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Human Rights Law Commons

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Law and Race

Boston University School of Law

Racism

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Human Rights Law

Title 42, Asylum, And Politicising Public Health, Michael Ulrich, Sondra S. Crosby Nov 2021

Title 42, Asylum, And Politicising Public Health, Michael Ulrich, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

President Biden has continued the controversial immigration policy of the Trump era known as Title 42, which has caused harm and suffering to scores of asylum seekers under the guise of public health.1 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered the policy in March 2020 with the stated purpose of limiting the spread of the coronavirus into the U.S.; though, CDC and public health officials have admitted this policy has no scientific basis and there is no evidence it has protected the public.2,3 Instead, the impetus behind the policy appears to be a desire to keep out or …


Racism As A Human Rights Risk: Reconsidering The Corporate 'Responsibility To Respect' Rights, Erika George Oct 2021

Racism As A Human Rights Risk: Reconsidering The Corporate 'Responsibility To Respect' Rights, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

Darnella Frazer, a teenage witness to a fatal police encounter, used social media to share her cell phone video footage capturing a white police officer casually kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed Black man named George Floyd for nearly nine minutes. Her video rapidly went viral, sparking civil unrest across the United States (US) and protests around the world.1 Independent experts of the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council came together to issue a joint statement condemning 'systemic racism' and 'state sponsored racial violence' in the US.2 George Floyd was not the first unarmed …


Reckoning: A Dialogue About Racism, Antiracists, And Business & Human Rights, Erika George, Jena Martin, Tara Van Ho Mar 2021

Reckoning: A Dialogue About Racism, Antiracists, And Business & Human Rights, Erika George, Jena Martin, Tara Van Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Video of George Floyd's death sparked global demonstrations and prompted individuals, communities and institutions to grapple with their own roles in embedding and perpetuating racist structures. The raison d'être of Business and Human Rights (BHR) is to tackle structural corporate impediments to the universal realization of human rights. Yet, racism, one of the most obvious of such barriers, has been a blind spot for BHR. While the field has contended with gender inequality, there have only been tokenistic nods to intersectional harms caused by business activities. The failure to address racism seriously undermines both the promise of BHR generally and …


The Past As Present, Unlearned Lessons And The (Non-) Utility Of International Law, Susan M. Akram Jul 2019

The Past As Present, Unlearned Lessons And The (Non-) Utility Of International Law, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

The contemporary moment provides an acute illustration of the dangers of historical amnesia—as if the Trump Administration’s policies of exclusion, extremist nationalism, and presidential imperialism were singular to ‘now,’ and entirely reversible in the next election. This Article argues to the contrary; that we have been down this road before, and the current crisis in immigration and refugee policies is the inevitable development of trends of racism, including anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia, that have only become normalized by the populist resurgence of Trumpism. If this premise is correct—that we are experiencing a culmination of a historical trajectory—what lessons from …


The Aftermath Of September 11, 2001: The Targeting Of Arabs And Muslims In America, Susan M. Akram Jul 2002

The Aftermath Of September 11, 2001: The Targeting Of Arabs And Muslims In America, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

THE DEMONIZING OF ARABS AND Muslims in America began well before the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. It can be traced to deliberate mythmaking by film and media,2 stereotyping as part of conscious strategy of 'experts' and polemicists on the Middle East,3 the selling of a foreign policy agenda by US government officials and groups seeking to affect that agenda,4 and a public susceptible to images identifying the unwelcome 'other* in its midst.5 Bearing the brunt of these factors are Arab and Muslim non-citizens in this country. A series of government laws and policies since …