This chapter explores the concept of vulnerability, its recognition and use in international human rights law, and the broader debate on the (potential) advantages and downsides of focusing on vulnerable identities to strengthen protection. Following this overview, it examines core categories of vulnerability that are either already reflected in international human rights law, largely in the form of anti-discrimination instruments, or constitute a priority area in recent debates and legal developments. This includes ‘race’, gender and sexual orientation, persons with disabilities, persons living in extreme poverty, age (the rights of children are addressed in a discreet chapter), as well as refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons (IDPs). For each of these categories, the chapter examines core notions, highlights specific concerns, charts relevant legal developments and analyses both advancements made and remaining challenges.

Under international law, occupation is meant to be temporary and occupying powers cannot be sovereign in the territory they occupy. In contrast, since 1967 Israel has systematically altered the status of the OPT with the aim of annexing it, de facto or de jure. During this time, though the UN has focused on documenting the legality of a range of individual violations of international law by the occupying power, scant attention has been paid by the Organization to the legality of the occupation regime as a whole. Emphasis has instead been placed on encouraging the parties to bring the occupation to an end through continued, though widely discredited, bilateral negotiations. By what rationale can it be said that Israels occupation remains either legal or legitimate in the absence of good faith on its part in negotiating the occupation’s end? How can its end reasonably be made contingent on negotiations between occupier and occupied? This chapter argues that the UN’s failure to take a more principled position on the very legality of Israel’s half-century ‘temporary’ occupation of the self-determination unit of the Palestinian people is demonstrative of the maintenance of Palestine’s legal subalternity in the UN system, under a different guise.

Japanese occupation of British Asia challenged British prestige at an unprecedented scale, but what the War challenged about Britishness went far beyond the myth of white supremacy. This chapter explains how the Second World War shattered the cosmopolitan, inclusive notions of Britishness that developed in pre-war Hong Kong. Even before the outbreak of war, systemic discrimination involved in the 1940 evacuation scheme made colonial subjects realize that Britishness was reduced to a ‘race’ at moments of crisis. The chapter also explored the varied wartime experience of Portuguese refugees in Macau, students and graduates of the University of Hong Kong, and members of the British Army Aid Group (B.A.A.G.). Increased interactions with the British state made some acutely aware of the racism they experienced under British colonialism, and eroded their identification with Britishness. The practicalities of war, then, highlighted the fragility of the rhetoric of imperial cosmopolitanism, and put the diverse forms of Britishness articulated in pre-war Hong Kong to a severe test.

This chapter discusses the direct effects of racial discrimination on Black Americans’ health. It begins by documenting that daily exposure to the various forms of racial discrimination is a common experience for Black people living in the United States. Encountering racial discrimination creates stress, which activates physiological stress responses – bodily systems that normally provide person with the energy needed to rapidly reduce the stress. However, the stress created by racial discrimination is usually chronic because many Black Americans repeatedly experience racial discrimination over a prolonged period of time. When the bodily systems activated by stress response remain active, it creates a harmful physical condition – allostatic overload. Allostatic overload is responsible for a host of physical illnesses, including heart diseases, diabetes, and immune disorders. It is also associated with poorer mental health, as well as alterations in epigenetics, such as premature aging. Chronic stress can also cause people to engage in behaviors that may provide short-term emotional relief from discrimination-related stress but are unhealthy, such as drug use or eating certain unhealthy “comfort” foods. In sum, prolonged exposure to racial discrimination is a chronic stressor that threatens the health of Black Americans.

Experimental data, observational data, and analyses using automatic association data show that the manager–worker racial identity match influences hiring, pay, and access to managerial resources. Explanations of racial inequality in labor market outcomes depend on the wage–productivity relationship. The manager–worker racial identity match may affect productivity and wages in two ways: managers may use higher pay and better promotion opportunities to raises the productivity and wages of own-group workers; and, managers provide time, assistance, or other resources to own group workers and thereby increase their productivity, employment stability, and opportunities for promotion. Stratification economists link persistent discrimination to job competition. Equally skilled workers may receive different pay for doing the same work because they are employed at firms that are differentiated by the capacity to pay and by the capacity of workers to make firms pay. Equally skilled workers who perform the same job at firms with less competitive characteristics, or who are part of a workforce with lower bargaining power, will receive lower pay.

Linton v. Commissioner of Health & Environment was a 1965 case from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in which the plaintiffs alleged disparate-impact racial discrimination. The Tennessee Medicaid program covered the skilled nursing facility care but allowed facilities to certify a limited number of beds for Medicaid patients (for whom the facilities typically received lower rates). The plaintiffs argued that the limited bed policy violated the federal Medicaid statute and had a disparate impact on black Medicaid recipients in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In the original opinion, the court side-stepped the discrimination issue, relying instead on the finding that the state had violated the Medicaid statute. Professor Gwendolyn Majette’s feminist concurrence corrects the Sixth Circuit’s failure to address the Title VI issue and provides a fuller, more comprehensive analysis that addresses the intersection of gender, race, class, and age. Professor Ruqaiijah Yearby’s commentary explores whether the opinion in Linton could have done more to ensure that the unique harms experienced by patients because of their race would be fully addressed in the remedial plan.

Writers in Latin America’s Black press frequently publicized and denounced particularly egregious examples of discrimination or racism, including many that involved painful accusations having to do with pernicious stereotypes about Black sexuality. In so doing, they responded to claims by Latin American politicians and intellectuals that racism was mild or non-existent in their countries, and that to speak about racism was itself racist, and would have the effect of dividing the national community. The rhetorical strategies writers in the Black press adopted included barely contained expressions of outrage, skillful deployment of irony, careful efforts at debunking, and, quite frequently, with expressions of agreement with the premise that racism was inconsistent with the local political culture.Authors who wrote about racism consistently presented the United States as a yardstick against which the existence or severity of racism could be measured, or as a source for the importation and imposition of racism that was at odds with local values and tradition.Finally, writers discussed and debated the mechanisms that should be employed to combat racism.

I dissent today from the majority’s decision in these cases because the detestable segregation in the public schools that the majority finds unconstitutional is a manifestation of the evil of racism the depths and pervasiveness of which this Court fails even to acknowledge, much less address and attempt to correct.

Mr. Chief Justice STONE1 delivered the opinion of the Court.

The petitioner, Fred Korematsu, was born in Alameda County, California, and is of Japanese ancestry. He is an American citizen by birth. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1889). That his parents were born in Japan and, with the commencement of war, became formally classified as enemy aliens is of no moment in this case.2 No question has been raised as to petitioner’s loyalty to the United States.

Petitioner was convicted in a federal district court for remaining in San Leandro, California, a “military area,” contrary to Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the Commanding General of the Western Command, U.S. Army, which directed that after May 9, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry should be excluded from that area.

Dec. 1, 1981.

Argued April 10, 1967.Decided June 12, 1967.

Davis, J. delivered the opinion of the Court.*

Appellants challenge a statutory scheme adopted by the Commonwealth of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons whom the Commonwealth assigns to different racial classifications. We conclude that the scheme cannot stand, for it violates principles expressed in our founding documents and definitively embraced when the Nation was reconstructed by constitutional amendment after Confederate secession and Civil War. More specifically, such a statute fails to respect the dignity and autonomy of free people, and it violates our obligation of equal protection and respect for every member of our society.

Argued March 1, 1976.Decided June 7, 1976.

Ms. Justice CRENSHAW delivered the opinion of the Court.1

Since Africans were brought to North America to serve whites four centuries ago, nothing has been more closely associated with their status as enslavable people than the power granted to policing agents to surveil, control, capture, and punish them. And during slavery and since, nothing has been used to justify the brutal coercion of those deemed enslavable more than the idea that their subjugation was due to inherent deficiencies purportedly tied to race: physical, moral, temperamental, and intellectual. Even science has been manipulated to advance the false proposition that the purported inferiority of African people is objectively observable, quantifiable, and inalterable, a transhistorical characteristic of an essentialized Blackness thought to exist entirely apart from the specific contours of racial subjugation.

Argued April 20, 1993.Decided June 28, 1993.

Justices Guy-Uriel CHARLES and Luis FUENTES-ROHWER delivered the opinion of the Court.

Argued November 2, 1999.Decided January 12, 2000.

Justice L. SONG RICHARDSON delivered the opinion of the Court*

The issue in this case is whether a person’s sudden and unprovoked flight from a clearly identifiable police officer, who is patrolling a high crime area, is sufficiently suspicious, without more, to justify a temporary investigatory stop pursuant to Terry v. Ohio. We hold that it is not.