A wise young woman whom I’ve never met, spoken with, or corresponded with, but whom I feel like I know, once said: “All you have to do to qualify for human rights is be human.” In those 13 words, she elegantly summed up both the ultimate meaning of the claim for human rights and the origin of their breach. The very articulation of human rights traces their prior transgression. Without humans wronged, there is no need for a claim of human rights
The claim for human rights is a simple proposition: “I am human.” But this claim depends upon recognition and accord. The one who violates the rights of the other does so precisely because this claim of humanity is not recognized or falls on deaf ears.
Thus the paradox of human rights: There where they need to be asserted, they are precisely denied. When I most need to say “I am human,” I cannot. I need you to say my I, the I that is being violated, negated, erased.
The claim of human rights depends upon a circuit of recognition. Dehumanization is the staging ground of all human rights transgressions; one need only think about chattel slavery, or the rhetoric of vermin in racist discourse. The dehumanization renders possible the escalating violence of torture and the horrifying acts of brutality committed during so-called “ethnic cleansing.” The dehumanization of the victim corresponds to the dehumanization of the violent aggressor.
When the violations are practiced by a government itself, the asymmetry of power leaves the victims of human rights abuse literally negated, unintelligible in the social body and body politic. There is no way that they can articulate the ultimate ground of the claim for human rights: “I am human.” The human rights victim is caught in the nightmare of what Orlando Patterson calls “social death“–a non-presence in the social and political gaze, a non-presence characterized by being completely subject to an asymmetry of power, the violence that ultimately subtends all legal authority.
To make a claim for human rights in this case, a third party is needed to lend the moral, political, and social force of intelligibility. The advocate is the one called upon to defend; the one whose ears are open to the unheard cries of the other; the one who speaks in the place of the victim’s enforced silence and social erasure. Often this voice too falls on deaf ears, but our responsibility to and for the brutalized body requires that we advocate nonetheless, that we tell the story of the silenced ones, even if it falls on deaf ears, to tell it again and again, until the basic claim is heard, recognized, and respected: “She/He is human.”
This unending responsibility to advocate for the other who has been subject to brutal aggression and annihilation is also part of our claim of humanity. “I am human” translates into “I recognize that you are human,” which translates into, “We are human. A human community.” I dare say, because of the dehumanization that is essential to human rights violations, that the true meaning of human rights also includes advocacy for animal rights, for the dehumanization or animalization of the victim is built on and justified by an ethos that rationalizes and accepts violence against animals. “I am human. We are human. We speak for and protect; we advocate for all those beings subject to pain and degradation. We will not stop speaking out for the silenced, degraded, brutalized other.”
In What is The What, the protagonist, Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, poignantly intones this solemn and unending responsibility, even while he is bound and gagged during a home invasion; his stories of the war also being the stories of untold others:
Written words are rare in small villages like mine, and it is my right and obligation to send my stories into the world, even if silently, even if powerlessly.
“My right and obligation”–the twin pillars of the claim for human rights–the entwined articulation of right and responsibility.
Witness. Advocate. Don’t stop talking and writing. 
Support the work of Amnesty International, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights First.
10 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
Also at the big orange nut house.
Is the question I asked myself while reading this.
My response to myself: Well, no. There is no such thing as “enough.” That’s the point Spielberg tried so inartfully — and unnecessarily — to make at the end of Schindler’s List, for example.
The question “Is that enough?” has to be the wrong question, then.
Maybe it’s also the wrong kind of question. Maybe it would be better, instead of asking the inward-looking sort of question “Is that enough?” to ask a more outward looking question: “Are there still people in need?”
The answer to that question is clear enough. Of course there are. So, then . . . do what you can. Do more than nothing. Do what you can live with yourself for having done. I guess?
Thanks for this.
To be a witness is a very powerful act and has often had powerful results. Anne Frank is only one of the many examples of folks whose humanity refused to let them turn away from others’ suffering or allow others to turn away afterwards.
Just wonderful writing, and real heartfelt truths, srkp23. Wow.
thank you so much….for putting into words so much of what i have felt for years….
a tiny revolution i ask you to join/share….when given a form that asks for race….write in HUMAN
And certainly a topic that needs much more discussion. Thank you.
I think two random thoughts in response:
1. Although we certainly have many human rights issues to tackle in the US, I think we’ll never really understand the concept until we do away with our “US exceptionalism” mantra. That, for me, is where the dehumanization towards the rest of the world starts.
2. For a couple of years now I’ve been thinking about the idea of “bearing witness.” It seems like a passive thing to do, but there is something in me that keeps thinking it is a powerful tool.