With all the news and media distractions lately, it was easy to miss an important United Nations resolution naming chattel slavery of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. Cornelius Corps Board member The Rev. Ellis Crum shares a two part reflection on this landmark resolution in light of our nation’s current climate of denying or distorting history. Please take time to read and reflect on this first part of Rev. Ellis’ valuable insights. Part two will be shared next week. – Jim Melson
In March 2026, the United Nations adopted a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel slavery as the gravest crime against humanity. It called for serious engagement with reparatory justice and structural repair. The resolution passed with 123 nations in support. Only three nations voted against it: Israel, Argentina, and the United States.
The United States retreated behind a proceduralist mask, objecting to a “hierarchy of crimes.” But a refusal to rank a wound is a refusal to name its depth, and this national dissent acts as a shield against a global call for accountability. This is the hubris of the protected, the logic of a debtor who claims all debts are equal to ensure that not even the “gravest” debt is ever collected. Refusing the language of hierarchy only protects the story we prefer to tell about ourselves.
Privilege Is Distance
This dissent is not about power alone; it is about the privilege of the unaffected. Privilege is the power to treat a burning house as a theoretical debate about arson because you are standing in a different zip code. This insulation affords the nation the luxury of choosing when, or whether, the truth is allowed to matter.
Naming slavery as structural and ongoing unsettles the present. For generations, the U.S. has told a story of progress: a nation that struggled, corrected, and moved forward. Naming it as a force that still shapes systems disrupts that narrative. It forces a deeper question: not just who we were, but who we are willing to admit we still are.
A Pattern of Preference
The U.S. objected to the resolution on the grounds that it created a hierarchy of human suffering. Yet, that same government spent the preceding year doing exactly that. In 2025, it decided that white Afrikaner suffering warranted emergency refugee status while Black and brown refugees from Haiti and Africa were turned away. It launched missiles to protect Christians in Nigeria, prioritizing one faith’s suffering over others.
By the time the U.S. entered the UN chamber, it had already ruled African perspectives invalid. It overruled South Africa with an executive order and Nigeria with a missile. The UN vote was simply a more formal way to say “no.” The objection was not a principle; it was a preference. That is not foreign policy; that is privilege with a passport.
The Architecture of Inequality
Discomfort sharpens the moment we admit that an active wound is not a historical artifact. What is owed is the obligation to tell the truth without dilution. This requires an honest account that names the crime, identifies the beneficiary, and tracks the persistence of the stain.
We must audit the systems that grew out of this history. This is not theory; it is practice. The zip codes of our schools, the thresholds of our banks, and the gates of our credibility determine who is heard in the rooms where decisions are made. These are not accidents; they are architectures. We must stop asking if inequality exists and start asking who authorized the blueprint and who continues to bear the weight of a structure they never consented to inhabit.
Linguistic Laundering
As long as slavery is framed as a closed chapter, its meaning can be managed and mourned without requiring change. We are witnessing the linguistic laundering of atrocity, a controlled demolition of truth where “bondage” is scrubbed into “labor” and “the enslaved” are recast as “immigrants.” This is a forensic removal of bloodstains to preserve a comfortable national ghost story.
When we soften the story, we are being convenient. The descendants of the enslaved do not get the luxury of a sanitized account; they live in the residue of the unedited version every day. To clean the story for the comfort of those who benefited from it is a second crime dressed in the language of sensitivity.
The refusal to support the resolution reveals how bias operates in what we avoid. It allows distance to feel like objectivity and silence to feel like neutrality. The question is no longer what a nation decided on the record. The question is what you have already decided in the silence no one transcribes.
That decision may be the call to build transforming relationships through a network of organizations (churches) and individuals committed to a shared journey of racial justice, reconciliation, and spiritual formation.
The national “no” is only half the story. Part 2, The Quiet No, turns the mirror around.