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1
HOUSE RESOLUTION

 
2    WHEREAS, The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
3the Crime of Genocide was unanimously adopted by the United
4Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948; and
 
5    WHEREAS, Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and
6Punishment of the Crime of Genocide confirms that genocide,
7whether committed during peacetime or in war, is a crime under
8international law which the Contracting Parties undertake to
9prevent and to punish; and
 
10    WHEREAS, Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and
11Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as any of
12the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in
13whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
14group, as such (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing
15serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c)
16deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
17calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
18in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births
19within the group, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the
20group to another group"; and
 
21    WHEREAS, Article 3 of the Convention on the Prevention and
22Punishment of the Crime of Genocide verifies the following acts

 

 

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1punishable: (a) genocide, (b) conspiracy to commit genocide,
2(c) direct and public incitement to commit genocide, (d)
3attempt to commit genocide, and (e) complicit in genocide; and
 
4    WHEREAS, The United States and its sub-governmental units
5are responsible for policies and practices against the Black
6population that conform to Article II's definition of genocide
7and Article III's specification punishable crimes of the
8Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
9Genocide; and
 
10    WHEREAS, The World Conference Against Racism, Racial
11Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance has
12declared "slavery and the slave trade are a crime against
13humanity"; Africans forcibly imported into the 13 British
14colonies that became the United States of America were legally
15chattel for 246 years, 170 under the United States, played a
16significant role in the slave trade; the last slave ship, the
17Coltilda, arrived in Mobile, Alabama in July of 1860, just
18seven months before the Civil War; and
 
19    WHEREAS, Of the nearly 11 million enslaved Africans,
20approximately 300,000 were brought to what would become the
21United States of America; laborers were subjected to
22brutalization, mutilation, rape, torture, suppression of
23cultural practices, and routine humiliation, including the

 

 

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1breaking up of families, and were denied access to education
2and a nutritious diet; their inhumane, unpaid working
3conditions produced severe illnesses; additionally, because
4slavers scrimped on food and shelter, malnourishment,
5diarrhea, dysentery, worms, whooping cough, and respiratory
6diseases were rampant; these conditions pushed the infant and
7early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that of White
8infants and children; half of all African American enslaved
9infants died in their first year; African American children
10continue to be plagued by these problems; for the period 2013
11to 2016, African American children experienced a death rate
12from SIDS of 74.4 per thousand compared to White children's 39
13per 1000; African American infants die at a rate of 171.1 per
14thousand compared to the death rate of 85.0 for White infants;
15and
 
16    WHEREAS, African American history is replete with horrific
17atrocities, terrorist lynchings, racial pogroms and massacres,
18and, in the contemporary moment, heinous hate crimes and
19murders by police; the Equal Justice Initiative has documented
204000 lynchings; Black people are the only U.S. racial or ethnic
21group who are killed by police at a rate greater than their
22percentage of the population; between 2016 and 2018, the number
23of murders by White supremacists more than doubled, with 2017
24being the fifth deadliest year on record for extremist violence
25against Blacks since 1970; and
 

 

 

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1    WHEREAS, African Americans are disproportionately killed
2by police; although they comprise only 13.4 percent of the U.S.
3population, from 2015 to 2019 they accounted for 26.4 percent
4of individuals killed by police; Whites make up 50 percent of
5police killings but compose 61 percent of the population;
6Latinx people comprise 18% of both police killings and the U.S.
7population; Asians constitute 2 percent of police killings and
85 percent of the population; and
 
9    WHEREAS, Economic genocide is defined as "deliberately
10inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
11about its destruction in whole or in part"; from emancipation
12into the 1960s, African American men working the same job as
13White men earned only two-thirds of their wages; the
14Black-White wage gap expanded with rising wage inequality from
151979 to 2018; consequently, African American women and men
16reside at the bottom of the wage scale and disproportionately
17comprise unskilled, non-union, service sector labor; due to
18ethnic cleansing forcing them out of towns, destroying or
19stealing their property, African American homeowners and
20business owners have had to start over two or more times; since
21the late 19th Century, most African Americans have been
22restricted to apartheid neighborhoods with substandard housing
23stock and poor municipal services; according to United for a
24Fair Economy, 55 percent of all housing loans to African

 

 

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1Americans between 1994 and 2006 were subprime, thus when the
2housing market crashed in 2007, Black people lost between $71.5
3and $92.9 billion dollars in wealth; and
 
4    WHEREAS, Since the 2000 Presidential Election, suppressing
5the Black vote has been the dominant electoral strategy of the
6Republican Party; it includes gerrymandering to limit
7predominantly Black-populated areas from influencing elections
8and referendums, requiring voter IDs, using Reconstruction-era
9laws to purge voter rolls, gutting Section 5 of the 1965 Voting
10Rights Act, the pre-clearance clause, and cutting the number of
11polling places in African American neighborhoods and the hours
12they are open; also, the mass incarceration of African American
13males eliminates their right to vote and therefore proves a
14direct link between racialized policies and the suppression of
15African American voices in the political process of the United
16States; and
 
17    WHEREAS, Even with its record of anti-Black racial
18violence, the lynchings of William "Froggie" James on November
1911, 1909 in Cairo, of Jesse Washington on May 16, 1911 in Waco,
20Texas, and of Laura and L.D. Nelson on May 25, 1911 near
21Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma stand out; the massacres in
22Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, in East Louis, Illinois in
231917, in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma in
241921 are remembered for their barbarity; in modern times, the

 

 

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1savage 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the atrocious rape of Mary
2Ruth Reed in Monroe North Carolina in 1959, the monstrous
3murders of James Byrd Jr. in 1998 in Jasper, Texas, and the
4Charleston Massacre (North Carolina) in 2015 continue to
5resonate with the public; the current wave of protests was
6ignited by the callous police murder of George Floyd; his
7execution was preceded by several despicable police murders,
8including Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Breonna Taylor and the
9contemporary lynching of Ahmaud Aubrey; and
 
10    WHEREAS, As quoted by the statement by certain Special
11Procedures at HRC urgent debate on police violence against
12people of African descent and peaceful protesters,
13"[African-Americans] in the United States, the domestic legal
14system has utterly failed to acknowledge and confront racial
15injustice and discrimination. This injustice and
16discrimination is so deeply entrenched in law enforcement that
17even during this period of uprising, reports continue of
18extrajudicial killings of Black people by the police. This
19injustice and discrimination also affects other racial and
20ethnic minorities. Despite several decades of policing reform,
21executive intervention, and judicial oversight, this violence
22and racial injustice persists."; therefore, be it
 
23    RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE
24HUNDRED FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that

 

 

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1the situation in the United States requires an international
2response that can help ensure that people of African descent in
3this country are no longer subject to the routine but egregious
4violations; and be it further
 
5    RESOLVED, That we urge the United Nations Human Rights
6Council to pass a resolution denouncing and charging the United
7States with the crime of genocide against its Black population;
8and be it further
 
9    RESOLVED, That we call upon the U.N. General Assembly under
10the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
11Genocide "to assure the safety of the 42 million Black people
12in the U.S."; and be it further
 
13    RESOLVED, That suitable copies be delivered to the member
14states of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the
15President and Vice President of the United States, the Speaker
16of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Majority Leader of
17the U.S. Senate, and to each Senator and Representative in the
18United States Congress.