We Charge Genocide petition exposed US hypocrisy on human rights abroad

Evidence

But the State Department could not stop William Patterson, chairman of the short-lived Civil Rights Congress, from slipping into Geneva in 1951 and personally delivering a petition, entitled We Charge Genocide, to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. Signed by Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones (founder of England’s first Black newspaper), and almost one hundred others, the petition—and documentation of nearly five hundred brutal crimes against African Americans in the late 1940s—blasted the credibility of the self-identified leader of the free world. The true “test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals,” the antiracists boomed from Switzerland to Swaziland. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 921

Categorization

• QUESTION: Kendi notes the petition’s documentation of nearly 500 crimes — worth chasing the actual primary text of We Charge Genocide to see its evidence and legal framing.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in self-interest-driven policy: the State Dept’s managed ‘freedom brand’ is a textbook example of reputational self-interest shaping overseas enforcement of domestic race policy.