The United States joined Israel and Argentina on Thursday in voting against a Ghana-led resolution that declared the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans the “gravest crime against humanity” and urged countries to pursue reparations.
The nonbinding measure, backed by more than 120 nations, calls for formal apologies, compensation, and other forms of reparatory justice for people of African descent worldwide. The measure explicitly links centuries of slavery to today’s anti-Black racism and economic inequality.
Washington’s refusal to support it puts the U.S. at odds with much of the Global South and with Black reparations advocates at home, who see the vote as a rare opening for global accountability on slavery’s enduring harms and a test of U.S. leaders’ stated commitments to racial justice.
Last year, Elisha Fye Jr. told Capital B that he felt Black Americans deserved reparations because of the proximity to slavery and Jim Crow era policies. His father, Elisha Sr., was born on a plantation in 1918 and was one of 14 children in a family of sharecroppers who toiled all year for just $200 and a share of the crops in Vidalia, Georgia.
“I’m looking for reparations for my father, who passed away when he still wasn’t allowed to walk on the same sidewalk as a white person,” said Fye Jr., a public housing resident in New York City.
In remarks before the vote, U.S. Ambassador Dan Negrea condemned slavery, but called the text “highly problematic in countless respects.” He said Washington “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.” Israel opposed language it said downplayed other atrocities, namely the Holocaust. The United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union were among those that abstained from voting.
Ghana’s president, John Mahama, who introduced the resolution last year, pointed to the fact that schools across the U.S. are being discouraged from teaching and talking about slavery and racism. The resolution, he said, is “a safeguard against forgetting.”
Negrea objected to what he described as attempts by the sponsors to question the U.S. and President Donald Trump’s record with Black Americans, insisting Trump “has done more for Black Americans than any other president.”
Black reparations advocates in America have long said that the U.S. stance exposes a widening gap between rhetoric on racial justice and its ability to offer true material repair. Organizers have pushed for a federal reparations commission and backed city-level efforts in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and California. But as racial justice commitments made in 2020 have waned, so has support for reparations policies.
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