Juneteenth and the question of self-determination
Human rights are harder to realize when they are treated as gifted rather than inherent
Today is Juneteenth, the day we commemorate the end of slavery and emancipation of African-Americans in the United States. June 19, 1865, marked the final enforcement of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, when Army Major General Gordon Granger informed the formerly enslaved people of Texas of their freedom. Long celebrated in Texas, Juneteenth spread to other states and was made a federal holiday by Congress and President Biden in 2021.
Juneteenth is an occasion to reflect on the African-American experience in U.S. history and how it is taught. It is welcome and long overdue. But there is an inherent contradiction in the Juneteenth holiday which should be part of our reflection. June 19 is the day that a White military officer informed Black Americans that a White government, under a proclamation by a White president, had granted them their freedom. The narrative of the Juneteenth holiday is of freedom being gifted to a people, rather than a people being able to claim inherent freedom for themselves.
I don’t say this to deny the agency and actions that African-Americans engaged in their own liberation, which is one aspect of the story we are seldom taught. But my point is to provoke another layer of thinking.
The Juneteenth national holiday was created in the wake of the George Floyd racial justice protests. My personal takeaway from the Black Lives Matter movement was that I needed to listen. It bothered me when “woke” Whites like me barked commandments to “check your White privilege,” because the framing felt like justice as granted by the majority, rather than rights inherent in people for whom justice was denied. From this I resolved to read more Black authors, both fiction and non-fiction.
Why am I writing about Juneteenth in a foreign policy blog? Because I see parallels in the struggle for agency between African-Americans in the United States and people around the world attempting to exercise their inherent rights within political systems that treat rights as gifted.
Go read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It is an unambiguous and foundational affirmation of the notion of inherent rights, of the “dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women.”
The concept of inherent human rights has its opponents in the United States. In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created the “Commission on Unalienable Rights,” positing a vision of human rights as “endowed by the Creator.” It grounded this view in the documents written by America’s Founding Fathers. It explicitly privileged “property rights” as an unalienable right while omitting the fact that the Founders privileged this right in part to preserve their ability to retain humans as property. It’s worth noting that, as Secretary, Mike Pompeo spoke of multiculturalism as “not as who we are” and as making us “weaker.”
Pompeo, who directed U.S. foreign policy for several years, show us how a politician who embraces the gifted rights paradigm tends to dictate rather than listen. This paradigm serves to deny agency to those struggling to exercise their inherent rights.
This notion of agency is expressed in the UDHR through the right of self-determination. It is core; the drafters put it right up front in Article I of both the International Conventions on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
In practice, however, self-determination is treated as a given rather than inherent right -- a thing powerful nations grant to people only when it suits their interests. This has long been true of U.S. foreign policy. Self-determination is readily invoked by President Biden and his team to support Ukraine against Russian aggression. In that context, Blinken praised he universality of self-determination in a speech on China, even as the U.S. government rejects any suggestion it applies to Tibetan and Uyghurs.
And then there’s the duplicitous approach to Palestinians. Expressing rhetorical support for a two-state solution, President Biden allows himself liberty to call for a “better future for the Palestinian people, one of self-determination, dignity, security, and freedom.”
But in action, the U.S. government does the opposite. The same month President Biden invoked self-determination for Palestinian, his representative voted no on a UN General Assembly resolution on Palestinian statehood.[1] The U.S. government does next to nothing to oppose Israeli actions (e.g. settlements in the West Bank) that subvert Palestinians’ ability to exercise their right of self-determination.
These diplomats dictate rather than listen.
The U.S. approach to Palestinians is not unlike many American politicians’ attitude on racial justice. Every MLK Day you see politicians posting on social media That One Line of his about not judging people by the color of their skin, who then the rest of the year vote to undermine the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, and to block teaching of the history and study of racism in America.
These politicians dictate rather than listen.
These politicians treat rights of African-Americans as something gifted by the majority, rather than rights inherent to their humanity. Black aspirations under the right of self-determination are thus conditioned on whether it is comfortable for the White majority that controls the power structure. There’s a reason why us White kids were taught Martin Luther King Jr.’s words rather than those of Marcus Garvey or Angela Davis.
These educators dictate rather than listen.
This is also how the U.S. foreign policy establishment treats peoples around the world. The question of whether a people have the ability of exercise their universally-recognized rights, including that of self-determination, is conditioned on whether it is comfortable for American policymakers and their politics. There’s a reason why Ukrainians and Palestinians, two peoples suffering aggression at the hands of heavily-armed neighbors, are treated very differently under U.S. policy despite the fact that they share the same inherent rights.
These policymakers dictate rather than listen.
On this Juneteenth, let us resolve to do a lot more listening.
[1] To clarify, I am not equating self-determination (a process) with independence (one of the possible end states of that process). But in this case, the will of the Palestinians for statehood is clear, and widely supported internationally.