A Legal and Moral Indictment of Systemic Human Rights Violations Against Black Americans

Despite its global role as a human rights guardian, the United States perpetuates profound and ongoing human rights violations against its Black communities within its borders. These violations are not isolated incidents or unfortunate oversights but are deeply embedded in law, institutional design, and cultural norms. This is a nation that has never atoned for its past and continues to inflict racial harm in its present.

Human rights are the fundamental freedoms and protections guaranteed to everyone, regardless of race, nationality, or status. Enshrined in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and codified in treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), these rights include the right to life, liberty, education, health, housing, and participation in civic life without discrimination. When governments violate these rights through policy, practice, or neglect, they breach moral norms and international obligations. By these standards, the United States is in chronic violation.

The United States' long-standing war against its Black citizens is a clear and ongoing violation of human rights.

Slavery, Jim Crow, and the Unpaid Debt

America's original sin was the enslavement of African people—an atrocity so vast in scope and brutality that it should forever disqualify the United States from the moral high ground unless it engages in radical repair. For over 250 years, Black people were legally treated as property. They were bought, sold, raped, tortured, and worked to death—generating immense wealth for white families, white institutions, and the American state.

The abolition of slavery did not bring liberation. It brought a rebranding. Black Codes, convict leasing and sharecropping replaced plantation slavery with forms of bondage that remained rooted in white domination. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, creating a loophole that laid the groundwork for mass incarceration.

The Jim Crow era was not merely a time of segregation—it was a regime of racial terror. Black Americans were denied voting rights, excluded from economic opportunity, consigned to inferior education and healthcare, and subjected to daily violence. Lynchings were not rare—they were orchestrated displays of racial power, sanctioned by silence and often celebrated in public.

The United States' refusal to provide reparations for the land stolen, the wealth extracted, and the lives destroyed is a clear human rights violation. Under international law, victims of gross human rights violations have the right to restitution, compensation, and guarantees of non-repetition. The US has violated all three.

International Human Rights Law and US Noncompliance

The US signed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1966. It ratified it in 1994, committing to eliminate racial discrimination in all forms. But it did so with crippling reservations—declaring the treaty non-self-executing, rejecting the ban on racist speech, and stating that the treaty provided no new rights beyond those already recognized under the US Constitution—a document that, in practice, guarantees no affirmative or substantive rights to its citizens. This reservation reflects a fundamental tension: the US Constitution, unlike international human rights instruments, does not guarantee positive rights such as housing, education, or healthcare. Its protections are largely negative—restraining government interference rather than obligating government provision. As constitutional scholar Frank Michelman noted, the US framework 'secures liberty by withholding power' rather than mandating equitable outcomes. Thus, ICERD's promise of racial equity through enforceable rights directly contrasts America's constitutional tradition of non-intervention. This neutered ICERD's legal impact domestically.

Despite ratification, the US continues to violate ICERD's core obligations:

1. It has not eliminated systemic discrimination.

2. It has not paid reparations for slavery or segregation.

3. It has not ended racially biased policing, incarceration, or economic exclusion.

The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has repeatedly condemned these failures. Yet the US ignores the recommendations and shields itself from accountability.

Criminalization as Control: The Legal System as a Site of Abuse

The US criminal legal system is a primary instrument of racial harm. Black people are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated at rates grossly disproportionate to their population. These disparities stem not from criminal behavior but from racially targeted policing, biased laws, and discriminatory sentencing.

Mass incarceration is the continuation of slavery by legal means. The 13th Amendment permits involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. Today, incarcerated people—many of them Black—work for cents per hour while producing goods and services that benefit corporations and government agencies. This is not justice. It is legalized exploitation.

Policing reinforces this system. Black neighborhoods are overpoliced and surveilled. Encounters with police often end in violence or death. Qualified immunity, prosecutorial discretion, and the legal shielding of law enforcement create a culture of impunity. This isn't neglect. Strategic racial containment is enforced through the badge and the gavel.

Economic Exploitation and Wealth Theft

The racial wealth gap is not accidental—it is the legacy of centuries of theft, exclusion, and racial capitalism. From slavery to redlining to predatory lending, Black communities have been systematically denied access to economic opportunity.

Government policies—denying GI Bill benefits, excluding Black workers from New Deal protections, and displacing communities under urban renewal—stripped Black families of assets and opportunities. Today, Black families possess one-tenth the wealth of white families on average. Reparations are not optional—they are owed. The refusal to pay them is not mere indifference. It is an ongoing, state-sanctioned theft rooted in racial contempt.

Education, Healthcare, and Environmental Neglect

The education system is not broken—it functions as designed to reproduce racial hierarchies. Black children are disproportionately punished, funneled into under-resourced schools, and denied access to equitable curricula. Discipline policies and curricular erasure work hand-in-hand to undermine their potential.

Healthcare outcomes are equally damning. Black Americans are more likely to suffer from preventable diseases, receive inadequate care, and die prematurely. Black women face maternal mortality rates three times higher than white women. This is a public health crisis rooted in racism.

Environmental injustice compounds these harms. Black communities are more likely to live near toxic waste sites, factories, and highways. Flint was not an exception—it was a symptom. The government tolerates environmental degradation when it affects Black lives.

Political Disenfranchisement and the Suppression of Black Power

Voting is supposed to be a fundamental right. But for Black Americans, it is a battleground. From gerrymandering and voter ID laws to felony disenfranchisement and polling place closures, modern voter suppression strategies mirror the intent of Jim Crow laws.

The Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to implement discriminatory laws without federal oversight. Millions of Black Americans are systematically denied their voice. This is not democracy. It is voter suppression by design.

Conclusion: Repair or Repetition

The United States has never truly reckoned with its crimes against Black communities. Slavery was not abolished—it was reinvented. Segregation, incarceration, exclusion, and state-sanctioned neglect were not separate eras; they are evolving strategies in the same war on Black life. Each system was built upon the foundation of the one before it, reinforcing the same racial caste under new names and new legal justifications.

These are not policy failures. They are expressions of a racial caste system maintained through law, bureaucracy, and willful denial. The US violates Black Americans' rights to life, liberty, health, education, wealth, and political participation—rights guaranteed under both domestic ideals and international law.

What Must Be Done:

1. Establish a federal reparations program rooted in economic justice and land return.

2. Fully implement ICERD, including enforceable domestic legislation.

3. Abolish prison labor and eliminate the 13th Amendment's exception clause.

4. Restore and expand the Voting Rights Act with federal oversight.

5. Guarantee universal, equitable healthcare and education access.

6. Fund environmental remediation in Black communities harmed by state neglect.

Human rights do not stop at America's borders. Until the US confronts its legacy, honors its treaties, and delivers material justice, it cannot claim to be a free nation. The time for acknowledgment has passed. Now is the time for repair.

 Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law.