Alana Lentin

RACISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Unpublised paper. Please do not cite without permission

“There is a pressing need for the establishment of a Council working

group for human rights in Europe. Amnesty International believes that
the steadily increasing workload relating to fundamental rights within
the EU makes the current situation untenable. The overarching
emphasis on security and counter-terrorism makes it all the more
urgent to establish a proper forum to address these concerns also from
a human rights perspective. European Union Must Focus on Human
Rights Implications of Asylum and Security Policy.”

Amnesty International UK Brussels, Monday 27th September 2004

(http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/15616.shtml)

This statement, part of a press briefing sent out by the human rights

organisation, Amnesty International, last summer, exemplifies the central

paradox this paper intends to address: the coexistence in politics today of a

professed commitment to the protection of human rights and their increasingly

legitimised infringement in the case of people considered to threaten the

security of the West.

It appears almost tautological to talk about the ‘human rights

perspective’ on security and counter-terrorism. However, this is not strictly a

paper about the current abuses of rights and liberties that have become a

reality of the ‘War on Terrorism’. This matter will be addressed, but as a

means for illustrating the more theoretical concerns I wish to raise.

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 Here, I want to talk about racism, because since the explosion of

human rights, it is something we don’t hear enough about, almost as if by

talking about rights as a solution we can only talk about individual

discrimination – rather than systemic domination such as racism or sexism –

as the problem.

I think by saying this that I have made it clear that I want to critique

racism in relation to human rights, not – and I wish to make this clear from the

outset – because I am opposed to human rights (to put it so simplistically

would be to miss the point), but because I believe that the way the

humanitarian discourse of human rights has been constructed historically

makes it impossible for it to bring about real change in this deeply unequal

world.

Specifically, I hope to do three things:

1. I want to point to the relationship between the humanist legacy and

modern racism and problematise the notion of an ideal of humanity.

2. I will then show how this central problem should also be seen as crucial

to a critique of the human rights approach. This is because, like the

growth of racism as a political project at a time of unparalleled

democracy in the late nineteenth century, so too humanitarianism

coexists with imperialism and market fundamentalism; and the

racialisation, criminalisation and incarceration that they incur on a

global scale.

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 3. Not wishing to be entirely pessimistic, I shall conclude my paper by

making some remarks about recent calls for a radical humanism to

replace reactionary, Eurocentric humanism which, it is hoped, would

overcome the shortcomings of human rights. However, not being able

to be entirely optimistic either, I should say already that before I

announce radical humanism as a great new hope, it will be

accompanied by a few health warnings.

1. Racism and ideal humanity

Teachers of ‘race’ and racism will know that the hardest thing to do is

to convincingly get across the idea of the modern and socially constructed

nature of racism. But it is vital to do so if we are to fully uncover its

perniciousness and to understand that the likelihood of its being eradicated in

an age of nation states and capitalism is sadly a dream. The modernity of

racism relates precisely to the problem I am proposing to be at the core of

human rights, namely the contingent emergence of a notion of ideal humanity;

an ideal based on an aesthetic, secular, rational - and therefore wholly

modern - person, made in the image of the European white man.

Etienne Balibar shows us that racism and universalism, although

separate, affect each other ‘from the inside’ because of the importance of

defining what it means to be human to the racist project. To construct an idea

of universally rational man it was necessary to define it against what it was

not. Quite simply, to conceive of what ideal humanity would look like it had to

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be pitted against what it could not include; that is the Other: the savage, the

black, the Jew…

Racism itself is universalised because, by the late nineteenth century, it

becomes a system for ordering the world’s population which is divided into

‘races’, each positioned in relation to the ideal, a standard set by those whose

idea it was in the first place: the Europeans.

The racism that should concern us is not what David Goldberg calls

naturalist racism, which sees racial inferiority as inherent and scientifically

provable. Naturalism precedes and coexists with another, more persistent,

mode which Goldberg calls historicist or progressivist racism, which comes

about in the late nineteenth century. It emerges mainly out of the conditions of

colonial rule and proposes that inferior ‘races’ may be civilised through

assimilation.

The historicist approach to the government of Others, be they natives

of the colonies or unruly immigrants and indigenous minorities at home, is

based on a supposed need for ‘racial realism’: It would be possible to civilise

inferiors by exposing them to the superior culture of the dominant group.

The success of historicism is in its ability to outlive the public

condemnation of murderous naturalist racism. While assimilation has been

more or less completely discredited, the assumptions behind historicist racism

persist. It is the basis for contemporary notions of colour-blindness or

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‘racelessness’ that perpetuate racial domination by literally refusing to see

‘race’, or in other words, denying the oppression caused by systemic

racialisation.

The idea that diversity can be ‘managed’ or that multiculturalism can be

‘put into practice’, for example, always implies that there is something – or

someone – in control. Rarely is the source and make up of this power to

organise society questioned. On the contrary, it is taken for granted.

Taking this for granted is the precise problem behind the universalism

in play in human rights. The well-known criticism of humanist ideals on the

grounds that they are based on a Eurocentric definition of humanity needs to

be taken a step further. Not only is the reactionary humanism that sees

European man as the standard for humanity flawed from the outset.

More concretely, the idea that rights can be extended to a subordinated

group from within a dominant culture which is taken to be neutral should

refute the true universality of the humanist agenda as it is practiced.

Eurocentric humanism can only fail in bringing about equality for all

because it does not question the restrictiveness of its idea of humanity. This is

because within the western nation-state system, the composition of the

hegemonic core group – that is of who governs – has not changed sufficiently

to actually represent the diversity of our societies. So, humanist ideals are

promoted within a system which maintains stratification, despite the fact that

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this should in principle contradict the ideal of universal humanity and its

egalitarian aims.

On both a national and on a world scale, the resulting inequality is very

often racialised because universalism has never been separated from the

notion of an ideal humanity. As I have said, the problem is that ideal humanity

always requires a dehumanised Other for its own definition.

2. The paradox of human rights

I want to propose that the possibility for human rights to bring about

greater equality are impeded by a basic constraining paradox. The historical

fact that universalism has been so greatly affected by the racialised vision of

‘ideal man’ has in turn shaped the way in which humanist principles have

been put into practice. The persistence of Eurocentrism and its solidification

today on a global scale that perpetuates the divisions between first, third, and

now fourth worlds makes it difficult to accept human rights as truly universal.

This is because, in practice, they are based on what Aimé Césaire called a

pseudo-humanism.

Today we are faced with a global political situation that illustrates the

paradox of human rights. The aftermath of September 11, 2001 has shown

us, more clearly than ever, how humanist principles may be violated in the

name of those same humanist ideals. In particular, racist practices,

legitimated by states, coexist with a declared commitment to spreading

human rights.

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 For example, the racial profiling techniques used to identify potential

terrorists mean, according to David Cole, that ‘Arab Americans and Muslims

have been “raced” as “terrorists”: foreign, disloyal, and imminently

threatening’ (p. 54). So, all Arab-looking people are potentially subject to

investigation under anti-terrorism legislation, while a war is waged to bring

democracy to Arabs whose human rights were violated.

In neither case can it be said that Arabs are being seen in a truly

humanistic light. They constitute either threats or victims, and as such are

stripped of autonomy. In either case, they are dehumanised; seen either as

incapable of action or as the architects of actions so monstrous as to not

qualify as human.

As Slavoj Zizek remarked in relation to the NATO intervention in

Kosovo, it is disingenuous to see the objectives of humanitarian missions that

aim to ‘restore human rights’ as non-political because ‘beneath this

depoliticised, lets-just-protect-human-rights rhetoric, there is an extremely

violent gesture of reducing the other to the helpless victim.’

Human rights are always bestowed by those whose rights are assured

upon such helpless others. This is the main problem in the human rights

approach. While human rights are the objective of activism, they cannot be

self-granted. Therefore, the struggle for human rights is almost always

undertaken on behalf of others.

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 When considering the anti-racist struggle, this poses some very

significant problems. The dominance of human rights limits the scope for

autonomous anti-racisms and forces them into a depolitical realm populated

by despised ‘eternal victims’.

The framing of all struggles against oppression in a human rights

perspective creates the false impression that the problems of relativism are

overcome by a re-found cosmopolitanism. But the ambiguous relationship

between universalism and racism and the dehumanisation and victimisation of

the Other implied by human rights are accompanied by a third problem: The

professionalisation of human rights activism over the last two decades

disconnects it from the lived-experience of those it seeks to act on behalf of,

denying the hard-fought struggle of the racialised for autonomy in the

definition of the anti-racist agenda.

If humanism seeks the equality of all humankind, all must be equally

free to act on their own behalf. The dehumanising capacity of human rights,

practiced on behalf of others and granted and violated by states in equal

measure, deny this agency. If human beings are not even equally free to

secure their own human rights, it is extremely problematic to see human rights

as the vanguard in the ultimate aim of global equality. But, as history

continues to demonstrate, this was hardly the aim in the first place…

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 3. Radical humanism?

I want to conclude this paper by giving voice to some new ideas which

might lead me in a more positive direction. Recently moves have been made

– for example by Edward Said - to restore humanism after the poststructuralist

critique. I don’t think that this will transform the way human rights have been

conceptualised and – more importantly – institutionalised. But it helps us to

see the possibility of rescuing humanist ideals from the victimised passivity

that they have been reduced to in humanitarian human rights.

Edward Said, Zillah Eisenstein and Richard Pithouse among others

would argue that my critique of humanism as Eurocentric and intimately

related to racism is only one side of the story. Richard Pithouse turns to

Frantz Fanon and Hardt and Negri to distinguish between a reactionary and a

revolutionary humanism.

Revolutionary humanism is radically opposed to reactionary humanism

because it strives towards knowledge and action. Hardt and Negri see these

powers of creation as emerging from the Multitude rather than The People;

multitude referring to universal humanity in its truest sense.

Zillah Eisenstein argues that the critique of humanism is itself based on

a Eurocentric attitude which assumes that human rights are a western idea. In

her view, ‘rights are cross-culturally human’. They have to be released from

colonialism, imperialism and global capitalism to reveal their counter-

hegemonic capacities.

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 According to Richard Pithouse, revolutionary humanism, most

basically, means the potential in every human being to freely create and

change their worlds. The problem is that reactionary humanism constrains this

potential by turning the Multitude into Peoples. This takes the power of

creation away from humanity and gives it to the Nation, or Europe, or the

Party.

Pithouse sees Fanon, for example, as resolutely humanist in the

revolutionary sense because of his emphasis on freedom, human desire, the

potential of human agency and creativity and the interconnectedness of

human beings. All these authors consider it necessary to re-endow humanism

with this revolutionary spirit, grounding it in a critique both of western

imperialism and of ultimately Eurocentric anti-humanism.

The problem is whether this will be practically – rather than

theoretically – possible. For example, while Fanon advocated that postcolonial

Algeria should be the home of all those - regardless of their origins - who

identified with the Algerian struggle, the fact is that Algerian nationalism did

not allow this to become reality. The international state system does not allow

for multitudes, only peoples.

Hardt and Negri among others put their hopes in the new global

movement of movements and the Multitude that they see it as representing.

While local politics are undoubtedly being transformed by a revived movement

of the powerless – the landless peoples and Sans-papiers – the theorisation

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of Multitude takes place at a distance from these struggles. In other words,

the language used to describe radical politics today does not come out of the

lived-experience and action of those it seeks to theorise.

Therefore, there is a risk that we ultimately reproduce the passivity of

the reactionary humanism from which human rights emerge. In order for

humanism to be truly radicalised, it has to be autonomously conceptualised as

well as practiced by the dispossessed and dominated.

Taking our cue from those who until now have been seen only as

victims, beneficiaries of ‘our rights’, might actually lead us out of the impasse

of human rights and towards the radically transformative potential of - simply -

humanity.

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