Reflections on Race and the American Society of International Law

Abstract

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) is a globally important American professional non-governmental organization, organized by and for international lawyers as a learned society, and influential in its legal interpretations. For its first sixty years, it excluded African Americans. Subsequently, African Americans were allowed incremental but slowly widening participation, though they were still excluded from the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) Board of Editors. Divesting its stock portfolio to oppose apartheid was a reluctant step toward racial justice in 1986. The rise of a new minority-led racial critique of the Society produced, inter alia, the first African American AJIL Board member in 2014, followed by others. It also produced the adoption of the “Richardson Report,” which confirmed the early deliberate African American exclusion, and called for a reparations obligation to Black members. In 2020, new Society statements and priorities toward racial equity and diversity were added to a previous active Black task force (BASIL). However, the Society's transformation toward racial equity will depend upon its committed defiance of the current historic global white nationalist extremism which threatens to penetrate international law in America and the global community. This essay discusses ASIL's racial narratives from its origins of deep racial exclusion, through racial incrementalism to policy changes and reparations obligations toward greater equity, as it now confronts global white identity extremism.