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In the middle of a global pandemic, red hearts
spray-painted on pieces of wood line country roads in my rural
Connecticut community, as a sign of solidarity with healthcare
workers. A few hours away, across the five boroughs of New York
City, people cheer and bang pots and play music from their windows
and balconies and fire escapes every night at 7pm as health workers
change shifts, in a similar demonstration of appreciation. Rural,
urban, red, blue—the dominant theme in US political discourse for
much of the past four years has been our growing and seemingly
irreconcilable differences. Human rights—a discourse some (on the
American left) have dismissed as either too “elite” or (on the
right) too “alien to traditional values”—may have seemed a casualty
of this divide.
But as the COVID-19 pandemic deepens across the
this country and globally, scholars of economic rights (myself
included) are finding that symbols like the red hearts offer a
vehicle for deeper conversations about people at risk and the need
for social safety nets and basic income guarantees that long
pre-dated the pandemic. Basic access to healthcare, childcare,
education, food, a living wage, workplace safety protections
(including personal protective equipment)—these are all integral to
protecting not only our own individual health and ability to fight
the virus, but our common welfare and human dignity writ large. If
it was difficult to show the interconnections among people and
rights before the onset of COVID-19, we have an opportunity to do so
now.
The virus has disproportionately affected people
of color in the United States; and, with the highest rates of
unemployment since the Great Depression, there are also millions of
people of all races, education and income levels newly vulnerable to
economic and social dislocation. Healthcare workers themselves vary
in terms of earnings and education—from the highly paid and
specialized physician to the lowest paid home health worker. If we
display a red heart in our window, implicitly we are not
differentiating among them. Yet our imagined healthcare worker
deserving of thanks and respect may not “look” like the one who is
most vulnerable. The red hearts offer an opportunity to think more
deeply about who is inside (or outside of) that circle of caring.
Precisely because of its legibility across political divides, the
heart symbol offers an opportunity to ask why, and how to expand
rights. Harsh Mander, one of India’s leading rights advocates, has
called this a politics of radical and transformative love.
Cosmopolitanism—the notion that all people are
deserving of respect and entitled to protection, regardless of
citizenship status or other characteristics—may have seemed elusive
(or naïve) pre-COVID-19. But we have an opportunity to harness
emerging symbols and re-imagine their scope and depth, starting with
the red heart. Mander insists that the mobilization of empathy is
among the most important acts we can engage in. While mobilizing
shame-and-blame has been a principal tactic of human rights
promotion since the abolitionism of the nineteenth century and the
advent of modern human rights advocacy of the twentieth, today
Mander’s notion of transformative love offers a creative and
unexpected form of power—a way to interpret and enact human rights
that crosses political and social divides at a time when we are
collectively vulnerable (though to differing extents).
People on the economic and social margins of their
own societies have historically been among the principal drivers of
rights-based social change, although there are varying degrees of
privilege even at the margins. With a few notable exceptions,
conventional histories of social movements often obscure those more
complex mappings of power and privilege. Non-elite actors have
transformed classic interpretations of human rights in visionary and
pragmatic ways that have influenced “mainstream” rights discourses
and practices centrally. But in order to understand those dynamics,
we have to be willing to engage in human rights research that
engages people at the margins as research partners (not subjects).
And we have to be open to embracing tactics that expand empathy
instead of shame. Using hearts as a touchstone for deeper
conversations about economic rights and human vulnerability is a
subtle but bold form of reinterpretation with potentially bolder,
practical consequences.
The pragmatism of economic rights advocates has
enabled them to nimbly select the most advantageous venues for
struggle. As I have explained elsewhere, economic rights advocates
move between international and domestic normative frameworks and
institutional structures to “do more than legitimate or contest
existing international norms. They can forge entirely new ones or
flesh out existing norms that have been underplayed or ignored.” The
intellectual underpinnings of this work involve nonconventional
partnerships across disciplines and social locations which afford
collaborators the flexibility to “downplay, ignore, re-route,
reject, or augment dominant human rights norms and traditional modes
of advocacy, and in the process, expand the scope of claim-making
and the nature of compliance.” Mutual learning and strategy-building
around economic rights and nondiscrimination among people at the
grassroots level—regardless of whether they are rural or urban—has
helped legitimate, expand, and ground the discourse of human rights
even before the COVID-19 epidemic.
What if we took the invitation to talk about the
deeper patterns of exclusion at the “heart” of the spread of
COVID-19, and did it in a manner that fostered conversation from a
place of caring? The structures of injustice are deep and abiding
and place us at risk—even if differentially so. The urge to applaud
healthcare workers is also deeply rooted. Can we mobilize empathy in
a manner that opens these uncomfortable conversations at a moment
when we are all mutually vulnerable? We have the right and duty to
try.
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