Principle Of Racial Equality Research Articles

The Transnational Turn

And it interests him less and less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. Historical work, it would seem, consists of both explaining and reinventing. Historians have an obligation to explain past events on the basis of empirical evidence; they are also engaged in considering alternative explanations, often devising new conceptual frameworks. Explaining and reinventing may be pursued simultaneously. And in a period of momentous change, whether in the past on which historians work or in the world in which they live, “inventing” may become necessary when usual explanations no longer seem adequate. In many ways, those of us who have been members of SHAFR from the earliest years may have been “explaining” the history of U.S. foreign relations by “inventing” and “reinventing” conceptual frameworks in response to rapidly changing world conditions. These transformations have been explored by many writers.2 In Saturday, the protagonist deals with one aspect when he muses: “This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish.”3 The forty-year history of SHAFR has witnessed “the expanding circle of moral sympathy,” which now embraces not only the principle of racial equality and tolerance for cultural diversity but also environmental sensitivity. Such a phenomenon, “the modern condition,” did not, of course, arise all of a sudden in the last four decades, but has clearly been felt by historians of U.S. foreign relations, who have been studying not only more traditional subjects such as origins of wars, empire building, and treaty making but also gender, interracial, and intercultural relations as well as human rights, environmentalism, and other themes that have become more and more visible in the recent decades. In this brief essay, it is impossible to cite more than a few examples, but clearly books such as John McNeill's Something New under the Sun, Petra Goedde's GIs and Germans, Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World, or Naoko Shibusawa's America's Geisha Ally reflect the authors’ attempt at tracing “the expanding circle of moral sympathy” in the context of the global transformation.4

A Collision of Principles? Free Expression, Racial Equality and the Prohibition of Racist Speech

Freedom of expression is celebrated as one of the glories of the American political system. But does all speech deserve immunity? In particular, should speech designed to vilify or degrade on the basis of race be protected? Opinions on racist speech are complicated because they must accommodate two fundamental democratic principles that operate at cross purposes: freedom of expression, which implies support for racist speech, and racial equality, which implies the opposite. Using data from the 1990 General Social Survey, we examine how Americans resolve this conflict. Our major finding is that the principle of free expression dominates the principle of racial equality. What contemporary legal scholars regard as a hard case entailing a collision of democratic principles, ordinary Americans seem to interpret as a straightforward application of just a single principle. This result mirrors and perhaps reflects a nearly century-long and mostly lop-sided debate favouring free speech among American elites.

First Principles of Racial Equality: History and the Politics and Diplomacy of Human Rights Provisions in the United Nations Charter

Repulsed by atrocities and shocked by the slaughter of millions, representatives from many countries gathered immediately after World War II to assess the cause of the catastrophe they had just experienced. Of all the possible explanations they could have used, these diplomats felt compelled to focus upon only one. and terrible war which has now ended, they poignantly concluded, was a war made possible by the denial of democratic principles of the dignity, equality, and mutual respect for men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.' The horrors of this war represented neither the first case of discrimination and the denial of human rights in international politics, nor the last. But their blatant, widespread, and abhorrent nature brought into focus an issue described as extremely complex,2 burning, 3 one of great delicacy for the world,4 and, indeed, as