Effective Organizing in Terrible Times: The Strategic Value of Human Rights for Transnational Anti-Racist Feminisms

Abstract

These are terrible times and terrible times require those committed to social change to rethink our approaches—not only to ensure that we remain relevant but also to help sustain hope both in ourselves and in others. Recently I’ve encountered hope in an unexpected place. After twenty years of activism writing and teaching under a variety of mantles— primarily feminism and anti-racism but also anti-militarism anti-imperialism and queer liberation—I’ve become immersed in the world of human rights. My turn to the human rights framework is certainly contextual: it is a response to the current political climate as well as to the expansion and radicalization of the global human rights movement both of which I will address below. But more fundamentally it is a strategic turn one that engages issues of naming and movement-building. While I passionately subscribe to the multiracial and transnational feminist vision articulated by radical women of color indigenous and “two-thirds world” women this is a difficult politic to package accessibly. (excerpt)