Human Rights in the Margins — A Response to a Cynical Grantmaker

“The human rights framework just hasn’t taken off,” a grantmaker told me today.  “It’s really just at the margins of efforts toward social change.”

Of course, as someone who focuses her working hours on the transformative potential of human rights, I wasn’t happy to hear this view.  But at the same time, I wondered how it was that he reached this conclusion.

Preparing to write a blog for today, I surveyed, as I often do, recent human rights developments in the US.   And as always, there were many.  Some were positive developments, like the mainstream news’ recognition of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ successful campaign to improve working conditions for farmworkers, and reports that big businesses are beginning to prepare human rights impact statements as part of their reporting to stockholders and consumers.  Another mainstream article, looking over the Supreme Court term, noted not only the Obergefell decision, but Justice Kennedy’s statements expressing concerns about solitary confinement and laying the groundwork for future restrictions of that practice.  Of course, some U.S. human rights news was less encouraging, such as the Justice Department’s fight to narrow the scope of Judge Gee’s ruling releasing immigrant families from detention or the rising water bills around the nation that threaten to jeopardize low income families’ health, housing and well-being.

Why, with all of this activity, much of it explicitly linked to the US human rights movement, did the grantmaker view human rights frames as marginal?

I can imagine a number of reasons.  Perhaps groups like the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative or the US Human Rights Network are so modest about their successes, so team-oriented and so willing to spread the credit that the role of human rights as an important mobilizing, organizing and policy-shaping tool is obscured. 

Or perhaps grantmakers feel that they must try to name a single frame as the most effective vehicle for social change and disregard the others.  If human rights is at the margins, then the grantmaker must see something else at the center – perhaps civil rights, or human-centered design, or art.  But surely these hierarchies are misleading.  All of the frames are in the mix at any one time, and all of them are doing work toward social change, with the margins serving as boundaries that define and strengthen the center.  I imagine stirring up a cake mix with an electric mixer.  Some stuff gets stuck on the sides, but soon enough, it gets brought back in and becomes part of the center itself, absolutely necessary to the cake’s success.

Or perhaps the grantmaker is simply misinformed.  Among the US human rights items that hit my desk recently was a report on the Milk with Dignity campaign in Vermont, patterned on the CIW campaign.  The campaign effectively publicized the working conditions at dairies in the state, brought Ben & Jerry’s to the negotiating table, and inspired a film that carries the message forward.  Social change in small places, close to home . . .  it might be mistaken for marginal work and lack of progress, but that would be wrong.