The Slippery Rhetoric of Rights

In my last post, I noted that President Bush claimed to support rights abroad, including the right to health, food, and a decent standard of living, in a talk before the UN General Assembly, but failed to mention rights here at home even once. Given the deficiencies, from a rights perspective, in our trade policy, foreign policy and the support we provide to international finance institutional policies that undercut basic rights, such purported international support is actually of course a bit dubious. Paired with recent brutal decisions, like vetoing expanding health care insurance to scores of children without basic care and callous comments about the emergency rooms providing as much care a person may need, our the current administration's position on economic and social rights is abundantly clear-- international rhetoric aside. But it would be a mistake to ascribe the severe reluctance to address basic rights solely to this administration.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of listening to an extraordinary presentation by Professor Carol Anderson, author of "Eyes off the Prize." What makes Professor Anderson so unique is a combination of rigorous scholarship and analysis, with a drop dead straightforwardness and keenly funny presentational style. Carol has researched the history of human rights in the United States. She traces how the NAACP committed itself to ensuring that the founding UN documents dealt not only with race discrimination, but also with fundamental economic and social rights, and how visionary civil rights leaders understood that without protection in both those arenas African-Americans would never achieve equality in our country. She also details the severe backlash the NAACP's position engendered and its ultimate retreat from this strategy.

Finally, Carol traces the slippery rhetoric of rights, and how governments can distort rights notions to surreal proportions. One of my favorite examples from her talk yesterday was how, after agreeing to standards which protected minorities against discrimination during the Jim Crow era, the United States concluded (somehow with a straight face) that there were no minorities in our country. First, the government claimed that "national minorities" only meant minorities from another country, with a a distinct language and culture. Then, it concluded that since all possible minority groups (including African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc...) all actually wanted to be "Americans" and adopt American culture, there were no minorities here. Government is not the only guilty party of such manipulations. Corporate actors also provide far too many examples of these not so subtle attacks on rights.

Only a vigorous and widespread civil society response pushing for concrete commitments to human rights can provide the necessary counter-weight to these efforts. When we only have a rhetoric of rights, and not actual rights, with clear standards and enforcement mechanisms and structures, that rhetoric can become slippery indeed and serve interests that were clearly not intended. When it comes to economic and social rights in the United States, in particular, we have much work to do. The Opportunity Agenda recently collected polling data which shows that the overwhelming percentage of people in the United States support human rights, with high levels of support for rights such as health and education. But we remain at the rhetorical level for these rights. When politicians, again with a straight face, can argue that putting metal detectors and armed officers in severely overcrowded and under-resourced schools is about the right to education and emergency rooms demonstrate that we have a right to health, we know we have fallen into the realm of the slippery rhetoric of rights. We need to move into the solid footing of rights commitments, with clear standards and enforcement, and leave mere rhetoric behind.

How should activists respond to President Bush's speech before the General Assembly? Do we try to hold him to his word? Ignore it because it appears bereft of authenticity? And how do we break the dynamic where the United States government claims the human rights mantle on the global stage, while refusing to protect the rights of its own people? Or do we work locally until every municipality in this country becomes a center for commitment to the full range of human rights hoping that such a groundswell will impact our national leaders?

I look forward to your thoughts!