86 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 11:83 international law, meaning it is “a norm from which no derogation is permitted,”5 how is it that national legal systems continue to permit race-based discrimination—in form or effect— in matters of nationality? And more poignantly, why is the international community apparently reticent to unequivocally critique racialized nationality laws, particularly when their application has produced large numbers of stateless persons? For instance, while the severe persecution and forcible deportation of Rohingya people from Myanmar in 2014 and 2017 has recently been widely condemned by the international community,6 very little attention was directed at first instance to the racially discriminatory denationalization of Rohingya people that is a root cause of the predicament.7 This “racial aphasia,” that is, a “collective inability to speak about race” 8 in the context of nationality (at least until it reaches a point of crisis), may reflect a perennial tension between nationality as it pertains to individual rights (for example, the right to a nationality and the right not to be deprived of it arbitrarily) and nationality as it is reserved to the domain of states.9 Despite the “astounding shift in international law from protecting the sovereignty of racism at the beginning of the twentieth century to openly combatting it by the beginning of the new millennium,”10 the sovereign fortress of nationality laws still seems somewhat impervious to direct attack, even where such laws contravene anti-racial discrimination norms. This tension is reflected in the very text of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of 5 Spiro, supra note 3, at 716 n.144. 6 See, e.g., S.C. Pres. Statement 2017/22 (Nov. 6, 2017); Human Rights Council Res. 37/32, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/RES/37/32 (Mar. 23, 2018); Hum. Rts Council, Rep. of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review of Its Twenty-Third Session, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/31/13 (Dec. 23, 2015); G.A. Res. 70/233, Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (Mar. 4, 2016). 7 Early international reports concerning the denationalization of Rohingya people made few references to racial discrimination. See, e.g., Hum. Rts. Council, Rep. of Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review of Its Tenth Session U.N. Doc. A/HRC/17/9 (Mar. 24, 2011). See also G.A. Res. 66/230, Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (Dec. 24, 2011); G.A. Res. 65/241, Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar (Dec. 24, 2010). 8 Debra Thompson, Through, Against and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race, 26 CAMBRIDGE REV. INT’L AFF. 133, 134–35 (2013). We are grateful to E. Tendayi Achiume for alerting us to this reference. 9 For a discussion on the tension between human rights and state sovereignty, see SUZANNE EGAN, THE HUMAN RIGHTS TREATY SYSTEM: LAW AND PROCEDURE (2011). 10 Thompson, supra note 8, at 133.