United Nations’s second International Decade for People of African Descent.
The United Nations has launched a second International Decade for People of African Descent. This new decade — which officially began January 1, 2025, and will continue until December 31, 2034 — will again employ a Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to document and highlight quality-of-life issues for Black people worldwide.
The first Decade, which ran from 2015 to 2024, saw the Permanent Forum meet three times. The Permanent Forum will hold its fourth session at the United Nations’ New York City headquarters April 14-17, 2025. The theme of the second Decade mirrors that of the initial decade: “recognition, justice, and development.” Activists expressed excitement, gratitude, and a good deal of apprehension about the naming of a second Decade.
A long-term Black activist demand
The first Decade was important because it placed the global concerns of African descendants in the international arena. This had been a long-term Black activist demand –– a request that started back when the United Nations system was created. Activists have wanted the United Nations to pay attention to the issues faced by Afrodescendant communities since its establishment. In 1947, W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sent the United Nations a 94-page document entitled “An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities.”
“[T]oday,” DuBois wrote in the introduction, “the paradox again looms after the Second World War. We have [a] recrudescence of race hate and caste restrictions in the United States and of these dangerous tendencies not simply for the United States itself but for all nations. When will nations learn that their enemies are quite as often within their own country as without? It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi; not Stalin and Molotov but Bilbo and Rankin; internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad.”
Harlem’s own Malcolm X planned to turn to the U.N. to aid Black Americans. In a 1964 article, the Amsterdam News quoted the Black-nationalist leader as saying that he had “received pledges from African nations to support a stand against the United States before the United Nations. The United States would be compelled to face the same charges as South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia. The United States…has colonized the Negro people just like the people of Africa and Asia were colonized by Europeans.”
More recent calls for the U.N. to acknowledge how racism curtails the lives of Black people were made at the Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001 and again at the IV Meeting of Afro-descendant Social Movements in Caracas in 2011.
Prioritizing Black communities
Following the first Decade declaration, the U.N. created a Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to advise its Human Rights Council. But Venezuelan anthropologist Diógenes Díaz Campos asserts that neither this initiative nor the first Decade has led to the kind of new policies that change the realities of Black communities.
Díaz Campos is an executive committee member of ARAAC (Articulacion Regional Afrodescendientes de America Latina y el Caribe/Regional Afrodescendant Coordination for Latin America and the Caribbean) and served as the delegate to U.N. events from the Red de Organizaciones Afrovenezola (Network of Afro-Venezuelan organizations). “The second International Decade for People of African Descent is being met with skepticism in light of the failure of the first one,” he claimed. “While millions of people of African descent remain in critical poverty, initiatives such as the U.N. Permanent Forum are criticized as elitist and manipulated spaces. There is an urgent need to build an autonomous and radical movement that prioritizes historical reparations and restorative justice and exposes opportunistic leadership and the complicity of power centers.
“There is an urgent need to evaluate the first decade, [look at] the compliance by States with the general guidelines of ‘recognition, justice, and development,’ diagnose the few public policies developed and their achievements, and look at the execution of the budget and the balance on the part of Afrodescendant communities and peoples. In general, there has been no progress in public policies in favor of the more than 200 million people of African descent in [this] region. We are still in a situation of critical poverty and the faces of our women, children, and youth are images of misery.”
While many activists acknowledged that the U.N. should enhance its mechanisms, most believed that the organization’s initiatives have positively impacted the advancement of their political rights at home.
Harlem’s own Malcolm X planned to turn to the U.N. to aid Black Americans. In a 1964 article, the Amsterdam News quoted the Black-nationalist leader as saying that he had “received pledges from African nations to support a stand against the United States before the United Nations. The United States would be compelled to face the same charges as South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia. The United States…has colonized the Negro people just like the people of Africa and Asia were colonized by Europeans.”
More recent calls for the U.N. to acknowledge how racism curtails the lives of Black people were made at the Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001 and again at the IV Meeting of Afro-descendant Social Movements in Caracas in 2011.
Prioritizing Black communities
Following the first Decade declaration, the U.N. created a Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to advise its Human Rights Council. But Venezuelan anthropologist Diógenes Díaz Campos asserts that neither this initiative nor the first Decade has led to the kind of new policies that change the realities of Black communities.
Díaz Campos is an executive committee member of ARAAC (Articulacion Regional Afrodescendientes de America Latina y el Caribe/Regional Afrodescendant Coordination for Latin America and the Caribbean) and served as the delegate to U.N. events from the Red de Organizaciones Afrovenezola (Network of Afro-Venezuelan organizations). “The second International Decade for People of African Descent is being met with skepticism in light of the failure of the first one,” he claimed. “While millions of people of African descent remain in critical poverty, initiatives such as the U.N. Permanent Forum are criticized as elitist and manipulated spaces. There is an urgent need to build an autonomous and radical movement that prioritizes historical reparations and restorative justice and exposes opportunistic leadership and the complicity of power centers.
“There is an urgent need to evaluate the first decade, [look at] the compliance by States with the general guidelines of ‘recognition, justice, and development,’ diagnose the few public policies developed and their achievements, and look at the execution of the budget and the balance on the part of Afrodescendant communities and peoples. In general, there has been no progress in public policies in favor of the more than 200 million people of African descent in [this] region. We are still in a situation of critical poverty and the faces of our women, children, and youth are images of misery.”
While many activists acknowledged that the U.N. should enhance its mechanisms, most believed that the organization’s initiatives have positively impacted the advancement of their political rights at home.
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