Colombia's VP calls on former colonial powers to confront past as UN forum opens
By Catarina Demony
(Reuters) - Colombia's Vice President Francia Marquez, an advocate of slavery reparations, urged former colonial powers to take responsibility for their past wrongs as a United Nations forum on people of African descent opened in New York on Monday.
"Colonial states, states that fostered... that form of domination based on the definition of race have to assume the responsibility of restoring the human dignity of people of African descent," Marquez told Reuters in an interview.
While the issue of reparations has gained momentum worldwide, from Africa to the Caribbean, so has the backlash. Many of Europe's leaders have opposed even talking about reparations.
Marquez, a celebrated environmental activist, was elected in 2022 and is Colombia's first Black woman vice president.
At least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped, forcibly transported by European ships and sold into slavery from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Hundreds of thousands were shipped to Colombia.
Marquez said many Afro-Colombians still lacked basic rights, such as access to health, housing and higher education, a reality she sees as a legacy of that period: "We continue to experience the damage and consequences of that system."
Opponents of reparations argue, among other things, that contemporary states and institutions should not be held responsible for their past.
But advocates say action is needed to address the legacies, such as systemic and structural racism, and say that contemporary states still benefit from the wealth generated by hundreds of years of exploitation.
At the fourth session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD), participants such as Marquez will discuss calls for reparations in the digital age. The forum says systemic inequities risk being replicated in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI).
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in remarks delivered by his Chef de Cabinet Courtenay Rattray, reiterated his call for reparations, and said there was a need to "eliminate bias" from AI.
"Even AI, which holds such promise for humanity, too often mirrors and amplifies the same inequalities and racial biases that have plagued us for centuries," Guterres said.
Marquez said although important steps had been taken by the UN in the fight for reparations, such as the creation of the PFPAD, more must be done: "It is not enough to face the challenges of systemic racism the population still faces."
Brazil's Minister of Racial Equality Anielle Franco was among other politicians attending the four-day UN forum. Franco said slavery was a crime against humanity and "must be faced with courage".
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
17 minutes ago
- Yahoo
NATO chief's speech was meant as a call to arms, but it was also a shameful admission for the alliance
For all the stark warnings and ominous predictions made by the head of NATO today, one key fact remained unmentioned. The West is still funding the Russian war effort to the tune of billions by buying oil and gas, funnelling vast amounts into an economy that is now fully militarised. Russian gas exports to Europe went up by 20% last year and its LNG exports to the EU are now at record levels. Read more: Vladimir Putin's Russia is now making more money from selling fossil fuels than Ukraine receives from allies. NATO's secretary general Mark Rutte did not mention any of that. But he did spell out what Russia is doing with all that hydrocarbon revenue. It is using it to put its economy onto a war footing that is now pumping out munitions at a rate that puts the West to shame, to the extent Russia could have the capability to take on NATO in three to five years, according to Mr Rutte. New Sky News podcast launches on 10 June - simulates an attack by Russia to test UK defences 👉Search for The Wargame on your podcast app👈 The secretary general meant his speech in London as a warning and call to arms. But it was also a shameful admission for the Western alliance he heads. More than three years into this war, Russia is outstripping the entire Western bloc by four to one in terms of munitions production. Russia's economy is 1/25th that of NATO's combined economic might and crippled by sanctions and yet every three months pumps out more shells than the entire NATO bloc manages in a year. And while Europe carries on funding Russia's war effort by buying its oil and gas, none of that is going to change. We are now in the insane and obscene situation where European taxpayers will have to fork out more, a lot more, to counteract the threat of a militarised Russia, whose resurgence is being subsidised by Western countries buying its fossil fuels. Historians will look back on that and wonder why it was allowed to continue more than three years into this devastating conflict.
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Bipartisan bill in Congress would name Zablocki VA women's clinic after Anna Mae Robertson
Bipartisan legislation in Congress could rename part of Milwaukee's Zablocki VA Medical Center after Anna Mae Robertson, a member of the famed Six Triple Eight battalion who died May 30 at 101. The Women's Well Clinic, which provides services like primary care, gynecology, maternity care and mental health care, would be named the Anna Mae Robertson VA Well Women Clinic. The VA as a whole, named after former Milwaukee congressman Clement J. Zablocki, would keep its name. The bill is authored by Democratic U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and has the support of three Wisconsin Republicans — Reps. Bryan Steil, Scott Fitzgerald and Tony Wied. Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan also backs the legislation. 'As our community and her family mourn her passing, I am pleased that my Wisconsin colleagues from both sides of the aisle have come together to help honor her in this way," Moore said in a news release. Wied, a Republican who represents the northeastern part of the state, said Robertson "exemplifies the best of Wisconsin." And Stiel, from southeastern Wisconsin, said "it's fitting that she receives recognition for her service to our nation and her fellow veterans at the facility she dedicated her time and talents.' Robertson was among the 855 women in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black female unit stationed overseas during World War II. With the slogan 'No Mail, Low Morale,' they cleared a nearly three-year logjam of mail destined for homesick soldiers in just three months. After decades of little recognition of their service, the Six Triple Eight's story became a Netflix film directed by Tyler Perry and starring Kerry Washington. More: Milwaukee's Anna Mae Robertson, one of last surviving members of World War II's famed Six Triple Eight unit, dies at 101 In 2022, Robertson, then 98, and other members of the Six Triple Eight were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest civilian honors awarded in the United States. At the time, there were only six known living veterans of the unit. Robertson's celebration of life was held June 7. If the clinic is named after Robertson, her name will grace a place that was closely connected to her life. After moving to Milwaukee post-war, Robertson worked as a nurse's aide, caring for sick veterans at the veteran's hospital. Eventually, she too received care from the VA. 'The VA hospital was wonderful to my mother,' Sheree Robertson told the Journal Sentinel. 'They provided her with such loving care, and any time she needed any equipment, it was provided to her." She thanked Moore for recognizing her mother in a profound way and 'for doing the tough work to get this legislation passed.' 'I just wished that people would remember the life she lived and be inspired by it,' Robertson said. "I think it is only fitting that they name (the) women's clinic after my mother, so everyone who goes to that clinic would know about my mother's history, her life, the story of the Six Triple Eight … and that she proudly served her country.' The clinic could become even more important in the coming years. Women are the fastest-growing segment of the veteran population, projected to make up 18% of all veterans in 2040, compared to just 4% in 2000. Democratic lawmakers in the state Capitol — including Moore's son, state Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde from Milwaukee — also introduced a joint resolution early this month to honor Robertson. Resolutions express lawmakers' opinion and don't carry the force of law. Two Republicans have signed onto the resolution, according to Moore Omokunde's office, and GOP legislative leaders could choose to schedule it for a vote during an upcoming floor session. Robertson "(leaves) behind a profound legacy of resilience, service, and inspiration," the resolution reads. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee VA women's clinic could be named after Six Triple Eight hero
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The History of White Refugee Narratives
White South Africans who support U.S. President Donald Trump in front of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa on February 15, 2025. Credit - Marco Longari—AFP/Getty Images In May, a charter flight from Johannesburg landed at Dulles International Airport. About 50 white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, were on board, claiming that their livelihoods were jeopardized by a climate of "anti-white racism." This depiction of South Africa has resonated among American right-wing commentators since at least the first Trump Administration. In the view of folks such as Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Stephen Miller, efforts to redress inequalities and injustices borne of the Apartheid era constitute, in Miller's words, 'race-based persecution.' The Afrikaners' whiteness, they claim, opens them up to discrimination, threatens the seizure of their farms, and makes them targets of violence. In response, the Trump Administration has granted some Afrikaners refugee status, a glaring exception to the general halt it has put on the entry of people fleeing persecution from around the world. President Donald Trump has rationalized this exceptional treatment by gesturing to unsubstantiated and debunked reports of racialized attacks. 'It's a genocide that's taking place,' he told reporters. Trump recently used the same terms in an attempt to browbeat South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in the oval office. Now, the Afrikaners are on a fast-track to citizenship. The characterization of 'Black' government as existentially threatening has a long history in the United States. Slaveholders first developed the trope in the 1790s in their representations of the emergent nation of Haiti, framing it as a dangerous site of social experimentation and savagery where Black freedom would inexorably lead to white death. This depiction was reductive, and purposeful. Haiti's 'horrors' served as a rallying cry and a cautionary tale; they justified a certain understanding of the nature (and future) of racial pluralism in the United States. Today, spurious depictions of South Africa as an anti-white hellscape swim in the same waters. The treatment of refugees, then and now, brings this similarity into high relief. The Long History of the U.S. Backing White South Africans Haitian independence was declared on January 1, 1804. Before that, Haiti was known world-wide as Saint Domingue, a French colony on the western third of Hispaniola that generated tremendous wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans. The series of events that history deems 'the Haitian Revolution' spanned the prior 14 years and encompassed a staggering array of changes. Americans were intimately aware of those events. Over the period, 'St. Domingo' was depicted as a beleaguered colony, a site of fights over racial equality, a plantation economy unraveled by slave rebellion, a place where slavery was legally abolished, a diplomatic partner, and a player in European geopolitics. After 1804, the country became the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere, one expressly defined around the absence of slavery and colonial control. All Haitians, regardless of their ethnicity, were constitutionally defined as 'Black'; land was to be shared; runaway slaves were declared free the moment they touched its shores. In an age of revolutionary change, there was perhaps no more radical shift than this. For most white Americans, and especially enslavers, the white colonists of Saint Domingue experiencing these changes were a focus of racial empathy. 'When we recollect how nearly similar the situation of the Southern States and St. Domingo are in the profusion of Slaves,' South Carolina's governor wrote to the colony's General Assembly in September 1791, 'we cannot but sensibly fear for your situation.' The thousands of white French colonists who fled Haiti and arrived in American communities after a particular moment of disruption in June 1793 were met with open arms, receiving support from private groups, state governments, and the U.S. Congress alike. Dominguans of color, meanwhile, were painted as figures of terror. 'French negroes' prowled Southern nightmares. Southern states and municipalities quickly passed laws that prevented Black refugees from entering their borders (and requiring those present to depart). Rumors of connections between Saint Domingue and slave resistance abounded in Virginia after 1793 and shaped how whites understood Gabriel's revolt in Richmond in 1800. Denmark Vesey's rumored insurrectionary plot in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822 centered around the notion that he had been in contact with Haitian leaders. While posed as being about a threat from without, this U.S. hysteria had everything to do with domestic realities. White American anxiety over 'the horrors of St. Domingo' reified a nation that was white. The phrase cropped up repeatedly as a way to describe the dangers of antislavery activism and 'fanatical' notions of human equality within the United States that weakened the master class's authority and opened the floodgates for Black violence. This narrative proved to be powerful and long-lasting. In 1859, 68 years after the initial insurrections, a proslavery writer would describe John Brown's raid as 'nothing more nor nothing less than an attempt to do on a vast scale what was done in St. Domingo in 1791.' A pro-Confederate cartoon in 1863 showed Abraham Lincoln penning the Emancipation Proclamation with his foot on the Constitution, the devil on his desk, and a blood-drenched picture of Haiti over his shoulder. By this treatment, Haiti was an upside-down world: Black people were free and white people were dead, a depiction that normalized and celebrated the United States as a white slaveholding republic. The Vilification of Springfield's Haitians Taps Into a Long and Troubling History There were other American understandings of the burgeoning Haitian Revolution alongside this one. Some Americans looked to Saint Domingue and saw a just struggle for human dignity and racial equality. Alongside the Revolution in France, Saint Domingue sparked conversations about an oncoming global democratic wave rooted in universal human rights, one that would sweep away tyranny of all sorts. The fact that Americans, white and Black, made these cosmopolitan connections reminds us that, although the American war for independence was in the (recent) past, the American Revolution—the meaning, and quality of the new polity—was very much in flux. White Americans' reactions to events in Saint Domingue allowed for discussions about an American future in which slavery would not exist. The white Dominguans refugees arriving in Philadelphia in 1793 entered a state in which slavery was being gradually ended and in which white and Black activists were attempting to spread that ethos nationwide. As elsewhere, Philadelphia's philanthropic community rose up to provide them food, shelter, and succor, but the white Dominguans were not permitted to maintain their slaves (despite their best efforts to do so). In the 19th century, Americans of color would take Haiti as an emblem of possibility, one that helped bolster pride and engender action. Like the proslavery usage, these efforts were an attempt to make Haiti into an argument about citizenship, race, and rights in the United States. The Trump Administration's decision to grant Afrikaners refugee status flies in the face of U.S. procedures and practice in place since the 1980 Refugee Act, which, in accordance with the international definition, defines a refugee as a person with a 'well-founded fear of persecution.' This initiative bears many of the hallmarks of a Trump policy—it originates from a selective understanding of the realities on the ground; it has been conveyed, explained, and rationalized via a blend of bullying and bluster; above all, it is driven by a venal self-interest. At its heart, the policy seems to bolster Trump's picture of the dangers of initiatives that place value on striving for racial equality. In this view, the Afrikaners are quite literally pale-faced messengers: their plight fits snugly alongside Trump's attacks on institutions of higher education and the U.S. civil service as bastions of antisemitism and DEI initiatives. As such, the administration is overtly taking a side in a longstanding, and ongoing, battle over the meaning of the American nation. James Alexander Dun is a historian at Princeton University and the author of Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Write to Made by History at madebyhistory@
