Foreword

On April 20 local time, the State Department of the United States released its country reports on human rights practices for 2017, posing once again as "the guardian of human rights" and a self-styled "human rights judge." It continued to point fingers and cast groundless blame on the domestic affairs and human rights situation of other countries as if it had the most perfect human rights condition in the world. However, looking back on the year of 2017, even those with the slightest sense of righteousness will find that the human rights record of the United States itself remained tarnished and showed a continued deterioration tendency.

   -- On the evening of October 1, 2017, almost 60 people were killed and over 800 injured in a mass shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

            -- In August 2017, some white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, chanting Nazi slogans in the "largest hate gathering in decades".

   -- According to reports on The Atlantic website and New York Times website, several polls of American scholars revealed that most of the respondents believed that quality of democracy in the United States had been plateauing for decades, and that American democracy is drowning in money.

   -- A research from Martin Gilens, a politics professor at Princeton University, showed that American economic policies over the last 40 years “strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent, but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans.”

   -- A study from the U.S. National Registry of Exonerations released on March 7, 2017 showed that black Americans were about seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white Americans. When it comes to drug crimes, black Americans are about 12 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than innocent white people. Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than those of “similarly situated” white male offenders.

   -- The Economic Policy Institute released a report on February 13, 2017, saying that the average wealth for white families is seven times higher than average wealth for black families and that median white wealth is twelve times higher than median black wealth. More than one in four black households had zero or negative net worth.

   --According to websites of The Guardian and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in December 2017, 52.3 million Americans lived in “economically distressed communities” and 18.5 million were living in deep poverty.

   -- A report of BBC on December 11, 2017 said that of those living in poverty in the United States, there were about 13.3 million children – 18 percent of those under the age of 18. The U.S. Urban Institute statistics revealed that nearly 9 million children in the United States (11.8 percent of American children) would grow up in persistently poor families.