Why the World Conference Against Racism is Critical to Women's Human Rights Advocacy

Presentation by Charlotte Bunch at a panel held during the Commission on the Status of Women, NYC

March 7, 2001

I would like to talk about why I think the World Conference Against Racism is important for the human rights of women and for the women's movement globally.  In some places I am hearing talk about UN world conference fatigue.  While this is understandable given the frustrations of the Plus Five reviews - of Cairo+5 and Beijing+5 in particular, I think that we must ask what is the message that it sends if people are tired of world conferences just at the time when the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) is to be held.  What does it mean if there is less interest in this conference or less money available for it than there has been for other world conferences?  Whether you attend the conference in South Africa or not, the holding of the WCAR and the discussions that it should bring about locally and regionally as well as globally are important for all women and for future advocacy for women's human rights.

While discussing the intersection of race and gender at the WCAR does not mean putting all the issues of all women onto that agenda, racism should be seen as an issue relevant to all women and men.  Race affects us all.  Our lives as women are constantly affected by the race/gender intersection whether our racial gap is the subordinate or dominant one in our societies.  Understanding the construction of race, including the construction of "whiteness," is critical to understanding how race privilege as well as race subordination functions, and to contesting racial hierarchies. Just as women want and expect male allies to learn about the construction of gender and to work against its oppressiveness, so too we must ask women of all races to learn about and combat racism.

DIVERSITY AND UNIVERSALITY

Dealing with issues of difference is also crucial to the future of women's movements. Our diversities of race, caste, class, culture, religion, sexual orientation, age, rural/urban, disabilities, etc. will divide us unless we seek to understand and build movements that work across differences not by ignoring them but by acknowledging them.  This requires both challenging systems of power and privilege based on differences as well as valuing some aspects of our diversity.  Women's organizations can lead the way in doing this and some have at times, but this is not easy or inevitable and requires constant vigilance.

Finding the right balance between respect for diversity and the affirmation of our universality as human beings with equal rights to human rights is one of the leading challenges in human rights theory and practice today. The struggle for the human rights of women is at the center of the contemporary controversy over universal human rights versus cultural relativists claims of conditional human rights.  The defenders of women's human rights must respond to this debate by emphasizing that all women have a universal right to the enjoyment of all human rights, but this does not mean that all women's experiences, strategies or choices in affirming their human rights are or need to be identical.  Rather, human rights can only be universal in practice if they are looked at in terms of the full diversity of people's experiences and when diverse remedies are shaped in response to different and intersecting factors that deny women and men the full exercise of their rights. In working toward the WCAR, women can advance our understanding of the creative tension between these demands of the universal and the particular.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND INDIVISIBILITY

The methodology of intersectionality - of looking at how different aspects of our identities such as race and gender affect each other - also helps to further work toward another basic human rights concept: indivisibility.  The human rights system is based on the idea that human rights are indivisible and interrelated.  But the treaties and mechanisms set up to defend and promote human rights tend to be linear - that is, they treat different aspects of abuse and discrimination (race, sex, age, migrant status, etc.) separately.

Over the past decade, there have been moves towards realizing indivisibility that can help to build an understanding of an intersectional approach to human rights practice.   The women's human rights movement has called for the integration of gender perspectives into the application of all human rights mechanisms.  For example, feminists have insisted that in order to integrate gender effectively, we need disaggregated data by sex, as well as to examine how the "forms" a violation takes may be different for women and men or how gender affects the "circumstances," in which abuse occurs or the "consequences" of violations (such as rape).  Only then can we shape remedies and prevention strategies that will be effective for women as well as men. This work on methodology and guidelines for how to relate gender to issues such as torture, war crimes, freedom of expression, arbitrary execution, etc. can be useful to thinking about an intersectional approach that looks at how race and gender as well as other factors affect each other.  Thus the same questions can be asked in terms of multiple factors; for example, we need data that is disaggregated by multiple factors - race and sex and others depending on the issue.

Finally, the occasion of the WCAR offers another opportunity to tell women's stories which becomes a way to document intersectionality in women's lives concretely.  The women's tribunals we have organized over the past decade showed us in real life terms why women need both more diverse and more holistic solutions and policies in order to bring an end to the many and complex human rights violations that women suffer in the world.

Above all, we must seek to ensure that the World Conference Against Racism does not just become an isolated year of looking at racism, but an opportunity to advance a way of working that permeates all human rights practice in the future.  We must use this occasion to declare the necessity of addressing diversity in human rights and to show what can be done when the human rights of all in all our diversity are addressed.  This World Conference is taking place in the present, but the issues it addresses are shaped by the past and how we do this work now will point the way towards the future.