Afro Pessimism Core

Lab Perspective:
The world is sculpted through the logic and sociological ordering of the
Middle Passage; and modern surveillance policy is just another iteration of
chattel slave logic. The argument is functionally that there can be no hope
for the black body within the current political system.

Links

Link - Privacy
The very yearning for privacy is anti-black. Black bodies have been historically banned from the public
sphere and at the same time had to make their most intimate feelings, their pain, and thoughts available to
whiteness at every turn. Black people have had to model interiority while having none of their own. Calls
for rights and privacy are moves toward whiteness and against blackness.
And should be rejected on face

CASTIGLIA prof of English @ Penn State 2015

Christopher; Abolitions racial interiors and the making of white civic depth
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v014/14.1castiglia.pdf

Although the displacement of citizenship onto divine will shares a logic of irresistibly expansive
republicanism with nineteenth-century imperialism, the privatizing of citizenship to individual
affect had equally conflicting results. Since privileged Americans, in entering the public, risked evacuating
the private, other Americans had to bear the burden of representing interiority in its threefold
nature: morality, virtue, and affect. An extensive body of criticism has demonstrated that the association of white womanhood
with a supposedly natural relationship to domestic privacy allowed white men to develop a commercial sphere unimpeded by emotional or moral

Black Americans bore a similar burden

of interior representation, representing traits of piety, nurturance, and conjugal fidelity threatened
by the outrages of slavery: mothers could not raise their children; husbands could not provide
homes for wives or even ensure their wedding bond; women could not control their sexuality; slaves
were not permitted a spiritual life. Constructed as pure, pious, and domestic, black Americans came
to represent an already feminized privacy. The division of abolition authority into (black) privacy
and (white) publicity meant, on the one hand, that black Americans themselves could not be
represented as properly public figures (hence Garrisons objections to Frederick Douglasss decision to edit a newspaper and
honor national institutionsthat is, to enter the discourses of national publicityhimself, rather than through Garrisons mediation).17 On the
other hand, it meant that white abolitionists needed to pass through a black interior (experiencing,
through sympathy, black pain so as to speak with a public authority), allowing themselves a racially
bivalent persona that blacks themselves were denied. Although whites such as Garrison could move
in and out of the national symbolic, criticizing the nation so as paradoxically to gain ground in its
public discourse, blacks, who had no privileged place in that public, were positioned as the
unwavering bearers of (privatized, interiorized) virtue.
qualms, while limiting the legal, social, and economic potentials of antebellum women.

Link Surveillance/Racism Aff

The seeming benevolence of the aff is nothing but a cruel joke to allow more intimate surveillance of the
black body sympathy and promises are only meant to make black bodies ever more vulnerable to the aff
we say

OR NAW
CASTIGLIA prof of English @ Penn State 2015
Christopher; Abolitions racial interiors and the making of white civic depth
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v014/14.1castiglia.pdf

Sympathy is never simply an outpouring of individual sentiment; it is an affective register of more

obviously collective social arrangements.4 Some contemporary critics have celebrated sympathy for
creating a fellow feeling that prompts the privileged to imagine themselves in the place of the less
fortunate.5 This account of affective sociability builds on the first step in Adam Smiths 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
argues that sympathizers create mental tableaux in which they see themselves in the place of the
sufferer, thereby creating an imaginative bridge between socially separated peoples. Others have
complicated such formulations of democratic sociability, noting how sympathy generates theatrical
distance by creating suffering as a spectacle watched from afar.6 This second model makes a more careful use of
Smith, who, denying the merger of sympathizer and sufferer, claims, Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has
befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned (26). Sympathetic identification, for Smith, is
but momentary, kept in check by the sympathizers self-concern: the thought that they themselves are not the real sufferers, continually
intrudes itself upon them, and though it does not hinder them from conceiving a passion somewhat analogous to what is felt by the sufferer,
hinders them from conceiving anything that approaches to the same degree of violence (2627). In both models, self-transformation lies with the
person who extends sympathy. For Smith, however, sympathy also transforms the sufferer, who, sensing the spectatorial distance maintained by
the cautious sympathizer, longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his
own (2627). The sufferer may achieve this entire concord, Smith writes, only by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators
are capable of going along with him. He must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to

If one expresses 36 Abolitions Racial Interiors

an emotion too extreme or a suffering too unusual, the audience will be unable to identify and will
experience no sympathy. The burden therefore falls on the sufferer to conceal extremes or
anomalies, or to translate them into scenarios with which the audience will be familiar. Sufferers
must transform themselves, in a model of imagined spectatorial normalization that Foucault, following
Smiths contemporary Jeremy Bentham, called panopticism: just as the spectators place themselves in the
sufferers situation, Smith writes, so the sufferer must imagine in what manner he would be
affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation (28).8 In sympathetic abolition,
for instance, the suffering of slaves might be shaped to correlate with texts white audiences had
previously encountered: other slave narratives, white reports of slavery such as Theodore Welds American
Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), or especially popular works of fiction such as Uncle Toms Cabin (1852). Even
while serving as the keynote of benevolence, then, sympathy was a form of surveillant discipline
what we might call sympathetic disciplinein which the black sufferer must imagine himself or
herself always in the eyes of whites, becoming a body shaped by an idea of a body.
harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him (27).7

Link - Relations
The scholarly discipline is uniquely anti-black; justifies colonialism, war slavery, and
strategic displacement of black bodies in the name of justice and peace.
PERSUAD assoc prof of International service @ American U & WALKER prof of political Science U of
Victoria 2k1 Randolph B. Persaud and, R.B.J. Walker- apertura: Race in international relations- Alternatives: Global, Local, Political,
Oct-Dec, 2001

The theory of international relations has shown a famous aversion to complex and multiply contested
concepts. It has been especially silent about race ,

as about many other practices that cannot be quickly reduced to

claims about the necessities of states in a modern states-system. Like culture, economy, or gender, it does not fit into the prevailing
division of the world into "levels" above (the international) and below (the individual) the state .

gender, there has been very little attempt to insist that claims about race

Unlike culture, economy, and

do indeed deserve serious discussion in

the context of a changing international or global order. From time to time, of course, the discipline does open up to problems
hitherto deemed outside its epistemological boundaries. "Opening up" has historically resulted from sustained wars of position
between the forces that represent a broadening of the proper subjects of the discipline and those who insist that international
relations (IR) is about "war and peace" among states. It may be time for one more apertura; namely, for race to be systematically
incorporated into the analysis of global politics. Consider the following: The first global attempt to speak of equality focused upon
race. The first human rights provisions in the United Nations Charter were placed there because of race. The first international
challenge to a country's claim of domestic jurisdiction and exclusive treatment of its own citizens centered upon race. The
international convention with the greatest number of signatories is that on race. Within the United Nations, more resolutions deal with
race than any other subject. And certainly one of the most long-standing and frustrating problems in the United Nations is that of
race. Nearly one hundred eighty governments, for example, recently went as far as to conclude that racial discrimination and racism
still represent the most serious problems for the world today. (1) The primary problem that must be addressed is not that race has
been ignored in IR (there is, in fact, a fairly significant literature on racial factors in world politics),

given the epistemological status of silence .

but that race has been

Silence, Michel-Ralph Trouillot tells us, has four moments; namely, "the

moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of retrieval (the
making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)." (2)

Silence is

also linked to invisibility, which, according to John Maclean, "refers to the removal (not necessarily through
conscious action) from a field of enquiry, either concrete aspects of social relations, or of certain forms of
thought about them." (3) At a minimum, the politics of race and the practices of racism have been part of
global relations in the following ways. First, racial discourses have performed a taxonomical role by
dividing up the world into various binary opposites such as civilized/uncivilized; modern/backward ;
rational/superstitious,

developed/undeveloped, and so on. As Ashis Nandy has pointed out, (4) this ordering of the world

is readily framed as a relation between adult and child, and the processes of colonialism and neocolonialism

in which

such binary taxonomies have been instantiated have involved both subtle and very unsubtle practices of infantilization . Second,

the impact of race on the spatial and demographic configuration of the world cannot be overemphasized.
The modern world system was very much shaped by conquest of territories and peoples. Conquest
involved a long, brutalizing engagement between Europeans and indigenous populations

throughout the

world, the end result being not the discovery of the New World but the remaking of that world in the image of the conquerors. The

displacement or disappearance of indigenous populations in

Asia and Africa, combined with

all of the Americas, the Caribbean, and many parts of

the instrumental and arbitrary implantation of peoples from completely different

cultural backgrounds, have had enormous consequences for the global politics of belonging and identity .
Moreover, the

collective memories of these displacements still weigh heavily on the global politics of

identity and difference.

Third,

the world economy has been significantly influenced by racialized labor

supply and other practices of labor recruitment ,

such as, among others, indentureship in the nineteenth century,

importation of Third World domestic labor, and trafficking in mostly Third World sex workers. Although modern African slavery may
not have been caused by racism, (5)

an ideology of racial supremacy was crucial in stabilizing acute economic

exploitation. These racialized practices of supremacy were important not only in terms of the global
framework of race-based, coerced economic exploitation, but also in terms of forming the deep structures
of the modern world system.

In more recent times, these deep structures have been important in managing a careful balance

between labor supply, on the one hand, and immigration control, on the other. Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, for example,
have shown that practically all "white" countries (along with Japan), for instance, have had some version of a "white only" policy, ei
ther in relation to immigration or the granting of citizenship. (6) Fourth, race has been a decisive force in the constitution of social
formations, and many societies have been produced through aggravated racial othering. Othering is a complex of cultural and
political practices that instantiate identity by framing and reproducing difference. The production of "racial sameness" (7) is, and has
long been, an integral aspect of a general strategy of inscribing the principles of national solidarity and the broader cultural
framework of citizenship.

The contradictory and often violent racio-cultural politics of nation building and

national cohesion must be of interest to the IR scholar because they speak directly to particular forms of
internal instability, such as "ethnic cleansing" or, as in the case of Rwanda, to outright genocide. To say
the least, these violent practices throw entire regions into disarray and generate further violence.

Link Gender/Feminism
The concept of gender in this modernity is a product of European epistemology
and does not apply to black bodies or the black social condition
BROECK

Professor of black diasporic and gender studies @ The U of Bremem

University of Bremen, Germany, Gender Forum, Issue 22 (2008)

2k8

Sabine;

(White) Gender Studies may decide to reflect self-critically on its own embeddedness in the Enlightenment
proposal of human freedom which strategically split a certain group of humans, namely enslaved African-origin
people, from the constitutive freedom to possess themselves and as such, from any access to subjectivity, which
entailed, as Hortense Spillers above all has argued, a splitting of African-origin women from gender. If, thus, the
knowledge of the slave trade and slavery will become the site of a rereading of Enlightenment, modernity and
postmodernity, a revised theoretical, and material approach to an epistemology of emancipation like Gender
Studies will be possible. Gender Studies, too, lives "in the time of slavery," in the "future created by it"
(Hartman 2007, 133). It is the economic, cultural and epistemic regime of human commodification, that

transgressive nexus of violence, desire and property which first formed the horizon of the EuroAmerican modernity that US and European intellectuals, including Gender Studies, have known and
claimed. The Enlightenment's proposal of human subjectivity and rights which was in fact inscribed into
the world the slave trade and slavery had made (Blackburn), created a vertical structure of access claims
to self-representation and social participation from which African-origin people, as hereditary
commodities, were a priori abjected. It is on the basis of that abjection, that the category of woman, of

gender as a framework to negotiate the social, cultural and economic position of white European
women was created. To accept that the very constitution of gender as a term in European early
modernity was tied to a social, cultural and political system which constitutively pre-figured "wasted
lives," and an extreme precariousness of what constitutes human existence, throws contemporary
notions of gendered subjectivity into stark relief . Hartman's work, therefore, may be read as just as
axiomatic as Bauman's, Butler's or Agamben's in measuring postmodern global challenges to critical theory.
Elaine Scary's, Susan Sontag's interventions on pain and voyeurism, and Spillers' or Wood's considerations,
more specifically, on the sexualized campaigns of Anglo-American abolition, have compounded the challenge
for an epistemology of slavery as a modern episteme not to recycle abolitionist titillation - the risk to become part
of a second order abolitionist discourse must, however, be run.

To play an active role in the

project of decolonizing (post) modern critical theory, gender studies need to acknowledge
and reckon with black de-colonial feminist interventions beyond add-on approaches. Those
interventions will enable an epistemic turn away from the solipsistic quasi universal presentism of
much of contemporary theory, and make it answerable to its own indebtedness to the history of early
modern Europe, and the New World . Hartman's and Spiller's texts, as well as Morrison's writing become
something like deconstructive guides: we are being asked to look, and listen with black women's

perspectives - but at the same time the texts fold back on themselves, and thus on our reading; they
disrupt a smooth appropriation of suffering, they derail us from a swift hate for the Thistlewoods

(Mother, 61). Those texts under scrutiny here do enact a kind of self-conscious parasitism, forcing readers into
complicity - but they refuse to do it innocently, disrupting a renewed take on slavery by way of abolitionist
benevolence. They teach readers that the boundaries of the archive cannot be trespassed at will, and without
consequence; and they also teach us to respect what Hartman calls, with Fred Moten, "black noise" (2008, 12).

Impact

Impact
The reality of anti-blackness controls uniqueness on every aspect of our lives. Voting aff locks in the
world of anti-blackness with a smiley friendlier face.
Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State; Stephen Dillon; A
dissertation for a PhD in Philosophy; May 2013;
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/153053/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf?sequence=1

Dillon 2013
As Omiseeke Tinsley writes, The brown-skinned, fluidbodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental,
maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.40 Extending Ruth Wilson Gilmores definition of

racism as state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploration of groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature death, we can understand race and death as a
possessive spirit that works as one, born out of the genocide of conquest and slavery.41
Being placed at the bottom of the ladderby an expansive network of racialized
management and control is Boggss way of describing the uneven distribution of value and
disposability produced by slaverys ongoing role in the present. Although death is sometimes
a natural biological phenomenon, it is more often manufactured and distributed by regimes
of power far removed from ones last breath or final heartbeat. Race is one such technology;
it is a mechanism for distributing life and death, and for black people, race and white
supremacy are motivated by a past of subjection, subjugation, torture, terror, and
disposability that has not ended.42 Race possesses life in both the biological and biopolitical
sense, ending or extending biological life for individuals and populations. While race
sometimes haunts, it more often limits life chances by inhabiting and controlling
individuals, institutions, and populations. In short, we are possessed by race and death and
life are the outcome. The relationship between race and possession is also evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the
the contemporary prison is animated
by logics, technologies, and discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For
countless prisoners and activists, race (and anti-blackness) were instruments that
transcended space and time so that the past could invade and contort the present in its image . For instance, in
1970s who connected the contemporary prison to chattel- slavery. Within this body of work,

his best-selling collection of prison writing Soledad Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the ways that the prisons connection to
slavery reverses, compresses, and undoes the progress of time:My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap.

Ive lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions
who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, unto the
third and fourth generation, the tenth, the hundredth. Here, Jackson describes the relationship
between memory, time, and possession. His captive body is metaphorically infested with the
cotton and corn grown under the prison of the plantation. Time did not wash away the horrors of slavery,
but rather, modified and intensified them. Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife .

He feels possessed by the forms of death produced under slavery, and throughout
his writing connects this to his living death in prison. This possession is not
temporally constrained; neither the law nor the state can exorcise black bodies of
this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that the U.S. must be destroyed and that
anything less would be meaningless to the great majority of the slaves .44 Although an extensive
review of Jacksons discussion of slavery is beyond the scope of this project, his ideas

and declaration that I am a slave to, and of, property were not unique among the black
liberation movement.45 In fact, Jacksons writing was emblematic of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in
the 1960s and 1970s, and paradigmatic of the political thought of the black liberation movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the
lines of flights that depart from the thought of Jackson and the black liberation movement. Indeed, Davis dedicates Reflections to Jacksons life
(cut short by his violent death) and his struggle against his own misogyny. In addition, Davis offers a literal embodiment of how the theories,
histories, and epistemologies produced by the black feminist and black liberation movements have entered the university. During the past few
decades, some scholars have followed the intellectual lead of prisoners and activists in the 1960s and 1970s by exploring the legal, discursive,

Most critically, the connection between

slavery and the prison is formalized and institutionalized by the Thirteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.46 Joy James refers to this as an enslaving anti-enslavement
narrative, since the Thirteenth Amendment recreates and repositions slavery inside the prison, even
as it abolishes it in the free world. 47 This was made clear during congressional debates about the meanings of
and institutional relationships between chattel-slavery and the modern prison.

emancipation, when Senator Charles Sumner presented to Congress a notice from the sheriff of Anne Arundel County in Maryland: Public Sale.
The undersigned will sell at the court-house door, in the city of Annapolis, at twelve o clock, on Saturday, 8th December, 1866, a negro man
named Richard Harris, for six months, convicted at the October term, 1866, of the Anne Arundel county circuit court for larceny, and sentenced

the Supreme Court declared in Ruffin v.

Commonwealth (1871) that prisoners were civically dead (dead to the law) and slaves of the
state.49 The power of the law converted the slave into a prisoner and the prisoner into a slave. In this
by the court to be sold as a slave. Terms of sale, cash. Just six years later,

way, the law criminalized race, racialized crime, and allowed slavery to live on, or
possess, the law. And so, with the end of one form of slavery came new mechanisms to
control, exploit, and contain black bodies, labor, and freedom. As the historian
David Oshinsky writes, Law enforcement now meant keeping ex-slaves in line.
After the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, the convict-lease system
emerged as one mechanism in slaverys aftermath that extended and renewed the
confinement and exploitation of black people. Throughout the south, black people
(former slaves) were rounded up and charged with crimes that in the past would
be punished by the torture and terror of the master. The theft of a pig, insulting
gestures, cohabitating with whites, mischief, being unemployed, and vagrancy
were now crimes that would be punished by the state. The law of the master was
now the law of the land: An offense against Mr. Shields had become an offense against
the state.51 Former slaves were arrested and leased to private contractors to be
worked until death. What was once personal property was made public and since
black bodies were no longer owned by private individuals but rather leased by the
state, many contractors felt free to work convicts to death. As one private contractor
put it, Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford
to keep him.. .But these convicts we dont own em. One dies, get another.52 Without
private investment and ownership by the master, black bodies were subject to even more
extreme forms of torture, terror, and violence. The legal construction of new forms of
freedom ushered in new mechanisms for producing human disposability. Black pain,
injury, and death did not slow the accumulation of capital in the same way as they did

under plantation slavery; one could just get another. But the convict-lease system was
just one mechanism among a massive regime of racialized power and violence that
allowed the spirit of slavery to live on. Like the writing of Boggs and Shakur, the
sociologist Loic Wacquant has extended this analysis of the relationship between
race, the carceral, and death to encompass the twentieth century as a whole. He
argues that the prison is part of a carceral continuum that traverses time (slavery, the convictlease system, Jim Crow, and the early ghetto) and space (the prison, schools, welfare,
and the hyper-ghetto) to manage and contain populations rendered surplus or disposable to the
racial state and neoliberal capital. 53 In this way, an anti-blackness established under chattel-slavery
possesses and structures a variety of institutions over space and time . Thus, we might modify Foucaults famous
question, Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? to include the plantation, the
slave ship, the coffle, and the auction block. Although the connections between slavery and the prison are important to this project, I am also
interested in more expansive understandings of the afterlife of slavery. In particular, I am concerned with theories that can help make the

slavery
structures much more than the prison or even more than Wacquants carceral
continuum. For instance, Christina Sharpe argues that our very subjectivity is
indebted to, and born out of, the discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery. For
Sharpe, engaging and analyzing a post-slavery subjectivity means examining subjectivities constituted
by trans-Atlantic slavery and connecting them to present (and past) mundane horrors that arent
acknowledged to be horrors.55 This is one of the main projects of black feminism, as exemplified by Boggs engagement with the
connection between the market under chattel-slavery and the market under neoliberalism. In other words, the afterlife of

seemingly innocuous institutions of insurance, state bureaucracy, and the university.56 This project is also central to Hortense Spillerss classic
essay, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar book, where she connects slavery to the life of the symbolic world. She writes
Even though the captive flesh/body has been liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter,

dominant

symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and
valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if

neither time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the
human subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and
anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. Like Jackson and Shakur,
Spillers argues that slavery ruptures the progress of time. The ways meaning and value are
institutionalized have been determined by the violence and terror of slavery. Slavery is a death sentence
enacted across generations, one that changes name and shape as time progresses. Freedom

presupposes and builds on slavery so that post-slavery subjectivities are shaped by

forms of power that resemble and sometimes mimic power under slavery (force,
terror, sexual violence, compulsion, torture) while they are also confined by the postemancipation technologies of consent, reason, will, and choice.58 Frank Wilderson
summarizes this more expansive understanding of the afterlife of slavery: The
imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave no
world.59 According to Wilderson, slavery connotes an ontological (not experiential)

status for blackness, one that is shaped not by exploitation and alienation, but by
accumulation and fungibility (the condition of being owned and traded.).60 In this
way, slavery does not lay dormant in the past, but became attached to the political
ontology of blackness.61

Aleternative

Alt General
The alternative is to embrace political apostasya retreat from the all powerful god-state
is the only way to combat anti-blacknessany other approach results in endless black
struggle through a false hope in the system
WARREN

Assistant professor of American Studies @ George Washington 2k15

Calvin;
Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 215-248 (Article), Project
Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v015/15.1.warren.pdf//AKP )

The atheism that Carter proffers, however, is entangled in the metaphysical bind that sustains the very
violence his atheismis designed to dismantle. For him, this atheism entails social, political, and
intellectual struggle... struggle in solidarity with others, the struggle to be for and with others, the struggle
of the multitude, the struggle that is blackness [as] the new ecclesiology (2013, 4). The term struggle
here presents political metaphysics as a solution to the problem of anti-blacknessthrough labor, travail,
and commitment one embraces progress and linearity as social goods. With this metaphysics, according to
Carter, we can struggle to get rid of these Stand Your Ground Laws that are in place in many states
besides Florida, struggle against state legislatures (such as North Carolinas) that are enacting draconian
laws of various sorts, struggle in the name of the protection of womens agency about their own bodies
in short, struggle to imagine a new politics of belonging (4). This struggle contains the promise of
overcoming anti-blackness to usher in a not-yetsocial-order. Again, the trick of time is deployed to
protect struggle from the rigorous historical analysis that would demand evidence of its efficacy. The
not-yet-social-order, situated in an irreproachable future (a political prolepsis), can only promise
this overcoming against a history and historicity of brutal anti-black social organization. Carter is
looking for a political theologyalthough weve always had one under the guise of democratic liberalism
that will provide conditions of life by mobilizing the discourses of hope andfuture temporality. The
problem that this theology encircles, and evades, is the failure of social justice and liberation
theology to dismantle the structure of anti-black violence; this brings us full circle to the problem
that Dr. William R. Jones brilliantly articulated. Are we hoping for a new strategy, something completely
novel and unique, that will resolve all the problems of the Political once and for all? If the Political itself
is the temple of the idolatrous godthe sphere within which it is worshipped and preservedcan we
discard the idol and purify the temple? Does this theology offer a political philosophy of purification that
will sustain the progress that struggle is purported to achieve? In short, how does one translate the
spiritual principle of hope into a political programapolitical theology?The problem of translation haunts
this theology and thel ooking-forward stance of the political theologian cannot avoid the rupture between
the spiritual and the Political. Can we reject this racist god and, at the same time, support the political
structure that affirms this idol? Can we be partial atheists? This becomes a problem for Carter when he
suggests that we abandon this idol but fails to critique the structure of political existence, which sustains
the power of this idol. Atheism as imagined here would entail rejecting the racist-white-god, or a racist
political theology, and replacing it with a just God, or an equitable political theology. Will replacing the
idol with a more just God transform the Political into a life-affirming structure for blackness? Unless we
advocate for a theocracy, which is not what I believe Carter would propose, we need an answer to this
question of translation. The answer to this question is glaringly absent in the text, but I read this absence
as an attempt to avoid the nihilistic conclusion that his argument would naturally reach. We might even
suggest that one must assume a nihilistic disposition toward the Political if justice, redress, and

righteousness are the aims. The problem with atheism, then, is that it relies on the Political as the sphere
of redemption and hope, when the Political is part of the idolatrous structure that it seeks to dismantle. In
this sense, Dr. William R. Jones becomes an aporia for Dr. Kameron Carters text, if we read Jones as
suggesting that black theology offers no cogent political philosophy, or political program, that would
successfully rid the Political of its anti-black foundation. The Political and anti-blackness are
inseparable and mutually constitutive. The utopian vision of a not-yet-social order that purges
anti-blackness from its core provides a promise without reliefits only answer to the immediacy of
black suffering is to keep struggling. The logic of struggle, then, perpetuates black suffering by
placing relief in an unattainable future, a future that offers nothing more than an exploitative
reproduction of its own means of existenc e. Struggle, action, work, and labor are caught in a political
metaphysics that depends on black-death . The black nihilist recognizes that relying on the Political and
its grammar offers nothing more than a ruse of transformation and an exploited hope. Instead of atheism,
the black nihilist would embrace political apostasy: it is the act of abandoning or renouncing a situation of
unethicality and immorality in this sense, the Political itself. The apostate is a figure that
selfexcommunicates him-/herself from a body that is contrary to its fundamental belief system. As
political apostate, the black nihilist renounces the idol of anti-blackness but refuses to participate in
the ruse of replacing one idol with another . The Political and Godthe just and true God in Carters
analysis are incommensurate and inimical. This is not to suggest that we can exclude God, but that any
recourse to the Political results in an immorality not in alignment with Godly principles (a performative
contradiction). The project to align God with the Political (political theology) will inevitably fail. If
antiblackness is contrary to our beliefs, self-excommunication, in other words black nihilism, is the
only position that seems consistent. We can think of political apostasy, then, as an active nihilism when an
alternative political arrangement is impossible. When faced with the impossibility of realizing the notyet-social order, political apostasy becomes an empowered hermeneutical practice; it interprets the antiblack Political symbolic as inherently wicked and rejects it both as critique and spiritual practice.

Alt Solvency
The Alt is the only viable option for the black body
The viability of our modernity is rooted in the destruction of the black body only
denying the system through removing black participation in it can solve

WARREN

Assistant professor of American Studies @ George Washington 2k15

Calvin;
Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 215-248 (Article), Project
Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v015/15.1.warren.pdf//AKP )

V. C ONCLUSION Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve metaphysical
structures that sustain black suffering. This preservation amounts to an exploitation of hopewhen the
Political colonizes the spiritual principle of hope and puts it in the service of extending the will to
power of an anti- organization of existence. The Politics of hope, then, is bound up with metaphysical
violence, and this violence masquerades as a solution to the problem of anti-blackness. Temporal
linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle, work, and utopian futurity are conceptual instruments of the
Political that will never obviate black suffering or anti-black violence; these concepts only serve to
reproduce the conditions that render existence unbearablefor blacks. Political theologians and black
optimists avoid the immediacy of black suffering, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief
in a not-yet-but-is (maybe)-to-come-social order that, itself, can do little more but admonish blacks to
survive to keep struggling. Political hope becomes a vicious and abusive cycle of struggleit mirrors
the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an object (black freedom, justice, relief, redress, equality, etc.)
that is inaccessible because it doesnt really exist. The political theologian and black optimist, then,
propose a collective Jouissance as an answer to black sufferingfinding the joy in struggle, the victory in
toil, and the satisfaction in inefficacious action. We continue to struggle and work as black youth
are slaughtered daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates
are soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of desperate black youth. In
short, these conditions are deep metaphysical problemsthe sadistic pleasure of metaphysical
domination and work and struggle avoid the terrifying fact that the world depends on black death
to sustain itself. Black nihilism attempts to break this driveto stop it in its tracks, as it wereand to
end the cycle of insanity that political hope perpetuates. The question that remains is a question often put
to the black nihilist: what is the point? This compulsory geometrical structuring of thoughtall
knowledge must submit to, and is reducible to, a pointit is an epistemic flicker of certainty,
determination, and, to put it bluntly, life. The point exists for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains
knowledge. Thought outside of this mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the
episteme of life and its grammar will require a position outside of this point, a position somewhere in
the infinite horizon of thought (perhaps this is what Heidegger wanted to do with his reconfiguration of
thought). Writing in this way is inherently subversive and refuses the geometry of thought. Nevertheless,
the nihilist is forced to enunciate his refusal through a point, a point that is contradictory and
paradoxical all at once. To say that the point of this essay is that the point is fraudulentits promise of
clarity and life are inadequate will not satisfy the hunger of disciplining the nihilist and insisting that
one undermine the very ground upon which one stands. Black nihilistic hermeneutics resists the point
but is subjected to it to have ones voice heard within the marketplace of ideas. The point of this essay
is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope in
the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will never resolve anything. This is

why the black nihilist speaks of exploited hope, and the black nihilist attempts to wrest hope from the
clutches of the Political. Can we think of hope outside the Political? Must salvation translate into a
political grammar or a political program? The nihilist, then, hopes for the end of political hope and its
metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it.
Hope is the foundation of the black nihilistic hermeneutic. In Blackness and Nothingness, Fred Moten
(2013) conceptualizes blackness as a pathogen to metaphysics, something that has the ability to
unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through Motens brilliant analysis,
we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche were really after. It is a
blackened world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but putting an end to metaphysics will also put
an end to the world itselfthis is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through. This is a far
cry from what we call anarchy, however. The black nihilist has as little faith in the metaphysical
reorganization of society through anarchy than he does in traditional forms of political existence. The
black nihilist offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of denouncing metaphysical violence,
black suffering, and the idol of antiblackness. The act of renouncing will not change political
structures or offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual concept of hope from
the captivity of the Political. Ultimately, it is impossible to end metaphysics without ending blackness,
and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw from the Political completely without a certain deathdrive or being-toward-death. This is the essence of black suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics,
the tormenting complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a coherent grammar to
articulate these dilemmas.

Alt solvency

The only ethical demand that the slave can make is the end of civil society.
The world is structured against the slave and there is no turning back.
WILDERSON

assistant professor of African American studies and drama @ UC Irvine

2k7

Frank; Red, white, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S Antagonisms pgs. 5-7

When I was a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who used
to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East- and South Asian students, staff, and
faculty as they entered the university. She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her
into slavery. She always winked at the Blacks, though we didnt wink back. Some of us thought her
outbursts too bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and rainbow
coalitions to endorse. But others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that
her isolation would become our isolation,

and we had come to Columbia for the express, though largely assumed and

unspoken, purpose of foreclosing upon that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy.

Later, when I attended UC Berkeley, I

saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of
him was an upside down hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here was where they could settle

the Land Lease Accounts that they had neglected to settle all of their lives.
was crazy. Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind,

He too, so went the scuttlebutt,

it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar,

or better still the grammar of their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas
indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to
modern politics and modernity writ large , for they draw our attention
used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests ,

not to the way in which space and time are

but to the violence that underwrites the modern

worlds capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally . The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land
provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of
the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less !

The woman at Columbia was not demanding

to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within
capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a
triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal
integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a being for the captor (206), the drama of value
(the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal
integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street.

She gave birth to

the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it . In her
eyes, the worldand not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itselfwas unethical. And
yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim.

Instead, it calls her crazy. And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity?
Hes crazy if he thinks hes getting any money out of us? Surely, that doesnt make him crazy.
Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun . What are we to make of a world that
responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political ?

Why are these

questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically
unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the
Savage. Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, twelve simple

words, and the structure of U.S . (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An ethical
modernity would no longer sound like an oxymoron.

From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that

have been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights.

When pared down to twelve

words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethicopolitical, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political
broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films.

Alt Burn it Down

Its a rap in this modernity for the black subject. The only thing to do now is
burn it all down it all must go
FARLEY

Professor of Law @ Boston College

Perfecting Slavery

2k5

Anthony P;

What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity,
burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a

charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right
to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of
this unknown anarchist.48 The slaves burned everything because everything was against them.
Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in
which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything.49 Leave
nothing white behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-over- black.50 God
gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.51 The slaves burned everything,
yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Hait i.52 Theirs was the greatest and most
successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the
great tragedy of the nineteenth century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois
wrote, The colorline belts the world.54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was
the problem of the colorline.55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the
problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is
the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become and so the slaves
of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be
free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. Education is the call. We are called to be and
then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we
pursue a calling. Freedom is the only callingit alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that
may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves
die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot be. The
only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call.
The slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood.

The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-overblack, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.

AT:

AT: Reform Good

The affirmative is structured to make the oppressed comfortable with the

current white supremacist structure. The call for a curtail in surveillance is
nothing more than a smiling face that has the same cruel intentions we are
having none of it
El Kilombo revolutionary student and activist coalition 2k7
(El Kilombo Intergalactico, people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and other community members in Durham, North Carolina,
Beyond Resistance Everything: An Interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos DM)
The following lines are the product of intense collective discussions that took place within what is today El Kilombo Intergalctico during
much of 2003 and 2004. These discussions occurred during the advent of the Iraq War and our efforts (though ultimately ineffective) to
stop it. During those months it became very clear to us that the Left in the United States was at a crossroads, and much of what we had
participated in under the banner of activism no longer provided an adequate response to our current conditions . In our efforts to forge a
new path, we found that an old friendthe Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacio- nal (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN)
was already taking enormous strides to move toward a politics adequate to our time, and that it was thus necessary to attempt an evaluation
of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real event of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the Zapatista uprising
had blown into the US political scene since 1994, we began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo had been quickly con- tained
through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable narrative: Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent third world

From our position as an

organization composed in large part by people of color in the
United States, we viewed this focus on solidarity as the foreign policy
equivalent of white guilt, quite distinct from any authentic
impulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social
change. The notion of solidarity that still pervades much of the
Left in the U.S. has continually served an intensely conservative
political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the
latest rebellion in the darker nations while carefully
maintaining political action at a distance from our own daily lives,
thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that more closely
resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant
or active agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the
solidarity recipient to a mere object (of our pity and mismatched socks). At both ends
of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects and
political action never meet; in this way it serves to make change
an a priori impossibility. In other words, this practice of solidarity urges
us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the narrative
that power tells us about itself: that those who could make
change dont need it and that those who need change cant make
it. To the extent that human solidarity has a future, this logic and practice do not! For us, Zapatismo was (and
continues to be) unique exactly because it has provided us with the elements to shatter this tired schema. It
has inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the
necessity, of always viewing our- selves as dignified political
subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With
movements that demanded and deserved solidarity from leftists in the global north.

the publication of The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas have made it

we must move be- yond appeals to this stunted form

of solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficult
challenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we
must become companeros (neither followers nor leaders) in a
truly global struggle to change the world . As a direct response to this call, this
even clearer that

analysis is our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of a manual for contemporary
political action that eventually must be written by us all.

The affirmative is a product of the Bill of Sale and bankrupt from the
beginning
FARLEY

James Campbell Matthews Professor of Law

2k12

Anthony;

Critical Race Theory and Marxism: Temporal Power

Repetition is the mode in which we preserve that which overwhelms us. That which overwhelms us sets
itself up in our soul as a repetition of what seems to have been the original catastrophe . We become a
permanent wave of our own undoing.9 But the precise nature of our own trauma continually eludes us .
We give chase, but only through repetition. We become what we do and this fact of repetition makes what
was said of us, they know not what they do, true . What we do is repeat the disaster that originally left us
traumatized. Through repetition we become the very disaster that was our original, albeit unremembered,
disaster. It was unspeakable. It remains unsaid. But the cruelty from which we imagine ourselves escaped
is what we become, and that which we continually make of ourselves. There are cruelties that happen to
us as individuals ([a]nd I only am escaped alone to tell thee11) and there are cruelties that
happen to us as collectives ([l]et my people go12). What happens in the individual can

happen to the collective and so, as the long story of philosophy verifies, each is a
window to the other. The individual is not the unity it is often imagined to be ([m]y
name is Legion13), nor are the borders of the collective as distinct as they are
often imagined to be ([t]hings fall apart14). Nevertheless, it is useful to speak of
the individual (I think, therefore I am15) and the collective ([w]e the
people . . .16) when what is hard to see in the one is easy to make out in the other.
Our beginning was the scene of an unspeakable event. That unspeakable event keeps
repeating. Capital arrived in the world dripping . . . with blood and dirt.17 If, as Margaret
Thatcher infamously put it, There is no alternative18 to capitalism, then there
must not have been a time before capitalism. Capital, like trauma, is outside of history,

outside of the world of things that change, or so it claims by asserting that there is no alternative. The fact
that capitalism presents itself to us as a horizon less world should give us pause. But it does not give us
pause: We are on the clockrepeating and not livingand so we go on and on not thinking at all about
Modern Times, just repeating.19 Marxism has as its zero degree the disclosure of the unspeakably cruel
event that threw the modern world up all around us. Its name is Legion,20 but three were
introduced in Capitals first volume with these birthnames: genocide in the New World, colonialism in the

Orient, and the conversion of the Dark Continent into a hunting ground for slaves . These three mass
murders were race-making moments. These three mass murders were the original
accumulation, the first capital. These three mass murders made capitalism a world system. Modernity is
the repetition of the original accumulation. We are, in other words, still in that original moment to the
extent that we are modern and have always been modern. Time has not passed . We passed out of the
time of the real and into the false eternity of the spectacle . As psychoanalysis revealed: A

condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical
concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has
been given the name traumatic neurosis. The terrible war which has just ended
gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind . . . The chief weight in their
causation seems to rest on the factor of surprise.21 Before World War I, Josef Breuer
and Sigmund Frued observed,Hystericssuffermainlyfromreminiscences.22 After
the war to end all wars, Freud wrote: In the war neuroses, too, observers . . . have
been able to explain certain motor symptoms by fixation to the moment at which
the trauma occurred. I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from
traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their
accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking about it.23 History is this
way for us as a collective. We are much concerned with not thinking about it.24 Uranus is
castrated by Cronos. The open sky is violated by the desperate hours. Call the perpetrator
and the violated by their Greek names or by any other names and the scene
remains the same: blood rains down on the water, and from that meeting the Furies
are born. The Furiesunceasing Alecto, resentful Tisiphone, avenging Magaera
immortals all, are born of that meeting of blood and water, and are forever
punishing violations of the order that allows no alternative.25 James Baldwin
understood the Furies: History, as no one seems to know, is not merely something
to read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the
contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us,
are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we
do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and
our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this .26 The time that seems
to pass only seems to pass. Baldwin understood false time. Baldwin understood that this false time of
ours is not even ours; it is the time of the spectacle .27 We belong to it, not the other way
round. What is the spectacle? The spectacle is the systems endless hymn of self-praise. When
we have been here 10,000 years / bright shining as the sun / we will have no less time to sing its praise /
than when wed first begun. That is the spectacle. We are within the false time of the spectacle, within the
repetitions. The repetitions are spectacular time. We do not live spectacular time, we only repeat, and
repetition is not living. The death event that produces the first capital begins with a mark made or found
ready-made on the body: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,

enslavement and entombment in the mines of the indigenous population of that

continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion
of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things
which characterize the dawn of capitalist production.28 Before the great death event all

flesh is common. After the event a mark, insignificant in itself, is made to signify life or death. The mark is
a line, a color line, which separates life from death and connects now with then. After the mark life
becomes having and not having becomes its opposite. After the murders reach a certain mass, death
follows in an unbending line from now till then, and then becomes a hole in the universe, a hole though
which we fall and are now falling, forever.29 The New World was not new before the killing. The blacks

were not black before the killing. The colonized were not colonized before the killing. The murders
constitute and mark a new species. The production of race is the production of a race that

is to have and another race, subordinate to the first, that is to have not. The
abundance belonging to the One and the lack that is the chief property of the Other
are conjoined twins, born of the same unspeakable event . The black can trace its origin
only as far back as a bill of sale. James Baldwin, speaking in London, was clear on this
point: I tried to explain that if I was originally from [an African point of origin] I couldnt find out where it
was because my entry into America was a bill of sale . And that stops you from going any
further. At some point I became Baldwins Nigger.30 But is the same for the white?
The bill of sale is the official screen memory of the mass murder that is the origin of capital. The bill of
sale is the alpha and omega of law. The bill of sale is a death certificate, ours. The bill of sale is the
recording angel assigned to the children of slaves and children of slave masters. The legality of that bill of
sale is what keeps the chains, the genealogies of property that bind now to then, and all of us to the
repetitions, together.

Legal reforms failhistory proves Americas surveillance system is inherently racist

Kundanani and Kumar 3-21 Arun Kundnani: former editor of the journal Race & Class, he was
miseducated at Cambridge University, holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University, and teaches at
New York University. Deepa Kumar: Associate Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. She is
affiliated faculty with Middle Eastern Studies and graduate faculty in the Sociology department.
(Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar, 3-21-2015, "Race, Surveillance, and Empire,"
http://www.kundnani.org/2015/03/21/race-surveillance-and-empire-2/)//AK
The mechanisms of surveillance outlined in this essay were responses to political struggles of various kinds
from anticolonial insurgencies to slave rebellions, labor militancy to anti-imperialist agitation.
Surveillance practices themselves have also often been the target of organized opposition . In the 1920s and
1970s, the surveillance state was pressured to contract in the face of public disapproval. The antiwar activists who broke into an FBI field office
in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and stole classified documents managed to expose COINTELPRO, for instance, leading to its shut down. (But
those responsible for this FBI program were never brought to justice for their activities and similar techniques continued to be used later against,
for example in the 1980s, the American Indian Movement, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.68) Public concern
about state surveillance in the 1970s led to the Church committee report on government spying and the Handschu guidelines that regulated the
New York Police Departments spying on political activities. Those concerns began to be swept aside in the 1980s with the War on Drugs and,
especially, later with the War on Terror. While

significant sections of the public may have consented to the security

state, those who have been among its greatest victims the radical Left, antiwar activists, racial justice
and Black liberation campaigners , and opponents of US foreign policy in Latin America and the
Middle Eastunderstand its workings. Today, we are once again in a period of revelation, concern, and
debate on national security surveillance. Yet if real change is to be brought about, the racial history of
surveillance will need to be fully confrontedor opposition to surveillance will once again be easily
defeated by racial security narratives. The significance of the Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of
the NSAs mass surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider can have. The result has been a generalized level of alarm
as people have become aware of how intrusive surveillance is in our society, but that alarm remains
constrained within a public debate that is highly abstract, legalistic, and centered on the privacy rights
of the white middle class. On the one hand, most civil liberties advocates are focused on the technical
details of potential legal reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard privacy. Such initiatives

are likely to bring little change because they fail to confront the racist and imperialist core of the
surveillance system. On the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government surveillance can
be fixed simply by using better encryption tools. While encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a
government agency would need to monitor an individual, they do nothing to unravel the larger surveillance apparatus.
Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns about loss of sales to foreign customers
concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon Valley, what should be a debate about
basic political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits. 69 Another and perhaps deeper problem
is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit the current situationsuch as George
Orwells discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the
type of government surveillance we face today.70 Reference to Orwells 1984 has been widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the
book were said to have soared following Snowdens revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother is, on one
level, supported by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groupsMuslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalistsstate surveillance
certainly looks Orwellian. But this level of scrutiny is not faced by the general public. The

picture of surveillance today is therefore

quite different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwells 1984, which assumes an
undifferentiated mass population subject to government control. What we have instead today in the
United States is total surveillance, not on everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by
their race, religion, or political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as the bad guys. In March 2014,
Rick Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told an audience: Contrary to some of the stuff thats been printed, we dont sit
there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If youre not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets,
you are not of interest to us.72 In the national security world, connected to can be the basis for
targeting a whole racial or political community so, even assuming the accuracy of this comment, it points to the ways
that national security surveillance can draw entire communities into its web, while reassuring average
people (code for the normative white middle class) that they are not to be troubled. In the eyes of the
national security state, this average person must also express no political views critical of the status quo.
Better oversight of the sprawling national security apparatus and greater use of encryption in digital
communication should be welcomed. But by themselves these are likely to do little more than reassure
technologists, while racialized populations and political dissenters continue to experience massive
surveillance. This is why the most effective challenges to the national security state have come not
from legal reformers or technologists but from grassroots campaigning by the racialized groups most
affected. In New York, the campaign against the NYPDs surveillance of Muslims has drawn its strength from building alliances with other
groups affected by racial profiling: Latinos and Blacks who suffer from hugely disproportionate rates of stop and frisk. In Californias Bay Area,
a campaign against a Department of Homeland Security-funded Domain Awareness Center was successful because various constituencies were
able to unite on the issue, including homeless people, the poor, Muslims, and Blacks. Similarly, a demographics unit planned by the Los Angeles
Police Department, which would have profiled communities on the basis of race and religion, was shut down after a campaign that united various
groups defined by race and class. The

lesson here is that, while the national security state aims to create fear and to
divide people, activists can organize and build alliances across race lines to overcome that fear. To the
extent that the national security state has targeted Occupy, the antiwar movement, environmental rights
activists, radical journalists and campaigners, and whistleblowers, these groups have gravitated towards
opposition to the national security state. But understanding the centrality of race and empire to national security surveillance
means finding a basis for unity across different groups who experience similar kinds of policing: Muslim, Latino/a, Asian, Black, and white
dissidents and radicals. It is on such a basis that we can see the beginnings of an effective multiracial opposition to the surveillance state and
empire.

Link- the surveillance state was built on targeting communities of colorlegal

reform on surveillance cannot solve
Khalek 13

(Rania Khalek, 10-26-2013, "Activists of Color Lead Charge Against Surveillance, NSA," Truthout,
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19695-activists-of-color-at-forefront-of-anti-nsa-movement)//AK
Surveillance State Was Built on Targeting Communities of Color Two days prior to the Stop Watching Us
rally, Busboys & Poets, a progressive DC restaurant, hosted "Enemies of the State? Government
Surveillance of Communities of Color," a panel discussion organized by Free Press, the Center for Media
Justice and Voices for Internet Freedom. The room was packed mostly with activists of color concerned
about the implications of NSA surveillance on already-marginalized and increasingly surveilled
communities. Enemy of the state panel from left to right: Fahd Ahmed, Adwoa Masozi, Alfredo Lopez,
Seema Sadanandan, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Jared Ball. The panel took place at Busboys and Poets in
Washington, DC, on October 24, 2013. (Photo: Rania Khalek) Enemy of the state panel from left to right:
Fahd Ahmed, Adwoa Masozi, Alfredo Lopez, Seema Sadanandan, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Jared Ball. The
panel took place at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, on October 24, 2013. (Photo: Rania Khalek)
Steven Renderos, national organizer for the Center for Media Justice, who helped put together the panel,
told Truthout that examining the legacy of surveillance in communities of color could help lead to
solutions. "It's critical to understand the history so we can learn how to dismantle it," Renderos said.
"Those of us from marginalized communities grew up in environments very much shaped by surveillance,
which has been utilized to ramp up the criminal justice system and increase deportations," Renderos said.
"It's having real consequences in our communities where children are growing up without parents in the
home and families are being torn apart through raids and deportations, a lot of which is facilitated through
the use of surveillance." Panelist Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director for the South Asian-led social
justice organization Desis Rising Up and Moving, argued that mass surveillance is the predictable
outgrowth of programs that have targeted marginalized communities for decades . "Just by the very nature
of [the United States] being a settler-colonialist and capitalist nation, race and social control are central to
its project," Ahmed said. "Anytime we see any levels of policing - whether it's day-to-day policing in the
streets, surveillance by the police or internet surveillance - social control, particularly of those that resist
the existing system, becomes an inherent part of that system." But, he warned, "These policies are not
going to be limited to one particular community. They're going to continue to expand further and further"
because "the surveillance has a purpose, which is to exert the power of the state and control the potential
for dissent." Seema Sadanandan, program director for ACLU DC, acknowledged the collective
resentment felt by people of color who are understandably frustrated that privacy violations are only now
eliciting mass public outrage when communities of color have been under aggressive surveillance for
decades. "The Snowden revelations represent a terrifying moment for white, middle-class and uppermiddle-class people in this country, who on some level believe that the Bill of Rights and Constitution
were protecting their everyday lives," Sadanandan said. "For people of color from communities with a
history of discrimination and economic oppression that prevents one from realizing any of those rights on
a day-to-day basis, it wasn't a huge surprise." But Sadanandan argued that NSA surveillance still "has
particular concerns for communities of color because of their unique relationship to the criminal justice or
social control system, a billion-dollar industry with regard to, for example, border patrol or data mining as
it's applied to racially profile." Sadanandan warned that NSA surveillance more than likely would
strengthen that system of control. Former political prisoner and Black Panther Party leader Dhoruba BinWahad declared that "the United States has moved into a full garrison police state," which "has been
exported and institutionalized all over the globe." His antidote? "We have to put together an international
movement to check the development evolution of the modern national security state," which requires
linking globalized labor exploitation to the prison industry to the war on terror to institutionalized white
supremacy rooted in the "European-settler state." Bin-Wahad was skeptical about the ability of "legal"

remedies to reform the system . "You cannot make the police state better. You cannot reform white
supremacy. We need to abolish the system as it now stands," Bin-Wahad said.

AT: Hegemony
The notion of Hegemony is linked to notions of control that ignore structural inequality and that
also ignore how the politics of white supremacy order the world writ large

Margonis Professor of education & cultural studies U of Utah 2k7

Frank;
John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke: A Case Study in White Ignorance and Intellectual - Segregation - Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance- p.185-189

By concentrating upon the divisions among European immigrants and ignoring the processes of
racial segregation, Dewey contributed to a significant tendency in white political and social thought.
Because they had erased the legacy of slavery from their understanding

of the modern city, Dewey and

Kallen assumed that the tensions between European groups were paradigmatic of racial divisions in the
society, that is, white philosophers took cases of cultural separatism to be the same as cases of forced segregation. 5 Just as
Deweys accounts of the frontier edited out the violent acts of the dominant group, Deweys and Kallens writings about
democracy served as a discourse that erased the race riots and forced relo- cations then occurring in Midwestern and
Northern cities, while redefin- ing the meaning of segregation to be the same as choosing to live withones own group and
pursue ones own values.

The greatest threats to democracysuch as the white mobs that attacked

African Americans in East Saint Louiswere defined outside the theory. Consequently, what Du Bois
had labeled the problem of the twentieth century was placed outside of white philosophers
discussions of cultural pluralism. Mills might say that Deweys democratic theory has a lexical gap, that
because he has not theorized segregation as an obstacle to the realization of democracy, his theory will not enable us to
overcome segre- gation and work toward democracy (Mills 1998, 110). Moreover, Dewey contributed to the epistemology of
ignorance by offering a dominant group understanding of U.S. democracy that blurs the distinction between separatism and
segregation and implicitly blames the victims of racial vio- lence for their disinterest in contributing to the national good. And
lastly,

Deweys overwhelming focus upon developing close relations among European groups, to the

exclusion

of

people

of

color,

could

only

serve

the process of white racial formation by

encouraging whites of different languages and nations to band together to reserve the most
resources for themselves.

Dewey was antiracist, as Hutchinson argues, but his version of antiracism can hardly be

offered as a model for European American theorists seek- ing to emerge from the epistemology of ignorance. The

motivations guid- ing Deweys antiracism combined an epistemological distrust of racial categories with an
awareness that much of the social science of his day was disproving racial generalizations. Morally and politically, Dewey
wished to undercut all specious claims to hierarchy en route to establishing the communicative conditions for democracy. This

combination of episte- mological and moral concerns enabled Dewey to criticize the faulty rea- soning
underlying racial practices, such as intelligence testing in schools but did not prepare him to see the
macroscopic racial patterns in U.S. for- eign policy or within U.S. cities. Consequently, Deweys suspicions

of racially based reasoning did not go far enough to enable him to actually chart a democratic
course, because his antiracism was not guided by a larger understanding of the patterns of white
supremacy.

Deweys blindness to patterns of white supremacy appears in his un- willingness to differentiate his position

from Roosevelts. Dewey did not break with the guiding values of a U.S. society set on an expansionist for- eign policy, nor did
he break with the exceptionalist narrative of the United States as a nation that was every day realizing democracy. Dewey
erroneously considered the task of developing a nonracist philosophy to merely a matter of eliminating unwarranted racial
generalizations from his theory. Contemporary European American philosophers hop- ing to work ourselves out of the

epistemology

of

ignorance

must

do much more than avoid racist generalizations.

We must place ourselves

historically and sociologically in relation to the racial strategies of white groups and seek to contest
those strategies,

whether they be interna- tional acts of neocolonialism or domestic acts of segregation and exclu- sion.

When the United States attacks yet another nation populated by people of color, with promises of
bringing democracy to the region, it is incumbent upon democratic theorists to critically scrutinize such opportunistic references to democracy. When conservative white groups increase the surveillance of

Latinas/os and thus effectively limit the ability of Latina/o citizens and activists to speak publicly and influence govern- ment
policy,

these racial movements are very much a part of democratic theory

(Flores and Benmayor 1997).

Philosophers who enter debates over the nature of just wars or cosmopolitanism without considering the racial
dynamics

of international politics and the disproportionate power of European and European-descendant nations,

or

philosophers who discuss citizenship assuming a free public space in which the possibilities for
political participation
philosophers

and cross-group exchange

are available to all people on American soil such

follow Deweys example in ignoring and obscuring the very real social processes

whereby white racial supremacy is extended . The most basic step away from Deweys blindness lies
in a rejection of the stories of U.S. exceptionalism .

Deweys sensitivity to the racial strate- gies of the dominant

group was blunted by his acceptance of the basic outlines of the narrative of manifest destiny. As Cornel West argues so
brilliantly, Dewey was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emersons faith that the Anglo-Saxons were a chosen people destined to
overrun North America, bringing democracy in their wake (West 1989, 2835). West invites us to see the resonances of
Emersons position in subsequent pragmatist schol- ars, and Emerson did indeed leave his imprint upon Deweys thought.
Dewey offers a culturalist narrative that rearticulates the basic outlines of the doctrine of manifest destiny. Even though
Deweys antiracism pre- vents him from thinking that there is a group that is accurately called the Anglo-Saxons, he
nonetheless accepts the fundamental story suggesting that the group that colonized the North American continent is distinctively capable of bringing democracy to the rest of the world. Dewey al- tered Emersons and Roosevelts accounts in believing
the advance of American citizens had little to do with their genetic makeup, but Dewey did believe Americans were uniquely
positioned to further the spread of democracy, as shown by his testimony in favor of entering World War I. Even in its
culturalist rearticulation, this is a narrative that is well designed John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois 187to justify U.S. expansionism .

The promise of bringing democracy to other nations has underwritten countless U.S. invasions;
most recently, the promise of bringing democracy to the Middle East has been the most basic
justification for the invasion of Iraq

(LaFeber 1984; Khalidi 2004). This narrative, with its exceptional protagonist,

carries forth the arro- gance of Emersons and Roosevelts white supremacist accounts and needs to be abandoned.
Instead of accepting the traditional exceptionalist narrative

U.S. philosophers would do better to follow the

example of Du Bois and work from a historical understanding that is more completely rooted in the
factual recorda record that shows gains and losses, winners and losers. Philosophers cannot
further the pursuit of democracy in the United States if we , like Dewey, allow stories of an inevitable
advance of democ- racy to obscure our understanding of historical and contemporary acts of racial

control; slavery, the taking of Mexican territories, and the ex- ploitation of Chinese laborers continue to
undermine democratic possi- bilities in the present. We might better release ourselves from the claim that exceptionalist
narratives make upon us if we compare those stories to the narratives told by groups that suffered acts of colonization .

Du

Bois used the words war, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery to cover the same acts
that Emerson, Roosevelt, and Dewey consid- ered the march of progress .

Bishop Desmond Tutu offers

narratives of reconciliation and national rebuilding following the tragic processes of colonization and apartheid suffered by
Africans in South Africa (Tutu 1999). Wole Soyinka offers narratives of repayment for the centuries of devastation that Africans

have suffered as Europeans preyed upon their continentstealing humans, land, and resources (Soyinka 1988). Shan- non
Sullivan offers us an example of what it takes for a European Amer- ican philosopher to respond meaningfully to such
narratives when she argues that white Americans need to pay reparations to African Ameri- cans partly to repay a debt and
partly so that dominant group members can learn to stop claiming the credit for African American accomplish- ments (Sullivan
2003). European American philosophers could perhaps prepare ourselves to break Deweys silences if we engaged in
dialogue concerning the rela- tive merit of divergent historical narratives. When contemporary philoso- phers are silent
concerning the meaning that imperialist wars have for the nature of U.S. democracy, when we do not consider the role racial
segregation presently plays in limiting civic and economic opportunities for people of color, and when discussions of justice do
not include a con- sideration of the disproportionate incarceration of men of color then we are continuing Deweys tradition of
silence. When Dewey was silent on matters of colonization and lynching, it indicated his inability to under- stand and respond
to such acts in a way that would further the cause of Deweys embrace of silence is a way of declining to identify his own perspective, his personal perspective, on racial injustice. He never took up the burden of explaining, to himself and others,
his connection to white supremacy. And that is a paradigmatically white thing to do. (Tay- lor 2004, 23132, emphasis in
original) Following Taylors analysis, it is the duty of white philosophers to be able to place themselves in relation to the racist
acts of their own group and, when appropriate, to show the nondemocratic aspects of the aggressive acts of white leaders,
citizens, or philosophers.

Millss concept, global white supremacy, is designed to enable theorists to

conceptualize the ways in which macroscopic actions of white control are combined with day-to-day acts of racial solidarity
to maintain

a system of white privilege.

AT: Warming Key

The current ecological crisis is rooted in whiteness and the protections that
exist for white subjects and the vulnerabilities of black subjects. The current
debate totally misses the boat.
DUNAWAY

associate professor of History @ Trent University 2k8

Finis; Gas
Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism, American Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1
Rather than revealing absolute shiftsfrom liberal reform to individual responsibilitythe environmental politics of this period demonstrate instead how these themes
complemented one another. Moral appeals about individual responsibility reinforced the expanding power of the regulatory stateand vice versa. In both

cases,

pollution and other environmental issues were seen as constituting a "crisis," a visible, definable
problem that could be "solved "on the one hand, through changes in individual behavior, and, on the other, through technical fixes
initiated by the federal government .
devoted to

a specific entity

In both cases,

environmentalism was portrayed as a movement

the "environment"and not a broad-based effort to bring about social justice.

Issues of race, class, and power, therefore, had nothing to do with the quest for a cleaner environment .
Neutral experts employed by the environmental policy apparatus, together with individuals engaged in voluntary action around the nation, would participate in a
consensus-building crusade to rid America of pollution.

37

By placing visual images in dialogue with public policy and subaltern perspectives, we can better understand

the limits to American environmentalism as it developed during this period. To be sure, some environmental activists sought to forge connections with other social
struggles, to link their cause to the antiwar movement or to the fight against systematic racism and poverty in the inner cities. For the most part, however,

mainstream environmental organizations adhered to a narrow conception of the "environment."

These groups worried about the presence of lead in the ambient environment and pushed for clear air
measures, to make sure that people like Sarah and Lucy would not have to wear gas masks in the future . Nevertheless,
they did not participate in the contemporaneous struggle against lead poisoning , a debilitating condition
most commonly found in the inner city, among children who [End Page 90] lived in dilapidated housing units with peeling lead paint. Rather than
making connections between this environmental hazard and questions of social justice, rather than forging links with grass roots and community organizations, the major
environmental groups simply ignored it and did not view it as constituting an environmental issue.

38

The mass media, moreover, found no place for African Americans in

the environmental movement. Media coverage of Earth Day described the overwhelming whiteness of the event's participants and implied that pollution was irrelevant to
the plight of minority groups. NBC News interviewed Michael Harris, an African American student at Howard University, who dismissed Earth Day as a "calculated
political move by the established order in this country to divert attention from the pressing problems of black people." Other media reports emphasized similar criticisms
of environmentalism, including the pointed words of Mayor Richard G. Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, who argued that this newfound "concern with environment has done
what George Wallace was unable to do: distract the nation from the human problems of the black and brown American, living in just as much misery as ever."

39

These

comments, much like the demonstration staged against the San Jose State car burial, reveal an important dimension of environmental discourse during this time period.
Earth Day participants, and environmental activists more generally, claimed to speak for the general public and to represent all Americans.

Their vision of

environmentalism imagined the movement as unifying everyone in a common struggle against

pollution. Yet left unspoken, and almost never acknowledged by mainstream groups at the time , was
how their conception of environmentalism obscured divisions among the American population and
elided the ways that economic and racial inequalities influenced the experience of environmental risk .
Even as the media provided some space for criticisms of Earth Day, this same coverage also ignored the efforts of subaltern communities to form an alternative vision of
environmentalism. In St. Louis, for example,

an organization called Black Survival performed a series of skits on Earth

Day dramatizing the environmental problems of the inner city: high rates of air pollution that led to
asthma, emphysema, and other respiratory ailments; inadequate city services, such as infrequent
trash removal that resulted in rat and roach infestations; and a frightening epidemic of lead poisoning
among children in the city's poorest neighborhoods. Black Survival in fact grew out of a larger
campaign against lead poisoning, a struggle coordinated by Ivory Perry, Freddie Mae Brown, and

other civil rights activists in conjunction with scientists based at Barry Commoner's Center for the
Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University . The Earth [End Page 91] Day skits featured poignant moments, including a
father learning that his baby has died of lead poisoning, and voiced radical sentiments, including chants of "Black Power" and "Power to the People." Although
newspapers in St. Louis described these skits and other actions, Black Survival went unmentioned in national media coverage of Earth Day.

40

It is worth asking why this

form of environmental theater did not receive media attention, while white people wearing gas masks or smashing or burying automobiles became central to mainstream
views of the environmental cause. As the growing literature in the field of environmental justice studies demonstrates, subaltern groups did not separate environmental
struggles from the broader quest for social justice. Black Survival's conception of environmentalism thus did not fit within the dominant understanding of the movement
as a cause that voiced the concerns of all Americans and that described its constituency as a classless, undifferentiated group. By enacting their position as an
oppressed segment of the population, by revealing the particular environmental conditions of the inner city, problems, they emphasized, that were located within larger
structures of power, the members of Black Survival posed an important challenge to the self-conception of mainstream environmental organizations.

41

The sociologist

Nathan Hare, writing in Black Scholar during the same month as the Earth Day celebration, reminded readers that the term "'ecology' was derived" from the Greek word
oikos "meaning 'house.'" Environmental activists adopted the language of ecology, but they seemed, Hare suggested, to have forgotten this etymologyor perhaps they
were simply unwilling to concern themselves with the "household and neighborhood environment of blacks." Indeed, mainstream environmental groups did not join in the
struggle against lead poisoning and even refused to define it as an environmental problem. The journalist Jack Newfield, who described lead poisoning as "an
environmental disease of the urban ghettos," suggested why the mass media and mainstream organizations neglected to confront this "silent epidemic." "It seems," he
wrote, "that nothing is real to the media until it reaches the white middle class. . . . Then it is a crisis."

42

The photograph of Sarah and Lucy represented the crisis of air

pollution reaching the middle class, as did the posters that warned of poisoned breast milk. These latter images also became linked to another struggle, one that
suggested the possibility of viable interaction between mainstream and subaltern environmentalisms. In 1969, as the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee
(UFWOC) struggled to get union recognition and bargaining rights for its primarily Latino membership, the group also began to focus on farmworkers' exposure to
pesticides. The UFWOC had earlier called for a grape boycott in order to link consumers to producers and put pressure on growers to accept its demands. As part of this
boycott campaign, the UFWOC began to stress that grapes posed health threats to consumers as well as workers. The UFWOC suggested that all bodies were porous,
that both consumers and workers could suffer from the "economic poisons" sprayed on grapes. In publicizing this dimension of the boycott, the UFWOC emphasized that
nursing mothers could pass pesticides on to their babies. The vulnerable female body again became a central motif in environmental politics.

43

While the grape boycott

signaled a promising collaboration, it also revealed the limitations of mainstream environmentalism. For the most part, these organizations did not give their support to
the UFWOC. Even as mainstream environmental groups called for the banning of pesticides such as DDT, they focused on how these toxic chemicals affected wildlife
populations and did not form alliances with farmworker organizations. The UFWOC viewed its campaign against pesticides as part of a larger struggle against the
inequalities and power relations faced by Latino workers on a daily basis. Mainstream environmental groups did not understand how the pesticide issue was embedded
in these larger, structural frameworks. Moreover, even though the UFWOC played an important role in removing DDT from the fields, the replacements for this pesticide
known as organophosphateswere in fact even more hazardous to workers (although not to wildlife). Nevertheless, mainstream organizations did not view the health
of workers as an environmental issue and so, with few exceptions, did not worry about the dangers of pesticide replacements. As both the lead poisoning and pesticide
issues illustrate, the dominant strand of American environmentalism refused to consider power relationships among different groups of Americans and detached itself
from larger struggles for social justice. By defining environmental problems in a narrow fashion, by focusing on technical solutions, and by refusing to ally itself with other
social movements, the environmental cause became an interest group that seemed to speak primarily for white, privileged Americans.

44

The technical

solutions proposed by environmental groups and policymakers assumed that "everyone breathes the
same air and drinks the same water." As one critic of mainstream environmentalism explained, referencing the widespread use of the gas mask
image: "If air pollution continues to get worse, the rich will produce the gas masks but they will not be the first to have to buy them." Indeed, the
emerged from this period

legislation that

failed to consider how racial and economic inequalities determined rates of

environmental risk. The generalized air and water pollution measures also created other problems: the
proliferation of toxic waste dumps, located primarily in minority communities. "The primary legacy of the environmental
movement and its resulting regulations," the historian Andrew Hurley writes, "was not so much a reduction of industrial waste but a transfer of wastes from water and air
to the land."

Because white privilege was inscribed into the American landscape, these apparently race-

neutral policies in fact only worked to racialize the distribution of environmental risk even further ,
forcing "aggrieved racial minorities,"

as George Lipsitz explains,

to "encounter higher levels of exposure to toxic

substances." To a certain extent, these new policies did help clean up the nation's air and water, but they also

exacerbated environmental inequities by increasing the levels of pollution in minority neighborhoods,

the spaces so often ignored by mainstream environmentalists and hidden from view by media
coverage of the environmental crisis.45

AT: The Block is Not Socially Dead

History is on our side. The death of the black body is a prerequisite for the very existence
of the United States and the concept of the west. No examples of progress can change
that
WILDERSON assistant professor of African American studies and drama @ UC Irvine 2k3 Frank;
Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society? Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2,
2003
What I am saying is that the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing

structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the

modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent) the black
body cannot give its consent because generalised trust, the
precondition for the solicitation of consent, equals racialised
whiteness (Barrett). Furthermore, as Patterson points out, slavery is natal alienation
by way of social death, which is to say that a slave has no symbolic
currency or material labour power to exchange: a slave does not
enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is
subsumed by direct relations of force, which is to say that a slave is
an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an
articulation of a symbolic rationality. White supremacys despotic
irrationality is as foundational to American institutionality as capitalisms
symbolic rationality because, as West writes, it dictates the limits of the operation of
American democracy with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb
vital to its sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the
necessary condition for the flourishing of American democracy, the tragic
prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what Richard Wright meant when he noted,
The Negro is Americas metaphor. (1996, p. 72) And it is well known that a metaphor comes into being
through a violence that kills, rather than merely exploits, the object so
that the concept might live. Wests interventions help us see how marxism can only come
to grips with Americas structuring rationality what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot
come to grips with Americas structuring irrationality: the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and its
hyper-discursive violence that kills the black subject so that the concept, civil society, may live. In

other words, from the incoherence of black death, America

generates the coherence of white life. This is important when considering the
Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of US social movements today) which is so
dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles over hegemony are seldom, if
ever, asignifying at some point they require coherence, they require
categories for the record which means they contain the seeds of antiblackness.

AFF ANSWERS

Identity Politics Doesnt Control the World

The use of identity categories are uniquely problematic and viable solutions become impossible
and an economy of violence is the only end that is possible.
ENNS

Associate Prof of Philosophy & Peace Studies @ Mcmaster University

2k7

Diane;

Political Life Before Identity, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og)
That we need to extricate ourselves not only from the worldview of the perpetrator, but also that of the victim, is the claim I turn to in the remainder of the paper. I will
argue, as Mahmood Mamdani does, that once

an economy of violence has evolved out of a binary logic of victim and

perpetrator, political transformation cannot occur on the basis of identity.5 It is crucial then, that we engage with
those thinkers who attempt to refuse the politicization of identities to begin with -- who articulate a sense of political
life before it becomes named or names itself by identifying with this or that category. Arendt, Agamben and
Fanon give us some clues as to how to reconceive politics and community in radical ways that disrupt the
association between politics and identity, community and the common, sovereign power and mere
existence. Several noteworthy points of resonance can be found especially between Agamben and Fanon; both of whom express an
affirmation of life lived in an altered relation to politics and to other living beings.

Affirming identities in terms of victims and perpetrators good and evil lead to
genocide Rwanda is the key example
ENNS

Associate Prof of Philosophy & Peace Studies @ Mcmaster University

2k7

Diane;

Political Life Before Identity, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og)
In his formidable analysis of the Rwandan genocide, Mahmood Mamdani concludes that political

identities are artifacts. This does not

mean there are not real victims or real perpetrators, but that continuing to act in the name of an identity
once an economy of violence has sprung out of the binary logic of victim and perpetrator , or friend and enemy,
does not enable political transformation, but prevents it . The great crime of colonialism, from this perspective,
went beyond the expropriation of the native; "the greater crime was to politicize indigeneity in the first place ."6 Mamdani includes in this
politicization both the negative libeling of the native by the settler, as well as the positive self-assertion of the native response to this libel, a perspective remarkably
similar, as we shall see, to Fanon's position in Black Skin White Masks. The

1994 genocide in Rwanda -- unprecedented for its massive civilian

participation in the massacre of the Tutsi population -- occurred in the context of a political world set in motion by Belgian colonialism: a
world divided into natives and settlers. The genocide was a natives' genocide , Mamdani argues, a struggle by the majority,
the Hutu, to cleanse the country of a threatening "alien" presence, the minority Tutsi, a group with a privileged relation to power before colonialism. This was a

a violence
therefore that sought to eliminate a foreign presence from home soil . Rather than focusing on the origin of a racial or ethnic
violence not of neighbors against neighbors then, as it is generally portrayed, he contends, but against a population viewed as a foreigner;

difference, the crucial task, according to Mamdani, is to ask when and how Hutu was made into a native identity and Tutsi into a settler identity, and to understand

It is not merely the settler's or perpetrator's worldview

we need to break out of, but that of the victim as well, for they stand or fall together.

how violence is the key to sustaining the relationship between them.7

Politics Comes First

Theorizing about epistemology, ontology, and methodology is useless only
policy discussions will have an impact outside of this debate
Lepgold and Nincic 1

(Joesph, associate professor of Government at Georgetown and Miroslav professor of Poly Sci at UCDavis, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance pg. 6-7)JFS
Unlike literature, pure mathematics, or formal logic, the study of inter- national relations may be valued largely for its practical
implications and insights. SIR, like the major social-science disciplines, initially gained a firm foundation in
academia on the assumption that it contributes to improved policy .9 It is part of
what August Comte believed would constitute a new, positive science of society, one that would supersede the older tradition of
metaphysical speculation about humanity and the social world. Progress toward this end has been

incomplete as well as uneven across the social sciences. But, in virtually all of these fields, it has been driven by more than
just curiosity as an end in itself. Tightening our grip on key social processes via improved understanding has always been a major
incentive for new knowledge in the social sciences, especially in the study of international relations. This broad purpose covers a lot of
specific ground. Policymakers want to know what range of effective choice they

have, the likely international and domestic consequences of various policy decisions,
and perhaps whether, in terms of more general interests and values, contemplated policy objectives are
really desirable, should they be achievable. But the practical implications of international issues
hardly end there. How wars start and end, the causes and implications of economic
interdependence, and what leverage individ- ual states might have on trans-state problems
greatly affects ordinary citizens physical safety, prosperity, and collective identity. Today, it is hard
to think of any major public-policy issue that is not affected by a states or societys
relationships with other international actors. Because the United States looms
so large within the international system, its citizens are sometimes unaware of the range and
impact of international events and processes on their condition. It may take an experience
such as the long gas lines in the 1970s or the foreign-inspired terrorist bombings in the 1990s to remind them how powerfully the outside
world now impinges upon them. As Karl Deutsch observed, even the smallest states can no longer
effectively isolate themselves, and even the largest ones face limits on their ability to change others behavior or
values.11 In a broad sense, globalization means that events in many places will affect peoples investment opportu- nities, the value of
their money, whether they feel that their values are safe or under attack, and perhaps whether they will be safe from attack by weap- ons
of mass destruction or terrorism. These points can be illustrated by observing university undergraduates, who constitute one of the
broadest categories of people who are potentially curious about IR. Unlike doctoral students, they care

much less about po- litical science than about the substance of
politics. What they seem to un- derstand is that the subject matter of SIR, regardless of the level of theoretical abstraction at
which it is discussed, inherently has practical implications. One might argue that whatever our purpose in analyzing IR
might be, we can have little confidence in our knowledge absent tightly developed theory
and rigorous research. One might then infer that a concern with the practical implications of our
knowledge is premature until the field of SIR is better developed on its own terms. But if one assumes that SIR
inherently has significant real-world implications, one could also conclude that the balance in contemporary
scholarship has veered too far from substance and too close to scholasticism. As in other
fields driven by a concern with real-world developments, SIR research has been motivated by both internally- and externally-driven concerns. The former are conceptual, epistemological, and methodological

mat- ters that scholars believe they need to confront to do their intellectual work:
Which research programs are most apt to resolve the fields core puzzles? What is the meaning of contested
concepts? Which empirical evidence or methods are especially useful, convincing, or weak in this field? The latter consist of
issues relevant to policy practitioners and citizens: How can people prepare to
deal with an uncertain future? More specifically, how can they anticipate
future international developments to which they might need to adapt ,
assess the likely consequences of measures to deal with that future, or at least think about such matters intelligently? 12 While the best
scholarly work tends to have important ramifications for both types of concerns, the academic emphasis has

shifted too far toward work with little relevance out- side academia . This
balance must be redressed if SIR is to resonate outside the Ivory Tower.

Stop standing on the sidelines theorizing alone without real practical

solutions makes us all spectators in the world incapable of solving
anything
RORTY

Professor of philosophy @ Stanford

Richard; Achieving our country Pg. 7-9)JFS

1998

Such people

find pride in American citizenship impossible, and vigorous participation in

electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of
atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them
think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf
War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies
after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live
in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy

few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of
contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative
program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and
self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books
like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely
right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transformation would be needed
because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this
rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America
would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual
liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during
the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The
difference between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their

contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the

early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her
country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she
was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer
from politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely
perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with
American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The
kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed , to James,
decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's
picture. "2

Detached theorizing not only trade off but revive the same world that
created the genocidal atrocities of the 20th century
WOLIN

Professor of intellectual history U of NY 2K4

Richard; The
Seduction of Unreason: the intellectual romance with fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, pg. 8-9)JFS
The Seduction of Unreason is an exercise in intellectual

genealogy. It seeks to shed light on

and postmodernism. As such, it may
also be read as an archaeology of postmodern theory. During the 1970s and 1980s a panoply of texts by Derrida,
Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard were translated into English, provoking a farreaching shift in American intellectual life. Many of these texts were inspired by Nietzsches anticivilizational
the uncanny affinities between the Counter-Enlightenment

animus: the conviction that our highest ideals of beauty, morality, and truth were intrinsically nihilistic. Such views found favor among a
generation of academics disillusioned by the political failures of the 1960s. Understandably, in despondent times

Nietzsches iconoclastic recommendation that one should philosophize

with a hammerthat if something is falling, one should give it a final pushfound a ready echo. Yet,
too often, those who rushed to mount the Nietzschean bandwagon downplayed or ignored the illiberal implications of his positions.
Moreover, in retrospect, it seems clear that this same generation, many of whose representatives were comfortably
ensconced in university careers, had merely exchanged

radical politics for textual

politics: unmasking binary oppositions replaced an ethos of active
political engagement. In the last analysis it seems that the seductions of theory helped
redirect formerly robust political energies along the lines of acceptable
academic career tracks. As commentators have often pointed out, during the 1980s, while Republicans
were commandeering the nations political apparatus, partisans of
theory were storming the ramparts of the Modern Language Association and the local English
Department. Ironically, during the same period, the French paradigms that American academics were so busy assimilating
were undergoing an eclipse across the Atlantic. In France they were perceived as expressions of an obsolete political temperament:
gauchisme (leftism) or French philosophy of the 1960s.21 By the mid-1980s French intellectuals had passed through the acid bath
of antitotalitarianism. Under the influence of Solzhenitsyns pathbreaking study of the Gulag as well as the timely, if slick,
anticommunist polemics of the New Philosophers such as Andr Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Lvy, who were appalled by the
killing fields of Pol Pots Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge leader had been educated in Paris during the 1950s) and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, French intellectuals began returning to the indigenous tradition of

democratic republicanismthereby leaving the 1960s leftists holding the bag of an

outmoded philosophical anarchism. The tyrannical excesses of Third WorldismChinas
Cultural Revolution, Castros Cuba, Idi Amins Uganda, Mobutus Zaire, Duvaliers Haitifinally
put paid to the delusion that the wretched of the earth were the
bearers of a future socialist utopia. Suddenly, the nostrums of Western
humanism, which the poststructuralists had emphatically denounced, seemed to merit a second
look.

Social Death Theory is Wrong

Their use of social death and absolute dereliction as epistemological frameworks is
bankrupt and debilitating and doesnt accurately describe black life
MOTEN

Professor of Black Studies and Poetry @ Duke University 2k8

The Case of Blackness, Criticism, Volume 50, Number 2, Spring, Project Muse, Accessed: 11/5/11, OG)

Fred;

So I'm interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what lies between
subjects and objects), the

ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the
Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extrapolitical constanta destructive, healing agent ; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing
lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing
(Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed, the

impure, degraded, manufactured (in) [End Page

who moves only in response to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same
time, this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that this special onticontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon . So that
in contradistinction to Fanon's protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness , to that mode of being
for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its
relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general . Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization
in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not
obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be
understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological , the historical and the essential.
186] human

Indeed, as the ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is now meant by
ontological requires special elucidation. What

is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived

experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of
dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been (toward) the ontic or existential field of
things and events. That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even
as it gathers diaspora as an open setor as an openness disruptive of the very idea of setof
accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that
continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the previous . This is a Nathaniel
Mackey formulation whose full implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanon's pathontological refusal of blackness leaves
unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the
name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced
by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem. As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say,

"Black(ness) is a country" (and a sex) (that is not one). 13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as
surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction.

The fact is that social death cannot explain the nuances of slavery
specifically or black life in general
BROWN

PROF OF history & African American Studies

2k9

(Vincent, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,

http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

But this was not the emphasis of Pattersons argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his exposition of slaveholding
ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved. Seen

as a state of being, the concept of social death is

ultimately out of place in the political history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks
and maneuvers of the enslaved as an important part of that history, scholars would do better to keep in
view the struggle against alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive peril entails a subtle
but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved
Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and
regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a concept depends on what scholars of slavery seek to explainblack pathology or
black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black families took precedence over
discussions of how such families were formed; disputes about whether African culture had survived in the Americas overwhelmed discussions
of how particular practices mediated slaves attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of resistance over the
examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves social and political life grew directly out of the violence and
dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic modes of storytelling,
for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to
make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human
experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to try. If

scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more

than the condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest
and most abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of their social and political lives lies
between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their condition but in their continuous struggles to
remake it. Those struggles are slaverys bequest to us.

People who are socially dead find not value in revolution

-

The very presence of a radical disposition in slave communities shows

that the very idea of social death is false

BROWN

PROF OF history & African American Studies

2k9

(Vincent, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,

http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

African American history has grown from the kinds of peoples histories that emphasize a progressive
struggle toward an ultimate victory over the tyranny of the powerful. Consequently, studies that privilege the
perspectives of the enslaved depend in some measure on the chronicling of heroic achievement, and historians of slave culture and resistance
have recently been accused of romanticizing their subject of study.42 Because these scholars have done so much to enhance our understanding of
slave life beyond what was imaginable a scant few generations ago, the allegation may seem unfair. Nevertheless, some of the criticisms are
helpful. As the historian Walter Johnson has argued, studies

of slavery conducted within the terms of social history have

often taken agency, or the self-willed activity of choice-making subjects, to be their starting point.43 Perhaps it was inevitable,
then, that many historians would find themselves charged with depicting slave communities and cultures that were so resistant and so vibrant that
the social relations of slavery must not have done much damage at all. Even if this particular accusation is a form of caricature, it contains an
important insight, that the

agency of the weak and the power of the strong have too often been viewed as simple
opposites. The anthropologist David Scott is probably correct to suggest that for most scholars, the power of slaveholders and the damage
wrought by slavery have been pictured principally as a negative or limiting force that restricted, blocked, paralyzed, or deformed the
transformative agency of the slave.44 In this sense, scholars who have emphasized slaverys corrosive power and those who stress resistance and
resilience share the same assumption. However, the

violent domination of slavery generated political action; it was not

antithetical to it. If one sees power as productive and the fear of social death not as incapacity but as a generative
forcea peril that motivated enslaved activity a different image of slavery slides into view, one in
which the object of slave politics is not simply the power of slaveholders, but the very terms and
conditions of social existence.

From the ships to the shores black bodies maintained aspects of their
cultural practice and identities aboard slave ships and through other
methods of cultural retentions in the new world this reality disproves
the idea of a social death
BROWN

PROF OF history & African American Studies

2k9

(Vincent, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,

http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

In fact, the funeral was an attempt to withstand the encroachment of oblivion and to make social meaning
from the threat of anomie. As a final rite of passage and a ritual goodbye, the ceremony provided an outlet
for anguish and an opportunity for commiseration. Yet it also allowed the women to publicly contemplate
what it meant to be alive and enslaved. The death rite thus enabled them to express and enact their social
values, to articulate their visions of what it was that bound them together, made individuals among them
unique, and separated this group of people from others . The scene thus typifies the way that people who
have been pronounced socially dead, that is, utterly alienated and with no social ties recognized as
legitimate or binding, have often made a social world out of death itself. The funeral was an act of
accounting, of reckoning, and therefore one among the multitude of acts that made up the political history
of Atlantic slavery. This was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans, but as a
struggle to define a social being that connected the past and present . It could even be said that the event
exemplified a politics of history, which connects the politics of the enslaved to the politics of their descendants.
Although the deaths of slaves could inspire such active and dynamic practices of social reconnection,
scholars in recent years have made too little of events like the funeral aboard the Hudibras and have too
often followed Orlando Pattersons monumental Slavery and Social Death ( 1982) in positing a
metaphorical social death as the basic condition of slavery. In a comparative study of sixty-six
slaveholding societies ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, precolonial Africa, and
Asia, Patterson combined statistical analysis and voluminous research with brilliant theoretical insights
drawn from Marxian theory, symbolic anthropology, law, philosophy, and literature in order to offer what
he called a preliminary definition of slavery on the level of personal relations. Recognizing violence,
violations of personhood, dishonor, and namelessness as the fundamental constituent elements of slavery,
Patterson distilled a transhistorical characterization of slavery as the permanent, violent domination of
natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. In this way the institution of slavery was and is a
relation of domination, in which slaveholders annihilated people socially by first extracting them from
meaningful relationships that defined personal status and belonging, communal memory, and collective
aspiration and then incorporating these socially dead persons into the masters world. As a work of historical
sociology concerned primarily with the comparative analysis of institutions, the book illuminated the dynamics
of a process whereby the desocialized new slave was subsumed within slave society.5