Davis takes up a question decolonial thought usually approaches with suspicion: whether the language of human rights is any use to people trying to change how wealthy societies live. He grants the objections at length. The 'human' of human rights was invented by Christian Europe; responsibility has been repackaged as development and as justification for military intervention; corporations recast structural harm as an individual carbon footprint.

Borrowing Stuart Hall's account of ideological terrain, he answers that rights remain the moral vocabulary in which enormous numbers of people actually reason, and so can be rearticulated rather than abandoned. His anchor is Glissant's claim to a right to opacity, from which he draws duties: joining coalitional protest of the kind gathered at Standing Rock in 2016, then reconsidering food, work, clothing, travel and kinship.

A final chapter on Du Bois's own retreat from rights language marks where the strategy stops working.