Guest Blogger: Jeannine Bell

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome guest blogger Jeannine Bell (left).
Jeannine is Professor of Law and Charles Whistler Faculty Fellow at Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington. (As blogreaders know, the law school also is the home institution of IntLawGrrl Christiana Ochoa and guests/alumnae Hannah Buxbaum and Dawn Johnsen.)

After earning her A.B. degree in government from Harvard College, Jeannine earned a J.D., as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science, from the University of Michigan. At Indiana she teaches Criminal Procedure, Property, and seminars on the First Amendment and Law and Society. She's active in the Law and Society Association (about which IntLawGrrls also posts today): in addition to having served on the LSA board and chaired several LSA committees, she's an associate editor of the Law and Society Review. Her publications, which have focused on matters of criminal justice, include Policing Hatred (2004), Police and Police and Policing Law (2006), and, with Martha S. Feldman and Michele Berger, Gaining Access (2003). In her guest post below, Jeannine describes her article on torture, which grew out of questions that arose when she served as a member of a political science special task force on terror and political conflict.

Jeannine would like to dedicate her post to a woman about whom IntLawGrrls has posted before: the activist Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977, in the foreground of the photo below). Jeannine writes: "Though largely known for her work on behalf of civil rights in Mississippi, Hamer was also an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. Rather that just fighting for the rights of Blacks from Mississippi, Hamer used her voice to call attention to injustice outside the U.S. Her fearlessness, courage, and refusal to accept the place to which society relegated her is truly inspiring." Today Hamer joins the list of IntLawGrrls' transnational foremothers, just below the "visiting from..." map in the righthand column.

Heartfelt welcome!

Obama: It's About Us...

(Warning: This post has very little to do with international law. Instead, it’s about all those people with tears in their eyes in living rooms, bars, classrooms, conference centers, and a big sports arena in Denver, Colorado, on Thursday night. It’s about the smile on my mom’s face (she doesn’t get to smile often enough) when she got a glimpse of Senator Barack Obama at a campaign event last winter... Or maybe it is about human rights after all.)

Then and Now
As a child of the 60s and 70s, I was constantly instilled with the belief that individuals or groups could change the world. The problems of the day were clear even to children — war, racism and apartheid, sexism, violence in streets and homes, political corruption, abuses against immigrants, and grinding poverty in urban centers and rural valleys.
But the sense that we could participate in broad social movements and thereby could DO something about these things was palpable. We had the optimistic expectation that grassroots action and organized political pressure on governments could result in real change.
This sense of commitment to social justice was both substantive and enmeshed in popular culture. People flashed peace signs and Black power salutes to strangers on the street. We called each other “sister” or “brother.”
Women marched for “liberation” and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Music and art called for cross-cultural and cross-gender respect and dialogue.
Young people joined the Peace Corps.
Civil rights laws were passed, a massive anti-war movement took place, and anti-poverty, early childhood education, and healthcare programs were organized. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (see photo left: courtesy of UBM.com), testified about state-sanctioned racism and violence at the Credentials Committee before the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Prior IntLawGrrls post here; click here for audio and text of speech). Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm spoke out in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and ran for President (lower right). (Prior IntLawGrrls post here.)
Such efforts had their successes and failures, as have the movements that came before them. Since then, however, we’ve seen the Gulf War, the September 11 crimes against humanity, the Iraq War, the Rwanda genocide, “ethnic cleansing” in the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, systematic rape and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Darfur genocide, and other violent conflicts throughout the world.
We’ve seen governments fail to protect the economic and social rights of the poor, persons with disabilities, the elderly, and other marginalized groups among us on a daily basis, as well as during massive crises such as Hurricane Katrina and Cyclone Nargis in Burma. We’ve seen too many young men in prisons or hospital emergency rooms who should have been in high school classrooms.
Fundamental human rights are under attack. Over the last 8 years, the absolute legal prohibition on torture under international law and the international and domestic laws protecting privacy and due process have been put up for grabs.
So, instead of the urge toward social change, a sense of cynicism, helplessness, and despair began to pervade the atmosphere and our popular culture. That included those of us in the academy.

“Rock Star” or Leadership?
What many pundits missed from the beginning about Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is that Americans need to believe that THEY can do something that matters again. All the remarks about “rock star” status and “Obamania” aside, it is that desire that primarily motivates the crowds to show up in Iowa and New York, Wisconsin, and Illinois, South Carolina, Oregon, and now, Colorado.
Charges of “elitism” ring hollow. If anything, Obama’s life story fits the classic American Dream narrative instead. African-American son of a white working-class single-mother and a Kenyan immigrant rises to attend Ivy League schools on scholarship and loans. He ends up vying for the presidency of the United States. Elitism involves looking down on, or mistreating, others because of class bias, not whether one did well at a high-profile university.
Of course, many are engaged by the senator’s individual charisma, intelligence, oratory, and political savvy. We tend to be an image-driven society after all.
But when I talk with young and older people who are committed to the campaign, it is apparent that they have a sense of relief and renewed energy. Even the young felt beaten down and silenced by immoral and illegal official policies, unreliable or superficial news coverage, fears about relatives and friends sent off for third deployments in an ill-conceived war, anger that Americans had become hated targets for some, and frustration that the promises of the American Dream are still largely unattainable for most poor, working-class people, and people of color.

“Yes We Can”
That is why, like some other crusty skeptics of my generation, I found myself in tears in front of my computer when I first saw the “Yes We Can” music video making the rounds on the internet (and about which IntLawGrrls posted here). Nice song, yes. Stylish images, yes. Famous young entertainers, yes (although I was sufficiently out of touch not to know who most of them are). And evocative of Martin Luther King Jr.’s great oratory. (IntLawGrrls posted video examples of Dr. King's speeches here and here.)
What was most moving, however, was the evidence that young people had been inspired to believe that THEY, in diverse coalitions, could help create social change. Everything was possible.

The End of Racism? Or A Step in the Right Direction?
The Iowa primary was another such moment. No matter what followed, the buzz on the phonelines and e-mails was that change is possible. Possible, despite pundits that said racism would always prevail in presidential elections. Possible, despite the ingrained belief that voters would never think outside traditional race, class, and gender demographic expectations.
Yet, neither Obama himself, nor the rest of us can believe that a single primary, nomination, or election victory signals the end of racism in the United States. There are some who prefer to believe this, I know. But every long-time activist is aware that the ascendancy of “firsts” are an important beginning, not the end. Real change is broad, deep, and complex.

History
Still, it is those historic and symbolic moments—Rev. Dr. King proclaiming his dream for America in Washington, DC, and his vision for an end to the war in Vietnam and an end to poverty at home (click here for audio of his “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” speech) and the Obamas’ potential to be the First Family of the United States — that inspire us all to keep working for change.

On October 6, ...

... 1942 (65 years ago today), the last internees left a temporary camp that the Canadian government had built in Vancouver's Hastings Park. Women were crammed into the dormitory at right, formerly a livestock barn; men were in a mass dormitory in an auditorium. The internment "of 23,000 Japanese Canadians during the war was the largest mass exodus in Canadian history." It did not end in full until 1949. (photo courtesy of JapaneseCanadianHistory.net)
... 1917 (80 years ago today), in Montgomery Country, Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer was born. Her parents were sharecroppers; her grandparents had been slaves. As a website on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee explains:

In 1962, when Hamer was 44 years old, SNCC volunteers came to town and held a voter registration meeting. She was surprised to learn that African-Americans actually had a constitutional right to vote. When the SNCC members asked for volunteers to go to the courthouse to register to vote, Hamer was the first to raise her hand.

Despite enduring a "brutal beating," Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which endorsed her 1964 run for Congress against a white supremacist man. Though she lost, the party 2 seats after posing a challenge to the all-white delegation of the state's regular party; she became "'the first African American to take her rightful seat as an official delegate at a national-party convention since the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, and the first woman ever from Mississippi.'" Though she died 30 years ago, Hamer's rallying cry is immortal:

All my life I've been sick and tired. Now I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.

(Associated Press photo of Hamer at Democratic Convention courtesy of American Radio Works)