The Telos Press Podcast: Ruth Starkman on Making Human Rights Readable

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Ruth Starkman about her article “Making Human Rights Readable: The Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.

From Telos 192 (Fall 2020):

Making Human Rights Readable: The Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights

Ruth Starkman

Human rights have long troubled post–World War II American presidencies. Some presidents, like Jimmy Carter, remarkably unpopular in office, offered a specific human rights agenda. Others, like the widely admired Barack Obama, notoriously failed to address human rights during their presidencies. Now, Americans can read an official governmental report: The Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights is a distinctly American document elaborating the American human rights tradition for all audiences.

Some critics aver that there is no such thing as an American human rights tradition. Indeed, the very idea of a specific American perspective on human rights scandalizes some observers, who maintain: (1) it never existed in the language of the founders; and (2) a national perspective is simply inimical to the concept of human rights per se because the purview must remain resolutely global to uphold the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the historic document adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, which declares that the equal and inalienable rights “of all members of the human family” are “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace.”

Imagining themselves defending the primacy of a globalist view, critics of the commission and its report fought to maintain control of conversations about how to develop a truly inclusive concept of human rights. Yet their own work tends to impede public inclusion in human rights discussions, and when the commission’s report rolled out, their main response focused on the “lack of footnotes,” the use of the word “racial” but not “racist,” and other minutiae.

It is little surprise, then, that until this report, conversations about human rights proved stubbornly opaque and inaccessible to the public outside universities and bureaucratic circles. Although human rights courses and institutes abound in American higher education, their conversations have remained mired in intramural squabbles over definitions, terms, and dates. All this scholarly effort has produced a thriving academic subfield, which, however, has had minimal impact on human life.

Meanwhile, the public, especially the younger generation, demonstrates sharp intuitions about human rights. Asked to list important human rights issues around the world, the high school students and college freshmen I teach easily identified the following problems:

1. The problem of human trafficking

2. Loss of independent media

3. Gender minorities’ rights to marriage and equality

4. Sickness among the poor due to a lack of clean water

5. Refugees fleeing political or religious violence

6. A genocidal state policy toward members of an ethnic group

These students, between the ages of 14 and 19 with little formal knowledge of the field of human rights, are eager to learn more. The commission’s report offers them, and the general public, a new opportunity to debate human rights, to ask why humans are entitled to fundamental rights simply because they are human, why these rights can be neither created nor abrogated by any government or any other political authority, and what it means to uphold human dignity.

Anyone with a high school level of literacy can read and argue with the report. It is an accessible and readable document, unlike the university press tomes produced by experts that remain unnoticed except by their peers. Most importantly, the thorny and contradictory history of human rights in America announces itself immediately in discussions of the founders’ words and deeds. Readers can debate the report’s assessment of eighteenth-century American ideals alongside the principles of the UDHR and investigate the meaning of human rights in a multipolar world full of international and domestic conflict.

Addressing America’s particular turmoil in 2020, the report underscores “the nation’s unfinished work in overcoming the evil effects of its long history of racial injustice . . . [and] that the credibility of U.S. advocacy for human rights abroad depends on the nation’s vigilance in assuring that all its own citizens enjoy fundamental human rights” (p. 4). The report calls for a clear-eyed understanding that the United States has not met what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the promissory note” of the founding. That means that there is still much work to be done, and the report is written in a way to engage the public, beyond the academics, in the labor of achieving rights.

Continue reading this article at the Telos Online website (online subscription required). If your library does not yet subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page to let them know how.