Human rights cities and the expanding global toolkit for decolonization and racial justice

Abstract

Amid a growing white backlash against racial progress that is rolling back voting rights and restraining public discourse and education about the history and legacies of slavery and colonialism, a global “George Floyd effect” has amplified efforts outside the United States to address systemic racism and engage growing numbers of US activists in the UN human rights system. Global institutions provide opportunities for US activists to expose US human rights violations linked to systemic racism, expand support and legitimacy for their claims, and attract influential global allies. Today’s activism builds on the earlier internationalism of US advocates, which helped build international legal and institutional foundations for combating systemic racism. Within this globalized context of antiracism activism, local human rights city advocates in the United States have leveraged treaty reviews and mobilized around the newly created Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to heighten attention to systemic racism and broaden their analyses and alliances. These new global modes of engagement can help neutralize and roll back some of the threats to human rights that proliferate today.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my fellow human rights organizers for all they have contributed to this learning process. What is presented here reflects emergent collective wisdom about how people make social change. Thanks also to Michael Goodhart and Steven Jensen for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 The coalition letter was sent by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the larger coalition of human rights advocates, many linked through the US Human Rights Network (https://www.aclu.org/letter/coalition-letter-request-un-independent-inquiry-escalating-situation-police-violence-and?redirect=letter/coalition-letter-request-un-investigation-escalating-situation-police-violence-and-repression). Although US influence deterred the Human Rights Council from authorizing a formal inquiry into US police killings, activists conducted such an inquiry in order to assemble evidence and analysis for the High Commissioner’s report, which the Council requested (see https://inquirycommission.org/).

2 This phrase was used by Pastor Elías Murillo Martínez, a Colombian lawyer and member of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD), during the opening session of the inaugural PFPAD meeting.

3 The expanded use of “cause lawyering” in the late 1990s certainly contributed to these global changes while also expanding the skills and political repertoires of US movements (e.g., Simmons, 2009).

4 For more details on this history and how activists are interpreting and mobilizing it, see Anderson (2003) and Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute (2019). For a recent discussion of Malcolm X’s internationalism and its impacts on Black and popular culture and its relevance to today’s struggles, see Daulatzai (2012).

5 There was also a proliferation and expansion of national human rights institutions at this time, and these served to expand attention to human rights within UN member states, despite persistent refusal by the United States to establish such a body (see Davis’s contribution to this special issue).

6 Prior movement work in UN spaces helped activists learn new strategies and skills that enabled this initiative to take shape, and Falcón’s ethnographic work on US advocacy at international treaty reviews and global conferences details this learning process (Falcón, 2009, 2016).

7 The 2022 review was the 12th CERD periodic review of the United States, and this combined multiple reviews (10th-12th) due to the Trump administration’s failure to participate.

8 These reports are available at http://ushumanrightscities.org.

9 Many local officials know little if anything about international human rights obligations, despite the fact that they are the primary duty-bearers charged with enforcing these laws and standards. This is compounded by the fact the US government also does little to inform state and local governments of their treaty obligations, as is required by international law. In Pittsburgh and other cities, my fellow organizers and I have found that local officials were typically unaware of their obligations under the CERD or other international conventions. US legal training and thus case law also provide few precedents to allow for the use of US courts to protect human rights. But movement lawyering networks like the “Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers Network,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Southern Center for Human Rights have been building awareness and skills to change this (see, e.g., Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, 2019; Kaufman & Ward, 2017).

10 While resisting pressure to improve practices, the US government has gone to extreme lengths to convey the image of domestic racial harmony to the world (Daulatzai, 2012).

11 Documentation is available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cerd (see “State Party Reporting”).

12 The concept of co-governance is being used to describe emergent practices in contemporary US movements (Engler & Engler, 2022; Partners for Dignity and Rights & Race Forward, 2023). I extend the concept here to include similar kinds of work with foreign government and international officials.

13 Following the CERD review, US advocates came together to petition US Ambassador Susan Rice to follow the CERD Committee’s and other global recommendations calling for a US national human rights institution (American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU], 2022). We have found in our local advocacy work that this position is supported by officials working in local human rights and antidiscrimination agencies, who see a need for more national support and coordination (see also, e.g., Open Society Justice Initiative, 2013).

14 See CERD Cities 2022: Using International Law to Advance Racial Justice in our Cities, at https://humanrightscities.wixsite.com/hrca/cerd-cities.

15 This sentiment was echoed in the webinar, “The African Diaspora Convenes on the World Stage & Calls for Reparatory Justice” (see note 17), and observed in my praxis in Pittsburgh, when our local human rights city alliance helped convene a coalition to host a visit by Justin Hansford, regional delegate to the PFPAD.

16 We created an online resource page to share documentation from our meeting and collect other resources available to participants and others: See Pittsburgh’s Appeal to the World: Taking Back our Human Rights! Building a Black Regional Agenda for Justice, available at: http://wiki.pghrights.mayfirst.org/index.php?title=Taking_Back_our_Human_Rights!_Building_a_Black_Regional_Agenda_for_Justice.

17 The webinar was titled, “The African Diaspora Convenes on the World Stage & Calls for Reparatory Justice,” and is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iWMWVB9CX8.

18 That resource page is linked to the Human Rights Cities Alliance website: Cities Support the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, available at https://humanrightscities.wixsite.com/hrca/cities-unpfpad.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jackie Smith

Jackie Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and member of the Coordinating Committee of the Pittsburgh Human Rights City Alliance and the Steering Committee of the Human Rights Cities Alliance. She is author or editor of numerous works on transnational advocacy including Social Movements in the World-System (with Dawn Wiest), Social Movements for Global Democracy, and Social Movements, Globalization and Peacebuilding (co-edited with Ernesto Verdeja).