CONGRATS : Jamaican-born New York professor, Dr Ahmed Reid sits on on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)....“We are tasked to study the problems of racial discrimination faced by people of African descent."

Sunday, May 29, 2016    

Associate professor of history at Bronx Community College (BCC) Dr Ahmed Reid is the representative for Latin America and the Caribbean on the United Nations Human Rights Council. Reid, a Jamaican who hails from St James, is one of five members of the council’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, serving from December 1, 2015 until June 2022.

Dr Ahmed Reid, a son of St James in Jamaica, is the
 representative for Latin America and the Caribbean on
 the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Workign
Group of Experts on People of African Descent.Photo: BCC

“We are tasked to study the problems of racial discrimination faced by people of African descent. We gather all relevant information from governments, non-governmental organisations and other sources. We also visit countries where we think problems exist. Then we submit our report to the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly,” Dr Reid said, explaining the working group’s functions.

Reid, the only historian on the working group, is no stranger to activism.

“Since my time as a graduate student living in the Caribbean, and as a historian with the experience of colonialism and what colonialism has done to the Caribbean — disfigured it, I always use that phrase — I have believed that history and social justice go hand in hand. My task is not just to teach history in the classroom, but also to do a lot of advocacy work. I do public lectures and history education because, in the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, about three per cent of the population gets the chance to go to university. The wider public needs to know the history and the legacy of slavery and colonialism,” he said. In 2007, the bicentenary of the British abolition of slavery, Dr Reid worked as a researcher for the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee. Thus began his interest in what is now the focus of his career.

“I started then and I’ve never stopped. The legacy of slavery and colonialism is still there and people of African descent continue to face discrimination and intolerance. My motivation is to help eliminate all of this. The working group tries to find measures to sensitise not only people of African descent about these issues, but everyone,” he says. more