Where assumptions and choices reflect racialized thinking, IIL scholarship can cause or contribute to structural, racialised inequalities. I argue that addressing implicit biases is not only a normative good but can facilitate better scholarship.Ĭapers’ ‘Reading Black’ involves an ‘oppositional’ approach to textual readings, one that ‘reveals sites of contestation’ in the assumptions and beliefs that underpin judicial decisions. 17 In this piece, I focus on how racism continues to embed in modern IIL scholarship. Scholars have analysed the racialised and colonial foundations of international law generally and IIL specifically. Understanding how our language perpetuates or reproduces racialized hierarchies is a necessary step to developing an antiracist praxis.

15 It takes intentional conduct to both unlearn racist assumptions and to develop alternative, antiracist approaches. 14 It is therefore unsurprising that legal scholarship and practice can manifest racist beliefs. 13 While individuals can choose to consciously adopt or amplify racist beliefs, one need not consciously embrace racist ideas or hierarchies to replicate them. 12 Despite the disavowal of racist intentions, racist assumptions are often concealed in ‘coded’ language and framing choices in the media, politics, and law. 10 The centuries of intentional justification means that racist beliefs are ‘pervasive, permeating the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render invisible and neutral.’ 11 A racist statement or action reinforces racial inequalities whereas an antiracist one deconstructs and counters racialized privileges and hierarchies. 9 For most of the past 600 years, writers, politicians, philosophers, economists, and biologists intentionally constructed a belief in race, racial identities, and racial hierarchies. Race is a social construct, not a biological one. Bennett Capers’ ‘Reading Black’ methodology 8 to interrogate racial hierarchies embedded in modern international investment law (IIL) scholarship. 7 This article continues that trend, utilizing I. 5 Developed in the United States of America, 6 CRT has been adopted by legal scholars elsewhere who wish to better understand and respond to embedded racism and colonial legacies within their own legal systems. 4 Critical race theory (CRT) grapples with how racialized thinking manifests in the law. 3 It manifests in biases, assumptions, and beliefs that allow for the privileging of racial majorities at the expense of racial minorities. 2 In many ways – explicit and implicit – that socialisation of White supremacy and attendant racialized assumptions continues today. Immanuel Kant argued that by nature White Europeans possessed a ‘more beautiful body, work harder, more jocular, more controlled in passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world.’ 1 His belief, first published in 1802, reflected not only the ideas of the time, but also an intentional socialisation of White supremacy that had begun in the 1400s and was intimately tied to colonialism and slavery. I offer suggestions that researchers and journals can take, individually and collectively, to develop antiracist praxes. Premised on the belief that countering implicit, racialised biases is a normative good, I examine how it can also facilitate better scholarship. The purpose is not to condemn the individual authors but to identify how the socialisation and structures of racism continue to affect our scholarship. Bennett Capers’s ‘Reading Black’ methodology to interrogate racialised narratives embedded in four contributions to modern international investment law debates. One area of concern for scholars is how our linguistic and framing choices perpetuate or reproduce racialised hierarchies. Rejecting racism and developing alternative antiracist approaches similarly require intentionality. Historically, it was socialised into global existence through intentional acts that have become embedded parts of the international legal order and domestic social systems.

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