February 15, 2007

State of the Nation: A Human Rights Report Card for the United States

As I surveyed the political and economic landscape of America, I wondered how to reconcile that triumphal civil rights image with a grimmer reality. I had to ask how all of the blood, all of the courage, and all of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement could still leave in its wake a nation where education is more segregated than ever, where more than half of all black children live in poverty, and where the life expectancy of African Americans has actually declined? And how could a movement with so much promise still leave more than six million African Americans trapped and dying in the "underclass?"

- Carol Anderson

The answer, Carol believes, lies not so much in the well-documented struggle for civil rights but in the little known, but infinitely more important, struggle for human rights.

The core of Amnesty's work is shaped by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizing that human rights are interdependent and indivisible.

Through integrating research and advocacy on behalf of economic, cultural and social rights within the context of Amnesty's work to address grave human rights abuses has enabled Amnesty to respond to complex human rights problems in a more holistic and comprehensive manner. Amnesty's work now reflects in practice what we have long held in principle: that no human right can be realized in isolation from other rights. Just as full enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression requires concerted efforts to realize the right to education, so the right to life requires steps to reduce maternal mortality, epidemics and malnutrition.

Join our chat today at 1:00 PM EST with the Featured Speaker of this year's AGM (link to AGM home page) in Milwaukee, WI to discuss the enormous work that is still to be done in provoking extraordinary change for our global quest for all human rights.

Featured Guest: Carol Anderson

From our featured guest: "I look forward to talking to you on the 15th."

---

Question Submitted by Oronde:

What role do you see for African-Americans in creating a more indivisible human rights movement in the United States?

Carol Anderson answers:

The issue is that this is a nation that has been broken. Broken by racism. Broken by classism. Broken by sexism. Those breaks have been used quite successfully to undercut the indivisibility of rights and to elevate some people over others. Yet, that seeming elevation has only created more problems, more turmoil, more distress, and more chaos. The recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows not only was there a 700% increase in the prison population between 1970 and 2005 but that the growth in incarceration has not peaked. Another $27 billion will be spent to house more inmates – overwhelmingly black and brown, and overwhelmingly poor. There are costs. And we have to help society see those costs. Not simply the toll taken on people of color and the poor but on society as a whole.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Martha:

I heard John Perkins, author of CONFESSIONS of an ECONOMIC HIT MAN say that 51 corporations (47 are US) run the geopolitical world.I learned from another source that the US Space program's plans are to use Space, militarily, to dominate the world. How can Human Rights advocates cause the corporate structure to change from Imperialistic Capitalism to Democratic Capitalism? How can citizens (as the Fifth Estate?) change the US direction, to work, as one nation among many, for peace and human rights around the world?

Carol Anderson answers:

What corporations understand is the bottom line. I noticed, as I'm sure you have, for example, that many hotels are touting their concern for the environment by asking you to re-use your towels and bed linens. Now, we don't often think of these big hotel chains as being at the forefront of environmental issues. They're not. Yet, there is a coalescence here. Not having to wash all those towels and linens everyday saves them millions of dollars. It also saves water and pollution. Yet, saying "we want you to use the same towel so our profit margin and stock shares are higher", just does not resonate. On the other hand, talking about saving the environment taps into a strong vein for many of their customers.

Similarly, the question of human rights violations occurring because of globalization needs to be countered by leveraging the enormous purchasing power that makes it more expensive -- politically, economically, and, in terms of corporate image -- to systematically abuse.

In the days of the civil rights struggles, African American communities often launched "don't buy where you can't work" campaigns that shut down entire stores and business districts. My point is that we need to really discern the power we do have and wield that economic power to help convince corporations that there is a much greater benefit to adhering to basic human rights standards than there is in violating them with impunity.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Alison Ross:

I don't have a weighty question, just a humble inquiry: How can we subvert the prevailing mindset that dictates that only certain humans are afforded rights? I don't understand how people cannot see that ALL humans are innately endowed with rights; they seem to think only the rich, or white, or American are afforded human rights. So what can we do to change this mindset? I'm exhausted and exasperated trying to change people's ways of thinking!

Carol Anderson answers:

When I find myself in that situation, I flip the script. I talk about the situation that puts that person or someone they are very close to a treasure more than life itself right there in the middle of it. Empathy can be very powerful. It can shake people out of their privileged position and put them in the milieu of the human race and the struggle for basic dignity and respect.

Keep fighting, even though you are very tired, because change does occur. It seems slow but it is this long, hard, drawn out struggle that has gotten us even to this point.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Sarah:

What do you believe it will take to effectively desegregate the American school system- the foundation of the deep-running, systemic inequality?

Carol Anderson answers:

There are several things at work here.

1. The issue of education in America has consistently been approached as a zero-sum-game. Thus, and we have all heard this in various iterations, if Latino students in California have access to education, it can only come at the expense of other children. If the decaying urban school systems, which overwhelmingly graduate less than half of their African American and Latino students, are provided funding on par with those in suburban school districts, it can only come at the expense of those suburban districts. In short, we have the old tried and true strategy of pitting people against each other to see which one gets a basic human right. Any of us who live in these states where these battles have been raging, see it. Especially during an election year. I remember one campaign ad in particular that had a sweet, innocent little girl, her blond hair blowing in the wind, while she's standing in a field of wheat with the barn behind her, saying "vote for Senator xyz, he'll make sure that my school dollars don't end up in St. Louis."

2. Of course, funding and the fact that schools are funded overwhelmingly by property taxes and that, because of a series of public policy decisions, the property where most poor people live has a decidedly lower value than in the wealthier areas has built-in systemic and perpetual inequity. The Rodriguez decision affirmed that.

3. The reality of racially and economically segregated neighborhoods reinforces racially and economically segregated schools.

So, what will it take? It will take a normative change in ideology in the United States to quit conceptualizing education as a zero-sum-game.

It will take totally restructuring the funding mechanisms for K-12 and building in quality pre-school programs and their availability. The funds are there (just note how there's never a shortage for a new prison), this nation does not have the will to prioritize quality education for all, yet.

And it will take ensuring that quality schools are available, regardless of neighborhood.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Kenta:

It is well documented that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has hit the black community harder than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. Studies also indicate that this disparity is not caused by a higher likelihood of blacks to engage in high risk behaviors. Blacks are just as likely as whites to use condoms, to use clean needles, and to get tested for HIV. This means that there are other factors behind the spread of HIV in the black community which are structural in nature and endemic. These include poverty, massive disparities in health care and educations, and an extrememly high incarceration rate. How do you think these systemic failures of government fit into the human rights movement and how should human rights be seen through the lens of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Thank you for your great work.

Carol Anderson answers:

What we know is that there is a basic human right to health care. When we see the quality of health care available to African Americans in the United States, what was true in 1947 when the NAACP petitioned the UN asserting that this was one of the key areas where African Americans' rights were systematically denied, is equally true in 2007.

The lack of access to physicians, to insurance, to medications illustrates the confluence of human rights denial. The education system that tracks students of color out of college prep courses, the assault on affirmative action that has closed access to universities and medical schools to very good but not privileged students, has, as a result, shut down to a trickle the number of doctors and health care professionals that are available and willing to work in underserved communities.

The grinding poverty that has come about because of deindustrialization, decapitalization, and centuries of discrimination, has been rewritten as a singluar narrative of individual moral failure, instead of a societal crisis, and has exacerbated the difficulty in accessing the necessary health care opportunities.

AI's work in South Africa with GRIP is telling in this regard on the confluence of poverty, education, and HIV/AIS.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Helen:

Seeing all the pain and outrageous suffering that children and adults are living through, how are you able to keep your heart from shattering?

Carol Anderson answers:

Because as painful as this is; it would be even more painful to stop fighting. And although my heartbreaks, it never shatters, because, and I truly believe this, there is always a cadre of folks determined to end the degradation of human beings.

Capitulation and surrender is heart-shattering. The struggle for a nation and a world that truly embraces human rights provides the strength to fight the next day.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Sherree:

Because the fight for human rights and civil rights have always been addressed in such a dichotomy; what ways do you recommend that we as activists begin to holistically approach the movement for all rights equally?

Carol Anderson answers:

One of the key elements is to understand the limits of what civil rights can address particularly in this political environment) and to really think through and organize around the totality that human rights brings to bear on an issue. That totality provides allies and broadens constitutencies.

Prisoner rights, for example, are often not just about due process. But the quality of that due process that has been undermined by poverty and lack of education.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Sherree:

Why do you think the US struggles so much in recognizing economic, cultural and social rights; particularly for communities of color?

Carol Anderson answers:

Frankly, I think that because there was a major economic and social benefit to the systematic denial of human rights to those communities and that it was also instrumental in cowing a larger, white working class, as well.

I found in my research, for example, that State Department officials in the late 1940s were open that they did not have a problem with some of the economic and social rights, it was just they had a problem with universal economic and social rights and that the "non-discrimination" clause in the covenants made it impossible for the U.S. to sign on.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by Rachel Jacobs:

What do you think have been the effects of mainly focusing on civil rights, and not social and cultural rights? Do you think this was the right direction to go in?

Carol Anderson answers:

I think that it was a move forced on the black leadership by the viciousness of the Second Red Scare, but it was absolutely disastrous. It provided a false sense of total success. It did not have the framework to fight for and argue for those issues that are now dragging so many African Americans and other folks in the undertow of a post-industrial economy. The next wave of the struggle has to be a Human Rights Movement.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Question Submitted by nancy:

hi, it seems to me that the U.S. opposition to international human rights standards on justice, equality and rights to adequate standards of living you documented in your book continue to do this day. what are the political goals and strategies that human rights activists can engage in to advance a more human rights-progressive agenda?

Carol Anderson answers:

Right now, the refusal to embrace these rights is still shrouded in American exceptionalism, American exemptionalism, and American patriotism. This allows the deep inequities to continue under the cloak of "respectability". The strategy is to pull off that cloak. Not by attacking the core values but by demonstrating that human rights are not anti-thetical to the "American way of life" but, in fact, what are absolutely necessary to sustain and enhance the quality of that life.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

ASK AMNESTY Home

The views expressed in the online discussions hosted on this site reflect the views of the discussion guests and do not necessarily reflect those of Amnesty International USA. Amnesty International USA does not necessarily sponsor, endorse, recommend or license content posted by third parties.