Hope Lewis

My project entails research and writing for a book on racial identity and migration through the lens of international human rights law.  The working title of the book is Black Without Borders:  Race and Migration in Human Rights Perspective). 

The book will explore, through a series of essays, fundamental gaps in the promotion and protection of international human rights for selected African Diaspora groups in the United States and Europe.  It is my thesis that Black transnational migrants and post-Katrina internally-displaced persons (IDPs) experience a complex array of human rights abuses that require equally textured responses on the level of international law.  Although fundamental human rights against racial, sexual, national origin, and class discrimination were formally recognized in such post-World War II international instruments as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the promise of “human rights for all” remains unfulfilled for many in the African Diaspora.   

The stories of Black transnational migrants and IDPs serve as telling illustrations of the multidimensional nature of race-related human rights violations.  Despite the potential significance of their experiences, however, immigrants from the Caribbean region and the African continent remain largely invisible as subjects of international human rights legal analysis.  This situation has only been exacerbated by the anti-immigrant backlash in North America and Europe that followed the events of September 11, 2001.  The significance and specifics of Black migrations seemed largely invisible even during the high-profile U.S. pro-immigration reform organizing efforts and protests in early 2006. 

The specifics of Black migration are also either subsumed as part of a broader essentialized Black racial identity, or else placed in opposition to “authentic” Blackness (often characterized as linked to native-born status).  The definitions and implications of “Black” or “African-American” identity are complicated and subject to debate, as illustrated by early controversies over the identity status of prominent political figures such as Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Some asked whether Obama and Powell, as first-generation descendants of Kenyan and Jamaican immigrants respectively,  could represent African-American interests.  In a context in which many among native-born Black communities in the U.S. are themselves alienated from the benefits of “American-ness,” how will the interventions of foreign-born Blacks be perceived?  Is there a basis for solidarity, or cause for further distrust and division among those groups?  Most importantly for this inquiry, how can a race-conscious international human rights framework take account of differences in ethnicity or migration status without deepening political and cultural divisions? 

The Fall of 2005 revealed yet another challenge for the international human rights legal framework—taking human rights seriously and making them work for African-Americans.  The internal Diaspora resulting from Hurricane Katrina (and the governmental failures that accompanied it) reasserted the evident second-class citizenship status in which many poor and middle-class African Americans live.  It reignited underlying tensions between working-class native-born Blacks and working-class Latino/a immigrants.  It also renewed old arguments about whether or not African Americans should identify with Black human rights struggles in other countries given the need to “care for our own” within U.S. borders.  Even the angry outcry over the erroneous labeling of Katrina survivors as “refugees” (technically, “internally-displaced persons” or IDPs) evoked a further sense of alienation and outrage.  But many discussions of that sense of alienation did not fully surface questions about the nature of “foreign-ness” in American society.  Those debates and tensions demonstrate both the need to see race, poverty, and other identity issues in international perspective as well as the need to do so in a contextualized way. 

Finally, the essays in Black Without Borders will argue that the complex nature of Black migration is a central factor in its relative invisibility on the international human rights agenda. The book posits the need for theoretical and practical strategies that address the simultaneous forms of oppression that Black transnational migrants and IDPs experience.  It will examine important case studies involving the status of female transnational household workers and caregivers from the English-speaking Caribbean, the human rights implications of Black transnational migration (“economic” and “political”) to the U.S. and Europe, and the implications of internal displacement of African-Americans within the U.S. for international law and politics more broadly. 

Although Black Without Borders focuses on cases involving selected African Diaspora groups, the significance of the research extends beyond their particular social and cultural contexts. The book will employ insights from critical race and feminist legal theory that are in the process of transforming international human rights theory and practice.  These theoretical approaches can identify weaknesses in the traditional legal framework that help explain why Blacks who cross geographic or political “borders” tend to fall through the cracks of human rights analysis.