Anthropology of humanitarism

At the end of March, I celebrated an important anniversary: three years as GGAF (Global Goodwill Ambassador Foundation) and two years as INSPAD Peace Ambassador. In Italy and around the world, a terrible pandemic raged for over a year, followed by an unprecedented economic crisis that confined students at home with the adoption of online distance learning. I wondered what future will the pandemic generation hold and what educational model will shape their culture? I, therefore, take this opportunity to thank those who, like Prof. George Onsy, have grasped my humanitarian enthusiasm. In truth, for about three years my life has changed radically and social networks have helped to put me, in spite of myself, in the spotlight. However, I hope that my many posts, comments, poems, articles, messages, etc. have been of help to those who, in a desperate moment like the one we experienced globally, managed to find Ariadne's thread to survive events. A thread similar to that of the Greek mythological hero Theseus about to kill the Minotaur, the monster that terrified the collective imagination and to which the lives of many young people were sacrificed. Don't you seem to find an analogy with what is happening now? After all, the Minotaur embodies the evil and fears of this troubled age. But monsters, such as the journey to the Underworld of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose 700th anniversary of his death this year is celebrated, are used to defeat our atavistic fears and represent the anxieties and anxieties of our days. troubled.

This thesis examines the ways in which the African Medical and Research Foundation may be considered a ‘mutation’ of medical humanitarianism, across both time (through the course of the organization’s history) and space (from humanitarianism’s birthplace in Europe to its headquarters in East Africa). To this end, the author conducted field research with staff at the Kenya Country Office between June and September, 2012, involving participant observation, field visits, and archival research. In Chapter 1, the Foundation’s commitment to projects of medical, technical and bureaucratic modernity in East Africa is explored, which complicates analyses of humanitarian minimalism. In Chapter 2, the organization’s history is discussed as a reference point for understanding its unique characteristics. In Chapter 3, the organization's research activities are unpacked as additions to, and transgressions of, boundaries between medical humanitarianism and global health.

Ce cours a pour objectif d’initier les étudiants aux problématiques de l’action humanitaire sur la scène internationale contemporaine. Il propose une analyse de l’émergence de la question humanitaire dans les relations internationales à travers l’étude de l’histoire de l’action humanitaire, de ses ressorts émotionnels et organisationnels, des problématiques éthiques et politiques qui lui sont liées, de ses applications et de ses évolutions. Chaque séance s’attachera à un problème donné et entendra articuler ce questionnement théorique à l’étude d’une ou plusieurs crises humanitaires, en revenant sur le contexte de ces crises, les modalités de l’intervention internationale et le bilan.

Resumo: Este artigo tem como principal objetivo analisar as diferentes formas como o racismo estrutural se manifesta cotidianamente, tendo como ponto de partida o desenvolvimento do trabalho de campo antropológico. Nesse sentido, a própria experiencia do autor serviu como ponto de partida para tal discussão, tendo em vista que, a partir de uma perspectiva interseccional, o lugar do homem negro não é o da produção intelectual. Pelo contrário as masculinidades negras, a partir da naturalização de perspectivas hegemônicas, tende a ser isolada simbolicamente, reduzida a virilidade-potência sexual-e força física, alvo de medo, o que por meio de uma necropolítica, parece justificar as execuções tão comuns de jovens homens negros. As reações de surpresas que os interlocutores demonstram, revela, na realização de uma etnografia multissituada, que este corpo racializado não pode ser mais ignorado na construção do conhecimento antropológico. Palavras-chave: masculinidade negra; antropologia; necropolítica; trabalho de campo. DISCUSSING THE RACIALIZED BODY: BLACK MASCULINITIES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK Abstract: This article aims to analyze the different ways structural racism is present in everyday life, starting from the development of the anthropological fieldwork. Thus, the experience of this study's author is a starting point to this discussion, since, through an intersectional perspective, the black men have no place in the intellectual production. On the contrary, the black masculinity, through the naturalization of hegemonic perspectives, tend to be symbolically isolated, reduced to virility-sexual vigor-and physical strength, a target of fear, what through a necropolitic, seems to justify the so common executions of young black men. The reactions of surprise shown by the interlocutors reveal, through a multi-sited ethnography, that this racialized body can no longer be ignored in the discussion of the anthropological knowledge.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the deaths of migrants have become a regular occurrence in southern Arizona where an average of 170 bodies are recovered from the desert each year. This dissertation examines the causes and effects of death and disappearance along the U.S.-Mexico border, seeking to address the contradiction present in the fact that thousands of people have died or disappeared in one of the world’s most heavily surveilled landscapes. It interrogates the ways in which the dead, the missing, and their families are simultaneously erased and exposed in a biopolitical process that has powerful implications beyond the space of the borderlands. The observations for this dissertation are drawn from nearly a decade of both ethnographic research and applied humanitarian assistance in the field of forensic human identification, primarily at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, in Tucson, Arizona. Although the majority of migrant fatalities have been determined by the medical examiner to be accidental, resulting from exposure to the elements or unknown causes, a historical analysis reveals the violent nature of these deaths and disappearances, which are a structured result of U.S. border and immigration policies. From their homes to their destinations, migrants in the Americas face a particular kind of structural violence and social invisibility that is revealed when they disappear at the border. This disappearance is then made more thorough by the structured lack of access for families of the missing to services to assist them in their search. Practices of care, whether occurring within families of the missing and dead, during the desert crossing itself, or in the forensic work to identify the dead, powerfully contest the invisibility and erasure experienced by migrants in the Americas today.

In the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most residents are dependent on humanitarian and foreign assistance for food, services, aid, and jobs. Yet, some residents feel that the conditions under which such aid is provided actively blocks their ability to live a life they find meaningful. In this article, I explore how some Haitians theorize this humanitarian condition through the figure of the dog, an animal that exemplifies, for Haitians, the deep history of violence, dehumanization, and degradation associated with foreign rule. I then contrast this with how foreign aid workers invoke the figure of the dog to illustrate their compassionate care for suffering others. Drawing on research among Bel Air residents and foreign aid workers in the years after a devastating earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, I show how the figure of the dog is central both to Haitian critiques of humanitarian aid and to the international humanitarian imaginary that responds to forms of suffering it deems cruel.

The neglected intersection between religion and disaster relief should be given much greater attention. This emerging field is an intellectually compelling area for study, though much work stills needs to be done to explore the processes that take place on the ground in different settings. It is also important for practitioners and policy makers involved in disaster response to have a nuanced understanding of the work that religious actors undertake. This special issue begins with an interview with representatives of prominent humanitarian organizations, all of whom call for greater attention to the work of religious actors in disaster relief. The following case studies provide a textured empirical analysis of religious responses to disasters in contemporary Asia. By attending to particular contexts it is shown that religious actors can and do play important yet complex roles in relief processes. This special issue – edited by Philip Fountain, Robin Bush, and R. Michael Feener – aims to critically examine these diverse intersections and also help set future research agendas on the subject.

Employing a perspective on humanitarianism as a ‘morphing’ project of ‘doing good’, this article explores the historical process of drawing humanitarian institutions to northern Pakistan via Muslim networks. Focusing on local men who have practised a variety of forms of humanitarian engagement in past and present, it looks at the broader moral assemblages of which these humanitarians are part. The article thereby shows how these moral assemblages are marked by affect, local distinctions and translocal aspirations. Amidst co-existing humanitarian genealogies, I argue that it is the emotional impulse not only to care for others, but also to get the unlikely done and to build a material legacy that provides a legitimacy for humanitarian work that goes beyond the politics of compassion.

Drawing on my research in refugee settings in Greece, I relate the biopolitics of humanitarianism with the Greek notion of “hospitality” and established cultural schemata of social relations. The dominant discourse on hospitality is reproduced in the humanitarian setting of a camp where asylum seekers are produced as worthy guests, placed in the middle ground between mere biological life and full social existence. Volunteers working with refugees on the street, by contrast, attempt to challenge biopolitical power through the reversal of hospitality, through which the refugee is symbolically reconstituted as a host (though a disputable one) and a political subject.

This article focuses on the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots. It argues that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two fundamental questions that form the basis for the article: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for? The article understands humanitari-anism as a logic of government that is more expansive than the mainstream ideal that emerged in the 20th-century. Instead humanitarianism is understood as concerning logics developed to both effectively manage disaster and to secure (in both senses of the word) imminently mobile populations for the maintenance of liberal order alongside and through the securing of life. The article takes an expansive view of humanitarian government to consider genealogies of caring and population security logics in the establishment of modern, western and liberal states. The article unsettles some of the traditional geographical understandings of humanitari-anism as care for distant strangers and considers the ways compassion is rationalised by the hotspot approach. This critical reading of humanitarianism and the hotspots offers empirical weight to what has been called 'humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic', through which humanitar-ianism is deployed to secure both life and a liberal political order across multiple scales. On 25 November 2016, in Moria 'hotspot' camp on Lesbos, a woman and child were killed in a fire after a gas canister attached to a hot plate exploded inside their small nylon tent. They were using the hot plate to try and keep warm. As a result of the accident, two people died and many more were injured.. . Later that month, three young men died in Moria camp and a fourth was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Survivors and friends reported that the deceased had no pre-existing medical conditions. To keep warm, the men had been burning cardboard, plastic and scraps of wood in the tents they shared. (MSF, 2017: 12)

En contraste con los ensayos filosóficos de Giorgio Agamben y Roberto Esposito, en este artículo serán discutidas algunas de las recientes contribuciones antropológicas al estudio de las políticas de la vida. Divido el escrito en cuatro partes. En la primera ofrezco una visión sintética del concepto de biopolítica, tal y como Foucault la había definido a partir de la distinción entre normación y normalización. Acto seguido expongo a la crítica etnográfica las revisiones realizadas por Agamben y Espósito. El tercer epígrafe versa sobre las etnografías del biopoder y de la biolegitimidad de Fassin y Petryna. Finalmente, concluyo con una distinción entre biopolítica y humanitarismo a partir de los análisis del Anthropological Research on the Contemporary.

“To live in a library,” writes Gianni Vattimo, capitalizing on the etymological link between liberty and libri in the romance languages, “is perhaps the image itself of perfection, of humanism, of the experience of the truth which renders us . . . free” (2001: 69). To live without a library, then, is a case for humanitarian intervention. In a globalized “information society,” teaching someone to read and write may still represent the quintessential act of humanitarianism. All of these secular expressions of faith in reading share a foundational assumption about the intrinsic relation between literacy and liberty. This liberal ideal was revived and given renewed philosophical vigor during the so-called “Culture Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s by public intellectuals such as Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and K. Anthony Appiah. These thinkers advocate models of sentimental and cosmopolitan reading that ask readers to enter into imaginative relations of identification with what Rorty generically describes as “people very unlike us” (1993: 77). In this chapter, I elaborate a model of humanitarian reading that tends to be overlooked by philosophers who consistently pose the question of humanitarian sentiment as a problem of what Elaine Scarry calls “generous imagining,” a problem of the reader’s imaginative identification with the suffering individual. Such models “allow the fate of another person to be contingent on the generosity and wisdom of the imaginer” (Scarry 2002: 106). My model is drawn primarily from a reading of J. Henry Dunant’s Un Souvenir de Solférino (A Memory of Solferino, 1862), which is one of the most objectively successful of humanitarian interventionist narratives in history, precipitating both the incorporation of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention for The Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field.

The European Union’s external border regime in the Mediterranean is the classic ‘humanitarian border’. It is presented and performed as a humanitarian and caring enterprise, but conceals strong elements of exclusionary border control. Important actors in its daily social construction are territorial borderworkers who are tasked with the implementation of the laws and policies underpinning the humanitarian border. Their narratives are passionate and articulated using emotive language and expressions denoting an intensity of personal feelings, while the moral framing of the issues indicates a moral discomfort. Drawing on multi-sited and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Sicily and Lampedusa, situated on the external Mediterranean border of the European Union, this article explores the key themes and form of the personal narratives of territorial borderworkers who discuss border processes and deliberate their own roles within it. Their narratives reveal insights about their experiences and thoughts, and add empirical depth to our understanding of the humanitarian border and the enterprise of constructing it.

Since 2015, grassroots volunteers have emerged as key actors in the humanitarian response to Europe’s “refugee crisis.” Based on ethnographic research on the Greek island of Chios and in Paris, this essay explores how volunteers navigate the ethical and political dilemmas inherent to humanitarian action in their everyday encounters with refugees. We argue that while volunteers sometimes mimic disciplinary humanitarian practices, the exchange of “biographical life” in and beyond camps allows volunteers to reimagine a more dignified provision of care and for creative solidarities to emerge. The presence of volunteers, we conclude, thus plays an important role in re-humanizing and re-politicizing refugee spaces, thereby challenging—even if momentarily—dominant humanitarian logics.

This paper examines the experiences of Filipino workers recruited for technology and communications work by international aid agencies involved in the Typhoon Haiyan response. Filipino workers, many of whom were personally coping with the social and economic impact of this disaster, were hired on short-term contracts to test and implement various digital humanitarian innovations such as feedback and hazard mapping technological platforms. These workers were doubly marginalized: first, as tech workers whose work was viewed by aid officers on the ground as less substantial than that of food or shelter programs; and second, as local voices often drowned out by national and international colleagues. Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers' aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project's ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers.

The limits and consequences of humanitarian military operations continue to be major issues in Western public debates on global security, democracy and human rights. This article focuses on the intersection of war and humanitarianism, situating the study of humanitarian militarism within a European context in which a reinvigorated proliferation of the military ethos coexists with ongoing transformations in European military culture and a resurgence of nation-state ideologies. Building on a reeection of the historical consolidation of humanitarian militarism and interviews conducted with soldiers, the paper explores the politics of humanity produced by humanitarian militarism.

Despite the massive humanitarian response and high investment in coordinative brokerage practices by individual barangay (village) captains that have had a for an "aid interface" that was highly politicized, localized, and variable. In a that they enacted dual roles as both patron-brokers and broker-clients, causing anxiety within communities. Problematizing current trends in the aid sector of technological solutionism and vague emphasis on "building local capacities," we identify challenges and opportunities for responsible aid brokerage.

The iconography of the African AIDS orphan, captured in National Geographic–style images of half-starved toddlers with distended bellies, inspires humanitarian aid for the continent. In Botswana, stereotypes underlying both foreign-funded and governmental programs for orphaned children—which imply that orphans are underfed and underloved—initially resonated with Tswana people’s anxieties that neglect by overburdened kin results in parentless children going hungry. However, during the past decade international feeding projects began to evolve into elaborate day-care complexes in which village orphans gained exclusive access to swimming pools, DVDs, trendy clothing, and daily meat rations. This article traces the shifting moral semiotics of orphans’ fat and skinny bodies, explaining why new discourses protesting the overfattening of orphans arose in a southeastern village. Metaphors of fat and feeding have become a scale on which the excesses of humanitarian aid and the perceived shortcomings of local kinship practices are weighed. A new kind of “politics of the belly” calls into question relations of patronage around metaphors of fleshiness and dependence on foreign support. In the process, contestations over children’s skinny and fat bodies lead to reconfigurations of the idea of orphanhood.

After arriving to volunteer at a rural hospital in Zambia, many short-term American missionaries began to doubt whether the Christian character of their work was recognisable to Zambian patients and health professionals. In this article, I argue that these missionary doubts were a result of what Webb Keane has recently called ‘the ethical dilemma of humanitarianism’, a term he uses to describe the lack of mutual ethical recognition in humanitarian encounters. After showing how missionaries experienced and articulated a distinctively Christian version of this ‘dilemma’, I demonstrate how they were able to transcend it by identifying other people who could properly recognise the Christian character of their work: namely, their families, friends and church members back ‘at home’ in the United States. In conclusion, I suggest that more attention should be paid to the political importance of various forms of domestic ethical recognition in sustaining humanitarianism in practice.

During the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, volunteering health professionals provided on-site medical assistance to protesters faced with police violence characterized by the extensive use of riot control agents. This led to a government crackdown on the medical community and the criminalization of “unauthorized” first aid amidst international criticisms over violations of medical neutrality. Drawing from ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with health care professionals, and archival research, this article ethnographically analyzes the polarized encounter between the Turkish government and medical professionals aligned with social protest. I demonstrate how the context of “atmospheric violence” –the extensive use of riot control agents like tear gas– brings about new politico-ethical spaces and dilemmas for healthcare professionals. I then analyze how Turkish health professionals framed their provision of health services to protestors in the language of medical humanitarianism, and how the state dismissed their claims to humanitarian neutrality by criminalizing emergency care. Exploring the vexed role that health workers and medical organizations played in the Gezi protests and the consequent political contestations over doctors’ ethical, professional, and political responsibilities, this article examines challenges to medical humanitarianism and neutrality at times of social protest in and beyond the Middle East.

Living in intimate and permanent contact with stories of victimization from political violence in Colombia, due to professional work and commitments, poses challenges at various levels for the worker. The experience and challenge of being faced with the pain of others is investigated here from the particularities lived by the group of professionals responsible for building the pilot project of the Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia launched at FILBO-2018 in Bogota-Colombia. From the specialty of museography, the additional challenge was to represent & publicly reveal the truth of horror in these stories in the most pedagogical way. This research took distance from the narratives of vicarious trauma brought by Clinical Psychology, and in general from concepts that reduce this particular experience to a diagnosis or symptomatology. The results - in addition of informing us of the psycho-emotional process that a person tends to go through when relating with these topics, which changes depending on time exposure and life trajectories - also revealed the strong influence that an organizational context, in its precariousness and cultural specificities,  exerts over the worker´s experience. However, we mainly focus & refer to the influence of two imperatives: moral duty and social duty. Both of them tenaciously affiliate the worker with the principles of reparation and social agreement, making his commitment to acquire a sacrificial tone. Even if there are numerous learnings in the process of reconciling a social project with an aesthetic project aimed at reaching a whole nation, and if the worker's action is motivated by a genuine altruism, the type of commitment he or she establishes ends up confronting and depleting them. When the sacrificial logic is perceived as very much internalized in the psyche of the individual and the group, it can be problematized not from an anti-moral stance, but when it compromises the worker's willingness to self-care - one that is activated from its interiority in connection with the needs of his corporality.

The refugee assistance regime that prevails today seems to insist that the best, or only, solution to protracted refugee situations is firmly rooted in improving access to employment. This approach, however, inevitably favours some and excludes others, while also ignoring the deeper political and social issues at stake.

Based on ongoing fieldwork within a German Relief Organization specialized in secondhand clothes this paper deals with the daily work of sorting out relief supplies. How do the employees qualify the donations?  The paper focuses on the infrastructures and points out the influence of senses and affects.

Both humanitarian and academic discourses present gender-based violence and forced marriage as dominant characteristics for girls associated with armed forces and groups (Bodineau 2012, Hynd in Bunting & al 2016). Thus, it is generally concluded that military worlds produce or exacerbate pre-existing gender-based violence, and that all girls who have lived within an armed force or group have experienced rape and/or sexual and conjugal slavery. Yet some narratives differ from this one. This is the case of a research -which was not specifically focusing on this issue- carried out in the Democratic Republic of Congo with young people who were demobilized between 2004 and 2007, where participants discussed their conjugal relationships, as well as the general relationships between men and women during and after their association with armed forces and groups. Does this alternative data reveal another reality or another representation? Or both? Did this particular armed group have different practices, or are the discourses and representations of young people different? Are their representations linked to the characteristics of the programmes through which they have passed, their own history, the social norms of their environment, or by the methodological and epistemological conditions of the research? These are some of the questions that this presentation will ask.

Marseille 23-24 septembre 2015 – Séminaire International

MUCEM – Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée

Représenter l’Humanitarisme

Date limite de remise des propositions : le 30 mai 2015.

Lancé en janvier 2014 par le Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie – LAMES (MMSH/ Université d’Aix-Marseille), le projet Emborders étudie les politiques et interventions humanitaires s’adressant aux victimes de la traite des humains et aux demandeurs d’asile appartenant à une minorité sexuelle au Royaume-Uni et en France. Le projet examine les dispositifs en jeu dans « l’humanitarisme sexuel », concept par lequel Nicola Mai entend comprendre et représenter la gouvernance humanitaire des migrants envisagés et présentés comme vulnérables du fait de leurs orientations et pratiques sexuelles.

Ce séminaire tentera de donner à voir et à comprendre les multiples dimensions esthétiques, politiques et scientifiques des représentations que la gouvernance humanitaire des migrations implique. Les représentations alternatives et les contre-représentations figureront bien sûr parmi les sujets examinés.
Le choix de l’ethnofiction comme outil de travail stratégique pour Emborders répond à un souci d’examiner et de représenter la manière dont l’affect, la représentation et la performativité participent à la compréhension qu’ont les migrants de l’agency et de l’exploitation qui marquent leur propre expérience des interventions humanitaires. À la lumière des développements théoriques, des préoccupations de méthodologie et des résultats de recherche qui ont caractérisé notre travail sur le rôle de la sexualité et du genre dans le contrôle humanitaire des migrations, nous explorerons les pistes de recherche qu’offrent les questions suivantes :
• Quels enjeux déploient un tel contexte où le contrôle des migrations fait de la sexualité/du genre des variables d’obtention de droits?
• Quelles spécificités présentent les paniques morales liées à la sexualité et au genre lorsqu’elles prennent pour cible les populations migrantes ?
• Comment les impératifs néolibéraux contradictoires de garantie des libertés et de sécurisation peuvent-ils coexister au sein des mécanismes de filtration des populations aux frontières?
• Quels modes de représentation artistique, politique, documentaire et fictionnelle naturalisent et opérationnalisent l’humanitarisme sexuel?
• De quelles représentations alternatives disposons nous pour questionner ce modèle de répartition du sensible?
À ce séminaire participeront artistes, réalisateurs, journalistes et chercheurs de diverses disciplines (anthropologie, sociologie, philosophie, sciences politiques) spécialistes des questions des migrations, de la sexualité et du genre. Dans un souci de transdisciplinarité, nous invitons également les chercheurs d’autres disciplines à participer à ce séminaire.
Nous aborderons les questions liées à la formation récente de l’humanitarisme sexuel en tant que logique de protection et de contrôle des migrants présents dans le Nord néolibéral globalisé. Les participants au séminaire devront établir les liens entre l’objet de leurs recherches et l’humanitarisme sexuel.

Votre proposition d’intervention (300 mots max.) ainsi qu’une brève notice biographique (150 mots max.) sont à adresser à
Calogero Giametta : [email protected]
et Nicola Mai : [email protected].

Afin de laisser la plus grande place aux discussions lors du séminaire, il sera demandé aux participants sélectionnés d’envoyer un court article de présentation de leur intervention (2 500 mots max.) qui sera diffusé en amont du séminaire.

Les articles présentés lors du séminaire seront publiés dans un numéro spécial d’une revue scientifique spécialisée anglophone.

Les interventions se feront en français et en anglais.

Over the five last years, crisis mapping has gained wide popularity in the humanitarian world with collaboration between crisis mappers and the UN on several emergency projects. Crisis mapping relies on interactive maps to monitor both incidents and resources in settings undergoing a "crisis" (political, environmental, etc). Focusing on one case study (the monitoring of violence during the 2011 elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and building on several interviews conducted with leading crisis mappers and project coordinators, this paper shows that the deep significance of crisis mapping cannot be grasped through an understanding of the goals and success or failure of its projects. It is rather to be found in the space of collaboration brought forth by the coordination of the deployments which generates a new manner of "being in crisis"-understood both as being in a crisis and the state of crisis.

In regards to the formalized practice of racial profiling in the classroom, students – particularly African-American – are targeted and subjected to unfair treatment by teachers and administrators through the use of harsh disciplinary action that ultimately affects their academic achievement. This is usually done through psychological malpractices that include (but are not limited to): isolation, humiliation, name calling, ridicule in relation to intellectual ability, and so on. Issues that surface in the classroom between Caucasian faculty and African American students are typically a byproduct of cross-cultural conflict that stems from miscommunication and misinterpretation of behavior. Combined, this results in inhibiting African-American students from receiving quality education, thus violating their human rights. But what comes from the expulsion, suspension, or isolation of students? Teachers utilize these harsh punitive techniques to construct “safe” and “secure” environments for their pupils to learn within, excluding those who they feel pose a threat to their authority or ethical character. Foolish ideologies that are used to maintain the continual mistreatment of minority youth such as the “culture of poverty”, violate students’ human right to accessible quality education. A term coined by Oscar Lewis (Lewis:1979), “culture of poverty” claims that poor people all share predicable belief systems, values, and behaviors that characterize them as unmotivated, drug abusers, “linguistically deficient,” and incapable of learning. By casting adolescents that inhabit low-income neighborhoods that are characterized as to belong to a “culture of poverty,” teachers are able to justify their creating of environments that reflect their superficial sense of “security,” both in their misuse of authority and as individual persons in fear of others they are not “familiar” with. Ultimately, the prejudices and misplaced judgments of teachers and administrators of pupils that determine African American students’ capabilities of academic achievement utilize the act of racial profiling in the classroom to maintain a layer of “security” in school environments, resulting in the severe violation of human rights of students by limiting their access to quality education.