For many of us, Derrick Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law was a fundamental, devastating revelation about the role of law in constructing, reinforcing, and emboldening social institutions and structures that perpetuate and strengthen racism and de facto apartheid. Bell’s sphere was primarily the domestic United States—although of course it was not possible to completely separate the local from the global in 1973 and certainly is not today. Scholars influenced by Bell applied his lessons to other areas of legal research, including, but not limited to, international law. At its origin and continuing today, international law was anchored in racialized paradigms placing at their apex the “civilized” i.e. white and colonial sovereign powers, partially civilized countries like “Siam” and the Ottoman Empire, and “savage” or “barbarian” states comprised of what Frantz Fanon was later to famously describe as “the wretched of the earth.”
International law represents, therefore, an even more focused study of Bell’s precepts, and I welcome this new volume dedicated to this essential nexus of law and justice, Race, Racism, and International Law edited by Devon Carbado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Justin Desautels-Stein, and Chantal Thomas. Featuring chapters from E. Tendayi Achiume and Aslı Bâli, Aziza Ahmed, Adelle Blackett, Christopher Gevers, Wadie Said, and Matiangai Sirleaf, in addition to the editors, the volume provides scholars of international law and racial justice one of the most important resources to date on how the history, agents, processes, and discourse of international law not only entrenched racial oppression as part of imperial global extraction and exploitation, but now sustain and feed this oppression within international legal rules and institutions. As wielders of these forces, the International Criminal Court is just as culpable as the World Trade Organization.
This book is one I like a lot, and I hope others active in the study and shaping of international law do as well. The book is divided into three sections covering “histories and structures”; “peoples, places, perimeters, and powers”; and “critical race theory and international law.” The editors and contributors cover themes, institutions, and essential concepts that advocate a fundamental reorientation of theory and praxis of international law its widest range of subjects—commerce, crime, health, the major neo-liberal economic institutions—toward the perspective and welfare of those it has historically oppressed.
In addition to providing perhaps the most comprehensive volume on the juxtaposition of international law and racial justice (many scholars including myself analyze the socially beneficial and pernicious effects of specific international legal regimes and organizations, but far fewer characterize them in such a specific way), Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, Thomas and their contributors have offered a thoughtful critique of how essential concepts in international law—for example sovereignty, universal norms, commerce—thread racial inequality throughout the global order. Indeed, Wadie Said brings this point home in a particularly compelling way in his chapter, Race and Politics in International Criminal Law: Case Studies from the Arab World, on how international criminal law itself has absorbed and regurgitated specialized forms of racial oppression against unpopular Arab regimes largely to the detriment of their innocent populations.
Two examples are illustrative. In Matiangai SIrleaf’s chapter, White Health and International Law, she carefully traces how global health law—itself a vestige of so-called “tropical medicine” developed to address the concerns of American and European colonial administrators and their militaries—entrenches “racialized” disease classification and response, not broadly because those diseases maintain a fundamental biological connection to race (of course some diseases and conditions do), but rather signal race as part of the “political, legal, and social privileging and salience given to ailments thought to touch and concern White people.” (P. 203.) Tendayi Achiume and Asli Bali provide a similarly insightful lesson in Critical Race Theory Meets Third World Approaches to International Law, about how scholars in the tradition of “third world approaches to international law” (TWAIL) and critical race theory share perspectives that 1) the formation and force of international law cannot be separated from its imperial and colonial origins and 2) that empire and colonialism are fundamentally racist endeavors that place the capital-accumulating European class at the apex of a contorted and oppressive system of exploitation and territorial control. These scholars and traditions still have much to learn from one another, and Achiume and Bali set an extraordinary stage for doing so, some of which is then provided in Part III.
Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas have undertaken an extraordinarily valuable exercise in using this volume not only to map the pressure points where racial justice principles may better inform the international legal order, but also to expose the ways in which conventional justifications and practices are vulnerable to their piercing and incisive criticisms. As international law struggles as part of the battle ground between violent, racist, fascist territorial expansion on the one hand and those opposed to it on the other, Carbado, Crenshaw, DeSautels-Stein, and Thomas’s volume, and along with it their contributors, will be a go-to resource for those assessing how to move forward both inside and outside the academy.
