Striving for Equality: An Honest Assessment

Last spring, the Bush administration quietly submitted a report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination articulating the Administration's version of the state of equal opportunity in America. Last week, a group of 250 independent U.S. experts submitted their own report to the U.N. committee, providing a much-needed reality check to the administration's story.

Coordinated by the U.S. Human Rights Network, the independent experts' "shadow" report examined government data and investigated evidence on equal opportunity in employment, education, criminal justice, housing, health care, environmental protection and other gateways to opportunity. My organization, The Opportunity Agenda, was among the groups providing data and analysis, particularly on access to quality health care.

The Bush administration submitted its report under the international Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which the United States helped to craft, and which the U.S. Senate ratified into our federal law in 1994. Each of the nearly 170 nations who've adopted the treaty—including the U.S.—must periodically report on their progress to the U.N. Committee on Racial Discrimination. This year, it's the U.S. government's turn.

A recent national poll commissioned by The Opportunity Agenda found that overwhelming majorities of Americans believe that equal opportunity regardless of race and freedom from discrimination are fundamental human rights that all people should enjoy. For example, 84 percent believe (and 70 percent believe strongly) that "when the police stop and search people solely based on their race or ethnicity they are violating their human rights." More generally, 81 percent believe (58 percent strongly) that "we should strive to uphold human rights in the U.S. because there are people being denied their human rights in our country."

Human rights, Americans believe, are crucial to upholding our national values.

Though unfamiliar to many Americans, our international system of human rights embodies those same shared values of fairness, dignity, and opportunity. As the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination declares, "the Charter of the United Nations is based on the principles of the dignity and equality inherent in all human beings." The United States and other countries that have ratified the treaty have pledged to work with the U.N. "to promote and encourage universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."

The shadow report filed last week is part of an important accountability system, revealing problems that governments themselves may shy away from, and proposing positive solutions.

The shadow report documents the significant ways in which our government has fallen short in its responsibility to protect equal opportunity—and which the Bush Administration's report failed to address adequately or at all. While the U.S. government report barely mentions Hurricane Katrina, 60 percent of Americans believe that "the way residents of New Orleans were treated after Hurricane Katrina was a violation of their human rights."

The shadow report validates that belief, and documents that, even today, governmental authorities have failed to reopen essential public health care facilities in New Orleans, contributing to an increase in the number of deaths due to lack of medical services.

The shadow report documents the persistence of unequal opportunity in many other sectors, including in the juvenile justice system. The report explains that African-American and Latino young people regularly receive more severe sentences than white youth in juvenile courts. Young people of color, the report also found, are "held in custody and prosecuted 'as adults' in criminal courts more often than white youth and given adult sentences more frequently. Because this disparate treatment cannot be explained away based on differences in conduct, and because fairer alternative policies exist, the American promise of equal opportunity embodied in the treaty is violated.

Unlike the administration's report, the shadow report proposes a range of workable solutions for expanding equal opportunity for all Americans. Regarding juvenile justice, for example, it recommends training for judges, probation officers, and prosecutors on the developmental needs of children, alternatives to detention and incarceration, and monitoring of racial bias in the juvenile justice system. Also recommended are ensuring vigorous enforcement of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Act-which requires states to demonstrate reductions in racial disparities—as well as using objective screening methods to ensure fair treatment of young people of different races, and investing in community-based support for young people and their families at the community level.

The next step in the international human rights process is for the U.N. Committee responsible for the Discrimination Convention to hear directly from the U.S. government, as well as from a delegation of the shadow report's authors. The Committee will issue findings and recommendations later this year. The timing will be ideal for Americans to probe the U.S. presidential candidates' positions on protecting the human right to equal opportunity here at home. And it can provide impetus and direction for needed human rights enforcement reforms in a new administration and Congress early next year.