[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Glover on Obama and WCAR

[Patrick Bond]

The Nation
Race and the Obama Administration
Danny Glover

April 8, 2009

In 2001 I traveled to Durban, South Africa, to join the tens of 
thousands of people who came to participate in the United 
Nations-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial 
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. More than 2,000 came 
from the United States, a rainbow of people crossing all lines--racial, 
ethnic, national, language, immigration status, religious and much 
more--joining an equally diverse crowd from across the globe. It was an 
extraordinary opportunity to meet, discuss, argue and strategize over 
how to rid the world of these longstanding evils.

Our participation paralleled that of the official US delegation. And 
that's where we faced a huge challenge. The Bush administration team, 
having only grudgingly agreed to participate at all, made clear they had 
no real commitment to fighting racism or offering leadership on other 
challenging issues of discrimination. When they didn't like a few small 
parts of the sixty-one-page text, they packed up and walked out of the 
conference. It was a sad but hardly surprising moment, exposing once 
again the history of US failures to take seriously the consequences of 
its own legacy of racism, a point most recently made by Attorney General 
Eric Holder.

The 2001 Declaration expressed powerful truths. It stated: "We 
acknowledge and profoundly regret the massive human suffering and the 
tragic plight of millions of men, women and children caused by slavery, 
the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, apartheid, colonialism 
and genocide, and call upon States concerned to honour the memory of the 
victims of past tragedies and affirm that, wherever and whenever these 
occurred, they must be condemned and their recurrence prevented." 
Another part declared, "We recognize the inalienable right of the 
Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an 
independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States 
in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the 
peace process and bring it to an early conclusion."

Now, eight years later, the United Nations is convening the Durban 
Review Conference in Geneva April 20 to 24 to review and assess the 
progress since 2001. Member nations have toiled for two years to craft 
an outcome document that assesses the current analysis and challenges. 
This document--which called for particular measures to provide support 
and reparations to all the victims both of long-ago histories, like the 
descendants of the European-Atlantic slave trade, and those facing 
contemporary forms of discrimination and apartheid policies, such as the 
Roma, the Dalits (India's "untouchables") and the Palestinians--was 
rejected by the Obama administration.

This year we thought things would be different. Our country has taken a 
huge step in our long struggle against racism: we have elected our first 
African-American president. And perhaps more important, the mobilization 
of people who made Barack Obama's election possible brought more young 
people of color into political action, with others of various ethnic and 
political backgrounds, than perhaps any campaign before. It is a moment 
not to sit on our laurels; certainly, we have much farther to go. But it 
is certainly a moment for our nation's political leadership to 
acknowledge a new marker in the long and painful struggle for justice, 
and a time to offer global leadership in the United Nations forum 
organized to combat bigotry and injustice.

In an effort to address the administration's concerns, the United 
Nations has released a new "outcome document," stripped of all language 
deemed offensive or controversial. Yet we face the sad reality that our 
president, the first African-American to lead this country, who has 
galvanized hope among victims of injustice around the world and 
encouraged them to stand up with dignity for their rights, has yet to 
indicate if he will send an official delegation or continue to abstain 
from the entire process.

Our historical struggle against racism can claim great progress as a 
legacy of the civil rights movement led by the likes of Fanny Lou Hamer 
and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but this 2009 review of the 2001 Durban 
conference against racism should still be a moment in which the 
administration of President Obama returns to the world stage to join 
deliberations aimed at making even further progress against injustice.

For twenty years, Congressman John Conyers, dean of the Congressional 
Black Caucus, has annually introduced a bill urging the United States to 
form a commission to study whether reparations are an appropriate 
response to the continuing legacy of slavery in our country. Would not 
the Durban Review Conference be a perfect venue to the administration to 
support the remedies recommended by the global community of nations to 
overcome the impacts of racism, slavery, anti-Semitism, apartheid and 
other forms of discrimination?

Would this United Nations conference not be exactly the right place for 
our new president to show the world that his administration's commitment 
to "change we can believe in" means rejecting our country's tarnished 
legacy of violating international law, undermining the United Nations 
and using American exceptionalism to justify walking away from the 
leadership responsibility many in the world expect of the United States? 
To make that change clear, wouldn't this be a great opportunity to 
remind the world that even if the final document does not call out the 
name of every perpetrator government, the United States at least 
believes that every group of victims facing discrimination or worse 
based on their identity, especially the most vulnerable, and those who 
are stateless and thus in need of special attention by the international 
community, should be named and promised assistance?

This should be a moment for the United States to rejoin the global 
struggle against racism, the struggle that the Bush administration so 
arrogantly abandoned. I hope President Obama will agree that the United 
States must participate with other nations in figuring out the tough 
issues of how to overcome racism and other forms of discrimination and 
intolerance, and how to provide repair to victims. Our country certainly 
has much to learn; and maybe, for the first time in a long time, we have 
something by way of leadership to share with the rest of the world in 
continuing our long struggle to overcome.