A man wearing sweatpants and a beanie with a skull and crossbones on it stands on the edge of Riverside Park in the snow, playing scales on his trumpet. Is he thinking America’s a different country from this week on, or is he just making music? It doesn’t matter. The notes are clear and hopeful.
At the “funeral” for JEHT Foundation last week, which had to close suddenly as all of its donor’s funds were invested with Bernard Madoff, the air was bittersweet. Combined with the sense of lost opportunity, the fact that one man’s reckless selfishness (or whatever it was) has stifled organizations working to help people that no-one else wants to – young offenders, prisoners, ex-prisoners just released into society – were ripples of relief that years of hard work for human rights is paying off.
Human rights work is a process of patient attrition, step by setback, by step. Then sometimes there are breakthroughs that make every moment worthwhile. They may be small, the release of an innocent man from jail. Or they may, rarely, be sweeping. Obama’s victory was one of those sweeping breakthroughs, the culmination of years and years of brave people speaking out against discrimination and injustice. The fact that the election of America's first black president it is so momentous, however, is also a reminder of how completely perverse entrenched discrimination is in the first place – why should it be historic that a man whose presidential qualities know no bounds wins the presidency?
On the same day as JEHTs funeral, Obama had signed three executive orders, to close Guantanamo, to put a stop to torture and other inhumane interrogation techniques by US officials and to end the use of secret prisons overseas. When he signed the order on interrogation, a group of retired generals were standing behind him. Human Rights First, one of JEHTs grantees, had been working for several years to bring those generals together, across party lines, to speak out against torture and other forms of prisoner abuse. Here's Jane Mayer's look "Behind the executive orders".
The NGOs and foundations that are now seeing their campaign goals attained in rapid succession are re-assessing their priorities. Changes at federal level aren’t going to be replicated in every state. Commitments to strengthen civil liberties don't mean those commitments will be followed through behind prison walls. And the economic crisis means that millions more people are going to need help to keep their and their families’ lives together. There’s a sense though that the net to catch people when they fall and bring them back up again has strengthened.
The day before Martin Luther King day and two days before Obama’s inauguration SY and I were at a WNYC radio event at Brooklyn Museum marking both occasions (and the links between them). One of the panellists happened to be Patricia Williams, who I’d heard speaking in Brooklyn Library back in the heated tumble of the primaries. An implication ran throughout the event that the days of civil rights campaigning, of an outspoken and powerful black voice in the style of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, are over. That Obama’s demonstrated those tactics are outdated and a new approach is needed to achieve change. But Obama’s campaign was about so much more than race that it almost wasn’t about race. That in itself may signify a momentous change, but there are still divides to overcome, present victories are still founded on past tactics (effective and ineffective), the "old" approaches still do have relevance.
The broad human rights landscape is changing though. There's a sense of doors opening and new connections being made. Patricia Williams mentioned how Martin Luther King began to shift towards the end of his life from a necessarily (at the time) narrow civil rights perspective to a wider one based on human dignity. One that takes the fact we are all born equal as a starting point, then looks at the factors enabling or preventing each individual from living a life of dignity. We’re going to see more of that approach, Williams said. The global “Human Dignity Campaign" on poverty & human rights that Amnesty is launching this year is one indication that we will. Andrea Batista Schlesinger from the Drum Major Institute, one of those rare fantastic think tanky-types who are also hysterically entertaining (she could just as easily have made it as a satirical comedian) talked about how all fronts of the social justice movement are interconnected. You can’t look at civil rights without looking at immigration, without looking at trade, without looking at corporate power. This week I’ve felt more privileged than ever to be working on the intersection of business and human rights. It's an embryonic and crucial movement that has its work cut out. (I re-read the last chapter of Joel Bakan's "The Corporation" at the weekend, in which he says “The question of what to do about, and with, the corporation is one of the most pressing and difficult of our time.”).
Back to human rights tactics...narrow interest campaigns are not redundant, they are still critical. The key is linking them up with each other, to apply pressure to power and achieve common goals. Now, in the US at least, the climate’s right to make those connections.
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