AMERIKKKA Built on Black Bodies: The U.S. Denies the UN’s Recognition of Slavery as Humanity’s Gravest Crime

On March 25th, 2026, the United States of America has demonstrated a persistent and shameless pattern of denying its participation in crimes against humanity, both historical and ongoing, in an effort to evade accountability for the atrocities inflicted upon the human race. In 2026, as a veteran and a member of a generation committed to the pursuit of global justice, I remain deeply disheartened by the United States representative’s public refusal to acknowledge that the nation’s actions against African peoples constituted illegality under prevailing principles of international law. The rhetoric deployed in that denial was not merely inappropriate, but it was dangerously revisionist. I write to correct the record, to assert the primacy of truth in shaping historical consciousness, and to reclaim the narrative that rightfully belongs to those whose ancestors built this nation. In exercising my moral and civic authority, I speak truth to power, with the conviction that our collective liberation depends on exposing institutional falsehoods and affirming historical justice until our final breath.

The United States’ rejection of the United Nations resolution on reparatory justice for the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trade, as articulated by Ambassador Dan Negrea before the Economic and Social Council, represents a legally deficient, historically revisionist, and morally indefensible position. This article systematically dismantles each of the Ambassador’s and other nations that abstained central claims through the lens of natural law jurisprudence, the historical evolution of jus cogens norms, the early legislative abolition of slavery across multiple sovereigns as early as the late seventeenth century, and the documented demographic devastation wrought upon African peoples through the slave trade, colonial genocide, forced cultural erasure, miscegenation by compulsion, cannibalism perpetrated by colonial agents, and chattel slavery. The cumulative toll of hundreds of millions of African lives lost or permanently destroyed constitutes the largest human rights catastrophe in recorded history. The assertion that slavery was not ‘illegal under international law at the time’ is exposed as a stratagem of power, not a statement of law. Law is invariably the product of those who wield the pen and the sword simultaneously. The United States’ vote against accountability is a political act to continue the terror on human lives.

As declared by Ambassador Dan Negrea:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The United States remains steadfast in its opposition to and condemnation of the historic wrongs that resulted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the trans-Saharan slave trade, and all other forms of slavery. We remain committed to the acknowledgement that these are historical wrongs. Despite this, the United States observes that the text of this resolution remains highly problematic in countless respects. Consequently, the United States cannot support the adoption of this resolution. We regret that the United States must once again remind this body that the United Nations exists to maintain international peace and security. It was not founded to advance narrow, specific interests and agendas, to establish niche international days, or to create new costly meeting and reporting mandates. This resolution does all three.  The United States has defined, long-standing objections to the framing of “reparatory justice” and the “duty of reparation” for historical wrongs. While we acknowledge the horrors of the past, we do not accept this resolution’s assertion that historical facts from the 15th through 19th centuries constitute violations of jus cogens as that term is understood in contemporary international law. The United States also does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.

The argument that the resolution violates jus cogens as it is understood in contemporary international law is constructed to appear legally sophisticated while actually obscuring the relevant question of whether the norms that jus cogens codifies existed as binding moral and legal obligations before their positive law articulation. Let us begin with the legal record. Vermont, in its constitution of 1777, became the first jurisdiction in the Americas to abolish slavery absolutely. The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 provided for the progressive manumission of enslaved persons. Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Jennison (1783) that slavery was incompatible with the state’s constitution. These are not diplomatic aspirations — they are binding legal instruments within the jurisdictions that enacted them. The Roman law prohibition sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas, meaning, “use your own property so as not to harm another’s,” established that even private rights carry public oblications. Francisco de Vitoria, the sixteenth century Dominican theologian and jurist widely regarded as the founder of international law, argued in his Relectio de Indis (1532) that indigenous people cound not be lawfully enslaved because they possessed inherent rational nature, a quality that entitled them to legal personhood irrespective of any soverign enactment. Hugo Grotius, in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), articulated that certain universal moral norms bound soverigns regardless of their positive legislation. Samuel von Pufendorf, in De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672), was even more explicit of natural law, arguing, precedes and supersedes the will of rulers, and the enslavement of persons without basis in just war or voluntary contract violated those natural rights.

The transatlantic and trans-indian slave trade involved the mass kidnapping, forcible transportation, branding, torture, sexual exploitation, and commodification of hundreds of millions of innocent persons, manifestly violateds every principle of natural law as articulated by the foremost jurists of the era in which it was conducted. Ambassador Negrea’s refusal to recognize this constitutes t a political choice. This choice is a privilege of narrow positivist reading of jus cogens over the substantive moral tradition from which that doctrine emerged. On the international stage, the historical record is equally clear. Denmark, by Royal Ordinance of King Christian VII on March 16, 1792, became the first European colonial power to formally prohibit participation in the transatlantic slave trade, with the prohibition taking effect in 1803. Britain followed with the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The United States itself, in the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves of 1807 (effective January 1, 1808), declared the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States a federal crime. If the trade was ‘not illegal under international law,’ why did the United States criminalize it — and why did that prohibition exist before the nineteenth century had barely begun?

Moreover, the Concert of Europe’s Congress of Vienna Declaration of February 8, 1815 formally condemned the slave trade as ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’ — language that invokes precisely the natural law tradition that preceded and underpinned jus cogens doctrine. Bilateral anti-slave trade treaties proliferated through the first half of the nineteenth century. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 between the United States and Britain established joint naval patrols for suppression of the trade. By mid-century, the slave trade was criminalized by the domestic law of most maritime nations and condemned by the explicit treaty obligations of the same.

To argue that an institution condemned by leading natural law theorists since the sixteenth century, formally prohibited by the first European colonial state in 1792, outlawed by Britain and the United States in 1807-1808, and condemned by the Concert of Europe in 1815 was ‘not illegal under international law’ requires a conception of international law so narrow as to be uninhabitable by truth.

-NKOZIA X

In addition to its obvious legal problems, this resolution is also unclear as to whom the recipients of “reparatory justice” would be. The drafters and supporters of this resolution seem to believe it is them. The United States strongly objects to the cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point in an attempt to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims.

Ambassador Negrea characterizes advocates for reparatory justice as people who ‘cynically’ use historical wrongs to ‘reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims.’ This framing demands scrutiny at every level.

First, ‘distantly related’ is factually and legally inadequate as a standard for the extinguishment of claims arising from state-sponsored or state-sanctioned wrongs. The International Court of Justice’s jurisprudence on state responsibility, codified in the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility (2001) does not require that claimants be the direct victims of historical wrongs in order to establish entitlement to remedies. States themselves bear continuing obligations arising from internationally wrongful acts, and those obligations survive changes in government, generation, and demographic composition. Germany’s ongoing reparations to the State of Israel and to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, obligations that the United States itself championed, rest upon precisely this framework.

Second, the Ambassador’s characterization ignores the legally recognized doctrine of unjust enrichment. The wealth generated by enslaved African labor by the cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice, and indigo economies that funded the industrial revolution in Britain and the United States was historical. However, it constituted the capital base upon which modern financial institutions, insurance companies, universities, infrastructure, and commercial empires were built. The Bank of England, Lloyd’s of London, Yale University, Georgetown University, The White House, and the very architecture of Wall Street bear the structural imprint of unpaid enslaved labor. The descendants of the enslaved lost the accumulated wealth, property, and opportunity that those ancestors would have generated across generations absent the institution of slavery along with their lives. This is compound interest on an unpaid debt. As stated at the outset of these negotiations, the United States also strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy. The assertion that some crimes against humanity are less severe than others objectively diminishes the suffering of countless victims and survivors of other atrocities throughout history. This is not a competition. This attempted ranking is also simply incorrect and disgustingly inappropriate as a matter of law.

The Ambassador states that the United States ‘objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy,’ arguing that this ‘diminishes the suffering of countless victims.’ The United States itself regularly engages in the hierarchical treatment of atrocitie providing specific legislative protections, diplomatic recognition, and financial reparations for some historical crimes while categorically opposing accountability for others.

The United States has consistently supported Holocaust reparations, Comfort Women recognition, Asian rights and reparations, indigenous reparations, and Armenian Genocide acknowledgment in various legislative and diplomatic contexts. The argument against a ‘hierarchy’ of crimes is mobilized exclusively when the victims are African. This selective universalism is racial selectivity wearing the mask of legal principle. The United States would also like to express disappointment in the arbitrarily historical perspective of the text. Trafficking of African slaves began long before the 15th century and sadly continued even after the 19th. These dates were clearly selected for political reasons rather than historical accuracy. All trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans deserves to be condemned, not merely the politically expedient. Also, there are some fake news articles suggesting that the sponsors of this resolution called into question President Trump’s support of the Black community. We reject any such suggestions. Indeed, President Trump has done more for Black Americans than any other president and enjoyed historic support from the Black community in the 2024 election. He is working around the clock to deliver for them and make our country greater than ever.

The inclusion, in an official diplomatic statement at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, of the claim that ‘President Trump has done more for Black Americans than any other president’ is without precedent in the formal record of U.S. multilateral diplomacy. It is a domestic political talking point, interjected into a forum concerned with global human rights obligations, for the evident purpose of deflecting from the substantive legal and moral questions raised by the resolution. Its presence in the Ambassador’s statement is itself evidence of the absence of substantive legal arguments sufficient to justify the U.S. position. When the diplomatic brief runs out of law, it reaches for politics. The United States chose, at a moment of profound historical reckoning before the international community, to make a campaign advertisement that was a blanket lie.

Finally, we must express our deep disappointment regarding the process that led to this text. Throughout drafting, the United States and other delegations offered constructive contributions aimed at aligning the text with established international legal frameworks. These contributions were ignored. For these reasons, the United States will vote “no” on this resolution. Thank you.

In the American context, the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857 rendered by the Supreme Court of a nation whose founding documents proclaimed all men to be created equal, held that persons of African heritage ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ This was law. This was the positive legal order of the United States. And it was wrong. It was not merely wrong by contemporary standards; it was wrong by the standards of the natural law tradition that the Founders themselves invoked when they styled their revolution as a recovery of inalienable rights. If natural law could justify revolution against a distant sovereign, it could not simultaneously immunize the enslavement of hundreds of millions, unless one accepted that African people were categorically excluded from its protections. That exclusion was itself a legal choice, made by persons who had every interest in making it.

The legal philosopher Roberto Unger observed that law operates as a ‘frozen politics’ and the crystallization of prior political settlements into normative structures that present themselves as neutral and universal while encoding the specific preferences of the politically dominant. The transatlantic slave trade was sustained by exactly this mechanism: the preferences of European maritime powers and New World planter classes were encoded as law, and the resulting legal order was then cited as evidence that no legal wrong had occurred. Ambassador Negrea’s argument belongs in this tradition.

The Nuremberg Principles, accepted by the United Nations General Assembly in resolution 95(I) of 1946, established that individuals could be held criminally liable for crimes against humanity even when those crimes were committed in conformity with domestic law. The principle was articulated precisely because the Nazi legal order had been used to authorize atrocity, and the international community recognized that the legality of a domestic legal system could not insulate its conduct from moral and legal accountability. The same logic applies to the legal systems that authorized, regulated, and enforced chattel slavery. Their posited legality is not a defense it is the indictment.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Middle Passage and Its Dead

The Slave Voyages Database, the most comprehensive scholarly instrument for the quantification of transatlantic slave trade data, drawing on records from 34,948 individual voyages, documents the following baseline estimates:

Africans forcibly embarked on slave ships, 1501–1866: Approximately 12.5 million

Africans who survived to disembark in the Americas: Approximately 10.7 million

Deaths during the Middle Passage alone: Approximately 1.8–2.2 million

Deaths during capture and forced march to the coast: Estimated 820,000+

Deaths in coastal slave forts (’factories’) awaiting embarkation: Estimated 400,000–600,000

Deaths during first year of enslavement (’seasoning’): Estimated 300,000–500,000

These figures represent only the direct mortality attributable to the trade. They do not capture the downstream deaths from overwork, malnutrition, medical neglect, punishment, and systematic dehumanization that characterized the institution of slavery once established in the Americas. I believe these numbers are way more than we can ever comprehend or grasp due to inaccurate and lack of record keeping. Historian Patrick Manning’s demographic modeling estimates that approximately 4 million additional Africans died inside Africa as a direct result of slave-raiding warfare, forced marches, and coastal imprisonment deaths that occurred before any enslaved person ever set foot on a European ship. Among the most profound and least discussed dimensions of Middle Passage mortality is the deliberate choice of death over enslavement made by tens of thousands of Africans aboard slave ships.

Cultural Genocide and Systemic Erasure

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) which the United States initially opposed and only endorsed in 2010 recognizes that cultural genocide encompasses the forcible destruction of a people’s language, religion, cultural practices, and collective identity. By every metric established by that declaration and by the broader scholarly literature on cultural destruction, the transatlantic slave trade and its associated colonial systems perpetrated cultural genocide against African peoples on a civilizational scale.

An estimated 6,000 African languages exist today. The languages of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were systematically suppressed by inhumane slaveholders who recognized, correctly, that shared language enabled communication, collective organization, and resistance. Prisoner of War that were Africans from the same linguistic communities were deliberately separated at auction to prevent the formation of cohesive groups capable of coordinated action. Those who spoke their native languages were beaten. Children born in captivity were raised in the language of their enslavers. Within two generations, the linguistic heritage of the majority of enslaved African Americans had been irretrievably lost through systematic violent suppression.

The Gullah Geechee language of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands preserved by a community of descendants of enslaved Africans who were, by geographic accident, somewhat less subject to the linguistic suppression that characterized mainland slavery offers a glimpse of what was lost elsewhere. It is not a curiosity; it is a survival. The languages it incorporates Mende, Igbo, Yoruba, Wolof, Fula, Mandinka represent the linguistic heritage of millions of people who were denied the right to speak them.

A dimension of cultural genocide that receives insufficient scholarly attention is the deliberate erasure of African epistemological systems in the ways in which African peoples organized, transmitted, and validated knowledge. The medicine of Congolese traditional healers, the navigational knowledge of West African mariners, the agricultural science embedded in indigenous African farming systems, the architectural and engineering knowledge encoded in structures like the Great Zimbabwe. They were sophisticated systems of understanding the world, developed over millennia, that colonial conquest either dismissed as superstition, appropriated without attribution, or actively destroyed.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, at which European powers drew the boundaries of Africa with no reference to existing African political, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural geography, constitutes perhaps the most comprehensive act of epistemological violence in recorded history and the declaration, by people with guns, that the human geography of an entire continent was legally invisible. The boundaries drawn at Berlin which the postcolonial African Union has largely maintained as a matter of practical stability remain the structural inheritance of that act of erasure.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES…

Notes on Sources and Methodology

Demographic estimates in this article draw primarily from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Slave Voyages, slavevoyages.org), the demographic modeling of Patrick Manning (Slavery and African Life, 1990), Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), Jan-Bart Gewald’s Herero Heroes (1999), and the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility (2001). Where estimates vary significantly across scholarly sources, this article presents ranges rather than single figures and identifies the methodological basis for each range.

The legal analysis draws on the primary texts of Hugo Grotius (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625), Samuel von Pufendorf (De Jure Naturae et Gentium, 1672), Emmerich de Vattel (Le Droit des Gens, 1758), the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility (2001), the Nuremberg Principles (UNGA Res. 95(I), 1946), and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).

Quotations from Ambassador Negrea’s statement are taken from the text as publicly released by the United States Mission to the United Nations, designated ‘AS DELIVERED,’ and are treated as the official position of the United States Government before the Economic and Social Council.

The author acknowledges that ‘reparatory justice’ encompasses a wide range of possible remedies from direct financial payments to investments in education, infrastructure, and institutional development in affected communities and nations and that the appropriate form and quantum of remedy is a matter of ongoing scholarly and political debate. This article arguements are limited to the legal obligation to engage with the question in good faith, which the United States has declined to do.