A/HRC/45/44 65. On 12 June 2020, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued an early warning and urgent action procedure with regard to the United States, calling upon the State inter alia to comply with its treaty obligations, to mitigate police misconduct, to recognize structural discrimination, to desist in calling the military in against peaceful protesters, and to enact policing reform and eliminate racial profiling. IV. Conclusions and recommendations A. Conclusions 66. The Working Group welcomes the current attention to the issue of systemic racial discrimination that people of African descent face, and thanks the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism protestors for turning a spotlight towards this urgent matter. It is now time for Member States to take real action to ensure that the roots of the problem are effectively addressed, that international human rights law is implemented and that justice is provided. Positive steps at the local levels must continue until equal justice is finally achieved. 67. Evidence suggests that this moment has been a complex test for the human rights system, including its ability to address grave violations and States’ commitments to compliance with and enforcement of human rights law. With respect to people of African descent, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that systemic racism touches the lives of people of African descent broadly. Structural racial discrimination exacerbates inequality in access to health care and treatment, leading to racial disparities in health outcomes and increased mortality and morbidity for people of African descent. These racial disparities suggest that the precarity that many people of African descent experience, particularly in intersectional populations, will increase. 68. COVID-19 outcomes have been overtly socially-determined, centring race as a significant factor, despite popular narratives that the virus was race-neutral and assurances that “we are all in this together”. Policymakers neither acknowledged nor corrected existing social determinants of health, creating even greater risks for people of African descent. Racial disparities ensued, and persist. Recent research confirms the importance of taking proactive measures to protect frontline workers of African descent, a high-risk category within the high-risk category of frontline workers.50 69. Racial discrimination cannot be resolved merely by ignoring race and assuming that the legacy mindsets of colonialism and that trade and trafficking in enslaved Africans have vanished.51 This is of particular relevance in the context of the COVID19 pandemic, where there is a risk that knowledge production will baseline white experiences as standard, that is, fail to question the impact of systemic racism in this context as a feature of the pandemic that must be addressed rather than merely narrow the gaps between people of African descent and a white-defined norm. 70. As anti-racism protests continue, many State and non-State institutions have embraced symbolic changes and echoed key tag lines. This is, however, only a first step. The toxic effects of systemic racism can be dismantled only through substantive efforts to curb police violence, address impunity and ensure racial equity and equality. 71. Disaggregated data are also an important, politicized resource in the COVID-19 pandemic. The failure to keep disaggregated data facilitates and conceals human rights violations against people of African descent globally. Some States nonetheless fail to keep or publish such data. In the case of the pandemic, existing disaggregated data highlight the stark racial disparities in rates of infection and mortality. Racial 50 51 See Nguyen et al., “Risk of COVID-19 among front-line health-care workers”. An African American author, Toni Morrison, expressed this concern in 1975 when she identified the function of racism as one of ’distraction’, “a device that “keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” 15