UC Irvine Law Review

Despite the United Nations’ (UN) ongoing commemoration of the International Decade for People of African Descent and direct calls from UN member states for the body to confront systemic racism in the United States, the United States has with the support of its allies—successfully blocked measures beyond those which gently encourage mere aspiration to racial equity. Moreover, notwithstanding formal guarantees of equal access to justice and accountability for human rights violations, people of African descent and majority Black member states are systematically constructed out of international policymaking authority and legal protections at the UN—leaving them vulnerable to aggression, exploitation, and extraction.

This Article contends that the UN and its contemporary public international law regime, created and dominated by settler colonial states, has no ability to combat anti-Black racism because it has no interest in so doing; rather, the regime is both the manifestation of global racial contracting and the mechanism by which such contracting persists. The structure of the UN, along with the substance and procedure of public international law, work together in coordinated fashion to guarantee that the racial contracts in force in individual states are also performed, enforced, and protected within a global Racial Superstate.