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Introduction The International Division of Humanity  In October 1944, amid a flurry of intense lobbying efforts leading to the signing of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois received a letter from Judge Joseph Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee asking the distinguished scholar to sign on to the committee’s draft of a “Declaration of Human Rights.” “On the eve of liberation,” Proskauer wrote, “we feel a particular urgency for all men of peace and goodwill to emphasize and reaffirm the godly concept of the dignity of the individual man.” The judge ended the letter by writing that “we trust that you will join with us in presenting the Declaration of Human Rights to the American public. To this end, please sign and return one copy in the enclosed self-addressed envelope.”1 Prior to the receipt of this appeal, Du Bois had vociferously denounced the persecution of Jewish people in Europe in a number of essays, describing the genocide as the “supertragedy” of European civilization. In his response to Proskauer a couple of weeks later, however, he wrote the following: My Dear Sir, I have received your declaration of human rights and want to say frankly that I am greatly disappointed. . . . You say under paragraph two of your creed: “No plea of sovereignty shall ever again be allowed to permit any nation to deprive those within its borders of these fundamental rights on the claim that these matters are of internal concern.” How about depriving people outside the borders of a country of their rights? . . . Under paragraph five you appeal for sympathy for persons driven from the land of their birth; but how about American Negroes, Africans, and Indians who have not been driven from their land of birth but are nonetheless deprived of their rights? Under paragraph six you want redress for those who wander the earth but how about those who do not wander and nevertheless are deprived of their fundamental human rights? . . . In other words, xiii xiv Introduction this declaration of rights has apparently no thought of the rights of Negroes, Indians, and South Sea Islanders. Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?2 In this Declaration’s summary bypass of a range of historic and contemporary conditions of violence, Du Bois recognized a looming danger: the new universal human was remarkably similar to previous ideological iterations of the Rights of Man. Indeed this was neither the first nor the last time that Du Bois would object to a postwar rearticulation of rights for reproducing an already existing international division of humanity. A few months later in February 1945, Du Bois expressed a related set of concerns about the plans for a “new” world government organization floated by the influential Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. In response to their proposal for “regional commissions” to oversee the “dependent territories ” occupied by Axis powers, Du Bois wrote to the executive director Clark Eichelberger that the commission’s document “combine [d] the interest in colonial peoples with the interest in imperial objects and is too strongly weighted on the side of imperialism.”3 Against these midcentury elisions of the color line, Du Bois submitted a proposal to the UN Conference stating that the “first statute of international law” should read: “The colonial system of government, however deeply rooted in history and custom, is today undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars [and] at the earliest practical moment no nation or group shall be deprived of effective voice in its own government and enjoyment of the four freedoms.”4 His language never made it to the floor for consideration . Several years after his failed efforts to have “the rights of dependent peoples to govern themselves” acknowledged in the UN Charter, Du Bois served as one of the authors of the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 petition to the UN in which the U.S. government, the self-proclaimed world leader of human rights, was itself charged with the crime of genocide.5 Predictably, the UN did not respond. Du Bois’s efforts to speak on behalf of, in his words, “the unrepresented 750,000,000” ran up against a formidable imperialist consensus determined to maintain a divided world. But despite the official rejection of his appeals for a more critical reckoning with imperial violence from 1492 onward, unofficial and popular demands for a truly new international order have never subsided. This book is...

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