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.
“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.
Reid specialises in Caribbean social and economic history, particularly on the economic performance of plantation societies. He has previously presented his work at the working group, at meetings of the Economic History Society at Oxford University, the Association of Caribbean Historians, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was at a speaking engagement at the latter that he became aware of the post on the working group and interviewed for it.
“I received the highest ranking from the Consultative Group — the five ambassadors who recommend candidates for Humans Rights Council positions,” Reid said.
Dr Reid joined the faculty at BCC in 2011, having received a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of the West Indies, Mona, and a PhD in Social and Economic History at the University of Hull, England.
He is the recipient of several awards, including a prestigious research fellowship from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition; a research fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University; and a PSC-CUNY grant to conduct archival research in England. He has written articles such as Sugar, Land Markets and the Williams Thesis: Evidence from Jamaica’s Property Sales 1750–1810 in Slavery and Abolition, vol 34, 3 (2013): 401-424 (co-author David Ryden); Sugar, Slavery and Productivity in Jamaica, 1750 - 1807, also in Slavery and Abolition; and West Indian Economic Decline in Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, 2013.
“Such scholarship will make him an indispensable asset for the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent,” BCC says on its website. “But students in his Caribbean history, world regional geography and the history of the modern world classes will be happy to know he will continue to teach, preach and inspire on the campus of Bronx Community College”.
BCC is part of the City University of New York network of more than 20 institutions.
Source: Jamaica Observer