Hierarchy & Human Rights
Description: This talk unearths racial hierarchy in human rights by examining its primary sources and methods. Doing so reveals how the process of international law-making has restricted the recognition of claims and rights priorities of Black peoples. Centering anti-Blackness in human rights also reveals how conventional scholarship and pedagogical approaches to conceptualizing the origins of human rights further erasure and reinscribes the functioning of White imperial power. By surfacing whose ideas, discourses, social movements, and declarations are regarded as foundational in the discipline of human rights, this talk demonstrates how the canon conveys narratives about who the project is for, which fundamentally miseducates, distorts, and limits any potential resonance of the field. Returning to Black peoples’ early visualizations of human rights, many of which are hidden in plain sight, can help us to better understand the development of human rights and perhaps more importantly how the human rights project did not develop. Doing so allows us to consider more emancipatory futures.
Abstract: Black peoples’ early visions of rights, some captured in law, some not, are part of human rights genealogy and deserve to be recognized as such. This book surfaces key rights enacted or asserted by Black peoples from the 1800s to the 1940s to demonstrate how the early human rights priorities of Black peoples are hidden in plain sight. The book highlights the complex human rights histories of early Black States like Haiti, Ethiopia, and Liberia, as well as key Black social movements from abolitionist groups, to the African National Congress in South Africa, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, in the United States, as well as the Pan-African Congresses, which brought together delegates from the Black Diaspora in the Caribbean, Europe, the Americas, and the African continent. Many Black visions for rights examined in this project like Ethiopia’s long assertion of the right to self-determination and to be free from foreign occupation and rule are marginalized in the canon. Each chapter surfaces critical aspects of erasure and marginalization of Black peoples’ rights claims in human rights. By examining rights not only manifested in law, but emancipatory normative claims asserted by Black peoples through ideas, discourses, social movements, as well as rebellions and uprisings, this book reveals a vision of human rights that is consumed with concerns about attaining substantive equality, and eradicating slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination, and subordination amongst others. The rich tradition of rights claims within the Black Diaspora goes back much further than is acknowledged. By looking back using the Ghanaian principle of Sankofa, we can learn from early Black visions and better understand the rights claims being made today for the full recognition of Black humanity.
Bio:
Professor Matiangai Sirleaf is an interdisciplinary international scholar, justice seeker, and award-winning author who has worked to unearth unjust hierarchies embedded in international law and to remedy the inequities that emerge and persist. She is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She holds a secondary appointment as a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
