Can Black males be subjects of human rights violations?

ABSTRACT

This essay assesses the recent discourse that has developed around the death of Black males in the U.S. and how these deaths have been animated by anti-misandry. Anti-Black misandry refers to the pathological hatred of Black males. Using the theory of anti-Black misandry, my central argument is that human rights frameworks that centre on arbitrary killings and racial discrimination by agents of the State and private citizens are incapable of capturing that there is a persistent belief framed as a social, cultural, and political right to kill Black male by the State and white vigilantes that governs Black male life in the U.S.

Keywords:

• Anti-Black misandry
• black male studies
• black critical theory of human rights
• Africana philosophy
• critical race theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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7 Davila, ‘Afro-Descendants’, 152.

8 Randall, ‘Introduction’, 10.

9 Davila, ‘Afro-Descendants’, 156.

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11 Human Rights Council, Promotion and Protection of the Human Rights and Fundamental freedoms of Africans and of People of African Descent Against Excessive Use of Force and other Human Rights Violation by law enforcement officers. Forty-Seventh Session (June 21 July 2021) A/HRC/47/CRP1.

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13 Thiago Amparo, and Andressa Vieira e Silva, ‘George Floyd at the UN: Whiteness, International Law, and Police Violence’, UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law 7 (2022): 91–120; Laura Goolsby, ‘Why International Law Should Matter to Black Lives Matter: A Draft Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Behalf of the Family of Eric Garner’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 21 (2018): 29–51; Jeremy I Levitt, ‘Fuck Your Breath: Black Men and Youth, State Violence, and Human Rights in the 21st Century’, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 49 (2015): 87–120.

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16 Ibid., 303.

17 United Nations, The Minnesota Protocol on the Investigation of Potentially Unlawful Death (New York and Geneva, 2017), 1, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Publications/MinnesotaProtocol.pdf.

18 Ibid., 3.

19 United Nations, Human Rights Standards and Practice for the Police (New York and Geneva, 2004), V, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Publications/training5Add3en.pdf.

20 Ibid., 296.

21 Ibid.

22 Lewis, ‘Reflections on BlackCrit Theory’, 1085–9.

23 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Thematic Rapporteurships and Units. https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/mandate/rapporteurships.asp (accessed March 10, 2023).

24 Ibid.

25 Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro (New York University Press, 2014). Lamonte, Aidoo, Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History (Duke University Press, 2018).

26 Celina, Romany, ‘Black Women and Gender Equality in a New South Africa: Human Rights Law and the Intersection of Race and Gender’, Brooklyn Journal of International Law 21 (1995): 857–98; Lisa A. Crooms, ‘Indivisible Rights and Intersectional Identities or, What Do Women's Human Rights Have to Do with the Race Convention’, Howard Law Journal 40 (1996): 619–40; Hope Lewis, ‘Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights and Inter/national Black Women’, Meine Law Review 50 (1998): 309–26.

27 Abigail Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, ‘Intersectionality and the United Nations World Conference against Racism’, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice 38, no. 1 (2017): 221.

28 Agnes Callamard, Human Rights Council (June 6, 2017). Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions on a Gender-sensitive Approach to Arbitrary Killings. A/HRC/35/23, 5–6.

29 N.p. ‘Invisible Man: Black and Male under Title VII’, Harvard Law Review 104, no. 3 (January 1991): 749–68; Darren Lenard Hutchinson, ‘Identity Crisis: Intersectionality, Multidimensionality, and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination’, Michigan Journal of Race & Law 6 (2000): 285; Jim Sidanius, Sa Kiera Tiarra, and others ‘The Theory of Gendered Prejudice: A Social Dominance and Intersectionalist Perspective’, in The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Political Science, eds. Alex Mintz and Lesley G. Terris; Adebayo Oluwayomi, ‘The Man-Not and the Inapplicability of Intersectionality to the Dilemmas of Black Manhood’, The Journal of Men's Studies 28, no. 2 (2020): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/1060826519896566; Tommy J. Curry, ‘Killing Boogeymen'.

30 Charles P. Henry and Tunua Thrash, ‘US Human Rights Petitions before the UN’, The Black Scholar 26, no. 3–4 (1996): 60–73; Robert Staples, ‘Black Male Genocide: A Final Solution to the Race Problem in America’, The Black Scholar 18, no. 3 (1987): 2–11; Robert Johnson and Paul S. Leighton, ‘Black Genocide? Preliminary Thoughts on the Plight of America's Poor Black Men’, Journal of African American Men 1 (1995): 3–21; Castellano Turner and William A. Darity, ‘Fears of Genocide among Black Americans as Related to Age, Sex, and Region,’ American Journal of Public Health 63, no. 12 (1973): 1029–34.

31 Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Duke University Press 1991), 6.

32 Ibid., 40.

33 Executive Session on Foreign Relations: 1949–1950 Eighty-First Congress, First and Second Sessions (1976). U.S. Government Printing Office, 370.

34 Anthony Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 401–2; Carol Elaine Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–5.

35 Hope Lewis, ‘Transnational Dimensions of Racial Identity: Reflecting on Race, the Global Economy, and the Human Rights Movement at 60’; Maryland Journal of International Law 24 (2009): 300.

36 Darren Lenard Hutchinson, ‘Out yet Unseen: A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal Theory and Political Discourse’, Connecticut Law Review 29 (1996): 561. Darren Lenard Hutchinson, ‘Ignoring the Sexualization of Race: Heteronormativity, Critical Race Theory and Anti-racist Politics’, Buffalo Law Review 47 (1999): 1.

37 Ibid.

38 Athena D. Mutua, ‘Multidimensionality Is to Masculinities What Intersectionality Is to Feminism’, Nev. LJ 13 (2012): 341–67.

39 Bryan Warde, ‘Black Male Disproportionality in the Criminal Justice Systems of the USA, Canada, and England: A Comparative Analysis of Incarceration’, Journal of African American Studies 17 (2013): 461–79; Patrick Williams et al., ‘Omission, Erasure and Obfuscation in the Police Institutional Killing of Black Men’, Mortality 28, no. 2 (2023): 250–68. João Costa Vargas and Jaime Amparo Alves, ‘Geographies of Death: An Intersectional Analysis of Police Lethality and the Racialized Regimes of Citizenship in São Paulo’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, no. 4 (2010): 611–36.

40 Ontario Human Rights Commission, A Collective Impact Interim Report on the Inquiry into Racial Profiling and Racial Discrimination of Black Persons by the Toronto Police Service. (2018), 20.

41 Adebayo Ogungbure. ‘Homoeroticism, Phallicism and the Racialization of Black/Brown Males: A Historiography of Sexual Racism in America,’ Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 9, no. 2 (2018): 1–23; Tommy J. Curry, ‘He Never Mattered’, The Movement for Black Lives, ed. Bradon Hogal (Oxford University Press, 2021), 59–89.

42 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey Being Black in the EU (2018), 10.

43 Lisa Wallin and Klara Hradilova Selin, Afrophobic Hate Crime. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (2022), 2; EUAFR 2018, 13.

44 Frederick Douglass, Why is the Negro Lynched (Bridgwater: John Whitby and Sons, 1895); Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1894).

45 Lewis, ‘Reflections on BlackCrit theory,’ 1085–9.

46 D. English et al., ‘Measuring Black Men's Police-based Discrimination Experiences: Development and Validation of the Police and Law Enforcement (PLE) Scale’, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 23, no. (2): 17.

47 Andrea J. Ritchie and Joey L. Mogul, ‘In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse of People of Clor in the United States’, DePaul Journal for Social Justice 1 (2007): 175–246; Justin Hansford and Meena Jagannath, ‘Ferguson to Geneva: Using the Human Rights Framework to Push Forward a Vision for Racial Justice in the United States after Ferguson’, Hastings Race & Poverty LJ 12 (2015): 121–147.

48 Anthony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-racism: The United States, UNESCO, and Race 1945–1968 (Springer, 2012), 2–3; Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘The Racial Limits of Social Justice: The Ruse of Equality of Opportunity and the Global Affirmative Action Mandate’, Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): 184–209.

49 Da Silva, ‘The Racial Limits’, 189.

50 Senate. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 103D Congress., 2nd sess., 1994, Exec Rept 103-29. p. 2–3.

51 Ibid., 6.

52 Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family (United States Department of Labor, 1965), 16.

53 Anthony L. Brown, ‘“Same Old Stories”: The Black Male in Social Science and Educational Literature, 1930s to the Present’, Teachers College Record 113, no. 9 (2011): 2047–79. Dalitso Ruwe, ‘Eugenic Caricatures of Black Male Death from the Nineteenth-to Twenty-first Centuries’, Theory & Event 25, no. 3 (2022): 665–88.

54 Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–19.

55 Ruwe, ‘Eugenic Caricatures’, 665–88.

56 Douglass, ‘Why Is the Negro Lynched’, 13.

57 Ibid., 15.

58 Ibid.

59 Wells, ‘Red Record’, 1.

60 Douglass, ‘Why Is the Negro Lynched’, 3.

61 Maurice Glele-Ahanhanzo, Implementation of the Programme of Action For the Second Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination. Commission on Human Rights. Fifty-First Session. 1994 (Accessed June 10, 2023).

62 Ibid.

63 Allyson Collins, Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States (Human Rights Watch, 1998), 1.

64 Douglass, ‘Why Is the Negro Lynched,’ 3.

65 Leah N. Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 18–27.

66 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2007), 47.

67 Kenneth B. Nunn, ‘Law as a Eurocentric Enterprise,’ Law & Inequality 15 (1997): 323–71; Jerome McCristal Culp Jr, ‘Toward a Black Legal Scholarship: Race and Original Understandings’, Duke Law Journal (1991): 39–105.

68 Samera Esmeir, ‘On Making Dehumanization Possible’, PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1546.

69 Ibid., 1545.

70 Ibid., 1545–6.

71 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, ‘Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality’, Social Identities 7, no. 3 (2001): 447.

72 Ibid., 441.

73 Ibid.

74 United Nations. Combined Tenth to Twelfth Periodic Reports Submitted by the United States of America article 9 of the Convention, due in 2017. (2021 CERD/C/USA/10-12). (4-5).

75 U.S. Department of Justice. Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department (Civil Rights Division, 2016), 5.

76 Ibid., 29.

77 Ibid.

78 United States Department of Justice. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. (Civil Rights Division, 2014) 2015, 2.

79 Ruwe, ‘Eugenic Caricatures’, 665–88.

80 Department of Justice, ‘Investigation Ferguson’, 3.

81 Ibid., 2.

82 George Jackson, Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 18.

83 Ibid., 18.

84 Ibid., 2–3.

85 Douglass, ‘Why Is the Negro Lynched’, 13.

86 ‘An interview with Derrick Bell: Reflections on Race, Crime. And Legal Activism’, McArdle Andrea and Tanya Erzen, eds. Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2001), 243–4.

87 Miron J. Clay-Gilmore, ‘“This Is the Nature of the Threat!”: Black Male Gendercide, Social Dominance Theory, and the Evolutionary Origins of Inter-Group Conflict’, Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 8, no. 4 (2022): 25–53.

88 Tommy Curry, Man-Not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of Black manhood (Temple University, 2017), 170–1.

89 GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, ‘Fatal Police Violence by Race and State in the USA, 1980–2019: A Network Meta-regression’, The Lancet 398, no. 10307 (2021): 1243.

90 Ibid., 1245.

91 Ruwe, ‘Eugenic Caricartures’, 665–88.

92 Ibid.

93 Jessica Auchter, ‘Paying Attention to Dead Bodies: The Future of Security Studies?’, Journal of Global Security Studies 1, no. 1 (2016): 47.

94 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers, https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000015f-11c2-d01e-a35f-f7c641380000 (accessed August 3, 2017).

95 Gail Mason, ‘Blue Lives Matter and Hate Crime Law’, Race and Justice 12, no. 2 (2022): 411–30.

96 Dalitso Ruwe, ‘Black Minds Matter: Repression of Critical Race Theory and Racial Violence against Black Students’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry 9, no. 2 (2022): 77.

97 The Guardian, ‘What Does the UN Stand for? Anger Follows Memo on Anti-racism Protests’, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jun/09/what-does-the-un-stand-for-anger-as-staff-told-not-to-join-anti-racism-protests (accessed June 9, 2023).

98 W. E. B. Dubois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1945), 7.

99 Ibid., 10.

100 United States of America V. Morteza Amiri, Eric Allen Rombough and Devon Christopher Wegner 2023, 4.

101 Ibid., 5.

102 Ibid., 15–18.

103 Ibid., 13.

104 Huey P. Newton, ‘Fear and Doubt,’ in Huey P. Newton Reader, eds. David Hillard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 131.

105 Ibid.

106 Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 41.

107 Albert James Williams-Myers, Destructive Impulses: An Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence (University Press of America, 1995).

108 Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office. Tamir Rice Investigation Part 3. Los Angeles Times, https://documents.latimes.com/tamir-rice-investigation-part-3/ (accessed June 13, 2023).

109 Goff et al., 'The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526.

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111 Lisa Guerrero and David Leonard, ‘Playing Dead: The Trayvoning Meme & the Mocking of Black Death’ New Black Man (in Exile) https://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2012/05/playing-dead-trayvoning-meme-mocking-of.html (accessed May 29, 2023).

112 Harvey Young, ‘The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching’, Theatre Journal (2005): 639–57.

113 Franklin Nii Amankwah Yartey, ‘Race, Solidarity and Dissent in the Trayvon Martin Case: A Critical Analysis’, Visual Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 54–6.

114 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, 2008) 113.

115 Yartey ‘Race’, 55.

116 Jessica Auchter, Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 19–20.

117 Katherine Cooney, ‘Man Sells Out of Trayvon Martin Gun Range Targets’, News Feed, https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/14/man-sells-out-of-trayvon-martin-gun-range-targets/ (accessed May 14, 2023).

118 LaKerri R. Mack and Kristie Roberts-Lewis, ‘The Dangerous Intersection between Race, Class and Stand Your Ground’, Journal of Public Management & Social Policy 23, no. 1 (2016): 4.

119 George Floyd Toys, https://georgefloydtoysofficial.com (accessed February 18, 2021).

120 Alfred Frankowski, ‘Spectacle Terror Lynching, Public Sovereignty, and Antiblack Genocide’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33, no. 2 (2019): 268–81.

121 Oliver Cox, ‘Lynching and the Status Quo’, The Journal of Negro Education 14, no. 4 (1945): 582.

122 Ibid., 582.

123 People v. Miner, Appellate Court of Illinois, Oct 4, 2017. 3.

124 Ibid., 2.

125 Ibid., 2.

126 Douglass, ‘Why Is the Negro Lynched,’ 15.

127 Ibid., 13.

128 Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (Anchor Books, 1992). Woodard, The Delectable Negro.

129 Jillian Steinhauer, ‘Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry,’ Hyperallegric, https://hyperallergic.com/190954/kenneth-goldsmith-remixes-michael-brown-autopsy-report-as-poetry/ (accessed March 16, 2021).

130 Jason Okundaye, ‘The Fetishisation of Black Masculinity,’ GQ https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/fetishisation-black-masculinity (accessed October 13, 2020).

131 Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (The New York Age Print, 1892), 7–11.

132 Ibid., 7–11.

133 Ibid., 7–18.

134 Fanon, Black Skin White Mask, 154. Ogungbure, ‘Homoeroticism, Phallicism’, 1–23. Curry, ‘Killing Boogyeman’, 1–38.

135 Office of District Attorney, ‘Juvenille Indicted on Racially Motivated Attempted Murder Charges from Incident in Chatham in July’, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Cape & Islands District, https://www.insideedition.com/sites/default/files/inline-files/Untitled.pdf (accessed August 31, 2023).

136 Colin Samson, The Colonialism of Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 6.

137 Ibid., 5.

138 Ibid., 6.

139 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Who Speaks for the “Human” in Human Rights?’ Cadernos de Estudos Culturais 3, no. 5 (2011), 7.

140 Ibid., 7.

141 Jackson, Soledad Brothers, 4.

142 Ibid., 4.

143 Douglass, ‘Why Is the Negro Lynched’, 15.

144 Ibid., 15. Norman Ajari, Dignity Or Death: Ethics and Politics of Race (Wiley, 2022), 38.

145 Curry, The Man-Not: Race, 170–7.

146 Douglass, ‘Why Negro Lynched’.

147 Huey Newton, ‘War Against the Panthers’ (PhD diss., University of Santa Cruz, 1980), preface.

148 da Silva, ‘No-bodies’, 233–5. Derrick Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law (Aspen, 2004), 598–9.

149 Curry, The Man-Not: Race, 170–7.

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Dalitso Ruwe

Dalitso Ruwe holds a joint appointment as an assistant professor of Black political thought in the Philosophy and Black Studies Departments at Queen's University. He is a 2023–2025 Azrieli Global Scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Horrors of the Flesh: Black Misandric Violence and the Dehumanizing Logics of Western Sciences that traces how scientific caricatures between the 17th–21st centuries have conscripted Black males as ontologically violent beings and serve as scientific justifications for new violent and non-lethal methods to deal with the believed violent nature of Black males.