Anticarceral Internationalism: Rethinking Human Rights through the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition

From Garveyism to the Black Panthers, from campaigns to free political prisoners to the current fight to #FreeThemAll, imprisoned Black activists and their allies have deployed expanded conceptions of human rights. These anticarceral organizers have internationalized the struggle against state violence by condemning genocidal police and prison practices at the United Nations, building global solidarities, and appealing to the world. In redefining traditional understandings of human rights, imprisoned Black radicals have called forth a right to breathe in the face of state killings, a right to resist in individual and collective self-defense, and a right to repair in restorative and abolitionist terms. Rethinking human rights through the imprisoned Black radical tradition offers insight into the genealogy of a major anticarceral thread of Black internationalism that has been reanimated in the current phase of the global struggle for Black liberation.