Black Women's Rights-Blurring Strategies in a Culture of Rights Discrimination

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Abstract This article examines the case of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant house in Oakland, California as an attempt to advance a human right to housing. It argues that the U.S. penchant for rights discrimination, the idea that one must choose between whose and which rights matter, contributes to the need for a rhetorical strategy of rights-blurring. Building on previous scholarship that establishes a history of Black women connecting civil rights to human rights as a rhetorical strategy in the United States, this article explains how rights-blurring actually operates. It also demonstrates how this strategy functions in conversations about property rights in the United States and in the context of a twenty-first century direct-action protest.