Oral Statement to the 52nd Session of the Sub-Commission
on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, August 2000
Agenda Item 8, Minorities
We appreciate and applaud the efforts of the Working Group on Minorities and we join with them in the recommendation that a Regional Seminar for the Americas be held in order to examine the issues of African-Americans, in the Americas. Thirty-one African-American organizations from the grassroots to the intellectual elite stand with us today in support of the proposed Regional Seminar for the Americas.
I came to the Sub-Commission to seek recognition that we, the so-called African-Americans, do not fit the UN established definition of human beings, in the category of minority or as a People. The United States has the UN under the belief that we do fit, one or the other, in that the US asserts that the UN is in charge of promoting and protecting the inherent rights of human beings - everyone, everywhere. To the extent that we do not fit the UN definition, presently, the UN definition is in need of expansion to also include us. For we have not our original ‘mother tongue’, culture nor religion, thus, no identity: due to the lingering effects of plantation slavery. We are but clones of the Anglo-Saxon in the United States. During slavery, we were forced to speak the Anglo-Saxon’s mother tongue, and practice their religion and culture. Our human rights were destroyed.
Therefore, like the Indigenous People, it is our preference to be reinstated as a "people," in that we have been historically categorized by continental ancestry, from which territory we were shackled and removed. We invoked that characteristic in order to obtain our rights. Notwithstanding, we have brought our prayer to the Working Group on Minorities, as it has been entrusted with the task of promoting and protecting rights of minorities, in which category we are placed in the US. We support the notion that "Race" is a constituent element of the definition of a minority. My people are the living evidence of a group with a consciousness of " otherness," of difference, having been victims of four hundred years of plantation slavery, by the rigor of "Racial" grouping.
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