For the past several decades, the United States has played a key role in confounding a growing movement seeking reparative justice for slavery, colonialism, and persisting structures of racial inequality. Even as sentiment among much of the international community has shifted in favor of reparations, the United States remains one of the world’s leading opponents.
Acting on multiple levels, the United States has stood in the way of a domestic movement that has spent decades fighting for reparations, an international effort that has laid the foundation for reparative justice, and a progressive interpretation of international law that holds that states are legally obligated to make reparations for colonialism and slavery.
“Reparations are a vital aspect of a global order genuinely committed to the inherent dignity of all, irrespective of race, ethnicity or national origin,” Achiume told the U.N. General Assembly.
“Ultimately, the difficult truth is that the greatest barrier to reparations for colonialism and slavery is that the biggest beneficiaries of both lack the political will and moral courage to pursue these reparations,” Tendayi Achiume, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on racism, told the U.N. General Assembly last year.
In the United States, calls for reparations are rooted in unfulfilled promises made by the U.S. government to emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Although the federal government awarded monetary compensation to those who formerly enslaved Black people, it largely failed in its pledge, under Special Field Order No. 15, to provide reparations to emancipated slaves, many of whom should have received forty acres of land and a mule to help work it.
Since the 1960s, a number of Black leaders in the United States have revived calls for reparations, particularly over the ongoing racial terror and injustice that Black Americans experience. From 1989 to 2017, U.S. Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, repeatedly introduced into Congress H.R. 40, a bill that called for the creation of a commission to develop proposals for reparations.
In 2014, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates significantly re-energized the movement with his essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” in which he argued that reparations would create “a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”
Although President Barack Obama dealt the movement a major blow in 2016 when he told Coates that he opposed reparations, many advocates remained undeterred. Last year, prior to Conyers’s death in October, U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, reintroduced H.R. 40 and organized an unprecedented Congressional hearing on reparations, welcoming Coates and others to discuss the growing calls for reparative justice.
“Reparations quite simply mean to repair that which has been broken,” the retired Reverend Eugene Taylor Sutton explained. “It is not just about monetary compensation. An act of reparation is an attempt to make whole again, to restore, to offer atonement, to make amends, to reconcile for a wrong or injury.”
But even before the hearing began, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, made it clear he would oppose any efforts to move the country toward reparations. “I don’t think reparations are a good idea,” McConnell said. Indeed, Congress, under his leadership, has done nothing to act on H.R. 40.
Beyond its domestic failure on reparations, the United States has played an obstructionist role on the international stage, effectively preventing the international community from requiring former colonial powers to make reparations for slavery and the slave trade. Specifically, the United States has staunchly opposed the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA), an international plan crafted in 2001 that lays the basis for reparative justice.
“The U.S. has consistently opposed the call for reparations for a variety of reasons, and will continue to do so,” Wood said in a statement to Congress.
Supported by most of the world, the DDPA provides an extensive set of recommendations for achieving racial justice. It calls on nations to create national plans to eliminate racism, adopt measures to address racial discrimination, implement programs to ensure racial inclusivity, and provide compensation to victims of racial injustice.
“That document, the Durban Declaration, is one of the most important documents that has been produced by the U.N. on issues to do with reparations,” Achiume said during a press conference last year.
In March 2002, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of the DDPA, passing a resolution with a vote of 134 to two. The two countries that voted against the resolution were the United States and Israel. Australia and Canada abstained.
For the past two decades, the leaders of the United States have presented two basic objections to the DDPA. First, they have argued that the DDPA unfairly criticizes Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Second, they have said that the international plan could require the United States to pay reparations for slavery.
In 2001, State Department official William B. Wood pointed to draft texts that contained inflammatory language about Israel and complained about “extreme and unbalanced language relating to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and calling for reparations or compensation.”
“The U.S. has consistently opposed the call for reparations for a variety of reasons, and will continue to do so,” Wood said in a statement to Congress.
Notably, the final version of the DDPA did not include any inflammatory language about Israel, but the administration of George W. Bush still opposed the measure. Administration officials pointed to the World Conference Against Racism in 2001, which had been tarnished by racist acts toward Israel, but some observers speculated that the Bush Administration remained primarily concerned about language in the DDPA that opened the door to reparations.
“The nations of the European Union and the United States were very concerned, going into the U.N. World Conference, about the tenor and content of any discussion of the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” law professor Anthony J. Sebok reported.
The election of Barack Obama in November 2008 created new hope that the United States would look favorably on reparative justice. But the new administration announced in February 2009 that it would not participate in a major review conference on the DDPA.
In an internal memo, the State Department complained that “the text still contains language that reaffirms in toto the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.” It cited problems with the document’s length as well as language about Israel, restrictions on hateful speech, and pursuit of reparations.
The Obama Administration’s stance shocked many of its supporters. “For many antiracist campaigners,” journalist Naomi Klein reported, “the realization that Obama might not be the leader they had hoped for came when he announced his administration would be boycotting the U.N. Durban Review Conference on racism.”
Despite these setbacks, supporters of the DDPA continued to build international support for the initiative. They regularly introduced U.N. resolutions in support of reparative justice.
Last year, the U.N. General Assembly passed a widely supported resolution that called on the world to take concrete action to eliminate racism. The resolution included a statement that welcomed a call upon former colonial powers to make reparations for slavery and the slave trade.
Once again, the United States stood in opposition, casting one of the small number of votes against the resolution. The United States “categorically reject[s] the resolution’s welcoming a call for ‘former colonial Powers’ to provide reparations ‘consistent with’ the DDPA,” U.S. Counselor Jason Mack explained.
The Trump Administration’s opposition to the DDPA remains one of the main obstacles to reparative justice.
Finally, U.S. officials have reinforced their obstructionist position by ignoring growing calls by independent experts for states to shift their understanding of their obligations under international law. While opponents of reparations often cite international law to deflect U.S. responsibility, many experts now argue that international law requires former colonial powers to make reparations.
Last year, U.N. Special Rapporteur Achiume published a landmark report calling on governments to make reparations for slavery, colonialism, and ongoing racial injustice. Calling on states to reject “neocolonial law,” which perpetuates neocolonial dynamics, Achiume argued that states should understand international law as a framework for achieving justice.
“Reparations are a vital aspect of a global order genuinely committed to the inherent dignity of all, irrespective of race, ethnicity or national origin,” Achiume told the U.N. General Assembly.
Although Achiume’s report has been ignored by the U.S. government, it now stands as one of the strongest calls in the world in favor of reparative justice. Following the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, a group of sixty-six United Nations human rights monitors cited the report in a joint statement.
“Reparative intervention for historical and contemporary racial injustice is urgent, and required by international human rights law,” they wrote.
Momentum continues to build in favor of reparations; much of the international community now supports reparative justice. But sadly, the United States, which claims to be the standard-bearer for freedom and justice around the world, has been one of its greatest obstacles.