Thank you Samantha Paige (she/they), zink, Darnell Martin, Rebel Guest, Dmg, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Brother Malcolm Told Us Where the Courtroom Was Before I get into what happened in Switzerland I need to pay a debt, because this trip does not exist without a man who never got to make it. On April 3, 1964, in Cleveland, Malcolm X stood up at Cory Methodist Church and told a room full of Black folks that they had been fighting in the wrong courtroom. Civil rights, he said, keeps the whole struggle inside the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. You are asking the man who is violating you to also be the judge. Human rights, though, is a different jurisdiction. Human rights are the rights you were born with, and the moment you frame the case that way you can carry it to the United Nations and put the United States in the dock in front of the whole world. That is the argument of “The Ballot or the Bullet” that people skip past when they only quote the title. Then he did what he said. On June 28, 1964, he founded the Organization of Afro American Unity, modeled on the Organization of African Unity, with the explicit purpose of internationalizing the struggle. Three weeks later, on July 17, 1964, he was in Cairo at the OAU summit handing African heads of state a memorandum asking them to bring the condition of 22 million Black Americans before the United Nations. He spent the last year of his life flying between Africa and Harlem building that case. He was assassinated on February 21, 1965, before he could file it. I’m a former national championship winning policy debate coach and hall of fame college policy debater, that spent years running Afro pessimist critiques of civil society in rounds. I know the arguments about why the UN is a colonial instrument, why the state cannot be reformed into recognizing Black humanity, why appealing to the international order is appealing to the same order that built the plantation. I still believe a lot of that as description. Malcolm believed a lot of that too. Then he went to Cairo anyway, because he understood something that took me a flight to Geneva to feel in my body: the value of the human rights forum is not that it will save you. The value is that it forces the state to be seen refusing to save you, on a record it does not control, in front of people it cannot intimidate. That is the work I went to Switzerland to continue. Not because I think Geneva is Wakanda. Because Malcolm told us where the courtroom was, and in November 2025 the United States refused to show up to it, and somebody had to be in the room to write that down. Why I Was There Let me zoom in for a minute, y’all. I did not go to the United Nations for me. I went because two people invited me to come capture what they were doing, and what they were doing was putting the reproductive health of Black women, pregnant people, and multiply marginalized folks in this country into the international record while our own government was actively trying to erase it. Pearl Ricks, who uses they and them pronouns, is the executive director of the Reproductive Justice Action Collective in New Orleans and a cofounder of the Choice Congregation Church. Pearl is an artist and, in their own words, a full human being who refuses to forget that while doing advocacy and care work. Kiana Lewis is a full spectrum community doula with over 25 years of birth work, born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, seventeen years in Texas, and now between the two. She founded the Holy Ho Institute, a reproductive justice sanctuary in Dallas, she serves as interim executive director of the historic Jamaa Birth Village in Ferguson, Missouri, and she is cochair of the National Network of Abortion Funds. She entered this work, as she said on my stream, as a Black queer birth worker. Neither of them is a diplomat. Neither of them has a law degree. Pearl told me in Geneva that they had to leave college because it was giving depression and broke. That is important, because the United Nations has a word for who they are, and the word is civil society. I looked it up, because I know how my audience is. According to the UN, civil society is the third sector of society, distinct from both government and business, the realm of organized voluntary activity by citizens. Which means the doula in Dallas and the organizer in New Orleans are not guests in that building. Structurally, they are one of the three legs the whole thing stands on. What the Universal Periodic Review Actually Is Huey P. Newton once said that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. So before we get into the phenomenon, let me define it, because most people in the U.S. have never heard of it and that is not an accident. The Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, is a process of the UN Human Rights Council in which every single member state, all 193, has its human rights record reviewed by the other member states on a cycle of roughly four and a half years. Every country. The rich ones. The powerful ones. The ones that position themselves as defenders of democracy and human rights. That is the entire point of the word universal. No country is supposed to be above scrutiny. Here is how it works, in Kiana’s words on my stream, because she explained it better than the website does. The government being reviewed submits a national report on what it is doing to protect human rights. Other governments examine the record and make recommendations, which can cover racial discrimination, reproductive rights, policing, incarceration, LGBTQ rights, health care, housing, voting rights. The country under review can accept, note, or respond to each recommendation, and ideally it acts on them before the next cycle. The process is not a world court. It cannot force anybody to change a law. What it does is put violations into an international record, allow governments to question one another, and allow civil society to introduce evidence that the official government narrative leaves out. In Kiana’s phrasing: hey, I know this is what our government told you, but this is what our experience is on the ground. That civil society evidence has a name. It is called a stakeholder submission, or in the language of the people who do this work, a shadow report. Pearl put it plainly: anything a government does not want to talk about, it is going to omit. Anything a government wants to change the facts on, the shadow report gives us the opportunity to tell the truth about. Pearl and Kiana, with the Reproductive Justice Action Collective, Birthmark Doulas, Ipas, and a coalition of other organizations, spent the better part of a year interviewing people, talking to legislators, and reviewing policy to produce a submission titled Diminishing Reproductive and Bodily Autonomy in the United States. It documents restrictions on freedom of movement, abortion access, and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, whether that outcome is a miscarriage, an abortion, or a stillbirth. Pearl noted something that mattered to them: in a global venue they were able to degender the language, to talk about pregnant people and bodies capable of pregnancy, and to bring a reproductive justice lens that refuses to put trans people, intersex people, or immigrants on the chopping block to protect somebody else. Now here is the phenomenon. The fourth cycle review of the United States was scheduled for November 7, 2025. Civil society organizations had already filed 155 submissions documenting arbitrary detention, abuse of immigrants, regression on sexual and reproductive rights, systemic racial discrimination. The government’s national report was due in August. On August 28, 2025, the chief of the UPR branch announced that the United States had withdrawn from its own review. On November 7, the chair of the Human Rights Council opened the session, the U.S. delegation’s seats were empty, the interactive dialogue could not proceed, and the Council adopted by consensus a decision expressing regret and urging the U.S. to resume cooperation. No UN member state had ever failed to be reviewed since the process began in 2008. Israel boycotted its own review in 2013 and came back the same year. The United States, which participated actively in its first three reviews, including in 2020 after it had already left the Human Rights Council once, is now the only country on Earth to simply not show up. Kiana described what that felt like. A group of them had gone to Geneva for the presession in the fall of 2025 because they had an inkling the government might not participate, and they were there to testify anyway. In the middle of a session, in the middle of a testimony, a note came through that the United States would not be participating. She said it felt disrespectful, and not to the UN. It felt disrespectful to the people whose lives were in the reports. To the people being criminalized, denied health care, living in state violence. She remembers sitting with a delegate, she thinks Norway or Chile, and telling them: even if the United States decides not to show up, you cannot not still name the atrocities. You cannot leave the citizens of the United States alone with this administration. It is not safe. I’m a educator. I come from the academic space. When I hear the word review, I understand what a peer review is. I understand what it means when you pull out of one. It means you do not want your claims checked. It means you would rather have your work uncited than refereed. That is not a technicality to me. That really means something. The Same Year, Three Times Here is where the historian in me needs to slow the room down, because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a neutral document that fell out of the sky. It was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, the day after my birthday, in the ashes of the Second Wo
