Corporations, Universalism, and the Domestication of Race in International Law

Abstract

In 1960, Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan, French trained psychiatrist, wrote not long before his death that when ‘[l]ooking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.’ Some forty years later, in a seminal article about ‘global justice’, philosopher Thomas Pogge wrote, ‘[w]e are quite tolerant of the persistence of massive and severe poverty abroad even though it would not cost us much to reduce such poverty dramatically. How well doe..