Three Against the World: Why the US, Israel, and Argentina Voted No
They stood alone in the UN chamber. But their no votes didn’t come from nowhere. They came from a long history of erasing Black people from the story.
On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly held one of the most significant votes in its history. The resolution on the table, formally known as UN Resolution A/80/L.48 and spearheaded by Ghana on behalf of the African Union, called on the international community to formally declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. It demanded reparatory justice for the descendants of the approximately 12.5 million Africans who were stolen from their homes, chained, and shipped across the Atlantic between the 15th and 19th centuries to be worked to death on plantations across the Americas and the Caribbean. It called for formal apologies, restitution, compensation, the return of stolen cultural artefacts, and structural reforms to address the racism and inequality that slavery built into the foundations of the modern world. It was the culmination of years of diplomacy led by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, backed by the entire 54-nation African Union bloc and the Caribbean Community. The vote was held deliberately on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. When the result was announced, 123 countries had voted yes. Fifty-two had abstained. And three had voted no.
Three countries. Out of 193 member states of the United Nations, only three raised their hand and said no. The United States. Israel. Argentina. In a vote witnessed by the world, they stood against a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. Their objections were wrapped in legal language, carefully worded, procedurally framed. But strip that language away and what you find underneath is something the diaspora has always known: that powerful nations will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid acknowledging what was done to Black people, and even greater lengths to avoid paying for it.
This is not just about reparations. It is about erasure. It is about the systems these three countries have built, and continue to maintain, on the foundation of anti-Blackness. The legal arguments are the latest chapter in a very old story.
The United States: Built on Black Bodies, Determined to Forget
Let’s start with the most powerful country on earth and the one whose no vote carries the most weight. Deputy US Ambassador Dan Negrea told the General Assembly that the United States “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.” He called the resolution “highly problematic in countless respects” and described reparations as a “cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point in an attempt to reallocate modern resources.”
Read that again. The United States government, in 2026, described the demands of descendants of enslaved people as cynical. It framed the children and grandchildren of those who built this country for free as opportunists. That is not a legal argument. That is anti-Blackness dressed in a suit.
The United States was constructed on the labour of enslaved Africans. This is not a metaphor. The cotton that fuelled the Industrial Revolution was picked by enslaved hands on American soil. The banks that financed America’s growth held enslaved people as collateral. The insurance companies that enabled American commerce wrote policies on enslaved human beings as property. The White House itself was built by enslaved labour. The wealth generated by slavery between the 16th and 19th centuries has been estimated by economists at trillions of dollars in today’s money, wealth that was inherited by white American families and institutions across generations while Black families inherited nothing but the trauma of what had been done to them.
And then, after emancipation, the erasure continued. The brief promise of Reconstruction, when freed Black Americans began to build wealth, political power and communities, was violently dismantled. Black Wall Street in Tulsa was burned to the ground in 1921 by a white mob with government complicity. Redlining locked Black families out of homeownership and the wealth that came with it for generations. The GI Bill that created the American middle class after World War Two was administered in ways that largely excluded Black veterans. Every time Black Americans found a foothold, the system found a way to knock them back down.
“The United States does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.” — US Ambassador Dan Negrea, 2026
Today the racial wealth gap in the United States tells the story plainly. The median white family holds roughly eight times the wealth of the median Black family. Black Americans face higher rates of poverty, incarceration, maternal mortality, infant mortality, unemployment, and housing insecurity than white Americans across every measure. These are not coincidences. They are consequences. They are the mathematical result of a system that extracted everything from Black people and gave nothing back.
And the Trump administration, which cast the no vote on March 25, has not just refused to address these inequalities. It has actively accelerated the erasure. Since returning to power in January 2025, the administration has gutted federal diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. It has moved to remove Black history from school curricula and defunded institutions dedicated to preserving African American history. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, one of the most visited museums in Washington, has faced political pressure and forced removal of artefacts. The message being sent to Black America is clear: your history is inconvenient, your claims are illegitimate, and your suffering will not be acknowledged on any official ledger.
Voting no at the UN was entirely consistent with that message. It was, in fact, its logical extension to the international stage.
The Erasure of Black America in Plain Sight
What makes the US position particularly painful for the diaspora is how visible the need for reparations is, and how aggressively the conversation has been suppressed. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 triggered the largest civil rights uprising in American history, with millions of people in hundreds of cities demanding that the country finally reckon with its racial past. For a brief moment it seemed like the conversation might actually happen. Some cities began local reparations programmes. Congressional bills were introduced. The word reparations entered mainstream political discourse in a way it never had before.
Then the backlash came. “Critical race theory” became a rallying cry for politicians who wanted to shut down any honest teaching of American history. Books were banned. Teachers were fired. Diversity programmes were dismantled. The window that had opened in 2020 was systematically forced shut by a political movement whose central project was, and remains, the preservation of a version of American identity that has no room for Black grievance, Black history, or Black demands for justice.
The no vote at the UN is that same project operating on a global scale. If the United States acknowledged at the UN that the transatlantic slave trade demands reparatory justice, it would become impossible to deny the same logic domestically. And that is precisely what this administration is not prepared to do.
Israel: The Pain of a Parallel
Israel’s no vote hit differently for many people, and it is worth sitting with why. The State of Israel was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the systematic genocide of six million Jewish people by Nazi Germany. The world’s recognition of that genocide, the insistence that it be remembered, taught, and never repeated, that its survivors and their descendants receive compensation and acknowledgement, is something that Israel has fought for and that the international community has largely honoured. Germany has paid out over 80 billion euros in reparations for the Holocaust. The principle that historical atrocity demands acknowledgement and material redress is one that Israel has championed.
And then, on March 25, 2026, Israel voted no on a resolution asking the world to apply that exact same principle to the enslavement of African people.
The contradiction is not lost on anyone in the diaspora. Many Black communities, particularly in the United States and the Caribbean, have long felt a kinship with Jewish communities around the shared experience of systematic persecution and the fight for historical recognition. That kinship makes Israel’s no vote feel like a betrayal of something deeper than diplomacy.
Israel’s stated reasons aligned with the US: legal hierarchy of crimes, retroactivity of international law. But the subtext matters too. Israel’s relationship with the UN General Assembly has deteriorated dramatically over the past two years amid the war in Gaza and international legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice. Israel’s posture toward UN resolutions is one of near-blanket resistance, and the reparations vote was caught in that broader pattern.
But none of that makes it easier to hear. A nation that has built its entire moral and political identity around the imperative to remember historical atrocity voted against remembering someone else’s. And for the Afro-Jewish community, for Black people who have long stood in solidarity with Jewish causes, the vote raised questions that will not be quickly resolved.
Argentina: Erasure Written into the Nation Itself
Argentina’s no vote is perhaps the least discussed of the three, but in some ways it is the most revealing, because it exposes a form of Black erasure so complete that most people are not even aware it exists.
Argentina today presents itself as a white European nation. Its population is overwhelmingly of Spanish and Italian descent. If you ask the average Argentine about Black Argentines, many will tell you there are none, or almost none. This is one of the most successful acts of demographic and cultural erasure in the history of the Americas.
The reality is that Buenos Aires was one of the largest slave ports in the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were trafficked through Argentina. At the beginning of the 19th century, Black people made up roughly 30 percent of Buenos Aires’s population. By the end of that century, the official census recorded them as having almost disappeared. Where did they go? The explanations offered by Argentine historians have long been: the wars, the yellow fever epidemic, intermarriage. But scholars of Afro-Argentine history argue that the disappearance was also a product of deliberate state policy: the erasure of Blackness from the national identity to construct a European-facing Argentina that would attract white immigration and align itself with the colonial powers.
The descendants of enslaved Africans in Argentina are still there. They are invisible in the national narrative, unacknowledged in the history books, and unrepresented in the country’s political and cultural life. Argentina’s no vote was not just a political choice by the Milei government, it was the latest expression of a national project of Black erasure that has been running for two centuries.
President Javier Milei, with his explicit alignment with Trump-era politics and his dismissal of what he calls “woke” ideology, provided the political vehicle for the vote. But the deeper driver is a country that has spent 200 years pretending its Black population never existed, and is not ready to start acknowledging them now.
What These Three Votes Have in Common
Strip away the different national contexts and the three no votes share a single thread: they were all cast by governments that have a vested interest in maintaining a version of history and national identity in which Black suffering is minimised, Black claims are dismissed, and Black people are cast as the problem rather than the victims of a problem that continues to this day.
The legal arguments are real in the sense that lawyers can make them. But they are chosen arguments, selected from a menu of possible positions precisely because they provide cover for a political choice. The same countries that invoke non-retroactivity and legal hierarchy to block reparations for Black people have found no difficulty applying contemporary legal and moral standards when the victims were not Black.
One hundred and twenty-three countries saw through it. The diaspora sees through it. History is seeing through it.
The vote is recorded. The no votes are recorded. And the communities who have always known that the fight for Black dignity would be resisted at every turn by those with the most to lose, are not surprised. They are not defeated either. They are, if anything, more determined.
Because the ancestors did not survive the Middle Passage, the plantations, the whip, the auction block, Reconstruction’s betrayal, Jim Crow, Windrush, and every form of erasure since, for their descendants to stop here.
The 123 countries that voted YES:
Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Every single African nation voted yes. Every Caribbean nation voted yes. The entire Global South, with very few exceptions, voted yes. Brazil, home to the largest African diaspora population outside Africa, voted yes. India, China, and Russia voted yes. The message from the majority of the world’s nations and the majority of the world’s people was unmistakable.
The 52 countries that ABSTAINED:
Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay.
The abstaining bloc is a map of Western wealth and former colonial power. Every one of the 27 European Union member states abstained. The United Kingdom abstained. Canada abstained. Australia abstained. Japan and South Korea abstained. These are the countries that built their modern economies on the trade in enslaved African people, or on the colonial systems that slavery sustained. They could not bring themselves to say yes. But they would not say no either. We will examine what that fence-sitting really means in Article 3.
The 3 countries that voted NO:
Argentina. Israel. United States of America.
