Oral Statement to the 57th Session of the Commission on Human Rights
14. Specific Groups and Individuals: (b) Minorities
Greetings, Mr. Chairman. I have come to the UN, from the United States, where stands the Statue of Liberty. I do not say statue of Liberty in mockery. Liberty is an important word to me, and I hope it has a meaning to each and every one of you. We, African Americans, were, and are still mentally, politically and economically deprived, as every scholar knows. We were captured in slavery. My question is, do we now fit in the category of minority, or national minority or a people? Four hundred years of plantation slavery and its lingering effects have left us deprived and denied the use of our 'mother tongue', and thus, OUTSIDE OF a definite place within the UN system.
We are all from a common a territory, Africa, and from many tribes who spoke many languages. Like the Indigenous Americans, who were colonized and are receiving recognition as peoples, and reparations, we recognize ourselves as a "race" of people, by virtue of our origin and other commonalties and traits: the sufferance of slavery and its legacies, and the feeling of difference (or otherness) from the majority. We are not in control of our intellectual future, or our political and economic future. It would be impossible for the United States to implement a prayer for the reconstruction of our 'mother tongue', owing to forced breeding between slaves. We are without a definite identity, as to tribe, nation or people.
The international community does well understand that human dignity is attached to identity. We African Americans do not know where we fit. And what is more, I have learned, the United Nations does not know where we fit.
To this date and time we are denied, and deprived, the human right of speaking our 'mother tongue' in violation of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. has ratified. Therefore, our prayer is for reparations, for the damage suffered, during this ongoing legal, and moral wrong. We ask that the Commission on Human Rights hear us as we demand our choice of reconstituting ourselves. May the Commission on Human Rights find a category within which we fit, or make a category in which we will fit? For the acts of wrong that the U.S. Government has committed against the very character of the UN -- HUMAN RIGHTS for everyone, everywhere -- we recommend a reparations sanction.
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