<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nOnly then did I realize that Baldwin was right. I had become a devotee of the religion of racial performance, a faithful participant in the rituals of white supremacy and capitalism, which together established the rungs of social hierarchy that for so long I had desperately sought to climb. I was a co-conspirator in the hypocrisy of America. Daily, I had worked to prove to my White peers that I, a Black man in America, belonged at MIT and Johns Hopkins and Harvard, just as I had worked to prove to my Black peers that I belonged on the basketball court. I\u2019d learned to bury my personal American history: my childhood subway rides from the South Bronx to the Upper East Side; the economic struggles that had propelled my grandparents from the islands of the Caribbean to the tenements of New York City; the stories of countless Black families I met growing up, who stand as the legatees of America\u2019s Great Migration. All of it was trapped in me, buried under the weight of colorblindness and exceptionalism, mingled with a stubborn conviction that forgetting the ugly truth about economic inequality was necessary to forge a pathway toward freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My secondhand exposure to Baltimore\u2019s underbelly fostered in me, in the words of the feminist scholar bell hooks, an \u201ceducation as the practice of freedom.\u201d It also helped me understand the protests that ignited the city\u2019s streets after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, and the hauntingly similar protests that exploded after the tragic killing of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police officers in April 2015, and the global protests that left American cities smoldering in the summer of 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These uprisings were not merely byproducts of the social <\/em>isolation of Black communities, beset with racially biased policing and unmitigated de facto<\/em> racial segregation. They also stemmed from the economic<\/em> isolation of the poor into American nightmares haunted by underpaid jobs, underfunded schools, under resourced healthcare facilities, unclean neighborhoods and parks\u2014all of which have existed since the earliest colonists dreamed of revolution. We have simply been trained to forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nLong before protesters began chanting \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, long before Donald Trump turned America\u2019s bully pulpit into a stage for bullying, long before the novel coronavirus began decimating Black neighborhoods across America, a man named William L. Patterson was advocating for Black lives before a global audience at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. An influential activist and leader in the American Communist Party, Patterson must have looked odd on that December day in 1951, as he delivered his petition in France in a foreign tongue to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. \u201cWe Charge Genocide,\u201d the Black man declared in a voice that I imagine sounded like the battle cry of a soldier on the front line, nervous yet defiant, hopeful for the war to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Drafted by the Civil Rights Congress, and signed by leading civil rights activists of the day, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People <\/em>boldly declared that the U.S. government had violated international human rights law by sanctioning \u201cpersistent, constant, widespread, [and] institutionalized\u201d genocide of African Americans. To demonstrate the U.S. government\u2019s complicity and responsibility in efforts to destroy Black America \u201cin whole or in part,\u201d as defined by the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the report documented the police killings and lynching by mobs of 152 Black people between 1945 and 1951\u2014a sliver of America\u2019s brutal episodes of racial violence during that era. Patterson\u2019s petition also unveiled the crippling impact of isolating millions in \u201cinhumane Black ghettos\u201d marked by substandard housing, education, jobs, and health care. <\/p>\n\n\n\nMore than civil rights, Patterson called for the United States to be held accountable and condemned by the nations of the world for violating the human rights of Black Americans through \u201cconsistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.\u201d Although the petition was well received in Europe, news media in the U.S. suppressed and derided it as \u201cCommunist propaganda.\u201d Meanwhile, politicians worked to erase Patterson\u2019s voice from collective memory. Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady and then-head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, called the charge \u201cridiculous,\u201d even though just three years earlier she\u2019d led the charge on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which made clear that racial discrimination must not deprive any human of their rights and freedoms. Upon returning home, the government seized Patterson\u2019s passport. Perhaps most ironically, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose research on police brutality and lynching had substantiated many of the claims in the petition, caved to pressure from the State Department and condemned We Charge Genocide<\/em> as \u201ca gross and subversive conspiracy.\u201d From that point forward, the U.S. government worked hard to maintain the widespread illusion that human rights violations only occur in faraway countries like Rwanda and Sudan. I was never taught about William Patterson or We Charge Genocide<\/em> in my twenty-plus years of schooling.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\nSilencing Patterson and his human rights petition was a squandered opportunity to reconsider the concept of personhood in the Leviathan. While the rule of law and social contract have the power of guaranteeing every American liberty, this power is far from fully realized because we continue to view ourselves as exceptional. Our fixed obsession with the idea that the United States already<\/em> enjoys unparalleled heights of liberty and opportunity has caused us to see prescriptions for liberation as threats to America\u2019s (perceived) greatness. We justify inequality as a sanctified opportunity for the rich to serve the needs of the poor. Once fused with the language of racism, such old-fashioned beliefs stifle our collective imagination for democratic possibility, while rationalizing our association of concepts like welfare<\/em> with the alleged laziness of Black people and the assumed illegitimacy of immigrants. <\/p>\n\n\n\nFar more than a tool to condemn, the language of human rights pushes us to consider the primary role of dignity in assessing the effects of policy on human lives. For example, while the concept of fair housing focuses on equal<\/em> protection against discrimination when one is exercising liberty<\/em> to rent or buy a home, the human right to adequate housing focuses on the indignity<\/em> of being deprived of a standard of living adequate for health and well-being. The human rights frame reveals that one can experience equality<\/em> under the law, by securing freedom from the discrimination of others\u2014what some view as the defining achievement of the Fair Housing Act\u2014yet simultaneously experience unfreedom<\/em> under the law, by remaining subject to systemic racism and the mythologies of whiteness\u2014what others view as the ongoing injustices that inspired the Black Lives Matter Movement. Put another way, human dignity demands not only the inclusion of subordinated citizens into<\/em> the marketplace, but also the recognition of dominated, yet invisible, citizens within<\/em> the marketplace. This recognition is not only foundational to the development of self-awareness that facilitates the pursuit of well-being. It is also crucial to a thriving democracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe future of American democracy then demands a radical reconstruction of rights that bears witness to the freedom dreams of oppressed peoples, beyond coordinated public health measures and short-term stimulus plans in response to COVID-19; beyond social distancing rules to survive the plague; beyond white guilt, corporate committees on diversity and inclusion, and anti-racist trainings to cleanse us of racist beliefs and implicit biases; even beyond Critical Race Theory primers in the ivory towers of academia. Radical reconstruction calls for moral reckoning as a nation that transcends healings of the mind. Rather, the task at hand demands an exorcism of the specter of exceptionalism that claims that America is already great, that American citizens do not deserve rights to free higher education, free national health care, adequate housing, living wage jobs, and other redistributive, class-based reforms to dismantle the wealthy\u2019s stranglehold on the poor. To bring it about, we must rip to shreds our limited conception of what Hannah Arendt called the human condition; we need the kind of collision that led to a spiritual breaking in me on the basketball courts of Harvard Law. But breaking, I have learned, is only the beginning of healing. Some lessons are hard to remember, and some memories are easier to keep forgetting, again and again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although my injury, my absorption of The Wire, <\/em>and the conversations in my seminar had unsettled my assumptions about the city I had called home for two years, it did not immediately alter my own plans. I graduated law school in 2012 with an offer from a white-shoe law firm that would pay me more money as a know-nothing associate than both of my parents had ever amassed in one year. For some folks, myself included, the fiction of money has always felt like the best way to buy real freedom in America. Even if the game ends up being rigged, at least you could finally afford Air Jordan 11 Space Jams and a ticket to the NBA Finals. And so, hood dreams lulled me back. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is how I found myself sitting at a mahogany desk in the nation\u2019s capital, a few months out of law school\u2014sharp in my custom tailored suit, fit for a prestigious firm a stone\u2019s throw from the White House\u2014as the chants of protestors pierced through my window like a bolt of lightning: Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. Black. Lives. Matter. The words wafted from Pennsylvania Avenue up to my office and lingered, stifling me with an unease not dissimilar to that I imagine the U.N. delegates felt in Paris as Patterson declared: \u201cWe Charge Genocide.\u201d It struck me in that moment, fluorescent light glittering upon my shined leather brogues, that loss is an essential condition of capitalist accumulation in America: loss of our individual stories of freedom struggle; loss of our individual memories of racialized subjugation and human atrocity; loss of our spirit of resistance; and perhaps most terrible, loss of ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I left the firm on Pennsylvania Avenue after two short years. The last day felt like the final minutes of a sleep paralysis where I could see my body for what it truly was, but struggled to understand the power of my bondage. I shook myself loose of a six-figure salary and headed to a non-profit civil rights advocacy organization, then on to legal academia, intent on searching for more among those with less, and on finally confronting my ghosts. Yet, I did not march in the streets of Washington, D.C. after the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks. This time, a part of me felt numbed by the risks of the novel coronavirus. I am the father to two Black sons who I hope to one day teach the game of basketball. But I must confess, I also found myself wondering if my fear of being killed by the police, and consequently my absence from those protests, could be compensated for\u2014or forgiven\u2014by being one of a handful of Black male law professors in the United States doing anti-racist teaching, community-based legal advocacy, mentoring of diverse law students, and writing on racial justice, human rights, and law reform. Was I already doing enough? Was I finally enough? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As James Baldwin contends in his 1951 essay, Many Thousands Gone<\/em>, \u201cThe man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him as a child; nevertheless the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.\u201d Though no longer running from my history, I was and still am afraid of what we, as a country, might become if we remain trapped doing what we have always done. But I find hope in human rights discourse and its insistence on dignity as integral to any meaningful conception of freedom. I see it as a means to unearth the darkness of American history we each carry within. A laboratory for the collective and ongoing project of reimagining legal subjectivity and redefining state responsibility. Not only can the language of human rights help us craft a new vision of American democracy, it can serve as a tool of remembrance to reckon with what America has always been. I am reminded here of Eddie Glaude Jr., who declares in his book, Begin Again: James Baldwin\u2019s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own<\/em>, \u201cAmericans must walk through the ruins, toward the terror and fear, and lay bare the trauma that we all carry with us.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\nIn this age of political uncertainty and social unrest, shaped by the logic of racial capitalism and the resilience of white supremacy, remembering the clarion call for human rights of yesterday can guide us through the ruins of today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps to begin again, we must first stop running, and remember.<\/p>\n\n <\/section>\n \n\n\n
This post was originally published on Current Affairs<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A story about race, power, and getting free. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5655,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5655"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193156,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193155\/revisions\/193156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}