Hierarchy & Human Rights

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.