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In her essay for the Carr Center's latest publication, Making a Movement: The History and Future of Human Rights, Sandra Susan Smith discusses the challenges that the racial justice movement still faces, decades after the civil rights era.

Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice, Harvard Kennedy School

"Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have witnessed a number of truly inspiring accomplishments, the result of civil rights and racial justice movements across the globe.

These include, but are not limited to, the decolonization movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean; the implementation of civil rights legislation barring discrimination on the bases of race, color, religion, sex, and/or national origin; the enactment of affirmative action policies; the end of apartheid in South Africa; and the adoption of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to protect Indigenous lands and cultures. That this is just a sampling speaks to the cataclysmic changes that movement activists and advocates have fought for over the past 75 years.

"Clear signs of progress, however, should not overshadow the harsh fact that disparate and brutal treatment remains a fact of life for members of many communities defined by race, ethnicity, and class. In the United States, for instance, as systems of oppression and repression were dismantled during the civil rights era, they were replaced by other institutions of racial and class domination. Primary among them was the criminal legal system, with race- and class-based overpolicing; dehumanizing mass incarceration; and mass surveillance in targeted communities as the institution’s many tools of containment, control, and extraction.

"Clear signs of progress, however, should not overshadow the harsh fact that disparate and brutal treatment remains a fact of life for members of many communities defined by race, ethnicity, and class."

"Indeed, when the masses who have been warehoused in U.S. jails, prisons, immigration facilities, and juvenile detention centers are properly accounted for, what becomes clear is that much of the racial progress we believe we have made over the past 50 years—in educational attainment, employment and earnings, and the like—has been an illusion. Calls for abolishing the prison industrial complex will surely end the devastation that this particular system has wreaked on communities marked by race and class, but it will only be replaced by another system of racial and class domination unless and until white supremacy and racial capitalism are themselves defeated and replaced by systems that take for granted the intrinsic worth of every human being." ■

Read the full publication.