Human Rights Now

The Best Class Ever!

#004

Yes, I know that I wrote somewhere earlier that the students in my two Fall classes, Soc 131 and Soc 273 were the best ever, so now (hmm) it is a wee bit awkward to write that the students in my Spring class, Soc. 290 are the best ever. Never mind; what is remarkable is that the Spring students took what they inherited from the Fall students and launched an amazing project -- the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Human Rights Initiative (CH-CHRI)!!

In the Fall students studied international human rights law and the human rights provisions in other countries’ constitutions. They were shocked to learn that the US  lags behind the world and the majority of countries by about fifty years. They decided to hold a mock Constitutional Convention, which is documented in a blog  maintained by then-undergraduate student, Cynthia Trinh, and in an article written by graduate student, Beth Latshaw. The Convention was a smashing success, attended by NAACP representatives, community activists , labor representatives, and the mayors of both cities.

Americans can protest that their government fails to ratify human rights treaties. It will take, however, great public support as well as broad-based coalitions of lawyers, determined scientists, civic leaders, church leaders, and representatives of major nonprofits to lobby and persuade Congress and the president to make this a reality. No US president, with the exception of Carter (and he failed), has been supportive of the US ratifying international human rights treaties (or for that matter, the human rights treaties of the Organization of American States.

What do we do in the meantime?

Why Not Cities?

Locales are where people engage one another -- ethically, responsibly, while recognizing others’ dignity, cultures, and identities. It is in locales where residents find solutions for universal housing and health care, gender equity, nondiscrimination, quality education, green power, migrants’ rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, local farms, and (even) redistribution of wealth. And, its in locales where inclusion and pluralism are nurtured and celebrated.

Soc 290 picked up where Soc 131 and Soc 273 left off. Only the scale is different – a shift from the international/national to the local. The students were encouraged by both mayors’ saying that they would support Chapel Hill and Carrboro becoming Human Rights Cities.They were also empowered by the knowledge that there is one other HR City in North America –  Edmonton - with others in the making, and quite a few around the world. This is the background for why we decided to launch the CH-CHRI. (For a background, with links to other cities, see my article; Excellent sources of information on Human Rights Cities are PDHRE and the John Humphrey Center of Edmonton. 

A Citizens’ Steering Committee was formed at the beginning of the semester, and will continue to grow in size and diversity. At their meetings (about monthly), the students presented their work and updates. As things move forward, the Steering Committee will propose projects for the students to tackle.

To make a long story short – the 19 students in Soc 290 did amazing work. In a sense, we were “all over the map.” We went to town hearings (taking our message about the priority of human rights with us), met with university researchers, met with people in the nonprofit sector, went to a Law School conference, proposed changes in the police department’s work with minority kids, attended sessions in a black church on environmental racism, went to meetings for developers and “gave them a piece of our minds,” went to health care meetings, worked on a clean-water initiative, consolidated connections with an end-the-homelessness coalition and met with some homeless people. We felt we wanted and needed this "all-over-the-map" approach in order to better understand how human rights are situated in the two cities and where the weak and strong spots are. (None will be surprised that the challenges will be building solidarity across racial, ethnic and citizenship lines, and overcoming the divides of wealth, ownership, and privilege.)

I will not say more here, but let the 19 students describe their projects. See two blogs, one by Bernard Worthy, which captures the core theme of our course, and another by Meredith Austin, which includes entries by students and is an excellent summary of our semester.

Let me end by saying that it takes courage for a college student to speak at a public hearing, telling developers that their classy projects are an assault on the well being of near-by African Americans because they will be forced out of the community that their families had lived in for generations. That’s just one reason this was the Best Class Ever. (There are 18 other reasons)

Spring Term

Toolkits

#003

Albie Sachs, prominent South African jurist, sums up the logic of human rights this way: when we celebrate human rights we celebrate human equality, but at the same time we celebrate that each and every one of us is different from all the rest. Sachs captures the essence of what human rights are: human equality and human difference. By implication, too, humans have responsibilities to one another to ensure equality and difference. If these are the principles, where do we go next? Surely we need tools, but there are different kinds of tools, and therefore different toolkits.

There are three.

The International Toolkit

In the international toolkit, there are three tools. The first are human rights laws agreed to by nation-states and “housed” within international agencies: the United Nations, UNESCO, and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The second are Nongovernmental Organizations – NGOs -  that mobilize and coordinate human rights actions transnationally. NGOs are diverse, including “whistle blowers,” such as Human Rights Watch, and mobilizers, such as Via Campesina. The third  are networked movements that span the globe and unite people in opposition to oppression, economic exploitation, war and militarism. At the center of these movements is the World Social Forum. In different ways, human rights laws, NGOs, and networked movements are advancing equality while upholding peoples’ distinctive cultural rights.

National Toolkits

Toolkits of nation-states are constitutional provisions for human rights. The range is extraordinary. Just to illustrate, Brazil has detailed labor provisions; Finland, South Africa and Spain have provisions for language and cultural rights; Paraguay protects the rights of its indigenous peoples; Belarus, among other countries, has provisions for universal medical care; and Argentina and other countries have constitutional provisions for the rights of women.  In spite of great variation, the trend is towards uniformity and enhanced protections because citizens and NGOs everywhere are demanding it, and this includes socioeconomic rights and provisions for the rights of particular groups, such as women and minorities. 

 Local Toolkits: Learning with Others

It is only at the local level - in neighborhoods, communities, towns and cities - that people existentially learn, feel and understand the significance of equality and difference. By this I mean that people discover these principles themselves, through engagement with others, not abstractly through laws and constitutions. Black Americans and white Americans sort through their shared and different histories; citizens listen to migrants and, in turn, migrants to citizens; and  farmers and city folk come together and have discussions about what they have in common and how they are different.

The local toolkit of human rights is messy and disorganized, but it is the most significant of them all.

Please see my students’ blogs: 

 
http://humanrightscity.blogspot.com/

http://www.unchumanrights.bigbig.com/

 

Singing in America 

#002

The rich in America enjoy human rights. The rest of can imagine that they sing as they enjoy their rights -- :

Housing. ♫

Healthcare. ♫

Decent job. ♫

Good income. ♫

Food. ♫

Education for their children ♫

Besides that they enjoy: Clean water. ♫ Security in old age. ♫ Opportunities to enjoy culture. ♫ Benefits from science. ♫

We can say that these rights that the rich enjoy have been stolen from the rest of us – ordinary men and women. It is quite clear in international law that these are everybody’s rights. Just as we have inequality of wealth in America, we have inequality in the realization of human rights. 

But how much inequality is there?

America suffers from extreme inequalities. In  2001, the top 1% of households owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth. More details can be found on Professor Domhoff’s webpage.

Those who are poor in the United States are denied their fundamental rights to live fully as human beings in the richest country in the entire world.  Singing joyfully is probably not the first thing on their minds. Below are some depressing facts:

►Housing: HUD reports that 3.5 million persons are likely to experience homelessness during a given yearand 40 percent of them will be children.

►Healthcare: Census data show that over 47 million Americans are uninsured,

►Decent job: A third of American workers, according The State of Working America, are in nonstandard jobs (not regular and not full-time)

►Good income: Forbes ran an article on the fastest growing jobs in America and  Wal-Mart came out on top.

►Food: 35.5 million people lived in households considered to be food insecure, with blacks and Latinos far higher than the national rate.

►Education: Jonathon Kozol describes the confoundedness of poverty, race and isolation in inner city schools: “In the typically colossal high schools of the  Bronx, for instance,  more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic.”

The moral of the story is clear enough – all Americans would join in the chorus were human rights to be distributed equitably, fairly, and lawfully.

♫  ♫ ♫  ♫

We would dance and sing for joy.

Do Americans Have Human Rights?

#. 001

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only American president who recognized that Americans have human rights. (Citizenship rights, in contrast, are part of the US Constitution.) In his 1944 State of the Union Address Roosevelt proposed that all Americans are entitled to sufficient food, an education, housing, a decent job, health care, and security in old age. That was the first and last time we heard an American political leader defend human rights, in spite of the fact that they have become international law and most countries include human rights in their constitutions. To be sure, we Americans enjoy citizenship rights and can protest when our government has violated them. Yet we Americans cannot protest violations of human rights because we have none, at least none that are constitutionally binding

Returning to Roosevelt. He died in 1945. After that the Cold War ideology took fierce hold in America, but it was a more comprehensive ideology than often described. It was not only anti-Communism, it was also about class, race, and gender in America. This ideology justified patriarchy, kept racial minorities in their place, and defended a class hierarchy. The "undeserving," it was said, were coddled in communist countries, but not in capitalist America. Why? The answer that ideologues gave was that the system was fair! Those who did not meet the mark simply would go hungry, unhoused, unemployed. "Too bad. Maybe the Salvation Army would look after them"

Fast forward to the 1990s. Same system, same myth, but what has changed is that Americans workers had to compete with all workers around the world, and American workers – lots and lots of them – began to recognize that the whole system is rigged. Again fast forward, this time to 2007, The top one percent of American households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s.( Saez). The ratio of the wealth of the richest one percent of US households to the typical US households was 190 (State of Working America 2006-07, Figure 5B).

Life chances in America are not only unequal, they are perniciously linked with race and ethnicity. The poverty rate is 24.4 percent for blacks, 22.5 percent for Hispanics, and 23.2 for Native Americans. (US Bureau of the Census), and a disproportionate many of the 47 million without health insurance are people of color. A recent Harvard Public Health study found that Indigenous males lived only to about 50 years of age.

The problem in America is that we may be dismayed and shocked at these facts but we have no objective grounds to protest them. Of course we have human rights, which are birthrights, but they are not birthrights that are recognized by our government.

There are many questions: Why are human rights so dangerous that they were pushed underground in America? Where do human rights come from? What countries have adopted human rights? Do all countries agree about human rights? I always welcome your comments.