America, the Colorblind

I wrote a news brief for AlterNet about the recent report by the U.S. Human Rights Network, which gathered over 250 organizations to collectively respond to the U.S. government’s report to the U.N. Committee on Ending Discrimination (CERD).

The U.S.’ report is obviously distorted, but the philosophy underlying it is one that needs to be properly addressed. The U.S. report only mentions Katrina once, presumably under the following logic:

Concern has been expressed about the disparate effects of Hurricane Katrina on housing for minority residents of New Orleans. Recognizing the overlap between race and poverty in the United States, many commentators conclude nonetheless that the post-Katrina issues were the result of poverty (i.e., the inability of many of the poor to evacuate) rather than racial discrimination per se.

The argument is a permutation of the familiar form of colorblindness of “class not race” – that it wasn’t their race that made the U.S. government indifferent, but their class. How about we try a class and race analysis. After all, how did low-income black people get to be low-income in the first place?

The statement highlights a defining tension between de jure and de facto discrimination: the former meaning racial discrimination that is directly written into U.S. law as it was during the Jim Crow era, and the latter meaning a law that effectively segregates or undermines specific communities. Colorblind law in effect, perpetuates historical inequalities between people of color and whites in the U.S. So while on its face a law may not “say” the word color, but only negatively impacts people of color, then it is a white supremacist law because it maintains the hierarchy of white supremacy.

And even if the “law” could be colorblind, law enforcers are not. This results in, for example, more black youth being tried and sentenced as adults, than white ones. This is not just about “class” as hard as white liberals wish it were.

One other musing I had was the whole framework of “human rights,” of which I am admittedly skeptical. The phrase conjures up images of well-meaning white liberals running around Africa or Asia saving the ignorant brown, black, and yellow people from their misinformed cultural practices. But speaking to Professor Lisa Crooms, Professor of Law at Howard, she offered me another perspective: human rights as a framework where people of color assert their status as “global citizens in a global community.” Such a strategy would also require uniting the oppression experienced at home with the oppression perpetuated abroad.

~e.a.