The U.N. human rights chief on Monday urged countries of the world to “fully fund comprehensive processes” and take “a wide range of reparations measures” to address racism.
Michelle Bachelet—a Chilean politician who has served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2018—presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council report that “hopes to build on momentum around the intensified scrutiny worldwide of the blight of racism and its impact on people of African descent,” according to The Associated Press.
Bachelet recommended to the U.N. that all countries should “create, reinforce and fully fund comprehensive processes –- with full participation of affected communities — to share the truth about what was done, and the harms it continues to inflict.”
The United Nations is a “global international and intergovernmental organization” currently made up of 193 Member States. Their recommendation is not to see reparations paid to a single offending institution or even one country. Rather, the U.N. aims to apply reparations “measures” across entire “societies” in order to completely “transform our future.”
“Establishing the truth about these [racist] legacies, and their impact today, and taking steps to address this harm through a wide range of reparations measures is crucial to healing our societies and providing justice for terrible crimes,” Bachelet said. “Measures taken to address the past will transform our future.”
But not everyone believes the concept of reparations is as beneficial as Bachelet and the U.N. want the world to accept.
American economist Thomas Sowell—the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution—criticizes the concept of reparations because its practice would lead to a massively unproductive “transfer of wealth” between all races.
Sowell points out that this is because, for example, the number of whites “who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that put together.”
Watch Sowell explain in his interview with Peter Robinson:
Dr. Sowell might advise the push for global reparations from Bachelet and the U.N. in the following manner, as he did in his seminal 2018 work Discrimination and Disparities:
The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future—both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being facts beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with the evils of the past.
Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.
Although President Trump removed the United States from the Human Rights body during his tenure, Bachelet has now been urging nations to pay reparations for slavery and colonialism for more than a year.
Jon Fleetwood is Managing Editor for American Faith.
