In 1964, Malcolm X pressed the need for the civil rights movement to expand its scope and adopt a human rights framework:
.... if they would expand their civil rights movement to a human rights movement it would internationalize it. Now, as a civil rights movement, it remains within the confines of American domestic policy...whereas if they expanded the civil rights movement to a human rights movement then they would be eligible to take the case of the Negro to the United Nations....our African brothers and our Asian brothers and Latin American brothers can place it on the agenda at the General Assembly ...and Uncle Sam has no more say-so in it then.
Malcolm's comments were at the height of a national civil rights movement that had hit the limits of its ability to seek redress within the racist and exploitative liberal democracy of the United States. The United Nations was an alternate body outside the purview of what Malcolm and others viewed as the non-reformable U.S. government.
Another compelling use of the human rights framework was more recently put forward by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Kentucky. CIW has successfully built an organization of migrant farm workers who are challenging large and powerful corporations for better wages. They have been successful in their fight against Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, winning significant wage increases. They got that victory by strategically depending on people who weren’t directly affected (i.e. farm workers). CIW uses a human rights perspective to nationally engage students and faith-based groups, and it seems to be working. They are winning and mobilizing a large movement in support of rural workers.
In both these cases, the human rights frame provided a number of advantages. The United Nations is an avenue outside the control of the U.S. government with accountability (at least in theory) to the vast majority of the world's population who are poor and of color. It also establishes a universal humanist set of moral assertions that go beyond particular issues and provides a foundation of moral credibility. In doing so, the human rights frame means we can engage people beyond the ones who are directly impacted.
Despite these advantages, the human rights frame is scantly in use among U.S. activists who are organizing people for social justice. Whereas it may seem to be a good tool for international cases where human rights standards are established and potentially enforceable by law, the framework hasn't been as relevant for day-to-day politics and issues here. While the assertion of universal rights may be important for documenting and exposing where those rights are trampled, it is of little importance unless it leads to a strategy of making those rights real on the ground.
Why has it been of such little use? Because the human rights framework has been rooted in moral assertions and has not addressed the question of power.
Frederick Douglass laid out the basic axiom that, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." These simple words hold most all of the theory any political organizer will ever need.
The first word in Douglass' axiom is a recognition that the ills of oppression and exploitation are rooted in unequal power relations. There’s a struggle between the interests of the powerful to deny rights and the power of the oppressed to assert them. From a racial justice perspective, the target of our organizing is white supremacy and racism. But with a human rights framework, who is the target? The humans?
* * *
Systems of power do not change unless they are forced to. The question for me in organizing has been how do we actually translate a moral assertion of rights into a practical demand on power. Effective demands do two things. They weaken the power of existing systems of inequality and strengthen the rights and conditions of those whose rights are at risk. The difference between universal assertion of what's right and practical demands is that ultimately organizing demands are based on a recognition of current power relations. The demands must reflect some present or future possibility for the forces we are organizing to make those demands a reality, and for the target of the demands to be able to take action on them.
(Tomado de:http://colorlines.com)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario