The Politics of Antiracism & Social Justice: The Perspective of a Human Rights Network in the U.S. South

Abstract

Abstract: Since 9/11 the sociopolitical and legal climate of the country has deteriorated, engendering a moral panic over national security and intensifying a longstanding trend of violating the human rights of a portion of the citizenry and immigrant population. These segments of the populace lived under de facto conditions of a police state long before the War on Terror and the USA Patriot Act. This repression implicates the War on Drugs and a racially‐ and class‐biased system of criminal (in)justice with which Homeland Security intersects. Problems such as these have attracted the attention of both social scientists and activists mobilizing for social justice. Among the latter is a southeastern network of human rights organizers who map their region as part of the Global South. A multiracial group organized around the vision of three African American women, the Southern Human Rights Organizers Network promotes consciousness and praxis shaped by the vernacularization of international human rights discourse and the reclamation of the history of African American and broader Afro‐Atlantic struggles for expanding the terms of what it means to be human.