident in Africa--are erased simply by virtue of not, say, having been kidnapped, subjected to the transatlantic Middle Passage, enslaved, and, even more specifically, Christianized. There are also complicated stories of blackenings in the West Asian peninsula known as “Europe” with which to contend--for example, the racialization of Circassians. There was, however, enslavement without racialization in West Asian or European history; theorists who equate blackness with enslavement should consider the etymological roots of “slave” in the people who became known in Central Asia/Eastern Europe as “Slavs.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">These complexities affect legal interpretations, since the legal systems and rationalizations of enslavers varied from those of, say, common law to code law to those premised on early theological decrees from “Christendom” to caliphates. For purposes of specificity, this reflection will focus on the Anglophone context, in which conceptions of law are mediated by a dialectic between common law and positivist law (or law determined by fiat of an executive, legislative, or official administrative body). These, of course, have a history of their own rationalizations from appeals to so-called divine law to so-called natural law. An irony of such metaphysical assumptions is that legitimation through the divine and the natural often follows the logic of theodicy. The term “theodicy” is a conjunction of the Greek words theos (god) and dik (justice) that addresses the supposed compatibility of the divine's presence in a seemingly unjust world. The rationalization took at least two forms. The first was that the god's will was beyond our comprehension, which made injustice an expression of human limitation. The other was that the benevolence of the god granted human beings freedom, which made the deity not responsible for human actions. In sum, the god's perfection is preserved. Theodicean logic appeals to the intrinsic goodness and absolute power of the god. If we apply this logic to a legal system, the conclusion is that any contradiction of its goodness stands outside of it. This amounts to adherents perceiving or at least appealing to the system as intrinsically good. Anglo-legal rationalizations are not immune to this fallacy, as history has shown through judicial interpretations in which the basic goodness and justice of the system is presumed, whether it be the American, Canadian, Australian, or South African (post-apartheid) constitutions, among many others. In the U.S. context, the presumption of intrinsic goodness is so strong that even the country's most renowned political philosophers and political theorists, the late John Rawls being the most eminent, sought justice in the “basic structure,” which included the legal institutions of U.S. society. There were, of course, jurists, philosophers, and political theorists who thought otherwise. That many were Black, such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and Bayard Rustin, or Native American, such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Sarah Deer, and Glen Coulthard, reveals a system that tends to fall short for African Americans and Native Americans. For them, there is a flawed deep structure at the founding of a legal system that centers enslavement, inequality, exploitation, racism, land theft, and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples at the heart of its juridical aspirations. Appealing to that deep structure as ultimately just is, even in avowed liberal form, conservative and contradictory. Instead, those critics in effect appeal to other sources of authority, which some legal theorists, from Frederick G. McKean in the early twentieth century to Drucilla Cornell in recent times, prefer to call “the law of laws”--in other words, that which brings authority and legitimacy to law beyond mere sovereignty.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">To understand the source of these critiques, there are some theoretical resources from Africana philosophy, particularly its Black existential variety, that illuminate discussions of Afrofuturity.</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">An aspect of existential thought that is difficult for those invested in a model of action premised on knowing outcomes before performance is that optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin. Both optimism and pessimism reduce action to a specific manifestation--advanced or expected knowledge--counting for the whole. Yet there are so many instances of acting without advanced knowledge of outcomes that such a model would render most of human life unintelligible. It is possible to act through existential commitments--namely, what brings coherence and meaning to a human being's life. Where pertaining to institutions of power and their transformation, such action is extended into existential political commitments.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Committed political actions don't offer guarantees. That is one of the conundrums of what has historically distinguished right-wing-oriented actions from left-wing-oriented ones. The former seeks salvation in a past that promises, albeit in a distorted way, immediate satisfactions of order and security, usually by way of traditions, forceful authority, and antipathy to difference. The latter accepts the taking on of responsibility for what is to come as a feature of human existence. I added “historically,” however, because there are forms of avowed leftwing orientations that seek closure in the form of absolute, binary constructions that slide into the logic of the right despite claims of being otherwise. There are many examples, but perhaps none that was made more starkly in the realm of Afrofuturistic representation than the antagonist Killmonger's edict in the film Black Panther, summarized by W'Kabi, the former head of security: “The outside world is catching up and soon it will be the conquerors, or the conquered. I'd rather be the former.” Although there were audience members that extolled Killmonger as the real hero, they may think otherwise if they were to realize that such a position is a false dilemma. Why not fight for a world rid of conquest? Why not recognize, as others have argued from Fanon to Cornell, that “violence” versus “non-violence” is complicit with violence and that one should be actively anti-violence, which requires building better societies? And perhaps more concrete, under whose governance would they prefer to live--T'Challa's, in which one could make fun of the society's most powerful figure, or Killmonger's, in which any challenge would be met by the threat of a broken neck, as he did to a female elder?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">There is something of which one must let go to transcend conservatism and the lack of imagination about transcending the status quo, and that is the ego. Not taking oneself too seriously affords relationships with others. Much of the conservative impulse is to forego this through a perceived security in the quest for certainty through returning to an imagined safe place, traditional organization of power, or set of values. Adult life, however, is the realization that no one is ultimately “safe.” There is an extraordinary adult sensibility to this form of thought. It faces, constantly, the human dimensions, the metastability, of its strivings. Realizing that nothing can emerge without action, there is an intimate relationship with conditions by which any future can be built and the often-dreaded truth that the future may not necessarily be a better one. But for a better one to have any chance of coming to fruition, actions by which such conditions are laid must be made. Placed in the context of law, legal conditions are, in the end, part of a story greater than themselves. They are, however, a very important part that offers, in the words of Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu, “more than you know.”</span></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut (lewis.gordon@uconn.edu).</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></summary>
<content type="html"><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 18pt;">Abstract<br /></span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;"></span></strong></span></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;">Excerpted From: Lewis R. Gordon, A Black Existential Perspective on Afrofuturity and the Law, 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1409 (June, 2024) (132 Footnotes) (<a href="https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2024/09/Gordon_BlackExistential.pdf" target="_parent">Full Document</a>)</span></span></strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/GordonLewis.jpg" alt="GordonLewis" width="200" height="239" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />A guiding principle of Afrofuturism is that another world is possible. This possibility is linked to an unusual amount of weight on the imagination, since “possible” in Afrofuturistic literature often means thinkable. This imaginative recourse emerges from understandings that accompanied the Euromodern transformation of African peoples into “blacks.” In this context, there is a double move, for as there have been--and continue to be--many kinds of blacks, the focus here is on Afro-blacks, those concomitant with the rise of the African diaspora. Euromodern societies mark such blacks in specific moments and movements of their history, most of which distinguish those in the “New World” on one side of the Atlantic from those on the “Dark Continent” on the other, with the Indian Ocean on the continent's other side and the Mediterranean to its north. Yet even this demarcation needs elaboration and added complexity, for the diasporic elements outside of Africa have different markers than those within the continent. Even more, the varieties of Euromodern imperial efforts to subjugate Africans also transformed their subjugators. Thus, carried along are multiple converging forces of cosmological, legal, philosophical, and political reflections. The cosmological asks: How did the world or worlds emerge and what world is this? The legal asks: What kind of regulations of power are at play in this or these worlds? The philosophical asks: How do we make sense of what has happened in this or these worlds and how do we evaluate it? And the political, in a nutshell, asks: What is to be done for the health, legitimacy, maintenance, or transformation of this and any other world?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Because it focuses on worlds produced by racialized African peoples and their diaspora, Afrofuturist thought is a species of Africana or African diasporic thought. Africana thought is not identical to Black thought, although it includes elements of it. Black thought focuses on blackness or the circumstances and conditions of people whom Euromodern, Middle Eastern, and Southwest Asian societies “blackened,” and the questions that phenomenon poses. Blacks are, after all, not the same everywhere, although in most places, everyday people and theoreticians often commit the error of thinking their blacks are the blacks. North American blacks, for example, have similar and different histories from blacks in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa, and we should also consider black peoples in South Asia and Oceania. And in some instances, blackness is made so specific that whole continents of black peoples--as is evident in Africa--are erased simply by virtue of not, say, having been kidnapped, subjected to the transatlantic Middle Passage, enslaved, and, even more specifically, Christianized. There are also complicated stories of blackenings in the West Asian peninsula known as “Europe” with which to contend--for example, the racialization of Circassians. There was, however, enslavement without racialization in West Asian or European history; theorists who equate blackness with enslavement should consider the etymological roots of “slave” in the people who became known in Central Asia/Eastern Europe as “Slavs.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">These complexities affect legal interpretations, since the legal systems and rationalizations of enslavers varied from those of, say, common law to code law to those premised on early theological decrees from “Christendom” to caliphates. For purposes of specificity, this reflection will focus on the Anglophone context, in which conceptions of law are mediated by a dialectic between common law and positivist law (or law determined by fiat of an executive, legislative, or official administrative body). These, of course, have a history of their own rationalizations from appeals to so-called divine law to so-called natural law. An irony of such metaphysical assumptions is that legitimation through the divine and the natural often follows the logic of theodicy. The term “theodicy” is a conjunction of the Greek words theos (god) and dik (justice) that addresses the supposed compatibility of the divine's presence in a seemingly unjust world. The rationalization took at least two forms. The first was that the god's will was beyond our comprehension, which made injustice an expression of human limitation. The other was that the benevolence of the god granted human beings freedom, which made the deity not responsible for human actions. In sum, the god's perfection is preserved. Theodicean logic appeals to the intrinsic goodness and absolute power of the god. If we apply this logic to a legal system, the conclusion is that any contradiction of its goodness stands outside of it. This amounts to adherents perceiving or at least appealing to the system as intrinsically good. Anglo-legal rationalizations are not immune to this fallacy, as history has shown through judicial interpretations in which the basic goodness and justice of the system is presumed, whether it be the American, Canadian, Australian, or South African (post-apartheid) constitutions, among many others. In the U.S. context, the presumption of intrinsic goodness is so strong that even the country's most renowned political philosophers and political theorists, the late John Rawls being the most eminent, sought justice in the “basic structure,” which included the legal institutions of U.S. society. There were, of course, jurists, philosophers, and political theorists who thought otherwise. That many were Black, such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and Bayard Rustin, or Native American, such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Sarah Deer, and Glen Coulthard, reveals a system that tends to fall short for African Americans and Native Americans. For them, there is a flawed deep structure at the founding of a legal system that centers enslavement, inequality, exploitation, racism, land theft, and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples at the heart of its juridical aspirations. Appealing to that deep structure as ultimately just is, even in avowed liberal form, conservative and contradictory. Instead, those critics in effect appeal to other sources of authority, which some legal theorists, from Frederick G. McKean in the early twentieth century to Drucilla Cornell in recent times, prefer to call “the law of laws”--in other words, that which brings authority and legitimacy to law beyond mere sovereignty.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">To understand the source of these critiques, there are some theoretical resources from Africana philosophy, particularly its Black existential variety, that illuminate discussions of Afrofuturity.</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">An aspect of existential thought that is difficult for those invested in a model of action premised on knowing outcomes before performance is that optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin. Both optimism and pessimism reduce action to a specific manifestation--advanced or expected knowledge--counting for the whole. Yet there are so many instances of acting without advanced knowledge of outcomes that such a model would render most of human life unintelligible. It is possible to act through existential commitments--namely, what brings coherence and meaning to a human being's life. Where pertaining to institutions of power and their transformation, such action is extended into existential political commitments.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Committed political actions don't offer guarantees. That is one of the conundrums of what has historically distinguished right-wing-oriented actions from left-wing-oriented ones. The former seeks salvation in a past that promises, albeit in a distorted way, immediate satisfactions of order and security, usually by way of traditions, forceful authority, and antipathy to difference. The latter accepts the taking on of responsibility for what is to come as a feature of human existence. I added “historically,” however, because there are forms of avowed leftwing orientations that seek closure in the form of absolute, binary constructions that slide into the logic of the right despite claims of being otherwise. There are many examples, but perhaps none that was made more starkly in the realm of Afrofuturistic representation than the antagonist Killmonger's edict in the film Black Panther, summarized by W'Kabi, the former head of security: “The outside world is catching up and soon it will be the conquerors, or the conquered. I'd rather be the former.” Although there were audience members that extolled Killmonger as the real hero, they may think otherwise if they were to realize that such a position is a false dilemma. Why not fight for a world rid of conquest? Why not recognize, as others have argued from Fanon to Cornell, that “violence” versus “non-violence” is complicit with violence and that one should be actively anti-violence, which requires building better societies? And perhaps more concrete, under whose governance would they prefer to live--T'Challa's, in which one could make fun of the society's most powerful figure, or Killmonger's, in which any challenge would be met by the threat of a broken neck, as he did to a female elder?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">There is something of which one must let go to transcend conservatism and the lack of imagination about transcending the status quo, and that is the ego. Not taking oneself too seriously affords relationships with others. Much of the conservative impulse is to forego this through a perceived security in the quest for certainty through returning to an imagined safe place, traditional organization of power, or set of values. Adult life, however, is the realization that no one is ultimately “safe.” There is an extraordinary adult sensibility to this form of thought. It faces, constantly, the human dimensions, the metastability, of its strivings. Realizing that nothing can emerge without action, there is an intimate relationship with conditions by which any future can be built and the often-dreaded truth that the future may not necessarily be a better one. But for a better one to have any chance of coming to fruition, actions by which such conditions are laid must be made. Placed in the context of law, legal conditions are, in the end, part of a story greater than themselves. They are, however, a very important part that offers, in the words of Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu, “more than you know.”</span></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut (lewis.gordon@uconn.edu).</span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>George Bush Doesn't Like Black People</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/430-george-bush2012"/>
<published>2012-03-25T08:00:39-04:00</published>
<updated>2012-03-25T08:00:39-04:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/430-george-bush2012</id>
<author>
<name>The Legendary K.O.</name>
</author>
<summary type="html"><p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><span style="font-family: georgia,palatino; font-size: 12pt;"><strong><span>George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People<br /> </span></strong><span>by: <a target="_parent">The Legendary K.O.</a></span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;
<video src="https://racism.org/images/Videos/GeorgeBushandBlackPeople.mp4" controls="controls" width="560" height="240" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></video>
</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: georgia,palatino; font-size: 12pt;"> &nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: georgia,palatino; font-size: 12pt;"><strong><span>George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People<br /> </span></strong><span>by: <a target="_parent">The Legendary K.O.</a></span></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;
<video src="https://racism.org/images/Videos/GeorgeBushandBlackPeople.mp4" controls="controls" width="560" height="240" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></video>
</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-family: georgia,palatino; font-size: 12pt;"> &nbsp;</span></p>
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<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>If You Are Black and Still on Twitter, Why??</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/11023-if-you-are"/>
<published>2019-07-18T16:55:39-04:00</published>
<updated>2019-07-18T16:55:39-04:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/11023-if-you-are</id>
<author>
<name>Vernellia Randall</name>
</author>
<summary type="html"><p>&nbsp;<strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 10pt;">Become a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=6204241" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Patron</a>!&nbsp;</span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Images/If_You.jpg" alt="If You" width="100%" height="494" style="margin: 10px auto; display: block;" />&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;</p>
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<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Latin American International Law and Afro-Descendant Peoples</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/10880-latin-american"/>
<published>2022-11-09T09:37:11-05:00</published>
<updated>2022-11-09T09:37:11-05:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/10880-latin-american</id>
<author>
<name>John Herlyn Antón Sánchez</name>
</author>
<summary type="html"><p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Abstract</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;">Excerpted From: John Herlyn Antón Sánchez, Latin American International Law and Afro-Descendant Peoples, 116 AJIL Unbound 334 (2022) (17 Footnotes) (<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C384CAC2F2B468DD96240D7C3C8B12CA/S2398772322000514a.pdf/latin-american-international-law-and-afro-descendant-peoples.pdf" target="_parent">Full Document</a>)</span></strong></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/JohnHerlynAntónSánchez.jpg" alt="JohnHerlynAntónSánchez" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />After the Third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, an important movement emerged. The African diaspora communities in the Americas, or “Afro-descendants,” as they prefer to self-identify, began to seek legal recognition in the context of international human rights law, and especially within the inter-American human rights system. Progress has been remarkable, including the rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, changes in the constitutional and legal systems of Latin American countries, and a UN draft of a Declaration of the Rights of People of African Descent, as part of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). However, conceptual, technical, and doctrinal issues still exist in defining the legal agency of people of African descent under international law. Who are Afro-descendants in legal terms, and how do we understand “Afro-descendance” within the context of Indigenous and tribal peoples? In this essay, I explain how different regional bodies in Latin America have interpreted Indigenous rights progressively to overcome the marginalization of Afro-descendants, and address some important questions that remain unclear despite this welcome evolution.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">However, reaching an international declaration of the rights of (tribal) peoples of African descent will require overcoming arguments opposing it, especially those that limit the interpretation of collective rights only to ethnic Indigenous groups. The definition of “peoples” for Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean proposed here invites consideration of the fact that Afro-descendants are in a situation of exclusion and vulnerability and should enjoy the protection of international law. Such recognition implies an evolution in the doctrines of public international law and a consolidation of the New Latin American Constitutionalism. Perhaps we would witness the birth of new rights, related to restorative justice for those enslaved subjects, which, in the framework of racialized states, were denied equal rights. Such victims of injustice were not compensated or redressed. With the recognition of Afro-descendants as peoples, what comes into play is the recognition of the rights to autonomy and self-determination and reparations for slavery. It also increases attention to dignify the life of Afro-descendants. This scenario of course challenges liberal models of racialized democracy and privileged whiteness, which translates into a more inclusive and intercultural democracy. Nevertheless, Afro-descendants have characteristics that, under international law, are (or should be treated as) like those of Indigenous peoples. Yet, the differences are relevant enough to recognize their distinct protections.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Universidad Intercultural Amawtay Wasi, Quito, Ecuador.</span></p></summary>
<content type="html"><p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Abstract</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva;">Excerpted From: John Herlyn Antón Sánchez, Latin American International Law and Afro-Descendant Peoples, 116 AJIL Unbound 334 (2022) (17 Footnotes) (<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C384CAC2F2B468DD96240D7C3C8B12CA/S2398772322000514a.pdf/latin-american-international-law-and-afro-descendant-peoples.pdf" target="_parent">Full Document</a>)</span></strong></span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/JohnHerlynAntónSánchez.jpg" alt="JohnHerlynAntónSánchez" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />After the Third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, an important movement emerged. The African diaspora communities in the Americas, or “Afro-descendants,” as they prefer to self-identify, began to seek legal recognition in the context of international human rights law, and especially within the inter-American human rights system. Progress has been remarkable, including the rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, changes in the constitutional and legal systems of Latin American countries, and a UN draft of a Declaration of the Rights of People of African Descent, as part of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). However, conceptual, technical, and doctrinal issues still exist in defining the legal agency of people of African descent under international law. Who are Afro-descendants in legal terms, and how do we understand “Afro-descendance” within the context of Indigenous and tribal peoples? In this essay, I explain how different regional bodies in Latin America have interpreted Indigenous rights progressively to overcome the marginalization of Afro-descendants, and address some important questions that remain unclear despite this welcome evolution.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">However, reaching an international declaration of the rights of (tribal) peoples of African descent will require overcoming arguments opposing it, especially those that limit the interpretation of collective rights only to ethnic Indigenous groups. The definition of “peoples” for Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean proposed here invites consideration of the fact that Afro-descendants are in a situation of exclusion and vulnerability and should enjoy the protection of international law. Such recognition implies an evolution in the doctrines of public international law and a consolidation of the New Latin American Constitutionalism. Perhaps we would witness the birth of new rights, related to restorative justice for those enslaved subjects, which, in the framework of racialized states, were denied equal rights. Such victims of injustice were not compensated or redressed. With the recognition of Afro-descendants as peoples, what comes into play is the recognition of the rights to autonomy and self-determination and reparations for slavery. It also increases attention to dignify the life of Afro-descendants. This scenario of course challenges liberal models of racialized democracy and privileged whiteness, which translates into a more inclusive and intercultural democracy. Nevertheless, Afro-descendants have characteristics that, under international law, are (or should be treated as) like those of Indigenous peoples. Yet, the differences are relevant enough to recognize their distinct protections.</span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Universidad Intercultural Amawtay Wasi, Quito, Ecuador.</span></p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Legal Responses to Black Subordination, Global Perspectives</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/9544-legal-responses"/>
<published>2021-06-13T10:39:23-04:00</published>
<updated>2021-06-13T10:39:23-04:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/9544-legal-responses</id>
<author>
<name>Kevin E. Davis</name>
</author>
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<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 10pt;"></span>&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Abstract</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Excerpted From: Kevin E. Davis, Legal Responses to Black Subordination, Global Perspectives, 134 Harvard Law Review Forum 359 (June 1, 2021) (Comment) (100 Footnotes) (<a href="https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/134-Harv.-L.-Rev.-F.-359.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Full Document</a>)</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/KevinEDavis.jpg" alt="KevinEDavis" width="200" height="258" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />[I]n order to win and bring as many people with us along the way, we must move beyond the narrow nationalism that is all too prevalent in Black communities.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">--Black Lives Matter</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Around the world, people of African descent (“Afro-descendants”)--to use one of the broadest possible definitions of Blackness--are overrepresented among the poor and disempowered. Any effort to understand the role that law has played in the past--and might play in the future--in either causing or mitigating these patterns of subordination should account for the fact that while those patterns exhibit enormous variety, they also transcend national boundaries and operate on a global scale. These insights are staples of postcolonial analyses of Black culture. Less well explored is why or how the relationship between law and Black experiences ought to be analyzed from a global perspective. So, for instance, it is not immediately obvious why the killing of a Black man by police in the United States should lead to protests around the world. Nor is it obvious why the members of the Congressional Black Caucus--or activists or scholars who support them-- would ever look at the experiences of Black people outside the United States while formulating an agenda for legal reform. This Essay argues that there are several good reasons why lawmakers, activists, or scholars reckoning with legal responses to Black subordination should reject parochialism and approach their task from a global perspective; the challenge is to do that while avoiding the inherent pitfalls.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Adopting a global perspective necessarily entails rejecting any form of African American exceptionalism, meaning, the assumption that the experiences of Black people in the United States have nothing in common with experiences of Afro-descendants in other countries. It also involves abandoning similar preconceptions about the uniqueness of the Black experience in other countries. The rejection of these forms of parochialism can be a step toward providing support, learning, and recognizing interdependence across borders.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">At the same time, a global perspective need not and should not presume that there is either a universal Black experience, a universal definition of Blackness, or a universally effective set of legal responses to Black subordination. Projects that involve studying foreign societies in order to identify common problems that merit common legal responses are founded on a problematic assumption of “legal universalism.” Those projects founder whenever either (a) the people in the relevant jurisdictions face different problems or (b) the relevant legal response can be expected to have different effects in different environments. Both these factors, which have been carefully examined in the literature on critical race theory and comparative law, are likely to limit the value of comparative analysis as a way of identifying legal responses to the problems that Black people face. Afro-descendants in different countries have different histories and do not necessarily have the same ideals and aspirations. Even in the Western Hemisphere, where over 150 million Afro-descendants share the historical experience of having ancestors who were subject to the transatlantic slave trade, the problems caused by the legacy of slavery intersect in varying ways with other potential sources of disadvantage such as skin color, nationality, and geographic dispersion. And, of course, the laws that might be used to address those problems operate in very different environments. In the face of these kinds of differences, comparative analysis still has a valuable role to play, but it is a limited one.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Although it is important to acknowledge the differences between Black communities in the Western Hemisphere, it also is important to account for their interconnections. For instance, it is important to recognize the ways in which the United States and international institutions under its control project the influence of U.S. legal norms beyond borders, including to foreign countries inhabited by many Afro-descendants. There also are enormous cross-border flows of people, goods, services, and capital that can serve to transmit the influence of laws from one country to another. The existence of these kinds of legal spillovers complicates the task of evaluating the impact of both U.S. and foreign laws upon Afro-descendants. At a minimum, a global approach requires abandoning the conventional presumption that the legal determinants of outcomes in any given country are located exclusively in the relevant national legal system. Instead, the Americas should be treated as a single but diverse region, which contains multiple societies that are partially distinct but also deeply interconnected. In particular, it is a region inhabited by Afro-descendants whose experiences and outlooks are both common and distinct and are, at least potentially, influenced by multiple national, subnational, and supranational bodies of law.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The remaining Parts of this Essay take up each of these points in turn. Part I discusses the case against parochialism. Part II considers the dangers of legal universalism. Part III demonstrates the importance of recognizing transnational interconnections. To keep the analysis tractable, this Essay will focus on the Western Hemisphere.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Adopting a global approach to Black subordination involves a careful blend of comparative and transnational legal analysis. Cross-country comparisons can illuminate new dimensions of the problem and help to identify and assess alternative legal responses. Meanwhile, attention to the transnational dimensions of the phenomenon can identify ways in which both legal causes and responses operate across borders. All of this is possible even as we acknowledge significant diversity among the experiences of Afro-descendants and available legal responses. In short, studying legal responses to Black subordination requires a perspective that moves beyond parochialism while avoiding the pitfalls associated with legal universalism and accounting for complex transnational interconnections.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Beller Family Professor of Business Law, New York University School of Law.</span></p>
<hr />
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<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 10pt;"></span>&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Abstract</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"><strong>Excerpted From: Kevin E. Davis, Legal Responses to Black Subordination, Global Perspectives, 134 Harvard Law Review Forum 359 (June 1, 2021) (Comment) (100 Footnotes) (<a href="https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/134-Harv.-L.-Rev.-F.-359.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Full Document</a>)</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/KevinEDavis.jpg" alt="KevinEDavis" width="200" height="258" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />[I]n order to win and bring as many people with us along the way, we must move beyond the narrow nationalism that is all too prevalent in Black communities.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">--Black Lives Matter</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Around the world, people of African descent (“Afro-descendants”)--to use one of the broadest possible definitions of Blackness--are overrepresented among the poor and disempowered. Any effort to understand the role that law has played in the past--and might play in the future--in either causing or mitigating these patterns of subordination should account for the fact that while those patterns exhibit enormous variety, they also transcend national boundaries and operate on a global scale. These insights are staples of postcolonial analyses of Black culture. Less well explored is why or how the relationship between law and Black experiences ought to be analyzed from a global perspective. So, for instance, it is not immediately obvious why the killing of a Black man by police in the United States should lead to protests around the world. Nor is it obvious why the members of the Congressional Black Caucus--or activists or scholars who support them-- would ever look at the experiences of Black people outside the United States while formulating an agenda for legal reform. This Essay argues that there are several good reasons why lawmakers, activists, or scholars reckoning with legal responses to Black subordination should reject parochialism and approach their task from a global perspective; the challenge is to do that while avoiding the inherent pitfalls.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Adopting a global perspective necessarily entails rejecting any form of African American exceptionalism, meaning, the assumption that the experiences of Black people in the United States have nothing in common with experiences of Afro-descendants in other countries. It also involves abandoning similar preconceptions about the uniqueness of the Black experience in other countries. The rejection of these forms of parochialism can be a step toward providing support, learning, and recognizing interdependence across borders.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">At the same time, a global perspective need not and should not presume that there is either a universal Black experience, a universal definition of Blackness, or a universally effective set of legal responses to Black subordination. Projects that involve studying foreign societies in order to identify common problems that merit common legal responses are founded on a problematic assumption of “legal universalism.” Those projects founder whenever either (a) the people in the relevant jurisdictions face different problems or (b) the relevant legal response can be expected to have different effects in different environments. Both these factors, which have been carefully examined in the literature on critical race theory and comparative law, are likely to limit the value of comparative analysis as a way of identifying legal responses to the problems that Black people face. Afro-descendants in different countries have different histories and do not necessarily have the same ideals and aspirations. Even in the Western Hemisphere, where over 150 million Afro-descendants share the historical experience of having ancestors who were subject to the transatlantic slave trade, the problems caused by the legacy of slavery intersect in varying ways with other potential sources of disadvantage such as skin color, nationality, and geographic dispersion. And, of course, the laws that might be used to address those problems operate in very different environments. In the face of these kinds of differences, comparative analysis still has a valuable role to play, but it is a limited one.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Although it is important to acknowledge the differences between Black communities in the Western Hemisphere, it also is important to account for their interconnections. For instance, it is important to recognize the ways in which the United States and international institutions under its control project the influence of U.S. legal norms beyond borders, including to foreign countries inhabited by many Afro-descendants. There also are enormous cross-border flows of people, goods, services, and capital that can serve to transmit the influence of laws from one country to another. The existence of these kinds of legal spillovers complicates the task of evaluating the impact of both U.S. and foreign laws upon Afro-descendants. At a minimum, a global approach requires abandoning the conventional presumption that the legal determinants of outcomes in any given country are located exclusively in the relevant national legal system. Instead, the Americas should be treated as a single but diverse region, which contains multiple societies that are partially distinct but also deeply interconnected. In particular, it is a region inhabited by Afro-descendants whose experiences and outlooks are both common and distinct and are, at least potentially, influenced by multiple national, subnational, and supranational bodies of law.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The remaining Parts of this Essay take up each of these points in turn. Part I discusses the case against parochialism. Part II considers the dangers of legal universalism. Part III demonstrates the importance of recognizing transnational interconnections. To keep the analysis tractable, this Essay will focus on the Western Hemisphere.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[. . .]</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Adopting a global approach to Black subordination involves a careful blend of comparative and transnational legal analysis. Cross-country comparisons can illuminate new dimensions of the problem and help to identify and assess alternative legal responses. Meanwhile, attention to the transnational dimensions of the phenomenon can identify ways in which both legal causes and responses operate across borders. All of this is possible even as we acknowledge significant diversity among the experiences of Afro-descendants and available legal responses. In short, studying legal responses to Black subordination requires a perspective that moves beyond parochialism while avoiding the pitfalls associated with legal universalism and accounting for complex transnational interconnections.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: verdana, geneva;"></span></p>
<hr />
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Beller Family Professor of Business Law, New York University School of Law.</span></p>
<hr />
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<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title> Vienna Declaration (2001)</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/1428-introduction-to-the-vienna"/>
<published>2019-02-25T09:44:00-05:00</published>
<updated>2019-02-25T09:44:00-05:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/1428-introduction-to-the-vienna</id>
<author>
<name>Vernellia R. Randall</name>
</author>
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<hr />
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><img style="margin: 10px; float: left;" src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/vernelliarandall2015.jpg" alt="vernelliarandall2015" width="200" height="266" />Vernellia R. Randall, Introduction to the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action of Africans and African Descendants, 8 Washington and Lee Race and Ethnic Ancestry Law Journal 7 (Spring, 2002) (35 Footnotes omitted)</span><br /><br /><br /></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Vienna Declaration and Program of Action was the result of a historical meeting of Africans and African descendants that took place on April 28 to 29, 2001 in Vienna, Austria. At that time about 135 African and African-descendant non-governmental organizations and individuals gathered to plan for the third United Nation World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) to be held in Durban, South Africa from August 31 to September 7, 2001. Prior to that meeting, Africans and African descendants met during the First World Preparatory and the Regional Preparatory Conferences (PrepCon) in Europe, Africa, Asia and America. From these meetings it became clear that the interests of African and African descendants were not being adequately acknowledged in the preliminary meetings and conferences.</span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="Background" alt="Background" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>BACKGROUND</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Since its creation, the United Nations has struggled to find measures to combat racial discrimination and ethnic violence. This commitment is reflected in the adoption of a number of resolutions, conventions and declarations, including:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">1. Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - 1948</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">2. Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">3. Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination - 1963</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">4. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination - 1965</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">5. March 21 was designated International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination - 1966</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">6. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid - 1973</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">7. First Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination1973-1982</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">8. First World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination Geneva, 1978</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">9. Second World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination Geneva, 1983</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">10. Second Decade for Action to Combat Racial Discrimination 1983-1992</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">11. Third Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination 1994-2003</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">In December 1997, the General Assembly called for a third world conference against racism. In 1999, the General Assembly's Third Committee decided that the conference should be preceded by regional meetings. Each regional conference was charged with drafting a declaration and a plan of action on racism that would ultimately be synthesized into a single set of documents to be ratified in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The regional meetings were in Strasbourg, France; Santiago, Chile; Dakar, Senegal; and Tehran, Iran. In addition, the committee also decided to have two preparatory inter-governmental meetings at the United Nations in Geneva.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Previously, the two other world conferences, held in 1978 and 1983, had almost exclusively focused on apartheid in South Africa. The proposed third world conference had no such limitations. Apartheid had ended in South Africa in 1994, and the General Assembly expanded the conference to include not only issues of racism and racial discrimination, but also xenophobia and related intolerance. Consequently, the groups and issues vying for attention included an extreme range of diversity: the Dalits, the Russian Panthers, the Romas, the Sikhs, the Palestinians, the Jews and migrants and migrant workers.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">With the broad range of constituents struggling for attention, African and African descendants from Asia, Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean attended the Vienna Conference because of a deep concern that the preparations for the third WCAR, had given little attention to issues of anti-black racism. For instance, at the November 2000 meeting of the European Preparatory Conference for European Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and state governments in Strasbourg, France, there was very little discussion of anti-black racism. The situation was complicated by the European Union's position (both governmental and non-governmental organizations) regarding the term race. Specifically, the European Union (EU) adopted the position that addressing the problems of different races was inappropriate because there was only one race - the human race. Thus, according to the EU, the notion of racism as a theory based on the so-called superiority of a race or ethnic group over another is no longer pronounced, [although] theories of supposedly insurmountable cultural differences between groups can be observed. The EU acknowledged the problems of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, but was reluctant to address the problems of African descendants. This reluctance did not extend to other groups. Consequently, the EU's Declaration and Program of Action mentions Romas, Jews, and Immigrants. Amazingly, the European Declaration and plan of action makes no specific mention of African and African descendants or of anti-black racism.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Concerned about this lack of focus, a strong statement was issued by people of African descent at the Americas Prepcon in Santiago, Chile in December, 2000. However, subsequent documents from other WCAR-related meetings, most notably the Inter-sessional meeting in Geneva in March 2000, continued to ignore issues related to Africans and African descendants, most specifically, anti-black racism.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">This is not to say that there was a total absence of any discussion around any issue of concern to Africans and African descendants. Compensation (or reparations) owed to descendants of victims of the slave trade, slavery and colonialism was a central issue of contention at the first World Prepcon in Geneva in February, 2000. Governments from North America and Western Europe clashed with African states and NGOs over whether compensation should be included under the theme of effective remedies for victims of racism. There was also disagreement over declaring slavery and the slave trade crimes against humanity. Thus, controversy over compensation and over declaring slavery a crime against humanity, coupled with the absence of focus on anti-black racism, left many Africans and African descendants feeling as though issues of importance to them would not be fairly represented in the final document emerging from WCAR. The one exception to this lack of attention was the America's Declaration and Plan of Action which included a number of sections specifically on African descendants and the African Report which addressed the issues of Africans. These circumstances set the stage for the Vienna Meeting of Africans and African Descendants.</span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="The Vienna Meeting" alt="The Vienna Meeting" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>THE VIENNA MEETING</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Vienna Meeting was not the first time Africans and African descendants had met to address the globalization of Anti-Black Racism. Pan-African meetings date back as far as 1900 when the first Pan-African Conference was held in London, England. After World War I and through the 1920s, African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois organized four Pan-African Congresses held in various sites around Europe. In 1945, the fifth Pan-African Congress, which Du Bois participated in but did not organize, was held in Manchester, England. In 1974 and 1996, the sixth and seventh Pan-African Congresses broke with history and were held on the continent of Africa, in Tanzania and Uganda, respectively. In all of these gatherings, issues of racism, colonialism, the legacy of slavery and the slave trade and Black Diaspora unity were addressed:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">[the] exploitation of the continent of Africa and African people ... has driven the engine of capitalism from slavery, colonization to present day globalization. It is ... [the] exploitation of the continent of Africa and African peoples that has resulted in the particular form of anti-Black racism that is pernicious and marginalizes Africans and African descendants socially, economically and politically.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Thus, the Vienna Meeting represented a continuation of those discussions, concerns and issues echoed at previous efforts to bring together Africans and people of African descent.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Vienna Meeting was called by the Rev. Ihueghian Victor, of the Association for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (AHDA) and Chinedu Ene, of the Petadisis Community Organization. The co-chairs of the conference were Amani Olubanjo Buntu and Sithabile Mathe, both of the Afrikan Youth In Norway. The stated purpose of the meeting was to raise important issues and to seek a consensus about these issues in preparation for the WCAR and beyond. The meeting included a number of presentations on issues confronting Africans and African descendants including:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">1. transatlantic slave trade and declaring it a crime against humanity;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">2. compensation or reparations for victims of the slave trade, colonialism and present injustices related to racism;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">3. lack of overall mention of people of African descent in WCAR preparatory declaration and plan of action documents;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">4. action to combat racism;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">5. legacy of apartheid, colonization and slavery;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">6. migrants, asylum seekers and refugees;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">7. education and employment;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">8. health and health care;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">9. youth; and</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">10. women.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">On the second day of the meeting, a coordinating committee was elected to carry the work of the gathering to the Second World Preparatory Conference held in Geneva at the end of May, 2001. The members of this Committee included Vernellia Randall and Mildred Bahati, both from the United States of America, Eleonora Wiedenroth of Germany, Marian Douglas of Macedonia, Cikiah Thomas of Canada, Mutombo Kanyana of Switzerland and Annie Davies of Nigeria. This committee was specifically charged with drafting a Declaration and Program of Action.</span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="The Drafing, Approval and Distribution" alt="The Drafting" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>THE DRAFTING, APPROVAL </strong>AND<strong> DISTRIBUTION</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">During the Vienna Meeting, a small-group process was utilized to brainstorm items that should be included in the Declaration and Program of Action. Each small group presented their list to the entire body where the items were discussed. The drafting committee headed by Professor Vernellia Randall generated a draft that was circulated via email to all the attendees at the Vienna Meeting. After redrafting, the document was circulated to the African Caucus Group. This group included Africans and African descendants who attended any of the preparatory meetings and included several hundred individuals throughout the Black Diaspora. After feedback, comment and redrafting, the final document was adopted by consensus via e-mail.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="IMPACT OF THE VIENNA DECLARATION AND PROGRAM" alt="Impact" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>IMPACT OF THE VIENNA DECLARATION AND PROGRAM</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">An English version of the declaration was distributed at the Second World Preparatory Conference and was a foundational document for much of the lobbying activity that occurred. French, English and Spanish translations were widely distributed at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The Vienna Conference and the resulting Vienna Declaration played a pivotal role in the work of Africans and African descendants at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. As noted in the final Report of the Africans and African Descendant Caucus:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">A major development in the ability of Africans and African Descendants to independently organize was the international African and African Descendants Conference [(AADC)] held in Vienna, Austria in April, 2001. This historic conference, attended by representatives covering most of the Black World, was convened by Africans and African Descendants in a concerted effort to refute the efforts at Strasbourg and the attempts by the Western European countries to subvert the work and unity of the Africans and African Descendants manifesting itself in the international and regional preparatory meetings. The Vienna Conference produced a groundbreaking declaration which eloquently articulated and delineated many key positions which would be read and advocated by African and African Descendants throughout the WCAR process. Without question the Vienna Declaration's unique and unadulterated, sharpened, and keenly intellectual expression of the key issues and programmes of action for Africans and African Descendants was used as guidance by the Drafting Committee of the AADC and would inform the content of many of the position papers of the AADC.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Professor of Law, University of Dayton, School of Law, B.S.N. 1971 University of Texas, M.S.N. 1978 University of Washington, J.D. 1987 Lewis and Clark College Northwestern School of La</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">w.</span></p></summary>
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<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><img style="margin: 10px; float: left;" src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/vernelliarandall2015.jpg" alt="vernelliarandall2015" width="200" height="266" />Vernellia R. Randall, Introduction to the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action of Africans and African Descendants, 8 Washington and Lee Race and Ethnic Ancestry Law Journal 7 (Spring, 2002) (35 Footnotes omitted)</span><br /><br /><br /></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Vienna Declaration and Program of Action was the result of a historical meeting of Africans and African descendants that took place on April 28 to 29, 2001 in Vienna, Austria. At that time about 135 African and African-descendant non-governmental organizations and individuals gathered to plan for the third United Nation World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) to be held in Durban, South Africa from August 31 to September 7, 2001. Prior to that meeting, Africans and African descendants met during the First World Preparatory and the Regional Preparatory Conferences (PrepCon) in Europe, Africa, Asia and America. From these meetings it became clear that the interests of African and African descendants were not being adequately acknowledged in the preliminary meetings and conferences.</span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="Background" alt="Background" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>BACKGROUND</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Since its creation, the United Nations has struggled to find measures to combat racial discrimination and ethnic violence. This commitment is reflected in the adoption of a number of resolutions, conventions and declarations, including:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">1. Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - 1948</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">2. Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">3. Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination - 1963</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">4. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination - 1965</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">5. March 21 was designated International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination - 1966</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">6. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid - 1973</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">7. First Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination1973-1982</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">8. First World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination Geneva, 1978</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">9. Second World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination Geneva, 1983</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">10. Second Decade for Action to Combat Racial Discrimination 1983-1992</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">11. Third Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination 1994-2003</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">In December 1997, the General Assembly called for a third world conference against racism. In 1999, the General Assembly's Third Committee decided that the conference should be preceded by regional meetings. Each regional conference was charged with drafting a declaration and a plan of action on racism that would ultimately be synthesized into a single set of documents to be ratified in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The regional meetings were in Strasbourg, France; Santiago, Chile; Dakar, Senegal; and Tehran, Iran. In addition, the committee also decided to have two preparatory inter-governmental meetings at the United Nations in Geneva.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Previously, the two other world conferences, held in 1978 and 1983, had almost exclusively focused on apartheid in South Africa. The proposed third world conference had no such limitations. Apartheid had ended in South Africa in 1994, and the General Assembly expanded the conference to include not only issues of racism and racial discrimination, but also xenophobia and related intolerance. Consequently, the groups and issues vying for attention included an extreme range of diversity: the Dalits, the Russian Panthers, the Romas, the Sikhs, the Palestinians, the Jews and migrants and migrant workers.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">With the broad range of constituents struggling for attention, African and African descendants from Asia, Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean attended the Vienna Conference because of a deep concern that the preparations for the third WCAR, had given little attention to issues of anti-black racism. For instance, at the November 2000 meeting of the European Preparatory Conference for European Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and state governments in Strasbourg, France, there was very little discussion of anti-black racism. The situation was complicated by the European Union's position (both governmental and non-governmental organizations) regarding the term race. Specifically, the European Union (EU) adopted the position that addressing the problems of different races was inappropriate because there was only one race - the human race. Thus, according to the EU, the notion of racism as a theory based on the so-called superiority of a race or ethnic group over another is no longer pronounced, [although] theories of supposedly insurmountable cultural differences between groups can be observed. The EU acknowledged the problems of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, but was reluctant to address the problems of African descendants. This reluctance did not extend to other groups. Consequently, the EU's Declaration and Program of Action mentions Romas, Jews, and Immigrants. Amazingly, the European Declaration and plan of action makes no specific mention of African and African descendants or of anti-black racism.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Concerned about this lack of focus, a strong statement was issued by people of African descent at the Americas Prepcon in Santiago, Chile in December, 2000. However, subsequent documents from other WCAR-related meetings, most notably the Inter-sessional meeting in Geneva in March 2000, continued to ignore issues related to Africans and African descendants, most specifically, anti-black racism.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">This is not to say that there was a total absence of any discussion around any issue of concern to Africans and African descendants. Compensation (or reparations) owed to descendants of victims of the slave trade, slavery and colonialism was a central issue of contention at the first World Prepcon in Geneva in February, 2000. Governments from North America and Western Europe clashed with African states and NGOs over whether compensation should be included under the theme of effective remedies for victims of racism. There was also disagreement over declaring slavery and the slave trade crimes against humanity. Thus, controversy over compensation and over declaring slavery a crime against humanity, coupled with the absence of focus on anti-black racism, left many Africans and African descendants feeling as though issues of importance to them would not be fairly represented in the final document emerging from WCAR. The one exception to this lack of attention was the America's Declaration and Plan of Action which included a number of sections specifically on African descendants and the African Report which addressed the issues of Africans. These circumstances set the stage for the Vienna Meeting of Africans and African Descendants.</span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="The Vienna Meeting" alt="The Vienna Meeting" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>THE VIENNA MEETING</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Vienna Meeting was not the first time Africans and African descendants had met to address the globalization of Anti-Black Racism. Pan-African meetings date back as far as 1900 when the first Pan-African Conference was held in London, England. After World War I and through the 1920s, African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois organized four Pan-African Congresses held in various sites around Europe. In 1945, the fifth Pan-African Congress, which Du Bois participated in but did not organize, was held in Manchester, England. In 1974 and 1996, the sixth and seventh Pan-African Congresses broke with history and were held on the continent of Africa, in Tanzania and Uganda, respectively. In all of these gatherings, issues of racism, colonialism, the legacy of slavery and the slave trade and Black Diaspora unity were addressed:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">[the] exploitation of the continent of Africa and African people ... has driven the engine of capitalism from slavery, colonization to present day globalization. It is ... [the] exploitation of the continent of Africa and African peoples that has resulted in the particular form of anti-Black racism that is pernicious and marginalizes Africans and African descendants socially, economically and politically.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Thus, the Vienna Meeting represented a continuation of those discussions, concerns and issues echoed at previous efforts to bring together Africans and people of African descent.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">The Vienna Meeting was called by the Rev. Ihueghian Victor, of the Association for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (AHDA) and Chinedu Ene, of the Petadisis Community Organization. The co-chairs of the conference were Amani Olubanjo Buntu and Sithabile Mathe, both of the Afrikan Youth In Norway. The stated purpose of the meeting was to raise important issues and to seek a consensus about these issues in preparation for the WCAR and beyond. The meeting included a number of presentations on issues confronting Africans and African descendants including:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">1. transatlantic slave trade and declaring it a crime against humanity;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">2. compensation or reparations for victims of the slave trade, colonialism and present injustices related to racism;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">3. lack of overall mention of people of African descent in WCAR preparatory declaration and plan of action documents;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">4. action to combat racism;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">5. legacy of apartheid, colonization and slavery;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">6. migrants, asylum seekers and refugees;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">7. education and employment;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">8. health and health care;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">9. youth; and</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">10. women.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">On the second day of the meeting, a coordinating committee was elected to carry the work of the gathering to the Second World Preparatory Conference held in Geneva at the end of May, 2001. The members of this Committee included Vernellia Randall and Mildred Bahati, both from the United States of America, Eleonora Wiedenroth of Germany, Marian Douglas of Macedonia, Cikiah Thomas of Canada, Mutombo Kanyana of Switzerland and Annie Davies of Nigeria. This committee was specifically charged with drafting a Declaration and Program of Action.</span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="The Drafing, Approval and Distribution" alt="The Drafting" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>THE DRAFTING, APPROVAL </strong>AND<strong> DISTRIBUTION</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">During the Vienna Meeting, a small-group process was utilized to brainstorm items that should be included in the Declaration and Program of Action. Each small group presented their list to the entire body where the items were discussed. The drafting committee headed by Professor Vernellia Randall generated a draft that was circulated via email to all the attendees at the Vienna Meeting. After redrafting, the document was circulated to the African Caucus Group. This group included Africans and African descendants who attended any of the preparatory meetings and included several hundred individuals throughout the Black Diaspora. After feedback, comment and redrafting, the final document was adopted by consensus via e-mail.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<hr class="system-pagebreak" title="IMPACT OF THE VIENNA DECLARATION AND PROGRAM" alt="Impact" />
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>IMPACT OF THE VIENNA DECLARATION AND PROGRAM</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">An English version of the declaration was distributed at the Second World Preparatory Conference and was a foundational document for much of the lobbying activity that occurred. French, English and Spanish translations were widely distributed at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The Vienna Conference and the resulting Vienna Declaration played a pivotal role in the work of Africans and African descendants at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. As noted in the final Report of the Africans and African Descendant Caucus:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">A major development in the ability of Africans and African Descendants to independently organize was the international African and African Descendants Conference [(AADC)] held in Vienna, Austria in April, 2001. This historic conference, attended by representatives covering most of the Black World, was convened by Africans and African Descendants in a concerted effort to refute the efforts at Strasbourg and the attempts by the Western European countries to subvert the work and unity of the Africans and African Descendants manifesting itself in the international and regional preparatory meetings. The Vienna Conference produced a groundbreaking declaration which eloquently articulated and delineated many key positions which would be read and advocated by African and African Descendants throughout the WCAR process. Without question the Vienna Declaration's unique and unadulterated, sharpened, and keenly intellectual expression of the key issues and programmes of action for Africans and African Descendants was used as guidance by the Drafting Committee of the AADC and would inform the content of many of the position papers of the AADC.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 12pt;">Professor of Law, University of Dayton, School of Law, B.S.N. 1971 University of Texas, M.S.N. 1978 University of Washington, J.D. 1987 Lewis and Clark College Northwestern School of La</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">w.</span></p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title> Inequality in the United States Is Killing African Americans!</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/2981-inequality-in-the-united-states"/>
<published>2017-06-29T15:45:36-04:00</published>
<updated>2017-06-29T15:45:36-04:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/2981-inequality-in-the-united-states</id>
<author>
<name>Prof. Vernellia R. Randall</name>
</author>
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<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong style="font-size: 14pt; background-color: inherit; color: inherit; font-family: inherit;">Vernellia R. Randall, Inequality in the United States Is Killing African Americans.</strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For blacks, health inequalities are the cumulative result of both past and current discrimination throughout U.S. culture. Due to discrimination and limited educational opportunities, blacks disproportionately work in low-pay, high-health-risk occupations (e.g., they are migrant farm workers, fast food workers, garment industry workers).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Historic and present racism in land and planning policy also plays a critical role in minority health status. Even controlling for income, blacks <img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/vernelliarandall2015.jpg" alt="vernelliarandall2015" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />are much more likely to have toxic materials (and other unhealthy substances) sited in their communities than whites. For example, overconcentration of alcohol and tobacco outlets and the legal and illegal dumping of pollutants pose serious health risks to minorities.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Another significant factor affecting many blacks is the lack of grocery stores with fresh foods but the ready availability of fast foods with high salt and fat content. Exposure to these risks is not a matter of individual control or even individual choice. Health status disparities are a direct result of policies, practices, procedures, and laws--institutional discrimination--that protect white privilege at the expense of black health.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Black Americans are sicker than white Americans, and they are dying at a significantly higher rate. These are undisputed facts. Black men live on average six years less than white men. Black men have shorter life spans than men in Chile, Barbados, Bahamas, or Jamaica. Black women live on average four years less than white women. Black women have shorter life spans than women in Barbados, Panama, Bosnia, and the Bahamas. Infant mortality rates are two times higher for blacks. Some racist has commented that African Americans should be grateful for being in the United States; yet black Americans have more low birth weight infants than women in Rwanda, Ghana, and Uganda.</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Social determinants of health are the primary factors in the health status inequality between blacks and whites. Social determinants of health are the social, economic, political and legal forces under which people live. These determinants include</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">wealth/income,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">education,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">criminal justice,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">civil justice</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">physical environment,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">health care,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">housing,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">employment,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">targeting of the African American Communities for Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">racialized stress, and</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">racism/discrimination.</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In fact, for blacks, racism is a primary factor. Even when you control for economics, blacks have poorer health. That is, middle-class blacks suffer poorer health than middle-class whites. In fact, middle-class whites live ten years longer than middle-class blacks, while poor whites live only three years longer than poor blacks. Furthermore, the stress of living in a discriminatory society accounts for the racial health disparities.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Appropriate state and federal laws must be available to eliminate discriminatory practices. On its face, Title VI (with its implementing regulations) should be an effective tool for eliminating racial discrimination. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has held in Alexander v. Choate, 469 U.S. 287 (1985), that Title VI itself directly reached only instances of intentional discrimination. Because of the very specialized knowledge required in medical care, individuals can be totally unaware that the provider has injured them. Finally, the health care system, through managed care, has actually built-in incentives that encourage unconscious discrimination. Thus, the crux of the problem, given managed care, the historical inequity in health care, and unthinking reckless discrimination is that current laws do not address the current barriers faced by minorities. (Reckless discrimination occurs when an individual knows that there is a high risk of discrimination and the individual proceeds with the behavior. Negligent discrimination occurs when the individual knew or should have known their behavior would result in discrimination and failed to take appropriate action to prevent or minimize discrimination.)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Compounding the racial discrimination experienced generally is the institutional discrimination in health care affecting access to health care and the quality of health care received. Racial discrimination in health care delivery, financing, and research continues to exist. Racial barriers to quality health care manifest themselves in many ways, including (1) economic discrimination, which rations health care on ability to pay; (2) insufficient hospitals and health care institutions and clinics; (3) insufficient physicians and other providers; (4) racial discrimination in treatment and services; and (5) culturally incompetent care.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">A Health Care Anti-Discrimination Act would <br />(1) recognize multiple forms of discrimination; <br />(2) authorize and fund testers; <br />(3) assure appropriate fines and regulatory enforcement; <br />(4) require racial/ethnic disaggregate data collection and reporting; <br />(5) provide a private and organizational Right of Action; <br />(6) cover prevailing party attorney fees; <br />(7) provide punitive damage, in part or in whole, to fund monitoring and assessment programs; and (<br />8) require a health scorecard/report for health agency, provider, or facility.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Unless specifically addressed, inequality in health care will most certainly remain and blacks will continue to die at a disproportionate rate.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Vernellia R. Randall is a professor emeritus at the School of Law at the University of Dayton.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></summary>
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<p><strong style="font-size: 14pt; background-color: inherit; color: inherit; font-family: inherit;">Vernellia R. Randall, Inequality in the United States Is Killing African Americans.</strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For blacks, health inequalities are the cumulative result of both past and current discrimination throughout U.S. culture. Due to discrimination and limited educational opportunities, blacks disproportionately work in low-pay, high-health-risk occupations (e.g., they are migrant farm workers, fast food workers, garment industry workers).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Historic and present racism in land and planning policy also plays a critical role in minority health status. Even controlling for income, blacks <img src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/vernelliarandall2015.jpg" alt="vernelliarandall2015" style="margin: 10px; float: left;" />are much more likely to have toxic materials (and other unhealthy substances) sited in their communities than whites. For example, overconcentration of alcohol and tobacco outlets and the legal and illegal dumping of pollutants pose serious health risks to minorities.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Another significant factor affecting many blacks is the lack of grocery stores with fresh foods but the ready availability of fast foods with high salt and fat content. Exposure to these risks is not a matter of individual control or even individual choice. Health status disparities are a direct result of policies, practices, procedures, and laws--institutional discrimination--that protect white privilege at the expense of black health.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Black Americans are sicker than white Americans, and they are dying at a significantly higher rate. These are undisputed facts. Black men live on average six years less than white men. Black men have shorter life spans than men in Chile, Barbados, Bahamas, or Jamaica. Black women live on average four years less than white women. Black women have shorter life spans than women in Barbados, Panama, Bosnia, and the Bahamas. Infant mortality rates are two times higher for blacks. Some racist has commented that African Americans should be grateful for being in the United States; yet black Americans have more low birth weight infants than women in Rwanda, Ghana, and Uganda.</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Social determinants of health are the primary factors in the health status inequality between blacks and whites. Social determinants of health are the social, economic, political and legal forces under which people live. These determinants include</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">wealth/income,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">education,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">criminal justice,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">civil justice</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">physical environment,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">health care,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">housing,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">employment,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">targeting of the African American Communities for Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">racialized stress, and</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 12pt;">racism/discrimination.</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In fact, for blacks, racism is a primary factor. Even when you control for economics, blacks have poorer health. That is, middle-class blacks suffer poorer health than middle-class whites. In fact, middle-class whites live ten years longer than middle-class blacks, while poor whites live only three years longer than poor blacks. Furthermore, the stress of living in a discriminatory society accounts for the racial health disparities.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Appropriate state and federal laws must be available to eliminate discriminatory practices. On its face, Title VI (with its implementing regulations) should be an effective tool for eliminating racial discrimination. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has held in Alexander v. Choate, 469 U.S. 287 (1985), that Title VI itself directly reached only instances of intentional discrimination. Because of the very specialized knowledge required in medical care, individuals can be totally unaware that the provider has injured them. Finally, the health care system, through managed care, has actually built-in incentives that encourage unconscious discrimination. Thus, the crux of the problem, given managed care, the historical inequity in health care, and unthinking reckless discrimination is that current laws do not address the current barriers faced by minorities. (Reckless discrimination occurs when an individual knows that there is a high risk of discrimination and the individual proceeds with the behavior. Negligent discrimination occurs when the individual knew or should have known their behavior would result in discrimination and failed to take appropriate action to prevent or minimize discrimination.)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Compounding the racial discrimination experienced generally is the institutional discrimination in health care affecting access to health care and the quality of health care received. Racial discrimination in health care delivery, financing, and research continues to exist. Racial barriers to quality health care manifest themselves in many ways, including (1) economic discrimination, which rations health care on ability to pay; (2) insufficient hospitals and health care institutions and clinics; (3) insufficient physicians and other providers; (4) racial discrimination in treatment and services; and (5) culturally incompetent care.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">A Health Care Anti-Discrimination Act would <br />(1) recognize multiple forms of discrimination; <br />(2) authorize and fund testers; <br />(3) assure appropriate fines and regulatory enforcement; <br />(4) require racial/ethnic disaggregate data collection and reporting; <br />(5) provide a private and organizational Right of Action; <br />(6) cover prevailing party attorney fees; <br />(7) provide punitive damage, in part or in whole, to fund monitoring and assessment programs; and (<br />8) require a health scorecard/report for health agency, provider, or facility.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Unless specifically addressed, inequality in health care will most certainly remain and blacks will continue to die at a disproportionate rate.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Vernellia R. Randall is a professor emeritus at the School of Law at the University of Dayton.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
<entry>
<title>On Obsessions or When Being Black Is Not Enough</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/2731-on-obsessions-or"/>
<published>2019-05-04T23:51:22-04:00</published>
<updated>2019-05-04T23:51:22-04:00</updated>
<id>https://racism.org/articles/race/defining-racial-groups/62-africans-and-african-descendents/2731-on-obsessions-or</id>
<author>
<name>Vernellia Randall</name>
</author>
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<hr />
<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Vernellia Randall,&nbsp;On Obsessions or When Being Black Is Not Enough (1997).</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><img style="margin: 10px; float: left;" src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/vernelliarandall2015.jpg" alt="vernelliarandall2015" width="200" height="266" />&nbsp;When I was growing up our obsession was skin color. You were a good skin color if you were "paper sack brown" or lighter. My foster mother made a comment to me that my sister, brother and I were close enough to being "paper sack brown" that we would be okay. She said "you are lucky that you aren't very dark skin".&nbsp;</p>
<p>When I was nineteen (and working at her bar) I met a young man in service whom I like a lot. He was very dark skin - "blue black". He had a friend who was "so light he could be white". My mother was beside herself. "Why", she asks "do you have to like the dark one?" "If you have children with him" she shouted, "they will be too dark!" I remember saying to her: "The Blacker the berry the sweeter the juice." And she retorted - "Yeah, but who wants diabetes"&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . The black obsession of the '40s, 50's, 60's - skin color.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Yet, being too light was also a problem. . . black people would accuse light skin people of "thinking you were white." My birth mother's family could claim multi-racial status if they were of this generation. My mother died when I was really young. But I recently comment to an aunt that all of them except one married very dark men. . . . . "how did that happen?" . . . I asked. . My aunt said, "I don't think it was deliberate. . . but it was hard growing up light skin in the '20s and the '30s. Being light skin can mean being too dark for whites- too light for blacks.&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . . The Black obsession of the '20s and 30's - skin color.&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . I first notice the resurgent of the obsession over skin color on television (about 10 years ago). "Have you noticed" I commented to my son Tshaka " that on MTV all the black women are very light skin and all the black men are very dark. What's with that? Have you notice that except for comics and singers black actors are pretty much limited to light skin women, dark skin men?" Then I notice the personal ads. . "Wanted professional black men (honey tone). ."&nbsp;</p>
<p>honey tone (hmmm now ain't that something)&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . So, being "black and proud" is fading to "if you are black step back". . . And we disguise our obsession in the trap of ancestry. "I am African, Native, Italian", we announce proudly. . . Who isn't I think? Black people by definition are mongrels.&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . .The obsession of the '80s and 90's skin color - disguised in ancestry.&nbsp;</p>
<p>African American - a made-up name - for a made-up people. True Africans have tribal connections. . We were snatched, sold, stolen from different tribes. We were forced to develop kinship relationship with people whom we had nothing in common but the color of our skin. We were force to give up language, religion, customs and all apparent sign of our former culture. Over the years into our rank came any person who had "one drop" of black blood. Our collective ancestry includes every ethnic, national and racial group on the face of the earth. Our defining factor is our black ancestry and our culture born out of American racism and slavery.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But slavery and racism have made us obsess with color. Where the benefits of society is distributed by skin color. . . then we want more. . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>Where jobs and resources in a society are distributed based on color? Not just black and white but shades of black? We want more. . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>What we are, is not good enough.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Like the hungry orphans in David Copperfield&nbsp; - we want more&nbsp;</p>
<p>"Can I have more please?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>French, Spanish, Japanese?&nbsp; "More Ancestry?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Italian, Chinese, Thai.?&nbsp; "More Please?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Irish, Swedish, Navajo?&nbsp; "MORE PLEASE?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Cherokee, Russian, British?&nbsp; "MORE, MORE, MORE PLEASE!!!!!"</p>
<p>Obsessed with skin color, ancestry, full of self-hate and self-doubt.&nbsp;</p>
<p>So we let our children divert us into an obssessive conversation about who or what is Black. Children, who may be grown, but "who wouldn't know how to pour piss out of their boots if the direction says turn straight down", not because they aren't intelligent, smart and capable (they are) but because they haven't had life experiences to temper their ramblings.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Our children, many of whom have been sheltered and protected. Our middle-class, over-educated, overprotected children. foolish children. Who tend to forget that they are just one white person's breath away from being "just another nigger". . . from one paycheck away from being poor.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong. I respect the intellectual capabilities of our children. . . but intellectual musings have to be tempered by the cold hard realities of experience. I have two children. I know that they are intelligent and capable even brilliant. . . I also know that they sometimes say foolish things. . . that comes from the lack of experience.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"Wait", I say "Come back to me when you are 35, 45, 55. Let me see what you think then when you are tired, in trouble and the world is biting you in the ass."&nbsp;</p>
<p>Everyone comes back eventually. . . even if it is for a short period.&nbsp;</p>
<p>OJ came running back to his family. . . . Clarence Thomas. . brought out the image of lynching a black man when&nbsp; he needed being black . . . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>Everyone eventually comes back. . . even if it is merely a self-serving moment.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When I hear individuals talk about their lack of identification with African Americans.&nbsp;</p>
<p>I think - - Wait.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But what's our excused.&nbsp; We aren't young.&nbsp; Why are we obsessed with what he [Tiger Woods] calls or does not call himself. . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>My niece. . decided when she was eight that she didn't want to be called Kuya. . she wanted a name like the other kids. . so she started calling herself "Mary" We did not obsess over her comment. . . we saw it for what it was. . a child not wanting to be different. . We laugh. . teased her little bit. .. and continued to call her "Kuya" all her friends called her Mary. Now Kuya is 23. She is proud of her name and has named her daughter RuKiya. . . I laugh .. asked her. "I thought you would have named her Mary." She laughed. . . and said. . "Oh that was just a phase"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Why are we obsessed what a child calls him or herself? is it because it is our obsession too. As a culture, we are still young. African Americans are the youngest culture on the face of the earth. We were only born into being in the last 300 years. We are still growing and developing and defining. Perhaps its not obsession but normal growing pains?&nbsp;</p>
<p>Of course a person can call himself (or herself) whatever she (or he) wants?&nbsp; It doesn't change who she or he is?&nbsp;</p>
<p>We can call ourselves whatever we want&nbsp;</p>
<p>nigger Negro colored black Afro-American African-American Americans&nbsp; it doesn't change who we are.&nbsp;</p>
<p>We are&nbsp; . . a proud strong culture&nbsp; . . a survival culture&nbsp; . . a culture of acceptance&nbsp;</p>
<p>When white people kicked their children out because they had a drop of black blood&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . we accepted them&nbsp;</p>
<p>When Natives kicked their children out because they had a drop of black blood&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . we accepted them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When Asians kicked their children out because they had a drop of black blood&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p>. . we accepted them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>We are wonderful&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .courageous&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .generous&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .strong&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .survivors</p>
<p>Whatever our ancestry. . . we should be proud to claim being black.</p>
<p>There are no others like us on the face of the earth!!</p></summary>
<content type="html"><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=6204241" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva; font-size: 10pt;">Become a </span></strong><strong>Patron!&nbsp;</strong></a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: left;">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Vernellia Randall,&nbsp;On Obsessions or When Being Black Is Not Enough (1997).</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><img style="margin: 10px; float: left;" src="https://racism.org/images/Portraits/vernelliarandall2015.jpg" alt="vernelliarandall2015" width="200" height="266" />&nbsp;When I was growing up our obsession was skin color. You were a good skin color if you were "paper sack brown" or lighter. My foster mother made a comment to me that my sister, brother and I were close enough to being "paper sack brown" that we would be okay. She said "you are lucky that you aren't very dark skin".&nbsp;</p>
<p>When I was nineteen (and working at her bar) I met a young man in service whom I like a lot. He was very dark skin - "blue black". He had a friend who was "so light he could be white". My mother was beside herself. "Why", she asks "do you have to like the dark one?" "If you have children with him" she shouted, "they will be too dark!" I remember saying to her: "The Blacker the berry the sweeter the juice." And she retorted - "Yeah, but who wants diabetes"&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . The black obsession of the '40s, 50's, 60's - skin color.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Yet, being too light was also a problem. . . black people would accuse light skin people of "thinking you were white." My birth mother's family could claim multi-racial status if they were of this generation. My mother died when I was really young. But I recently comment to an aunt that all of them except one married very dark men. . . . . "how did that happen?" . . . I asked. . My aunt said, "I don't think it was deliberate. . . but it was hard growing up light skin in the '20s and the '30s. Being light skin can mean being too dark for whites- too light for blacks.&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . . The Black obsession of the '20s and 30's - skin color.&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . I first notice the resurgent of the obsession over skin color on television (about 10 years ago). "Have you noticed" I commented to my son Tshaka " that on MTV all the black women are very light skin and all the black men are very dark. What's with that? Have you notice that except for comics and singers black actors are pretty much limited to light skin women, dark skin men?" Then I notice the personal ads. . "Wanted professional black men (honey tone). ."&nbsp;</p>
<p>honey tone (hmmm now ain't that something)&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . So, being "black and proud" is fading to "if you are black step back". . . And we disguise our obsession in the trap of ancestry. "I am African, Native, Italian", we announce proudly. . . Who isn't I think? Black people by definition are mongrels.&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . .The obsession of the '80s and 90's skin color - disguised in ancestry.&nbsp;</p>
<p>African American - a made-up name - for a made-up people. True Africans have tribal connections. . We were snatched, sold, stolen from different tribes. We were forced to develop kinship relationship with people whom we had nothing in common but the color of our skin. We were force to give up language, religion, customs and all apparent sign of our former culture. Over the years into our rank came any person who had "one drop" of black blood. Our collective ancestry includes every ethnic, national and racial group on the face of the earth. Our defining factor is our black ancestry and our culture born out of American racism and slavery.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But slavery and racism have made us obsess with color. Where the benefits of society is distributed by skin color. . . then we want more. . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>Where jobs and resources in a society are distributed based on color? Not just black and white but shades of black? We want more. . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>What we are, is not good enough.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Like the hungry orphans in David Copperfield&nbsp; - we want more&nbsp;</p>
<p>"Can I have more please?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>French, Spanish, Japanese?&nbsp; "More Ancestry?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Italian, Chinese, Thai.?&nbsp; "More Please?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Irish, Swedish, Navajo?&nbsp; "MORE PLEASE?"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Cherokee, Russian, British?&nbsp; "MORE, MORE, MORE PLEASE!!!!!"</p>
<p>Obsessed with skin color, ancestry, full of self-hate and self-doubt.&nbsp;</p>
<p>So we let our children divert us into an obssessive conversation about who or what is Black. Children, who may be grown, but "who wouldn't know how to pour piss out of their boots if the direction says turn straight down", not because they aren't intelligent, smart and capable (they are) but because they haven't had life experiences to temper their ramblings.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Our children, many of whom have been sheltered and protected. Our middle-class, over-educated, overprotected children. foolish children. Who tend to forget that they are just one white person's breath away from being "just another nigger". . . from one paycheck away from being poor.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong. I respect the intellectual capabilities of our children. . . but intellectual musings have to be tempered by the cold hard realities of experience. I have two children. I know that they are intelligent and capable even brilliant. . . I also know that they sometimes say foolish things. . . that comes from the lack of experience.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"Wait", I say "Come back to me when you are 35, 45, 55. Let me see what you think then when you are tired, in trouble and the world is biting you in the ass."&nbsp;</p>
<p>Everyone comes back eventually. . . even if it is for a short period.&nbsp;</p>
<p>OJ came running back to his family. . . . Clarence Thomas. . brought out the image of lynching a black man when&nbsp; he needed being black . . . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>Everyone eventually comes back. . . even if it is merely a self-serving moment.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When I hear individuals talk about their lack of identification with African Americans.&nbsp;</p>
<p>I think - - Wait.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But what's our excused.&nbsp; We aren't young.&nbsp; Why are we obsessed with what he [Tiger Woods] calls or does not call himself. . .&nbsp;</p>
<p>My niece. . decided when she was eight that she didn't want to be called Kuya. . she wanted a name like the other kids. . so she started calling herself "Mary" We did not obsess over her comment. . . we saw it for what it was. . a child not wanting to be different. . We laugh. . teased her little bit. .. and continued to call her "Kuya" all her friends called her Mary. Now Kuya is 23. She is proud of her name and has named her daughter RuKiya. . . I laugh .. asked her. "I thought you would have named her Mary." She laughed. . . and said. . "Oh that was just a phase"&nbsp;</p>
<p>Why are we obsessed what a child calls him or herself? is it because it is our obsession too. As a culture, we are still young. African Americans are the youngest culture on the face of the earth. We were only born into being in the last 300 years. We are still growing and developing and defining. Perhaps its not obsession but normal growing pains?&nbsp;</p>
<p>Of course a person can call himself (or herself) whatever she (or he) wants?&nbsp; It doesn't change who she or he is?&nbsp;</p>
<p>We can call ourselves whatever we want&nbsp;</p>
<p>nigger Negro colored black Afro-American African-American Americans&nbsp; it doesn't change who we are.&nbsp;</p>
<p>We are&nbsp; . . a proud strong culture&nbsp; . . a survival culture&nbsp; . . a culture of acceptance&nbsp;</p>
<p>When white people kicked their children out because they had a drop of black blood&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . . we accepted them&nbsp;</p>
<p>When Natives kicked their children out because they had a drop of black blood&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . we accepted them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When Asians kicked their children out because they had a drop of black blood&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p>. . we accepted them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>We are wonderful&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .courageous&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .generous&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .strong&nbsp;</p>
<p>. . .survivors</p>
<p>Whatever our ancestry. . . we should be proud to claim being black.</p>
<p>There are no others like us on the face of the earth!!</p></content>
<category term="Africans and African Descendents" />
</entry>
</feed>