World Conference Against Racism

World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,

Xenophobia and Related Intolerance

Oral intervention under provisional agenda theme 5:

Provision of effective remedies, recourse, redress, (compensatory) and other measures

at the national, regional and international level

We recommend a forum for the African American people: those who, due to our merciful parents, are the descendants of slaves, throughout North America, Central and South America, and the Diaspora. We recommend that a trust fund be established for activities under this forum, funded by all governments in which we are domiciled, or by any government or person[s] sympathetic to our quest for human rights.

We did not come to the Americas willingly, and we did not come as Christians, speaking English, Spanish, Portuguese or French. We are all from a common territory, Africa, where we are from many tribes who spoke many languages. The Indigenous Americans, who spoke many languages, and who were colonized, are now receiving reparations and should be receiving full recognition as peoples. We African Americans want to be restored, and recognized, and this is a form of reparations which can be examined and defined more completely in a forum. We are lost from our origins in Africa. Four hundred years of slavery, coupled with forced breeding between slaves and the slave masters, produced a people who have lost more than their independent character. It produced a people whose children are lost from their identity: mother tongue, religion and culture. We African Americans, who are the victims of slavery, will not mortgage the future of our generations to come.

For the past four years the UN Working Group on Minorities has been hard at work to find out where we fit, and to help us obtain a UN recognized identity. If my humble opinion may serve any use, let the name which identifies African Americans in the UN be "LOST FOUND Peoples." There is no question that we were lost, and that the Working Group on Minorities has been trying to find a place where we fit.

We urgently recommend that the World Conference Against Racism declare a decade to consider our issues, including whether "LOST FOUND Peoples" is the term that best identifies us: as at present, we have no UN collective human rights.