HR0906 101ST GENERAL ASSEMBLY

HR0906 LRB101 22200 MST 73230 r

HOUSE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948; and

WHEREAS, Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide confirms that genocide, whether committed during peacetime or in war, is a crime under international law which the Contracting Parties undertake to prevent and to punish; and

WHEREAS, Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"; and

WHEREAS, Article 3 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide verifies the following acts punishable: (a) genocide, (b) conspiracy to commit genocide, (c) direct and public incitement to commit genocide, (d) attempt to commit genocide, and (e) complicit in genocide; and

WHEREAS, The United States and its sub-governmental units are responsible for policies and practices against the Black population that conform to Article II's definition of genocide and Article III's specification punishable crimes of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; and

WHEREAS, The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance has declared "slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity"; Africans forcibly imported into the 13 British colonies that became the United States of America were legally chattel for 246 years, 170 under the United States, played a significant role in the slave trade; the last slave ship, the Coltilda, arrived in Mobile, Alabama in July of 1860, just seven months before the Civil War; and

WHEREAS, Of the nearly 11 million enslaved Africans, approximately 300,000 were brought to what would become the United States of America; laborers were subjected to brutalization, mutilation, rape, torture, suppression of cultural practices, and routine humiliation, including the breaking up of families, and were denied access to education and a nutritious diet; their inhumane, unpaid working conditions produced severe illnesses; additionally, because slavers scrimped on food and shelter, malnourishment, diarrhea, dysentery, worms, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases were rampant; these conditions pushed the infant and early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that of White infants and children; half of all African American enslaved infants died in their first year; African American children continue to be plagued by these problems; for the period 2013 to 2016, African American children experienced a death rate from SIDS of 74.4 per thousand compared to White children's 39 per 1000; African American infants die at a rate of 171.1 per thousand compared to the death rate of 85.0 for White infants; and

WHEREAS, African American history is replete with horrific atrocities, terrorist lynchings, racial pogroms and massacres, and, in the contemporary moment, heinous hate crimes and murders by police; the Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4000 lynchings; Black people are the only U.S. racial or ethnic group who are killed by police at a rate greater than their percentage of the population; between 2016 and 2018, the number of murders by White supremacists more than doubled, with 2017 being the fifth deadliest year on record for extremist violence against Blacks since 1970; and

WHEREAS, African Americans are disproportionately killed by police; although they comprise only 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, from 2015 to 2019 they accounted for 26.4 percent of individuals killed by police; Whites make up 50 percent of police killings but compose 61 percent of the population; Latinx people comprise 18% of both police killings and the U.S. population; Asians constitute 2 percent of police killings and 5 percent of the population; and

WHEREAS, Economic genocide is defined as "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part"; from emancipation into the 1960s, African American men working the same job as White men earned only two-thirds of their wages; the Black-White wage gap expanded with rising wage inequality from 1979 to 2018; consequently, African American women and men reside at the bottom of the wage scale and disproportionately comprise unskilled, non-union, service sector labor; due to ethnic cleansing forcing them out of towns, destroying or stealing their property, African American homeowners and business owners have had to start over two or more times; since the late 19th Century, most African Americans have been restricted to apartheid neighborhoods with substandard housing stock and poor municipal services; according to United for a Fair Economy, 55 percent of all housing loans to African Americans between 1994 and 2006 were subprime, thus when the housing market crashed in 2007, Black people lost between $71.5 and $92.9 billion dollars in wealth; and

WHEREAS, Since the 2000 Presidential Election, suppressing the Black vote has been the dominant electoral strategy of the Republican Party; it includes gerrymandering to limit predominantly Black-populated areas from influencing elections and referendums, requiring voter IDs, using Reconstruction-era laws to purge voter rolls, gutting Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the pre-clearance clause, and cutting the number of polling places in African American neighborhoods and the hours they are open; also, the mass incarceration of African American males eliminates their right to vote and therefore proves a direct link between racialized policies and the suppression of African American voices in the political process of the United States; and

WHEREAS, Even with its record of anti-Black racial violence, the lynchings of William "Froggie" James on November 11, 1909 in Cairo, of Jesse Washington on May 16, 1911 in Waco, Texas, and of Laura and L.D. Nelson on May 25, 1911 near Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma stand out; the massacres in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, in East Louis, Illinois in 1917, in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 are remembered for their barbarity; in modern times, the savage 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the atrocious rape of Mary Ruth Reed in Monroe North Carolina in 1959, the monstrous murders of James Byrd Jr. in 1998 in Jasper, Texas, and the Charleston Massacre (North Carolina) in 2015 continue to resonate with the public; the current wave of protests was ignited by the callous police murder of George Floyd; his execution was preceded by several despicable police murders, including Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Breonna Taylor and the contemporary lynching of Ahmaud Aubrey; and

WHEREAS, As quoted by the statement by certain Special Procedures at HRC urgent debate on police violence against people of African descent and peaceful protesters, "[African-Americans] in the United States, the domestic legal system has utterly failed to acknowledge and confront racial injustice and discrimination. This injustice and discrimination is so deeply entrenched in law enforcement that even during this period of uprising, reports continue of extrajudicial killings of Black people by the police. This injustice and discrimination also affects other racial and ethnic minorities. Despite several decades of policing reform, executive intervention, and judicial oversight, this violence and racial injustice persists."; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE HUNDRED FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that the situation in the United States requires an international response that can help ensure that people of African descent in this country are no longer subject to the routine but egregious violations; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we urge the United Nations Human Rights Council to pass a resolution denouncing and charging the United States with the crime of genocide against its Black population; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we call upon the U.N. General Assembly under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide "to assure the safety of the 42 million Black people in the U.S."; and be it further

RESOLVED, That suitable copies be delivered to the member states of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the President and Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, and to each Senator and Representative in the United States Congress.