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Mon, 02 Nov 2026 Feature Article

The Unfinished Work: Racism in 2026 and the Duty of a Generation.

The Unfinished Work: Racism in 2026 and the Duty of a Generation.

Racism remains a defining human rights challenge in 2026. Speaking at the UN's International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Secretary-General António Guterres described racism as a learned behaviour that remains widespread and destructive. He warned that anti-racist protections are being weakened in some countries, while misinformation and hate speech continue to spread online.

Drawing on findings from the UN, UNESCO, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and Amnesty International, the evidence suggests racism remains deeply embedded in societies worldwide.

A Persistent Global Challenge

UNESCO's first Global Report on Racism and Discrimination, based on more than 600,000 publications, found that race, gender and sex account for two-thirds of reported discrimination globally. The report highlights racism not only in individual behaviour but also in institutions and unequal social outcomes.

The UN has also raised concerns about the mainstreaming of racism and xenophobia on digital platforms and in political discourse, where coded language can quickly evolve into open hate speech.

Sudan: Ethnic Violence and Atrocity

The gravest example remains Sudan's Darfur region. UN investigators reported in February 2026 that attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) against non-Arab communities, including the Zaghawa and Fur, showed "hallmarks of genocide."

Amnesty International later concluded that RSF actions amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Reports of ethnically motivated killings have continued throughout the year.

United States Under Scrutiny

In March 2026, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern over racist rhetoric, racial profiling and immigration enforcement practices in the United States.

The committee cited alleged discriminatory actions by federal immigration agencies and linked several deaths to immigration enforcement operations. The White House rejected the findings, describing the UN body's conclusions as biased.

Europe Sees Rising Discrimination

The FRA's Being Black in the EU survey found that 34% of Black respondents reported experiencing racial discrimination in the previous year, with significantly higher rates in some countries.

A separate FRA study found that nearly half of Muslims in the EU face discrimination in daily life. Authorities across Europe have also reported increases in antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents in recent years.

Palestinian Territories Debate

In January 2026, the UN human rights office reported what it described as intensified racial discrimination in the occupied West Bank. Israel disputes such characterisations, reflecting the ongoing international debate over the issue.

Ghana and the Reparations Movement

One of the year's most notable developments came from Ghana. In March, the UN General Assembly adopted a Ghana-led resolution describing the transatlantic slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity" and calling for reparations.

Although non-binding, the vote marked a significant step in the global reparations debate and aligned with the African Union's Decade of Action on Reparations and African Heritage.

What Works?

Experts identify several key responses:

  • Strong anti-discrimination laws.
  • Better data collection to expose inequality.
  • Education programmes that challenge bias and stereotypes.
  • International cooperation against racism.
  • Accountability for perpetrators of hate crimes and mass atrocities.

The Bottom Line

Racism in 2026 is not confined to history books. It appears in ethnic violence in Sudan, discrimination at borders, rising intolerance in Europe and ongoing debates over historical justice.

The challenge is global, but so is the response. Governments, schools, media organisations and communities all have a role to play in confronting prejudice, protecting rights and ensuring equality is more than a promise on paper.

Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams
Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams, © 2026

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.
Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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