“A Problem of Humanity”: The Human Rights Framework and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Abstract

While the historical and ongoing symbolic and material inequalities and violence faced by African Americans can be understood as a human rights violation, the efficacy of the human rights framework for addressing racial injustice in the United States remains contested. In this article, I examine the relationship between the emergence and dominance of the geopolitical doctrine of human rights and the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Through historical, legal, and sociological analysis of relevant issues and cases, I discern the benefits and limitations of the human rights framework for achieving racial justice and elucidate dynamics between relevant institutional, political, and social actors. I argue that the human rights framework opens international pathways for information, accountability, and symbolic politics conducive to combating racial injustice, particularly regarding overt manifestations of oppression and violence, but enduring issues such as the role of the state in racial politics and the dehumanization of people of color present hindrances.

A false peace: Bringing racism and race into peace scholarship in the metropole.

“…Oftentimes, Whites can impose their own definition of situations as peaceful, conflictual, or violent. In response, “people of color must disprove interactional expectations qua racial stereotypes through performances and presentations of self that signify and symbolize white notions of acceptability or servility” (Rosino, 2018, p. 171). Racial domination in everyday life may not in and of itself be overtly violent but it is backed by the ever-present threat of state and individual violence against marginalized folks who defy the unwritten rules of a racialized society.…”

“…For example, protests surrounding racial issues in policing and the debate over Confederate statues have opened a much-needed discussion and call to examine how America seeks to define itself as a nation (Cox, 2021). An essential aspect of exploring human and civil rights in America is to assess which groups have access to peace and human rights (Rosino, 2018;Toussaint, 2024). The United States is a racialized country.…”

Social Movement Framing Tasks and Contemporary Racisms: Diagnostic and Prognostic Forms

“…As Rosino observes, though matters of racial injustice have increasingly come to be understood as human rights violations, that conceptualization alone does little to combat their persistence. Social change requires “collective actions that translate that [conceptualization] into institutional accountability and logics of everyday practice” (2018:347). That which constrains social movements, limits collective actions, or denies them success may, then, be defined as racist if it upholds and preserves prevailing racist structures.…”