AfroPessimism K

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File
Wilderson file
Misc.
THIS FILE BURNS THE

MOTHERFUCKIN CLUB DOWN!! I
HAVE ANSWERS TO ALMOST
EVERYTHING. THIS SHIT IS
INSANE LIKE A HOMELESS MAN
ON PCP. THIS SHIT IS PYRO LA
FLAME.
-P
a
y
t
o
n
Strategy
- If the proper impact cards are read in the 1nc or block,

this k can non-unique pretty much every impact claim,
global warming the blocks have been hot for years in the
black community, nuke war the govt. has always been at
war w/ the black body, extinction - blacks are already
dead, etc.
- Pretty much any attempts to answer this K can be solved
by whiteness coopts or this is just civil society afraid
to experience the impacts the black body has always been
subject to
- The some of these alts can make for pretty solid
epistemology indicts/impact calc cards
- The links usually have embedded impacts and can add to
impact calc
- Read the K prior stuff if for no other reason than to skew
the 1ar just frame the round as a question of scholarship
and say theirs is bad
- The Kokontis paradigmatic analysis alt is EXPONENTIALLY
better than the Wilderson one so use that one if this is
supposed to be a legitimate 2nr option, if this is just a
time skew, read Wilderson paradigmatic analysis
- With the Wilderson burn it down alt, it talks about how
ethical modernity is impossible/bad, which should help
if you hit an aff that claims to hate the
modernity/society/cap but want it to be ethical you get a
solid link and reason to prefer alt/epist. Indict.
- Another reason why the Kokontis alt is LA FLAME it says
that critiques of the state exclude blacks unless we
include antiblackness in the analysis of the state
- The Farley burn it down alt has perm pre-empts and is a
solvency take-out for K affs, especially ones that use the
state.
Notes/explanation
Fungibility being seen as a commodity

Black body an ontological condition inherent to people of
black skin. But can be accessed by those of non-black skin, i.e.
race is ontological not biological
Ontic the Wilderson version of ontology, essentially the black
body cant be accounted for in humanist understandings of
ontology which means that we need a new word for it, hence,
ontic
Whiteness white norms, i.e. how one acts, speaks, looks, etc.
You can be black and still facilitate whiteness.
Coherence 1. X occurred because something (typically
tangible/material) was to be gained by one group. Wilderson
makes the distinction that violence against blacks is gratuitous
because it lacks material explanation. 2. Exploitation is
contingent on something, there was a direct incentive, i.e.
sweatshops you can hire an American for $9hr. to work in a
factory that costs a lot of money to maintain to safety
standards or a Chinese toddler for $0.50 a day to work in a
factory thats falling apart and is as ventilated as an attic. If
you were in it for a profit motive, you exploit people to make
more money.
Gratuitous Violence for the fuck of it. Absolute dereliction.
People just hate you because youre black. Coherent violence
= getting mugged for money. Gratuitous violence = curb
stomped by a skinhead because of your color.
A few main points Wilderson makes:
1. The Black Body is an ONTOLOGICAL condition. Ontology here
is not in the Heideggerian sense of Dasein, but a social
formation in which Being, as such, is determined by the system
which produces it. Being, then, is defined by the outside. Who
you are, or who you think you are, is irrelevant against the
condition of Blackness. Blackness is the condition of a body
which is labelled as inhuman, uncivilized, etc, and is the figure
by which Civil Society is defined against. This opposition of
Civil Society being everything which is NOT the Black Body is
the way racism perpetuates itself in the status quo, and comes
from a long tradition of slavery.
2. While not all Black Bodies have black skin color, all persons
with black skin color are Black Bodies (again, an Ontological
condition). The reason all blacks have Black Bodies is not a

stupid pun, it is a result of the middle passage. Slaves entered
boats as Africans and left as Blacks - there was a complete
separation from their culture, heritage, and everything they
had grown accustomed to. In that sense, the Black Body (the
westernized ex-slave) has no civil society because "Civil
Society" is literally the society that is defined AGAINST the
slave. The slave is NOT civil, and so a white, "civil society" is
constructed to exclude the Black Body (and requires that body
to exist as a form of juxtaposition, otherwise there is no means
to define what a civil society is).
3. Given the ontological condition of Anti-Blackness, minor
reforms to the system are counter productive. By and large,
they are merely ways to assist the Black Body to play the
White game. It's not about changing the system, it's always
about helping the Black Body ASSIMILATE into society (because
any body which does not assimilate is a priori uncivilized).
Welfare, food stamps, college scholarships, inner-city
transportation: these do not destroy the ontological condition
of blackness, they provide symbolic "outs" so anti-blackness
can continue unabated. These reforms are CRITICAL to antiblackness because they say "look, isn't society getting better
for your kind? Aren't they doing better now?" all while making
a spectacle of the Black Body and simultaneously negating the
criticism of the radical black. Cap debaters will be familiar with
this logic: the more reforms to the system, the less power you
have to overthrow it. As the system is reformed, it still
maintains a particular hierarchy in which there is always a
Black Body, but now those cosmetic changes undercut the
criticism of the radical black. This is seen constantly when
conservatives say "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" and
liberals say "oh wow, these blacks are so articulate". Many
critical affirmatives will follow this pattern of helping the Black
Body assimilate successfully into the system without ever
challenging the system as it is.
4. Given all of this, the only possible alternative is to burn the
world down. Here, the world as we know it is an
EPISTEMOLOGY question: everything we know comes from the
enlightenment metaphysics which was not only silent in the
face of, but also justification for, slavery. That form of
knowledge, the very knowledge which was responsible for the

slave trade, continues on in silence through every form of
knowledge we have. Derrida makes this argument, that all
philosophy still comes from Plato and Socrates and so there is
nothing new to be had. Wilderson believes this applies to
social ontology as informed through a particular epistemology
which inevitably is inextricable from the racism of old.
Everything society has to offer, its every goal and every desire,
is founded on slavery and built on the backs of slaves. This
means the only possible response is to burn it down, a
COMPLETE epistemic break from all we know. This may be
unintelligable, this may be impossible to envision, but so be it.
We may not have an idea of what will come later, but that is
merely an extension of the Black Body being incapable of
explaining its relation to civil society. For civil society to exist,
the Black Body must ALWAYS be unintelligable, and therefore
any alternative which begins from that epistemology will also
be unintelligable. There is no road map, there is no final
solution, there is only a pure negativity and refusal to accept
anything except for burning it all down.
To Do
- Add 2nc tricks

- Write some overviews
- Re-tag the histot
1NC shell
For Friday
Their silence on race is not neutral its rooted in a power

matrix of white supremacy
Crenshaw 97
Carrie, Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, The University of Alabama. Summer 1997. Resisting whiteness' rhetorical silence. Western Journal of
Communication 61.3. PWoods.
In academic and political discourse, it is

rare for white people to
explicitly reference their whiteness.
Public political figures
avoid mentioning whiteness in
their discourse
even though the color of American politics is
implicit in current debates about welfare, affirmative action, crime, and
other issues.
such discourse tends to ignore the ways in which race,
gender, and class intersect with each other to perpetuate oppressive
human hierarchies
Because discursive constructions of
whiteness are typically unmarked and unnamed in personal, academic,
and public discourse, they present a constellation of challenges for
rhetorical scholars who are interested in the ideological role of whiteness
in intersecting discourses about race, gender, and class.
also
The strictures of the "approved identity" in academic writing often prevent us from revealing our personal social
locations and experiences (Blair, Brown and Baxter 402).
likewise
(Nakayama
and
Krizek
297)
a host of
Moreover,
(Crenshaw,
"Beyond";
Lorde).
Previous rhetorical scholarship has focused on racist
public discourse (e.g., Wander, "Salvation"; Wander, "The Savage"; Himelstein; Logue; Logue and Garner; Trank), but Nakayama and Krizek have recently taken our thinking a step further by mapping the terrain of whiteness. In a
provocative study which names whiteness as a strategic rhetoric, they ethnographically "map" the "everyday" strategies of the spoken rhetoric of whiteness from a cultural studies perspective. They are "interested in ... the
constructed space of whiteness, not the ways that it influences the margins" and "do[es] not address racism or racist ideology, although [they acknowledge that] these are closely aligned to many of the ways that whiteness is
constructed" (306n). Their conclusion invites us to move beyond their initial topological project to investigate how the rhetoric of whiteness functions in the context of other social relations, particularly gender (303-305). In this
essay, I accept their invitation and join the ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about whiteness (e.g., Allen; Dutcher; Dyer; Feagin and Vera; Frankenberg; Frye; Harris; hooks, Black; Mcintosh; Nakayama and Krizek; Roediger).
rhetoricians must do
the critical ideological work necessary to make whiteness visible and
overturn its silences for the purpose of resisting racism. To do this,
scholars must locate interactions that implicate unspoken issues of race ,
discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is invoked but its explicit
terminology is not, and investigate how these racialized constructions
intersect with gender and class.
Because whiteness and its intersections with gender and class are steeped in silence (hooks, Black; Mcintosh; Nakayama and Krizek), this essay argues that
One such interaction was the debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun (D-IL) and Jesse Helms (R-NC) over the U.S. Senate's decision
whether to grant a fourteen-year extension of the design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) insignia. Because the UDC insignia contains a representation of the Confederate flag, the debate centered on
whether a Senate approval of the patent would commend a charitable patriotic organization or commemorate an historical symbol of racism. Accounts of this debate were widely disseminated in the national news media and
described Moseley Braun's argument as a dramatic history-making challenge to racism in the U.S. Senate (e.g., Clymer; Lee; McGrory). "For once Senators changed their minds. Things that are usually decided in the cloakroom, were
settled on the floor in plain sight" (McGrory A2). Helms spoke first and Moseley Braun responded. After Helms' second speech, the motion to table the amendment was rejected 52 to 48. However, Moseley Braun was ultimately
victorious; after her final speech, the patent extension was denied on a 75 to 25 vote. / This debate is a uniquely interesting rhetorical artifact because it was a direct and public clash of arguments about race in political discourse. It
constitutes an important example of how two public political actors' discourse about race and how the personal dimensions of race, gender, and class entered into their public argument. In the next section, I argue that ideological
There is nothing essential, "natural,"

or biological about whiteness.
It is the historically located rhetorical meaning
of whiteness that assigns it social worth
Whiteness functions
ideologically when people employ it , consciously or unconsciously, as a
framework to categorize people and understand their social locations .
rhetorical criticism is an appropriate avenue for analyzing interactions like this one. / Ideological Rhetorical Criticism /
Because the overwhelming unity of our genetic makeup swamps any human differences that have historically been attributed to race
(Appiah 21; Shipman 269), race itself has been called a biological fiction (Gates 4).
(Nakayama and Krizek 292). /
Within this
framework, whiteness as a social position has value and has been treated legally as property (Bell; Crenshaw "Race"; Feagin and Vera; Harris). The term "white privilege" denotes a host of material advantages white people enjoy as a
Even though many white people sense

that privilege accompanies whiteness
they do not overtly
acknowledge their white privilege because they think of themselves as
average, morally neutral non-racists. They do not see racism as an
ideology that protects the interests of all white people; rather, they
envision racism in the form of white hooded Klansmen engaged in acts of
racial hatred
Because this ideology can be produced and
reproduced through spoken discourse
whiteness and its privilege
have both ideological and rhetorical dimensions.Ideological rhetorical
criticism reveals the vested interests protected by a particular rhetorical
framework for understanding social order. It assists the search for
alternatives to oppression and enables us to engage in right action for
good reasons
result of being socially and rhetorically located as a white person (Crenshaw, "Race"; Mcintosh; Wellman).
(Feagin
(Mcintosh
34;
Ezekiel
and
Vera),
1).
(van Dijk; Goldberg),
(Wander, "The Ideological" 2, 18). While cultural and ethnographic approaches that name the complexities of our racialized social locations make the rhetoric of whiteness visible and

an ideological approach helps to uncover the alliance
between the submerged or silent rhetoric of whiteness and white material
privilege. Ideological rhetorical criticism reveals how the public political
rhetoric of whiteness relies upon a silent denial of white privilege to
rationalize judicial, legislative, and executive decisions that protect the
material interests of white people at the expense of people of color .
Beyond the realm of "everyday" discourse, public political actors often
engage a submerged or silent rhetoric of whiteness to protect white
privilege, and their arguments are authorized by the powerful institutions
from which they speak. Those authorized arguments in turn sanction the
rhetorical frameworks through which white individuals make sense of and
justify their privileged social status
displace
its
centrality
(Nakayama
and
Krizek),
3]
(van Dijk; Wellman). / Stuart Hall's work is useful for grasping the rhetorical nature of ideology in general and racist
ideologies in specific. He defines ideology as "those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and 'make sense' of some aspect of social existence" ("The
Ideological struggles are struggles over meaning. Meaning is a social

production, a practice of making the world mean something, and this
meaning is produced through language.
language is the principle medium of ideologies, and ideologies are
sets or chains of meaning located in language
These chains
of meaning are not the products of individual intention even though they
are statements made by individuals. Instead, intentions are formed within
pre-existing ideologies because individuals are born into them. Ideologies
live within what we take-for-granted. They exist in our assumptions and
descriptive statements about how the world is. "Ideologies tend to
disappear from view into the taken-for-granted 'naturalised' world of
common sense. Since (like gender) race appears to be 'given' by Nature,
racism is one of the most profoundly 'naturalised' of existing ideologies "
Whites" 18).
Language is not a synonym for ideology because the same terms can be used in very different ideological
discourses. However,
("The Rediscovery" 67, 81; "The Whites" 18). /
(Hall,
"The Whites" 19). / To understand how racist ideologies operate, Hall draws upon the work of Antonio Gramsci. While Gramsci did not explicitly theorize about race, he did investigate the ideological and cultural implications of region
ideologies function hegemonically to preserve powerful

interests.
ideologies are taken-for-granted frameworks that naturalize
our descriptions of the way the world is, including its current power
structures. This power is not achieved solely by coercive might; it also
operates through the consent of those who are subjugated. Hegemony is
the production of consent that determines what is taken-for-granted. So,
our taken-for-granted, naturalized assumptions of what makes common
sense produce and reinforce our consent to the current social order and
its power structures.
hegemony is
historically contingent. Because hegemony is never stable and is always an
ongoing and fluid process of gaining consent, social transformation
through the critical examination of current relations of power is possible.
and nation. Hall embraces Gramsci's argument that
That is to say,
The advantage of Gramsci's position is that it makes room for an oppositional consciousness because it recognizes that
Following Gramsci, Hall also believes that it is essential to analyze the historical specificity of racist ideologies in a non-reductive manner. He rejects the gross form of economism in which everything is seen to be determined by class
structures, and instead he highlights the need to understand and conceptualize other oppressive forms of social differentiation including culture, region, nationality, and ethnicity. Doing so enables a productive reconceptualization of
the "class subject." The class subject is not homogenous; there is never simple unity among people said to be of the same "class." Rather, hegemony is a dynamic process of the production of consent within and between different
sectors and segments within classes. Thus, Gramsci's work can help us to understand how race and class intersect. We need not accept the false choice between class based explanations and race based explanations. In addition,
Hall argues that Gramsci's notion of hegemony helps us to understand one of the most common, least explained features of 'racism': the 'subjection' of the victims of racism to the mystifications of the very racist ideologies which
imprison and define them. He reveals how different, often contradictory elements can be woven into and integrated within different ideological discourses; but also, the nature and value of ideological struggle which seeks to
A
critical ideological approach to racialized discourse reveals the ongoing
struggle over the meaning of race. It makes room for oppositional
consciousness by helping us to "see" the meaning of racialized
constructions and the vested interests they protect so that we can contest
them. In addition
it enables our understanding of the
intersections among racialized, gendered, and class discourses.
transform popular ideas and the 'common sense' of the masses. All of this has the most profound importance for the analysis of racist ideologies and for the centrality, within that, of ideological struggle. ("Gramsci's" 440) /
, as the following analysis of the Braun-Helms debate illustrates,
Their doomsday scenarios separate the question of apocalyptic

violence from racial justice, ignoring that THE WORLD HAS
ALREADY ENDED for people of color and that their focus on

mere survivability elides the nuclear war waged on a daily
basis against blacks
Omolade 1984,
Barbara, Calvin College first dean of multicultural affairs, Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust, Womens Studies Quarterly vol. 12, No. 2
the movement for nuclear disarmament must overcome its reluctance
to speak in terms of power, of institutional racism, and imperialist
military terror. The issues of nuclear disarmament and peace have
been mystified because they have been placed within a doomsday
frame which separates these issues from other ones, saying, "How can we talk about struggles
against racism, poverty, and exploitation when there will be no
world after they drop the bombs?" The struggle for peace cannot be
separated from, nor considered more sacrosanct than, other
struggles concerned with human life and change. In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a
general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet
Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African people who died between 1492
and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The
same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban
housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as
well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of
color the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for
example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of color
throughout the world's urban areas is already blighted and
inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For
people of color, the world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its
own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to see with
increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for
it, and rebuild it in our, own image. The "death culture" we live in
has convinced many to be more concerned with death than with life,
more willing to demonstrate for "survival at any cost" than to
struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to
the daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear
holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs,
our housing, our schools, our families, and our lands.As women of color, we are warriors, not
pacifists. We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die
as a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba, in Guinea- Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and in
countless daily encounters with land- lords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions,
but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and
to provide for the future of our people.
To raise these issues effectively,
IR is a product of whiteness it ignores history, lacks

specificity or context and acts only to preserve state
sovereignty
Krishna 9
Sankaran, teaches international relations and comparative politics as the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, HI. His most recent book is Globalization and
Postcolonialism: hegemony and resistance in the 21st century. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). PWoods.
Yet, after two world wars, the rising tide of anti-colonial nationalism

across three continents (Asia, Africa and Latin America), and the growing
refusal of those who were the objects of its inquiry to recognize
themselves in its descriptions, a decolonized Anthropology could no longer
be delayed, even as significant numbers of scholars resisted such an
effort. One could chart a similar trajectory with varying degree of
success- in disciplines such as History, Sociology, Political Science,
Economics and others
The realization that power and knowledge
were inextricably intertwined, and that western descriptions of the nonwest were never innocent of their own political, economic and other
interests
worked their way towards a still incomplete and ongoing
process of decolonization
the discipline of International
Relations (IR) has been extraordinarily resistant to a decolonizing impulse .
IR emerged within the United States, a society that is ferociously
amnesiac about its own (domestic) history as a settler-colony and an
(external) history as a colonizer in Latin America, the Pacific Islands, the
Far East, etc. The US has instead emphasized its post-colonial status in
that it broke away from Britain
and
supported decolonization
This assiduous forgetting of the genocide (of
Native Americans) and slavery (of Africans exported to the New World)
central to the founding of the United States has carried over into the
quintessentially American discipline of IR which often talks of the relations
between nations as if they were ahistorical entities which suddenly
emerged all identical and sovereign- sometime in the middle of the 20th
century.
IR has always focused on explaining the
conditions that lead to war and ways to prevent it. This has produced an
obsession with issues of national security, and especially of the need to
avoid irresponsible policy or idealism that could lower ones guard and
create the conditions for war. Historical issues such as colonialism were
deemed less relevant and priority accorded to a presentism that
continuously focused on threats to national security and opportunities to
enhance national interests.
governed by a
methodological nationalism that it is designed at every turn to avert all
threats to statist sovereignty.
IR has sought to construct itself in the
image of a scientific discipline, one that aims to uncover the invariant laws
that govern relations between nations. This emphasis on achieving a
universal science applicable in all situations has meant that IR has a
strong preference for abstract theory at the expense of historical contexts
and specificity.
as the 20th century unfolded.
in those spaces, gradually
of these disciplines. For a variety of reasons,
Firstly,
in the late 18th century
(intermittently)
the
efforts of third world countries seeking independence from England, France or Japan.
Second, emerging as it did in the interregnum between two horrific world wars,
In other words, IR discourse is predominantly a prose of counter-insurgency: it is
And thirdly,
Whiteness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the

power relations established during colonialism are everpresent today and make possible the sovereign right to kill
Mbembe 3
Achille, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Necropolitics. 2003. Pgs. 6-22.
PWoods.
race
figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is
entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking
race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought
and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or
rule over, foreign peoples
the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death
racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of
That
(or for that matter racism)
(the ideology that defines history as an economic
struggle of classes),
. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness
and suggests that

Foucaults terms,
.18 Indeed, in

biopower, that old sovereign right of death. In the economy of biopower,
the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make
possible the murderous functions of the state.
the sovereign right to kill
and the mechanisms of biopower are
inscribed in the way all modern states function; indeed, they can be seen
as constitutive elements of state power in modernity .
the Nazi
state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to
kill. This state,
made the management, protection, and cultivation of
life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation
on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its
adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the
Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation
of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the final solution.
it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the
characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal
state.
slavery
one of the first instances of
biopolitical experimentation
the very structure of the plantation
system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure
of the state of exception
in the context of the plantation,
the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow
the
slave condition results from
loss of a home
rights over his or her
body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute
domination, natal alienation, and social death
The
extreme patterns of communication defined by the institution of
plantation slavery dictate that we recognize the anti-discursive and
extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative
acts. There may, after all, be no reciprocity on the plantation outside of
the possibilities of rebellion and suicide, flight and silent mourning, and
there is certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate
communicative reason.
As an instrument of labor,
the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or her labor
is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of
injury, in a phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity.
The violent tenor of the slaves life is manifested through the overseers
disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner and in the
spectacle of pain inflicted on the slaves body.
Slave life
is a form of death-in-life.
the slave condition produces a contradiction between freedom of
property and freedom of person. An unequal relationship is established
along with the inequality of the power over life. This power over the life of
another takes the form of commerce: a persons humanity is dissolved to
the point where it becomes possible to say that the slaves life is
possessed by the master.
it is notably in the colony and under
the apartheid regime that there comes into being a peculiar terror
formation I will now turn to. The most original feature of this terror
formation is its concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the
state of siege. Crucial to this concatenation is, once again, race
the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced
It is, he says, the condition for the acceptability of putting to death. Foucault states
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
According to Foucault,
he claims,
In
doing so,
Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address
, which could be considered
. In many respects,
. This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of
(expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the
plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought. As Paul Gilroy says,
In many respects, the plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.31
Violence, here, becomes an element in manners, like whipping or taking of the slaves
life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror.
, in many ways,
As Susan Buck- Morss has
suggested,
Because the slaves life is like a thing, possessed by another person, the slave existence appears as a perfect figure of a shadow. If the relations
between life and death, the politics of cruelty, and the symbolics of profanity are blurred in the plantation system,
. In fact, in most instances,

sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find
their first testing ground in the colonial world. Here we see the first
syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of
Western rationality.
Arendt develops the thesis that there is a link between national-socialism and traditional imperialism. According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a potential for
violence previously unknown. What one witnesses in World War II is the extension to the civilized peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the savages.
The alternative is to reject the affirmative as an act of burning

down the civil society that produces violence against the slave.
Freedom is an illusion created by the shackles of civil society,
and abandoning the pursuit for equality is the only way to
break down the way that whiteness maintains itself.
Farley 5 Boston College [gender-modified words denoted by brackets]
(Anthony, Perfecting Slavery,
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1028&context=lsfp, dml)
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-overblack. 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 Haiti. 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 colorline continues to belt the world.

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 . VIII. TRAINING We begin as children.
the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline.
Indeed,
We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves
The slaves are

called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling . The slave,
are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become.
then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The
The slaves begin as death,

not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no
slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die.
progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems.
We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest
narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from
slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite
The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the

end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions
direction of the pastpresent-future timeline.

of freedom , of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by
freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for
equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system of law is a
plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system,
hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself
as a slave through its prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and
the slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave
finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning
down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to
not be. 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
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
pursue a calling.
must become death . Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black,

death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is
not a calling.
Generic Short
State action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness
worse - erases the exploitation of the black body
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and
Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African
National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANCs armed wing, 2010
(Frank B. III Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics Red, White, & Black: Cinema
and the Strucure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16) GG
Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims
successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I
insist on positing an operational analyticfor cinema, film studies, and
political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist
pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of
todays Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of
Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions bydemonstrating
how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the
State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black
President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated
and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV
infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls
still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically
based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would
find ourselves on solid ground, which would only mystify, rather
than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to facts,
the historical record, and empirical markers of stasis and change,
all of which could be turned on their head with more of the
same.Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political
science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric
that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as
exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby
subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between
those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua
the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological
grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why
work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once
the solid plank of work is removed from slavery, then the

conceptually coherent notion of claims against the statethe
proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to
even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the
Black positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state
and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no
slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the
world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of
suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a
positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and
renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow
from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous
violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations
that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our
analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or
reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and
until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The
onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one
who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How,
when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia
University awaits an answer.
The world writ large and civil society are preconditioned on the
destruction of the black positionality
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., The Prison Slave as
Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12,
MR)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it
essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or
speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the
other way around: There is something organic to civil society that
makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is
a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the
face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be
established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot
become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black
citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.
Addressing Anti-Blackness is a prioirity scandalizes ethicality

and sets the stage for all violence
(Frank B. III Chapter One: The Ruse of Analogy Red, White, & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of
ethical dilemmas-- simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.This, I
submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position:
ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other
tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the
Black: I am, Fanon writes, a slave not of an idea others have of me
but of my own appearance. Being can thus be thought of, in the
first ontological instance, asnon-niggerness; and slavery then as
niggerness. The visual field, my own appearance, is the cut, the
mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness
and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead.Whereas
Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become
existentially present through some struggle for/of/through
recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition(West 82).
Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned
and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is
without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The
violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does
not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of
oppression, like the little family quarrels which for Fanon exemplify the
Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Blacks first
ontological instance, the Middle Passage, wiped out [his/her] metaphysics
his [her] customs and sources on which they are based (BSWM 110). Jews
went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the
latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it
makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the
Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.
This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally
and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it
positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying

and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say
fungible) for any subject. As such, the black has no ontological
resistance in the eyes of the white man (110) or, more precisely, in
the eyes of Humanity
The alternative is to reject the affirmative and reorient

ourselves towards the world through an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis
Wilderson 10 [Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former
ANC member, on some guerilla shit, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages ix-x, OG]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During
the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both
an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist
Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I
began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is
to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing
order.The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the
Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in
large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates'
feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of
attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put,
we abdicated the power to pose the questionand the power to
pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have
written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile
and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this
book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates
that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a
place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and
irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity
and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa
Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan
Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner,
Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu
Zulu
(

THE ALTERNATIVE- IS TO REFUSE TO AFFIRM. EACH AND EVERY
AFFIRMATION ONLY GIVES CIVIL SOCIETY MORE COHERENCE. REJECT
THIS SHALLOW REFORMISM IN FAVOR OF AN ENDLESS ANTAGONISM
THAT REFLECTS THE POSITIONALITY OF THE BLACK.)
order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the
Zulu
Generic Long
1. State action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness
worse - erases the exploitation of the black body

2. The promotion of civil society and institutional ethics

creates a state of emergency
MR)
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to
civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only
in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of
Black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best,
limnitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to
follow Fanon's analysis, and the gestures toward this understanding in some
of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips
with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself- rather than
its abuses or shortcomings - is a state of emergency. For Fanon, civil
society is predicated on the Manicheasm of divided zones, opposed
to each other "but not in service of a higher unity" (Fanon, 1968: 38-

39). This is the basis of his later assertion that the two zones produce
two different "species," between which "no conciliation is possible"
(Ibid.). The phrase "not in service of a higher unity" dismisses any
kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis. In "The AvantGarde of White Supremacy," Martinot and Sexton assert the primacy
of Fanon's Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity),
even in the face of American integration facticity. Fanon's specific
colonial context does not share Martinot and Sexton's historical or
national context. Common to both texts, however, is the settler/native
dynamic, the differential zoning, and the gratuity (as opposed to the
contingency) of violence that accrues to the blackened position. The
dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and
its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical;
the two are incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak
about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into a discussion
of particular events - high-profile homicides and their related
courtroom battles, for instance (Martinot and Sexton, 2002: 6; emphasis
added).
3. The world writ large and civil society are preconditioned

on the destruction of those in the black positionality
MR)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it
essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or
speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the
other way around: There is something organic to civil society that
makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is
a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the
face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be
established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot
become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black
citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.
4. Addressing Anti-Blackness outweighs scandalizes

ethicality and sets the stage for all violnece
Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of
ethical dilemmas-- simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.This, I
submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position:
ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other
tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the
Black: I am, Fanon writes, a slave not of an idea others have of me
but of my own appearance. Being can thus be thought of, in the
first ontological instance, asnon-niggerness; and slavery then as
niggerness. The visual field, my own appearance, is the cut, the
mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness
and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead.Whereas
Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become
existentially present through some struggle for/of/through
recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition(West 82).

Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned
and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is
without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The
violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does
not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of
oppression, like the little family quarrels which for Fanon exemplify the
Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Blacks first
ontological instance, the Middle Passage, wiped out [his/her] metaphysics
his [her] customs and sources on which they are based (BSWM 110). Jews
went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the
latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it
makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the
Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.
This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally
and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it
positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying
and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say
fungible) for any subject. As such, the black has no ontological
resistance in the eyes of the white man (110) or, more precisely, in
the eyes of Humanity
THE ALTERNATIVE- IS TO REFUSE TO AFFIRM. EACH AND EVERY
AFFIRMATION ONLY GIVES CIVIL SOCIETY MORE COHERENCE. REJECT
THIS SHALLOW REFORMISM IN FAVOR OF AN ENDLESS ANTAGONISM
THAT REFLECTS THE POSITIONALITY OF THE BLACK.
order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the

Zulu
Perm doesnt solve Policing/Settler societies always allow for the
black body to be a magnet for gratuitous violence
MR)
It makes no difference that in the U.S. the "casbah" and the "European" zone
are laid one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an
isomorphic schematic relation - the schematic interchangeability between Fanon' s settler society and Martinot and Sexton's policing
paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier(not the
discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one town
white and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean
delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing
that (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil
society/Black world, by virtue of the difference between those
bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those thatdo. "Police
impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere
that mandates it...the distinction between those whose human being is put
permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying" (Ibid.:
8). In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the
face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or
not.Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely
"represented" as some monumentalized coherence of phallic
signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of
contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their
construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is
manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against
those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply
"protected" by the police, they are - in their very corporeality - the
police. This ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of
Black people accounts for Fanon's materiality, and Martinot and
Sexton's Manichean delirium in America. What remains to be addressed,
however, is the way in which the political contestation between civil society's

junior partners (i.e., workers, white women, and immigrants), on the one
hand, and white supremacist institutionality, on the other hand, is produced
by, and reproductive of, a supplemental anti-Blackness. Put another way:
How is the production and accumulation of junior partner social capital
dependent upon on an anti-Black rhetorical structure and a decomposed
Black body?
1NC vs K AFF
Hegemony
The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of

the Slave and the Savage, the demand for the end of America
itself. This cry, born out of the belly of slave ships and the
churning vertigo of constitutive genocide, exposes the
grammar of the Affirmatives calls for larger institutional
access as a fundamental fortification of White Settler and
Slave Master civil society by its diversionary focus on the
ethicality of the policies and practices of the United States as
opposed to the a priori question its very existence. This silence
of the Affirmatives assumptive logic renders them
unaccountable to the revolutionary political ontology of
Redness and Blackness and thereby sets the stage for the
various dramas of conflictual relationships i.e. class struggle,
gender conflict, immigrants rights, etc. that are made possible
by the antagonism between Settler and Savage, Master and
Slave.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said,
Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 1-5]
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 didn't wink back. Some
of us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning
ethos of multicultural-ism and "rainbow coalitions." 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 precise, though
largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides,
people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California
at 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 they could settle the "Land Lease
Accounts" that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was
"crazy." Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, 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 it is the only ethical grammar available to modern
politics and modernity writ large, for it draws our attention not to how space
and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful
interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world's 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 on 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 but 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 two things. On the one hand was 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,"1
the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted from labor
power through commodity production and sale). On the other was 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 worldnot 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? "He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any money out of us"? Surely,
that doesn't 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 cinematicallyunless
they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle
Island back to the "Savage." Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sentences, fourteen 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, such as class
struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants' rights. One cannot but wonder
why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of
political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political
broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly
they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose
no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also
clearif the filmogra-phies of socially and politically engaged directors, the
archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are
anything to go byis that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years
and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two
simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker "crazy"
but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years
since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature
films began to speak the unspeakable.2 In the 1960s and early 1970s the
questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not Should the
United States be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but when and
howand, for some, what would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their
conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the United
States writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther

King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of Students for
Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to Bobby Kennedy Democrats)
were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic
Zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the
Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or
chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and
the possibility of "success," but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic
because they could not make a convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic
analysisthat the United States was an ethical formation and still hope to
maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (as a
U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical
standing in the presence of Blacks.3 One could (and many did) acknowledge
America's strength and power. This seldom rose to the level of an ethical
assessment, however, remaining instead an assessment of the "balance of
forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians,
circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics credibly. The raw
force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible
hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness
and Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose the question is the
greatest power of allretreated as did White radicals and progressives who
"retired" from the struggle. The question lies buried in the graves of young
Black Panthers, AIM warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison
cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary
confinement) for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and at the gates of the
academy where the "crazies" shout at passersby. Gone are not only the
young and vibrant voices that effected a seismic shift on the political
landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a
spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed
revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is it still
possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the
Slave estate's4 destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic
discourse when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political
discourse in the streets or of intellectual discourse in the academy? The
answer is "no" in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be
articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in
screenplays and in scholarly prose, but "yes" in the sense that in even the
most taciturn historical moments, such as ours, the grammar of Black and
Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance
of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as a
symptom of awareness of the structural antagonisms. The election of
President Barack Obama does not mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn
historical moment. Neoliberalism with a Black face is neither the index of a
revolutionary advance nor the end of anti-Blackness as a constituent element
of U.S. antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama enables a plethora of
shaming discourses in response to revolutionary politics and "legitimates"

widespread disavowal of any notion that the United States itself, and not
merely its policies and practices, is unethical. Between 1967 and 1980, we
could think cinemati-cally and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as
having the coherence of full-blown discourses. From 1980 to the present,
however, Blackness and Redness manifest only in the rebar of cinematic and
intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This
grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera
angles, image composition, and acoustic design), even when the script
labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of
conflict (i.e., a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved)
as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between
entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the
obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate
a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the
script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or
the absence of "family values"), the nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies of
the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of
Red and Black political ontologyor nonontology. The grammar of
antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics
teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is
assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.5
Likewise, the grammar of political ethics the grammar of assumptions
regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich underwrites film theory and
political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to
radical action), and which underwrites cinematic speech (in this book, Red,
White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken.
This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an
ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And this structure of suffering
crowds out others, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of
unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on
it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then
conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists
themselves may not be aware of the ontological position from which they
speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim
of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature
films and political theory that follows.
While the afterlife of slavery is far from an abstraction in the

lived reality of blackness, recourse to the sociological empirics
of suffering already codifies the category of exploitation as
the base grammar of suffering, ignoring the gratuitousness of
anti-black violence and enshrining the call for more public
policy as the limit point of our revolutionary demands. This
elides the way in which civil society is parasitic on The Middle
Passage and thus how Humanity itself can only be constituted
in opposition to the fundamentally anti-Human position of the
slave. It is this libidinal economy of anti-blackness which exists
as the condition of possibility for the violence of the world.
Wilderson 2010
[Frank B., again, dude straight up MURKED white supremacists like buk buk, Red, White &
Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 10-11]
Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the
state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for
cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and
essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of
today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the
exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by
demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state
has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police
brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing,
astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the
polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life . But such empirically based rejoinders
would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would
only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the
"historical record," and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned
on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology,
political science, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling
into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the
assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between
those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker.
Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in

Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or
forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of
"work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against
the state"the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even
contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position disintegrates
into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle
Passage. Put another way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson
argues, no slave is in the world.

If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not
a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and
renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson,
generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship
structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside
of re-lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric

of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless
and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus
is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a
distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split
occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
US hegemony is just the racial violence of America gone global

aff claims to benevolent control are symptoms of white
privilege
Rodriguez 07 [Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of
California Berkeley and Associate Proffessor of Ethnic Studies at University of
California Riverside, American Globality And the US Prison regime: State
Violence And White Supremacy from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to bagong
diwa, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048]
In fact, the notion of American globality I have begun discussing here already
exceeds negri and Hardts formulation to the extent that it is a global racial formation,
and more pointedly a global mobilization of a white supremacist social formation (read: a
united States of America formed by the social-economic geographies of
racial chattel slavery and their recodification through the post-13th
Amendment innovation of other technologies of criminalization and
imprisonment). The US prison regimes production of human immobilization and
death composes some of the fundamental modalities of American national coherence. It
inscribes two forms of domination that tend to slip from the attention of political
theorists, including Negri and Hardt: first, the prison regime strategically
institutionalizes the biopolitical structures of white racial/nationalist ascendancyit quite
concretely provides a definition for white American personhood, citizenship, freedom, and
racialized patriotism. Second, the prison regime reflects the moral, spiritual, and cultural
inscription of Manifest Destiny (and its descendant material cultural and state-building
articulations of racist and white supremacist conquest, genocide, and population control)
across different historical moments. to invoke and critically rearticulate negri and
Hardts formulation, the focal question becomes: How does the right of the uS-asglobal police to kill, detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally
recoded? the structure of presumptionand therefore relative political silenceenmeshing
the prisons centrality to the logic of American globality is precisely evidence of the
fundamental power of the uS prison regime within the larger schema of American
hegemony. In this sense the uS prison regime is ultimately really not an
institution. rather it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and

perpetual labor of institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist
institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of
human immobilization address (while never fully resolving) the socio-political
crises of globalization. The US prison regime defines a global logic of social
organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various
localities. What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white
supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the
self-contained means of American globality? I am suggesting a conception of
the prison regime that focuses on what cultural and political theorist Allen

Feldman calls a formation of violence, which anchors the contemporary
articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of coercion and
hegemony. Feldman writes, the growing autonomy of violence as a selflegitimating sphere of social discourse and transaction points to the inability
of any sphere of social practice to totalize society. Violence itself both reflects and
accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as something to be made. As

a formation of violence that self-perpetuates a peculiar social project through the discursive
structures of warfare, the US prison regime composes an acute formation of racial and white
supremacist violence, and thus houses the capacity for mobilization of an
epochal (and peculiar) white supremacist global logic. This contention should
not be confused with the sometimes parochial (if not politically chauvinistic)
proposition that American state and state-sanctioned regimes of bodily
violence and human immobilization are somehow self-contained domestic
productions that are exceptional to the united States of America, and that
other global sites simply import, imitate, or reenact these
institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the opposite: the US
prison regime exceeds as it enmeshes the ensemble of social relations that cohere uS civil
society, and is fundamental to the geographic transformations, institutional vicissitudes, and
militarized/economic mobilizations of globalization generally. to assert this, however,
is to also argue that the constituting violence of the US prison regime has
remained somewhat undertheorized and objectified in the overlapping
realms of public discourse, activist mobilization, and (grassroots as well as
professional) scholarly praxis.
Here I am arguing that it is not possible to conceptualize and critically address the
emergence and global proliferation of the (uS/global) prison industrial complex outside a
fundamental understanding of what are literally its technical and technological premises :
namely, its complex organization and creative production of racist and white supremacist
bodily violence. It is only in this context, I would say, that we can examine the
problem of how the Prison is a modality (and not just a reified product or
outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment. It is only a
theoretical foregrounding of the white supremacist state and social formation
of the united States that will allow us to understand the uS prison regime as
an American globality that materializes as it prototypes state violence and
for that matter, state power itself through a specific institutional site.
Vote neg freedom is an illusion created by the shackles of

civil society, we must burn the 1AC to the ground
What is to be done? Two hundred
necessity, burned everything:
years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of
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 [person] has a right to dispose of his

[their] 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-overblack. 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 Haiti. 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.
VIII. TRAINING
We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call.
Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the brokenhearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves
are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called
upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its
loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves
are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are
called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart
and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is not a beginning but
an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the
slave, or so it seems.
narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress
from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black to
white-over-black to white-overblack.
The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresentfuture timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline,
only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions of
freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely
choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by
offering a prayer for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The
system of property is a plantation. The system of law is a plantation. These
plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-overblack only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its
prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the
slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way
back from the undiscovered country only by burning down every plantation. When the

slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes
the free choice to not be.
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. Whiteover-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to
pursue its calling that is not a calling.
Life will not change for the better absent an assault on the
establishment. That doesnt mean we will live to enjoy the
fruits of the revolution but it DOES mean that we should
pursue revolutionary suicide because death is inevitable and
this is the only one worth pursuing.
Huey P. Newton 1973, Co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Revolutionary
Suicide, pages 2-6
Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and degrading, is a spiritual
death that has been the experience of millions of Black people in the United States . This
death is found everywhere today in the Black community. Its victims have ceased to fight
the forms of oppression that drink their blood. The common attitude has long been:
Whats the use? If a man rises up against a power as great as the United States, he will
not survive. Believing this, many Blacks have been driven to a death of the spirit rather than
of the flesh, lapsing into lives of quite desperation. Yet all the while, in the heart of
every Black, there is the hope that life will somehow change in the future. I do
not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment [The
power structure, based on the economic infrastructure, propped up and reinforced by the
media and all the secondary educational and cultural institutions.], which goes on exploiting
the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of
revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose forces that would drive me to selfmurder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least
the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is
important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real
understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are allBlack and white alikeill in the
same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope
and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning
reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect. Revolutionary
suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the
opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence
without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move
against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out

with a stick. Che Guevara said that to a revolutionary death is the reality and
victory the dream. Because the revolutionary lives so dangerously, his
survival is a miracle. Bakunin, who spoke for the most militant wing of the
First International, made a similar statement in his Revolutionary Catechism.
To him, the first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he
understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. When
Fidel Castro and his small band were in Mexico preparing for the Cuban
Revolution, many of the comrades had little understanding of Bakunins rule.
A few hours before they set sail, Fidel went from man to man asking who
should be notified in case of death. Only then did the deadly seriousness of
the revolution hit home. Their struggle was no longer romantic. The scene
had been exciting and animated but when the simple, overwhelming
question of death arose everyone fell silent. Many so-called revolutionaries in this
country, black and white, are not prepared to accept this reality. The Black Panthers are not
suicidal; neither do we romanticize the consequences of revolution in our lifetime . Other socalled revolutionaries cling to an illusion that they might have their revolution and die of old
age. That cannot be. I do not expect to live through our revolution, and most
serious comrades probably share my realism. Therefore, the expression

revolution in our lifetime means something different to me than it does to
other people who sue it. I think the revolution will grow in my lifetimes, but I do not
expect to enjoy its fruits. That would be a contradiction. The reality will be
grimmer.
If our alternative leads to violent revolution, that most

definitely solves
George Jackson1972, Revolutionary, Blood in My Eye, pages 59-62
The enemy culture, the established government, exists first of
govern, to maintain enough order to ensure that a cycle
all because of its ability to

of sorts exists between
the various levels and elements of the society. Law and Order is their
objective. Ours is Perfect Disorder. Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy
culture and replace it with our own revolutionary culture . This can be done only by creating
perfect disorder within the cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own
revolutionary culture.
When the fight takes place within the cities, the disorder will clearly be
hastenedthis will have an immediate effect on the consciousness of the
bulk of the population and will strain the relationship between government
and governed to the utmost.
If the life of the manufacturing city is to be stopped, it is clear that the normal
processes, at least, will be slowed by a convoy of establishment trucks, tanks or troops
simply moving in the citys arteries where commercial convoys should be moving.
The necessary checkpoints will further slow it. Each one of the oppositions own
tank shells that is fired inside the manufacturing city at the elusive guerilla will
destroy some aspect of that factory-city and undercut the ability of the
establishment to produce another tank shell. It will not help the fascist cause very
much at all when the armed personnel carrier or jeep patrol equipped with

30-caliber machine guns fires into a downtown shopping crowd at the elusive
guerilla who has taken refuge among them. The people just will not
understand.
The cities of fascist U.S.A.built straight up and with very little real planning or
pattern, the twisting side streets, gangways connecting roofs, manholes,
storm drain, concrete and steel treeswill hide a guerilla army just as effectively as
any forest. There is the added advantage that just being in an area doesnt
automatically make one suspect and fair game, as is the case when an
establishment army unit spots a gathering, no matter how innocent, in an
area where guerilla movements have been reported in the countryside; just
being out there defines them. The fact that the guerrilla can hide himself
fairly easily inside large population centers does not mean that hard work
neednt be done toward the winning of popular support. It simply means that
failure to gain full support for violent confrontation doesnt preclude violent
confrontation. If all the elements exist that have made guerilla warfare in its classical
style an invincible weapon against mechanized, industrially-based armies in undeveloped
areas, they will be even more successful in built-up urban Amerikan conditions .
The facts that make it impossible for the establishment army to overcome the attacking
guerilla armyit spite of the availability of the knowledge contained in the
master-works on guerrilla strategybecome clear when we realize that after

the strategy is understood by the guerilla chief, the tactics applicable to his
particular military problems are a product of his imagination alone , a constant creative
improvising. Also working against the establishments general staff is its own mentality.
Theyve convinced themselves or have been convinced by their experience
at war with other mechanized armies that having the most at the right
time wins war. In other words, they feel that winning wars depends mainly
on gadgets and they presume that they can dictate the terms and grounds
upon which each battle takes place. Theyve locked in on a fixed set of systematized
ideas that conflict completely with the realities of Peoples War. Their egos simply will
never allow them to admit that all the ingenuity that has gone into the
development of the blitz-krieg has been wasted. A $100,000 tank can be
destroyed with two dollars worth of materials; a jet is useless against the
rifleman, and it also can be destroyed with one well-placed burst from an
assault rifle or destroyed on the ground by mortar from miles away. Then,
too, the pilot, years in the making, can be killed with a knife. The copter as a
fighting machine is the most stupid of all the costly gadgets; it can be heard
from miles away; it cant be armored, a ten-cent bullet can render it useless.
All of these contraptions require liquid fuels that will stop flowing when the production of all
the other commodities stops. Fighting really depends upon the people and small
easily machined portable weapons.

Another factor that works to the advantage of the guerilla army is time. The establishment
forces cannot survive the prolonged unrest that is steadily building. Profits fall, the point of
diminishing returns is eventually reached; and from there, the establishments force and
energy goes into its last stages of life, while our new revolutionary culture is
buildingmusical chairs where each go-round excludes some element of

their control factors.
The objective, I repeat, of the destruction of a city-based industrial establishment and its

protective forces is to create perfect disorder,
to disrupt all of their interactive

processes that allow them to produce and distribute goods, and this can be
done from within the process much more easily than from without. Really,
there is no possibility of an establishment government ever overcoming a
determined internal enemy.
Their calls to prevent wars just gloss over the ongoing living
apocalypse for people of color.
Rodriguez 2008, (Dylan, Associate Professor at University of California
Riverside, " WARFARE AND THE TERMS OFENGAGEMENT," in Abolition Now:
Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex,
p.93-100.)
We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented
state-organized human capture and state-produced physical /social/psychic alienation, from
the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the
profound forms of informal apartheid and proto-apartheid that are being instantiated in
cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a
profound crisisand political possibilityfor people struggling against the
white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and
physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away. If we
are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and US state

hegemony and domination in a legitimately global way, it is nothing short
of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere
(e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly
oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and
nearby geographies of home.
This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political
and institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the
establishment left that is tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial
complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic
relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social
control with surveillance over public political discourse , including and especially emergent
progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the
industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal

and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of governmentproctored non-profit organizations.
It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure
that I wish to address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and
disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines, and actively
shapes the work of even the most progressive movements and organizations
within the US establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and
worse): that is, the lefts willingness to fundamentally tolerateand accompanying
unwillingness to abolishthe institutionalized dehumanization of the
contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most localized,
unremarkable, and hence normal manifestations within the domestic
homeland of the Homeland Security state.
Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil

liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to
defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist
criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the
mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive

suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the
expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building
project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social
and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time,
the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US) does not care to envision,
much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white
supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-profit
left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually wellintentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the
urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses
the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars .
Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of
rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion
against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of
radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and
politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence
that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of
our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have
historically struggled to survive and overthrow such classical structures of

dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other
genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could we live with
ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to
generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and
transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition of
domestic warfare in favor of short-term, winnable policy reforms? (For
example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a progressive political language
that reinforced dominant racist notions of criminality in the process of trying to discredit
the legal basis of Three Strikes laws?) What were the fundamental concerns of
our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were
they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable
opposition to the white supremacist states terms of engagement (that is,
warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anticolonial
liberation theorist Frantz Fanons memorable statement to his own peers,
comrades, and nemeses:
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in
relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding
generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of
colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current
struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the
habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning
incomprehension at their silence or passiveness.
Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by
such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to clarify the premises of
the social mission that our generation of US based progressive organizing

has undertaken.
In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the
US state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of community-based organizing
has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a
certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on
older liberal notions of the good citizen. Following Fanon, the question is whether
and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I believe that to respond
to this political problem requires an analysis and conceptualization of the state that is far
more complex and laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build
campaigns, organize communities, and write grant proposals. In fact, I think
one pragmatic step toward an abolitionist politics involves the development of grassroots
pedagogies (such as reading groups, in-home workshops, inter-organization
and inter-movement critical dialogues) that will compel us to teach ourselves

about the different ways that the state works in the context of domestic
warfare, so that we no longer treat it simplistically. We require, in other words,
a scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be
radically confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics.
In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void

created by what Ruthie Gilmore has called the violent "abandonments" of the
state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which
were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively)
exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities (guided by a " frightening
willingness to engage in human sacrifice"). Yet, at the same time that the
state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle
against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left
remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address
the questions of social survival, grassroots mobilization, radical social justice,
and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very
domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the
premises of its own coherence.
P I T FA L L S O F T H E P E DAG O G I C A L STAT E
We can broadly understand that "the state" is in many ways a conceptual
term that refers to a mind-boggling array of geographic, political, and
institutional relations of power and domination. It is, in that sense, a term of
abstraction : certainly the state is "real," but it is so massive and
institutionally stretched that it simply cannot be understood and "seen" in its
totality. The way we come to comprehend the state's realness-or differently
put, the way the state makes itself comprehensible, intelligible, and
materially identifiable to ordinary people-is through its own selfnarrations
and institutional mobilizations.
Consider the narrative and institutional dimensions of the "war on drugs," for
nample. New Y ork City mayor Edward Koch, in a gesture of masculine
challenge to the Reagan- era Feds, offers a prime example of such a
narration in a 1986 op-ed piece published on the widely-read pages of The
New York Times:
I propose the following steps as a coordinated Federal response to [the
war on drugs] :

Use the full resources of the military for drug interdiction. The Posse
Comitatus doctrine, which restricts participation of the military in
civilian law enforcement, must be modified so that the military can be
used for narcotics control . . .
Enact a Federal death penalty for drug wholesalers. Life sentences,
harsh fines, forfeitures of assets, billions spent on education and
therapy all have failed to deter the drug wholesaler. The death penalty
would. Capital punishment is an extraordinary remedy, but we are
facing an extraordinary peril . . .
Designate United States narcotics prisons. The Bureau of Prisons
should designate separate facilities for drug offenders. Segregating
such prisoners from others, preferably i n remote locations such a s the
Yukon or desert areas, might motivate drug offenders to abandon their
trade.
Enhance the Federal agencies combating the drug problem. The
Attorney General should greatly increase the number of drug
enforcement agents in New York and other cities. He should direct the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to devote substantial manpower
against the cocaine trade and should see to it that the Immigration and
Naturalization Service is capable of detecting and deporting aliens
convicted of drug crimes in far better numbers than it now does.
Enact the state and local narcotics control assistance act of 1986. This
bill provides $750 million annually for five years to assist state and
local jurisdictions increase their capacities for enforcement,
corrections, education and prosecution.
These proposals offer no certainty for success in the fight against
drugs, of course. If we are to succeed, however, it is essential that we
persuade the Federal Government to recognize its responsibility to lead
the way.
Edward Koch's manifesto reflects an important dimension of the broader
institutional, cultural, and political activities that build the state as a
mechanism of self-legitimating violence: the state (here momentarily
manifest in the person of the New York City Mayor) constantly tells stories
about itself, facilitated by a politically willing and accomplice corporate
media.
This storytelling-which through repetition and saturation assembles the popular
"common sense" of domestic warfare-is inseparable from the on-the-ground shifting,
rearranging, and recommitting of resources and institutional power that we
witness in the everyday mobilizations of a state waging intense, localized, militarized
struggle against its declared internal enemies. Consider, for example, how
pronouncements like those of Koch, Reagan, and Bratton seem to always be
accompanied by the operational innovation of different varieties of covert
ops, urban guerilla war, and counterintelligence warfare that specifically
emerge through the state's declared domestic wars on
crime/drugs/gangs/etc. Hence, it is no coincidence that Mayor Koch's
editorial makes the stunning appeal to withdraw ("modify") the Posse

Comitatus principle, to allow the Federal government's formal mobilization of
its global war apparatus for battle in the homeland neighborhoods of the war
on drugs. To reference our example even more closely, we can begin to see how
the ramped-up policing and massive imprisonment of Black and Latino youth in Koch's
1980s New York were enabled and normalized by his and others' attempts to story tell the
legal empowerment and cultural valorization of the police , such that the nutsand-bolts operation of the prison industrial complex was lubricated by the
multiple moral parables of domestic warfare.
This process of producing the state as an active, tangible, and identifiable

structure of power and dominance, through the work of self-narration and
concrete mobilizations of institutional capacity, is what some scholars call
"statecraft." Generally, the state materializes and becomes comprehensible to us
through these definitive moments of crafting: that is, we come to identify the state as a
series of active political and institutional projects. So, if the state's self-narration inundates
us with depictions of its policing and juridical arms as the righteously punitive and justifiably
violent front lines of an overlapping series of comprehensive, militarized, and culturally
valorized domestic wars-for my generation, the "war on drugs," the generation
prior, the "war on crime," and the current generation, localized "wars on
gangs" and their planetary rearticulation in the "war on terror"-then it is the
material processes of war, from the writing of public policy to the hyper-weaponization of the
police, that commonly represents the existence of the state as we come to normally "know"
it.
Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and concrete
material production of the state, the question remains as to why the
establishment left has not confronted this statecraft with the degree of
absolute emergency that the condition implies (war!). Perhaps it is because
we are underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical
(teaching) apparatus, replete with room for contradiction and relatively
sanctioned spaces for " dissent" and counter-state organizing. Italian political
prisoner Antonio Gramsci 's thoughts on the formation of the contemporary
pedagogical state are instructive here:
The Stale does have and request consent, but it also "educates" this
consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these,
however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the
ruling class.
Although Gramsci was writing these words in the early 1900s, he had already
identified the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the nonprofit industrial complex. The historical record of the last three decades
shows that liberal foundations such as the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Soros
and other financial entities h ave become politically central to "the private
initiative of the ruling class" and have in fact funded a breath-taking number
of organizations, grassroots campaigns, and progressive political interests.
The questions I wish to insert here, however, are whether the financially
enabling gestures of foundations also 1) exert a politically disciplinary or
repressive force on contemporary social movements and community based
organizations, while 2) nurturing a n ideological and structural a llegiance to
the state that preempts a more creative, radical, abolitionist politics.

Several social movement scholars have argued that the "channeling
mechanisms" of the non-profit industrial complex "may now far outweigh the effect of direct
social control by states in explaining the . . . orthodox tactics, and moderate goals of
much collective action in modern America." The non-profit apparatus and its symbiotic
relationship to the state amount to a sophisticated technology of political repression and
social control, accompanying and facilitating the ideological and institutional mobilizations
of a domestic war waging state. Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some
misnamed "revolutionary" groups find it opportune to assimilate into this state-sanctioned
organizational paradigm, as it simultaneously allows them to establish a
relatively stable financial and operational infrastructure while avoiding the

transience, messiness, and possible legal complication of working under
decentralized, informal, or even "underground" auspices. Thus, the
aforementioned authors suggest that the emergence of the state-proctored
non-profit industry "suggests a historical movement away from direct, cruder
forms [of state repression] , toward more subtle forms of state social control
of social movements."
The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately forfeit the crucial political
and conceptual possibilities of abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent
to which domestic war has been fashioned into the everyday, "normal " reality of the state.
By extension, the non-profit industrial complex, which is fundamentally

guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often state-funded), also
reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions of domestic warfare
are taken for granted because they form and inform the popular consensus.
Effectively contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular consensus (for example,
destabilizing assertive assumptions common to progressive movements and organizations
such as "we have to control/get rid of gangs," "we need prisons," or "we want better police")
is, in this context, dangerously difficult work. Although, the truth of the matter is
that the establishment US left, in ways both spoken and presumed, may
actually agree with the political, moral, and ideological premises of domestic
warfare. Leaders as well as rank-and-file members in avowedly progressive
organizations can and must reflect on how they might actually be supporting and
reproducing existing forms of racism, white supremacy, state violence, and
domestic warfare in the process of throwing their resources behind what they
perceive as "winnable victories," in the lexicon of venerable community
organizer Saul Alinsky.

Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political rupturing of existing
techniques and strategies that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging,
and management of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move
long overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with
the state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients
a progressive identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to
consider " insurgency" as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive

maneuvering of "resistance"). Reading a few a few lines down from our first
invoking of Fanon's call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here: "For
us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to
authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned
in blood."
Policy is only going to come after our radical abolitionist

pedagogy starts to go into effect.
Dylan Rodriguez, D Rod Will Make Ya Jump, Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as
Pedagogical Position, Radical Teacher, Number 88, Summer 2010, p. 7-19
Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical position other than an
abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach, and survive and thrive in a time
defined by the capacity and political willingness to eliminate and neutralize populations
through a culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence, is to better
understand why abolitionist praxis in this historical moment is primarily pedagogical, within
and against the system in which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in future moments,
abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of (creating and not simply opposing)
public policy, infrastructure building, and economic reorganization, the present moment
clearly demands a convening of radical pedagogical energies that can buil d the collective
human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, and material sites of learning that are
the precondition of authentic and liberatory social transformations.
The prison regime is the institutionalization and systemic expansion of

massive human misery. It is the production of bodily and psychic
disarticulation on multiple scales, across different physiological capacities.
The prison industrial complex is, in its logic of organization and its production of
common sense, at least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison regime is inseparable from
that is, present inthe schooling regime in which teachers are entangled. Prison is
not simply a place to which one is displaced and where ones physiological
being is disarticulated, at the rule and whim of the state and its designated
representatives (police, parole officers, school teachers). The prison regime
is the assumptive premise of classroom teaching generally. While many of us
must live in labored denial of this fact in order to teach as we must about American
democracy, freedom, and (civil) rights, there are opportune moments in which it is
useful to come clean: the vast majority of what occurs in U.S. classroomsfrom preschool to
graduate schoolcannot accommodate the bare truth of the proto-genocidal prison regime
as a violent ordering of the world, a primary component of civil society/school, and a
material presence in our everyday teaching acts.
As teachers, we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide management , in which
our pedagogical labor is variously engaged in mitigating, valorizing, critiquing, redeeming,
justifying, lamenting, and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic
violence of the global-historical U.S. nation building project. As radical teachers, we
are politically hailed to betray genocide management in order to embrace

the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The short-term survival of those
populations rendered most immediately vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular
violence of this system, and the long-term survival of most of the planets human population
(particularly those descended from survivors of enslavement, colonization,

conquest, and economic exploitation), is significantly dependent on our willingness
to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity.
Idea-Ethics DA
Slave.
"crazy."
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, 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 it is the only ethical grammar
available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for it draws
our attention not to how space and time are used and abused by

enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence
that underwrites the modern world's 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 on 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 but 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 two things. On the one hand
was 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,"1 the drama of value (the stage on
which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity
production and sale). On the other was 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 worldnot 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? "He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any money out
of us"? Surely, that doesn't 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
cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by
accident? Give Turtle Island back to the "Savage." Give life itself back
to the Slave. Two simple sen-tences, fourteen 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, such
as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants' rights.
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. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those
lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a
filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmogra-phies of socially and
politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the
plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that what can so

easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so
ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen
words not only render their speaker "crazy" but become themselves
impossible to imagine.
Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and
socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.2 In the
1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and
scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or even Would
it be overthrown? but when and howand, for some, what would come
in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a
discernable quantum of ethics in the United States writ large (and here I am
speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the
Tom Hayden wing of Students for Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and
Marion Barry faction of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to
Bobby Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical
machinations, to the paradigmatic Zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the
American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and
progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle
mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility
of "success," but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because
they could not make a convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic
analysisthat the United States was an ethical formation and still
hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby
Kennedy (as a U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers
had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.3 One could (and many
did) acknowledge America's strength and power. This seldom rose to the
level of an ethical assessment, however, remaining instead an assessment of
the "balance of forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser
extent Indians, circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics
credibly. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a
possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of
Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose
the question is the greatest power of allretreated as did White
radicals and progressives who "retired" from the struggle. The
question lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells
where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary
revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary Zeitgeist.
Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the
Settlement and the Slave estate's4 destruction, to manifest itself at
the ethical core of cinematic discourse when this dream is no longer

a constituent element of political discourse in the streets or of
intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is "no" in the sense
that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse
in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in screenplays and in scholarly prose,
but "yes" in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments,
such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this
foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit
registers in both cinema and scholarship as a symptom of awareness of the
structural antagonisms. The election of President Barack Obama does not
mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn historical moment. Neoliberalism
with a Black face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor
the end of anti-Blackness as a constituent element of U.S.
antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama enables a plethora of
intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars.
This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera
obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films
narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually
having to do with poverty or the absence of "family values"), the
nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this
coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black
political ontologyor nonontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in
on the mendacity of conflict.
Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar
goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through
which the labor of speech is possible.5 Likewise, the grammar of
political ethics the grammar of assumptions regarding the
ontology of sufferingwhich underwrites film theory and political
discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to
radical action), and which underwrites cinematic speech (in this book, Red,
White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken.
This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an
ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And this structure of suffering
crowds out others, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of
unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on

it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather
then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that
antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological position from
which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-ofstep claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading
of feature films and political theory that follows.

Wilderson 2010
insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and
demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully
made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a
Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated
still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such
empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction;
we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only
mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to
appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of
stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with
more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology,
political science, history, and public policy debates would be the
very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering
known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby

work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the
"solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the
conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"the
Black positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the
state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another
way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in
the world.
If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is
not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity
establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal
integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored,
perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship
structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being
outside of re-lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the
rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not
unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world.
The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but
on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and
Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the
gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
And, our impacts outweigh: their characterization of nuclear

peace in doomsday scenarios separates the question of
apocalyptic violence from racial justice, ignoring that THE
WORLD HAS ALREADY ENDED for people of color and that their
focus on mere survivability elides the nuclear holocaust waged
on a daily basis against non-white bodies.
Omolade 1984, Barbara, Calvin College first dean of multicultural affairs, Women of Color
and the Nuclear Holocaust, Womens Studies Quarterly vol. 12, No. 2
To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear disarmament
must overcome its reluctance to speak in terms of power, of
institutional racism, and imperialist military terror. The issues of
nuclear disarmament and peace have been mystified because they
have been placed within a doomsday frame which separates these
issues from other ones, saying, "How can we talk about struggles
struggles concerned with human life and change. In April, 1979, the

U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the
effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war
between the United States and the Soviet Union, 25 to 100 million
people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of
African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the
African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also
comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause
massive shortages after a nuclear war, as well as on the crops that
would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of
color the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when,
for example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own
people. And the housing of people of color throughout the world's
urban areas is already blighted and inhumane: families live in shacks,
shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America,
the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the
world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own
languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to
see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world,
struggle for it, and rebuild it in our, own image. The "death culture"
we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with death
than with life, more willing to demonstrate for "survival at any
cost" than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear
disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and
historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be
murdered. Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have
already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our
families, and our lands.As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists.
We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as
a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba, in GuineaBissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women's
movement, and in countless daily encounters with land- lords, welfare
departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but
the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to
provide for the future of our people.
Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of

the ontological position of Blacknessthe very possibility of
ethics and freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives
ratification of democracy, the state and civil society. Resisting
the lure of anti-blackness through a genealogy of historys
constitutive void is the starting point for imagining a new
world.
Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley,
Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and
performativity in the American racial state, Dissertation available on

Proquest)
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the
Exodus narrative toward the pursuit of social reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world,
[t]hrough biblical typology, particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their common experiences to biblical drama
and found resources to account for their circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a
sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of the story enabled
a sense of agency
and resistance in persistent moments of despair and disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively,
but often relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that presupposes a set of moral and
institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial,
religious, sexual, social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to
behave according to an ostensibly correct set of moral principles)
that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying terms of the
state and civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and
invisibilize antiblackness and/or policies that adversely impact black
people who are not part of the middle class, rather than to critique
or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state
and civil society: for her, they are inherently unethical rather than
redeemable, having engendered centuries of black social death and
historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward freedom
demands an unflinching critical analysis rather than an implicit or
explicit ratification of these institutions and the terms on which
they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political implications of the assumptive logic of a
theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated on not-knowing: if there is
no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions of a
a toppled faith in the redemptive possibilities of the

struggle has the potential to open the door to invention,
speculation, refashioning, and cobbling together something from
nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a
viable freedom dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and
absence and the history of processes of dehumanizing
antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic,
social, political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement
of its persistence rather than being deluded by tidy or optimistic
but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption. Only then
can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and
the possibilities and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley
and Gates draw on narratives that say that the past, including its suffering,
was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker
interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not
folded into any sort of teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom /dream,
because the subjects of her narrative are free from a
predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the
structures around its enactment. What she calls for is a profound refashioning of the
epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component of the black freedom struggle as is
an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of
psychic structures and historical silences to replace an implicit or
explicit faith in a divine logic in the (racial) order of things.
conservative social gospel:

Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a ghost
story, an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more
as a process toward understanding. Hartman constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a
genealogy of the stranger, of the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching. Projects that
make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional or poetic devices cant rest with
not-knowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or construct/invent evidence from
its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of some large-scale sense of collective responsibility, or
The imaginative devices dont exist for the sake

of being imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being
imaginative, they allow for radical possibilities to emerge that
literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different keys to be able to fill
because of personal yearning, or both.
in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but encouragement of
what uncertainty can yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are
impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the
blank that has been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to slip into a
genealogy as an object. A different version is used in order to

understand the gaps, to underscore or illuminate the negative
spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the context
around the blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to
trace the relationship between the past, present, and future . This I would
call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or even radical in
roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia,
gaping negative space. This I would call
according to most interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an
enactment of notalgia engages in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times
that never existed, and that therefore it is not conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that it is creative and
always seeking something new. Performative returns are inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to
be better than the present (which has devolved in some way) or a future that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec
homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant example: it is a wished-for, utopian space,
acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of its adherents toward social
justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomeli 1991). Hartman writes:
enslaved
To believe, as I do, that the
is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that
acknowledge that they accompany our
every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line,
and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of
freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The kind
of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken
back. [...] The demands of the slave on the present have everything to
do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much
more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the
reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to
the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs an unfinished
struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not
to incite the hopes of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But
are our contemporaries
we are owed what they were due but rather to
performative return is not necessarily critical, and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are
always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in
others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical practices, the
conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available
these projects attempt to

re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of African-Americans are configured as
being integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather
than an aberration. But they waver between trying to write that as a
narrative of progress, in which we have left slavery behind and have
roles of and categories for historically marginalized groups of people? All three of

ascended to a space of constitutive normativity; and trying to
underline the fundamental and unending nature of slavery a kind
of rejoinder to uncritical narratives that not only attends to the
subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the
possibilities and necessities of invention that have flourished in its
wake. What they have in common is that they present the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing
African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging a broader awareness of
the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of the future as
Hartmans vision, however, seems to espouse a

particularly liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not
try to deny or occlude the presence or significance of ongoing
disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience
have already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have
implicitly ratified the fundamental terms on which it is predicated,
Hartmans are still struggling to make something from nothing; they
have an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a
status quo that excludes or violates their well-being. What she
claims or advocates is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch
activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural
analysis, and a sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of
desire, yearning, and the possibilities for reinvention and
reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence and
loss.
well as more or less significant red flags.
And, ethics comes first in the context of debate failure to

explicitly problematize ethics transforms debate into an
epistemological void in which the ritualistic exchange of
floating signifiers is prioritized above authentic argumentation
and self-examination.
Duffy 83 (Bernard, Professor of Communication at Cal Poly,
The Ethics of Argumentation in Intercollegiate Debate: A
Conservative Appraisal,
http://www.nationalforensics.org/journal/
vol1no1-6.pdf)
Sometimes only an outsider sees clearly the problems of the insiders.
comment in a recent Time article about intercollegiate debate hit painfully
close to the truth: "Success at on topic [debate] demands fetishistic
research, note cards by the hundred gross and the rhetorical felicity
of an armored truck."1 Organized debate is so far removed from
reality that its very survival seems remarkable. While intercollegiate
debate teaches less about many things than we would like, least of all
does it teach ethics. By one interpretation ethics in debate involves
questions such as whether or not case-scouting or introducing counterplans
in the second negative constructive speech are conscionable acts.2 There is,
however, an entirely different sense in which the ethics of debate can be

discussed. To what extent does debate make students aware of the values
which underlie their choices, and to what extent does it show them the
ethical differences among arguments? Richard Weaver, whose works on
rhetoric are guided by the assumption that the methods an arguer chooses
reveal his ethics, provides an avenue for such inquiry.3 Weaver claims that
every rhetorical use of language, because it involves intention and
choice, has an ethical dimension. He illustrates this dictum through an
analysis of the essential argument forms: authority, analogy, principle, and
consequence. Weaver expresses preferences among these forms of
argument on the basis of their philosophical status. His is a reflection on
argumentation from which debaters would profit. The preferences he
articulates are not those of most debaters. Intercollegiate debate seems
almost to reverse his ideas of what ethical argumentation is.
Debaters learn from experience what kinds of arguments work within the
highly formalized context of intercollegiate debate, but they do not learn
what separates a merely effective argument from one that has
enduring value. Debate habituates students to lines of argument
which teach them less about their own beliefs and values than they
do about those of other people. This, however, is only part of the
problem. Debate coaches have accepted what passes as reasonable
argumentation in the tournaments and have fostered a type of
argumentation which philosophical conservatives like Weaver would reject as
symptomatic of modern, fact-oriented culture. One need not be a
conservative or a Platonist to appreciate Weaver's analysis, though it helps.
He claims that arguments from definition or genus are philosophically
preeminent to other forms since only they seek to establish principles and
ideals. Thus, Lincoln, though a political liberal, argues like a philosophical
conservative.4 In the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, for example, Lincoln's stand
against the extension of slavery into the territories was based not on the
material consequences of this act, but on a definition of the nature of
humanity. At their best, arguments such as Lincoln's provide timeless a
priori, which serve as the basis for future arguments and which illuminate
some facet of the human condition. Arguing from principle requires
debaters to reflect upon what ought to be, rather than on what is . It
makes them think in terms of ideals and essences and so puts them
closer to their own beliefs and values. One might say, it makes them
think ethically. But what is the reality of intercollegiate debate? Debaters
rarely argue from their own principles. In fact, they quickly learn that
debate is not a contest between the quality of ideas, but rather the
volume and credibility of evidence. Debaters, even if their coaches
teach them otherwise, learn from experience to place the highest
premium on hard fact, rather than on nebulous propositions. Even
the most noble and enduring sentiments of the constitution's framers
become items of data that can be used to win arguments, rather
than ideas which they can incorporate into their own thinking. For
example, the principle of states' rights is frequently reduced to a stock

argument which can be made against any case calling for federal
encroachment on powers traditionally granted the states. Although nominally
this is an argument from principle, in practice it is more like a tactical move
learned from experience. Such arguments are seen as no more or less
significant than other arguments. Educational debate tends to
reduce all arguments to tactics. It does not ask students to assess
the ethical superiority of any given argument, only its relative
potency in the mind of the judge. Since debaters cannot always predict
the basis on which a given judge will decide an issue or a debate, many
debaters simply make as many arguments as possible hoping that one will
work. No argument, then, is accorded a higher status than others. Some
arguments work and some do not. This is all most debaters seem to care
about. If debaters tend not to argue from principle, what types of arguments
do they use? One that enters into virtually all debates is the argument from
cause and its two subspecies, the arguments from consequence and
circumstance. In debate, arguments from consequence are used to support
or oppose a policy proposal because of its perceived advantages or
disadvantages. Weaver would claim that although it is philosophically less
important than the argument from principle, the argument from
consequence certainly has its place. He points out, however, that an
aberrant version of it, the argument from circumstance, does not
deserve the same approbation. The argument from circumstance proposes
that existing conditions demand whatever action the speaker favors. So, for
example, debaters might claim that runaway inflation leaves no choice but to
pass a balanced budget amendment. Weaver dislikes this sort of argument
because it is completely relative. It assumes that we should respond to
whatever stimulus the present supplies. It short- circuits reason. Such
arguments ask the audience to act on the basis of what is rather than
what ought to be. They are grounded in reality, rather than in principle.
Since material reality changes constantly, the value of such
arguments endures only as long as do the circumstances which gave
them rise. Arguments from circumstance appeal to a fact oriented culture in
the way that sensationalistic journalism does. Intercollegiate debate
manifests sensationalistic tendencies. Debaters consistently
exaggerate the harms and disadvantages of the problems they
discuss. Thus they might argue that the United States' lack of a civil
defense program invites the spectre of nuclear war. Inevitably they do
not leave it at this, but go on to describe in unnecessarily vivid
detail the loss of life and suffering which would result. Their litanies
of destruction sound invariably like tabloid report which under
ordinary circumstances we deplore. In debate, though, sensationalism is
accepted as common course. Debaters also use arguments from analogy,
although not as often as they might. Analogical arguments, like arguments
from principle engage the creative faculties of debaters. They stem from
perceptions of the similarities among things. A liberally educated student
with an imaginative mind might be expected to produce analogical

arguments. Debate as an activity which should both use and enhance a
liberal arts education ought to be rife with them. Yet, rarely do they emerge.
Instead there are countless arguments from authority. Authority is fine as a
source of argument as long as it is not overused and the authorities are
properly selected. The excessive reliance of debaters on arguments from
authority, however, makes them subservient to the opinions of others. In the
ideal, debaters evaluate evidence for its credibility and its correspondence
with their own beliefs. In practice, they often fail to read the context of their
evidence, do not know the credentials of the sources, nor even at times
understand the evidence they read with such lightening speed. An overdependence on authority depersonalizes the process of debate. It makes it
far less humane or humanizing. Debaters, to use a phrase of Weaver's,
become "logic machines," programmed to match evidence against
their opponents' evidence.5 While the process of selection and
organization this involves no doubt improves debaters' logical
abilities and skills in gamesmanship, it does not necessarily make
them aware of their own humanness (or lack thereof - og), that is, of their
individual character and ethics. Ethics, after all, grow out of feeling
and choice and not simply the complex operations of mind we refer
to as logic. Even among the very best debaters who habitually inquire into
the credibility of their evidence, few look beyond the source's expertise in his
or her area of specialty. The kind of authority preferred in debate
further documents debate's removal from ethical concerns.
Anonymous researchers whose objectivity is insured by the
scientific method they use are perceived as more credible than
great minds who have been tainted by having a point of view. On all
counts testimony of fact is preferred to testimony of opinion. Yet
facts are not ethical claims, and from scientists and social scientists
one rarely learns how facts should be used in making ethical
decisions. The model debater is a speedy processor of factual
information and a master of debate commonplaces and form. The
Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that the debate coach at
Randolph Macon College has developed a computer program to train
debaters. One program teaches them cross-examination. Asked the
right questions the computer will make damaging admissions to its
case.6 Presumably, perceptive debaters intuit the computer's program to
defeat it. This suggests the extreme formalism of debate. Effective
debaters are not contemplative scholars willing to engage in soul
searching speculative discussions. They are highly trained,
conditioned agents who respond to arguments with speed and
prolificity. Only by internalizing the structure of debate and its
commonplaces can they react quickly enough to win a debate. The more
second nature their responses become, the better they will fare. For the sake
of quick response, knowing the form is all important. Like debate's emphasis
on fact, its overwhelming concern with structure puts students no
closer to ethics. Nor does one detect in the language of debate any reason

to rejoice at what we are teaching debaters, or at what they learn at
tournaments. Though debaters are prolific in the number of points they
make, they express each laconically. They speak in shorthand with truncated
phrases and anograms which would try the patience of a government
bureaucrat. Their vocabulary could well comprise a computer language. It
cannot be understood by those outside the inner circle. What eloquence
there is in debate is ordinarily reserved for the first affirmative speech and
an occasional peroration. Otherwise debate discourse comes to the audience
as spurts of noise which a judge impassively transfers to a legal pad. The
disembodied language of debate may be ideal for presenting fact and logic,
but not for proferring the results of ethical choice. The subjectivity of the
debater is suppressed. The exigencies of debate make it impossible for him
to express the ideas and feelings which make him an individual. His language
strains to represent facts rather than conviction or emotion. In debate one is
more likely to hear language used referentially rather than evocatively. It
reveals neither feeling nor ethical choice. No wonder that it fails to move us
and that contemporary debate as a whole has been criticized as being
unpersuasive.7 Debaters' lack of subjectivity is also revealed in their
delivery. Good delivery addresses the audience as emotional as well as
rational beings. The nature of debate makes participants unconcerned about
genuinely influencing the judge. Though they want to win, they care little
about changing the judge's mind. Their recitation of colorless fact and logic
sounds like the frenzied whir of the computer. Often no one fact or argument
is vocally emphasized over another since all arguments seem to be valued
equally. Rather we hear the well practiced but artificial cadence by which a
torrent of words is released in a steady and uninterrupted stream. The
natural rhythms of the human voice as it expresses the thoughts and
individual personality of the speaker are replaced by a monotonous
intonation which allows speed at the expense of reflection. If Time reporter
Kurt Anderson was right when he called intercollegiate debate "secular self
mortification," the style of debate delivery is one evidence of it.8 Debate at
its worst is an activity which promotes self abnegation rather than self
discovery. Intercollegiate debate ought to educate students in more than
structure, credibility, and logical reasoning. It should teach them the
effective use of arguments from definition as well as arguments from
consequence, circumstance and authority. Definitional arguments, better
than others, orient students toward their own beliefs and principles.
Logic, fact, and authority wither without ethics, and debate without
ethical judgments sounds hollow and contrived. I am not proposing
that debaters only make arguments they believe in. Students also
learn from articulating the principles which underlie positions they
oppose. To ignore principle as a line of argument and focus instead
on mere fact and authority makes debate less effective as a method
of exploring one's own preferences and values. It might be argued that
debate is not dialectic, and that my criticisms require debate to be
something we cannot make it. After all the sophists, not Plato, gave birth to

debate. Protagoras saw it as a lesson in sophistic relativism. If one believes
in the relativism of the sophists, it would be absurd for debaters to search
after principles upon which to base their arguments. Of what use, one might
ask, are the eloquently expressed propositions of a bygone era to a scientific
age which bases decisions on calculable fact? For today's neosophists it
would be foolish indeed to think of debate as a philosophical or ethical
enterprise. But in this case, why talk about the ethics of debate at all? If the
term only means observing the rules of the game, it is not particularly
significant. Debate should be a thoroughly ethical enterprise. It
should educate students in ethics, as well as requiring them to
follow the rules. Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of choice. Should
we as coaches and judges permit the steady dismantling of debate as a
means of educating students? Ought we to praise students for making
sensationalistic arguments, and for relying on appeals to authority, while
ignoring arguments from principle? Should we give ballots to speakers who
are the most adept at parroting back the commonplaces they have learned
and to those who can read evidence with the greatest speed and the least
visible understanding? Should we encourage debate as a contest of evidence
rather than as a meeting of minds? No matter how much lip service is
given to the educational values of intercollegiate debate, it cannot
now be claimed as an activity which forces students to reflect upon
or use their ethical beliefs in the formulation of arguments.
Slavery
Slave.
"crazy." Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that
demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas
indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps it is the only ethical grammar
available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for it draws
our attention not to how space and time are used and abused by
enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence
that underwrites the modern world's 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 on 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 but 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 two things. On the one hand
was 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,"1 the drama of value (the stage on
which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity
production and sale). On the other was 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 worldnot 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? "He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any money out
of us"? Surely, that doesn't 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 cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and
unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the
"Savage." Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sen-tences,
fourteen 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, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and
immigrants' rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the
heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so
unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even
socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken,
even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a
scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the
filmogra-phies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of
progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to
go byis that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250
million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two
simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their

speaker "crazy" but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon
it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and
socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.2 In the
1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and
scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or even Would
it be overthrown? but when and howand, for some, what would come
in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a
discernable quantum of ethics in the United States writ large (and here I am
speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the
Tom Hayden wing of Students for Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and
Marion Barry faction of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to
Bobby Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical
machinations, to the paradigmatic Zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the
American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and
progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle
mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility
of "success," but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because
they could not make a convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic
analysisthat the United States was an ethical formation and still
hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby
Kennedy (as a U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers
had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.3 One could (and many
did) acknowledge America's strength and power. This seldom rose to the
level of an ethical assessment, however, remaining instead an assessment of
the "balance of forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser
extent Indians, circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics
credibly. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a
possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of
Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose
the question is the greatest power of allretreated as did White
radicals and progressives who "retired" from the struggle. The
question lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells
where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary
revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is it
still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the
Settlement and the Slave estate's destruction, to manifest itself at
the ethical core of cinematic discourse when this dream is no longer
a constituent element of political discourse in the streets or of
intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is "no" in the sense
that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse

in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in screenplays and in scholarly prose,
but "yes" in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments,
such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this
foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit
registers in both cinema and scholarship as a symptom of awareness of the
structural antagonisms. The election of President Barack Obama does not
mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn historical moment. Neoliberalism
with a Black face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor
the end of anti-Blackness as a constituent element of U.S.
antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama enables a plethora of
intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This
grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera
obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films
narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually
having to do with poverty or the absence of "family values"), the
nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this
coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black
political ontologyor nonontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in
on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that
when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is
assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is
possible.5 Likewise, the grammar of political ethics the grammar of
assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich underwrites
film theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated
in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrites cinematic
speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the
present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political
discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of
suffering. And this structure of suffering crowds out others, regardless of the
sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse
in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering
stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another
(despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the
ontological position from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most

controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the
foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that
follows.

Wilderson 2010
insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and
demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully
made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a
Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated
still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such
empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction;
we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only
mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to
appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of
stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with
more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology,
political science, history, and public policy debates would be the
very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering
known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby
work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the

"solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the
conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"the
Black positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the
state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another
way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in
the world.
If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is
not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity
establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal
integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored,
perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship
outside of re-lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the
rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not
unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world.
The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but
on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and
Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the
gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
Vote neg freedom is an illusion created by the shackles of

civil society, we must burn the 1AC to the ground
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-overblack. 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 Haiti. 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 .
VIII. TRAINING
We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call.
Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the brokenhearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves
are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are
called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The
slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is
schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to
not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so
the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children,
and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no progress and
no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems.
We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand
narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is
no up from slavery. The progress from slavery to the end of history is the
progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack.
The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresentfuture timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end
of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only
under conditions of freedom , of bourgeois legality, that the slave can
perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master.
The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. The
system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The
system of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of the same
system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-over-black only,
and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers
for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the
slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The
slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by
burning down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it
makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be.
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-over-black,
death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that
is not a calling.
Life will not change for the better absent an assault on the
establishment. That doesnt mean we will live to enjoy the
fruits of the revolution but it DOES mean that we should
pursue revolutionary suicide because death is inevitable and
this is the only one worth pursuing.
Huey P. Newton 1973, Co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Revolutionary
Suicide, pages 2-6
Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and

degrading, is a spiritual death that has been the experience of
millions of Black people in the United States. This death is found
everywhere today in the Black community. Its victims have ceased
to fight the forms of oppression that drink their blood. The common
attitude has long been: Whats the use? If a man rises up against a
power as great as the United States, he will not survive. Believing
this, many Blacks have been driven to a death of the spirit rather
than of the flesh, lapsing into lives of quite desperation. Yet all the
while, in the heart of every Black, there is the hope that life will somehow
change in the future. I do not think that life will change for the better
without an assault on the Establishment [The power structure,
based on the economic infrastructure, propped up and reinforced by
the media and all the secondary educational and cultural
institutions.], which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth.
This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is
better to oppose forces that would drive me to self-murder than to
endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the
possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.
This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based
upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we
are allBlack and white alikeill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we
die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is
the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is
the price of self-respect. Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I

and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We
have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that
existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us,
we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have
to be driven out with a stick. Che Guevara said that to a revolutionary death
is the reality and victory the dream. Because the revolutionary lives so
dangerously, his survival is a miracle. Bakunin, who spoke for the most
militant wing of the First International, made a similar statement in his
Revolutionary Catechism. To him, the first lesson a revolutionary must
learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does
not grasp the essential meaning of his life. When Fidel Castro and his small
band were in Mexico preparing for the Cuban Revolution, many of the
comrades had little understanding of Bakunins rule. A few hours before they
set sail, Fidel went from man to man asking who should be notified in case of
death. Only then did the deadly seriousness of the revolution hit home. Their
struggle was no longer romantic. The scene had been exciting and animated
but when the simple, overwhelming question of death arose everyone fell
silent. Many so-called revolutionaries in this country, black and
white, are not prepared to accept this reality. The Black Panthers
are not suicidal; neither do we romanticize the consequences of
revolution in our lifetime. Other so-called revolutionaries cling to an
illusion that they might have their revolution and die of old age. That
cannot be. I do not expect to live through our revolution, and most serious
comrades probably share my realism. Therefore, the expression revolution
in our lifetime means something different to me than it does to other people
who sue it. I think the revolution will grow in my lifetimes, but I do
not expect to enjoy its fruits. That would be a contradiction. The reality
will be grimmer.
If our alternative leads to violent revolution, that most

definitely solves
George Jackson1972, Revolutionary, Blood in My Eye, pages 59-62
The enemy culture, the established government, exists first of all
because of its ability to govern, to maintain enough order to ensure that
a cycle of sorts exists between the various levels and elements of the
society. Law and Order is their objective. Ours is Perfect Disorder. Our
aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with
our own revolutionary culture. This can be done only by creating
perfect disorder within the cycle of the enemy culture and replace it
with our own revolutionary culture.
When the fight takes place within the cities, the disorder will clearly be
hastenedthis will have an immediate effect on the consciousness of the
bulk of the population and will strain the relationship between government
and governed to the utmost.

If the life of the manufacturing city is to be stopped, it is clear that the
normal processes, at least, will be slowed by a convoy of
establishment trucks, tanks or troops simply moving in the citys
arteries where commercial convoys should be moving. The necessary
checkpoints will further slow it. Each one of the oppositions own tank
shells that is fired inside the manufacturing city at the elusive guerilla
will destroy some aspect of that factory-city and undercut the ability of
the establishment to produce another tank shell. It will not help the
fascist cause very much at all when the armed personnel carrier or jeep
patrol equipped with 30-caliber machine guns fires into a downtown
shopping crowd at the elusive guerilla who has taken refuge among them.
The people just will not understand.
The cities of fascist U.S.A.built straight up and with very little real
planning or pattern, the twisting side streets, gangways connecting roofs,
manholes, storm drain, concrete and steel treeswill hide a guerilla army
just as effectively as any forest. There is the added advantage that just
being in an area doesnt automatically make one suspect and fair game, as is
the case when an establishment army unit spots a gathering, no matter how
innocent, in an area where guerilla movements have been reported in the
countryside; just being out there defines them. The fact that the guerrilla can
hide himself fairly easily inside large population centers does not mean that
hard work neednt be done toward the winning of popular support. It simply
means that failure to gain full support for violent confrontation doesnt
preclude violent confrontation. If all the elements exist that have made
guerilla warfare in its classical style an invincible weapon against
mechanized, industrially-based armies in undeveloped areas, they
will be even more successful in built-up urban Amerikan conditions .
The facts that make it impossible for the establishment army to
overcome the attacking guerilla armyit spite of the availability of the
knowledge contained in the master-works on guerrilla strategybecome
clear when we realize that after the strategy is understood by the guerilla
chief, the tactics applicable to his particular military problems are a
product of his imagination alone, a constant creative improvising. Also
working against the establishments general staff is its own
mentality. Theyve convinced themselves or have been convinced by their
experience at war with other mechanized armies that having the most at
the right time wins war. In other words, they feel that winning wars depends
mainly on gadgets and they presume that they can dictate the terms and
grounds upon which each battle takes place. Theyve locked in on a fixed
set of systematized ideas that conflict completely with the realities
of Peoples War. Their egos simply will never allow them to admit that all
the ingenuity that has gone into the development of the blitz-krieg has been
wasted. A $100,000 tank can be destroyed with two dollars worth of
materials; a jet is useless against the rifleman, and it also can be destroyed
with one well-placed burst from an assault rifle or destroyed on the ground
by mortar from miles away. Then, too, the pilot, years in the making, can be

killed with a knife. The copter as a fighting machine is the most stupid of all
the costly gadgets; it can be heard from miles away; it cant be armored, a
ten-cent bullet can render it useless. All of these contraptions require
liquid fuels that will stop flowing when the production of all the
other commodities stops. Fighting really depends upon the people and
small easily machined portable weapons.
Another factor that works to the advantage of the guerilla army is
time. The establishment forces cannot survive the prolonged unrest
that is steadily building. Profits fall, the point of diminishing returns
is eventually reached; and from there, the establishments force and
energy goes into its last stages of life, while our new revolutionary
culture is buildingmusical chairs where each go-round excludes some
element of their control factors.
The objective, I repeat, of the destruction of a city-based industrial
establishment and its protective forces is to create perfect disorder,
to disrupt all of their interactive processes that allow them to produce and
distribute goods, and this can be done from within the process much more
easily than from without. Really, there is no possibility of an
establishment government ever overcoming a determined internal
enemy.
Their calls to prevent wars just gloss over the ongoing living
apocalypse for people of color.
Rodriguez 2008, (Dylan, Associate Professor at University of California
Riverside, " WARFARE AND THE TERMS OFENGAGEMENT," in Abolition Now:
Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex,
p.93-100.)
We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of
unprecedented state-organized human capture and state-produced
physical/social/psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned
by the domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the
profound forms of informal apartheid and proto-apartheid that are
being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the
country. This condition presents a profound crisisand political possibility
for people struggling against the white supremacist state, which
continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical
evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far
away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization,
and US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately global way, it is
nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy
protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when
there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive,
declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most

intimate and nearby geographies of home.
This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of
the political and institutional logics that structure so much of the US
progressive left, and particularly the establishment left that is
tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial complex
(NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic
relationships that link political and financial technologies of state
and owning class social control with surveillance over public
political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive
and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the
industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal
and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of governmentproctored non-profit organizations.
It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure
that I wish to address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm , a peculiar
and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures,
disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most
progressive movements and organizations within the US
establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that
is, the lefts willingness to fundamentally tolerateand
accompanying unwillingness to abolishthe institutionalized
dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment
apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence normal
manifestations within the domestic homeland of the Homeland
Security state .
Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over
public policy, civil liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent
mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist,
classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken
politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified
permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of
targeted and massive suffering , guided by the logic of Black,
brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and
essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project .
To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of
imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing
that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment
left (within and perhaps beyond the US) does not care to envision, much
less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and
its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task
of the present and future. Our non-profit left, in particular, seems

content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts
to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the
urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and
radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of
these wars .
Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of
rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion
against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of
radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even
culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and
openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially
neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of
our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have
historically struggled to survive and overthrow such classical structures of
dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other
generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging,
dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional
premises of this condition of domestic warfare in favor of shortterm, winnable policy reforms ? (For example, why did we choose to
formulate and tolerate a progressive political language that
reinforced dominant racist notions of criminality in the process of
trying to discredit the legal basis of Three Strikes laws?) What were
the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements
during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an
effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist states terms of
engagement (that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation
on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanons memorable statement to his
own peers, comrades, and nemeses:
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in
relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding
generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of
colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current
struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the
habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning
incomprehension at their silence or passiveness.
Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by
such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to clarify the premises of
the social mission that our generation of US based progressive organizing
has undertaken.
In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the
US state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of

community-based organizing has revolved around service provision.
Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive
ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation
on older liberal notions of the good citizen. Following Fanon, the
question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I
believe that to respond to this political problem requires an analysis
and conceptualization of the state that is far more complex and
laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations
to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant proposals. In
fact, I think one pragmatic step toward an abolitionist politics
involves the development of grassroots pedagogies (such as reading
groups, in-home workshops, inter-organization and inter-movement critical
dialogues) that will compel us to teach ourselves about the different ways
that the state works in the context of domestic warfare, so that we no longer
treat it simplistically. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist
framework to understand that the state can and must be radically
confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics.
In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void
created by what Ruthie Gilmore has called the violent "abandonments" of the
state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which
were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively)
exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities (guided by a " frightening
willingness to engage in human sacrifice"). Yet, at the same time that the
state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle
against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left
remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address
the questions of social survival, grassroots mobilization, radical social justice,
and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very
domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the
premises of its own coherence.
P I T FA L L S O F T H E P E DAG O G I C A L STAT E
We can broadly understand that "the state" is in many ways a conceptual
term that refers to a mind-boggling array of geographic, political, and
institutional relations of power and domination. It is, in that sense, a term of
abstraction : certainly the state is "real," but it is so massive and
institutionally stretched that it simply cannot be understood and "seen" in its
totality. The way we come to comprehend the state's realness-or differently
put, the way the state makes itself comprehensible, intelligible, and
materially identifiable to ordinary people-is through its own selfnarrations
and institutional mobilizations.
Consider the narrative and institutional dimensions of the "war on drugs," for
nample. New Y ork City mayor Edward Koch, in a gesture of masculine
challenge to the Reagan- era Feds, offers a prime example of such a
narration in a 1986 op-ed piece published on the widely-read pages of The
New York Times:

I propose the following steps as a coordinated Federal response to [the
war on drugs] :
Use the full resources of the military for drug interdiction. The Posse
Comitatus doctrine, which restricts participation of the military in
civilian law enforcement, must be modified so that the military can be
used for narcotics control . . .
Enact a Federal death penalty for drug wholesalers. Life sentences,
harsh fines, forfeitures of assets, billions spent on education and
therapy all have failed to deter the drug wholesaler. The death penalty
would. Capital punishment is an extraordinary remedy, but we are
facing an extraordinary peril . . .
Designate United States narcotics prisons. The Bureau of Prisons
should designate separate facilities for drug offenders. Segregating
such prisoners from others, preferably i n remote locations such a s the
Yukon or desert areas, might motivate drug offenders to abandon their
trade.
Enhance the Federal agencies combating the drug problem. The
Attorney General should greatly increase the number of drug
enforcement agents in New York and other cities. He should direct the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to devote substantial manpower
against the cocaine trade and should see to it that the Immigration and
Naturalization Service is capable of detecting and deporting aliens
convicted of drug crimes in far better numbers than it now does.
Enact the state and local narcotics control assistance act of 1986. This
bill provides $750 million annually for five years to assist state and
local jurisdictions increase their capacities for enforcement,
corrections, education and prosecution.
These proposals offer no certainty for success in the fight against
drugs, of course. If we are to succeed, however, it is essential that we
persuade the Federal Government to recognize its responsibility to lead
the way.
Edward Koch's manifesto reflects an important dimension of the broader
institutional, cultural, and political activities that build the state as a
mechanism of self-legitimating violence: the state (here momentarily
manifest in the person of the New York City Mayor) constantly tells stories
about itself, facilitated by a politically willing and accomplice corporate
media.
This storytelling-which through repetition and saturation assembles the
popular "common sense" of domestic warfare-is inseparable from the
on-the-ground shifting, rearranging, and recommitting of resources and
institutional power that we witness in the everyday mobilizations of a
state waging intense, localized, militarized struggle against its
declared internal enemies. Consider, for example, how pronouncements
like those of Koch, Reagan, and Bratton seem to always be accompanied by
the operational innovation of different varieties of covert ops, urban guerilla
war, and counterintelligence warfare that specifically emerge through the

state's declared domestic wars on crime/drugs/gangs/etc. Hence, it is no
coincidence that Mayor Koch's editorial makes the stunning appeal to
withdraw ("modify") the Posse Comitatus principle, to allow the Federal
government's formal mobilization of its global war apparatus for battle in the
homeland neighborhoods of the war on drugs. To reference our example
even more closely, we can begin to see how the ramped-up policing
and massive imprisonment of Black and Latino youth in Koch's
1980s New York were enabled and normalized by his and others'
attempts to story tell the legal empowerment and cultural
valorization of the police, such that the nuts-and-bolts operation of
the prison industrial complex was lubricated by the multiple moral
parables of domestic warfare.
This process of producing the state as an active, tangible, and identifiable
structure of power and dominance, through the work of self-narration and
concrete mobilizations of institutional capacity, is what some scholars call
"statecraft." Generally, the state materializes and becomes
comprehensible to us through these definitive moments of crafting:
that is, we come to identify the state as a series of active political
and institutional projects. So, if the state's self-narration inundates
us with depictions of its policing and juridical arms as the
righteously punitive and justifiably violent front lines of an
overlapping series of comprehensive, militarized, and culturally
valorized domestic wars-for my generation, the "war on drugs," the
generation prior, the "war on crime," and the current generation, localized
"wars on gangs" and their planetary rearticulation in the "war on terror"then it is the material processes of war, from the writing of public
policy to the hyper-weaponization of the police, that commonly
represents the existence of the state as we come to normally
"know" it.
Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative
language and concrete material production of the state, the question
remains as to why the establishment left has not confronted this statecraft
with the degree of absolute emergency that the condition implies (war!).
Perhaps it is because we are underestimating the skill and reach of the state
as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, replete with room for contradiction
and relatively sanctioned spaces for " dissent" and counter-state organizing.
Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramsci 's thoughts on the formation of the
contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here:
The Stale does have and request consent, but it also "educates" this
consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these,
however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the
ruling class.
Although Gramsci was writing these words in the early 1900s, he had already
identified the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the nonprofit industrial complex. The historical record of the last three decades

shows that liberal foundations such as the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Soros
and other financial entities h ave become politically central to "the private
initiative of the ruling class" and have in fact funded a breath-taking number
of organizations, grassroots campaigns, and progressive political interests.
The questions I wish to insert here, however, are whether the financially
enabling gestures of foundations also 1) exert a politically disciplinary or
repressive force on contemporary social movements and community based
organizations, while 2) nurturing a n ideological and structural a llegiance to
the state that preempts a more creative, radical, abolitionist politics.
Several social movement scholars have argued that the "channeling
mechanisms" of the non-profit industrial complex "may now far
outweigh the effect of direct social control by states in explaining
the . . . orthodox tactics, and moderate goals of much collective action
in modern America." The non-profit apparatus and its symbiotic
relationship to the state amount to a sophisticated technology of
political repression and social control, accompanying and facilitating
the ideological and institutional mobilizations of a domestic war
waging state. Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some
misnamed "revolutionary" groups find it opportune to assimilate
into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm, as it
simultaneously allows them to establish a relatively stable financial and
operational infrastructure while avoiding the transience, messiness, and
possible legal complication of working under decentralized, informal, or even
"underground" auspices. Thus, the aforementioned authors suggest that the
emergence of the state-proctored non-profit industry "suggests a historical
movement away from direct, cruder forms [of state repression] , toward
more subtle forms of state social control of social movements."
The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately
forfeit the crucial political and conceptual possibilities of abolishing
domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent to which
domestic war has been fashioned into the everyday, "normal "
reality of the state . By extension, the non-profit industrial complex, which
is fundamentally guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often
state-funded), also reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions
of domestic warfare are taken for granted because they form and inform the
popular consensus.
Effectively contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular
consensus (for example, destabilizing assertive assumptions
common to progressive movements and organizations such as "we
have to control/get rid of gangs," "we need prisons," or "we want
better police") is, in this context, dangerously difficult work.
Although, the truth of the matter is that the establishment US left, in ways
both spoken and presumed, may actually agree with the political, moral, and
ideological premises of domestic warfare. Leaders as well as rank-and-file
members in avowedly progressive organizations can and must reflect

on how they might actually be supporting and reproducing existing
forms of racism, white supremacy, state violence, and domestic
warfare in the process of throwing their resources behind what
they perceive as "winnable victories," in the lexicon of venerable
community organizer Saul Alinsky.
Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political
rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that fetishize and
fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the
worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long
overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical disidentification with the state, in the trajectory of an antinationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive
identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to
consider " insurgency" as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive
maneuvering of "resistance"). Reading a few a few lines down from our first
invoking of Fanon's call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here: " For
us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our
historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act,
and every attack aborted or drowned in blood. "
Policy is only going to come after our radical abolitionist

pedagogy starts to go into effect.
Dylan Rodriguez, D Rod Will Make Ya Jump, Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as
Pedagogical Position, Radical Teacher, Number 88, Summer 2010, p. 7-19
Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical position
other than an abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach, and
survive and thrive in a time defined by the capacity and political
willingness to eliminate and neutralize populations through a
culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence,
is to better understand why abolitionist praxis in this historical
moment is primarily pedagogical, within and against the system
in which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in future moments,
abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of (creating
and not simply opposing) public policy, infrastructure building, and
economic reorganization, the present moment clearly demands a
convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build the
collective human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, and
material sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and
liberatory social transformations.
The prison regime is the institutionalization and systemic expansion of

massive human misery. It is the production of bodily and psychic
disarticulation on multiple scales, across different physiological capacities.
The prison industrial complex is, in its logic of organization and its
production of common sense, at least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison
regime is inseparable fromthat is, present inthe schooling regime
in which teachers are entangled. Prison is not simply a place to which
one is displaced and where ones physiological being is disarticulated, at the
rule and whim of the state and its designated representatives (police, parole
officers, school teachers). The prison regime is the assumptive premise of
classroom teaching generally. While many of us must live in labored
denial of this fact in order to teach as we must about American
democracy, freedom, and (civil) rights, there are opportune
moments in which it is useful to come clean: the vast majority of
what occurs in U.S. classroomsfrom preschool to graduate school
cannot accommodate the bare truth of the proto-genocidal prison
regime as a violent ordering of the world, a primary component of
civil society/school, and a material presence in our everyday
teaching acts.
As teachers, we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide
management, in which our pedagogical labor is variously engaged in
mitigating, valorizing, critiquing, redeeming, justifying, lamenting,
and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic
violence of the global-historical U.S. nation building project. As
radical teachers, we are politically hailed to betray genocide management
in order to embrace the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The shortterm survival of those populations rendered most immediately
vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular violence of this system ,
and the long-term survival of most of the planets human population
(particularly those descended from survivors of enslavement, colonization,
conquest, and economic exploitation), is significantly dependent on our
willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity.
Anti-Policymaking Framework
Interpretation The affirmative must defend an advocacy that
recognizes individual identity
Shaffer 7
Butler teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. B.S., Law, 1958, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; B.A., Political Science, 1959, and J.D., 1961,
University of Chicago; Member, Colorado and Nebraska State Bars. Identifying With the State June 29th 2007. http://archive.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer159.html. PWoods.
One of the deadliest practices we engage in is that of identifying

ourselves with a collective entity. Whether it be the state, a nationality,
our race or gender, or any other abstraction, we introduce division
hence, conflict into our lives as we separate ourselves from those who
identify with other groupings. If one observes the state of our world today,
this is the pattern that underlies our deadly and destructive social
behavior.
Through years of careful
conditioning, we learn to think of ourselves in terms of agencies and/or
abstractions external to our independent being.
we have
learned to internalize these external forces; to conform our thinking and
behavior to the purposes and interests of such entities
in order to communicate to others our sense of who we
are. In such ways does our being become indistinguishable from our
chosen collective.
We discover a particular form of organization
through which we are able to cooperate with others for our mutual
benefit.
the advantages derived from this system have a sufficient
consistency to lead us to the conclusion that our well-being is dependent
upon it. Those who manage the organization find it in their self-interests
to propagate this belief so that we will become dependent upon its
permanency.
we find it easy to subvert our will and sense of purpose to the
collective. The organization ceases being a mere tool of mutual
convenience, and becomes an end in itself. Our lives become
institutionalized, and we regard it as fanciful to imagine ourselves living
in any other way than as constituent parts of a machine that transcends
our individual sense. Once we identify ourselves with the state, that
collective entity does more than represent who we are; it is who we are.
To the politicized mind, the idea that we are the government has real
meaning,
The successes and failures of the
state become the subject's successes and failures; insults or other attacks
upon their abstract sense of being
become assaults upon
their very personhood. Shortcomings on the part of the state become our
failures of character. This is why so many Americans who have belatedly
come to criticize the war against Iraq are inclined to treat it as only a
mistake or the product of mismanagement, not as a moral wrong.
This mindset was no better articulated than when George W. Bush declared you're either with us, or against us.
Or, to express the point more clearly,
. We adorn ourselves with flags, mouth shibboleths, and
decorate our cars with bumper-stickers,
In this way are institutions born.
Over time,
Like a sculptor working with clay, institutions take over the direction of our minds, twisting, squeezing, and pounding upon them until we have embraced a mindset conducive to their interests.
Once this has been accomplished,
not in the sense of being able to control such an agency, but in the psychological sense.
such as the burning of their flag
Our egos can
more easily admit to the making of a mistake than to moral transgressions. Such an attitude also helps to explain why, as Milton Mayer wrote in his revealing post-World War II book, They Thought They Were Free, most Germans
It is this dynamic that makes it easy for political

officials to generate wars, a process that reinforces the sense of identity
and attachment people have for their state. It also helps to explain why
most Americans
refuse to condemn government leaders for
the lies, forgeries, and deceit employed to get the war started: to
acknowledge the dishonesty of the system through which they identify
themselves is to admit to the dishonest base of their being. The
were unable to admit that the Nazi regime had been tyrannical.
though tiring of the war against Iraq

truthfulness of the state's rationale for war is irrelevant to most of its
subjects. It is sufficient that they believe the abstraction with which their
lives are intertwined will be benefited in some way by war. Against whom
and upon what claim does not matter except as a factor in assessing the
likelihood of success.
It is not the
symbiotic relationship between war and the expansion of state power, nor
the realization of corporate benefits that could not be obtained in a free
market, that mobilize the machinery of war. Without most of us standing
behind our system, and cheering on our troops, and defending our
leaders, none of this would be possible.
Only when our
ego-identities become wrapped up with some institutional abstraction
such as the state can we be persuaded to invest our lives and the lives
of our children in the collective madness of state action.
That most Americans have pipped nary a squeak of protest over Bush administration plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons if deemed useful to its ends
reflects the point I am making. Bush could undertake a full-fledged war against Lapland, and most Americans would trot out their flags and bumper-stickers of approval.
What would be your likely response if your neighbor prevailed upon you to join him in a violent attack upon
a local convenience store, on the grounds that it hired illegal aliens? Your sense of identity would not be implicated in his efforts, and you would likely dismiss him as a lunatic.
We do not have such attitudes toward organizations with
which we have more transitory relationships. If we find an accounting error in our bank statement, we would not find satisfaction in the proposition the First National Bank, right or wrong. Neither would we be inclined to wear a T-
One of the many adverse consequences of identifying with

and attaching ourselves to collective abstractions is our loss of control
over not only the meaning and direction in our lives, but of the manner in
which we can be efficacious in our efforts to pursue the purposes that
have become central to us. We become dependent upon the performance
of our group; our reputation rises or falls on the basis of what
institutional leaders do or fail to do. If our nation-state loses respect in
the world such as by the use of torture or killing innocent people - we
consider ourselves no longer respectable, and scurry to find plausible
excuses to redeem our egos. When these expectations are not met, we go
in search of new leaders or organizational reforms we believe will restore
our sense of purpose and pride that we have allowed abstract entities to
personify for us. As the costs and failures of the state become increasingly
evident, there is a growing tendency to blame this system. But to do so is
to continue playing the same game into which we have allowed ourselves
to become conditioned.
Whether we care to acknowledge it or not and most of us
do not each of us has an unconscious capacity for attitudes or conduct
that our conscious minds reject. We fear that
we might engage in
violence even deadly against others; or that inducements might
cause us to become dishonest. We might harbor racist or other bigoted
sentiments, or consider ourselves lazy or irresponsible. Though we are
unlikely to act upon such inner fears, their presence within us can
generate discomforting self-directed feelings of guilt, anger, or
unworthiness that we would like to eliminate. The most common way in
which humanity has tried to bring about such an exorcism is by
subconsciously projecting these traits onto others
and punishing
them
It
is somewhat ironic, therefore, that most of us resort to the same practice
in our criticism of political systems. After years of mouthing the highschool civics class mantra about the necessity for government and the
bigger the government the better we begin to experience the
unexpected consequences of politicization
shirt that read Disneyland: love it or leave it.
One of the practices employed by the state to get us to mobilize our dark side energies in opposition to the endless recycling of enemies it has chosen for
us, is that of psychological projection.
, sufficiently provoked,
(i.e., scapegoats)
for what are really our own shortcomings. The state has trained us to behave this way, in order that we may be counted upon to invest our lives, resources, and other energies in pursuit of the enemy du jour.
. Tax burdens continue to escalate; or the state takes our home to make way for a proposed
shopping center; or ever-more details of our lives are micromanaged by ever-burgeoning state bureaucracies. Having grown weary of the costs including the loss of control over our lives we blame the state for what has befallen
us. We condemn the Bush administration for the parade of lies that precipitated the war against Iraq, rather than indicting ourselves for ever believing anything the state tells us. We fault the politicians for the skyrocketing costs of
governmental programs, conveniently ignoring our insistence upon this or that benefit whose costs we would prefer having others pay. The statists have helped us accept a world view that conflates our incompetence to manage our
own lives with their omniscience to manage the lives of billions of people along with the planet upon which we live! and we are now experiencing the costs generated by our own gullibility .
By

identifying ourselves with any abstraction (such as the state) we give up
the integrated life, the sense of wholeness that can be found only within
each of us. While the state has manipulated, cajoled, and threatened us to
identify ourselves with it, the responsibility for our acceding to its
pressures lies within each of us.
Our
politico-centric pain and suffering has been brought about by our having
allowed external forces to move in and occupy the vacuum we created at
the center of our being. The only way out of our dilemma involves a
retracing of the route that brought us to where we are. We require
nothing so much right now as the development of a sense of who we are
that transcends our institutionalized identities, and returns us without
division and conflict to a centered, self-directed integrity in our lives.
The statists have as was their vicious purpose simply taken over the territory we have abandoned.
Violation The affirmative defends a fiated plan based on

federal action
Vote negative:
Fairness Institutional action upholds anti-Blackness
Wilderson 2010
(Frank B., Professor of Drama @ UC Irvine- Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms pg. 1-5- [SG])
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 bigoted and out of step with
the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and rainbow coalitions. 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 precise, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on
that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California at 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 they could settle
the Land Lease Accounts that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was crazy. Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind,
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 not to the way in which space and
time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful
interests, 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,
it would seem that
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
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
integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet

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 cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the
Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple

sentences, thirteen 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 thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go
to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are
so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and
Savage.
politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an
archive of
progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are
anything to go byis that what can so easily be spoken is now (five
hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so
ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen
words not only render their speaker crazy but become themselves
impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged
feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical
politics and scholarship were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even
Would it be overthrown? but rather when and howand, for some, whatwould
come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a
discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from
activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the
Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy
were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of

the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather
Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise
armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the
possibility of success, but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic
because they could not make a convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic analysis
that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility
as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential
candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the
presence of Blacks. One could (and many did) acknowledge Americas strength and power. This seldom, however,
rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an
assessment of the so-called balance of forces. The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser
Democrats)
extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible
the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the

questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all
retreated as did White radicals and progressives who retired
from struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young
Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in
prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for
ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the
crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and
vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political
hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently,

spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary
zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of
the Settlement and the Slave estatesii destruction, to manifest
itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent
element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is no in the sense
that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly
even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours,

the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like
prose; but yes in the sense that in
the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural
antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-
Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar

of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This
grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and
acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social
turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that
can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of
antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or
positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the
obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or
blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present,
Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of family
values), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black
The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the

mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar
is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics
the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich underwrite Film
Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite
cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This
notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema
assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the
sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the
political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological
suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one
another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though
political ontologyor non-ontology.
iii
this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of
feature films and political theory that follows.
Advocacy skills and education Nothing about voting aff actually

does anything in the real world, fiat disconnects you from your
agency because youre pretending to be something else
Polson 2012
(Dana Roe Polson, Co-Director, teacher, founder of ConneXions Community Leadership Academy, Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in
Action, http://media.proquest.com/media/pq/classic/doc/2719387941/fmt/ai/rep/NPDF?_s=QsK9GR%2Bx6bq%2BwLv%2BLzDyWm%2BcJH8%3D, RH) **Edited for gendered language

One of the ways performance debaters see themselves doing something as opposed to just talking is a concept they call in-round solvency. If something about a debaters argument is addressed and solved for in the round, then she
has in-round solvency. The concept of in-round solvency only makes sense in non-traditional speeches; traditional debaters would not claim in-round solvency for an argument that depends on the US government to enact.
While fiat says that for the sake of the debate round, we will all pretend
that there would be no barriers to enact the plan
the real world
(the opponents cannot argue that theres no way that would be approved in
; fiat says that we assume the plan could be approved), no one is
saying that the round itself does enact. The power of discourse, then,
is different in performance debate arguments because the actor is

not the USFG, but, in some cases, the debaters themselves; the
focus is often not the state but the state of debate. There is a
radical shift in who has potential agency
. As Janice Cooper says, We talk about specifically affirming... ourselves in this round, like
thats an act of actual in-round solvency, because we in this round are like the most oppressed.... The response of more traditional debaters to performance debate arguments is often to downplay or avoid them. Janice says that she
and her partner make real arguments, and she hopes that the debate community will start to realize that, like, were not just talking,like were actually making real arguments they should actually try to prepare for and actually
I heard more than once the argument that talking about

issues of race during a debate round, where it could actually have
an impact, is different from talking about
foreign policy
changes
performance
look out for (Cooper, interview, p. 15).
(in the sense of pretending to make)
. I think that individual agency is the key to the argument here. The playing-the-game takes away from individual agency; not playing a game, i.e.,
debate, asserts individual agency and is therefore doing something

this position:
. Kenneth explained
A lot of teams like to participate in some hypothetical world
where...the affirmative pretends to be the federal government, and ...

when the judge signs his ballot affirmative, the plan gets passed, this
problem gets solved, and, ... like we stop nuclear war. When the judge
signs the ballot, nuclear war gets stopped.
And I guess
the problem with that is
like back
it takes
away from what you as an individual person can do cause youre
constantly pretending to be something that youre not.
sing your individual agency to fix problems that you know you have
control over. .... By us taking advantage of our individual agency and talking
about whiteness and bringing it to the forefront of discussions
to like the
objectivity thing, it disconnects you from the real world
. Like
And so, like, like what [theorist] Carrie
Crenshaw says, like u
, like, we [he and his debate partner] do more
action than you [an opponent] do, even if you pretend to do something. (Kenneth, interview, p. 19)
1.
Academy K
Their attempt at academic change sustains powers ability to
constrain ANY resistance by turning those victims of power into
ghosts. The tradition of liberal citizenship is a ghostly attempt to
remember past political struggles that ultimately fetishize
movements of the past, especially in academic subculture
Occupied UC Berkeley 2k9.http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/thenecrosocial/, the necrosocial: civic life, social death, and the UC, nov. 19. PWoods.
Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere,
things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the
universitywhether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the personifications of the rule
of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and
out of the physical space of the universityeach one the product of some exploitationwhich seek to
absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to
absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office
the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense

exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass
the test of relevancy. But the irrelevant departments also have their place. With
their pure motives of knowledge for its own sake , they perpetuate the blind inertia
of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context. As the university cultivates its cozy
relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own
role, co-opting and containing radical potential . And so we attend lecture after lecture
about how discourse produces subjects, ignoring the most obvious fact that we
ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing
that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter. The university gladly
complexes. And at this critical juncture
permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of
A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any

confrontational radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which
contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books,
lecture halls. There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a
graveyard as es . The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity,
equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social
clich. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the universitys ghosts, the ghosts of
all those it has excludedthe immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and
commodities.
banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations. This is our gothicwe are
our actions will

never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain
permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories our force will be dependent on the
limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially , each of
us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators,
bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/
chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are
students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or
Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaderseach with our
so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless.In this graveyard
own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies,
identities, and subculturesand thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.
this graveyard?
Who doesnt participate in

Their argument that making this argument in a debate round
actually changes something ignores the coordinates of academic
power/knowledge at play in the debate tournament itself this
results in commodification of their advocacy to justify the
institutional structure of the activity
Occupied UC Berkeley 9.
http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/, the
necrosocial: civic life, social death, and the UC, nov. 19
In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation , which in reality
translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves were brighter than everyone else.
Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone
else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel
terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them
as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman . It should feel good, gratifying,
completing. It is our private wet dream for the future ; everywhere, in everyone this same
dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this . We are convinced,
owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of
happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course , and in this moment of
practiced theaterthe fight between the university and its own students we have
used their words on their stages: Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which
are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We
demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions dont care for those values, not at
all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and
ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public
education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities , the states
monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in
general. They sell the practice through the image. Were taught well live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the
British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and sociallywhich is to
nothing has changed , it is only an escalation, a provocation. Their most recent

attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more
willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to
see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every institution has of course our best
interest in mind, so much so that were willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and
eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts. Each bulging institutional value longing to become
more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety
to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror,
every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death .
Social death is our banal acceptance of an institutions meaning for our own lack of
meaning. Its the positions we thoughtlessly enact. Its the particular nature of being owned.
say,
Where does their change take place? Acadamia? Debate? Their

silence and demand for the ballot is damning their advocacy is
presented to legitimize the neutrality of debate allowing more
radical theories to be disregarded remember this moment when
they claim we have no alternative
Harney and Moten 13.
Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education at the Lee Kong

Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University and a co-founder of the School for Study and Fred Moten, Helen L.
Bevington Professor of Moden Poetry, Politics Surrounded, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pg. 29. PWoods.
Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its development, creates risks.
Like the colonial police force recruited un-

wittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods , university labor may harbor
refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways there are good reasons
for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or
. But
forced underground . Precautions have been taken, book lists have been
drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute
made.
Maroon
communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students,
adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state
college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visaexpired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college
sociologists, and feminist engineers And what will the university say of
them? It will say they are unprofessional
It is the charge against
the more than professional How do those who exceed the profession, who
exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize
themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider
them a problem, a danger
The
Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires.
. This is not an arbitrary charge.
? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book.
undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding. The

maroons
are the condition of possibility of the production of
knowledge in the university
It is not
merely a matter of the secret labor upon which such space is lifted,
though of course such space is lifted from collective labor and by it. It is
rather that to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the
university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and
know something about possibility. They
the singularities against the writers of singularity, the writers who write, publish, travel, and speak.
be recognized by it , and to institute the negligence of that internal

outside, that unas- similated underground, a negligence of it that is
precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions this act of being
against always already excludes the unrecognized modes of politics , the
beyond of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal paraorganiza- tion
This is why the negligence of the critical academic is
. And
, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic organization that is negated by the idea of intellectual
space in an organization called the university.
always at the same time an assertion of bourgeois individualism

it turns out professionalization is not the opposite of
negligence but its mode of politics in the United States
. Such negligence is the
essence of professionalization where
. It takes the form of a choice that excludes the prophetic
organization of the undercommons to be against, to put into question the knowledge object, let us say in this case the university, not so much without touching its foundation, as without touching ones own condition of possibility,
a general negligence of condition is the only

coherent position
This alwaysnegligent act is what leads us to say there is no distinction between the
university in the United States and professionalization There is no point
in trying to hold out the university against its professionalization They
without admitting the Undercommons and being admitted to it. From this,
. Not so much an antifoundationalism or foundationalism, as both are used against each other to avoid contact with the undercommons.
are the same the maroons refuse to refuse professionalization, that is,
to be against the university. The university will not recognize this
indecision, and thus professionalization is shaped precisely by what it
cannot acknowledge, its internal antagonism, its wayward labor, its
surplus. Against this wayward labor it sends the critical, sends its claim
that what is left beyond the critical is waste.
critical education only
. Yet
But in fact,

attempts to perfect professional education
if professional education ever
slips in its labor, ever reveals its condition of possibility to the professions
it supports and reconstitutes, critical education is there to pick it up, and
. The professions constitute themselves in an opposition to the unregulated and the ignorant
without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them. But
to tell it, never mind it was just a bad dream, the ravings, the drawings
of the mad.
critical education is precisely there to tell professional
education to rethink its relationship to its opposite
critical education
means both itself and the unregulated, against which professional
education is deployed
, critical education arrives to support any
faltering negligence, to be vigilant in its negligence, to be critically
engaged in its negligence. It is more than an ally of professional
Because
by which
. In other words
education, it is its attempted completion. A professional education has

become a critical education
It should be taken for what it is,
not progress in the professional schools, not cohabitation with the
Univer- sitas, but counterinsurgency, the refounding terrorism of law,
. But one should not applaud this fact.
coming for the discredited, coming for those who refuse to write off or
write up the undercommons.
Their try or die framing re-inscribes the status quos limited

scope of politics by maintaining the duality of forced choices,
characterizing the question always as EITHER the aff OR the
status quo, which is the same tactic that the current political
climate uses to keep dissidents content but only on its own
terms. Refuse the choices as offered, demand a third option.
Halberstam 13.
Jack Halberstam, professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at USC, The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons, The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Minor Compositions, pg. 8. PWoods.
we begin with the right to refuse what has

been refused to you Citing
Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal
the first right and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercom- mons if we begin anywhere,
Gayatri
the refusal of the choices as offered

gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box While
we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in terms of its
institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in
hand, you only get to check yes or no and the no, in this case, could
be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as
. We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom With Violence (2011) for Reddy,
offered
. Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term the call to order. And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the re-
When we refuse
we create dissonance
we allow
dissonance to continue when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it
to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps,
disorgan- ized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue
after we have left the room when we listen to music, we must refuse the
idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an
instrument music is also the anticipation of the performance and the
noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens
instantiation of the law.
, Moten and Harney suggest,
. Or,
and more importantly,

through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening
when we refuse the call to order the teacher pick- ing up the book, the
conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer
tightening the noose we refuse order as the distinction between noise
.
And so,
and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth
. These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys world of
the undercommons the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is a space and time
Our goal and the we is always the right mode of address here
is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those
which is always here.
particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed

inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics.
. Moten and Harney refuse the logic that stages refusal as
Moten and Harney tell us to listen to the noise we
make and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise into
music.
Academy K Long
movements of the past, especially in academic subculturethis
turns the case.


commodities.
our actions will


this graveyard?
Power structures are not neutral the only consciousness shift

they create is co-opted and used against them
Harney and Moten 13. Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic
Management Education at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore
Management University and a co-founder of the School for Study and Fred
Moten, Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University,
Politics Surrounded, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study, pg. 41
one comes face to face with the roots of professional and critical
commitment to negligence, to the depths of the impulse to deny the
thought of the internal outside among critical intellectuals, and the
necessity for professionals to question without question
critical
intellectuals who have found space in the university are always already
performing the denial of the new society
when they find that
space on the surface of the university when they join the conquest denial
by improving that space Before they criticise the aesthetic and the Aesthetic, the state and the State, history and History, they have already
Here
. What- ever else they do,
when they deny the undercommons,
, and
practiced the operation of denying what makes these categories possible in the underlabor of their social being as critical academics The
.
slogan on the Left

be possible
. In other words,
, then,
universities, not jails marks a choice that may not

,
perhaps more universities promote more jails
. Perhaps
it is
necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as

the product of its negligence
there is another relation between the
University and the Prison
that the undercommons
reserves as the object and inhabitation of another abolitionism
. Perhaps
beyond simple opposition or family resemblance
. What might appear as the
professionalization of the American university, our starting point, now might better be understood as a certain intensification of method in the Universitas, a tightening of the circle.
Professionalization cannot take over the American university it is the

critical approach of the university
it appears now that this state
with its peculiar violent hegemony must deny what Foucault called
the race war War on the commitment to war breaks open the memory of
, its Universitas. And indeed,
in his 1975-76 lectures
the conquest The new American studies should do this, too, if it is to be
not just a peoples history of the same country but a movement against
the possibility of a country, or any other; not just property justly distributed on the border but property unknown
the fire aimed at black studies by everyone from William
Bennett to Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the proliferation of Centers without
affiliation to the memory of the conquest, to its living guardianship, to the
protection of its honor, to the nights of labor, in the undercommons The
university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, they are both
.
. And there are other spaces situated between the Universitas and the undercommons, spaces that are
characterized precisely by not having space. Thus
since
involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social
individual.
And indeed, under the circumstances,
more universities and fewer prisons would, it has

to be concluded, mean the memory of the war was being further lost
takes the prison as a secret about the
conquest, but a secret
whose growing secrecy is its power
calling into being the prophetic
organization
, and living
unconquered, conquered labor abandoned to its lowdown fate. Instead, the undercommons
, as Sara Ahmed says,
, its ability to keep a distance
between it and its revelation, a secret that calls into being the prophetic, a secret held in common, organized as secret,
.


say,



. But
made.
Maroon
The

maroons
It is not

. And


coherent position

.
. Yet
But in fact,

of the mad.
Because
by which
. In other words


characterizing the question always as EITHER the aff OR the status
quo, which is the same tactic that the current political climate uses
to keep dissidents content but only on its own terms. Refuse the
choices as offered, demand a third option.
Halberstam 13.

Gayatri

offered
When we refuse
we allow

instrument music is also the anticipation of the performance and the
noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens
through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening
when we refuse the call to order the teacher pick- ing up the book, the
conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer
tightening the noose we refuse order as the distinction between noise
. Or,
And so,
and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth
. These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys world of
the undercommons the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is a space and time
Our goal and the we is always the right mode of address here
is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those
which is always here.
particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed

inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics.
. Moten and Harney refuse the logic that stages refusal as
Moten and Harney tell us to listen to the noise we
make and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise into
music.
Academy K Longest
movements of the past, especially in academic subculturethis
turns the case.


commodities.
our actions will


this graveyard?
Power structures are not neutral the only consciousness shift

they create is co-opted and used against them
Harney and Moten 13. Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic
Management Education at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore
Management University and a co-founder of the School for Study and Fred
Moten, Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University,
Politics Surrounded, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study, pg. 41
one comes face to face with the roots of professional and critical
commitment to negligence, to the depths of the impulse to deny the
thought of the internal outside among critical intellectuals, and the
necessity for professionals to question without question
critical
intellectuals who have found space in the university are always already
performing the denial of the new society
when they find that
space on the surface of the university when they join the conquest denial
by improving that space Before they criticise the aesthetic and the Aesthetic, the state and the State, history and History, they have already
Here
. What- ever else they do,
when they deny the undercommons,
, and
practiced the operation of denying what makes these categories possible in the underlabor of their social being as critical academics The
.
slogan on the Left

be possible
. In other words,
, then,
universities, not jails marks a choice that may not

,
perhaps more universities promote more jails
. Perhaps
it is
necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as

the product of its negligence
there is another relation between the
University and the Prison
that the undercommons
reserves as the object and inhabitation of another abolitionism
. Perhaps
beyond simple opposition or family resemblance
. What might appear as the
professionalization of the American university, our starting point, now might better be understood as a certain intensification of method in the Universitas, a tightening of the circle.
Professionalization cannot take over the American university it is the

critical approach of the university
it appears now that this state
with its peculiar violent hegemony must deny what Foucault called
the race war War on the commitment to war breaks open the memory of
, its Universitas. And indeed,
in his 1975-76 lectures
the conquest The new American studies should do this, too, if it is to be
not just a peoples history of the same country but a movement against
the possibility of a country, or any other; not just property justly distributed on the border but property unknown
the fire aimed at black studies by everyone from William
Bennett to Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the proliferation of Centers without
affiliation to the memory of the conquest, to its living guardianship, to the
protection of its honor, to the nights of labor, in the undercommons The
university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, they are both
.
. And there are other spaces situated between the Universitas and the undercommons, spaces that are
characterized precisely by not having space. Thus
since
involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social
individual.
And indeed, under the circumstances,
more universities and fewer prisons would, it has

to be concluded, mean the memory of the war was being further lost
takes the prison as a secret about the
conquest, but a secret
whose growing secrecy is its power
calling into being the prophetic
organization
, and living
unconquered, conquered labor abandoned to its lowdown fate. Instead, the undercommons
, as Sara Ahmed says,
, its ability to keep a distance
between it and its revelation, a secret that calls into being the prophetic, a secret held in common, organized as secret,
.


say,



. But
made.
Maroon
The

maroons
It is not

. And


coherent position

.
. Yet
But in fact,

of the mad.
Because
by which
. In other words


characterizing the question always as EITHER the aff OR the status
quo, which is the same tactic that the current political climate uses
to keep dissidents content but only on its own terms. Refuse the
choices as offered, demand a third option.
Halberstam 13.

Gayatri

offered
When we refuse
we allow

instrument music is also the anticipation of the around it, making it and
loving it, being in it while listening
when we refuse the call to order
the teacher pick- ing up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the
speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose we refuse
. Or,
. And so,
order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge,
pain and truth
. These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys world of the undercommons the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place
Our goal and the we is

always the right mode of address here is not to end the troubles but to
where we take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is a space and time which is always here.
end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that
must be opposed
. Moten and Harney refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics.
Moten and
Harney tell us to listen to the noise we make and to refuse the offers we
receive to shape that noise into music.
They make the ballot a commodity kills any social transformation

Bryant 13philosophy prof at Collin College (Levi, The Paradox of
Emancipatory Political Theory,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-paradox-ofemancipatory-political-theory/)
Theres a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory
that has pretensions of being emancipatory. In a nutshell, the question is that of
how this theory can avoid being a sort of commodity . Using Hegel as a model, this contradiction goes
something like this: emancipatory political theory says its undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x. Yet with rare exceptions, it is only published in academicjournals that few
have access to, in a jargon that only other academics or the highly literate can understand, and presented only at conferencesthat only other academics generally attend.
academic emancipatory
political
theory reveals itself
isnt aimed at political change or intervention
in its truth
at all,
Thus ,
as something that
but rather only as a
move or
moment in the ongoing autopoiesis of academia . That is, itfunctions as another

line on the CVand is one strategy through which the university system
carries outits autopoiesis or self-reproduction across time. It thus functions the issue isnt
here one of the beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function as something
like a commodity within the academic system . The function is not to
intervene in the broader political system despite what all of us doing political theory say and how
we think about our work but rather to carry out yet another iteration of
the academic discourse (there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for the autopoiesis of
academia in the humanities). Were the aim political change , then the discourse would have
to find a way to reach outside the academy, but this is precisely what
academic politicaltheory cannot do due to the publication and presentation
structure, publish or perish logic, the CV, and so on. To produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her erudition or scholarship,
because they would have to presume an audience that doesnt have a high falutin intellectual background in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Foucault (who is
one of the few that was a breakaway figure), etc. They would also have to adopt a different platform of communication. Why? Because they would have to address an audience beyond
the confines of the academy, which means something other than academic presses, conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would say that us Marxists are often the worst of the worst.

scholasticism that only schoolmen can appreciate, which presents a fundamental
contradiction between the form of their discourse only other experts can understand it and the
content; they want to produce change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist cant do either of these things. If they
We engage in a discourse bordering on medieval
surrender their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the academy (notice the way in which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political theory circles
despite the appreciable impact of her work). If they adopt other platforms of communication and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers sneer at the idea that theres a
necessity to investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse then they surrender their labor requirements as people working within academia. Both options are foreclosed
emancipatory academic political discourse is thus that it

is formally and functionally apolitical. At the level of its intention or what it says it aims to effect political change and intervention,
but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own discourse and labor conditions
without intervening in broader social fields ( and no, the classroom doesnt
by the sociological conditions of their discourse. The paradox of
count ). Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be why, in some corners, were seeing
the execrable call to re-stablish the party. The party is the academic fantasy of a philosopher-king
or an academic avant gard that simultaneously gets to be an academic and produce
political change for all those dopes and illiterate that characterize the people (somehow the issue of how the party eventually becomes an
end in itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never gets addressed by these neo-totalitarians). The idea of the party and
of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of unconscious recognition of the
paradox Ive recognized here and of the political theorist that genuinely wants to produce change while also recognizing that the sociological structure of the academy cant
meet those requirements. Given these reflections, one wishes that the academic thats
learned the rhetoric of politics as an autopoieticstrategy for reproducing the university discourse
would be a little less pompous and self-righteous, but everyone has to feel important and like their the best
thing since sliced bread, I guess.
Econ (Short)
State action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness worse erases the exploitation of the black body

Their adherence to capitalist economics necessitates the

systemic exclusion and destruction of the black body
Ortiz 2013
Michael, critical race theorist. The Age of Hyper-Racism: White Supremacy as the White Knight of Capitalism. September 20. http://truth-
out.org/opinion/item/18780-the-age-of-hyper-racism-white-supremacy-as-the-white-knight-of-capitalism. PWoods.
racism has been defined in a superficial way. Racism tends to get

looked at as a set of prejudiced beliefs or attitudes toward racial or ethnic
groups. However, the idea that racism is limited to individual thought and
behavioral patterns does a disservice to the examination of its structural
roots; this, in turn, works brilliantly to perpetuate racism because it
avoids deeper mainstream analysis
, racism refers to the
systemic, structural, institutional or ideological disparity in the allocation
of social and material rewards, benefits, privileges, burdens and
disadvantages based on race. That includes access to resources, capital,
property (which affect life chances) and possession of social power and
influence
racism is built on the framework of racial
supremacy. Racial supremacy refers to the systemic, structural,
institutional and ideological racial base that our contemporary society
operates within. All interaction among participating members or
structures of the society becomes racialized. If and when we find
disparate and discriminatory outcomes within the frame of racial
supremacy, then we've got ourselves a good ol' case of racism
white
supremacy is the form of racial supremacy that we operate under in
America. The white supremacist framework has been set in place for
centuries, yet it doesn't get much critical attention in the media or in the
overall social structure. And therein lies the root of the problem to which
Unfortunately,
. Sociologically speaking, though
. Going even farther down the rabbit hole,
. Specifically,

racism is tied. White supremacy is a social framework, which means that
its basis is fluid, not rigid. Its power lies in its amorphous ability, its ability
to change "faces."
we went from the system of slavery to the system of Jim
Crow to the contemporary system of colorblind racism and mass
incarceration
the fundamental centralization and
concentration of racial power has not shifted. In fact, it has only gotten
stronger.
The Supreme Court has struck down key
portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; affirmative action measures that
aim to reduce discrimination in college acceptance are being threatened;
surveillance and policing of black youths is becoming more rampant; and
Trayvon Martin and many other similar young people have been killed
because of intensified racial anxieties. Consider also all of the other
economic, educational and health disparities that are particularly
experienced by people of color. White supremacy is stronger now is
because it operates under the guise that it doesn't exist and that race is
no longer an issue in America. So certain rationales become justified in
stopping and frisking targeted black youths for nonracial "suspicion"
reasons. Or if black unemployment is disproportionately high, it must be
the result of a lack of trying because race is not an issue.
these rationales are highly racialized, and they do
become institutionalized. They divert attention from larger, more complex
forms of covert control
a hyper-racist social environment has been
constructed whereby the distribution of social and material advantage and
disadvantage has become severely disproportionate under the assumption
that race is no longer a factor in racially inequitable outcomes. Once we
understand what the racial framework of white supremacy is and how it
operates, then we can begin to see how contemporary racism works.
It expresses itself via different social and structural modalities. The only thing that actually changes is the systemic form that white supremacy portrays takes (through which
order and control is maintained). For example,
. Throughout all of these changes in form,
Consider what has taken place in the past few months.
Therefore policies meant to guard against
employment discrimination may no longer be needed. In actuality,
. In this way,
They are
inextricably linked. From that point, it may be possible to mobilize, contest and transform the racial platform and live in a racially equitable environment. The answer lies in the fact that white supremacy - just like any other social
structure - does not simply exist in a vacuum. It exists in relation to many other social frameworks and structures in an intersectional manner. And when we begin to fit the pieces of this intersectional puzzle together, we begin to see
The circumstances and consequences

of white supremacy are no coincidence. White supremacy has a history of
intersecting with social class, which has been utilized as a tool, of sorts, to
maintain prevailing social and economic power interests. White supremacy
was created as means for a powerful Eurocentric elite to exploit the labor
power of black slaves
and quell any possibility of people with a
common class status from realizing their commonality by creating the
constructed delineation or division of race. As time progressed, the
economic system of capitalism came into fruition and developed a
harmonious marriage between itself and white supremacy, which aimed to
exploit all people regardless of race, but granted whites dominant group
status and the illusion that they were truly part of the "in" crowd
white
supremacy acts as the white knight of capitalism. It acts as a specialized
type of guardian or warden of the economic elite by keeping the majority
of the population fractured along racial lines.
it works to cover up the
social ramifications of the crises that capitalism inherently produces . So if
we are living in a time of hyper-capitalism
it would make
perfect sense for white supremacy to create this environment of hyperracism
one specific way hyper-racism is generated is by
fueling white racial anxiety through accentuating and amplifying a false
narrative of "otherness." It creates this sense of an "in" crowd and an
exactly why there is a severe disunity of people based on race (as well as other social identities) in the first place.
(as well as poor whites)
. To this day,
In this way,
(or hyper-appropriation of value), then
. It is done through a plethora of ways mentioned earlier, but

"out" crowd, of the need to be protect the values and attributes of the "in"
crowd at all costs from "deviant outsiders." In this way, the perspectives
of individual dominant group members (as well as all members of the
population) can continue to be manipulated for the purposes of disunity
and dominant economic interests.
Severe economic inequality that affects all people of all social identities calls for extreme methods that must be implemented
to distract the masses of people from realizing the overwhelming commonality that they share with each other. So white supremacy offers temporary, specious benefits and privileges to dominant group members, which will run out
when this hyper-capitalist economy spins itself off the edge of the cliff. Dominant group members will feel the sting of the divorce between capitalism and white supremacy once they begin to lose the protective facade of whiteness
(that they may or may not have even known they had) to the reality of disastrous economic conditions.
Antiblackness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the

Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,
Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the

ontological position of Blackness the very possibility of ethics and
freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives ratification of the
state and civil society. Resisting the lure of anti-blackness through
a genealogy of historys constitutive void is the starting point for
imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011
(Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley, Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state, Dissertation available on Proquest)
a sense of agency





enslaved



loss.
Econ (Long)
The affirmatives call for institutional action upholds current
antagonisms of anti-blackness
Wilderson 2010
it would seem that
she had neither


Savage.
archive of


Democrats)
iv

the Settlement and the Slave estatesv destruction, to manifest




another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this
vi
is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and
political theory that follows.
Their adherence to capitalist economics necessitates the

systemic exclusion and destruction of the black body
Ortiz 2013

influence
white
Unfortunately,
. Specifically,

to change "faces."
incarceration
stronger.
. In this way,
They are

white
it would make
. To this day,
In this way,

Antiblackness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the power

relations established during colonialism are ever-present today and
make possible the sovereign right to kill
Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,

Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency





enslaved



loss.
The alternative needs to be done now while they waste time

performing thought experiments blacks continue to suffer
Yancy 8 George, Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of
the Black experience. Black Bodies, White Gazes THE CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE. 2008. Pgs. 231-232. PWoods.
"Bullshit!" functioned as a form of erasure of the experiences of Black men

who have indeed encountered the white gaze within the contexts of
elevators and other social spaces. She assumed no "responsibility to
marginalized people and to the understanding developed from their
lives." There was no suspension of her sense of self-certainty regarding
the dynamics and racism and how Black men struggle daily to deal with
issues of racism in their lives. She did not listen to me and did not take
any steps toward conceding my understanding of the social world as
legitimate.
''White racism involves a massive breakdown of
empathy,
In addition to the fact that
"bullshit" functioned as a form of erasure, not unlike the humiliating
experiences that I have had in the presence of certain white bodies, it also
pointed to various ways in which the manifest function of certain
objections may very well operate to obfuscate profound modes of living in
bad faith
she was lying to herself, concealing from view the reality of
her own racism
I
am careful here to note that the epistemic validity of an objection must
not be reduced to its emotional delivery or aim to insult
one philosopher
pointed out to me that if he and I held very different views regarding the
ontology of numbers that an objection from him ought to be judged on the
basis of its validity and nothing more. In the case of the white student,
however
it was about race and racism. Discussions
involving the ontology of numbers,
do not implicate the self
in the same way discussions around race and racism do. The self is not
similarly exposed, made potentially vulnerable
conceivably invested in protecting hidden and threatening
aspects of her white self that she would rather avoid. She was far more
interested in protecting her sense of "goodness," which functioned to
mask how she is implicated in the subtle workings of white racism. The
white student's objection raised the issue of how white interlocutors,
when in discussions involving race and racism, may
deploy theory
as a way of not being forced to examine aspects of their own white subject
position.
Whiteness,
is a master of concealment;
it is insidiously embedded within responses, reactions, good, intentions,
postural gestures, denials, and structural and material orders
Whiteness as a form of
ambushing is not an anomaly. The operations of whiteness are by no
means completely transparent.
Rather than rest assured
that she is effectively fighting white privilege, w hen engaging in
As Joe Feagin and Herman Vera state,
the human capacity to experience the feelings of members of an out-group viewed as different.,,2
. In other words,
in relationship to those moments on, elevators or in other social spaces where she engaged in perceptual practices that criminalized or demonized the Black body. However,
. In fact,
, the context of the, lecture was not about the ontology of numbers,
while I imagine can get very passionate,
. The white female student was not passionately invested in defending an ontological
theory regarding numbers, but
(more than they realize)
Indeed, the deployment of theory can function as a form of bad faith.
after all,
. Etymologically, the word "insidious"
(insidiae) means to ambush-a powerful metaphor, as it brings to mind images and scenarios of being snared and trapped unexpectedly.
This is partly what it means to say that whiteness is insidious. The moment a white person claims to have arrived, he/she often
undergoes a surprise attack, a form of attack that points to how whiteness ensnares even as one strives to fight against racism. Shannon Sullivan states, "

resistance a person needs to continually be questioning the effects of her
activism on both self and world lthough there are many white antiracists
who do fight and will continue to fight against the operations of white
power, and while it is true that the regulatory power of whiteness will
invariably attempt to undermine such efforts, it is important that white
antiracists realize how much is at stake. While antiracist whites take time
to get their shit together
Black bodies and bodies of color
continue to suffer, their bodies cry out for the political and existential
urgency for the immediate undoing of the oppressive operations of
whiteness the very notion of the temporal gets racialized. My point here
is that even as whites take the time to theorize the complexity of
whiteness, revealing its various modes of resistance to radical
transformation, Black bodies continue to endure tremendous pain and
suffering
.,,3 A
, a luxury that is a species of privilege,
. Here,
. Doing theory in the service of undoing whiteness comes with its own snares and seductions, its own comfort zones, and reinscription of distances. Whites who deploy theory in the service of fighting
against white racism must caution against the seduction of white narcissism, the recentering of whiteness, even if it is the object of critical reflection, and, hence, the process of sequestration from the real world of weeping,
suffering, and traumatized Black bodies impacted by the operations of white power. As antiracist whites continue to make mistakes and continue to falter in the face of institutional interpellation and habituated racist reflexes,
tomorrow, a Black body will be murdered as it innocently reaches for its wallet. The sheer weight of this reality mocks the patience of theory.
War (short)

Focus on international conflicts only ignores the living

apocalypse for people of color under the domestic warfare of
white supremacy
Rodriguez 08
(Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, ABOLITION NOW! TEN
YEARS OF STRATEGY AND STRUGGLE AGAINST THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AK Press 2008, [SG])

alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and
global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal
apartheid and proto- apartheid that are being instantiated in cities,
suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a
profound crisisand political possibilityfor people struggling against
the white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the
social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black
If
we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and
US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately "global" way, it is
protesting American wars elsewhere
when there are
overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive, declarations of and
mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby
geographies of "home." This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a
critical examination of the
US progressive left
that is tethered
to the non-profit industrial complex
physical/social/ psychic
, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away.
(e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan etc.)
political and institutional logics that structure so much of the
"establishment" left
(for better and worse)
, and particularly the

(NPIC). I have
defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially
emergent progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a
spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations.
It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a

political power structure that I wish to address
a peculiar
and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines,
and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements
and organizations within the US establishment left
the
left's willingness to fundamentally tolerateand accompanying
contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus
Behind the din of progressive and liberal
reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law
there is an unspoken politics of
assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of
domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive
suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous
subjection to the expediencies and
. To put it
differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social
and political repression, and violent policing
the
establishment left
does not care to envision, much less
politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its
structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the
present and future. Our non-profit left
seems content to engage in
desperate
attempts to manage the casualties of domestic
warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly,
critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political
premises of these wars. Not long from now, generations will emerge
from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and
(we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse
and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability :
, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm,
(of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is,
in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence "normal"
manifestations within the domestic "homeland" of the Homeland Security state.
, and beneath the infrequent
mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist crirninalization,
ESSENTIAL VIOLENCE OF THE
AMERICAN (GLOBAL) NATION-BUILDING PROJECT
that compose the mosaic of our historical time,
(within and perhaps beyond the US)
, in particular,
(and usually well-intentioned)
How were
we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby
populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such "classical" structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and
how could we live with ourselves in this domestic

state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the
creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and
transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition
of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, "winnable" policy reforms?
other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense,
(For
example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a "progressive" political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of "criminality" in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of "Three Strikes" laws?) What
were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state's
terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? 'this radical accountability reflects a variation on anti- colonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon's memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must
discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of
we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of

decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at
their silence or passiveness. Our historical moment suggests the need
for a principled political rupturing of existing techniques and strategies
that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and
management of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political
move long overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical disidentification with the state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or
anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the
creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider insurgency as a
politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of
resistance). Reading a few lines down from our first invoking of
Fanons call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here: For us
who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic
mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every
attack aborted or drowned in blood.
the current struggles. Now that
White supremacy is the historical foundation of biopolitics

the power relations established during colonialism are everpresent today and make possible the sovereign right to kill
Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,

Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency




enslaved


loss.
Extensions
Extend Wilderson number 1 evidence: State action is our link -- it

will always make anti blackness worse, the Aff will never be able to
solve police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and
substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV
still constitute the lived experience of Black life. The aff puts blacks
in the black body in the state of a slave as perpetuated by civil
society
Extend our Rodriguex 08 evidence the constant focus on war impacts is a
cover for white supremacy to ignore the real impacts of racism that is
happening at home by shifting the political to solve for the possiblilty of
wars happening abroad allowing blacks at home to continue to suffer
Extend our Mbembe 03 evidenceThe states right to determine who lives
and who dies is based off the premise of racim. The Nazi State proves that
racist assumptions creates a state of exeption where the population is
rendered socially dead because the state possesses the power to kill them
at any moment
War (Long)
Wilderson 2010
it would seem that
she had neither


Savage.
archive of


Democrats)
vii

the Settlement and the Slave estatesviii destruction, to manifest




ix

white supremacy
Rodriguez 08
(Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, ABOLITION NOW! TEN
YEARS OF STRATEGY AND STRUGGLE AGAINST THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AK Press 2008, [SG])

alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and
global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal
apartheid and proto- apartheid that are being instantiated in cities,
suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a
profound crisisand political possibilityfor people struggling against
the white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the
social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black
If
we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and
US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately "global" way, it is
protesting American wars elsewhere
when there are
geographies of "home." This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a
critical examination of the
US progressive left
that is tethered
to the non-profit industrial complex
physical/social/ psychic
, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away.
(e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan etc.)
political and institutional logics that structure so much of the
"establishment" left
(for better and worse)
, and particularly the

(NPIC). I have
defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially
emergent progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a
spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations.
It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a

political power structure that I wish to address
a peculiar
and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines,
and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements
and organizations within the US establishment left
the
left's willingness to fundamentally tolerateand accompanying
contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus
Behind the din of progressive and liberal
reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law
there is an unspoken politics of
assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of
domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive
suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous
subjection to the expediencies and
. To put it
and political repression, and violent policing
the
establishment left
does not care to envision, much less
politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its
structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the
present and future. Our non-profit left
seems content to engage in
desperate
attempts to manage the casualties of domestic
warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly,
critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political
premises of these wars. Not long from now, generations will emerge
from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and
(we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse
and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability :
, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm,
(of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is,
in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence "normal"
manifestations within the domestic "homeland" of the Homeland Security state.
, and beneath the infrequent
mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist crirninalization,
ESSENTIAL VIOLENCE OF THE
AMERICAN (GLOBAL) NATION-BUILDING PROJECT
that compose the mosaic of our historical time,
(within and perhaps beyond the US)
, in particular,
(and usually well-intentioned)
How were
we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby
populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such "classical" structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and
how could we live with ourselves in this domestic

state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the
creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and
transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition
of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, "winnable" policy reforms?
other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense,
(For
example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a "progressive" political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of "criminality" in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of "Three Strikes" laws?) What
were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state's
terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? 'this radical accountability reflects a variation on anti- colonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon's memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must
discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of
we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of

decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at
their silence or passiveness. Our historical moment suggests the need
for a principled political rupturing of existing techniques and strategies
that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and
management of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political
move long overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical disidentification with the state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or
anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the
creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider insurgency as a
politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of
resistance). Reading a few lines down from our first invoking of
Fanons call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here: For us
who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic
mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every
attack aborted or drowned in blood.
the current struggles. Now that

Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,

Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency





enslaved


loss.


legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,
.,,3 A

suffering
. Here,
Oil (Short)

The demand for oil is a byproduct of whiteness and continued

racialized violence that disproportionally effects bodies of color
Bullard 02
(Robert D Bullard Ph.D, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism: Strategies for
Building Healthy and Sustainable Communities, Environmental Justice Center, Clark Atlanta University,
http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html)
Increased globalization
of the world's economy has placed special strains on the ecosystems in many poor communities and poor nations inhabited
largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. This is especially true
for the global resource extraction industry such as oil, timber, and
minerals. [7] Globalization makes it easier for transnational corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental regulations, best tax incentives,
cheapest labor, and highest profit.The struggle of African Americans in Norco, Louisiana and
the Africans in the Niger Delta are similar in that both groups are negatively impacted by Shell Oil
refineries and unresponsive governments. This scenario is repeated
for Latinos in Wilmington (California) and indigenous people in
Ecuador who must contend with pollution from Texaco oil refineries.
The companies may be different, but the community complaints and concern s are very similar. Local residents have seen
their air, water, and land contaminated. Many nearby residents are "trapped" in their community because of inadequate
roads, poorly planned emergency escape routes, and faulty warning systems. They live in constant fear of plant explosions and accidents. Bhopal tragedy is
fresh in the minds of millions of people who live next to chemical
plants. The 1984 poison-gas leak at the Bhopal, India Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people-Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between nations and between transnational corporations.

. It is not a coincidence that the only place in the
U.S. where methyl isocyanate (MIC) was manufactured was at a
Union Carbide plant in in predominately African American Institute,
West Virginia. [8] In 1985, a gas leak from the Institute Union Carbide plant sent 135 residents to the hospital. The environmental justice movement has its
making it the world's deadliest industrial accident
roots in the United States. However, in just two decades, this grassroots movement has spread across the globe. The call for environmental justice can be heard from the ghetto of
Southside Chicago to the Soweto township. The environmental justice movement has come a long way since its humble beginning in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina where a PCB
landfill ignited protests and over 500 arrests. The Warren County protests provided the impetus for a 1983 U.S. General Accounting Office study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and
10] That study revealed that three out

of four of the off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in
Region 4 (which comprises eight states in the southern U.S.) were
located in predominantly African-American communities, although
African-Americans made up only 20% of the region's population.
Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. [
Antiblackness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the power

relations established during colonialism are ever-present today and
make possible the sovereign right to kill
Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,
Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of

the ontological position of Blackness the very possibility of
ethics and freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives
ratification of the state and civil society. Resisting the lure of
anti-blackness through a genealogy of historys constitutive
void is the starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency






we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our
enslaved



loss.
Oil (Long)
Wilderson 2010
it would seem that
she had neither


Savage.
archive of


Democrats)

the Settlement and the Slave estatesxi destruction, to manifest




xii
The demand for oil is a byproduct of whiteness and continued

racialized violence that disproportionally effects bodies of color
Bullard 02
Building Healthy and Sustainable Communities, Environmental Justice Center, Clark Atlanta University,
Increased globalization
largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. This is especially true
for the global resource extraction industry such as oil, timber, and
minerals. [7] Globalization makes it easier for transnational corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental regulations, best tax incentives,
cheapest labor, and highest profit.The struggle of African Americans in Norco, Louisiana and
the Africans in the Niger Delta are similar in that both groups are negatively impacted by Shell Oil
refineries and unresponsive governments. This scenario is repeated
for Latinos in Wilmington (California) and indigenous people in
Ecuador who must contend with pollution from Texaco oil refineries.
The companies may be different, but the community complaints and concern s are very similar. Local residents have seen
their air, water, and land contaminated. Many nearby residents are "trapped" in their community because of inadequate
roads, poorly planned emergency escape routes, and faulty warning systems. They live in constant fear of plant explosions and accidents. Bhopal tragedy is
fresh in the minds of millions of people who live next to chemical
plants. The 1984 poison-gas leak at the Bhopal, India Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people-making it the world's deadliest industrial accident . It is not a coincidence that the only place in the
Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between nations and between transnational corporations.

U.S. where methyl isocyanate (MIC) was manufactured was at a
Union Carbide plant in in predominately African American Institute,
West Virginia. [8] In 1985, a gas leak from the Institute Union Carbide plant sent 135 residents to the hospital. The environmental justice movement has its
roots in the United States. However, in just two decades, this grassroots movement has spread across the globe. The call for environmental justice can be heard from the ghetto of
Southside Chicago to the Soweto township. The environmental justice movement has come a long way since its humble beginning in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina where a PCB
landfill ignited protests and over 500 arrests. The Warren County protests provided the impetus for a 1983 U.S. General Accounting Office study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and
10] That study revealed that three out

of four of the off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in
Region 4 (which comprises eight states in the southern U.S.) were
located in predominantly African-American communities, although
African-Americans made up only 20% of the region's population.
Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. [

Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,

Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency





enslaved



loss.


legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,

suffering
.,,3 A
. Here,
Warming (Short)
Wilderson 2010
it would seem that
she had neither


Savage.
archive of


Democrats)
xiii

the Settlement and the Slave estatesxiv destruction, to manifest




xv
This racial inequality even extends to global warming:

1.) Less aid in the event of natural disaster
2.) Drastically increased disease and infant mortality rates
3.) Greater economic despair
4.) Increased rates of starvation
5.) Elevated exposure to greenhouse gases and pollutants
6.) Due to the non-inclusive nature of environmental policy
all climate policy is not only doomed to fail but further
entrench Antiblackness
Robinson and Hoerner 8
J. Andrew Hoerner is director of the Sustainable Economics Program at Redefining Progress. Nia Robinson is director of the Environmental
Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC). A Climate of Change African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy in the U.S. 2008. Pgs. 2-24. PWoods.
Global warming has emerged, not only as one of the most serious
environmental threats facing the world today, but also as a major threat
to people of color
It is now essentially certain that warming is
occurring, as evidenced by the melting of glaciers and ice caps, the rising
temperature of the seas, and the predicted increase in droughts and
storms around the world
African Americans and people of color worldwide bear the brunt of
this climatic shift. But global warming is not simply an environmental
issue. It is an issue of justice and human rights at the intersection of race
and class. Global warming will affect transportation policy, energy policy,
health policy, labor policy, and even military policy: no area of public life is
unaffected. Because of the United States historic legacy of
institutional racism, African American families and communities are highly
vulnerable to the whole range of problems caused by global warming
in America and around the world.
. In 2008, except for a few industry hired guns, there is unanimous consensus among the worlds scientists that global warming is real and that the worst is
yet to come.
slavery, Jim Crow, and

including the potential for climate change policy that continues and
extends this legacy. Problems of scarce household resources and lack of
access to community services will be exacerbated as these communities
are increasingly affected
there is a disproportionate burden on
African Americans from heat deaths; floods, fires, and other climaterelated disasters; tropical storms like Katrina and Rita; and economic
disruption of various sorts. African Americans are less responsible for
global warming, with average household emissions of greenhouse gases
that are nearly twenty percent lower than that of non-Hispanic whites. At
the same time, African American communities are also more vulnerable to
the consequences of shortsighted energy policies that are responsible for
maintaining the high dependence on fossil fuels
particularly given
racially motivated placement of fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities
. This report shows that
(coal, oil, and natural gas),
. These
policies cause the U.S. to be one of the worlds worst global warming polluters, and lead to health, economic, and environmental impacts both from warming itself and from associated air pollution. They also include a range of nonenvironmental costs ranging from higher energy bills to unemployment from recessions caused by global energy price shocks to wars designed to protect oil company interests abroad. This paper will demonstrate that, on average,
African American households are significantly more vulnerable to all of

these harms than
white households.
African Americans
are far less responsible for global warming pollution than non-Hispanic
whites. Including both direct emissions
and
indirect emissions
African Americans are
responsible for only nine percent of CO2 emissions, in contrast to seventysix percent for non- Hispanic whites. African Americans account
collectively for only about an eighth of the global warming pollution of
non-Hispanic whites and have nineteen percent lower emissions on a per
capita basis. Despite this, African Americans are particularly vulnerable to
energy price increases
African Americans have a unique and vital role in
the shaping of U.S. global warming policya role that can only be realized
if the law- and decision-making process is truly inclusive.
the vast majority of African Americans live in
neighborhoods with much higher average exposure to air pollutants of
every type
this phenomenon is caused by the discriminatory siting
of environmental hazards in existing African American neighborhoods, not
by a pollution-induced decline in property values and subsequent
influx of low income African Americans. In 2002, an estimated seventy-one
percent of African Americans lived in counties in violation of federal air
pollution standards
African Americans are more
likely than whites to live closer to the nearest industrial emissions source
and to live within two miles of multiple industrial emissions sources.
non-Hispanic
The final sections of this report describe the essential elements of a just domestic climate policy. It
finds, first, that specific policies to promote racial and economic justice are essential to achieving cuts in global warming pollution that are rapid, efficient, fair, and equitable.
(those that come from a households own purchase of fossil fuels and electricity),
(from the use of fuels to produce goods and services consumed by the household),
, whether caused by foreign cartels, political instability, domestic market manipulation, or environmental policy. Because of this combination of lower level of
responsibility for and greater vulnerability to the challenges of climate change,
As a result of the cumulative effects of the political
and economic disempowerment and racism,31
. Research indicates that
(as is sometimes suggested)
, as compared to fi fty-eight percent of the non-Hispanic white population.33
Seventy-eight
percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, as compared to fi fty-six percent of whites.35 In Maryland, census tracts with the highest proportion of African Americans were three times more likely to
Degree of segregation is also correlated with

inequity of pollution exposure and with higher cancer risks. Children of
color are three times more likely than white children to live in areas of
high automobile traffic and
more likely to attend
day care, preschool, and school in areas of high automobile traffic.
African Americans may be more vulnerable to
resulting adverse health effects than whites
infants of African
American mothers are more affected by particulate matter than those of
white mothers, and carbon monoxide exposure is more strongly correlated
with low birth weight among African American infants than whites.
infant mortality rates respond more strongly to reductions in particulate
have a high risk of air-pollution-related cancer than tracts with the lowest proportion.36
several studies have demonstrated that African American children are
To compound the issue
of greater rates of co-pollutant exposure, current evidence suggests that
. Studies have shown
Conversely,

matter air pollution among African American infants than among
whites
non-Hispanic
. These factors have combined to cause devastating health consequences for African Americans. Asthma, probably the health condition most clearly associated with air pollution, is more prevalent among African
Americans than any other ethnic groupthirty-six percent more prevalent than among whites.42 African Americans are three times more likely to visit an emergency room due to asthma than whites, and three times more likely to
Infant mortality among African Americans is twice as high as the

rate among whites, and babies born to non-Hispanic African American
mothers are twice as likely as those born to non-Hispanic white mothers to
die of SIDS. Health and resistance to illness is undermined by historical
and institutional racial discrimination. Physiological stress from
discrimination has been found to be an underlying cause of the high rates
of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke among
African Americans.
African Americans are also more likely
than whites to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after experiencing
trauma. The location of commercial hazardous waste facilities in lowincome communities of color has created a greater pollution burden for
African Americans than whites. In areas that host such facilities, twenty
percent of the population is African American, compared to twelve percent
for non-host areas. When hurricanes or tropical storms damage such
facilities, those living closest will bear the brunt of any released toxins.
Stereotypes and racist beliefs and actions hamper not only organized
relief efforts, but individual donations to disaster-stricken regions. In a
complex study on the effect of news media coverage to natural disaster
response, Stanford professor Shanto Iyengar and Washington Post
reporter Richard Morin asked 2,300 participants to choose a level of
financial aid and the number of the months that aid would be given based
on a short newspaper story about a person left homeless by Hurricane
Katrina. Each story was identical and featured a person with a nongender-specific name. The photo accompanying the story, however, varied
in skin tone and gender. When the person in the photograph was
identified as African American, they were awarded nearly one month less
of financial aid. With less access to resources to prevent catastrophic
losses during a disaster, and less relief efforts after a disaster, it is no
wonder that African American communities often experience the worst
consequences of extreme weather events.
die from the condition.43
Along with Asian Americans and Native Americans,
FEMAs notorious bungling of Hurricane Katrina relief is the latest in a long line of historic
government failures where HUD, Food and Nutrition Services, AFDC and other government agencies and programs had long been negligent. After Katrina, New Orleans lost fifty-seven percent of its African American population.
Compared to people who continued to live in New Orleans after the hurricane, the people who moved out tended to be younger, poorer, and African American. Additionally, the people who resettled the city were more likely to be
higher educated and white.65 Much like the redevelopment plans of the 1970s and 1980s, hurricanes and tropical storms have a unique power to destroy communities unless steps are taken to guard economic and social justice.
Like energy, food is a basic necessity. Like energy, African Americans are
more vulnerable to food price increases due to climate change or to
climate and energy policy because they spend a higher percentage of their
budgets on food than non-Hispanic whites. This is true in part because of
lower average incomes
Food security is attained when a household has reliable
access to adequate food. This simple condition is out of reach for over 850
million people worldwide, including almost half a billion children, who live
with chronic hunger or even fear of starvation.
, as the percentage of total income spent on food declines as household income increases. However, even when matched for income, African Americans spend a
somewhat higher income share on food.76
Climate change can seriously exacerbate this problem as extreme weather events
destroy crops and irregular season changes (also called climate variability) reduce yields. Ironically, some efforts intended to address climate change may make matters even worse as food crops and productive farm land are
diverted for the production of biofuels.
Warming (Long)
Wilderson 2010
it would seem that
she had neither


Savage.
archive of


Democrats)
xvi

the Settlement and the Slave estatesxvii destruction, to manifest




xviii
This racial inequality even extends to global warming:

1.) Less aid in the event of natural disaster
2.) Drastically increased disease and infant mortality rates
3.) Greater economic despair
4.) Increased rates of starvation
5.) Elevated exposure to greenhouse gases and pollutants
6.) Due to the non-inclusive nature of environmental policy
all climate policy is not only doomed to fail but further
entrench Antiblackness
Robinson and Hoerner 8
J. Andrew Hoerner is director of the Sustainable Economics Program at Redefining Progress. Nia Robinson is director of the Environmental
Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC). A Climate of Change African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy in the U.S. 2008. Pgs. 2-24. PWoods.
Global warming has emerged, not only as one of the most serious
environmental threats facing the world today, but also as a major threat
to people of color
It is now essentially certain that warming is
occurring, as evidenced by the melting of glaciers and ice caps, the rising
temperature of the seas, and the predicted increase in droughts and
storms around the world
African Americans and people of color worldwide bear the brunt of
this climatic shift. But global warming is not simply an environmental
issue. It is an issue of justice and human rights at the intersection of race
and class. Global warming will affect transportation policy, energy policy,
health policy, labor policy, and even military policy: no area of public life is
unaffected. Because of the United States historic legacy of
institutional racism, African American families and communities are highly
vulnerable to the whole range of problems caused by global warming
in America and around the world.
. In 2008, except for a few industry hired guns, there is unanimous consensus among the worlds scientists that global warming is real and that the worst is
yet to come.
slavery, Jim Crow, and

including the potential for climate change policy that continues and
extends this legacy. Problems of scarce household resources and lack of
access to community services will be exacerbated as these communities
are increasingly affected
there is a disproportionate burden on
African Americans from heat deaths; floods, fires, and other climaterelated disasters; tropical storms like Katrina and Rita; and economic
disruption of various sorts. African Americans are less responsible for
global warming, with average household emissions of greenhouse gases
that are nearly twenty percent lower than that of non-Hispanic whites. At
the same time, African American communities are also more vulnerable to
the consequences of shortsighted energy policies that are responsible for
maintaining the high dependence on fossil fuels
particularly given
racially motivated placement of fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities
. This report shows that
(coal, oil, and natural gas),
. These
policies cause the U.S. to be one of the worlds worst global warming polluters, and lead to health, economic, and environmental impacts both from warming itself and from associated air pollution. They also include a range of nonenvironmental costs ranging from higher energy bills to unemployment from recessions caused by global energy price shocks to wars designed to protect oil company interests abroad. This paper will demonstrate that, on average,
African American households are significantly more vulnerable to all of

these harms than
white households.
African Americans
are far less responsible for global warming pollution than non-Hispanic
whites. Including both direct emissions
and
indirect emissions
African Americans are
responsible for only nine percent of CO2 emissions, in contrast to seventysix percent for non- Hispanic whites. African Americans account
collectively for only about an eighth of the global warming pollution of
non-Hispanic whites and have nineteen percent lower emissions on a per
capita basis. Despite this, African Americans are particularly vulnerable to
energy price increases
African Americans have a unique and vital role in
the shaping of U.S. global warming policya role that can only be realized
if the law- and decision-making process is truly inclusive.
the vast majority of African Americans live in
neighborhoods with much higher average exposure to air pollutants of
every type
this phenomenon is caused by the discriminatory siting
of environmental hazards in existing African American neighborhoods, not
by a pollution-induced decline in property values and subsequent
influx of low income African Americans. In 2002, an estimated seventy-one
percent of African Americans lived in counties in violation of federal air
pollution standards
African Americans are more
likely than whites to live closer to the nearest industrial emissions source
and to live within two miles of multiple industrial emissions sources.
non-Hispanic
The final sections of this report describe the essential elements of a just domestic climate policy. It
finds, first, that specific policies to promote racial and economic justice are essential to achieving cuts in global warming pollution that are rapid, efficient, fair, and equitable.
(those that come from a households own purchase of fossil fuels and electricity),
(from the use of fuels to produce goods and services consumed by the household),
, whether caused by foreign cartels, political instability, domestic market manipulation, or environmental policy. Because of this combination of lower level of
responsibility for and greater vulnerability to the challenges of climate change,
As a result of the cumulative effects of the political
and economic disempowerment and racism,31
. Research indicates that
(as is sometimes suggested)
, as compared to fi fty-eight percent of the non-Hispanic white population.33
Seventy-eight
percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, as compared to fi fty-six percent of whites.35 In Maryland, census tracts with the highest proportion of African Americans were three times more likely to
Degree of segregation is also correlated with

inequity of pollution exposure and with higher cancer risks. Children of
color are three times more likely than white children to live in areas of
high automobile traffic and
more likely to attend
day care, preschool, and school in areas of high automobile traffic.
African Americans may be more vulnerable to
resulting adverse health effects than whites
infants of African
American mothers are more affected by particulate matter than those of
white mothers, and carbon monoxide exposure is more strongly correlated
with low birth weight among African American infants than whites.
infant mortality rates respond more strongly to reductions in particulate
have a high risk of air-pollution-related cancer than tracts with the lowest proportion.36
several studies have demonstrated that African American children are
To compound the issue
of greater rates of co-pollutant exposure, current evidence suggests that
. Studies have shown
Conversely,

matter air pollution among African American infants than among
whites
non-Hispanic
. These factors have combined to cause devastating health consequences for African Americans. Asthma, probably the health condition most clearly associated with air pollution, is more prevalent among African
Americans than any other ethnic groupthirty-six percent more prevalent than among whites.42 African Americans are three times more likely to visit an emergency room due to asthma than whites, and three times more likely to
Infant mortality among African Americans is twice as high as the

rate among whites, and babies born to non-Hispanic African American
mothers are twice as likely as those born to non-Hispanic white mothers to
die of SIDS. Health and resistance to illness is undermined by historical
and institutional racial discrimination. Physiological stress from
discrimination has been found to be an underlying cause of the high rates
of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke among
African Americans.
African Americans are also more likely
than whites to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after experiencing
trauma. The location of commercial hazardous waste facilities in lowincome communities of color has created a greater pollution burden for
African Americans than whites. In areas that host such facilities, twenty
percent of the population is African American, compared to twelve percent
for non-host areas. When hurricanes or tropical storms damage such
facilities, those living closest will bear the brunt of any released toxins.
Stereotypes and racist beliefs and actions hamper not only organized
relief efforts, but individual donations to disaster-stricken regions. In a
complex study on the effect of news media coverage to natural disaster
response, Stanford professor Shanto Iyengar and Washington Post
reporter Richard Morin asked 2,300 participants to choose a level of
financial aid and the number of the months that aid would be given based
on a short newspaper story about a person left homeless by Hurricane
Katrina. Each story was identical and featured a person with a nongender-specific name. The photo accompanying the story, however, varied
in skin tone and gender. When the person in the photograph was
identified as African American, they were awarded nearly one month less
of financial aid. With less access to resources to prevent catastrophic
losses during a disaster, and less relief efforts after a disaster, it is no
wonder that African American communities often experience the worst
consequences of extreme weather events.
die from the condition.43
Along with Asian Americans and Native Americans,
FEMAs notorious bungling of Hurricane Katrina relief is the latest in a long line of historic
government failures where HUD, Food and Nutrition Services, AFDC and other government agencies and programs had long been negligent. After Katrina, New Orleans lost fifty-seven percent of its African American population.
Compared to people who continued to live in New Orleans after the hurricane, the people who moved out tended to be younger, poorer, and African American. Additionally, the people who resettled the city were more likely to be
higher educated and white.65 Much like the redevelopment plans of the 1970s and 1980s, hurricanes and tropical storms have a unique power to destroy communities unless steps are taken to guard economic and social justice.
Like energy, food is a basic necessity. Like energy, African Americans are
more vulnerable to food price increases due to climate change or to
climate and energy policy because they spend a higher percentage of their
budgets on food than non-Hispanic whites. This is true in part because of
lower average incomes
Food security is attained when a household has reliable
access to adequate food. This simple condition is out of reach for over 850
million people worldwide, including almost half a billion children, who live
with chronic hunger or even fear of starvation.
, as the percentage of total income spent on food declines as household income increases. However, even when matched for income, African Americans spend a
somewhat higher income share on food.76
Climate change can seriously exacerbate this problem as extreme weather events
destroy crops and irregular season changes (also called climate variability) reduce yields. Ironically, some efforts intended to address climate change may make matters even worse as food crops and productive farm land are
diverted for the production of biofuels.
Deleuze affs
By attempting to put yourself in the place of the slave you
erase their identity and further Antiblackness
Hartman and Wilderson 3
(Saidiya, professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and history, and Frank B,
professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought, pg 185-186)
And there was a certain sense in

which the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as
a way of refashioning whiteness
this is just an
extension of the master's prerogative
. A body that you can do what you want with
. Here's a guy like the prototypical twentiethcentury white progressive anti-slavery and uses his powers of
observation to write for its abolition,
he
imagines that these slaves being beaten could be himself and his family.
Through this process it makes sense to him, it becomes meaningful. His
body and his family members' white bodies become proxies for real
enslaved black bodies and, as you point out, the actual object of
identification, the slave, disappears.
one of the fundamental ethical
ques tions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the
status of the other
in order to come to any recognition of common
humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly
displaced and effaced: "Only if I can see myself in that position can I
understand the crisis of that position."
the need
for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order
to see the racism of the racist state
- the moments of the sympathetic ally, who in some ways telling is
actually no more able to see the slave than the person who is exploiting
him or her as their property. That is the work Rankin does and I think it
suggests just how ubiquitous that kind of violence, in fact, is.
Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection, S. VH. - there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture and on minstrelsy in particular.
, and there were all these radical claims that were being made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no,
." It doesn't matter whether you do good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's why thinking
about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material relations of slavery was so key for me. F.W -Yes, that's clarifying
. In
your discussion of the body as the property of enjoyment, what I really like is when you talk about Rankin
even to his slave-owning brother. He's in the South, he's looking at a slave coffle, and
S.V.H. - I think that gets at
. It's as though
That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday
. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to .. . F.W. - [laughter] A nigga on the warpath! S. V.H. - Exactly! For me it was those moments that
were the most
Fluidity is inaccessible to blacks, to be black is to alwaysalready be a problem

Yancy 5
George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body. 2005. Pgs. 215-241. PWoods.
The reader will note that the question regarding how it feels to be a problem does not apply to people who have at some point in their lives felt themselves to be a problem. In such cases, feeling like a problem is a contingent
When Black people are asked the same question by

white America, the relationship between being Black and being a
problem is non-contingent. It is a necessary relation. Outgrowing this
ontological state of being a problem is believed impossible.
temporality is frozen. One is a problem forever.
disposition that is relatively finite and transitory.
Hence, when regarding one's "existence
as problematic,"
However, it is important to note that it is from within the
white imaginary that the question "How does it feel to be a problem?" is given birth. To be human is to be thrown-in-the-world. To be human not only means to be thrown within a context of facticity, but it also means to be in
Within
the white imaginary, to be Black means to be born an obstacle at the
very core of one's being. To exist as Black is not "to stand out" facing an
ontological horizon filled with future possibilities of being other than
what one is. Rather, being Black negates the "ex" of existence. Being
Black is reduced to facticity
Hence, within the
framework of the white imaginary, to be Black and to be human are
the mode of the subjunctive. It is interesting to note that the etymology of the word "problem" suggests the sense of being "thrown forward," as if being thrown in front of something, as an obstacle.
. For example, it is not as if it is only within the light of my freely chosen projects that things are experienced as obstacles, as Sartre might
say; as Black, by definition, I am an obstacle. As Black, I am the very obstacle to my own meta-stability and trans-phenomenal being. As Black, I am not a project at all.

contradictory terms.
whites remain
imprisoned within a space of white ethical solipsism
many whites would rather remain imprisoned within
the ontology of sameness,
The call of the Other
qua Other remains unheard within the space of whiteness's sameness.
whites occlude the possibility of developing new
forms of ethical relationality to themselves and to non-whites. It is
through
abandoning hegemonic
discourse
that
whites might
embrace the non-white Other
[End Page 237] Substituting the historical constructivity of whiteness for "manifest destiny,"
(only whites possess needs and desires that are truly worthy of
being respected [Sullivan 2001, 100]). It would seem that
refusing to reject the ideological structure of their identities as "superior."
Locked within their self-enthralled structure of whiteness,
partly
the process of
their
, monologistic
(functioning as the "oracle voice")
reach across the chasm of (nonhierarchical) difference and
in his or her Otherness. "A true
and worthy ideal," as Du Bois writes, "frees and uplifts a people" (1995b, 456). He adds, "But say to a people: 'The one virtue is to be white,' and people rush to the inevitable conclusion, "Kill the 'nigger'!" Of course, the idea
Whiteness is a "particular social and historical

[formation] that [is] reproduced through specific discursive and
material processes and circuits of desire and power
whiteness strives for totalization; it desires to claim the entire
world for itself and has the misanthropic effrontery to territorialize the
very meaning of the "human
that "the one virtue is white" is a false ideal, for it "imprisons and lowers" (456).
" (McLaren 1998, 66). On this score, reproduced through circuits
of desire and power,
."

Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,

loss of a home
The
Slave life
a triple loss:
, loss of
, in many ways,
suggested,
Their denial of their own whiteness reifies racialized otherness and

forecloses upon opportunities to resolve injustices the
unwillingness to see themselves as white is a DESIRE for white
supremacy
Mazzei 11
(Lisa A., Gonzaga U, Desiring Silence: Gender, Race, and Pedagogy in Education, British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4, August 2011, p. 657-
96)//LA
In framing whiteness
I am interested in how a lack of cognition
regarding one's racial identity/position as white serves to explain away
and in many cases perpetuate the existence of racial barriers to social
mobility
Since whiteness as a descriptor for whites often goes
unnamed, unnoticed and unspoken, the silence or absence (that which
is not spoken) of this racial identity continues to provide a framework
in the context of this paper,
(Sleeter, 2004).

for analysis
If white teachers continue to
effectively deny or fail to see their whiteness as raced then they will
continue to see students of colour as 'Other' and respond to them from
that perception- i.e., they are raced, I am not. Such an orientation
perpetuates a racially inhabited silence that limits, if not negates, an
open dialogue regarding race and culture. In such an environment
stereotypes are furthered rather than confronted and perceptions of
self and Other are allowed to remain circumscribed in a protective caul.
In short, education as a means of transformation or change is subverted
and silence as a means of control and protection of privilege is accepted
silence is an enactment of a desire to be recognized as governed by
social norms
'within the constraints
of normativity'
Privilege remains
unchallenged and is thus exercised as a desiring silence that maintains
an invisible mask of whiteness. In other words, these white preservice
teachers do not speak of whiteness, or more specifically their own race,
therefore whiteness is reinscribed as that which need not be named,
thereby reproducing
a 'neutral epistemology' .
the notion of
desire has to do with drive.
the
of the conversations I have with white teachers at both the preservice and inservice levels.
If we think
, then we acknowledge that the desire on the part of these white preservice teachers is a desire to be recognized
Jackson, 2009, p . 171). If they are recognized within such constraints, then their mark as white teacher remains intact.
what Seshadri-Crooks refers to as
Instead of asking, 'What is desire?' the impetus
is instead to ask, 'What does desire ask of these students?' Not what does it mean, but what does it do? Deleuze draws on Nietzsche for his theory of desire. For Nietzsche,
'What we call 'thinking' , 'feeling' , reason' is nothing more than a competing of the passions or drives' (Smith, 2007). Deleuze rejects desire
as a lack, gap or what is missing and, instead, puts forth an immanent concept of desire. As such, desire is primary, positive and not left wanting but, instead, producing something. What matters for Deleuze is not what desire
Through an engagement with

Deleuzian desire, I focus on what is producing the silence and/or what
the silence produces, in other words, a desiring silence
means; instead, he wants to know 'whether it works, and how it works, and who it works for' (Deleuze, 1990, p. 22).
. Not as in 'to desire' silence, but silences that are
produced and that produce an effect, emerging from a 'production of production' (O'Sullivan & Zepke, 2008, p. 1, emphasis in original). Such silences may be produced by resistance or the attempt to maintain power that
resists the 'gravity of the circle of recognition and its representations' (p. 1). What is desire? If desire does not begin from lack, in other words, desiring what we do not have, then where does it begin or, put differently, what
'life strives to preserve and enhance itself and

does so by connecting with other desires'
This preserving and
enhancing of desire coalesces with power, not in a 'repression of desire
but the expansion of desire'
interestssuch as
humanism, individualism, capitalism or communism are produced from
desires
spawns desire? Discussing Deleuzian desire, Claire Colebrook (2002) writes,
(p. 91).
(p. 91). The task of Deleuze's own method is to 'explain how
: the concrete and specific connection of bodies' (p. 92), in this case the bodies of white preservice teachers. The charge then becomes not to define desire, but to understand the interests that produce
desire and the interests that desire seeks to produce and/or protect. In the case of white preservice teachers, the visibleness of white as a marker of their bodies has previously been deemed invisible because of its normative
failure to have previously named whiteness thereby produces a

desire to protect the invisibleness and hence a maintenance of
whiteness as an unchallenged norm. 'Desire itself is power, a power to
become and produce images'
A powerful white presence
is an unnamed and silent image that continues to be masked in the
power of that which will not be named. Desiring silence then reproduces an unspoken white presence.
presence. This
(Colebrook, 2002, p. 94, emphasis in original).
The postmodernist critique of identity commodifies the

violence against otherized groups and reifies white supremacy
HOOKS 1994
BELL, Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from
her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. Tue, 19 Apr. POSTMODERN BLACKNESS. Oberlin College Copyright (c) 1990 by bell hooks, all rights reserved _Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html. PWoods.
The postmodern critique of "identity,

is often posed in
ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy
which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we
cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic
exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial
difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications
of a critique of identity for oppressed groups.
We must
" though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle,
Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance.

engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful
chances of survival
Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply
appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its
discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the "politics of
difference" from the politics of racism . To take racism seriously one must
consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom
are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the
advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under
current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued
displacement, profound alienation and despair.
There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the
one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden, insecure,
willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be,
concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward
social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an
underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug
addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential
rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a
devastated black industrial working class.
This
hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that
can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation
struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many
other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation,
despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not
informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention
to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class,
gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of
empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments
and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.
even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of
essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example.
Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective
plight:
We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness.
White supremacy masks racist norms meant to disguise the

socioeconomic inequalities and exploitation of modern society
Ortiz 2013

influence
Unfortunately,

white
to change "faces."
incarceration
stronger.
. Specifically,
. In this way,
They are

white
. To this day,

it would make
In this way,

ontological position of Blacknessthe very possibility of ethics and
freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives ratification of
democracy, the state and civil society. Resisting the lure of antiblackness through a genealogy of historys constitutive void is the
starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency





we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our
and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart
enslaved

their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be
taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The kind of
freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...]
The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with

making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much more
than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of
society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is
the intimacy of our age with theirs an unfinished struggle. To what
end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes
of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical,
and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they
work to challenge and bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question
of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do,
work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically marginalized
these projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the
African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of
outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver
between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we
have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of
constitutive normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental
and unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical
narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social
death that it has yielded but the possibilities and necessities of
invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they present
groups of people? All three of
circumstances of
the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of
migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied.
Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of the future as well as more or less significant red flags.
Hartmans vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly

liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or
occlude the presence or significance of ongoing disparity and loss:
while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience have already
succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified
the fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still
struggling to make something from nothing; they have an urgency
in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that
excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates
is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch activist one that is
inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a
sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning,
and the possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction that emerge
when faced with profound absence and loss.



legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
that she is effectively fighting white privilege, when engaging in
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,
.,,3 A
. Here,

suffering
Whites who
deploy theory in the service of fighting against white racism must caution
against the seduction of white narcissism, the recentering of whiteness,
even if it is the object of critical reflection, and,
sequestration from
the real world of
suffering
Black bodies impacted by the
operations of white power.
The sheer weight of this reality mocks the
patience of theory
. Doing theory in the service of undoing whiteness comes with its own snares and seductions, its own comfort zones, and reinscription of distances.
hence, the process of
weeping,
, and traumatized
As antiracist whites continue to make mistakes and continue to falter in the face of institutional interpellation and habituated racist reflexes,
tomorrow, a Black body will be murdered as it innocently reaches for its wallet.
.
Discourse affs
Calling on the left to engage in discursive work to rescue civil
society from the right only reinstantiates the anti-black semiotic
field of civil society.
Wilderson 2003
Wilderson, PHD Rhetoric, Berkeley, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003
It is true that Gramsci acknowledges no organic division between political society and civil society. He makes the
division for methodological purposes. There is one organism, the modern bourgeois-liberal state (Buttigieg, 1995,
p. 28), but there are two qualitatively different kinds of apparatuses: on the one hand, the ensemble of so-called
private associations and ideological invitations to participate in a wide and varied play of consensus-making
strategies (civil society), and on the other hand, a set of enforcement structures which kick in when that ensemble
is regressive or can no longer lead (political society). But Gramsci would have us believe not that white
positionality emerges and is elaborated on the terrain of civil society and encounters coercion when civil society is
not expansive enough to embrace the idea of freedom for all, but that all positionalities emerge and are elaborated
on the terrain of civil society. Gramsci does not racialise this birth, elaboration, and stunting, or re-emergence, of
civil society, supposedly, elaborates all

subjectivity and so there is no need for such specificity. Anglo-American
Gramscians, like Buttigieg and Sassoon, and US activists in the anti-globalisation movement whose
unspoken grammar is predicated on Gramscis assumptive logic , continue this tradition of
unraced positionality which allows them to posit the valency of
Wars of Position for blacks and whites alike. They assume that all
subjects are positioned in such a way as to have their consent
solicited and to be able to extend their consent spontaneously. This is
human subjectivity because
profoundly problematic if only leaving revolution aside for the moment at the level of analysis; for it assumes
that hegemony with its three constituent elements (influence, leadership, consent) is the modality which must be
either inculcated or breached, if one is to either avoid or incur, respectively, the violence of the state. However,
one of the primary claims of this essay is that,
whereas the consent of black people

may seem to be called upon, its withdrawal does not precipitate a
crisis in authority. Put another way, the transformation of black
peoples acquiescent common sense into revolutionary good
sense is an extenuating circumstance, but not the catalyst, of
State violence against black people. State violence against the
black body, as Martinot and Sexton suggest in their introduction, is not contingent, it is structural and,
above all, gratuitous. Therefore, Gramscian wisdom cannot imagine the emergence, elaboration, and stunting of a
subject by way, not of the contingency of violence resulting in a crisis of authority, but by way of direct relations
of force. This is remarkable, and unfortunate, given the fact that the emergence of the slave, the subject- effect of
an ensemble of direct relations of force, marks the emergence of capitalism itself. Let us put a finer point on it:
violence towards the black body is the precondition for the

existence of Gramscis single entity the modern bourgeois-state with
its divided apparatus, political society and civil society. This is to
say violence against black people is ontological and gratuitous as
opposed to merely ideological and contingent.2 Furthermore, no magical moment
(i.e., 1865) transformed paradigmatically the black bodys relation to this entity.3 In this regard , the
hegemonic advances within civil society by the Left hold out no
more possibility for black life than the coercive backlash of political
society. What many political theorists have either missed or ignored is that
a crisis of authority that might take place by way of a Left
expansion of civil society, further instantiates, rather than

dismantles, the authority of whiteness. Black death is the modern
bourgeois-states recreational pastime, but the hunting season is
not confined to the time (and place) of political society; blacks are
fair game as a result of a progressively expanding civil society as well.
Civil Death in Civil Society Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent. This phenomenon is
central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. The theoretical importance of emphasis- ing this in the early twenty-first
century is two-fold: first, the socio-political order of the New World (Spillers, 1987, p. 67) was kick-started by
approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with
variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery the accumulation of black bodies regardless of their utility as
labourers (Hartman; 230 Frank Wilderson, III Johnson) through an idiom of despotic power (Patterson) is closer to
capitals primal desire than is waged oppression the exploitation of unraced bodies (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci) that
labour through an idiom of rational/symbolic (the wage) power: A relation of terror as opposed to a relation of
hegemony.4 Secondly, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, direct relations of force
(the prison industrial complex), the despotism of the unwaged relation: and this Renaissance of slavery has, once
again, as its structuring image in libidinal economy, and its primary target in political economy, the black body.
The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the black subject,
lies in the black subjects potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a
demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and
democratic (Gramscis new hegemony, Lenins dictatorship of the proletariat), the slave, on the other hand,
demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its ultimate democratisation. Work is not an organic
principle for the slave. The absence of black subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the
discourses inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the black body of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late-capitals over-accumulation crisis,
the black (incarcerated) body of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, do not reify the basic categories which
structure marxist conflict: the categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all,
hegemony. If, by way of the black subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it
mean to be free? that grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up against a
grammar of suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering beyond
signification itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous terror of white supremacy is as much
contingent upon the irrationality of white fantasies and shared pleasures as it is upon a logic the logic of capital.
It extends beyond texualisation. When talking about this terror, Cornel West uses the term black invisibility and
namelessness to designate, at the level of ontology, what we are calling a scandal at the level of discourse. He
writes: [Americas] unrelenting assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture
that of black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and
namelessness, the first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as
a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds,
psychic scars, and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and self-annihilation. This is why
the ur-text of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not an architec- Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave
in Civil Society? 231 tural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan a cry not
the
black subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand that
can not be satisfied through a transfer of ownership /organisation of
existing rubrics; whereas the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be
so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. (1996, pp. 8081). Thus,
satisfied by way of a successful War of Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into
question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself.
From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the question hides
the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed and answered the
question, What does it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organised around the categories of exploitation
(unfair labour relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the only category of oppression which
concerns Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again,
this is inadequate, because it would call white supremacy racism and articulate it as a derivative phenomenon of
the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating white supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the
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
base itself. What I am saying is that
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

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
to say that
only come to grips with Americas structuring rationality what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot
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
anti-blackness.
come to grips with
You should vote negative to reject the affirmatives grammar of

discursive work in civil society. Only the positionality of the slave
ruptures the grammar of work that underpins white civil societys
absolute destruction and objectification of the black body.
Wilderson 2003
Wilderson, PHD Rhetoric, Berkeley, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003
the black
subject in the United States, the slave, presents both marxism and
American social movement practice with a historical scandal. Every
group provides American discourse with acceptable categories for
the record (a play of signifiers, points of articulation) except black
Americans. How is black incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis germane to the black experience as
Just as the KhoiSan presented the Discourse of the Cape with an anthropological scandal, so
a phenomenon without analog? A sample list of codes mapped out by an American subjects Historical Axis
include the following. (1) Rights or Entitlements: here even Native Americans provide categories for the record
when one thinks of how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the American constitution. (2) Sovereignty:
whether that state be one the subject left behind, or one, once again as in the case of American Indians, which was
taken by force and dint of broken treaties. White supremacy has made good use of the Indian subjects
positionality: a positionality which fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit
genocidal) idea, because treaties are forms of articulation, discussions brokered between two groups presumed to
possess the same kind of historical currency: sovereignty. The code of sovereignty can have both a past and future
history, if youll excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that there are 150 Native American tribes with
applications in at the B.I.A. for federal recognition, that they might qualify for funds harvested from land stolen
from them.5 In other words, the curse of being able to generate categories for the record manifests itself in
Indians ability to be named by white supremacy that they might receive a small cash advance on funds (land)

which white people stole from them. (3) Immigration: another code which maps the subject onto the American
Historical Axis narratives of arrival based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano/a subject
positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of America as an idea because racial conflict can be
articulated across the various contestations over the legitimacy of arrival, immigration, or of sovereignty, i.e., the
Slavery is
the great leveller of the black subjects positionality. The black
American subject does not generate historical categories of
Entitlement, Sovereignty, and/or Immigration for the record. We are
off the record. To the data generating demands of the historical axis we present a virtual blank, much like
Mexican-American War. In this way, whites and Chicano/as both generate data for this category.
the KhoiSans virtual blank presented to the data generating demands of the anthropological axis. The work of
Hortense Spillers on black female sexuality corroborates these findings. Spillers conclusions regarding the black
female subject and the discourse of sexuality are in tandem with ours regarding the black ungendered subject and
the question of hegemony and, in addition, unveil the ontological elements which black women and men share: a
scandal in the face of New World hegemony. [T]he black female [is] the veritable nemesis of degree and difference
[emphasis mine]. Having encountered what they understand as chaos, the empowered need not name further,
since chaos is sufficient naming within itself. I am not addressing the black female in her historical apprenticeship
as inferior being, but, rather, the paradox of non-being [emphasis mine]. Under the sign of this particular historical
In the socio-political
order of the New World the black body is a captive body marked
and branded from one generation to the next. A body on which any
hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between
human personality and its anatomical features, between one human
personality and another, between human personality and cultural
institutions [is lost]. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the
captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive
community becomes a living laboratory. (emphasis mine, p. 68) The
gratuitous violence begun in slavery, hand in hand with the absence
of data for the New World Historical Axis (Rights/Entitlement, Sovereignty, Immigration) as a result of slavery, position black subjects in excess of Gramscis
fundamental categories, i.e. labour, exploitation, historical self-awareness; for these processes of
subjectification are assumed by those with a semiotics of analogy
already in hand the currency of exchange through which a
dimension of relatedness between one human personality and
another, between human personality and cultural institutions can
be established. Thus, the black subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive
logic of Gramscian discourse. S/he implies a scandal: total objectification in
contradistinction to human possibility, however slim, as in the case of working class
hegemony, that human possibility appears. It is this scandal which places black
subjectivity in a structurally impossible position, outside of the
natural articulations of hegemony; but it also places hegemony in
a structurally impossible position because our presence works back
upon the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence . If
order, black female and black male are absolutely equal. (Spillers, 1984 p. 77)
every subject even the most massacred subjects, Indians are required to have analogues within the nations
structuring narrative, and one very large significant subject, the subject upon which the nations drama of value is
built, is a subject whose experience is without analogue then, by that subjects very presence all other analogues
are destabilised. Lest we think of the black body as captive only until the mid-nineteenth century, Spillers reminds
the total objectification are as much a part of

the present as they were of the past. 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
us that the marking and branding,

valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of
captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history,
nor historiography and its topics, shows 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. (1987, p. 68) Herein, the concept of civil war takes on a comprehensive and structural, as opposed
to merely eventful, connotation. Conclusion Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested,
mapped. And the invitation to participate in hegemonys gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not
extended to the black subject. We live in the world, but exist outside of civil society. This structurally impossible
position is a paradox because the black subject, the slave, is vital to civil societys political economy: s/he kickstarts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end black death is its condition
of possibility. Civil societys subaltern, the worker, is coded as waged, and wages are white. But marxism has no
account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the black subject: in Gramsci we have consistent
The black body in the US is that constant reminder that not

only can work not be reformed but it cannot be transformed to
accommodate all subjects: work is a white category. The fact that
millions upon millions of black people work misses the point. The
point is we were never meant to be workers; in other words,
capital/white supremacys dream did not envision us as being
incorporated or incorporative. From the very beginning, we were
meant to be accumulated and die. Work (i.e. the French shipbuilding industry and boursilence.
geois civil society which finally extended its progressive hegemony to workers and peasants to topple the
was what grew up all around us 20 to 60 million seeds

planted at the bottom of the Atlantic, 5 million seeds planted in
Dixie. Work sometimes registers as a historical component of blackness, but where whiteness is concerned,
work registers as a constituent element. And the black body must be processed
through a kind of civil death for this constituent element of
whiteness to gain coherence. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, we are
still not meant to be workers. We are meant to be warehoused and
die. The U.S. carceral network kills more blacks than any other
ethnic group [and] constitute[s] an outside in U.S. political life.
In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with
increasing distances from bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the
aristocracy)
unassimilable in the hell of lockdown, deprivation tanks, control units, and holes for political prisoners. (James,
1996, p. 34)
Work
(i.e. jobs for guards in the prison industrial complex and the shot in the arm it gives to
its positive reterritorialisation of White Space

and its simultaneous deterritorialisation of Black Space) is what
grows up around our dead bodies once again. The chief difference
today, compared to several hundred years ago, is that today our
bodies are desired, accumulated, and warehoused like the cows. Again, the
faltering white communities
chief constant to the dream is that, whereas desire for black labour power is often a historical component to the
institutionality of white supremacy, it is not a constituent element. This paradox is not to be found at the crux of
Gramscis intellectual pessimism or his optimistic will. His concern is with subjects in a white(ned) enough subject
position that they are confronted by, or threatened with the removal of, a wage, be it monetary or social. But
black subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a

ubiquitous emancipatory strategy, because Gramsci (like most US
social movements) has no theory of, or solidarity with, the slave.
Whereas the positionality of the worker enables the reconfiguration
of civil society, the positionality of the slave exists as a
destabilising force within civil society because civil society gains its

coherence, the very tabula raza upon which workers and
industrialists struggle for hegemony, through the violence of black
erasure. From the coherence of civil society the black subject
beckons with the incoherence of civil war. Civil war, then, becomes
that unthought but never forgotten spectre waiting in the wings the
understudy of Gramscis hegemony.
1NC Short (Burn State Alt) (oceans)

The year was 1759. The Europeans started to spread into the
Americas. The Ocean became the bridge from the old world to the
new world. The trans-Atlantic slave trade became the starting point
for the severing of the African Identity.
Farley 5
perfecting slavery {Anthony Paul; Associat prof at Boston college Law school; perfecting slavery;pg 222-228; January 27 2005}AvP
Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a
slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which
the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of
The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal
relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law
hoping for an answer. The slaves free choice, the slaves leap of faith, can
only be taken under conditions of legal equality . Only after emancipation and legal equality, only
slavery take place?
after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the
kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of
these meetings, these struggles for law, these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law,
but the law does not forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of
segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not
To
wake from slavery is to see that everything must go, every law
room,7 every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything .
Requests for equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of
need itself means that the request will fail. The request for equality and
freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The
request is produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of
bodies for lessless respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less.
The mark must be made on the flesh because that is where we start from.
Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that
childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates
our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark
is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essences
race, gender, class, and so onthat are said to precede existence. The
mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is
a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We
begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact,
education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by
class, and so on. Our education cultivates our desire in the direction
of our hierarchies. If we are successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis--vis all the
other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally
expected way. White-over- black is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that
enables us to find our place, and therefore our way, in our institutional
spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for
rightsfor equalitywill always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as
less than zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation
of the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called
to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object;
forgotten its origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count.6

the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death is
the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the
ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is
always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom
ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom,
objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can only do
under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the ghost
and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slaves final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest
content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no
consequence. The story, the law, the wolves table manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however,
represents a disguised or latent wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to ourselves. The dream of equality, of
The prayer for equal rights is the disguised desire

for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the disguise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal
rights, is the disguised wish for hierarchy.
rights is the slaves perfect moment. The slaves perfect prayer, the prayer of the perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows not what
it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since
property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce the final commodity law. In other words, the slave
produces itself as a slave through law. The slave produces itself as a slave (as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that prayer is all
there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights. The slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no law
before the slave bows down. The slaves fidelity becomes the law, and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle for the universal, through the
slaves struggle for equality of right. The slave prays for equality of right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities
open, like the gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains down.
White- over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of

forever. The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems
divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever. There is
a pleasure in this death. It is the pleasure of hierarchy. If there is
hierarchy, white-over-black, for example, there is an experience of
pleasure in it. Bodies are marked white-over-black. This is a pleasure and
a desire. Property is marked white-over-black. This too is a pleasure and
a desire. Law, following the system of marks and the system of property,
is white-over-black, and a pleasure and a desire.
There are always ambiguities.
The
ambiguities are vessels of our desires. Our pleasures and desires follow
the colorline. In a colorlined order, all institutions are ordered by the
colorline. A white-over-black orientation is required to navigate the
institutions that order life. In other words, a white-over-black orientation
is required to follow the colorline, and one must follow the colorline or
lose ones way . The ambiguities, then, are always white-over-black. White-over-black is the North Star. Every correct legal answer is
white-over-black. There is a pleasure and a desire in moving to the correct answer. The pleasure and desire of moving to the correct answer is
experienced as the sublime pleasure of the legal method, as the sovereignty of death. The commodity reaches its apogee in the black.11 There is no
black, save for white-over-black. White-over-black is slavery. Slavery is death. Death is the end of it all. Death is the complete end. Death, then, is
perfection, the end of all things. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it prays for slavery. The slave, being perfect in that moment of prayer, is one
with that before which it bows down in prayer. The slave prays to itself for itself to be transformed into itself and so its perfect prayer is always already
granted. The slave prays for equal rights. Rights cannot be equal. If the slave were not hated, lessened, then it would never experience itself as less- than.
Without the experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not arise. To be a slave is to become what one becomes through the experience of
less-than. The less-than experience may be expressed as white-over-black. White-over-black is an identity and an orientation. White-over-black is a form of
training. Our institutions, under the colorline, are forms of white-over-black. Every institution is a form of training. Our institutions, under the colorline, are
forms of training in white-over-black. The sum of our institutions is the sum of our training. The fact of white-over-black means that white-over-black has
become the form of our institutions and the orientation required to move through them. White-over-black as fact means that ambiguities are resolved into
. The fact that the slave is hated means that hating the slave
has become a habit and a pleasure and a desire and a system of
training (a system of providing pleasure and cultivating desire). There are
white-over-black
always ambiguities. White-over-black means we always know how to resolve the ambiguities. White-over-black means that we resolve the ambiguities into
white-over-black. The slave, then, who prays for rights, will receive an answer. The answer, like all answers, will be filled with ambiguities. The ambiguities,
in turn, will be filled with white-over-black. The requested right will be granted or withheld in the form of white-over-black. White-over-black is slavery.
The slave who prays for rights, for equality of right, prays, in the
end, for slavery, for white-over-black, for death. The slave truly

becomes a slave only in that moment of prayer when it chooses to
become itself. The deep meaning of the slaves prayer before the law, then, is that it is always already granted. The slave prays with
knowing non-knowledge for white-over-black. The slave prays for slavery. The slave prays for death. Death is its perfection as a slave . Death is
what it already is in that moment of perfect prayer. The slave, in its
moment of perfection, is already completely separate from itself.
The slave knows and does not know what it is doing. The slave has
knowing non-knowledge of itself and its actions. The slave, then, is
two and the two are strangers to each other: [F]ather, forgive them; for they know not what they
do.12 The slave, in its perfect moment, commends its everlasting spirit to its master: [F]ather, into thy hands I commend my everlasting spirit.13 The
slave, in that same perfect moment, simultaneously understands itself as forsaken by that master: [M]y God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?14
The slave gives up the ghost and the system of capital acquires a spirit.
Thus our alternative is to burn down the state.
Farley5
{Anthony Paul; Associat prof at Boston college Law school; perfecting
slavery;pg 235-238; January 27 2005}AvP
VII. BURN 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-overblack. 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 Haiti. 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 twentyfirst 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. VIII. TRAINING We begin as
children. We are called and we become our response to
the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them?
What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are
divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split
asunder by what they are called upon to become. The
slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood
is not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest
loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia.
The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called
to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living
can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The
slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is
not a beginning but an end. There is no progress
and no exit from the undiscovered country of the
slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think
through a progress narrative, a grand narrative,
the grandest narrative, that takes us up from
slavery. There is no up from slavery . The progress
from slavery to the end of history is the progress
from white-over-black to white-over-black to whiteoverblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite
direction of the pastpresent-future timeline. The slave

only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the
timeline, only under conditions of total juridical
freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of
bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself
as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before
its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by
offering a prayer for equal rights. The system of
marks is a plantation. The system of property is a
plantation. The system of law is a plantatio n.
These plantations, all part of the same system,
hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-overblack only, and that continually. The slave perfects
itself as a slave through its prayers for equal
rights. The plantation system will not commit
suicide and the slave, as stated above, has
knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave
finds its way back from the undiscovered country
only by burning down every plantation . When the
slave prays for equal rights it makes the free
choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to
not be. 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 calling it
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-overblack is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the
slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a
calling.
1NC Long (oceans)

The year was 1759. The Europeans started to spread into the
Americas. The Ocean became the bridge from the old world to the
new world. The trans-Atlantic slave trade became the starting point
for the severing of the African Identity. Thus the Ocean must
become the starting point for our analysis.
FARLEY
2k10
James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence Albany Law School
Anthony Paul-; SHATTERED: Afterword for Defining Race, A Joint Symposium of The Albany Law Review and the
Albany Journal of Science and Technology; ALBANY LAW REVIEW, Vo. 72:1053
What happened shattered whatever it was that we once were. Slavery happened.
We are the fragments of that happening. And it is still happening. We the
fragments are citizens of the undiscovered country. We the fragments, striving for
a lost union, continually burst apart. Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations makes no mention of what
happened. We will not find the flag of our undiscovered country within its binding, or on
any pages written within capitals long spell . Smith wrote of previously acquired capital. The
origin of this previously acquired capital is made a mystery, a foundational
mystery. This previously acquired capital is the navel of the modern world. Karl Marx,
writing at the time of the 13th amendments novelty, described what happened at our beginning as primitive
accumulation: I will call it the original accumulation, and I will call portraits of its repetitions primal
scenes of accumulation: The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation and entombment in the
mines of the indigenous populations..The beginnings of the conquest and plunder of Indiaand the conversion of
Africa into commercial hunting grounds for the capture of black skins. These idyllic proceedings are the chief
moments of primitive accumulation. Defining Race has been a symposium of definitions. I will begin the end of
Defining race with a definition of race that is itself intended to bring race to an end: Race is the mode of
repetition by which we refuse memories of the original accumulation. In what follows, I
will show the place of all the essays of Defining Race within this definition of race. The world that is
modern was made so by millions upon millions of murders. Lives and ways of
living, forms of life, were shattered. Blood became money. Money became capital.
Capital became nation. Nation is the perfect disguise for people, as in We the
people People, in other words, became white, or they failed to become
anything at all. We who are not people, we who are in material fact less than
nothing at all, we colors of those millions of murders merely ripen and fall and
cease, season after unforgiving season, like falling leaves, with the original
accumulation as the rhyme and the rhythm and the repressed reason. Reader, take
note that what I have just offered is an order of things, but not a temporal order. Time ceases with the
original accumulation. Life, at that point, call it the navel of the dream, becomes a
commodity, a thing like any other thing, a thing to be bought or sold, and the logic that
describes the commodity made out of the space for human development is the
logic of capital. As promised above, what Marx called primitive accumulation I will designate with two terms,
original accumulation and primal scene of accumulation. I will use the term original accumulation to discuss the
traumatic moment that seems always to have occurred just before the curtains of history were raised, and I will use
the term primal scene of accumulation to designate the always-tentative nature of our attempts to reconstruct that
time-before-time. When a form of life is shattered the fragments come together in the
form of the shattering force itself, not the form of life that was shattered. It is as
if the fragments, each feeling in itself the lack of a former, albeit unrecognized, unity, are drawn to
each other, but only in a way that preserves a certain lack. The lack is the
shattering force itself. And the shattering is a certainty. The lack becomes the
free-floating principle of reunification, and thus all attempts at reunification fail,
in perpetuity. The lack about which I write is not a simple one. The lack is in fact the worlddestroying force, the missing piece of all our reconstructions. The lack is the

missing piece and world-destroying force that we are. It is always what we are
becoming. Because we are that world-shattering force, the force of the original
accumulation, whatever institutional film we wrap around that which we mistake
for ourselves is doomed by the deadly contents that we ourselves are, both in
ourselves and ourselves, albeit without conscious awareness. Time, vanquished by the
original accumulation, now reappears as a never-ending puzzle we feel compelled to
complete. Our puzzle cannot be completed, for what it depicts is the end of the
world that has already ended. The puzzle that we feel mysteriously compelled to
put back together is not whatever was before the original accumulation, it is
instead the world-shattering force of that original accumulation . If it ever seems
as if we have found the final piece of the institutional puzzle that is the
achievement of social, industrial and perpetual peace, and it often seems so, then we
can be as sure as the original accumulation, as certain as the grave we are
already in, that the seemingly final piece will shatter everything: and it will do so
with all the eternity of the Middle Passage, the Black Atlantic, the undiscovered
country, our source and final resting place, the navel of our contemplations . The
repetitions are not repetitions of a form of life, they are repetitions of the fore
that opposed and shattered that form of life; they are repetitions of the original
accumulation, of the total extinction event at the beginning of what is modern . The
fragments come together in the form of the force that shattered the unit of their former life. That shattering force
was the force of the original accumulation, and it shatters them again. Thus it is that we never cross
the event-horizon of the original accumulation. The invisible hand of the market
and the shattering force of race-making genocide were and are one and the same.
The market is the ghostly return genocide. The word of the market, of capitalism,
looks like life, idyllic, but it is not, not for the have-nots whose not-having is the secret source of all
capital accumulation. Capitalism is the repetition and intensification of racial genocide
of its origin. Repetition and intensification of the great death event of the world is
not life; it is death, only death, and that continually. She comes in colors, like November.
B. Alternative is to engage in an unflinching paradigmatic analysisWilderson10

{Frank; Uc Irvine and former member at ANC; Unspeakable ethics red,
white and black; pp ix}AvP
STRANGE AS
it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked
for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general
an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete
overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the
radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate
elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to
hold the moderates' feet to tthe fire of a political agenda predicated
on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our
energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto
pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to
pose the questionand the power to pose the question is the
greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events
and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential
(Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this
book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate
enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in
earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity
and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin
Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye,
Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

C. Attempts to re-enforce traditional debate excludes minority
participation
Reid-Brinkley 2008 (Shanara, University of Georgia May 2008 THE
HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY
DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE
AND STYLE)
The stylistic procedures of the community are but one way in which the
boundaries of participation are maintained. Warner notes that stylistic
procedures refer to, but are not limited to, rate of delivery, note-taking
techniques, what qualifies as evidence, and other technical presentation
issues.23 Shanahan notes that there are violent forms of domination
throughout debate practice that include brutalizing forms of technique
that is, outrageous levels of speed in concert with impressive word
economy, slavish devotion to theminutiae of flowing where ink passes
for argument and the inevitable, speech reconstruction by debaters .24
Warner notes that these stylistic procedures are developed and
maintained through systems of privilege that lock out minority
participants. Yet, the stylistic procedures of the community also include
certain parameters or boundaries for identity performance. Style includes
bodily performance, from how we style the body, to how our bodies signify
as part of our rhetorical practices. It is not simply the stylistic
procedures relevant to actual debate competition itself, but the social
and cultural stylistic practices of the debate community relevant to the
performances of race, gender,68class, and sexuality. In other words, the
performance of identity is integral to the stylistic procedures that
produce a social and competitive environment hostile to shades of
difference. The stylistic norms of the policy debate community are
inextricably attached to the social performance of identity. In other words,
if the stylistic norms privilege the stylistic choices of white, straight,
economically privileged males, as is clearly indicated by their statistical
representation at the heights of competitive success, then difference
marks one as other unless the individual performs according to those
stylistic and identity-based norms. Racially and/or ethnically different
bodies must perform themselves according to the cultural norms of the
debate community. For UDL students it can often mean changing ones
appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing cultural

practices at least while participating in debate. In essence, students of color
are performatively whitened in order to have an opportunity for
achieving in debate competitions. Acting black or brown is problematic
because those performative identities are not privileged in terms of
successful participation. In fact, they signify a difference, an opposite, a
negative differential. It is not that the debate community actively
operates to exclude based on race, instead it is an exclusion based on
racial performance, in other words, how the differentially colored body
chooses to style itself.
Black Atlantic affs

The 1AC is a profoundly flawed misreading of history--conceptualization of a Black Atlantic necessarily excludes the
conceptualization of its totality---it reinscribes notions of modernity
and diminishes its own sensibility
Masilela, 1996, (Ntongela, Professor Emeritus of Creative Studies at Pitzer
College, available from JSTOR, Research in African Literatures, 27.4, The
"Black Atlantic" and African Modernity in South Africa,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819986, Date accessed: 28/06/2014) // dobp
The Black Atlantic cannot hide the fact that it is a
profoundly flawed book because of its exclusionary epistemic cultural
However, these impressive affiliations of
politics . Gilroy defines the "Black Atlantic" as essentially a dialogical intellectual system of discourse between the United
States and Europe about the nature of modernity concerning cultural and national identities, the very fact that cultural and political
With such a
conceptualization, Gilroy excludes Africa and Latin America (I am aware that Abdias do
formations of whatever kind are historical products of hybridization and syncretism.
Nascimento prefers the designation "South America," since "Latin" denies the Africanity of that continent- see his "The African
from the historical parameters of the "Black Atlantic." This

exclusionary process is not to be understood in the sense that a book
cannot be expected to say everything, but rather it reflects Gilroy's
political understanding of the dynamic structure of the black world within
the maelstrom of modernity. It is ironic that one would have to marshall the same arguments that Gilroy
Experience in Brazil")
himself rightly has made against the great Raymond Williams, that by excluding the "black settlers" from the making of
by excluding Africa,
Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the "Black
Atlantic."l Granted a book cannot say everything, it should at least attempt to conceptualize everything within the purview of
the historical logic of its object or subject. The Black Atlantic cannot or refuses and fails to
contemporary Englishness, he had unduly constricted its truly rich horizons. So likewise,
conceptually totalize
(either in the Lukacsian sense of totality or the Sartrean sense of totalization)
the
real field force , rather than the imaginary form, of its movement (see Sartre,
Lukacs) In a deeply saddening way, The Black Atlantic expresses an unremitting
disdainfulness for Africa, for things African, and for things that come from
our "Dark Continent."2 In these refusals the book is reflective of late European
modernist experience , even though it seeks to locate itself in the black
diasporic modernist articulations. Had it not been characterized by these irrational refusals, the book
would have made mention of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka, especially Ngugi since his first book of literary and cultural
criticism, Homecoming, with its ample referencing of C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, Eric Williams,
Samuel Selvon, Aime Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon, the first serious radical introduction of great Caribbean culture(s) into African
literary and cultural discourses, effected a further expansion of the African Trans-Atlantic World. Furthermore, the historic importance
for the whole African continent of the document "On the Abolition of the English Department," an appendix to Homecoming, lies in
its having revolutionized the study of African literature(s) by situating African Literature within a triangular system of the Caribbean,
Africa, and the black Americas. By this radical gesture of epistemological practice, Ngugi and his colleagues enormously enriched
the conceptual structure of trans- Atlanticism. Could there be a more fascinating trans-Atlantic affiliative relationship than that
between Ngugi and Fanon, it would rival that between Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, or between Ezekiel Mphahlele and
Langston Hughes, or between Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates, or between C. L. R. James and Kwame Nkrumah, or between
Solomon Plaatje and W. E. B. Du Bois, or between Peter Abrahams and Richard Wright, and so on. Though remarkable as it is in
many of its penetrative analyses, as well as the associative ensembles it configures and structures, The Black Atlantic fails to
register that the peregrinations of Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and others in Europe were a search for the
historical meaning of Africa. After all, since the 1884 Berlin Conference and during the whole colonial period, the key decisions about
Africa were being decided in European capitals. Is it mere chance that practically all Pan-African Congresses of the pre-independence
era took place in these imperial capitals and not in the imperialized capitals on the African continent? If one doubts that for most
black intellectuals in the African diaspora their historical project was the liberation of Africa, one need only examine the preoccupations of Edward Blyden, Martin Delany, and Alexander Crummell in Africa. This is the reason that they invented and constructed
Pan-Africanism, arguably the most important political philosophy among black intellectuals in the 20th century; so important,
indeed, that many of them imported Marxism (whether the Stalinist or the Trotskyist variant) to shore up the epistemology and

political vision of Pan-Africanism. In other words, Pan-Africanism, an invention by black diasporan intellectuals, whose object was the
liberation of Africa, was par excellence the fundamental political philosophy of black modernity in the 20th century.3 Many of the
diasporan intellectuals took different positions on the encounter between Africa and modernity: whereas Ras Makonnen accepted the
reciprocity between tradition and modernity, Richard Wright "rejected" Africa because he felt that tradition had triumphed over
modernity, while C. L. R. James found African political modernity deeply flawed and troublesome, and Du Bois made peace with it
because of other overdetermining exigencies. For practically all the major diasporan intellectuals, African modernities were
inescapable or unavoidable historical horizons. Even belated classical Pan-Africanists from Latin America such as Abdias do
Nascimento in Brazil and Manuel Zapata Olivella in Colombia, a rapprochement with Africa as a modernist experience could not be
evaded. Looking at a particular instance of the creation and construction of perspectives on African modernity by African
intellectuals, taking specifically South African modernity as an example, it is apparent why diasporan intellectuals could not avoid
Africa as a historical horizon since what they saw across the Atlantic was a reflection of their own historical dilemmas. The
placement of the intellectual bridge of trans-Atlanticism across the vast ocean between Africa and the African diaspora was not
because of racial ontologies or the myth of the search for origins, but rather because of political solidarity, intellectual affiliations,
cultural retainments, and historical appropriations. The construction of South African modernity by New African intelligentsia who
modeled themselves on the New Negro Talented Tenth is inconceivable without the example of American modernity: the New
Africans appropriated the historical lessons drawn from the New Negro experience within American modernity to chart and
negotiate the newly emergent South African modernity: the Africans learned from African Americans the process of transforming
themselves into agencies in or of modernity. The spectacular construction and theorizing of African modernities were undertaken in
South Africa in the 1920s by a group of brilliant New African intellectuals working together in the weekly Umteteli wa Bantu [The
Mouthpiece of the Native Peoples]-R. V. Selope Thema, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Solomon Plaatje, H. Selby Msimang, Allan Kirkland Soga, and
others. This necessity of transformation and the historical imperative of identifying with African Americans were a result of the fact
that we Africans experienced the entrance of European modernity into African history as a great historic defeat. Invariably, "forced"
modernization meant Westernization in our instance. We encountered European modernity as a process of the colonial system and
imperialist projection. The fundamental historical question became: what is it that enabled Europeans to defeat Africans militarily,
and subsequently hegemonically impose themselves on us? The only serious response on our part could only be through the
appropriation of that which had enabled Europeans to triumph: modernity. Hence the obsession with Christianity, civilization, and
education by the new African intelligentsia, from Blaise Diagne in Senegal through Harry Thuku in Kenya and Mnandi Azikiwe in
historical obsessions entailed the making of

the New Africans in South Africa; and there is no reason for doubting that
this did not also happen in other African countries. By decentering Africa
from its preoccupations about the "Black Atlantic ," The Black Atlantic
Nigeria to Walter Rubusana in South Africa. These
achieves the paradoxical effect of diminishing its own historical

sensibility while theorizing historical matters.
Colonialism and slavery are not aberrations in the project of

modernity but entirely inherent to modern institutions the affs
endorsement of racial humanism and cosmopolitanism papers over
structural evil and undermines racial progress
Gikandi 02
Simon, Currently Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he is the recipient of awards from organizations such as the American Council of
Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His most recent books include Maps of
Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism and Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Available from Project MUSE,
American Literary History, 14.3, pg. 602-04,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v014/14.3gikandi.html, Race and Cosmopolitanism | ADM
I am less troubled by Gilroy's privileging of race and fascism in his discourse than
his belief that the structure of evil is exterior to humanism and
In the end, however,
cosmopolitanism . This claim is faulty for two closely related reasons: the first
one relates to the point, made most powerfully by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), that the ethical and emancipatory claims of the
European Enlightenment were undermined by the irrational forces inherent
within the project of modernity itself. Zygmont Bauman extended this claim in his analysis of the logic of
evil within modernity in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Gilroy is, of course, aware of these prior claims.
Indeed, he sees his work as an extension of the critique of [End Page 602]
modernity represented by Horkheimer and Adorno and, more recently, Bauman. And yet , unlike his
important European precursors,
Gilroy seems unwilling to consider
be inherent within modernity
and the Enlightenment.
the etiology of
evil to
In describing what went

wrong with modernity and the Enlightenment, Gilroy's favorite metaphors are
those of ambiguity and aberration, not immanency or complicity . It is
precisely by presenting the evils implicit in the project of modernity
colonialism and slavery, for example as aberrations that Gilroy can hold
on to the ethical and emancipatory values enunciated by the modern in the name
of humanism and universality. I am in sympathy with the case Gilroy makes against raciology, but
I am not convinced that there is an implicit and emancipatory project
inherent in universalism, humanism, and cosmopolitanism . I am not sure that
racialism is absent from these ostensible redemptive economies. As I have argued in "Race and the Idea of the
even some of the most ethical and emancipatory categories in the

making of the modern European worldthe ideology of the aesthetic, for exampleseem
implicated in the more unsavory aspects of modern culture . From Bartholome Las
Casas to Hannah Arendt, the western discourse on freedom and emancipation has
been haunted by the figure of the Other, whose demands for freedom
seem incompatible with the idea of Europe . If it seems easier to recognize
evil in racialized movements and polities, to see its ugly prints on nationalism and not humanism, it
is not because racialized modes of exclusion are worse or their consequences
deadlier; rather, racialism appears to be a greater evil because it is premised on a
form of exclusiveness that is visible, irrational, and immutable . In contrast,
other systems of exclusion seem to deploy a more surreptitious tactic of
difference, one premised on the notion that the limits of social exclusion can be overcome. Class, for
example, is a form of social exclusion that has, even in the history of European society, led
to as much suffering as race. Yet, it is rare that one comes across books that analyze the evils of
Aesthetic,"
class in ethical terms. The reason why modes of discrimination based on culture or class don't seem to provoke any
outrage, I suspect, is that they operate within boundaries that human subjects can ostensibly overcome; these
the fixed
nature of racial boundaries is what compels Gilroy to conclude that a
racialized polity is one of "fortified nation-states and antagonistic ethnic
groups" (41). From the vantage point of our great cosmopolitan dreams, this may well be the case. Still, I
think it would be hasty to associate all nation-states with racialism and all ethnic
identities with [End Page 603] antagonism just because we are unhappy with their ambitions
and consequences. Just as humanism could coexist with the genocide of the native Americans and be used
to justify it, the nation-state could be invoked as the custodian of human
boundaries are hence not considered to be as disabling as the fixed notions of race. I suspect that
progress ; dubious ethnic differences have been used to justify genocide (the most recent examples being in
Rwanda and Bosnia), but by the same token
ethnic identities have sometimes functioned
as the refuge for persecuted people . Gilroy's dilemma, which is itself part of the
dialectic of modernity, is that both goodness and evil are hatched in the same
nest, as it were. For Gilroy, this nest is modernity.
Independently, this vision of racial cosmopolitanism represents a

Eurocentric approach that represses Pan-African identity and
entrenches violent modes of exclusion
Gikandi 02

Since there is no evidence that the emergence of the European community has
made the burden of blackness easier to bear, it is imperative to ask why Gilroy
associates cosmopolitanism with a certain relation to, or encounter with, Europeanness .
Let us remember that in the Black Atlantic, Gilroy's then-nascent discourse of
cosmopolitanism was structured by the black American's sojourn into
Europe : Frederick Douglass became cosmopolitan when he deployed
Scottish mythology in his self-constitution; Du Bois discovered his being-in-the-world
when he traveled to Germany; it was not Ghana but France that secured Richard
Wright's cosmopolitanism. In reviewing this rather Eurocentric narrative of
cosmopolitanism in an oeuvre that seeks to be against all forms of
ethnocentrism, one is left wondering about alternative narratives of a
Pan-Africanist identity repressed
or marginalized in Gilroy's text. One is reminded, for example,
of Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and Jamaica; of Langston Hughes in Cuba and Soviet Central Asia; of George
Why is a European
cosmopolitanism much more valuable in the institution of a Pan-African
identity than those other experiences? Readers seeking an answer to this question in Against Race are bound
to be disappointed, for Gilroy not only privileges Europe as the crucible of
Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, and Nnamdi Azikwe in the black belts of the US.
cosmopolitanism , but he does so in the kind of ultranationalist language that

makes mockery of the "planetary humanism" he wants to promote as an
alternative to racialism. Consider the following "take" on a certain influential African American's recognition of the
centrality of black music in "a creative model for the visual arts and a technical blueprint for novelists and poets":
"The great sage Alain Locke, fresh from three years as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and two more in Berlin, adopted
this approach in his careful exposition of the state of music-making published in 1936. Locke understood jazz in
tripartite terms as 'part Negro, part American, [and] part modern'" (296). In this scenario, Locke becomes a great
sage on account of his Rhodes scholarship, his three years at Oxford, and his residence [End Page 600] in Berlin,
not Harlem or even Harvard! Furthermore, in this rather ecstatic celebration of the authorizing cultural centers of
Gilroy forgets some simple racialist practices central to the

"Rhodes" phenomena, such as the fact that the benefactor of the Rhodes
scholarship was one of the major architects of imperialism in Africa, that until
fairly recently Africans were excluded from the Rhodes competition; or that in spite of his
Europeanness,
European credentials Locke could not secure an appointment in a white American university. My point here is that
when it comes to his European identity, Gilroy seems to embrace the camp
mentality he has set out to deconstruct
and denounce in his book. In this respect, Against
Central to this regime is the

unexamined notion that there are some preeminent positions in Western
political culture that made it the exceptional crucible of what Gilroy calls a
"precious humanism" (71). To be fair, Gilroy's book is an attempt to understand how race and racialism
Race is a text that operates within the very regime it seeks to critique.
have invaded this crucible and perverted its values. Indeed, much of Gilroy's agonizing is how such precious
positions as humanism can be rescued and secured given the persistence of racialism. His meditations on this
problem are worth quoting in some detail: I want to stop short of suggesting that the preeminent position of that
Western political culture is irrecoverable because the confidence and authority of epistemological and moral claims
staked in this tradition will never be restored. Instead, I would argue first that a partial and pragmatic restoration or
reform can proceed only if the depths of this tradition's difficulties with "race" are fully appreciated, and second,
that a sustained engagement with these problems would have to acknowledge that the recurrence of terror and
barbarity communicates more than a lapse from more exalted standards of rational conduct. We need to consider
the circumstances in which the application of terror can emerge as a rational, legal, or acceptable option. What
varieties of rationality sanction raciological brutality? How has the category of the human, which, as we have just
seen, Fanon would have us purge and redeem, circulated in those lofty attempts to differentiate epistemology and
morality, aesthetics and ethics? Racial and ethnic rhetorics, nationalist metaphysics, and imperial fantasies became
intrinsic to colonial modernities at home and abroad. As the history of colonial conflicts suggests, European
enlightenment's universal aspirations were undermined where they have been reinterpreted as tied to local and
[End Page 601] parochial preoccupations or read ethnohistorically so that their portentous, timeless promises
appear context-bound and are associated with the desires of particular populations in particular predicaments. (71-

72)
Eurocentric philosophy undergirds and legitimates politico-economic

colonialism and racism the presumption of universal reason
facilitates oppression while reinforcing intellectual imperialism
Stikkers, 08
Kenneth W., Professor, Philosophy & Africana Studies, Southern Illinois University, Philosophy
of economics and sociology, contemporary continental philosophy (Scheler, Foucault), American philosophy
(Puritanism, James), ethics, social/political philosophy. Editor of Max Scheler's Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge.
Author of Utopian Visions Past, Present, and Future: Rethinking the Ethical Foundations of Economy; Economics as
Moral Philosophy; and articles on philosophy of economics, American philosophy, and contemporary continental
thought. Also, Professor of Economics and Sociology at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, Mexico, and President
of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Available from Project MUSE, The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, 22.1, pg. 44-47, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/v022/22.1.stikkers.html,
An Outline of Methodological Afrocentrism, with Particular Application to the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois | ADM
Methodological Afrocentrism is intended as an antidote to the intellectual

colonialism that undergirds and serves to legitimate political and
economic colonialism . In the following I will, first, explain what I mean by "intellectual
colonialism" and how it adversely affects the reading of Africana philosophy;
second, delineate the central features of "methodological Afrocentrism"; and, third, illustrate the method, and how
it aims to overcome intellectual colonialism, in the reading of the African American thinker W. E. B. DuBois. Among
the conditions of colonialism is that the colonized must speak, if they are allowed to speak publicly at all, through
the language and conceptual schemas of the colonizer; they must thereby validate, as a prerequisite for speaking
publicly, both in form and in substance, the colonizer's intellectual enframement of the world, reinforce the
colonizer's worldview and rationality as the universally valid ones. That is, in order to speak publicly the colonized
must flatter the colonizer and in the process, simultaneously, denigrate his or her own cultural traditions. Indeed,
European efforts to legitimate philosophically its colonialist practices

were rooted largely in the presumption of a universal reason, of which
Europe further presumed itself to be the most advanced expression . Those
being colonized then were imagined to lie either at the earliest dawn of that reason or altogether outside [End Page
Colonial powers, thus, as the self-proclaimed vanguards of such reason, imagined and
projected themselves as the liberators of non-European "savages," freeing
40] its history.
them from their unreason by placing them under, not their (the colonizers') interests and fancies, but the rule of the
one true and universally valid Reason itself. Hegel's pronouncement regarding Africa is perhaps the bluntest: "Africa
. . . is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. . . . What we properly
understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature" (1956,
99). Karl Marx first noted how
the presumption of universal reason served to
legitimate oppression , although he did so with respect to class rather than race: "Each new class
which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to
represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society. . . . It will give its ideas the form of
universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones" (1904, 29899, in Marcuse 1960, 285).
And, to the best of my knowledge, it was William James who, as co-founder, along with Jane Addams, of the Antiimperialist League and outspoken critic of American imperialism, first identified the intimate connection between
the universal reason presumed by Western science and philosophy, on the one hand, and Western colonialist
practices, on the other, and his pluralism thus served as an antidote to the universalistic presumptions of
imperialism. Colonizers self-righteously believed themselves to be not oppressors but saviors, transforming the
presumably "irrational," "lazy," "inefficient," "unproductive" darker races into efficient instruments of rational
economic production, within growingly global markets. Colonizers could thus imagine themselves not as privileged
but as "burdened"bearers of "the white man's burden."2 As the king presumes to speak for his entire kingdom, so
colonizers presume to speak for all humanity, that the way they see and order things is the way in which all
creatures who wish to be deemed "rational" and "civilized" must see and order things: the eyes and mind of the
colonizer are assumed to be the eyes and mind for all (rational) humanity. Moreover, colonizing minds proceed in a
prior fashion; that is, they feel no need to verify empirically their universal judgments, no need even to ask those of
other cultures, "How does the world appear to you? How do you order and structure it?" prior to making their
sweeping pronouncements: after all, they, as the presumed vanguards of universal reason, are the measures of all
Kant saw no need actually to consult and to listen to non-Western

peoples in advancing his anthropology and theory of race : I think here of Kant's a
things. For example,
priori pronouncement, "The fellow was black from head to foot, a clear proof of what he said was stupid" (1991,
113). Similarly, Hegel did not think it even relevant to talk to African people prior to forming his judgment, quoted

colonizers presume,
that how they see and order the world must be how all
rational beings see and order it or at least ought to see [End Page 41] and order it: there is,
above, that they played no role in the historical unfolding of universal Spirit. Instead,
as the loci of universal reason,
therefore, no need to ask, because those who experience matters differently must be, a priori, just plain wrong,
irrational. Protests by the colonized are taken merely as evidence of their erroneous views and undeveloped
rationality: they, the colonized, simply do not understand.
Intellectual colonialism is clearly
visible even in recent African philosophy : African students of philosophy,

studying at universities built by the colonial powers and on European models, have been
required to learn in the colonizers' languages and to master the texts of the European
canon. Any attempt to articulate one's own native wisdom tradition, if it is to be allowed at all, has been by
reference to European concepts, thinkers, and texts and always, of course, still in the colonizers' language. I take
certain efforts of Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyeke to articulate elements of traditional Akan philosophy by reference
to European thinkers to exemplify such intellectual colonialism. The first, in his Cultural Universals and Particulars:
An African Perspective(Wiredu 1996, esp. chs. 24), utilizes John Dewey's pragmatic instrumentalism as a means for
comparing concepts in Akan and European traditions; the second, in his An Essay on African Philosophical Thought:
The Akan Conceptual Scheme(Gyeke 1995), explains Akan concepts by comparison especially to Aristotelian
works aim to legitimate African philosophy by

arguing its participation in universal reason, thereby affirming the
notions of "soul" and "virtue." Both
Eurocentric assumption of such a reason
and European accounts of it. In other works,
however, Wiredu (e.g., 1979, 1995) clearly identifies the limitations of efforts to interpret African philosophy
There are three principal, undesirable effects

of attempting to articulate African philosophies via European traditions .
First, colonizers mistakenly assume that indigenous people are using their ,
the colonizers', words in the same way that they do (Hallen 1997). Second, European
through European concepts and languages.
thinkers are unchallenged and thereby reaffirmed in their common belief

that European philosophy is the standard for philosophy universally. Third, as Robert
Bernasconi has shown, drawing from the work of Lucius Outlaw, African philosophy is placed in a
double bind. To the extent that it asserts similarities with European
traditions, it reinforces the prejudice that native traditions contribute to
philosophy little or nothing unique or original; that the latter's best insights can be found
already, and expressed generally in a much more sophisticated manner, in the European canon; that
indigenous wisdom is, at best, a mere shadow of what one finds better
expressed in European texts. On the other hand, to the extent that African thought asserts its
difference from European philosophy, it casts itself outside of philosophy altogether: it is deemed "unphilosophical."
African philosophy "effectively disappears" (Bernasconi 1997, 188).

Intellectual colonialism rules, too, the study of African American philosophy,
although it is perhaps more hidden than in the case of African philosophy . It is manifest most
strongly in the general tendency in the philosophical profession to see
African American philosophy mainly as an offshoot [End Page 42] and variation of EuroAmerican philosophy, rather than as rooted principally in Africana
In either case
traditions . African American philosophy thus appears as a colony of Euro-American thought and thus under
the latter's authority, administration, and jurisdiction. There are at least three sources for this error. First, there
is simply the extreme, general ignorance of Africana intellectual traditions ,
and such ignorance is then confused for there simply being no African philosophical traditions. (How many in the
philosophical profession can name even a single African philosopher?) Second, that African American students are
required by the academy to master the European canon as a prerequisite for study of their own traditions and must
articulate their interests in Africana philosophy by reference to that canon, for example, passing comprehensive
examinations and in the writing of theses and dissertations, reinforce the presumption that African American
philosophy is largely derivative from the Euro-American tradition and thus is rightly measured by reference to it.
Moreover, this canon often explicitly tells Africana students that they are incapable of understanding the texts they
are reading or even of doing philosophy, by virtue of simply being African: the comments of Kant and Hegel quoted
above are prime instances. Third, while the African student of philosophy still enjoys living access to his or her

native African language, and hence to the conceptual schema it manifests, the conditions of
slavery
in
deprived the African American student generally of such access: African slaves in
America who spoke the same language were systematically separated, to prevent them
from conspiring in their native tongues, and speaking in African languages was strictly
America
forbidden by law and the whip. That Africans brought to America were forced to speak English, though, has created
in European America generally, and within professional philosophy in particular, the illusion that African Americans
employ English terms in the same manner as European Americans and that they have no living connection to their
African Americans thus appear as standing in need of becoming

more Europeanized, to fill the presumed cultural, spiritual void that either, la Hegel, was imagined there
African heritage:
all along or, in the relatively more liberal understanding, was created by the conditions of slavery. Other academic
disciplines, such as religious studies, English literature, and art history, have long understood that African
Americans' lack of access to their native languages did not radically sever their ties to traditional Africana modes of
thinking and cultural expression: rather, they understand how African Americans have appropriated European
modes of expression to articulate their own cultural life. It is well understood within religious studies, for example,
that the use of Christian language and symbols by African American churches is quite different from their use in
Euro-American Christian churches, that African Americans use such language and symbols in ways that are more
consistent with and expressive of their own cultural traditions and for their own purposes. As Nathan Huggins [End
Page 43] writes, "In the spirit of Afro-Americans, Christianity was converted to their needs as much as they were
converted to its doctrine" (1990, 174).3
The alternative embraces a redefinition of African-American

philosophy through the lens of methodological Afrocentrism only
this strategy can combat Eurocentric intellectual colonialism
Stikkers, 08
Kenneth W., Professor, Philosophy & Africana Studies, Southern Illinois University, Philosophy
of economics and sociology, contemporary continental philosophy (Scheler, Foucault), American philosophy
(Puritanism, James), ethics, social/political philosophy. Editor of Max Scheler's Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge.
Author of Utopian Visions Past, Present, and Future: Rethinking the Ethical Foundations of Economy; Economics as
Moral Philosophy; and articles on philosophy of economics, American philosophy, and contemporary continental
thought. Also, Professor of Economics and Sociology at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, Mexico, and President
of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Available from Project MUSE, The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, 22.1, pg. 40-44, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/v022/22.1.stikkers.html,
An Outline of Methodological Afrocentrism, with Particular Application to the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois | ADM
Euro-American philosophers, however, tend to assume that African American philosophers use the standard stock of
philosophical terms and concepts as they do, rather than in ways that are more consistent with Africana traditions,
historical experiences, and purposes. Let one example suffice for now: it is often assumed that when African
American authors, such as David Walker, Henry Garnet, or Frederick Douglass, appropriate Enlightenment political
terms, such as freedom, liberty, and rights, they intend them in the modern European, individualistic sense of
personal freedom, personal liberty, and personal rights and they thus embrace all the anthropological and
Africana traditions do not

presuppose such individualism (Huggins 1990, 516); rather, speaking within them one
is more likely to be referring to the freedom, liberty, and rights of a
people, of one's community, in achieving its own collective ends . As Huggins notes, "to be
ontological assumptions entailed in such notions. However,
able to marry, have normal and stable family relations, and enjoy one's children until their maturity" (1990, 16465)
were much more central to the nineteenth-century African American understanding of "freedom" than the
opportunity for personal advancement, which has been much more central to Euro-American understandings of the
term. The results of this tendency to project European American understandings and purposes on the texts of
African American philosophies and of this failure to understand African American philosophers within their own
cultural histories and traditions are that African American philosophy is viewed primarily as derivative from EuroAmerican philosophy and not as rooted in Africana traditions and hence that African American philosophers are
seen as contributing little if anything to philosophy in America. Thus, Frederick Douglass appears something like a
black Thomas Paine; W. E. B. DuBois, as a black Marx or John Dewey; Alain Locke, as a black Josiah Royce; Martin
Luther King, as a black personalist, a black Brightman.4 The above, I submit, are among the primary reasons why
African American philosophers often feel alienated from American philosophy generally and from professional
associations for American philosophy, such as the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy: they are
experienced as colonialist enterprises.
Under " methodological Afrocentrism " I propose
two strategies for liberating Africana philosophy from intellectual

colonialism. The first of these strategies I describe here only briefly: references to
race, and even racist remarks such as the ones cited above from Kant and Hegel, in the canonical
texts of European philosophy, which one is generally trained to push aside and to ignore as merely

are brought forward, taken seriously, as
integral to the author's corpus and used as a lens through which to
interpret that corpus as a whole. Emmanuel Eze's "The Color of Reason: The Idea of 'Race' in
expressive of the writer's time or even not to see at all,
Kant's Anthropology" (1997) provides a good example of this first prong of the method. Eze shows how Kant's
discussions of race, which are both [End Page 44] numerous and extensive, are not peripheral but central to his
anthropology and hence integral to his whole critical project. As Eze concludes, "It is clear that what Kant settled
upon as the 'essence' of humanity, that which one ought to become in order to deserve human dignity, sounds very
much like Kant himself: 'white,' European, and male. More broadly speaking, Kant's philosophical anthropology
reveals itself as the guardian of Europe's self-image of itself as superior and the rest of the world as barbaric"
(1997, 130). What becomes abundantly clear through such a rereading of Kant and other central authors in the
humanity,
the modernist effort to define the nature of "reason," as the essence of

is intimately bound up with Europe's desperate effort to justify
morally its
colonialist practices , including the slave trade : if the capacity to reason is
European canon is that
taken, as it was, as the mark separating those who might morally be colonized and enslaved from those who may
not, then the entire defense of colonialism and slavery must rest on the prevailing definition of reason and who has
the authority, the power, to define it. As Outlaw (1996, 5459) has correctly noted, what is at stake in Kant's,
Hegel's, and others' accounts of "reason" is a struggle over the very meaning of humanity, and, set within the
context of colonialism and the slave trade, that means who may rightfully colonize and enslave and who may
rightfully be colonized and be enslaved. Efforts to disentangle supposedly purely "philosophical" concerns from their
political contexts are dishonest and irresponsible, if not outright racist, insofar as they conceal racist agendas in
which Western philosophies have participated and are implicated. This strategy of recentering the European canon
around those passages concerning matters of race is analogous to feminist efforts to reread that canon by
recentering it around gender. Such a recentering includes taking comments about and uses of gender, including
gendered language, seriously and as integral to a thinker's corpus as a wholefor example, Aristotle's treatment of
women and the gendered character of his notions of matter and form, which one is trained in traditional
philosophical education largely to ignore as irrelevant, are seriously examined. Such feminist scholarship, long
resisted by the masculinist academy, is now widely accepted, as evidenced by Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt's
anthology Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy (2004) and Pennsylvania State University Press's
The second strategy of methodological Afrocentrism

demands, in the name of philosophical, hermeneutical rigorand not as some sort of ideological agenda or
"political correctness"simultaneously, first, the bracketing or suspension of all possible
influences and parallels between European and Euro-American thinkers, on the one
hand, and Africana thinkers, on the other, and, second, the interpretation of Africana
authors strictly within the traditions of Africana thought itself, reserving discussion
extensive series Re-reading the Canon.
of such bracketed connections with European thought for a possible, future, postcolonial time, when Africana
thought is no longer compelled by the profession to legitimate itself by reference to European traditions, texts, and
authors. Following this strategy, whenever Africana authors [End Page 45] employ seemingly standard terms of the
European tradition, one refrainsagain, rigorouslyfrom assuming that the Africana uses are continuous with
European ones; that is, one refrains from assuming that Africana authors must speak to Europeans and that Europe
thus rightfully controls what can and cannot be said with its words: one instead attempts to understand the terms
within the context of Africana traditions themselves and how they have been appropriated for the purposes of
Africana people. I see nothing especially radical in this second part of the method. It is merely the extension of
sound, well-accepted hermeneutical principles to Africana thought: one refrains, as rigorously as possible, from
imposing and projecting the discursive norms of one's own culture on another. This second strategy is perhaps best
explained through an extended example: reading the works of W. E. B. DuBois. How does one Eurocentrically
trained in philosophy tend to read and to contextualize DuBois? I suggest the following tendencies. First, one tends
to notice that DuBois studied most closely with William James while at Harvard and thus look for (a) the
continuation of influences on James, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, into DuBois; (b) traces of pragmatism in
DuBois's thought; and (c) connections to other pragmatists, such as John Dewey. Cornel West unfortunately
reinforces this reading of DuBois in his The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989). Second, one emphasizes the
early DuBois, when he still believed that he could appeal to white America's conscience by reference to its own
political ideals, rather than the later DuBois, who turned his back, in disillusionment and anger, on white America
and her hypocrisy. Third, one imagines some semblance of Hegelian dialecticsperhaps after noting that DuBois
studied Hegel at Harvard with Roycefor example, in DuBois's notion of "double consciousness," despite the fact
that DuBois explicitly denies any connection to Hegel, that James instilled in him a deep suspicion of Hegel, and
that double consciousness knows no happy synthesis. Indeed, in a comment on his The Souls of Black Folk DuBois
explicitly indicates that he speaks first and foremost as a son of Africa in that work, wherein he presents the notion
of double consciousness, and implicitly warns against reading that work through any sort of European frame: "The
blood of my [African] fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraint of my training and surroundings."5
Fourth, one notices a foreshadowing of Sartrean existentialism, for example, the objectifying power of the "gaze,"
again especially in the notion of double consciousness. Fifth, one emphasizes, even overemphasizes, DuBois's
Marxism, ignoring DuBois's careful efforts to articulate the limits of Marxist analyses in the understanding of race,
the independence of race and racism from economic factors, and the utter inadequacy of Marxism as a

revolutionary program, based in class solidarity, for African people.6 Sixth, one utterly disregards, perhaps as mere
rhetoric, DuBois's frequent and emphatic appeals to "Africa," "Egypt," and "Ethiopia" and the need for African
Americans to see their thinking, self-understanding, and libratory efforts as essentially tied to those of Africans. In
all of the above tendencies, the aim seems clear: to make DuBois European, [End Page 46] to make him white, to
purge him of all that is African, to incarcerate him within the European tradition and canon, and thereby to reaffirm
Europe as the standard for philosophical discourse in general and Africa as subordinate to its standard, if not
Methodological Afrocentrism does not definitively

reject any of the above, but as a counterforce to the prevailing intellectual
outside that discourse altogether.
colonialism that focuses one-sidedly on European influences and traditions in interpretations of Africana
thinkers, it rigorously brackets them. By contrast, methodological Afrocentrism
would contextualize DuBois's thought strictly within Africana traditions and
would take seriously and emphasize such features of and influences on
DuBois's thought as the followingand these are only but a few of what we might list:
The aff endorses a method of racial cosmopolitanism this serves to

uphold modernity by claiming that anti-blackness is an aberration
turns case by solidifying modes of exclusion
Gikandi 02
Gilroy's difficultythe liberal dilemma, as it wereis how to explain the way modern
culture could simultaneously espouse some of the most important human values
and still fall to the temptation of raciology . How could the ideals of the Enlightenment have
been turned upside down and against themselves? Gilroy's work echoes the famous paradox faced by
Horkheimer [End Page 604] and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, a dilemma so central to our modern
dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the

first phenomenon for investigation: the self-destruction of the
Enlightenment. We are wholly convinced and therein lies our petitio principii that
identity that it needs to be recalled: The
social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought . Nevertheless, we believe

that we have just as clearly recognized that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the
actual historic formsthe social institutionswith which it is interwoven, already contains the seed
of the reversal universally apparent today. If enlightenment does not
accommodate reflection on this recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. If
consideration of the destructive aspect of progress is left to its enemies, blindly pragmatized thought loses its
transcending quality and, its relation to truth. In the enigmatic readiness of the technologically educated masses to
fall under the sway of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to popular paranoia, and in all uncomprehended
Gilroy rarely refers to

operates under the shadow of their dilemma. Like them, he is
convinced that universal freedom is inseparable from enlightened
absurdity, the weakness of the modern theoretical faculty is apparent. (xiii) Although
Horkheimer and Adorno, he
thought ; he also shares their conviction that the ideology of the Enlightenment
already contains the seeds of its destruction. In order to secure the first proposition against the
later, Gilroy often ends up making two arguments which , though not exactly at odds
with one another, are in constant tension: the first argument, which has been popular in European
social theory since World War II, holds that while the ideals of modernity were
themselves sound, the movement was perhaps compromised and
contaminated by the irrational forces that it sought to overcome, or, in my view, that it displaced
elsewhere. The locus of this argument is the claim that the modern theoretical faculty was
destablized by the initial exclusionary configuration of modernity, by the consistent endorsement

of "race" as a central political and historical concept , and by the grave
violence done to the central image of the human being what used to be called
"man"through the practice of Eurocentrism as it was manifested in the imposition of colonialism. In
Gilroy's words, "the enlightenment pretensions toward universality were punctured from the moment of their
conception in the womb of the colonial space" (65). But
there is a second, more frightening
part to this argument : this is the possibility [End Page 605] that modernity was
not simply contaminated by inhumane practices that were exterior to it; rather,
what we consider to be the excesses of Enlightenment anti-Semitism and
racism , for example were part of the immanent logic of modernity . This argument,
first expounded by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been the central subject in
Gilroy is much more at ease with

the former argument than the latter. He is comfortable when discussing how the
irrational forces of raciology have overwhelmed rational thinking , but less
Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. It seems to me that
willing to consider the possibility that the mythology of reason was itself the condition of possibility of irrationalism.
In one sense, Gilroy's discomfort seems to me to be the expression of a certain kind of intellectual courage: he
resists the postmodern response to this dilemma, which entails the dismissal and discredit of modernity and
Enlightenment as the totalizing discourse of a bourgeois culture that has brought nothing but misery to the world. I
think Gilroy is right to reject this easy solution or resolution to the dilemma of modernity and to insist that the
values of enlightened thought are crucial to our modern identity and our perpetual dream of universal freedom.
Still, there is the delicate issue of how to uphold the values of Enlightenment in the face of the dark side of
modernity. How can we sanction the values of Western political culture if "the confidence and authority of
His basic
premise is that "a partial and pragmatic restoration or reform can proceed only if
the depths of this tradition's difficulties with 'race' are fully appreciated,
and, second, that a sustained engagement with these problems would have to
acknowledge that the recurrence of terror and barbarity communicate more than a lapse from
epistemological and moral claims staked in this tradition will never be restored"? Gilroy wonders (71).
more exalted standards of rational conduct. We need to consider the circumstances in which the application of
terror can emerge as a rational, legal, or acceptable position" (71-72). From a European perspective, as I have
this is a dilemma that has haunted social theory since World War II. In
another sense, however, this is a dilemma only to the extent that it privileges
already noted,
Europe as both the source and the end of political freedom . In short, Gilroy's
dilemma is that of a European who considers it imperative to validate
he calls
what
" Western Political Culture "his culturewhile accounting for its
aberrations. In this context, racism is painful only to the extent that it

excludes one from this Western identity or seems to go against the tenets of a modern
European identity. What Gilroy fails to consideras do most other students of raciology is that
modes of exclusion [End Page 606] based on race are not universal . As I have already
noted, there are many parts of the world in which race is quite low on the totem pole of terror and as a cause of
social death.
Prison affs
The legal system has been the basis and justification for the very
same cultural violence they look to for protection.
Margulies and Metcalf 11
(Terrorizing Academia http://www.swlaw.edu/pdfs/jle/jle603jmarguilies.pdf, Joseph Margulies is a Clinical Professor, Northwestern University School of Law. He was counsel of record for the petitioners in Rasul v. Bush and Munaf v. Geren. He now is counsel of record for Abu Zubaydah, for whose torture (termed harsh interrogation by some) Bush Administration officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote authorizing legal opinions. Earlier versions of this paper were
presented at workshops at the American Bar Foundation and the 2010 Law and Society Association Conference in Chicago. Margulies expresses his thanks in particular to Sid Tarrow, AzizHuq, BaherAzmy, Hadi Nicholas Deeb, Beth Mertz, Bonnie Honig, and Vicki Jackson.Hope Metcalf is a Lecturer, Yale Law School. Metcalf is co-counsel for the plaintiffs/petitioners in Padilla v. Rumsfeld, Padilla v. Yoo, Jeppesen v. Mohammed, and Maqaleh v. Obama. She has written
numerous amicus briefs in support of petitioners in suits against the government arising out of counterterrorism policies, including in Munaf v. Geren and Boumediene v. Bush. Metcalf expresses her thanks to Muneer Ahmad, Stella Burch Elias, Margot Mendelson, Jean Koh Peters, and Judith Resnik for their feedback, as well as to co-teachers Jonathan Freiman, RamziKassem, Harold HongjuKoh and Michael Wishnie, whose dedication to clients, students and justice
continues to inspire., Journal of Legal Education, Volume 60, Number 3 (February 2011))
This conundrum is not adequately addressed by dominant strands of post-9/11

legal scholarship. In retrospect, it is surprising that much post-9/11 scholarship appears
to have set aside critical lessons from previous decades as to the
relationship among law, society and politics .14 Many scholars have
long
argued in other contexts that rightsor at least the experience of rightsare subject to political
and social constraints, particularly for groups subject to historic marginalization.
Rather than self-executing, rights are better viewed as contingent political resources,
capable of mobilizing public sentiment and generating social expectations .15
From that view,
a victory in Rasul or Boumediene no more guaranteed that
prisoners at Guantnamo would enjoy the right to habeas corpus than a

victory in Brown v. Board 16 guaranteed that schools in the South would
be desegregated .17 Rasuland Boumediene, therefore, should be seen as part (and
of a varied and complex collection of events, including the

fiasco in Iraq , the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, and the use of warrantless wiretaps ,
as well asseemingly unrelated episodes like the official response to Hurricane Katrina . These and other
probably only a small part)
events during the Bush years merged to give rise to a powerful social narrative critiquing an administration
committed to lawlessness, content with incompetence, and engaged in behavior that was contrary to perceived
the election of Barack Obama

stimulated massive opposition on the Right. The result
has been the emergence of a counter-narrative about national security that has
produced a vigorous social backlash such that most of the Bush-era policies
will continue largely unchanged, at least for the foreseeable future.19 Just as we see a widening
American values.18 Yet the very success of this narrative, culminating in
in 2008, produced quiescence on the Left, even as it
gap between judicial recognition of rights in the abstract and the observation of those rights as a matter of fact,
there appears to be an emerging dominance of proceduralist approaches ,
which take as a given that rights dissolve under political pressure, and, thus,
are best protected by basic procedural measures. But that stance falls short in
its seeming readiness to trade away rights in the face of political tension. First, it
accepts the tropes du jour surrounding radical Islamnamely, that it is a unique, and
uniquely apocalyptic, threat to U.S. security. In this, proceduralists do not pay adequate heed to the lessons of
it endorses too easily the idea that procedural

and structural protections will protect against substantive injustice in the face of
American history and sociology. And second,
popular and/or political demands for an outcome-determinative system that cannot tolerate acquittals.
Procedures only provide protection, however, if there is sufficient political

support for the underlyingright. Since the premise of the proceduralist
scholarship is that such support does not exist, it is folly to expect the
political branches to create meaningful and robust protections . In short, a
witch hunt does not become less a mockery of justice when the accused is given the right to confront witnesses.

And a separate system (especially when designed for demonized others, such as Muslims) cannot, by definition,
be equal. In the end, we urge a fuller embrace of what Scheingold called the politics of rights, which recognizes
the contingent character of rights in American society. We agree with Mari Matsuda, who observed more than two
rights area necessary but not sufficient resource for marginalized

people with little political capital.20 To be effective, therefore, we must look beyond
the courts and grapple with the hard work of long-term change with, through
and, perhaps, in spite of law. These are by no means new dilemmas, but the post-9/11 context raises
decades ago that
difficult and perplexing questions that deserve study and careful thought as our nation settles into what appears to
be a permanent emergency
The negative is a total and complete rejection of bondage and

captivity, the affirmative is a necessary but not sufficient rejection
of this reality.
Nagel and Nocella 13 (The End of Prisons: Reflections from the DecarcerationMovementedited by Mechthild E. Nagel,
Anthony J. Nocella II)
The original working title for this volume was Prison Abolition . After
discussion among the contributors however, we changed the title to The
End of Prisons. First, we wish to raise discussions about the telos of
prisons what purpose do they have?Second, Prison abolition is strongly
related to a particular movement to end the prison industrial complex .

Following Michel Foucault(1977), we argue that prisons are also
institutions such as schools, nursing homes, jails, daycare centers, parks,
zoos, reservations and marriage, just to name a few. Prisons are all
around us and constructed by those in dominant oppressive authoritarian
positions. There are many types of prisons religious prisons, social
prisons, political prisons, economic prisons, educational prisons, and, of
course, criminal prisons. Individuals leave one prison only to enter
another. From daycare to school to a nursing home, we are a nation of
instutionalized prisons. Criminal prisons in the United States are not
officially referred to as such, but rather as correctional facilities. A prison, as
we define it in this volume, is an institution or system that oppresses and
does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we
include the imprisonment of non-human animals and plants , which are
too often overlooked . Michel Foucault (1977) famously said, Is it
suprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals,
which all resemble prisons? (p. 288). We believe that this volume is one
of the first to extend Foucaults logica, by making a connection between
coercive institutions and all systems of domination as forms of prisons .
We argue that the conception of prison is far reaching, always changing
and adapting to the times and the socio-political environment . We expand
the concept of prison from concrete walls, barbed wire, gates and fences
to many of the institutions and systems throughout society such as
schools, mental hospitals, reservations for indigenous Americans, zoos for
non-human animals, and national parks and urban cultivated green spaces

for the ecological community. United States imperialism, which promotes
global domination and capitalism, not only imprisons convicted criminals
byt its people, land, non-human animals, those that surround it (nonUnited States citizens) and those trapped within it (American Indians and
immigrants).
Whiteness (unhighlighted)
(Frantz Fanon, philosopher, revolutionary, all around cool dude, 1952,

Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, p 84) gz
Look, a Negro! It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I
passed by. I made a tight smile.
Look, a Negro! It was true. It amused me.
Look, a Negro! The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of
my amusement.
Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened! Frightened! Frightened!
Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh
myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible
If you think this story is rooted solely in the past youve got another
thing coming this accusation is an act of performative policing by
white civil society the lived experience of the black subject
becomes simultaneously dangerous and fungible this reality is not
contingent but rather a structural ontology imposed on black
experience that unlocks gratuitous violence
Yancy 12 (George Yancy, PhD in philosophy from Dusquesne University,
professor of philosophy at Dusquesne University, 2012, Look a White! pp 25) gz
Note the iterative Look, a Negro! It is repetitive and effectively
communicates something of a spectacle to behold.
Be careful!
Negroes steal, they cheat, they are hypersexual, mesmerizingly so, and
the quintessence of evil and danger.
Fanon feels
the impact of the collective white gaze. He is, as it were, strangled by
the attention. He has become a peculiar thing. He becomes a dreaded
object, a thing of fear, a frightening and ominous presence. The turned
heads and twisted bodies that move suddenly to catch a glimpse of the
object of the white boys alarm function as confirmation that something
has gone awry. Their abruptly turned white bodies help to materialize
the threat through white collusion. The white boy has triggered something
of an optical frenzy. Everyone is now looking, bracing for something to
happen, something that the Negro will do. And given his cannibal
nature, perhaps the Negro is hungry.
Fanon has done nothing save be a Negro. Yet this is sufficient. The Negro
has always already done something by virtue of being a Negro. It is an
anterior guilt that always haunts the Negro and his or her present and
future actions. After all, this is what it means to be a Negroto have done
something wrong.
Yes. Its a Negro!
The tight smile on Fanons face is a forced smile, uncomfortable, tolerant.
Fanon writes, The little white boy throws himself into his mothers arms: Mama, the niggers going to eat me up.2
The little white boys utterance is felicitous against a backdrop of white lies and myths about the black body. As Robert Gooding-Williams writes, The [white] boys expression
of fear posits a typified image of the Negro as behaving in threatening ways. This image has a narrative significance, Fanon implies, as it portrays the Negro as acting precisely as historically received legends and stories about
the pointing is not only an

indicative, but the schematic foreshadowing of an accusation, one which
carries the performative force to constitute that danger which it fears and
defends against.4 The act of pointing is by no means benign; it takes its
phenomenological or lived toll on the black body
My body was given
back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that
Negros generally portray them as acting.3 One can imagine the innocent white index finger pointing to the black body. Here
. As Fanon writes,

white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is
mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger
the white boy, while not
fully realizing the complex historical, psychological, and phenomenological
implications, has actually distorted his (Fanons) body. Look, a Negro! is
rendered intelligible vis--vis an entire play of white racist signifiers that
ontologically truncate the black body; it is an expression that calls forth
an entire white racist worldview. The white boy, though, is not a mere
innocent proxy for whiteness. Rather, he is learning, at that very moment,
the power of racial speech, the power of racial gesturing. He is learning
how to think about and feel toward the so-called dark Other. He is
undergoing white subject formation, a formation that is fundamentally
linked to the object that he fears and dreads.
the white boys racial practices are learned
effortlessly, practices that are always already in process.
the white
boys performance of whiteness is not simply the successful result of a
superimposed superstructural grid of racist ideology. Rather, the white
boys performance points to fundamental ways in which many white
children are oriented, at the level of everyday practices, within the world,
where their bodily orientations are unreflected expressions of the
background lived orientations of whiteness, white ways of being, white
modes of racial and racist practice.
the distance implicit in presumptive white
purity is false, and covers an occluded racial proximity Look, a Negro!
draws its force from collective fear and misrecognition
Dirty nigger! Or
simply, Look, a Negro!9 There is no distinction here within the context
of the white gaze. To see a Negro is to see a nigger; it is to see a
problema problem that is deemed, from the perspectives of whites,
ontological. In the face of so many white gazes, one desires to slip into
corners
He cannot live a life of anonymity, etymologically,
without a name or nameless. Apparently, only whites have that
wonderful capacity to live anonymously, thoughtlessly, to be ordinary qua
human, to go unmarked and unnamedin essence, to be white.
Eastwoods central character is the
man with no name. This is the portrayal of white liberalism perhaps at its
best. The black lone figure already has a name. Indeed, he has multiple
names: nigger, rapist, savage. The white townspeople become
fearful as he moves through the street
The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all
moralities and prohibitions. To be the black or the Negro, then, is to be
immediately recognized and recognizable. One is in clear view: Look, a
Negro-nigger! There is no escape; there are no exceptions; it is a
Sisyphean mode of existence
When [white] people like me, they tell
me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is
not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle
It is the social world of white normativity and white meaning
making that creates the conditions under which black people are always
already marked as different/deviant/ dangerous. Look, a Negro!
has the perlocutionary power to incite violence, violence
.5 Fanon is clear that
To invoke Fanon, the [white] collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity;
it is the result of what I shall call the unreflected imposition of a culture.6 Or, as I would argue,
In short,
7 It is a process, though, where the white embodied subject is intimately linked to the black embodied subject. Therefore,
as Mike Hill argues in reference to Toni Morrisons insightful concept of American Africanism,
.8
. Although Fanon does grant that, within the field of culturally
available racial descriptors, it is true that he is a Negro, he recognizes how the term is fundamentally linked to various racist myths. This is why Fanon also writes,
.10 Yet as Fanon makes clear, it is not easy to hide. Metaphorically, he describes how his long antennae pick up the catch-phrases strewn over the surface of thingsnigger underwear smells of nigger
nigger teeth are whitenigger feet are bigthe niggers barrel chest.11
12 They are like Clint Eastwoods
white stock characters in his Western shoot-em-up movies who come into town nameless and mysterious. Indeed,
; they know that even as a man of the law, as shown in the comedy Blazing Saddles (1974), he is on the verge
of whipping it out. Fanon writes,
13
. Fanon writes,
.14 Yet this
infernal circle is not of Fanons doing.
(or perhaps, simply,
Look, the wretched and forlorn nigger!)

filled with white desire and bloodlust. Call: Look, a Negro! Response:
Rape the black bitch! Call: Look, a Negro! Response: Get a rope!
Call: Rape! Response: Castrate the nigger! The black body is deemed
a threat vis--vis the virgin sanctity of whiteness something to be
marked, sequestered, and in many cases killedjust for fun
,15
. In fact, in 2011 in Jackson, Mississippi, a forty-
nine-year-old black man, James Craig Anderson, was targeted primarily by a white eighteen-year-old male, who, according to law enforcement officials, said to his white friends, Lets go fuck with some niggers. On seeing a black
man standing in a parking lot (Look, a Negro!), the group first repeatedly beat him. It is alleged that the expression White Power! was also yelled out by one of the white youth. As Anderson staggered, he was then brutally run
over by a truck driven by the white eighteen-year-old, an event captured on surveillance tape. After driving over and killing Anderson, the white male, who since has been indicted on charges of capital murder and a hate crime,
allegedly said to his friends, I ran that nigger over.16 While many of the details of this crime are still unknown as of this writing, the racist narrative is certainly consistent with the historical legacy of whiteness in North America as it
relates to black people. As I write about this incident, I hear the words of many of my white students: But our generation has changed when it comes to racism. Call: Look, a Negro! Response: Run the nigger over!
Its time to flip the script vote aff/neg to affirm a counter-gift that
reveals the invisible practices of whiteness
Yancy 12 (George Yancy, PhD in philosophy from Dusquesne University,
professor of philosophy at Dusquesne University, 2012, Look a White! pp 512) gz
Look, a Negro! is a form of racist interpellation that, when examined

closely, reveals whites to themselves.
the Negro is that which
whites create as the specter/phantom of their own fear
the whites
who engage in a surveillance of Fanons body dont really see him; they
see themselves.
What is so powerful here is the
profound act of transposition. One might ask, Will the real nigger
please stand up? Ah, yes, Look, a white! Such naming and marking
function to flip the script. Flipping the script, which is a way of changing
an outcome by reversing the terms or, in this case, recasting the script of
those who reap the benefits of white privilege says, I see you for what
and who you are! Flipping the script is, one might say, a gift offering: an
opportunity, a call to responsibilityperhaps even to greater maturity.
Look, a white! is disruptive and clears a space for new forms of
recognition. Public repetition of this expression and the realities of
whiteness that are so identified and marked is one way of installing the
legitimacy that there is something even seeable when it comes to
whiteness
public repetition functions to further an antiracist authority
over a visual field historically dominated by whites
the subject
of the utterance, Look, a white! is not a sovereign, ahistorical, neutral
subject that has absolute control over the impact of the utterance Look, a
Negro! is already embedded within citationality conditions that involve
larger racist assumptions and accusations as they relate to the black body
that shape the intelligibility, and the meaningful declaration, of the
utterance. Look, a Negro! presupposes a white subject who is
historically embedded within racist social relations and a racist discursive
field that preexists the speaker. As a form of repetition, one that would be
cited often and by many, Look, a white! has the potential to create
conditions that work to install an intersubjective intelligibility and social
force that effectively counter the direction of the gaze, a site traditionally
monopolized by whites, and perhaps create a moment of uptake that
induces a form of white identity crisis, a jolt that awakens a sudden and
startling sense of having been seen
Look, a white! returns to white people
the problem of whiteness.
it is a
gift that ought to engender a sense of gratitude, a sense of humility, and
One might say that
.17 Thus, I would argue that
James Baldwin, speaking to white North America with eloquence and incredible psychological insight, says, But you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. But hes
unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I give you your problem back. Youre the nigger, baby; it isnt me.18
19
. Moreover,
20
. It is important to note, though, that
. In response, one might hear, You talkin to me? But unlike the scenario played out in Taxi Driver (1976), where Robert
De Niro poses this question, in this case the mirror speaks back: Youre damn right. Indeed, I am!
While I see it as a gift, I know that not all gifts are free of discomfort.21 Indeed, some are heavy laden with great responsibility. Yet

an opportunity to give thanksnot the sort of attitude that reinscribes
white entitlement
Those white people who want to continue the
dominant subordinate relationship so endemic to racist exploitation by
insisting that we serve themthat we do the work of challenging and
changing their consciousnessare acting in bad faith
. As bell hooks writes,
.22 The gift is not all about you. As white, you are used to
everything always being about you. We have heard, as Du Bois writes, your mighty cry reverberating through the world, I am white! Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief.23 But your cry to the world was followed by
I am white! was egomaniacal and thanatological; it was a

process of self-naming that functioned to justify, through racial myth
making, the actions of whites in their quest to dominate those backward
and inferior others. This process of self-naming was not a gift but a
manifestation of white messianic imperialism. In this case, it was a
deathdealing superimposition of white power.
As a gift, it must
see the world as other, against which it demands of its own citizens (the
white members of the white nation) that they stand in allegiance and
solidarity, and that the other on whom the gift is bestowed (imposed) be
grateful.
It has become commonplace
for whiteness to be represented as invisible, as the unseen or the
unmarked, as non-colour, the absent presence or hidden referent, against
which all other colours are measured as forms of deviance
Whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see
As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed,
whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its rule
as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations
White people remain
ignorant of white privilege because of the fact that all aspects of our lives
our institutions, practices, ideals, and lawswere defined and tailored to
fit the needs, wants, and concerns of white folk
whiteness is invisible to those who inhabit it to those who have come to
see whiteness and what it means to be human as isomorphic. For them, it
has become a mythical norm This does not mean
that whites who
choose to give their attention to thinking critically about whiteness are
incapable of doing so, though it does mean that there will be white
structural blinkers that occlude specific and complex insights by virtue of
being white
people of color are necessary to the project of critically
thinking through whiteness, especially as examining whiteness has the
potential of becoming a narcissistic project that elides its dialectical
relationship with people of colorthat is, those who continue to suffer
under the regime of white power and privilege
if the examination of whiteness is to be more
than about whiteness, [it must begin] with the Black critique of how
whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the effects of that
privilege on the bodies of those who are recognized as black
for
white people, whiteness is the transcendental norm in terms of which they
live their lives as persons, individuals People of color, however, confront
whiteness in their everyday lives, not as an abstract concept but in the
form of embodied whites who engage in racist practices that negatively
affect their lives. Black people and people of color thus strive to
disarticulate the link between whiteness and the assumption of just being
human, to create a critical slippage. By marking whiteness, black people
can locate whiteness as a specific historical and ideological configuration,
revealing it as an identity created and continued with all-too-real
exploitation, dehumanization, and death.
As Steve Martinot notes,
24 Flipping the script, within the context of this book, however, is about uscollectively. Sara Ahmed writes,
.25 According to George Lipsitz,
.26 He goes on to say,
.27 Richard Dyer writes, In fact, for most of the time
white people speak about nothing but white people, its just that we couch it in terms of people in general.28 Finally, as Terrance MacMullan sees it,
.29 But to whom is whiteness invisible? Ahmed is clear that
,30
.31
, however,
. Therefore,
. Pointing to the importance of Audre Lordes work, which emphasizes the importance of
studying whiteness and its significance to antiracism, Ahmed argues that
.32 The fact of the matter is that,

consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity
The act of marking whiteness is itself an act of historicizing whiteness,
an act of situating whiteness within the context of material forces and
raced interest-laden values that reinforce whiteness as a site of privilege
and hegemony. Marking whiteness is about exposing the ways in which
whites have created a form of humanism that obfuscates their
hegemonic efforts to treat their experiences as universal and
representative
Many [whites] are shocked that black people think
critically about whiteness because racist thinking perpetuates the fantasy
that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to
comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful
black subjectivity poses a threat to the invisibility of whiteness
Because of the profound relational reality of whiteness to the nonwhite
Other, whites are not the targets of their own whiteness, so the reality of
the invisibility of whiteness, its status as normative, does not affect them
in the same way.
this is impossible, for as whites continue to strive to
make whiteness visible, they do so from their perspective (which is
precisely embedded within the context of white power and privilege), not
from the perspective of those who constitute the embodied subjectivities
that undergo the existential traumas due to whiteness (the terror of
whiteness, the colonial desires of whiteness, the possessive investments
in whiteness that perpetuate problematic race-based economic orders,
residential orders, judicial orders, somatic orders, etc.).
.33
, then,
. According to bell hooks,
.34 On this score, then,
. Yet this is a specific type of threat.
In fact,
Speaking directly to the ramifications of this specific
threat, Crispin Sartwell writes, One of the major strategies for preserving white invisibility to ourselves is the silencing, segregation, or delegitimation of voices that speak about whiteness from a nonwhite location.35 While it is true
that not all people of color have the same understanding of the operations of whiteness, at all levels of its complex expression, this does not negate the fact that people of color undergo raced experiences vis--vis whiteness that
lead to specific insights that render whiteness visible. Being a wise Latina woman,36 for example, is one mode of expression of such raced experiences, experiences that have deep socio-ontological and epistemic implications. Yet
how can people of color not have this epistemic advantage? After all, black people and people of color, when it comes to white people, are bone of their thought and flesh of their language.37 As Du Bois writes, I see these souls
[that is, white souls] undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious!38 Ahmed, hooks, and Du
Bois emphasize the necessity of a black countergaze, a gaze that recognizes the ways of whiteness, sees beyond its invisibility, from the perspective of a form of raced positional knowledge. The black counter-gaze is a species of
flipping the script. Indeed, the expression, Look, a white! presupposes this counter-gaze. I encourage my white students to mark whiteness everywhere they recognize it. Of course, thinking critically with them about whiteness
enables these students to become more cognizant of the obfuscatory ways in which whiteness conceals its own visibility. The critical process creates a more complex epistemic field, as it were, in terms of which whiteness becomes
more recognizable in its daily manifestations. After taking my courses, many white students say, I cant stop seeing the workings of race. Its everywhere. One often gets the impression that they would rather return to a more
innocent time, before taking my course, before they learned how to see so much more. The reality is that the workings of race are precisely what people of color see/experience most of the time. Important to this learning
process, though, is reminding my white students that they are white, that they are part of the very workings of race that they are beginning to recognize.39 For most of my white students, before taking my course their own
whiteness is just a benign phenotypic marker. Indeed, for most of them, whiteness has not really been marked as a raced category to begin with. They do not recognize the normative status of whiteness that the marking is designed
to expose. For them, to be white means I am not like you guysthose people of color. Whiteness as normative and their whiteness as unremarkable thus remain in place, uninterrogated, unblemished. Sara Ahmed writes, There
must be white bodies (it must be possible to see such bodies as white bodies), and yet the power of whiteness is that we dont see those bodies as white bodies. We just see them as bodies.40 In short, the process of disentangling
the sight of white bodies from the sight of such bodies as just bodies is not easy, but it is necessary. For many whites, the process of marking the white body (Look, a white!) is not just difficult but threatening. The process dares to
mark whites as racists, as perpetuators and sustainers of racism. Furthermore, the process dares to mark whites as raced beings, as inextricably bound to the historical legacy of the workings of race. Hence, the process
encourages a slippage not only at the site of seeing themselves as innocent of racism but also at the site of seeing themselves as unraced.41 As Zeus Leonardo and Ronald K. Porter write, Hiding behind the veil of color-blindness
means that lifting it would force whites to confront their self-image, with people of color acting as the mirror. This act is not frightening for people of color but for whites.42 It is frightening because whites must begin to see
themselves through gazes that are not prone to lie/obfuscate when it comes to the workings of race qua whiteness. Indeed, there is no real need to lie about whiteness. People of color have nothing to lose; whites have so much to
protect. Yet what do they have to protect? As Richard Wright notes, Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets, made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it
impossible for them to learn a language that could have taught them to speak of what was in theirs or others hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.43 The use of the mirror is effective as a metaphor.
White people see themselves through epistemic and axiological orders that reflect back to them their own normative status and importance. Indeed, the script has already been written in their favor. It is time for the mirror to speak
through a different script, from the perspective of lived experiences of those bodies of color that encounter white people on a daily basis as a problem or perhaps even as a site of terror. The mirror will tell the truth: No, damn it!
Snow White is not the fairest of them all. She is precisely the problem! This returns us to the issue of the gift. Seeing whiteness from the perspective of, in this case, black people functions as an invitation to see more, to see
things differently. It is a special call that reframes, that results in a form of unveiling, of seeing, and of recognizing a different side. It is a gift that invites an opening, perhaps having a Hubble telescopelike impact: I had no idea that
there was so much more to see, and with such clarity! I have had this experience while reading works by feminist theorists. I have dared to see the world and my identity through their critical analyses, from their experiences of
male dominant culture, from their mirror. Damn, what a sexist! I overlooked that one. Yet I am thankful for their gift. And while it is true that I always fail to comprehend the sheer complexity of what it is like to be a woman in a
world that is based on male patriarchy, and the multiple forms of male violence toward women, I can use that mirror to make a difference. I can see me differently; I can see the operations of male hegemony differently, in ways that
implicate me. And as a gift, I treat it as such. I am humbled by it. Whites must also be humbled by the gift of seeing more of themselves, more of the complex manifestations of their whiteness, as seen through black experiences of
whiteness. As whites use the mirror to see and name whiteness, they do not magically become black. Indeed, accepting the gift ought to involve the recognition of important boundaries. There is no room for white territorialization or
white appropriation, features that are symptomatic of whiteness itself. To go it alone implies that whites themselves can solve the problems of whiteness. It would be like men getting together by themselves to solve the historical
problem of male hegemony and sexism without the critical voices of women. Within the context of whiteness, after the gift has been given, one still remains white, ensconced within a white social structure that not only continues to
confer privileges but also militates against one even knowing that [whiteness] is there to be shown.44 As stated previously, Look, a white! presupposes a black counter-gaze. Moreover, it is this black gaze that I encourage my
white students to cultivate. Look, a white! is a way of engaging the white world, calling it forth from a different perspective, a perspective critically cultivated by black people and others of color. It is a perspective gained through
pain and suffering, through critical thought and daring action. Seeing the world from the perspective of a flipped script (Look, a white!) does not, however, reinscribe a form of race essentialism. In Fanons case, Look, a Negro!
was never intended as a gift; it functioned as a penalty. For the object so identified, this phrase meant that there was a price to be paid. The public declaration was designed to fix the black body racially, to forewarn those whites
within earshot that a beastly threat was near. Look, a white! is not meant to seal white bodies into that crushing objecthood45 that Fanon speaks of vis--vis the white gaze. There is no desire to fix white people in the sense in
which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.46 Instead, Look, a white! has the goal of complicating white identity. It has the goal of fissuring white identity, not stabilizing it according to racist myths and legends. To say, Look, a
white! is an act of ostension, a form of showing, but it is not limited to phenotype, though this necessarily shows up in the act of ostension. Look, a white! points to what has been deemed invisible, unremarkable, normative. As
children, some of us liked counting anything at all, chairs, passing cars, birds on a rooftop. And we counted them partly because we just loved to count. But we also had this ability to notice so many things that adults had relegated
to the background. As adults, we count our money, we count the days of the weekthe things that apparently really matter. Look, a white! tells us to be attentive to what has become the background. As a powerful act of
pointing, Look, a white! brings whiteness to the foreground. Whiteness as a site of privilege and power is named and identified. Whiteness as an embedded set of social practices that render white people complicit in larger social
practices of white racism is nominated. It is about turning our bodies (and our attention) in the direction of white discourse and white social performances that attempt to pass themselves off as racially neutral, and it is about finding
the courage to say, Look, a white! As Christine E. Sleeter writes, While in an abstract sense white people may not like the ideas of reproducing white racism, and in a personal sense, do not see themselves as racist, in their talk
and actions, they are.47 Look, a white! also points to the historical white regulatory, antimiscegenation norms that produced white bodies. Look, a white! points to the [white racist] discursive rules and regulations that dictated
the biological chain that produced these hands, these eyes, and skin tone48 that have become privileged as beautiful, normative, white. Look, a white! assiduously nominates white bodies within the context of a stream of history
dominated by white racism. Look, a white! unveils the ways in which white bodies are linked to white discursive practices and racist power relations that define those white bodies. Look, a white! signifies compulsory repetitions
[that] construct illusory origins of [whiteness] that function as regulatory regimes to keep [whites] within a particular grid of intelligibility by governing and punishing nonnormative behavior, interpellating [whites] back into the
normative discourse [and back into normative spaces]. 49 Look, a white! dares to mark those whites who deem themselves ethically superior because they have a better grasp of the operations of white racism than those
other complacent whites. Look, a white! marks those whites who see themselves as radically progressive now that they are able to confess their racism publicly or because they publicly demonstrate intellectual savvy in how
they engage whiteness with sophistication. As intimated previously, Look, a white! militates against its reduction to identifying singular, individual, intentional acts of racism only. Instead, Look, a white! also identifies what one is
in a social framework or system of social categorizations.50 In this way, Look, a white! does not open the door to facile claims about symmetrically hurtful racial stereotypes, reverse discrimination, and the rhetoric of a so-called
color-blind, perpetrator perspective. Look, a white! marks such moves as sites of obfuscation, revealing them as forms of mystificatory digression from the clearly asymmetrical and enduring system of white power itself.51 Look,
a white! flags whiteness in the form of colonialism and imperialism, which function as forms of gluttony and fanaticism that would dare to consume the entire earth. Du Bois asks, But what on earth is whiteness that one should so
desire it? Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!52 I want my white students to shout, Look, a white! on a daily
basis, to call whiteness out, publicly. I encourage them to develop a form of double consciousness, one that enables them to see the world differently and to see themselves differently through the experiences of black people and
people of color. On this score, Look, a white! becomes a shared perspective, a shared dynamic naming process, buttressed and informed by the insights regarding whiteness that black people and people of color have acquired. The
strategy is to have my white students see the white world through our eyes, a perspective that will challenge whiteness, not deteriorate into white guilt or take new forms of white pity to help the so-called helpless. Look, a white! is
meant to be unsafe, indeed, to be dangerous to whites themselves. By dangerous I mean threatening to a white self and a white social system predicated on a vicious lie that white is rightmorally, epistemologically, and
otherwise.
Black skinhead
Play all of black skinhead by Kanye west
Kanye West is the modern voice of blackness his narcissistic
actions validate black existence and combats black death
Curry 14
Dr. Tommy J. Curry is an associate professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University. You Cant Stand the Nigger I See!: Kanye Wests Analysis of Anti-Black
Death. The Cultural Impact of Kanye West. 3/6/14. Fuck you if youre offended by our language. PWoods.
Kanye West
shows little respect for the opinions of others, much
less the copyright the academic plantation claims to have over theoretical
knowledge.
knowledge/theory/experience are misnomers. They
impede rather than motivates engagements with the world
is disrespectful. He
For West,
point to idle caricatures of
life and an etiquette that only
s,
. Over two
decades ago, Sylvia Wynter (1992) exposed the complacency of the academic enterprise to reify rather than refute the onto-anthropological nomenclature of the biological human in her essay No Humans Involved, or the acronym
[N.H.I.] The force of Wynters analysis surrounding the violence against Rodney King is not simply the infusion of social (non-ideal) context, or horror into the vacuous and sterile albatross of knowledge, or an attempt to remind us to
we reject the biologized

humanity we claim has the faculty of knowing, and the concomitant
apotheosis of disciplinary/conceptual/theoretical knowledge that valorizes
Western [person] man as the revelatory vessel of colonial history to the
exclusion of Black peoplethe Non-Humans
the rejection of the human being/Black Nigger is the
catalyst for Black Death
consider the relationship between the
paradigms of dehumanization that resulted in the genocide of Armenians
by Turkish pan-nationalists, the holocaust inflicted upon Jews by the
Germans, and the language used to describe
Black men as a species
deserving death
the incarceration and elimination of young
Black males by ostensibly normal and everyday means
analysis
of anti-Black death makes the Black male the conceptual paradigm of
inquiry; the lens through which this kind of death is best viewed, and the
body that should be grasped by the imagination to fully comprehend the
ontology and consequence of the violence that perpetuates this anti-Black
horror. Destroying the Black
extinguishes the idea of the Black human the white supremacist world
demands cannot exist
Kanye Wests
race consciousness is reflexive. It is an intuitive/emotive reaction to the
racist assaults and imagery in and of the world. West does not apologize
for being Black, nor does he care about the moralism of feminists, be they
Black or white. West embraces a narcissism that validates his existence,
to the dismay of both his critics and judgmental onlookers; a practice not
unfamiliar to the academy where scholars who label themselves feminists,
radicals, or democratic progressives are isolated from criticism given the
supposed virtue and moral correctness of their theories
Kanye West has built a career that mixes
the mythology of (Black) power and racial consciousness with disturbingly
accurate, but pessimistic descriptions of America as a police state.
think more critically about what we claim to know or define what we claim to possess in knowing as knowledge; rather, Wynter demands that
. Rejecting such ontology is not simply the work of discussions over and writings about the
degraded anthropos of modernity. For Black men specifically,
. Wynter urges the reader to
, through taxonomy,
. To classify the deaths of Black men as No Humans Involved, is to reify the sociogenic principle behind anti-Blackness; or as Wynter says for the social effects of this acronym
(N.H.I.), while not overtly genocidal, are clearly serving to achieve parallel results:
(Wynter, 1992, p.14). Wynters
male body, murdering the Black life that demanded to be more than the petrified phantasm of the white imagination,
. Killing Black men who dare to speak against and live beyond their place erases them from the world, making an example, and leaving only their dead melaninated
corpse as a deterrent against future revolts against white knowledge. Rather than being a calculated articulation framed by the most recent intersectional/apologetic jargon in vogue,
. Since his 2005 outburst that George Bush doesnt care
about Black people, his response to the dereliction of the relief agencies under the Bush administration,
Wests recent
performance of Black Skinhead and New Slave on Saturday Night Live (SNL) are powerful demonstrations of this modus operandi, a raw aesthetic technique that revealed itself only in glimpses throughout his previous album My
Beautiful
Twisted
Dark
Fantasy
(2010).
Yeezus!
(2013)
is
an
accumulation
of
this
pessimistic
rendering
of
the
world.
Yeezus not only holds the

government, the police, the prison-industrial-complex, and the racistcapitalist-corporatism responsible for the commodification of commercial
rappers
accountable, but dares to hold responsible the lives sustained
by this matrix of anti-Black oppression , including the quality of life that
racism affords white women. No one is safe! He does not pretend that
conversations about racism are constrained by the bourgeois morality that
marries it only to white men, or excuses the complacency of Black women
in its operation. Skin color
and genitalia are not intersectional shields
from criticism or condemnation for West. Its a refreshing aesthetic that
holds anyone and everyone accountable: a criticism far more visceral and
authentic than the quotidian bourgeois
criticisms waged by scholars
in the academy, aimed at garnering acceptance from, rather than the
destruction of, the oppressor class. West seems to believe that his
awareness of the theory behind the necropolitics of the American state
and the racist confinement of ghettos within it, extricates him from this
conceptual and psychological enslavement to the mere want of
possessions
(James, 2005)
(race)
(sex)
(pseudological)
. In a recent New York Times interview, Kanye West was asked if he sees things in a more race-aware way, now, later in his career, than several years ago when he attacked then President Bush
for his derelict in Hurricane Katrina. West replied No, its just being able to articulate yourself better. All Falls Down is the same [stuff]. I mean, I am my fathers son. Im my mothers child. Thats how I was raised. I am in the
lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, great activist-type artists. But Im also in the lineage of a Miles Davis you know, that liked nice things also (Caramanica, 2013).


legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
. In other words,
. In fact,

deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
activism on both self and world Although there are many white antiracists
suffering
Whites who
sequestration from
the real world of
suffering
patience of theory
after all,
.,,3
. Here,
weeping,
, and traumatized
..
2NC
Generic Shell only
Extensions
Extend Wilderson 1
Extend Wilderson number 1: State action will always make anti blackness worse, a
neither the Aff nor the Perm will never be able to solve police brutality, mass
incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical
rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls
still constitute the lived experience of Black life.
Extend Wilderson 2
Extend Wilderson number 2: The promotion of civil society creates a state of
emergency in the black body; It is plain to see that when policies like the Aff are
passed we start to see more crime in the black body.
Extend Wilderson 3
Extend Wilderson Number 3: The world writ large and civil society are
preconditioned on the destruction of those in the black positionality, and the
hegemonic observations of the Affirmative will always lead to the subordination of
the black body.
Extend Wilderson 4
Extend Wilderson Number 4: Addressing Anti-Blackness outweighs they
scandalize ethicality and set the stage for all violence Jews went into Auschwitz
and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The
black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man or, more
precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.
Extend Widerson 5
Extend Wilderson Number 5: The only way to solve for the subjugation of the
black body is to to reject the affirmative and reorient ourselves towards the world
through an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. During the Apartheid movement
The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement
made with the moderate eleme++nts were due, in large part, to our inability or
unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda
predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. This same alternative was
able to solve for the apartheid in South Africa.
Extend Wilderson 6
Extend Wilderson Number 6: The Perm will never be able to solve because in a
policy framework the black body will always become the magnet for structural
and gratuitous violence. For every supposed step congress and state legislations
go forward they take three steps back, Look at Stand your Ground laws that have
led to the death of thousands of blacks you have never heard of; Aaron Campbell,
Victor Steen, Steven Eugene Washington, Oscar Grant, James Anderson, and many
more.
Overviews
Discourse affs
The affirmatives call to action is rooted in the grammar of civil
society- this instantiates a semiotic of work and productivity that
sees inaction as idolatry this semiotic grammar of action is
underpinned by a fundamentally anti-black rhetorical structure that
refuses to recognize the legitimacy of idleness as a positive
positionality. The alternative affirms this idleness- the incapacity for
action in the face of a grammar of action that is entirely sutured by
white supremacy. When the political itself garners coherence
through the discursive registers of whiteness, ceding the political is
the only ethical option Only this absolute refusal of the semiotics of
whiteness allows for a revolutionary rupturing of white supremacist
civil society capable of attuning for the black bodys grammar of
suffering. The affs moral calculus the idea that we should take
action to save lives is ethically bankrupt because it protects the
status of white subjects as those who are only contingently subject
to violence- maintaining the norms through which the black body is
gratuitously and ontologically constructed as the object of social
death.
2NC (Discourse affs)
Alt/AT: Perm
Black positionality imposes a radical incoherence on civil society
Radical black positionality must refuse the logic of coherence out of
which civil society and the grammar of work are articulated.
Wilderson 03 Frank B. Wilderson III, The Prison Slave as Hegemonys
(Silent) Scandal, Social Justice 30:2 (2003)
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to
the U.S. his is not because it raises the specter of an alternative
polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its
condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a
negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a
"program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its
incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed
one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this
country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then through what strategy of legitimation
is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political
There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even

unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The
desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and
incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has
ever been known to say "gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end
a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be
embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness - and the state of political
movements in the U.S. today is marked by this very
Negrophobogenisis: "gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more
coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about
the joy of Black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions
today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society --- with
hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this
stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, that
work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence
(i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the
Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the
Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between
workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the
logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises
than as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms , simply
feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker
accountability?
demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the
the positionality of the Black subject (whether a prisonslave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil
society. From the coherence of civil society, the Black subject
beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims
Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site ,
reconfiguration of civil society,

Civil war,
then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of
hegemony. It is a Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless
antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation),
but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.
to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder.
Permutation attempts to account for black identity but remains

caught up in the discourse of work and hegemony this discounts
the positionality of idleness, replicating violence against the black
subject.
Any serious musing on the question of antagonistic identity formation --- a
formation, the mass mobilization of which can precipitate a crisis
in the instituions and assumptive logic that undergird the United
State of America --- must come to grips with the contradictions
between the political demands of radical social movements , such as the
large prison abolition movement, which seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex, and the
ideological structure that under-writes its political desire. I contend that
the positionality of Black subjectivity is at the heart of those
contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the
political limitations of several naturalized and uncritically accepted
categories that have their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci, namely, work or
labor, the wage, exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to
theorize the symptoms of rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson, when he
boils reform down to a single word, "fascism," or in Assata's brief declaration, "i
hated it," as well as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today, the failure of
radical social movements to embrace symptoms of all three
gestures is tantamount to the reproduction of an anti-Black politics
that nonetheless represents itself as being in the service of the
emancipation of the Black prison slave. By examining the strategy and structure of
the Black subject's absence in, and incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come
The Black American subject imposes

a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse and
on today's coalition politics. In other words, s/he implies a scandal. (2) The Black
subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian
discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and
thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a
comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse
and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that
transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations ,
formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery,
exploitation, and hegemony, but they are asleep at the wheel
when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged
face to face with three unsettling consequences: (1)

slavery, despotism, and terror.
(3) We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of

conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with
the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other
the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to

democratize work and thus help to keep in place and insure the
coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values
of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other
postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e., idleness. The scandal, with
which the Black subject position "threatens" Gramscian and
coalition discourse, is manifest in the Black subject's
incommensurability with, or disarticulation of, Gramscian
categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony,
and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the o Black subject destabilize ?
words,
emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of? historical materialism? How does the Black subject function
within the "American desiring machine" differently than the quintessential Gramscian subaltern, the worker?
Violence/Death
The refusal to dance with death marks the foundation of civilsocietys anti-blackness for the black body is subject to gratuitous
body whereas the white body is the body for whom violence is
made contingent.
Fanon (1968: 37) writes, "decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program
of complete disorder." If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the
Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real,

for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the
map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible:
namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no
categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an
Blackness is the site of absolute

dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon),
experience without analog ? a past without a heritage.
whoever says "prison" says Black, and whoever says "AIDS" says Black (Sexton) ? the "Negro is a phobogenic
object" (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of
gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for
alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal ? not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly
If a social movement is to be
neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of
political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest
with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting
whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of
social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn
the steps. They have been, and remain today ? even in the most
anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement ?
invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political
desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance
with death.
revolution? ary movement such as prison abolition.
Incapacity Ethics Module

The affs whole mode of political engagement is focused on ballots
capacity for meaning and action. Capacity itself is the hallmark of
whiteness that preys on the incapacity of the black body.
WILDERSON 2010 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010),
The libidinal economy of modernity and its attendant cartography (the

Western Hemisphere, the United States, or civil society as a construct)
achieves its structure of unconscious exchange by way of a thanatology"
in which Blackness overdetermines the embodiment of impossibility,
incoherence, and incapacity. Furthermore, political economy achieves its
symbolic (political or economic) capacity and structure of preconscious
exchange by way of a similar thanatology. Judy goes so far as to say that at the crux of modernity's crisis
is the dilemma how to represent the Negro as being demonstrably human within the terms of the law." Here, of
course, he does not mean law in a juridical sense but rather
law as a portal of intelligibility
through which one can be said to have the capacity to access Reason
and thus be recognized and incorporated as a bona fide subject . Through Judy's
analysis of the Negro (the slave) as modernity's necessity (the Other that Humanity is not: Simple enough one has
only not to be a nigger"), that which kick-starts and sustains the production of the Western Hemisphere, we can
begin to make the transition from the parasitic necessity of Whiteness in libidinal economy to its parasitic necessity
Whiteness is parasitic because it monumentalizes its

subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the
wasteland of Black incapacity. By capacity I have meant something
more comprehensive than the event and its causal elements and
something more indeterminate than agency." We should think of it as a
kind of facility or matrix through which possibility itself-whether tragic or
triumphant-can be elaborated: the ebb and flow between, on the one hand, empty speech, racist
in political economy.
actions, repressive laws, and institutional coherence and, on the other hand, full speech, armed insurrection, and
the institutional ennui. This is what I mean by capacity. It is a far cry from Spillers's state of being for the captor'
and Judy's muted African body, a far cry from pure abject- or objectness: without thought, without agency, with
no capacity to move."29 In short,
White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of

discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: Without the
Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best.
Capacity is articulated through black slavery and red genocide

only the alternatives affirmation of incapacity provide a source of
ethics in a semiotic field structured by whiteness.
WILDERSON 2010 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010), 13-14
Again, if accumulation and fungibility are the modalities through which

embodied Blackness is positioned as incapacity, then genocide is that
modality through which bodied Redness is positioned as incapacity.
Ontological incapacity, I have inferred and here state forthright, is the
constituent element of ethics. Put another way, one cannot embody
capacity and be, simultaneously, ethical. Where there are Slaves it is
unethical to be free. The Settler/Master's capacity, I have argued, is a
function of exploitation and alienation; and the Slave's incapacity is
elaborated by accumulation and fungibility. But the Savage is positioned, structurally, by

subjective capacity and objective incapacity, by sovereignty and genocide, respectively. The Indians liminal status
in political economy, how her or his position shuttles between the incapacity of a genocided object and the capacity
of a sovereign subject, coupled with the fact that Redness does not overdetermine the thanatology of libidinal
economy (this liminal capacity within political economy and complete freedom from incapacity within libidinal
economy) raises serious doubts about the status of Savage ethicality vis--vis the triangulated structure (Red,
Whiteness as a structural position

in modernity depends on the capacity to be free from genocide , perhaps
not as a historical experience, but at least as a positioning modality. This
embodied capacity (genocidal immunity) of Whiteness jettisons the
White/Red relation from that of a conflict and marks it as an antagonism:
it stains it with irreconcilability. Here, the Indian comes into being and is
positioned by an a priori violence of genocide.
White, and Black) of antagonisms. Clearly, the coherence of
Links
Ableism
The social structure of Whiteness is the root cause of ableism
technologies of violence and surveillance used against people
with disabilities originated in Eurocentric thought
Smith 4 [Phil, Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities
Council, Whiteness, Normal Theory, and Disability Studies, Disability
Studies Quarterly Spring 2004, Volume 24, No. 2, http://dsqsds.org/article/view/491/668]
This point, that ableism is created by those who define themselves as
able-bodied, as normal, and that it is a master status invisible to
themselves, calls out for the need to develop what might be called
normal theory and normal studies, similar to the development of
whiteness theory and whiteness studies, that can unpack more fully the
ideology of ableism and expose normality as a scopic site for the subjugation
of people labeled as having disabilities. It is also likely, given the
normative universalization of whiteness in modernist Western culture,
that the construction of whiteness is at the complex, multiple roots of
both racisms and ableisms. This is especially true given that
eugenic science is at the heart of current special education,
psychology, and the system of services and supports for people with
disabilities (Kliewer and Drake 1998). Clearly, whiteness is intimately
tied to modernist constructions of science (Kincheloe 1999). It would
seem, then, that the projects of developing multiple, postmodern, normal
studies may have as their subjects, at least in part, the complex ways in
which whiteness ideology creates ableisms. Kincheloe (1999) argues
cogently, when discussing the normative landscape of whiteness, that: This
norm has traditionally involved a rejection of those who did not
meet whiteness' notion of reason emerging from the European
Enlightenment. Whiteness deployed reason narrowly defined
Eurocentric reason as a form of disciplinary power that excludes those
who do not meet its criteria for inclusion into the community of the
socio-politically enfranchised. Understanding such dynamics, those
interested in the reconstruction of white identity can engage in the post
formal (a theoretical effort to redefine the Eurocentric notions of intelligence
and reason by examining such concepts in light of socio-psychological
insights from a variety of non-western cultures [see Kincheloe and Steinberg
1993; Kincheloe 1995]) search for diverse expressions of reason. Such a
project empowers white students seeking progressive identities to produce
knowledge about the process of White identity reconstruction, the
redefinition of reason, the expansion of what is counted as a manifestation of
intelligence, and the phenomenological experience of challenging the
boundaries of whiteness. (Paragraph 56) This analysis seems critical in
understanding the relationship of whiteness studies and disability studies.

The normative disciplinary power of whiteness undergirding the
rationality of Eurocentric culture and thought segregates not only
those defined as not-white from the terrains of equality, equity, and
justice, but also those defined as not-Able (body or mind). A project of
inclusion that reinvents whiteness by calculating freshly an ideology of
diverse reasons, intelligences, and experiences will, of necessity, involve an
exploration of the cartography of abled Normality. A broad whiteness studies
approach must shake hands with a broad disability studies approach if either
whiteness or ability is to be reconceptualized.
Air power
Their romanticization of mobility inexorably ties them to the power
structures of Whiteness.
Kaplan 2004Caren, January 9
th
, (cultural studies @ University of California at Davis, Mobility and War: The Cosmic View
of Air Power, word doc >:)
So I want to talk about war and the discourses of space and time that are at work in the current conflicts. Given the event we are all
attending, I would like to focus specifically on war and mobility. Here the question of what might be new or an alternative in relation
mobility is, of course, at

the heart of modern warfare. If mobility is one of the markers of the
modern--and it must be because we cannot understand the dictionary definition of
mobility as freedom of movement without understanding the history of
the rise of the notion of freedom as liberty to move as deeply grounded
in Euro-American Enlightenment thought and political practice--then the mobile war and the
war for mobility is the war of our generation and of our time. Thus, there are two
aspects of war and mobility that I want to address today--the mobility of war as an articulation of
the Enlightenment notion of free subjects and the mobility of war as an
articulation of military strategy and the contest of technologies, old and new. They go together, of course.
to what might be the same or unchanged throughout modernity comes right to the fore. Because
But pulling these strands apart a bit can give us some new insights. I am not yet convinced that mobility offers much in the way of
alternatives--but we can come back to that in discussion and I look forward to hearing your views, particularly from the vantage
point of the UK. To begin, then, I want to look back to the 2nd World War but I do not want to stop there. Because the discourse of
the 2nd World War is always already in dialogue with the world war that preceded it and with other armed conflicts from which it can
be differentiated or to which it can be linked. And it can only be read through the lens of the present. [IMAGE 1] For example, on the
day I was reading Alexander de Severskys 1942 appeal for aerial defense strategies to protect the United States from German and
Japanese attack, my Yahoo homepage was offering me a news story about possible infiltration of Air France flight crews by Al Queda
with the intent to destroy targets in the United States once again. As I am writing this paper, the entire US is subject to an orange
alert--one step below the greatest level of danger, signalled by the color red. We go about our business of observing our holidays
with an underlying sense of apprehension. Where I live, even the most cynical person has to think twice about the necessity of
crossing the Golden Gate Bridge since the media continues to identify it as a prime target of unspecified terrorists. Never mind
We are living in a time of profoundly heightened emotions mixed with

inadequate education and information. As a consequence, binary views
become more common and more urgently remembered as timeless and
meaningful. People who never thought about Iraq and who cannot locate it
on a map now think of themselves as always and forever opposed to the
nation and its tyrannical regime. Such thinking cannot accommodate any complexities (such as the longlogic.
standing US government support for Saddam Hussein across several presidential administrations and not to mention support for the
Taliban, for the mujihadeen, and for any number of vicious and despicable rulers, governments, and thugs of all kinds who, once the
political winds blow differently, no longer count as favored friends but serve as blood enemies). Perhaps most problematic for
people in the US is the tight fit between nation and religion. Thus, the US is always already a symbol of religious tolerance and
secular governmentality yet Christianity is the official and dominant expression of a religiosity that is articulated as organic to US
national identity. Under this bizarre mindset of official secular tolerance combined with intense Christian dominance in public and
governmental discourse, Islam is dealt with as an oppositional construct rather than a variant of what we already experience in the
countries with Islamic majorities are

viewed as anti-secular and anti-tolerant (despite varied histories in this
regard in different periods). Under this ideological regime, Islamicism
becomes viewed as a nationalist enterprise that operates the same way in
each country in which it is the dominant religion rather than understood
as a profoundly transnational network that is articulated differently across
cultures, classes, genders, nations, etc. The disastrous consequences of
this misreading are unfolding before our eyes in the wars of our
generation. I am visiting you from a nation that is trying as hard as it can to forget that anything bad has or can happen; a
US and other Western countries (Moallem 1999). Thus,
nation that is bringing home soldiers from Iraq who have the largest numbers of amputations and severe burns seen since the old
days of the war in Indochina; a nation whose media is unable apparently to follow war on two fronts and thus almost never focuses
a nation that enacts racialized

profiling in more and more venues; a nation whose historic racist paranoia
about foreigners and leaky borders has now reached an apotheosis in the post
on Afghanistan; a nation in the midst of some kind of economic free fall;

9-11 moment. Nothing seems good anymore. Maybe technology can help. The newer
technologies of surveillance and tracking are a boon for the immigration and transport arms of the government. We hear a fair
amount about scanning eyeballs, fingers, and other parts of the body. We hear about cross-referencing of data (we do not hear much
about the effect of downsizing post WWII area studies and the paucity of language and culture experts who can decipher the
difference between one Ahmed and another --right after 9-11, people were thrown into jail without benefit of a lawyer or any other
means of defense under war powers acts simply because someone who knew nothing about their language or culture of origin
misunderstood the spelling of their name--these kinds of inanities could, perhaps, be better addressed through spanking new forms
of information science but lets face it: if the people using this fancy stuff have no education, there isnt much hope for the
We hear about global positioning system applications for

keeping track of suspects. We hear about the success of new
technologies in armaments and defense--the precision and accuracy of
bombs and missiles, the tremendous destructive capacities of these
bombs and missiles (ie. the bunker busters). With each point I make here I could digress with a long laundry list of
technologies in situ).
what we do not hear as much about--the things that dont work as well as advertised, the things that cannot work in certain
situations, the lack of education and ability to use technological tools intelligently in any widespread way, etc.). I could also talk
about the interesting role of technology in the emerging peace and anti-globalization movements or the way in which the internet
interpellated subjects in Iraq and many other locations during the US invasion. My point here is that in the US, a nation that has
we
often look to technology as a sign of hope, as a signal that we can prevail, and
especially as a marker of our ability to defend ourselves from the horror of
wars immediate violence and to keep anything unspeakable and
unimaginable at bay. The discourses of new technologies do this kind of
work in the present moment. They are almost like paid advertisements for
US nationalism and militarism. But on September 11, 2001, something went wrong with this belief system.
invaded several other countries and killed countless civilians as well as official combatants within the last two years alone,
The United States was revealed to be exceedingly vulnerable in specific kinds of ways. It is hard to convey how shattering of
national identity these attacks were and how fragile is the mending of national psyche in the aftermath. Hence the discourse
everything changed--a classic trope of modern rupture. But those of us old enough to have lived through WWII (or those of us old
enough to have parents who lived through WWII) were reminded immediately of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941--a
date that President Roosevelt cemented in the public mind as a day that will live in infamy. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I
learned about Pearl Harbor as the quintessential sneak attack--an action somehow apart from the normal conduct of war that
signalled the almost inhumanly cruel nature of Japan. Its a pretty short leap from that view to a form of virulent racism directed
against Japanese people collectively and individually. And that dehumanization (with its accompanying incarceration of legal
Japanese immigrants and US citizens of Japanese descent) itself cannot be separated from the violent revenge of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki--no matter how often we are told it was more humane to drop an atomic bomb than prolong a war against an enemy who
violated the values of civilization, it is tough to rationalize. But the threat was believed to be overwhelmingly great. It was the 1942
equivalent of code orange. [IMAGE 2] Here is an example of this discourse of threatened security --its a passage from Victory
Through Air Power, a book published by Simon & Schuster in 1942 about a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor: From every point of
the compass--across the two oceans and across the two Poles--giant bombers, each protected by its convoy of deadly fighter planes,
converge upon the United States of America. There are thousands of these dreadnaughts of the skies. Each of them carries at least
fifty tons of streamlined explosives and a hailstorm of light incendiary bombs. Wave after wave they come--openly, in broad
daylight, magnificently armored and armed, surrounded by protective aircraft and equipped to fight their way through to their
appointed targets. Aerial armadas now battle boldly and fiercely, just as great naval armadas used to do in the past, only with a
destructive fury infinitely more terrifying. With the precision of perfect planning, the invading aerial giants strike at the nerve
centers and jugular veins of a great nation. Unerringly, they pick their objectives: industrial centers and sources of power,
government seats and fuel concentrations . . . The havoc they wreak is beyond description. New York, Detroit, Chicago, and San
Francisco are reduced to rubble heaps in the first twenty four hours. Washington is wiped out before the government has a chance
to rescue its most treasured records. A dozen crucial power plants . . . are wrecked, crippling a great section of American industrial
life at a single blow. A thousand tons of explosives deposited expertly on a few great railroad depots like those at Chicago dislocate
the countrys transportation system. . . (de Seversky 1942, 7-8) Thus does Alexander P. de Seversky, a Russian-born, commissioned
major in the US Army Air Corps, describe the beginning of the end of the world--or, at least, the vanquishment of the United States
of America. As a trope of national annihilation, this depiction of aerial attack is resonant with modern notions of enemies of the
state. An overarching threat that can come from any and every direction will zero in on specific, fixed targets and, having made their
coordinated attack without sufficient defense, conquer the subject of the attack. That the attack would come from the air was a key
part of argument for the formation of a comprehensive aerial defense strategy. By 1942, the Nazi Blitzkrieg and the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor had signalled that air power was a force with which to contend. If we had more time today, we could explore the
history of aerial bombardment in closer detail and think through a little more carefully the contest between land-based, sea-based,
and air-borne technologies and strategies. As well, in the US, the rise of and dominance of the air force is closely tied to the
militarization of so-called outer space. And information sciences and technologies are deeply entangled in the space race of the
late 1950s, 60s and 70s. We could talk more about when and where and how space is discerned as open territory and when it can
be viewed as the property of states and governments and what mobility means vis a vis deep space. [IMAGE 3] But for today, I
the area above the earth--the sky and the first layers of outer space--have
histories of representation that are, to a significant degree, constructed around
military intentions and interests. Space is a zone of freedom. But like all
aspects of freedom after the European Enlightenment, that zone is
structured by property relations and contests between states and
corporations for dominance and wealth. Severskys world view is, perhaps, understandably
just want to remind us that
Hobbesian. His life was imbricated by war, politics, and industry (military school, the Russian Naval Academy, an ace flyer in the
early days of WWI, emigr aeronautical engineer, US citizen and government consultant, designer of the worlds first fully automatic

bombsight, founding director of an aircraft corporation, and the designer of many features of modern aircraft intended for military
use). The print version of Victory Through Air Power was read by millions, promoted as it was by the widely
subscribed to Book-of-the Month Club. In a special preface to the Book-of-the-Month Club edition signed by the clubs president and
its distinguished editorial board, readers are warned that the first impact of the book will be one of alarm (Scherman et al. 1942,
xi). In what seems like a remarkable effort to simultaneously heighten and assuage public concerns, the preface argues that Major
de Seversky is a prophet and that unified, strategic air power is the only way for the US to win the war. To press their point, they
link technological advances in warfare to a rationalized teleology that leads inexorably to aerial bombardment: The airplane has
revolutionized war. It has done so as completely, this book shows, as gunpowder did in the fifteenth century; more so than the steelclad Monitor revolutionized naval warfare seventy-five years ago. Just so this book will revolutionize all our thinking about the war.
No informed person reading it will ever again read the mornings news the same way (Scherman et al 1942, xiv). Indeed. The force
of the books polemic against conventional naval and land-based standing armies in favor of the flexibility and deadly force of
stragetically deployed air power was underscored when
Walt Disney, then in almost fulltime production of war and US
government friendly propaganda films, produced an animated feature film of the same name in
cooperation with Seversky. The film is difficult to see these days since it proposes the incineration of Japan under the rubric of the
best defense is a good offense, offering a particularly graphic view of what was then still an imaginary future of fire, death, and
destruction for that nations populace. The Disney corporation has pulled most of its more overtly racist and controversial film
products out of circulation and one can only view these texts in their archives in Burbank (although Victory Through Air Power is
about to be released on dvd along with other Disney animated political films--look for it this spring just in time to enjoy it along
with other war-themed projects that are currently in production). Popular discourse holds that the combined effect of the book and
film versions of Victory Through Air Power changed the minds of both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, altering the course
of the war and changing national military strategy forever after. As I am in the middle of researching this text, Ill have to wait until
another time to let you know whether or not that line of argument is apocryphal or not. I suspect that the combined reach of the
book and film generated greater consensus towards air defense and offense along with other cultural products and forms of
discourse. There were certainly powerful interests invested in promoting this line of argument. The spatial logic that gripped
Severskys mind was one that could be best characterized as the birds eye view--that is from unlimited space on down to the
earths surface. In another section of the longer work of which this talk is a part, I refer to this birds eye perspective as a cosmic
view; that is, the unifying gaze of an omniscient viewer of the globe from a distance (Kaplan 2002). In his work on the history of
images of the earth as a globe, Denis Cosgrove, identifies this phenomenon as the Apollonian gaze; as a logic of vision that pulls
diverse life on earth into a vision of unity while maintaining an individualized, divine and mastering view from a single
the Apollonian gaze is far older

than the European Enlightenment, stretching back to classical Greek
cosmologies and cultural practices. But in the last several centuries a
specific intensification of this cultural tradition, corresponding with
European colonization and Euro-American globalization, has created the
context for the cosmic view I am concerned with here--the sight of the
world from the air and the question of ones location in relation to it as a
marker of subjectivity. The kind of vision and perceptual logic that I am discussing today
emerges in the modern age of travelers and is linked, therefore, to the modern
discourse of mobility. As Michel Foucault has argued, 18th century European imaginary was
structured around two fundamental tropes or perceptual structures. The first was the
situation of a child who is born without powers of sight and then, later,
becomes able to see--hence, the shock of the new in a dazzling moment of revelation. And the second example
concerns the point of view of the European traveler who is shocked out of
complacency and certainty by the situation of being thrust into an
unknown country full of strange, new sights, sounds, and customs (Stafford
1984, 20). IT is argued that these primal experiences alter European
consciousness in a profound way that can be traced throughout cultural production over the next several
centuries. Light, sight, and travel become structuring concepts for this
European Enlightenment subject, a subject that is arguably generically
masculine, raced, propertied, and individualized in a legal as well as
political, psychological, and philosophical sense. I am moving quickly through this cultural
history in order to bring us to the question of ways of seeing as a result of this privileging of
cosmopolitan mobility, particularly in relation to a specific logic of sight, what I am calling a cosmic
view. In thinking about how the cosmic view works in the modernity generated
by capitalist expansion and European imperialism, lets consider the hot air
balloon, which some consider to be the birth of space travel in more ways than one. [IMAGE 5] Throughout the mid-late
perspective (Cosgrove 2001, xi). [IMAGE 4] As Cosgrove reminds us,
1700s, balloon flights were conducted in Europe for scientific research. Indeed, the French word for balloon flight exprience--was
Although balloon flights were intended to

provide new answers to long-standing questions about topography and
weather, they quickly became thoroughly involved in military operations .
synonymous with experiment (Stafford 1984, 22).

Balloon invasions stirred the imaginations of many French commanders. Yet,
although balloons were used for both surveillance and the launching of artillery at the turn of the 18th century, the problem of
guidance and precision overcame the dream of military aeronauts. It is not until the invention of modern rockets and the airplane
that aerial photography and guided missiles become integral to military strategy and that space becomes seen as the most effective
the hot air balloon was not the perfect weapon, it can be argued that it initiated a
significant shift in modes of perception. Dovetailing with the emergence of
views of nature as a separate realm apart from the newly despoiled
industrial centers of capitalism, ballooning offered views of the
uncharted vastness of space as a kind of sublime experience (Stafford 1984,
arena for war. But if
355). Floating above the earth as high as humans had yet been able to go, the gaze that ballooning made possible, was one in
which distance is an advantage--that is, distant objects appear with the most clarity. It is a subjective or particular gaze, one that is
The belief that

this personal eye can see almost limitlessly and, therefore, with extreme
clarity, is one of the hallmarks of a culture that privileged exploration and
industrial expansion during a century that led to an intensification of
colonialism, nationalist ventures, and economic globalization in the form
of imperialism. This cosmic view promises to link subjects in a unified
gaze for the purpose of viewing and therefore mastering a world that had
been hitherto unknown or unobserved. Such a view also poses as benign, perhaps, as an experiment,
associated with interior consciousness, but it is articulated as a universal aesthetic or episteme. [IMAGE 6]
much as early ballooning did, and yet, it can be argued that the cosmic view is drawn upon for war as much as for anything else.
Anthro/Enviro affs
Their emphasis on colormuteness within the environmental
movement reifies antiblackness and white privilege
Wise 11
Tim Wise April 13th 2011 Tim Wise and White Privilege http://changefromwithin.org/2011/04/13/tim-wise-and-white-privilege/ [Wise served as an adjunct faculty member at the Smith College School for Social Work, in Northampton,
Massachusetts, where he co-taught a Masters level class on Racism in the U.S. In 2001, Wise trained journalists to eliminate racial bias in reporting, as a visiting faculty-in-residence at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.
From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, in Nashville, and in the early 90s he was Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the
largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political dear nidhi you are ;a cool cat and this candidate, David Duke. He graduated from Tulane University in 1990 and received antiracism training from
the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, in New Orleans.]
as troubling as colorblindness can be

colormuteness may be
even worse. Colormuteness comes into play in the way many
fail
to give voice to the connections between a given issue about which they
are passionate, and the issue of racism and racial inequity.
when
environmental activists focus on the harms of pollution to the planet in
the abstract, or to non-human species, but largely ignore the day-to-day
environmental issues facing people of color, like disproportionate
exposure to lead paint, or municipal, medical and toxic waste, they
marginalize black and brown folks within the movement, and in so
doing, reinforce racial division and inequity. Likewise, when climate
change activists focus on the ecological costs of global warming, but fail
to discuss the way in which climate change disproportionately affects
people of color around the globe, they undermine the ability of the
green movement to gain strength, and they reinforce white privilege.
How many climate change activists, for instance, really connect the dots
between global warming and racism? Even as people of color are
But
when evinced by liberals,
on the white liberal-left
So, for instance,
twice as likely as whites to live in the congested communities that

experience the most smog and toxic concentration thanks to fossil
fuel use? Even as heat waves connected to climate change kill
people of color at twice the rate of their white counterparts ? Even
as agricultural disruptions due to warming caused
disproportionately by the white west cost African nations $600
billion annually?
?
these facts
Even as the contribution to fossil fuel emissions by people of color is 20 percent below that of whites, on average
Sadly,
are typically subordinated within climate activism to simple the world

is ending rhetoric, or predictions (accurate though they may be) that
unless emissions are brought under control global warming will
eventually kill millions Fact is, warming is killing a lot of people now,
and most of them are black and brown. To build a global movement to
roll back the ecological catastrophe facing us, environmentalists and
clean energy advocates must connect the dots between planetary
destruction and the real lives being destroyed currently, which are
disproportionately of color. To do anything less is not only
a form of
racist marginalizing of people of color and their concerns, but is to
weaken the fight for survival.
.
to engage in
Environmentalist movements are built on white supremacy

minorities are used as tokens and are assessed through
stereotypes
Hamanaka and Basile 5
June/July, 2005, Sheila Hamanaka has studied anti-racism with The Peoples Institute and is a member of the Justice and Unity Campaign of WBAI,
Tracy Basile is a freelance journalist, The Peoples Institute, Racism and the Animal Rights Movement http://www.satyamag.com/jun05/hamanaka.html. PWoods.

We love animals. We hate racism. So whats to talk about
the animal rights (AR) movement
is predominantly white and middle class. Andrew Rowan, a VP at the
Humane Society of the U.S., said surveys indicate the AR movement is
less than three percent people of color.
If no one is racist, why is the movement largely segregated?
Most of us want to be inclusive. But why? Is it because it is the right
thing to do? Because then our march would look like a beautiful rainbow?
Because we have to be diverse to get funding? Pattrice Jones, a white AR
activist who has a page about racism at bravebirds.org states, The fact is
that a predominantly white movement will not and indeed cannot bring
about animal liberation. Jim Mason, a well-known white AR activist and
author of An Unnatural Order
which looks at the history of
racism as part of dominionism, agrees. He feels the imbalance keeps
AR from being a mass movement. It adds to the perception that it is just
another trivial concern of the comfortable classes, which repels people
who might otherwise be involved
Patrick Kwan, founder and Executive Director of the Student
Animal Rights Alliance, said, At the first demonstration I went to someone
asked me Do you speak English
Hes gotten these comments
from white staffers of pretty big AR organizations: I cant believe how
Asians treat animals and I dont like Asians. Kris, an African American
activist, describes how it feels to experience tokenism: They havent
done outreach to the community, but they callHey we need a black face
at the protest. I go, but its not a unifying way, its a marginalizing way of
organizing. Youre not one of us, but we need you
surveys have shown that African Americans are actually more
likely to consider vegetarianism than whites
? In fact, two South Asian activists I interviewed both
felt that they had not experienced any overt racism in
. Yet, like the peace and environmental movements, the AR movement
In April, 316 people from over 20 states attended the first Grassroots AR Conference in NYC, but the
people of color caucus numbered only eight.
(reprinted by Lantern Books, 2005)
. But is it just looking white that keeps people of color away from the movement? Or are white activists who lack awareness
making people of color feel uncomfortable?
?and that was in New York City!
. According to Patrick, there is a preconception that people of color do not
care about animals. But, he says,
after being informed about the plight of farmed animals. Surveys of Latinos and Asians also
show positive attitudes toward animal protection. Olivia, who grew up in the projects and lives in Spanish Harlem, reports that people eagerly take her flyers. Another African American activist found people snapped up samples of
vegan cooking. A young white woman active in the PETA KFC campaign noticed that older white men never take our flyers. The people who show the most interest in talking to us are African American men and women and Latino
men and women, and young white people. Another self-defeating attitude is that people of color are too busy organizing around civil rights or other issues. But, as in the white communities, only a small percentage of people are
Racism is a powerful tool of disorganization that has been

used against potential allies for centuries. It justified the European
invasion, enslavement and genocide of Native Americans and Africans.
active. There are still millions of others out there.
Many
immigrant European workers and landless peasants traded their class consciousness for the fabricated notion of whiteness and were rewarded with land grants and a chance to share in the profits of slavery. Even now textbooks
The mid-19th century saw the rise of the

Abolitionist movement as whites joined in; a few privileged whites also
formed the humane movement, which advocated for animals but ignored
the plight of slaves. Historically humane education was upheld as a means
of cultivating moral values amongst white children
todays liberal commitment to help those less fortunate rooted in this
same racist, missionary tradition? Well-meaning whites, sometimes armed
with the comment I do not see colorwhich often causes people of color
to smile inwardlycontinue to build essentially segregated organizations
because to them overcoming racism is still about cultivating moral values
and not sharing power
hide the long history of African, Indigenous, and multiracial rebellion.
, especially boys who would become tomorrows leaders. Is
. Whereas to oppressed peoples of color, race has always been about power. They do not fight for social justice to make white people feel better about
themselves.
Environmentalist movements are racist

1.) Diverts and forecloses on discussions of race
2.) Intentionally ignores white privilege
3.) Activist groups ostracize minority groups
JMB 12
02/29/12, JMB is his pen name, he is a PhD student in Environmental Studies in Oregon, Hes citing numerous peer reviewed studies in his article. Colorblind
Racism and Environmentalism, http://ecesisfactor.blogspot.com/2012/02/colorblind-racism-and-environmentalism.html. PWoods.
a pervasive lack of deep cultural-ecological

understanding
among white activists. They begin with an anecdote
involving a vegan Slow Food activist who, despite professed commitment
to local foods, knows nothing of the indigenous culture where she lives.
She is unable to name whose land she lives on, or even any of the foods
they rely upon. When asked about these matters, the woman responds,
in Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multigenerational farmers who are
not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much
stake in this watershed as anyone else. This assertion displaces focus
from the question of Native foodways and attempts simultaneously to
legitimate the land tenure of white farmers, an issue which she was not
asked to defend
It seems unlikely that this activist would think of herself
as racist, even though her responses suggest unexamined privilege and
white racial allegiances. Additionally, this implied allegiance with farming
families over the concerns of indigenous fishing rights complicates not
only this persons claims of colorblindness but also her professed
relationship to food systems that support environmental and human
health
animal
rights activism and vegan praxis are coded as white, and how vegans of
color respond to such coding.
practices, institutions, and
spaces are coded as whiteor at least not blacknot only through
the bodies that tend to inhabit and participate in them but also the
discourses that circulate through them
veganism and animal
rights activism are generally associated with radically leftist and
progressive whites, incapable of participating in the overt racism one
can normally find within radical rightorganizations
Although their
political positioning may incline white vegans to avoid traditional forms of
racism, Harper notes that collectively, good whites tend to shy away
from antiracism and reflections on white and class privilege
this tendency to omit discussions of race, class, and
sexuality
In their analysis of food justice, Teresa M. Mares and Devon C. Pea (2011) point to
, particularly
food
. The woman goes on to describe conflict between Indians and farmers, an issue which she concedes she knows little about, though her earlier comment regarding the Skagit farmers
suggests where she might stand on the issue (2011).
(Norgaard 2011). While Guthmans surveys indicate white internalization and deployment of colorblind racism, work by vegan scholar Breeze Harper (2011) considers ways in which
Harpers work, like Guthmans asserts,
(Guthman 2011). Harper indicates that
(Harper 2011).
(2011). Through a quick exploration of
popular vegan books and websites, Harper illustrates
. Then, drawing on comments taken from the popular blog Vegans of Color, Harper illuminates the effects of colorblind discourses on activists of color and how some whites respond to the experiences of
fellow vegans (2011). Centrally, Harpers analysis focuses on how words like exotic presume "a white audience, marginalizing the subjectivities of vegans of color (2011). The white blogger responses to VOC posts regarding this
Kram goes on to
write, if I were ever to be called out on terms of white guilt or
colonialist or other terms for trying to go to events that are more
inclusive of POC [people of color], or run/by or sponsored by POC, then I
will not be inclined to participate in those events. Her tone denies
responsibility for any possible wrongdoing, and furthermore places
responsibility for her inclusion on people of color. This type of response
seems strongly indicative of colorblind racism. Kram asserts her white
privilege, declaring her opinions on a blog for vegans of color, while
simultaneously undermining her fellow vegans experiences
issue highlight colorblind racism. Harper analyzes the response of a blogger, Kram, who conflates geographic food sources with the concept of foreign or exotic.
. Another series of experiences recorded in the
Vegans of Color blog highlight how colorblind racism has a chilling effect (Guthman 2011) on people of color and shapes the responses of white vegans. Bloggers Nassim and Supernovadiva, relate the discomforts experienced by
vegans of color in white spaces. Nassim writes of a conference that leaves her feeling so frustrated with the population, the cause and like I could not call myself a vegan. As if vegan was a white word (Harper 2011).
the tendency of white animal rights activists to single her out

because of her race
Although overt racism tends
to be scarce in environmental and animal rights movements, colorblind
racism and other liberal forms of racist praxis are pervasive. Discourses
Supernovadiva describes
. She writes, the colorblind thing comes up and how that person dont see color BUT you bee lined straight to me to tell me youre colorblind, seriously (Harper 2011).
These expressions of how colorblind racism effects vegans of color is met on the blog with further examples of the very same discourse.

that ignore or dispute any critical analysis of race are likely to reaffirm
racism despite good intentions.
). These
concepts, even when unvoiced, shape policy decisions and the codification
of environmental activism, and environmental benefits as white .
Furthermore, contemporary uses of words such as exotic or foreign effectively reinforce white as the norm, and in some
cases affirm colonial legacies that equate dark skinned people and racialized others with dirt, filth, and uncleanliness placing them outside of civilized society (Park and Pello 2011
Bioterror
Bioweapon threats are baseless fearmongering meant to
consolidate the Western humanist identity as benign in opposition
to the Evil people of color.
Loeppke 05
(Rodney, Prof. Intl Relations and Politics @ U of Sussex, Bioterrorizing US Policies, Millennium, Vol 34, Issue 1) Vinay
in relation to bioterror, there has been an amplification of threat

perception, which has revised the technological and civilisational discourse
that once offered reassurance. Prior to 9/11, government agencies exercised some reserve in characterizing the viability and severity of threat
More specifically
based on biological weapons. For instance, a prominent and influential report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) was taken seriously by lawmakers, when it stated that, in most
terrorists would have to overcome significant technical and operational challenges

to successfully make and release chemical or biological agents of sufficient quality and quantity
to kill or injure large numbers of people without substantial assistance from a state sponsor.
[S]pecialized knowledge is required in the manufacturing process and in improvising an
cases
effective delivery device for most chemical and nearly all biological agents that could be used in terrorist attacks. Moreover, some of the required components of chemical agents and
highly infective strains of biological agents are difficult to obtain.7 This is not to suggest a pre-9/11 absence of concern about the circulation, even possible use, of a biological weapon.8
However, a much greater urgency has recently been attached to biological weapons, fueled in large part by the terrorist imagery referred to above. Hardly limited to the conventional
foreign policy establishment, even Tommy Thompson, then US Secretary of Health and Human Services, stated confidently that, enemies seek, and in some cases have already
obtained, the ability to acquire and manipulate biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that could penetrate our military defenses and civilian surveillance systems and cause
open-ended biological
threat possibilities, which not only point to the resourcefulness and
cunning of Americas enemies, but also rely on the latters irrational
qualities. W.J. Billy Tauzin, then Chair of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, for instance, encapsulates this starkly dichotomous thinking
around bioterrorism, stating that [w]e dont think like evil people in
America. Evil people think different [sic] than we do we have to force
ourselves to think preemptively.10 It is critical to note that the certitude with
significant harm.9 The Bush Administrations policies, in tandem with Congressional oversight, resound with invocations of
which the US foreign policy establishment speaks to the issue of bioterror

emerges largely out of a subjunctive reality. In both intellectual and
policymaking circles, there is almost a ritualistic citing of weak case
evidence, followed by a thinly constructed assertion that mass casualty
bioterror attacks are undeniably on the horizon. Substantiating this new reality usually includes reference to the
attempts by the Rajneeshees in 1984 to infect local salad bars with Salmonella; Aum Shinrikyos unsuccessful work with biological pathogens; and the subsequent discovery of Anthrax in
powder form in the Fall of 2001.11 These strangely transparent attempts to construct a coherent historical trajectory of bioterror fail to provide any particularly compelling evidence
Even proponents of large-scale bioterrorism

preparedness, such as Amy Smithson, insist that, rubbing some type of an anthrax
substance on a keyboard is not a mass casualty dispersal attempt, and that, Aums
germ weapons programwas a flop from start to finish because the technical
obstacles were so significant.12 Indeed, a far more damning evaluation is provided by Milton Leitenberg, who not only takes apart the
precedent-setting rendition of these events, but also states pointedly that a detailed examination by the RAND
Corporation of 15 terrorist-labeled groups, demonstrated virtually zero
evidence of efforts to produce biological agents.13 Such sobering
counter-evidence, however, has little influence on the discursive muscle of
consecutive what if? statements, a practice recently exercised in a highly publicised Presidential Directive on biodefence, which builds its
concerning the likelihood of future mass casualty scenarios.
case around putative vulnerability: Biological weapons attacks could cause catastrophic harm. They could inflict widespread injury and result in massive casualties and economic
disruption. Bioterror attacks could mimic naturally-occuring disease, potentially delaying recognition of an attack and creating uncertainty about whether one has ever occurred. An
attacker may thus believe that he could escape identification and capture or retaliation. Biological weapons attacks could be mounted either inside or outside the United States and,
The cumulative effect of such

constant invocations of impending danger is to equate the identification of
any potential vulnerability with the palpable existence of threat, and this has certainly
because some biological weapons agents are contagious, the effects of an initial attack could spread widely.14
constituted a staple of US foreign policy for some time. David Campbell has supplied some of the most compelling historically-oriented analysis of such discursive practices. In one of his
central works, Writing Security, Campbell tracks the powerful discursive trends which guide US policy before, during and after the Cold War.15 Beyond this, he makes a persuasive case
for the critical role of foreign policy in the constitution of the domestic political scene, as well as the wider domain of American identity. Campbell points out that

common thread of the foreign policy establishment, broadly understood, is its
reproduction and renewal of danger discourse a recurring invocation of
externally emanating threats to the well being of American society. Here, [t]he global
inscription of danger was something that long preceded the cold war, but it was in the cold war, when numerous overseas obligations were constructed, that the identity of the United
States became even more deeply implicated in the external reach of the state. [C]oncomitant with this external expansion was an internal magnification of the modes of existence
Danger was being totalized in the external realm in

conjunction with its increased individualization in the internal field, with the
result being the reconstitution of the borders of the states identity.16 Campbell in no
which were to be interpreted as risks.
way tries to explain away Soviet practices as a mere discursive chimera. He states repeatedly that Soviet policies exhibited a range of troubling patterns, but it remains important to
note their representation in foreign policy discourse in no way required adherence to historical reality. Instead, the parade of horribles fundamentally associated to the Soviet Unions
existence provided the basis for both a highly militarised American society, as well as a powerful narrowing of the legitimate boundaries of political challenge within a liberal-democratic,
market society. It is important to note that throughout the 1990s, Campbells is hardly the only attempt to reconceptualise the manner in which security politics can be understood. On
the one hand, rather conventional understandings of security were expanded to incorporate new (objectively understood) threats, including those ostensibly emanating from the
environment, migration, or religious fundamentalism.17 Much of this work carried with it a deeply conservative undertow, equating new issues-areas with immanent conflict or acute
crisis, and advocating a defensive posture towards externally-derived threats. Campbells work, on the other hand, fits into a counteroffensive of discursively-grounded security
Calling into account the reliability and

constructed nature of threats, this literature placed in question the
reification of the state and its capacity to effect security for those under its
auspices.18 While largely ignored by conventional security theorists, such discursive approaches have had an
undeniable effect on the so-called constructivist school.19 Best captured in the writings of Barry Buzan and
approaches which openly challenged the basis upon which security had been conceptualised.
Ole Wver, constructivist security theorists take seriously the unstable nature of security and threats, but insist that, even the socially constituted often gets sedimented as structure
and becomes so relatively stable as practice that one has to do analysis also on the basis that it continues, using ones understanding of the social construction of security not only to
criticize this, but also to understand the dynamics of security and thereby maneuvre them.20 We will return to this below in a more evaluative spirit. Here, it is only important to
underline Campbells analysis within a wider trajectory of post-Cold War security studies that questioned the status of threat discourse. Campbells work merits special attention
inasmuch as it interprets threats as constitutive of American identity, and it does so in a historically-conceived fashion that provides a deeper understanding of threat discourse as it
emerged in the post-Cold War period. In the aftermath of post-1989 political realignments in Europe, Campbells argument offered a compelling suggestion that, the erasure of the
markers of certainty, and the rarefaction of political discourse, reproducing the identity of the United States and containing challenges to it is likely to require new discourses of
the newly refurbished threat of bioterror most certainly fits the

bill, in that it offers an interconnected international and domestic terrain of
open-ended threat possibilities. As so many intellectual and political
practitioners want to suggest, the risks now associated to biological weapons
are limited only by the psychosis of potential perpetrators a truly
dangerous world.22 There is, of course, much to contest here. Even if one were to leave aside the
extensive role of state terror orchestrated around the world, not the least of
which has been endorsed or organised by successive US administrations, it is
difficult to reconcile the ostensible desire to protect citizens health from
bioterror and the ongoing dilemma of public and personal health in the
American context. As Leitenberg rightly points out, roughly 30,000 people die from influenza A and B each year; more than 750,000 cases of sepsis occur
annually, of which 215,000 die; weight-related death kills 300,000 per year; and 440,000 yearly deaths are tobacco-related.23 Importantly, even those who
are otherwise in support of so-called bioterror preparedness exhibit concern
about its equation with public health. In fact, there is considerable apprehension that the substantial
redirection of resources toward bioterror preparedness is coming at the
expense of general public health and not enhancing any realistic response There
danger.21 In this sense,
is no necessity here for a full discussion of public and personal health challenges facing American society, but the gravity of such challenges certainly stands in direct confrontation with
This problematisation gives rise to an

obvious question, one suggested by Buzan and Wvers work: what is the referent object that needs
to be protected in the emergent foreign and domestic policy continuum
surrounding biological weapons and bioterror? The logic of Campbells argument
would suggest it to be nothing less than the reproduction of the domestic
identity that separates the United States from the uncivilised world. As such,
bioterror has been called up in conjunction with a range of other new
threats, in a manner that reasserts the necessity of both the United States
international role and its constitutive identity as a bulwark of rational,
democratic and peaceful Western values. While this reproductive logic of threat discourse
affords considerable insight into the operationalisation of power in the
American political context, it is, nonetheless, worth considering whether the particular (and emphatic) invocation
the marked certitude with which bioterrorist threats are now regularly invoked. capacities.24

of biological terror can be grounded in the specific interests of prevailing
social relations. Here, grappling with the material (social) purpose of political ordering via foreign policy is, in my view, complementary to Campbells discursive
approach. Michel Foucault, whose theoretical presence is heavy in Campbells work, insisted on a double conditioning, in which disciplines and biopower operate in tandem with, the
strategic envelope that makes them work.25 And the strategic envelope to which he consistently referred was both the state and capital. Indeed, for Foucault, the, growth of a
capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, political anatomy, could be
operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions.26 None of this is to claim that Campbells (or Foucaults) real interest lies in capitalist exploitation; rather it is
to contend that his valuable understanding of how power is operationalised through discursive regimes does not eschew our responsibility to elucidate its strategic envelope of state
coercive and class dynamics. For observers of the current biomania in foreign policy, this demands the explicit articulation and interpretation of state and capital relations that prop up
this vague yet powerful threat discourse.
Capitalism
Capitalism began through the destruction of the black body
which means we have a better articulation of why capitalism
exists. Its a sequencing question, profit motive doesnt make
any sense because it would have been cheaper to get the
white underclass from Europe
MR)
The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is
twofold. First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular
body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by
approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say
that slavery is closer to capital's primal desire than is exploitation. It
is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today,
late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the
direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This
renaissance of slavery, i.e., the reconfiguration of the prisonindustrial complex has, once again, as its structuring metaphor and
primary target the Black body. The value of reintroducing the
unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of
the Black subject, lies in the Black subject's potential for extending
the demand placed on state/capital formations because its
reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In
other words, the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in
excess of the demand made by the positionality of the worker. The
worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's
new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat, in a word, socialism).
In contrast, the slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its
ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The
absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is
symptomatic of the text's inability to cope with the possibility that
the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and
16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late
capital's over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the
20th and 21 st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure
conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.
Capitalism (long)
Race is the root cause of capitalism and the emancipation of
the Black the only way to break its hold.
Frank Wilderson III 2003, (The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent)
Scandal, Social Justice, Vol. 30, No. 2 (92), War, Dissent, and Justice: A
Dialogue (2003), pp. 18-27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768181, p. 21-3).
By examining the strategy and structure of the Black subject's absence in,
and incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we
come face to face with three unsettling consequences: (1) The Black
American subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive
logic of Gramscian discourse and on today's coalition politics. In other
words, s/he implies a scandal. (2) The Black subject reveals the inability
of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of
white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby
calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and
decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and
coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself
into a mass of antagonistic identity formations, formations that can
precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemony, but they
are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling
antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. (3) We
begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety.
There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society
that does away not with the category of worker, but with the
imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In
other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to
democratize work and thus help to keep in place and insure the coherence
of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of
productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other
postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e., idleness. The scandal, with which the
Black subject position "threatens" Gramscian and coalition discourse, is
manifest in the Black subject's incommensurability with, or disarticulation of,
Gramscian categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony,
and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the Black
subject destabilize--emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of-historical materialism? How does the Black subject function within the
"American desiring machine" differently than the quintessential Gramscian
subaltern, the worker? Capital was kick-started by the rape of the
African continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci
nor Marx. According to Barrett (2002), something about the Black body
in and of itself made it the repository of the violence that was the
slave trade. It would have been far easier and far more profitable to

take the white underclass from along the riverbanks of England and
Western Europe than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves . The
theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is
twofold. First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular
body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by
approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say
that slavery is closer to capital's primal desire than is exploitation. It
is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today,
late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the
direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This
renaissance of slavery, i.e., the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial
complex has, once again, as its structuring metaphor and primary target the
Black body. The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the
slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black subject, lies in the
Black subject's potential for extending the demand placed on
state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the
discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words,
the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of
the demand made by the positionality of the worker. The worker
demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony,
Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat, in a word, socialism). In contrast, the
slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate
democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence
of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of the
text's inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of
capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the
generative subject that resolves late capital's over-accumulation crisis, the
Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21 st centuries, do not reify the
basic categories that structure conflict within civil society; the categories of
work and exploitation. Thus, the Black subject position in America
represents an antagonism or demand that cannot be satisfied
through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics. In
contrast, the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that
can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful war of position, which
brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the
legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into
question the legitimacy of productivity itself . Thus, 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 "generalized
trust," the precondition for the solicitation of consent, "equals racialized
whiteness" (Barrett, 2002). Furthermore, as Orlando Patterson (1982) points
out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say,
a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange. A

slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical), but
is subsumed by direct relations of force. As such, a slave is an articulation of
a despotic irrationality, whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic
rationality. A metaphor comes into being through a violence that kills the
thing such that the concept might live. Gramscian discourse and coalition
politics come to grips with America's structuring rationality-- what it
calls capitalism, or political economy-- but not with its structuring
irrationality, the anti-production of late capital, and the hyperdiscursive violence that first kills the Black subject, so that the
concept may be born. In other words, from the incoherence of Black
death, America generates the coherence of white life. This is
important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm and their spiritual
progenitors in the world of organizing in the U.S. today, with their
overvaluation of hegemony and civil society. Struggles over hegemony
are seldom, if ever, asignifying. At some point, they require coherence
and categories for the record, meaning they contain the seeds of
anti Blackness. What does it mean to be positioned not as a positive term
in the struggle for anti capitalist hegemony, i.e., a worker, but to be
positioned in excess of hegemony, to be a catalyst that disarticulates the
rubric of hegemony, to be a scandal to its assumptive, foundational logic, to
threaten civil society's discursive integrity? In White Writing, J.M. Coetzee
(1988) examines the literature of Europeans who encountered the South
African Khoisan in the Cape between the 16th and 18th centuries. The
Europeans were faced with an "anthropological scandal": a being without
(recognizable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary habits,
sexual mores, means of agriculture, and most significantly, without character
(because, according to the literature, they did not work). Other Africans, like
the Xhosa who were agriculturalists, provided European discourse with
enough categories for the record, so that, through various strategies of
articulation, they could be known by textual projects that accompanied the
colonial project. But the Khoisan did not produce the necessary categories
for the record, the play of signifiers that would allow for a sustainable
semiotics.
.
Civil Society
The affirmative positions freedom as a question of reclaiming
humanity and participation this view cannot take into
account the gratuitous violence enacted on the slave.
Expanding the inclusionary circle of civil society can never
include Blackness because it is founded in contradistinction to
it their humanism is birthed from the murder of the slave.
Wilderson 10 [Frank, Associate Professor at UC Irvines Department of
Drama and African American Studies, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pp. 21-23]
Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is that the preColumbian period, the Late Middle Ages, reveals no
archive of debate on these three questions as they might be related to that massive group of Black-skinned people south of the
Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led to Britain taking the lead in the abolition of
slavery, but he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or
the Virginia Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late-18th century emancipatory thrustintraHuman disputes such as the French and American Revolutionsthat swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis
further than this. Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism of the Enlightenment and its subsequent
the discourse that elaborates the

justification for freeing the slave is not the product of the Human
beings having suddenly and miraculously recognized the slave . Rather,
as Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses present themselves to us as
further evidence of the Slaves fungibility: [T]he figurative
capacities of blackness enable white flights of fancy while
increasing the likelihood of the captives disappearance (Scenes22). First,
abolitionist discourses. It is highly conceivable that
the questions of Humanism were elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the African-quachattel (the 1200s to the end
of the 17th century). Then, as the presence of Black chattel in the midst of exploited and un-exploited Humans (workers and bosses,
exploited Humans (in the throes of class conflict with un-exploited

seized the image of the slave as an enabling vehicle that
animated the evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as un-exploited
Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase their profits. Without this gratuitous violence, a
violence that marks everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to mark the Black ontologically , the socalled great emancipatory discourses of modernitymarxism, feminism,
postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movementpolitical discourses predicated on
grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are
exploitation and alienation, might not have developed.vi Chattel
slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of
culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East. I am not suggesting that across the globe Humanism
developed in the same way regardless of region or culture; what I am saying is that the late Middle Ages
gave rise to an ontological categoryan ensemble of common
existential concernswhich made and continues to make possible
both war and peace, conflict and resolution, between the disparate members of the human race, east and west.
respectively) became a fact of the world,
Humans)
Senator Thomas Hart Benton intuited this notion of the existential commons when he wrote that though the Yellow race and its
culture had been torpid and stationary for thousands of years [Whites and Asians] must talk together, and trade together, and
marry together. Commerce is a great civilizersocial intercourse as greatand marriage greater (The Congressional Globe. May
28, 1846). David Eltis points out that as late as the 17th century, [p]risoners taken in the course of European military actioncould
cwqef death if they were leaders, or banishment if they were deemed followers, but never enslavementDetention followed by
prisoner exchanges or ransoming was common (1413). By the seventeenth century, enslavement of fellow Europeans was beyond
the limits (1423) of Humanisms existential commons, even in times of war. Slave status was reserved for non-Christians. Even the
latter group howeverhad some prospect of release in exchange for Christians held by rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and other
Mediterranean Muslim powers (emphasis mine 1413). But though the practice of enslaving the vanquished was beyond the limit of

intra-West wars and only practiced provisionally in East-West conflicts, the baseness of the option was not debated when it came to
the African. The race of Humanism (White, Asian, South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced itself without the simultaneous
through chattel
slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of
domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and
struggles, the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black ,
forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and
the social death of Blacks. In his essay To Corroborate Our Claims: Public Positioning and the Slavery
production of that walking destruction which became known as the Black. Put another way,
Metaphor in Revolutionary America, Peter Dorsey (in his concurrence with cultural historians F. Nwabueze Okoye and Patricia
Bradley) suggests that, in mid- to late-18th century America, Blackness was such a fungible commodity that it was traded as freely
between the exploited (workers who did not own slaves) as it was between the unexploited (planters who did). This was due to the
effective uses to which Whites could put the Slave as both flesh and metaphor. For the Revolutionaries, slavery represented a
nightmare that white Americans were trying to avoid (359). Dorseys claim is provocative, but not unsupported: he maintains that
had Blacks-as-Slaves not been in the White field of vision on a daily basis that it would have been virtually impossible for Whites to
transform themselves from colonial subjects into Revolutionaries: Especially prominent in the rhetoric and reality of the
[Revolutionary] era, the concepts of freedom and slavery were applied to a wide variety of events and values and were constantly
being defined and redefined[E]arly understandings of American freedom were in many ways dependent on the existence of chattel
slavery[We should] see slavery in revolutionary discourse, not merely as a hyperbolic rhetorical device but as a crucial and fluid
[fungible] concept that had a major impact on the way early Americans thought about their political futureThe slavery metaphor
destabilized previously accepted categories of thought about politics, race, and the early republic. (355) Though the idea of
taxation without representation may have spoken concretely to the idiom of power that marked the British/American relation as
being structurally unethical, it did not provide metaphors powerful and fungible enough for Whites to meditate and move on when
resisting the structure of their own subordination at the hands of unchecked political power (354). The most salient feature of
Dorseys findings is not his understanding of the way Blackness, as a crucial and fungible conceptual possession of civil society,
impacts and destabilizes previously accepted categories of intra-White thought, but rather his contribution to the evidence that,
even when Blackness is deployed to stretch the elasticity of civil

society to the point of civil war, that expansion is never elastic
enough to embrace the very Black who catalyzed the expansion. In fact,
Dorsey, building on Patricia Bradleys historical research, asserts that just the opposite is true. The more the
political imagination of civil society is enabled by the fungibility of
the slave metaphor, the less legible the condition of the slave
becomes: Focusing primarily on colonial newspapersBradley finds that the slavery metaphor served to distance the
patriot agenda from the antislavery movement. If anything, Bradley states, widespread use of the metaphor gave first evidence
that the issue of real slavery was not to have a part in the revolutionary messages (359). And David Eltis believes that this
philosophical incongruity between the image of the Slave and freedom for the Slave begins in Europe and pre-dates the American
Revolution by at least one hundred years: The [European] countries least likely to enslave their own had the harshest and most
sophisticated system of exploiting enslaved non-Europeans. Overall, the English and Dutch conception of the role of the individual in
metropolitan society ensured the accelerated development of African chattel slavery in the Americasbecause their own subjects
could not become chattel slaves or even convicts for lifeThere may be something to be said for expanding a variation of Edmund
Morgans argument to cover the whole of the British Atlantic, in the sense that the celebration of British libertiesmore specifically,
The circulation of Blackness

as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile and
progressive moments in history (e.g. the French, English, and American Revolutions), produces
dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more
parasitic on the Black, and more emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than any dream of human
liberation in any era heretofore. Black Slavery is foundational to modern
Humanisms ontics because freedom is the hub of Humanisms
infinite conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be infinite.
They are finite in the sense that they are predicated on the idea of
freedom from some contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized.
The contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy, freedom from economic
exploitation, freedom from political tyranny (for example, taxation without representation), freedom from
heteronormativity, and so on. What I am suggesting is that first, political discourse
recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and then it works to
disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political
ontologywhere it rightfully beganbut through political experience (and practice);
whereupon it immediately loses its ontological foundations. Why would
liberties of Englishmendepended on African slavery. (Emphasis mine 1423)

anyone do this? Why would anyone start off with, quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating on it
and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do Humans take such pride in self-adjustment, in
I contend,
in allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its
ontological status, one would have to lose ones Human coordinates
and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die. For the
Black, freedom is an ontological, rather than experiential, question.
There is no philosophically credible way to attach an experiential, a
contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the
Blacksuch as freedom from gender or economic oppression. The kind of contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black
when thinking freedom. Rather, the riders that one could place on Black freedom
would be hyperbolic though no less trueand ultimately
untenable: i.e., freedom from the world, freedom from humanity,
freedom from everyone (including ones Black self). Given the reigning episteme, what are the chances of
diminishing, rather than intensifying, the project of liberation (how did we get from 68 to the present)? Because,
elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and communicable, political project out of the necessity of freedom as an
? Gratuitous freedom has never been a trajectory of Humanist

thought, which is why the infinite trajectories of freedom that
emanate from Humanisms hub are anything but infinitefor they
have no line of flight leading to the Slave.
absolute
Humans are stuck in self adjustment and reform perpetuating

the existence of a civil society which necessitates for black
non-existence
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the
ANCs armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics Red, White, & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 31-32) GG
Black slavery is foundational to modern Humanisms ontics because

freedom is the hub of Humanisms infinite conceptual trajectories.
But these trajectories only appear to be infinite. They are finite in the
sense that they are predicated on the idea of freedom from some
contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized. The
contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy, freedom from
economic exploitation, freedom from political tyranny (for example,
taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and
so on. What I am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes
freedom as a structuring ontologic and then it works to disavow this
recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontology
where it rightfully beganbut through political experience (and
practice); whereupon it immediately loses its ontological
foundations. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone start off with,
quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating
on it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why
do Humans take such pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather
than intensifying, the project of liberation (how did we get from 68 to
the present)? Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to

attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one would have to
lose ones Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to say
one would have to die.
Because the affirmatives focuses on humanity, they also

exclude the black body from their politics and this perpetuates
anti-blackness which materializes in social death and white
supremacy
and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15) GG
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my
argument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or
even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White
Supremacist event, from which one then embarks upon a
demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish,
enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I
argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere,
indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis
of a Human subject, as imagined by marxism and/or psychoanalysis,
then his/her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of
repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science
and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold
is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of
Black peoples staunchest allies, and in some of the most
radical films. Herenot in restrictive policy, unjust legislation,
police brutality, or conservative scholarshipis where the
Settler/Masters sinews are most resilient
Reform will never free the Black- white culture has merely
changed her status from Slave to Imprisoned Criminal.
Rodriguez 2007, (Dylan Forced Passages, in Warfare in the American
Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, edited by Joy James. P.
40-42).
I am interested in stretching both the historical reach and conceptual
boundaries of this genealogical tracing, however. While there are always and
necessarily forms of passage into the temporalities and geographies of
death, such as those of the slave plantation and post-emancipation prison,
the contemporary case of the prison regime constitutes a site and
condition of death that is itself a form of passage. This is to say that
the prison is less a "destination" point for "the duly convicted" than it is a
point of massive human departure-from civil society, the free world,and the

mesh of affective social bonds and relations that produce varieties of
"human" family and community. Hence, labor exploitation, the construction
of unfree labor (what some have called a "new slavery"), and the mass
confinement of a reserve labor pool are not the constitutive logics of the new
prison regime, although these are certainly factors that shape the prison's
institutional structure. Whereas forced labor (formal prison slavery) was at
one time conceived as the primary institutional tool for rehabilitating
imprisoned white men," the proliferation of mass incarceration in the
current era has reinscribed a logic of extermination.
Sharon Patricia Holland's meditations on the entanglement-in fact, the
veritable inseparability-of death and black subjectivity indicts the very
formation of a white Americana and its accompanying social imaginary vis-avis the never-ending presence (and imminence) of racial chattel slavery:
It is possible to make at least two broad contentions here: a) that the
(white) culture's dependence on the nonhuman status of its
black subjects was never measured by the ability of whites to
produce a "social heritage"; instead, it rested on the status of the
black as a nonentity; and b) that the transmutation from
enslaved to freed subject never quite occurred at the level of
the imagination."
Extrapolating Holland's central theses, I would add that, indeed, what has
occurred is an inscription of the black nonhuman "nonentity"
through the category of the imprisoned-hence
illegal/extralegal/convict-subject. This is to argue that while the white
social imagination has been unable to assimilate the notion of a
"freed (black) subject" in its midst beyond cynical or piecemeal
gestures of "inclusion" (which is to say that ultimately it really cannot
assimilate blackness at all), the actual "transmutation" has been from
the white social imagination of the slave to that of the (black)
prisoner, or what Frank Wilderson theorized in the previous chapter as the
new black "prison slave."1l
The status of the enslaved-imprisoned black subject forms the
template through which white Americana constructs a communion
of historical interest, mobilizations of political force, and, more
specifically,the production and proliferation of a regime of massbased human immobilization. Thus, my theoretical centering of
black unfreedom here is not intended to minimize or understate
the empirical presence of "non-black" Third World, indigenous, or
even white bodies in these current sites of state captivity but,
rather, to argue that the technology of the prison regime-and the
varieties of violence it wages against those it holds captive-is premised on
a particular white-supremacist module or prototype that is in fact
rooted in the history of slavery and the social and racial crisis that it

has forwarded into the present.
The contemporary regime of the prison encompasses the weaponry
of an institutionalized dehumanization. It also, and necessarily,
generates a material rendition of the non-and sub-human that structurally
antagonizes and de-centers the immediate capacity of the imprisoned
subject to simply self-identify. Publishing in 1990 under the anonymous
byline "A Federal Prisoner," one imprisoned writer offered a schematic view
of this complex process, which is guided by the logic of a totalizing
disempowerment and social disaffection:
The first thing a convict feels when he receives an inconceivably long
sentence is shock. The shock usually wears off after about two years,
when all his appeals have been denied. He then enters a period of selfhatred because of what he's done to himself and his family. If he
survives that emotion-and some don't-he begins to swim the rapids of
rage, frustration and alienation. When he passes through the rapids, he
finds himself in the calm waters of impotence, futility and resignation.
It's not a life one can look forward to living. The future is totally devoid
of hope."
The structured violence of self-alienation, which drastically
compounds the effectof formal social alienation, is at the heart of
the regimes punitive-carceral logic. Yet it is precisely because the
reproduction of the regime relies on its own incapacity to decisively
"dehumanize" its captives en masse (hence, the persis-tence of institutional
measures that pivot on the presumption and projection of the "inmate's"
embodiment of disobedience, resistance, and insurrection) that it
generates a philosophy of the captive body that precedes the logic
of enslavement . Thus, the regime's logic of power reaches into the
arsenal of a historical apparatus that was an essential element of
the global formation of racial chattel slavery while simultaneously
structuring its own particular technology of violence and bodily
domination. What, then, is the materiality of the archetypal imprisoned
body (and subject) through which the contemporary prison regime has
proliferated its diverse and hierarchically organized apparatuses of racialized
and gendered violence, most especially its technologies of immobilization
and bodily disintegration?
Death Predictions
The prediction of death is premised off of the assumption that the
black body isnt the human that we are trying to save. This
continues racism Wilderson8
{Frank B; Professor at UC IRVINE and member of ANC; Absence of subjective
presence Biko Lives; pg 97-98; Other sections are by Andile Mngxitama;
Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson; Published by Palgrave Macmillan; July 8
2008}AvP
I am not saying that we welcomed the prophesy of our collective death. I am
arguing that the threat of our collective death, a threat in response to the
gesture of our collective our living will made us feel as though we were alive
as though we possessed what in fact we could not posses, Human life as
opposed to black life (which is always already substitutively dead, a fatal
way of being alive)- we could die because we lived. It was as though we had
penetrated three layers of absence in the libidinal economy; an economy
that organizes the structure of reality in ways that were too often eschewed
by south African Marxists and charterists more broadly in favor of the
verifiable data of political economy; an economy that in many respects was
at the center of steven bikos meditations and the foundation of black
consciousness. Like steven Biko before him, lewis Gordon also a close reader
of frantz fanon reminds us of the serious pitfalls and limitations in excluding
the evasive aspects of affect from interpretation of reality. Building on lewis
gordons ontological schema of absence and presence that is a
reconstruction and elaboration of fanons ontological arguments in Black skin
White masks, I designate three layers of black absence subjective,
cartographic and political, through which we might read the cheering that
erupted as affective (rather than discursive) symptoms of an ontological
discovery. The world cannot accommodate a blackened relation at the level
of bodies subjectivity. Thus, Black presence is a form of absence for to see
a black is to see the black an ontological frienze that waits for a gaze, rather
than a living ontology moving with agency in the field of vision. The Blacks
moment of recognition by the other is always already blackness upon which
supplements are lavished- American, Caribbean, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. But the
supplements are superfluous rather than substantive they dont unblacken.
As Gordon points out, there is something absent whenever blacks are
present. The more present a black is the more absent is this something. And
the more absent a black is, the more present is this something. Blackness,
then, is the destruction of presence, for blacks seem to suck presence into
themselves as a black hole, pretty much like the astrophysical phenomenon
that bears that name.
Debate
The debate space itself is organized around the governing rules of
whiteness. Unless we devise a radically new stance to engage,
ongoing violence becomes inevitable.
Wynter84 (Sylvia, Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of
California at San Diego to be a visiting professor for 1974-75. She then became chairperson of African
and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at
Stanford University in 1977. She is now Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, "The Ceremony
Must Be Found: After Humanism" Boundary II, 12:3 & 13:1, Accessed via JSTOR- [SG])
The social behaviors that were to verify this topos of iconicity which yoked the IndoEuropean mode of being to human being in general, and the new middle
class model of identity to the exemplary Norm of this new "empirico-transcendental
doublet," man (Foucault, 1984) (imagined/experienced as if a "natural being"), would be carried
out by the complementary non-discursive practices of a new wave of
great internments of native labors in new plantations orders (native wage labor), and by the
massacres of the colonial eraleading logically to their Summa in the Auchwitz/Belsen and in
the Gulag/Cambodia archipelagoes. Through all this, different forms of segregating
the Ultimate Chaos that was the Blackfrom the apartheid of the South to
the lynchings in both North and South, to their deprivation of the vote, and confinement in an inferior
secondary educational sphere, to the logic of the
jobless/ghetto/drugs/crime/prison archipelagoes of todayensured that,
as Uspenskij et al note, the "active creation" of the type of Chaos, which the dominant model needs for the
replication of its own system, would continue. It thus averted any effort
to find the ceremonies which could wed the structural oppositions, liberating the Black from
his Chaos function, since this function was the key to the dynamics of its
own order of being. As Las Casas had argued against Sepulvedawhen refuting the latter's humanist
theory that human sacrifice carried out by the New World peoples was proof of the fact of their Lack of
Natural Reason and, therefore, that it was just to make war against them to protect the innocents who were
sacrificed and to take over their territory"to sacrifice innocents for the good of the commonwealth is not
opposed to natural reason, is not something abominable and contrary to nature, but is an error that has its
origin in natural reason itself."" It is an error, then, not in the speaking/behaving subjects, but in the
ratiomorphic apparatus generic to the human, the cognitive mechanism that is the "most recent
superstructure in a continuum of cognitive processes as old as life on this planet," and, as such, "the least
tested and refined against the real world" (Riedl/Kaspar, 1984). And it is only with science, as Riedl and
Kaspar (quoting Roman Sexl) observe, that there is ever any true "victory over the ratiomorphic
apparatus"such as that of Galileo's and his telescope over the abductive logic of the if/then sequence of
inference dictated behind the backs of their consciousness to the Aristotelian doctors of philosophy as the
speaking subjects of the Christian-medieval system ensemble. II. Re-enacting Heresy: The New Studies and
the Studia as a Science of Human Systems The main proposal here is that the calls made in the 1960s and
1970s for new areas/programs of studies, was, although non-consciously so at the time, calls which reenacted in the context of our times a parallel counter-exertion, a parallel Jester's heresy to that of the
we asked
at first only to be incorporated into the normative order of the present
organization of knowledge as add-ons, so to speak. We became
entrapped, as a result, in Bantustan enclaves labelled "ethnic" and
Studia's. But because of our non-consciousness of the real dimensions of what we were about,

"gender" and/or "minority studies." These enclaves then functioned,
as
David Bradley notes, inter a/ia, to exempt English Departments from having to alter their existing definition
of American literature. Even more, these enclaves functioned to exempt the callers for the new studies from
taking cognizance of the anomaly that confronted us, with respect to a definition of American literature
which lawlikely functioned to exclude not only Blacks, but all the other groups whose "diverse
modalities of protest" (Detienne, 1979) in the 1960s and 1970s had fueled the call for new studies. Thomas
the recognition of anomalies is the first step which leads

to changes in the paradigms of the natural sciences.38 And in the same context
the linguistic scholar Whatmough has argued that human observers are parts of the
cosmos which they observe, that since all the knowledge that orders our behavior is gained
Kuhn points out that
from these human observers, such knowledge must either be solipsistic or reduce man to a part of his
environment. This knowledge is, therefore, not to be trusted unless the observer in his role as knower finds
the means to convert himself into an "external observer." Among the means which he proposes is the taking
of the "all pervading regularity noted in language," rather than the speaking subject, as the object of
regularities appear "all along the road through the

heirarchy of language, from everyday chit chat through law, and religions,
liturgy and homily, poetry, `literature,' science and philosophy to logic and mathematics."39
investigation. And these
These regularities, he goes on, will enable the knower to make use of what he calls the mathematike techne,
which enables her/him to treat languages like chemistry, for example, according to their grammars of
regularities, as if man, i.e. the speaking/thinking/representing subject, "did not exist at all." One problem
remained, however: that of the perception of these regularities. For, because the regularities are, so to
speak, "built in" to the discourses, the users of these discourses cannot normally isolate the existence of
this problem is applicable

not only for the boundary maintaining "true discourse" of the positivism
inherited from the nineteenth-century episteme, but also for the
eschatology of positivism's counter-discourse, Marxism, both generated
from the same ground (Foucault, 1973) of a materialist metaphysics, and each dialectically the
these regularities (Whatmough, 1967). And, as Foucault reminds us,
condition of the post-atomic dysfunctional sovereignty of the "grammar of regularities" of the other. The
we are trapped in the ordering

"categories and prescriptions" of our epistemic orders. He notes,
however, that the liminal groups of any order are the ones most able to
"free us" from these prescriptions, since it is they who existentially
experience the "injustice inherent in structure" (Legesse, 1973), that is, in the very
anthropologist, Legesse, has pointed to the extent to which
ordering of the order which dictates the "grammar of regularities" through which the systemic subjects
The normative categories

of any orderfor example the aristocratic category of European feudalismare normative
precisely because the structure of their lived experience is isomorphic
with the representation that the order gives itself of itself. The liminal
categories like those of the bourgeoisie in the feudal order of things, on the other hand,
experience a structural contradiction between their lived experience
and the grammar of representations which generate the mode of reality by prescribing the
parameters of collective behaviors that dynamically bring that "reality" into being. The liminal
frame of reference, therefore, unlike the normative, can provide what Uspesnkij et al
call the "outer view," from which perspective the grammars of
regularities of boundary and structure-maintaining discourses are
perceive their mode of reality as isomorphic with reality in general.

perceivable, and Whatmough's "external observer's position" made possible. What the calls for New
Studies at first overlooked, however, was precisely the regularities
which emerged into view in the wake of the "diverse modalities of
protest" whose non-coordinated yet spontaneous eruption now brought into unconcealednessnot only
the lawlike rule-governed nature of the exclusion of the diverse protesting groups/categories as groupsubjects from any access to the means of representation, but also the regularities of the exclusion of their
frames of reference and historical/cultural past from the normative curriculum, an exclusion so consistent as
to be clearly also rule-governed. This consistency was reinforced by the emergence of the equation between
the group/categories excluded from the means of representation and the ratios of their degrees of socioeconomic empowerment/disempowerment in the world outside. The dynamic presence of rule-governed
correlations which determined rules of in/exclusion, was, however, only perceivable by the non-orchestrated
calls for New Studies, calls like "the diverse modalities of protest" in the Greek city states analysed by
Detienne, which, by breaching parallel dietary and other rules, not only called the ontology of the religiopolitical order of the city-state into question, but made perceivable, through what they protested against, the
founding Order/Chaos oppositional categories which underpinned the boundary/structure maintaining
These regularities pointed to a fundamental

question which, at the time, remained unasked. It had to do with the
anomalous implication that they were determined by rules which
transcended the conscious intention of the academics who enacted the
decision-making processes as to what to in/exclude, just as the rules of inference
dynamics of the polis (Detienne, 1979).
of Galileo's doctors of philosophy were dictated by the ratiomorphic apparatus or rational world view based
on the a priori of an order of value between the imperfect terrestrial and the crystalline perfection of the
lunar realm: the Order/Chaos opposition of the autopoetic dynamics of the Christian medieval-system
What, in this case, then, determined the rules which determined

the decisionmaking processes by which individual scholars, working with integrity and
according to the criteria of objective standards, in/excluded? What determined what should and
should not be defined as American Fiction, and the mode of measure of the "objective"
standards of individual scholars? The question was not to be asked,
however, until the after side of the experience of disillusion which the callers
all underwent and which David Bradley traces in his article, "Black and American in 1982." For it was
to be a recognition, made by us all on the other side of that experience,
of the existence of objective limits to the incorporation of Blacks into the
normative order of being/knowing of the present order, that would lead
to our further recognition of the need for an epistemological break. Bradley
ensemble.
was one of a group of Blacks for whom Affirmative Action, by countering the "inbuilt distribution bias" of the
The interference of Affirmative Action with the

normative functioning of the order with respect to the distributionat
the group category levelof unequal ratios of access to educational
empowerment, had enabled Bradley, together with a group of young Blacks like
himself, to breach the rule-governed nature of the proscription which
confined Blacks-as-a-group to a secondary educational orbit, relative to their
dynamics of the order, had worked.
White peers-as-a-group. Bradley at the time, observing his father's great joy, had determined to do
everything to prove his father's and his own private hope true. His father's hope was that at long last Blacks
were to be allowed to break out of the secondary orbit to which their lives and dreams had been confined,
and if this hope would not be realized in time for his own life to be graced by the change, it would in time at
least be realized for his son's.
Bradley's own hope had been that once Blacks were

included in vast numbers in the highest levels of higher education, and
had worked hard and proved themselves, they would be so numerous,
so no longer the token exception, that they would eventually have to be
distinguished by criteria other than by "the uniform of skin." However,
he experienced on the campus both the overt and covert forms of
anathematization which met the breaching of the interdiction that the
black presence-as-a-group implied (since what Hofstadter calls the category structure of
the "representational system" "America" is based on the dynamics of the contradiction between individual
These experiences slowly stripped away the illusion

of any fundamental change in the ordering of group relations. The shouts of "Nigger! Nigger!"
in the citadel of reason in the heart of the non-redneck campus, the phoned bomb threats,
the fragile defenselessness of the Black students in the face of a
mindless hostility, the ineffective wringing of hands of concerned Liberal
Whites, were paralleled by the more discreet acts of partition (Detienne,
1979) by university administrators, whose proscription of the financially
starved Black Culture Center, always a whitewashed rotting house to be
reached by a scramble up a muddy bank, mainly always on the nether
edge of campus, once again gave the rule-governed regularity of the
game away. Blacks would be allowed on the campus as a group,
admitted to have even a culture, as long as this "culture" and its related
enclave studies could be made to function as the extra-cultural space, in
relation, no longer to a Wasp, but now more inclusively to a White American,
normatively Euroamerican intra-cultural space; as the mode of Chaos
imperative to the latter's new self-ordering. (The readapted Western
culture Core Curriculum is the non-conscious expression of this more
"democratizing" shift from Wasp to Euro.) Indeed once this
marginalization had been effected, the order of value recycled in
different terms, with the category homeostasis returning to its "built in
normalcy," the abuse and the bomb threats ceased. Order and Chaos
were once more in their relational interdefining places, stably expressing
the bio-ontological principle of Sameness and Difference of the present
order, as the rule-governed discourse of Galileo's doctors of philosophy functioned to verify the
equality and group heirarchy).
physicoontological mode of Sameness and Difference on which the Christian medieval order rested before
the Studia and Copernicus, before the Jester's heresy of the figures of rogue/clown/fool, had pulled the "high
seriousness" of its self-justifying self-representation down to earth. Bradley now recognized that he had been
wrong to hope that Black lives, from his father's to his own, had to "run along the same line ... one that rises
and falls like a sine wave," one that is "a graphed function not of a mathematical relation between sides and
angles but of a social relationship between Blacks and American society itself." Sometimes the line could be
"on the positive side of the base line," at other times on the negative side. If the effects were different, the
function had always to remain the same. Thus his hope for the next generation of Blacks, in this case for his
young godson, would have to be cut down to realistic size. His hope could only now be that by the time his
godson came of age, the "graph of black will once again be on the upswing," giving him, as Bradley himself
had had, "a little time to gain some strength, some knowledge, some color to hold inside himself." For that
would/could be, "all the hope there is. 11
Yet the beginning of hope also lay here. The

recognition of the regularities pointed outside the "functional rhetoric"
of the Liberal creed to the existence of objective limits and, therefore, of
laws of functioning which, beyond the conscious intentionalities of their
subjectsWhite or Blackdetermined the limits to the order's
normative incorporation of those whose lives in a "free" country had to
be made to serve as the "graphed function" of the boundary
maintaining system, as its markers of Chaos, the Not-Us. The Spanish historian
Americo Castro had noted the existence of this systemic function of Blacks in the comparison he made
between their function and that of Jew and Moor in sixteenth-century Spain. Although converted Christians
and, therefore, "according to the gospel and the sacraments of the Church," forming a part of the "mystical
Body of Christ and His Church," these categories had been stigmatized as being of unclean blood and
heretical descent (i.e., not Spanish-Christian). Their proscribed livesthey were excluded from jobs; many
were burnt at the stake by the Inquisition for "heresy"enabled them to function as the mode of Difference
from which the new secularizing bonding principle of limpieza, which came to constitute the "boundary
maintaining system" of the Statal Group Subject of monarchical Spain, could be generated as an ontologized
principle of Sameness. Here Americo Castro pointed to the regularity of the parallel by which the
subordination of the lives of the category-bearers of difference to their "grasped function" is repeated in the
lives of present day American Blacks, who are today re-enacting and "living a drama similar to that of the
Spanish moriscos and Jews," even though according to the Constitution they form part of the American We
Only with their complete strategic

marginalization did the by now bantustanized enclave studies begin to
rethink their function: to grasp a connection with that of the Liminal
outsider Jester's role of the original Studia, a role to which they were heir. This became clear
as they began to take as their parallel objects of inquiry the representations which had been
made of their groups by the order of discourse of mainstream
scholarship; as they began to find that these representations, too, functioned according to across the
board, objective rules. What was here revealed, when taken all together, were the regularities
of the "figuring" of an Other excluded series, with the discourse functioning to
(Americo Castro, 1977) or group-Subject.
constitute them as a "human species" totemic operator which paralleled that of the "animal species" totemic
operator of traditional Neolithic societies as well as the planetary grid of the Christian medieval order. This
discourse, then, operated to serve the same extra-cognitive function of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle
Ages. It re-enacted the celestial/terrestrial physico-ontological principle of Difference in new terms: this time
in terms of a bioontological principle of Sameness/Difference, expressed, not in the Spirit/Flesh order of
value of the Christian-medieval order, but in the rational/irrational mode of Order/Chaos of our own.
Whatever the groupwomen, natives, niggerswhatever the categorythe Orient, Africa, the tropics the
ordering principle of the discourse was the same: the figuration of an

ontological order of value between the groups who were markers of
"rationality" and those who were the markers of its Lack-State. And the
analyses which had begun to perceive the lawlike regularities of these ordering discourses went from
Virginia Woolf's observation of the compulsive insistence by "angry male professors" on the mental
inferiority of women, through Carter G. Woodson's diagnosis (1935) of the lawlike manner in which the
curriculum in American schools distorted history so as to represent the Whites as everything and the Blacks
as nothing, to Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism, which again diagnosed the regularities with which
the colonizers rewrote the past to show themselves as having done everything and the colonized nothing,
and, more recently Abdel Malek's/Edward Said's dissection of the phenomenon of Orientalism.4' What began
to come clear was the reality of the reflex automatic functioning of rules of figuration, parallel to those of
Galileo's doctors of philosophy, which went beyond the intentionality of the objectively rational scholar, rules
which then revealed that the objectivity was that of the ratiomorphic apparatus or cognitive mechanism of
our present organization of knowledge, one by which we are all, including the liminal Others, non-consciously
governed. A parallel suspicion of something automatic functioning beyond the conscious control of the

human had impelled the exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud, which was to be published under
the title, Why War?. In the early decades of the century Einstein had written Freud, asking if his new
discipline could provide some hope with respect to, and in the context of, the acceleration of the
phenomenon of inter-human wars. Freud had responded that there was his theory of the instincts but that as
yet he had no overall answer. Psychology as a discipline, however, was to confront the question by focussing
on the connection between the phenomenon of nationalism and the processes of socialization which
exacerbated nationalist allegiances as a primary causal factor. And in his History of Sexuality, Michel
Foucault suggested that with the shift from the monarchical order of things to the bourgeois
order in its pure statethe transposition from a governing figurative "symbolic of blood" to what
might be called a "metaphorics of naturality" in which the bourgeoisie comes to
image its boundary-maintaining Group-Subject system on the analogy of a living
organismthe imperative of the self-preservation of the "natural
community" (nation-Volk, race, culture) metaphorically ontologized as a
"biological" Body, had led to the acceleration of wars between men who
were now led to imagine themselves, for the first time in human history,
as "natural beings."42 Recently Lewis Thomas, the biologist, has again focussed on the
connection between nationalismwhich he sees as an evolutionary blind alley for the
human as a speciesand the threat of nuclear extinction. Like Einstein earlier, Thomas
has glimpsed that hope, if it is to exist, would have to be found in a new order
of knowledge. And he suggests that the disciplines that were concerned with
the problems of human behavior, although still in a groping uncertain
stage, are the only ones capable of providing an answer to mankind's
quest for social hope; that one day there would emerge from these uncertain attempts, a "solid"
discipline as "hard" as physics, plagued "as physics still is with ambiguities" yet with new rules "and new
ways of getting things done, such as for instance getting rid of patriotic rhetoric and thermonuclear warfare
such a discipline can only emerge with

an overall rewriting of knowledge, as the re-enacting of the original
heresy of a Studia, reinvented as a science of human systems, from the liminal
perspective of the "base" (Dewey, 1950) new Studies, whose revelatory heresy lies in their
all at once."" The proposal I am making is that
definition of themselves away from the Chaos roles in which they had been definedBlack from Negro,
these have revealed the

connection between the way we identify ourselves and the way we act
upon/know the world. They have made clear that we are governed in the way we know the world
Chicano from Mexican-American, Feminists from Women, etc. For
by the templates of identity or modes of self-troping speciation, about which each human system autoinstitutes itself, effecting the dynamics of an autopoetics, whose imperative of stable reproduction has
hitherto transcended the imperatives of the human subjects who collectively put it into dynamic play. The
proposed science of human systems, therefore, decenters the systemic subject. Instead, it takes as the
object of its inquiry the modes of symbolic self-representation (Creutzfeld, 1979), about which each human
system auto-institutes itself, the modes of self-troping rhetoricity through which the Subject
(individual/collective) actualizes its mode of being as a living entity. In addition, it takes the ratiomorphic
apparatus or episteme, which exists as the enabling rational world view of the self-troping mode of being as
an object of inquiry in the comparative context in which it is definable as one of the cognitive mechanisms
determined by the "psychogeny" of the human rather than by the phylogeny of purely biological organisms.
Taking the connection that Thomas makes between "patriotic rhetoric"

and "thermo-nuclear warfare" as a key linkage, a science of human
systems will take most crucially as an object of its inquiry the modes of

cultural imagination of human systemsJerison's "imagery systems"together with the
laws of functioning of the rhetorically coded mode of figuration, which, with its internal mediation of the
mimesis of Desire (Girard, 1965) and of Aversion (Fanon, 1967), orients the normative
seeking/avoiding/knowing behaviors of the systemic subjects. For it is this governing system of figuration
generated from the mode of self-definition which integrates with the neurophysiological machinery of the
brain, that functions as the shared integrative mechanism, determining not only the mode of consciousness
or "world of mind" of the order, but serving also, at the aesthetico-affective level of the order, to stabilize the
response to the target-stimuli of Desire for all that is the Self/Order and of Aversion to all that is the Chaos of
the Self, the Death of its Life. It is by thereby securing shared and predictably functioning endogenous
waveshapes in the brain (Thatcher/John, 1977), of the normative Subject of the order, that the system of
figuration sets limits to that Subject's mode of imagining its Self/Group-Self and, therefore, to the knowledge
that it can have of its world. A science of human systems which takes the laws of figuration of human
systems as its objects of inquiry must, therefore, adopt a synthetic rather than categorized approach to its
subject. In order to study their rhetor-neurophysiological laws of functioning, it must above all breach the
distinction between brain/minds, the natural and the human sciences. For one of its major hypotheses is that
systems of figuration
and their group-speciating Figuration-Work essentially constitute the

shared governing rhetor-neurophysiological programs or abduction schemas through which human Group
boundary maintaining systems. These governing

rhetor-neurophysiological programs--which can often function as regressive defects of social fantasy
(Thatcher/John 1977), as in the case of limpieza de sangre and of Aryaness, as well as of an
ontologized whiteness--are the mechanisms which determine the limit of
the figuratively coded "boundary-maintaing" systems. They then
function, as in the case of the American order, to set objective limits (such
as those to Bradley's hopes) to the definition of its fiction; and to the possible nonproscription of Black Culture Center at the nether edge of the campus, as the physical
Subjects realize themselves as
expression of the rhetorical configuration of the mode of chaos to the order's self-troping definition of itself.
Hence the paradox of the major proposal that we make: that it is the literary humanities which should be the
umbrella site for the transdisciplinary realization of a science of human systems.
Traditional knowledge production in debate leads to epistemological

myopia
Dr. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh Department Of

Communications, 8
("THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL
PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pages 81-83) (***Edited for ablist language)
The process of signifyin engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not
simply designed to critique the use of traditional evidence; their
goal is to challenge the relationship between social power and
knowledge. In other words, those with social power within the
debate community are able to produce and determine legitimate
knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to maintain
the dominance of normative knowledge-making practices, while
crowding out or directly excluding alternative knowledge-making

practices. The Louisville framework looks to the people who are oppressed
by current constructions of power. Jones and Green offer an alternative

framework for drawing claimsin debate speeches, they refer to it as a
three-tier process: A way in which you can validate our claims, is through
the three-tier process. Andwe talk about personal experience, organic
intellectuals, and academic intellectuals . Let me give you an analogy. If
you place an elephant in the room and send in three blind folded [masked]
people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the
elephant. And they come back outside and you ask each different person
they gone have a different idea about what they was talking about. But, if
you let those people converse and bring those three different people
together then you can achieve a greater truth. Jones argues that
without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular
perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic power.
The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per se, instead they
seek to augment or supplement what counts as evidence with other forms of
knowledge produced outside of academia. As Green notes in the doubleocto-finals at CEDA Nationals, Knowledge surrounds me in the streets,
through my peers, through personal experiences, and everyday
wars that I fight with my mind. The thee-tier process: personal
experience, organic intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a
method of argumentation that taps into diverse forms of knowledge-making
practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and organic
intellectuals are placed on par with traditional forms of evidence.
While the Louisville debaters see the benefit of academic research, they are
also critically aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic
minorities from policy-oriented discussions because of their lack of training
and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical solutions to racism, classism,
sexism, and homophobia from being more permanently addressed.
According to Green: bell hooks talks about how when we rely solely on
one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory theory
becomes rootless. Thats the reason why we use a three-tiered process.
Thats why we use alternative forms of discourse such as hip hop.
Thats also how we use traditional evidence and our personal narratives so
you dont get just one perspective claiming to be the right way.
Because it becomes a more meaningful and educational view as far
as how we achieve our education.The use of hip hop and personal
experience function as a check against the homogenizing function of
academic and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks, Green
argues that without alternative perspectives, radical libratory theory
becomes rootless. The term rootless seems to refer to a lack of
grounded-ness in the material circumstances that academics or
experts study. In other words, academics and experts by definition
represent an intellectual population with a level of objective distance from
that which they study. For the Louisville debaters, this distance is
problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that is

rooted in the community of those most greatly affected by the

status of oppression.
Democracy
Democracy and democratic practices are intertwined with racial

violence. That means they perpetuate violent democratic structures
Olson, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, 04
(Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004,
Two public acts characterized the democratic will of antebellum
America: the vote and the riot. The age that heralded the rise of the
first mass democracy in the world was also one of the most violent,
turbulent times in American history. Riots, lynch mobs, insurrections, and other
disturbances swept the urban landscape like a panic. In 1835 alone, seventy-one
people died in 147 riots across the country. Between 1830 and 1865 over seventy percent of all cities with a
population of 20,000 or more experienced some kind of major civil disorder. 1 Jacksonian
mobs
rioted for many reasons but the greatest number were in defense of
slavery and Black subordination. Mobs attacked Black people, abolitionists,
amalgamatorsanyone whose actions or mere existence raised the specter of social equality. But the riots
The majority were

organized, disciplined, and under the leadership of the citys most
prominent gentlemen. Mayors, congressmen, attorneys general, physicians, lawyers, and
were not the spontaneous actions of a few drunk mechanics gone mad. Hardly.
newspaper editors directed the mobs activities at night and defended them in the morning, often citing
The riots, participants argued, were

necessary to preserve American democracy from attempts to
undermine it by abolitionists, Negroes, and Tory agents.2 How could
such violence be done in the name of democracy and slavery alike ?
them as expressions of the will of the majority.
How could men, esteemed and lowly, invoke the heroes of the Revolutionary War as they burned Black
tenements? How could citizens of a democratic republic perpetuate such tyranny and terror? These
questions go to the heart of the problem of race in American democracy. Their answer, I argue, lies
in an analysis of the relationship between race and democracy that was established in the antebellum era. In
lies in the relationship between what it meant to be a citizen

and what it meant to be white. A common apology for the white mobs is that they
particular, it
represented a sad aberration of democracy. The universal democratic ideals of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution had not yet been fully implemented in the body politic due to significant
exclusions based on race, gender, and class. Racist mobs were tragic proof that the United States had a
ways to go before it would fully live up to its own ideals. Underlying this explanation is the assumption that
the mobs were antidemocratic. But this is certainly not how the rioters understood their actions. They took
themselves to be protectors of republican institutions .
Mob leaders presented
themselves as patriotsseveral claimed to have ancestors who came
over on the MayXowerwhile mobs christened themselves with names

like the Sons of Liberty and the Minutemen. The mobs saw anti-Black
riots as absolutely democratic, whether they involved tarring Black
people or smashing abolitionist presses. The question, then, is not
whether the white rioters were democratic but what kind of democracy

they believed in, practiced, and fought for. Riots and other acts of
racial oppression served to protect the color line.
But this line was much more

than a bar that excluded certain people from membership in the republic or that undermined democratic
ideals. It constructed democratic citizenship itself. And in turn, citizenship served to construct and defend
the color line. The result was the white citizen. To say that the antebellum American citizen was white is not
an empirical observation. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of a successful political struggle in which certain
persons won the right to proclaim themselves white and therefore citizens or potential citizens, largely by
distinguishing themselves from slaves and free Black persons.
The Black Subject's Absence from all State or Capital Formations

Functions as the Basis of the American Democracy but Kills and
Exploits Itself. Moreover, it Calls Into Question Productivity
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full
professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of
California, Irvine. Pp. 6-8, AF)
The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave , by way of noting
the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subjects potential for extending the
demand placed on state/capital formations because its reintroduction into
the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism . In other words, the slave
makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker demands that
productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the
proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop without
recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle
for the slave. The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is
symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with the possibility that
the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries,
and the generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-accumulation
crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the
basic categories which structure marxist conflict: the categories of work, production,
exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by way of the Black subject,
we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it mean to
be free? that grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up
against a grammar of suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a
grammar of suffering beyond signification itself, a suffering that cannot be
spoken because the gratuitous terror of White supremacy is as much
contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared pleasures
as it is upon a logicthe logic of capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking
about this terror, Cornel West uses the term black invisibility and
namelessness to designate, at the level of ontology, what we are calling a scandal at the
level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting assault on black
humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that of
black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility
and namelessness, the first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit
A central preoccupation of black culture is that of

confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and
existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and
selfannihilation. This is why the "ur-text" of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and
architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for
help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition . (80-81) Thus, the
Black subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand that can not
suicide as a desirable option.

be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing
rubrics; whereas the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that
can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful War of Position, which brings about the
end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy of
productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of
productivity itself. From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is
raised. But the question hides the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden
grammar which has already posed and answered the question, What does
it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized around the categories of
exploitation (unfair labor relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the only category of
oppression which concerns Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the
exploitation of the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again, this is inadequate, because it
would call White supremacy "racism" and articulate it as a derivative
phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating White
supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the base itself. 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 can not give its consent
because generalized trust, the precondition for the solicitation of
consent, equals racialized whiteness (Lindon Barrett). Furthermore, as Orland 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 labor 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 Cornel 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 America's metaphor ." (72) And it is
well known that a metaphor comes into being through a violence which
kills, rather than merely exploits, the object, that the concept might live. West's
interventions help us see how marxism can only come to grips with
America's structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political
economy; but cannot come to grips with America's structuring
irrationality: the libidinal economy of White supremacy, and its hyperdiscursive violence which kills the Black subject 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 thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors
in the world of U.S. social movements today) which is so dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil
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 anti-Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of
society:
a hypothetical scenario. In the early part of the 20th century, civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will, around
emerging industries such as meat packing. In his notes on Americanism and Fordism (280-314), Gramsci explores
the scientific management of Taylorism, the prohibition on alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working
class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of civil society in places like turn of the century Chicago:
Deleuzian becoming
By trying to put yourself in the body of a black person you are
putting yourself in control of the body which leads to the
exploitation and forcible whiteness of the slave.
Hartman, 3. (professor at Columbia University specializing in African
American literature and history, and Wilderson III, professor of African
American Studies @ UC Irvine, Saidiya and Frank B, published
Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought, pg 185-186)
Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection,
S. VH. -
there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-
And there was a certain sense in which

the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as a way
of refashioning whiteness, and there were all these rad ical claims that were being made for it.14
century culture
and on minstrelsy in particular.
And I thought, "Oh, no, this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." It doesn't mat ter whether you do
good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's why think
ing about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material rela tions of slavery was so key for me. F.W -Yes,
that's clarifying.
A body that you can do what you want with. In your discussion of the
body as the property of enjoyment, what I really like is when you talk about Rankin. Here's a guy like
the prototypical twentieth-century white progressive anti-slavery and
uses his powers of observation to write for its abo lition, even to his slave-owning
brother. He's in the South, he's looking at a slave coffle, and he imagines that these slaves
being beaten could be himself and his family. Through this process it
makes sense to him, it becomes meaningful. His body and his fam ily
members' white bodies become proxies for real enslaved black bodies
and, as you point out, the actual object of identification, the slave,
disappears. S.V.H. - I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical ques
tions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the
status of the other. It's as though in order to come to any recogni tion of
common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case,
utterly displaced and effaced: "Only if I can see myself in that position
can I understand the crisis of that position." That is the logic of the moral and political
discourses we see everyday the need for the innocent black subject to be
victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state.
You have to be
exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to .. .
F.W. -
[laughter] A nigga on the warpath!
S.
the moments of the

sympathetic ally, who in some ways telling is actually no more able to
see the slave than the person who is exploiting him or her as their
property. That is the work Rankin does and I think it suggests just how
ubiquitous that kind of violence, in fact, is.
V.H. -
Exactly! For me it was those moments that were the most -
Economy
Economics is infiltrated with racist politics. Growth
differentially affects racial populations and leaves
marginalized groups in the dust
Gabriel and Todorova 02 (Satyananda J., Evgenia O., Racism and
Capitalist Accumulation: An Overdetermined Nexus, Journal of Critical
Sociology- [SG])
The pervasiveness of racial consciousness cannot help but shape the economic
relationships in contemporary capitalist social formations. The interaction of
racialized agents shapes the parameters of a wide range of economic processes
such as market exchange transactions, employment contracts, pricing, capital
budgeting decisions, and so on. The fact that one can observe patterns of
differential economic success and failure based on racial categories is evidence
of the impact of racism upon agents.
Economic theories, both Marxian and neoclassical, have attempted to explain rational behavior of agents in the context of
the market for labor-power. The Marxian approach has been to make sense of this market in the context of capitalist exploitation, for which the market in labor-power is a precondition. Capitalism presupposes the existence of
free wage laborers. In the Marxian tradition, direct producers become "free" to sell their labor-power as a result of determinate social and natural processes. It is in this process of gaining capitalist freedom that the rationality
In this sense, it was born of a complex

association of ideas. In some instances, this would have included, from the
earliest stages of capitalist development, ideas produced within racist paradigms.
The wage laboring consciousness necessary for an agent to be willing and able to
sell her labor power would have been influenced, in the Western Europe and
Great Britain of early capitalist development, by aristocratic racism and then later
by white supremacist racism.
creation of labor markets would, necessarily, be very different in
an environment where direct producers view themselves as already free
The classic case is that of Tanganyika, under
German colonial rule, where resistance to working as wage laborers was so
strong that entire villages would move rather than submit to the labor market in
order to meet the imposed hut taxes. These villagers had lived as communal
producers, collectively performing and appropriating surplus labor. Their history
was one of collective decision-making, communal freedom, and the absence of
racialized consciousness.
of wage laboring is formed. Capitalist freedom came to exist in contrast to serfdom and slavery.
The perception of capitalist freedom, in contrast to serfdom or slavery, would certainly have made it easier to create, reproduce and expand the
wage laboring consciousness. Thus, the
. There are countless
stories of the difficulties of creating labor markets in African colonies, for instance.
Capitalist freedom did not appear to be an attractive alternative. This was not the case in Britain, Western Europe, or the United States, where the
perceived alternative was, in many but not all cases, serfdom or slavery. Under those conditions, the legitimacy of capitalist freedom was less likely to be challenged. We have already mentioned the importance of dissociation
The various forms of racialized

consciousness that were prevalent in most capitalist social formations, having
already produced forms of dissociation and alienation in the consciousness of
direct producers and others, may have been critical to the rapidity with which
labor markets were established and expanded.
to creating a wage laboring consciousness, one in which the individual can sell her labor power like so many bushels of tomatoes.
Economics growth
The promise of economic growth for all and democracy to come
is the most pernicious lie of whitenessthe affirmative defuses
revolutionary energy into an always unrequited hope,
justifying violence, warfare and racism through the dream of
inclusion.
Hoescht 2008 (Heidi, PhD in Literature from UCSD, Refusable Pasts:
Speculative Democracy, Spectator Citizens, and the Dislocation of Freedom
in the United States, Proquest Dissertations)
This dissertation examines the intimate connections between
emancipatory democracy and speculative economics. It studies
cultural texts that reflect and express national ideals of U.S. democracy
that emereged in three periods of heightened captialist speculation the
Jacksonian period of the 1830s, the 1930s Popular Front period, and the rise
of liberal multiculturalism between 1980 to the present. The project
engages two kinds of cultural texts. The project derives its proximate objects
of the study--folklore, literature, literary criticism, stage performances,
community festivals and public parksfrom a range of critical and cultural
texts produced by Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
George Catlin, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the neighborhood of Powderhorn
Park. Yet, the disseration also explores a second text that connects these
seemingly disparate objects and authors. The social text that binds the
chapters of this dissertaion is a broader text of U.S. culture and social
practice that is conditioned and inflated by the logic of speculation. This
second text reveals culture as a central link in the economic project of U.S.
nationalism. Culture in this text, is a key technology by which U.S. inequality
is reproduced, reiterated, and translated across contexts. I argue that the
cultural logic of specualiton disables possibilities for participatory
democracy and racial, gendered, and class justice and equality. This
logic aligns the emancipatory aspirations of aggreived groups to the
market and property interests of elites. I show that culture has been
instrumental for expanding social inequality through the promises of U.S.
nationalism. The speculative logic of U.S. democracy relies on the
category of "not yet freedom" to hide economic and racial
inequalities. It preserves the idea of democracy only by deferring
actual justice to a perpetually pushed back future. The pursuit of
democracy in the United States has been haunted by histories of refusal and
deferral. When aggrieved groups ask for emancipation, elites often
respond with promises of freedom without doing the hard work of
creating justice. Refusable Pasts explores how the national culture of
the United States portrays the deferral of freedom to some
unspecified "not yet" time in the future as evidence of real
democratic inclusion in the present. Promises of future freedom

evidence the power and pervasiveness of popular aspirations for
democracy. Yet because national culture offers aggrieved groups
democratic promises rather than democratic practices, it also
demonstrates the power of elites to suppress popular democracy and
preserve their own privileges. Speculative logic and market subjectivity
permeate U.S. national culture. Speculative practices originate in
economic relations, but their logic structures national culture as
well. Speculative logics promising future growth have connected the
expressive cultures of U.S nationalism to the economic life of the
nation's elites. Just as investors anticipate that economic returns in the
future will reward their work in the present, citizens are encouraged to
defer their desires for empowerment, autonomy, dignity and
community to some perpetually promised but never quite realized
time of "not yet" freedom in the future. Hope functions as a
fundamental mechanism for deferring freedom to the future and
refusing radical change in the present. Under these conditions,
culture serves as a cover story promoting economic expansion and
empire, slavery and racial subordination, plunder and perpetual
warfare. The national culture of the nation works to instantiate, legitimate,
and perpetuate economic inequality and social stratification. It is also one
forum that elites use to manage the emancipatory aspirations of popular
struggles. Culture counts because stories centered on the logic of
speculation promise symbolic reconciliations as the salve to the wounds
caused by the perpetuation of inequalities in society. The speculative
logics that inform national culture portray inexcusable injustices in
the present as mere preludes to a promised prosperity and freedom
in the future. Thus, the democratic promises inscribed inside
national culture actually function as powerful mechanisms for the
perpetuation of decidedly undemocratic practices and policies.
Education
The Modern Educational System Reentrenches the White-Over-Black
System and Continues to Shield the Persistence of Institutionalized
Racism
Farley 5, Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at
Boston College Before Teaching at Albany Perfecting Slavery Page 230-231
Slavery, our slavery, begins and ends with white-over-black. It sometimes seems that we
have moved away from the tyranny, from the terror, from slaverys death to some New England town meeting that
It sometimes
seems to some of us that we are on the verge of some great gettin up
mornin in which the dead will awaken, the many thousands gone will return, and all will
be right as rain, right as rain and without the thunder. We are said to have moved from slavery to
segregation to neosegregation. Free at last! Free at last! Free at last! Or so our masters tell us. But the fire
bell is still ringing in the night, somewhere behind the wall of sleep, and
all is not as it seems in the Promised Land of the Civil Rights Movement dream. Before the
includes, or will quite soon include, the souls of all those hitherto enslaved black folk. 27
morning is night and memory and forgetting will not let us simply declare things to be alright. Slavery is white-overblack. Segregation is white-over-black. Neosegregation is white-over-black.
The movement, then, from
slavery to segregation to neosegregation, from the so-called past to the so-called present,
from then to now, is movement from white-over-black to whiteover-black to whiteover-black, and that is not movement. That is the motionlessness of death. The so-called Civil
Rights Movement has taken us from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. White-over-black,
whatever its juridical designation, is slavery. Slavery is death. The end, death, requires a beginning. White-
We begin
after we are called. We are called and that is when and how we all begin. There is a calling. We are called
upon to be. We can only be by becoming. What we become depends upon the
calling that we choose to follow. We become the calling that we make our
own. Jonathan Kozol writes of education in the neosegregated, post-Brown v. Board of Education era as death at
an early age. 29 White-over-black is death at an early age. Slaves are not called. Slavery is death. Education
is where this death begins. 28
overblack begins where it ends. White-over-black begins with death. Education is where we begin.
Equality
The call for equality will always fail. Claims of American progression
are all lies. Civil society produces a perfected form of slavery, where
violence is hidden from us by a mask of freedom and reformism.
Liberation is impossible under current legal structure, and their
unwillingness to break away from that structure reinforces
hierarchies of anti-blackness through a process of the slave willingly
bowing down to its master.
Farley 05
(Anthony Paul, Professor of Law @ Boston College, Perfecting Slavery, 1/27/2005, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)
The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.
And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth,
and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of
constitutional liberty. People will be able to liberate themselves only after the
legal superstructure itself has begun to wither away. And when we begin to overcome
and to do without these [juridical] concepts in reality, rather than merely in declarations, that will be the surest sign that the narrow horizon of bourgeois
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery.

We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and
segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the
distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The
movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to
whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with postmodernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from
slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of
slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All
of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery
is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told
juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law.
And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it
bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave
accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree. When exactly does this
perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its
master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights,
and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer. The
slaves free choice, the slaves leap of faith, can only be taken under
conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as
law is finally opening up before us.
a slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason or the kingdom of ends or the New England town
meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these
Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many

mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget its father,
as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery has not been
forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not
been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the
gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not forgotten
its origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that. It
knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count. room,7
festivals of the universal.

every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything. Requests
for equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of
need itself means that the request will fail. The request for equality
and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or
denied. The request is produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for lessless respect, less land, less freedom, less
education, less. The mark must be made on the flesh because that is where
we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes,
orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the
mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of
those essencesrace, gender, class, and so onthat are said to
precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow
the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin
with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be
exact, education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our education cultivates our desire in the direction of our
hierarchies. If we are successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis--vis all the other bodies that inhabit our
We follow the call and move in the generally expected way.

White-overblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables
us to find our place, and therefore our way, in our institutional
spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom.
This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rightsfor equalitywill
always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for
less, to be marked as less than zero, to be marked as a negative
attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not
called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the calling
that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death
institutional spaces.
is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is
always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom,
objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave
he
texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of
wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty
or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The
story, the law, the wolves table manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the
gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slaves final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. T
story of law, the dream of wolves, however, represents a diuised or latent wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to
The dream of equality, of rights, is the diuised wish for

hierarchy. The prayer for equal rights is the diuised desire for
slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the
diuise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slaves perfect moment. The slaves perfect prayer, the prayer of
ourselves.
the perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows not what it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own
inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave
strives to produce the final commodity law. In other words, the slave produces itself as a slave through law. The slave produces itself as a slave (as a
commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights.
The slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no
law before the slave bows down. The slaves fidelity becomes the law,
and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle for the
universal, through the slaves struggle for equality of right. The
slave prays for equality of right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect
prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities open, like the gates of
heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black
accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains down.
Whiteoverblack is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond

If there is
hierarchy, white-over-black, for example, there is an experience of
pleasure in it. Bodies are marked white-over-black. This is a
pleasure and a desire. Property is marked white-over-black. This too
is a pleasure and a desire. Law, following the system of marks and
the system of property, is white-over-black, and a pleasure and a
desire. There are always ambiguities. The ambiguities are vessels of our desires. Our pleasures and desires follow the colorline. In a colorlined
the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever. There is a pleasure in this death. It is the pleasure of hierarchy.
order, all institutions are ordered by the colorline. A white-over-black orientation is required to navigate the institutions that order life. In other words, a
white-over-black orientation is required to follow the colorline, and one must follow the colorline or lose ones way. The ambiguities, then, are always
white-over-black. White-over-black is the North Star. Every correct legal answer is white-over-black. There is a pleasure and a desire in moving to the
correct answer. The pleasure and desire of moving to the correct answer is experienced as the sublime pleasure of the legal method, as the sovereignty
of death. The commodity reaches its apogee in the black.11 There is no black, save for white-over-black. White-over-black is slavery. Slavery is death.
Death is the end of it all. Death is the complete end. Death, then, is perfection, the end of all things. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it prays for
slavery. The slave, being perfect in that moment of prayer, is one with that before which it bows down in prayer. The slave prays to itself for itself to be
transformed into itself and so its perfect prayer is always already granted. The slave prays for equal rights. Rights cannot be equal. If the slave were not
hated, lessened, then it would never experience itself as lessthan. Without the experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not arise. To be a
slave is to become what one becomes through the experience of less-than. The less-than experience may be expressed as white-over-black. White-overblack is an identity and an orientation. White-over-black is a form of training. Our institutions, under the colorline, are forms of white-over-black. Every
Our institutions, under the colorline, are forms of

training in white-over-black. The sum of our institutions is the sum
of our training. The fact of white-over-black means that white-overblack has become the form of our institutions and the orientation
required to move through them. White-over-black as fact means
that ambiguities are resolved into white-over-black. The fact that
the slave is hated means that hating the slave has become a habit
and a pleasure and a desire and a system of training (a system of
providing pleasure and cultivating desire).
institution is a form of training.
Exploration
The desire to explore the unknown is intimately tied to the desire to
execute violence against the unknown the 1acs act of exploration
carries with it a history soaked in the blood of the middle passage
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor @
Vanderbilt University The John Hopkins University Press, Mama's Baby,
Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,
http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/8/14, KM)
Turning directly to this source, we discover what we had not expected to find that this
aspect of the search is rendered problematic and that observations of a field
of manners and its related sociometries are an outgrowth of the industry of
the exterior other [Todorv 3], called anthropology later on. The European males
who laded and captained these galleys and who policed and corralled these
human beings, in hundreds of vessels from Liverpool to Elmina, to Jamaica; from the Cayenne
Islands, to the ports at Charleston and Salem, and for three centuries of human life, were not
curious about this cargo that bled, packed like so many live sardines
among the immovable objects. Such inveterate obscene blindness might be
denied, point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except that we know it happened. Donnas
first volume covers three centuries of European discovery and conquest, beginning 50 years before pious Cristobal,
Christum Ferens, the bearer of Christ, laid claim to what he thought was the indies. From Gomes Eannes de
Azuraras Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441-1448 [Donnan 1:18-41], we learn that the
Portuguese probably gain the dubious distinction of having introduced black Africans to the European market of
servitude.
We are also reminded that Geography is not a divine gift. Quite to the
contrary, its boundaries were shifted during the European Age of Conquest in giddy
desperation, according to the dictates of conquering armies, the edicts of prelates, the peculiar myopia of the
medieval Christian mind.
Looking for the Nile River, for example, according to the fifteenth-
century Portuguese notion, is someones joke. For all that the pre-Columbian explorers
knew about the sciences of navigation and geography, we are surprised that more parties of them did not end up
discovering Europe. Perhaps,
from a certain angle, that is precisely all that they

found an alternative reading of ego. The Portuguese, having little idea
where the Nile ran, at least understood right away that there were men and
women darker-skinned than themselves, but they were not specifically knowledgeable, or
ingenious, about the various families and groupings represented by them. De Azurara records encounters with
Moors, Mooresses, Mulattoes, and people black as Ethiops [1:28], but it seems that the Land of Guinea, or
of Black Men, or of The Negros [1:35] was located anywhere southeast of Cape Verde, the Canaries, and the
River Senegal, looking at an eighteenth-century European version of the subsarharan Continent along the West
African coast [1:frontispiece]. Three genetic distinctions are available to the Portuguese eye, all along the riffs of
melanin in the skin: in a field of captives, some of the observed are white enough, fair to look upon, and wellproportioned. Others are less white like mulattoes, and still others black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in
features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere [1:28]. By
implication, this third man, standing for the most aberrant phenotype to the observing eye, embodies the
linguistic community most unknown to the European. Arabic translators among the Europeans could at least talk
this grammar of
description the perspective of declension, not of simultaneity, and its
point of initiation is solipsistic it begins with a narrative self, in an apparent
unity of feeling, and unlike Equiano, who also saw ugly when he looked out, this collective self
uncovers the means by which to subjugate the foreign code of
conscience, whose most easily remarkable and irremediable difference is
perceived in skin color. By the time of De Azuraras mid-fifteenth century narrative and a century and a
to the Moors and instruct them to ransom themselves, or else Typically, there is in
half before Shakespeares old black ram of an Othello tups that white ewe of a Desdemona, the magic of skin
color is already installed as a decisive factor in human dealings. In De Azuraras narrative, we observe males
looking at other males, as female is subsumed here under the general category of estrangement. Few places in

these excerpts carve out a distinct female space, though there are moments of portrayal that perceive female
captives in the implications of socio-cultural function. When the field of captives (referred to above) is divided
among the spoilers, no heed is paid to relations, as fathers are separated from sons, husbands from wives, brothers
from sisters and brothers, mothers from children male and female. It seems clear that the political program of
European Christianity promotes this hierarchical view among males, although it remains puzzling to us exactly how
this version of Christianity transforms the pagan also into the ugly. It appears that human beings came up with
degrees of fair and then the hideous, in its overtones of bestiality, as the opposite of fair, all by themselves,
without stage direction, even though there is the curious and blazing exception of Nietzsches Socrates, who was
Athens ugliest and wisest and best citizen. The intimate choreography that the Portuguese narrator sets going
between the faithless and the ugly transforms a partnership of dancers into a single figure. Once the faithless,
indiscriminate of the three stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they become an altered
human factor: And so their lot was now quite contrary to what it had been, since before they had lived in perdition
of soul and body; of their souls, in that they were yet pagans, without the clearness and the light of the Holy Faith;
and of their bodies, in that they lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings for they had no
knowledge of bread and wine, and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgment of houses; and worse
than all, through the great ignorance that was in them, in that they had no understanding of good, but only knew
how to live in bestial sloth. [1:30]
Environmental Injustice
Poor communities are effected by environmental injustices
Rimes 10 (Ben Rimes, Apr 14, 2010, E-waste: Dumping on the
Poor, Environment, Science, Social Studies Educator ,The tech Savy
Educator, http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/774)
This month Im sharing a short movie clip with my 5th graders about just
one way that the world, and more specifically the U.S., disposes of
their electronic waste; old computers, cell phones, digital cameras, etc.
The problem Im presenting to them is simple. Many thousands of pieces of
technology are tossed out into the garbage each and every day. Some
communities have recycling centers and programs for dealing with the
toxic materials, plastics, and metal found in our electronics, but many
communities simple dont know what happens to e-waste thats just
tossed in the trash. A lot of that e-waste ends up overseas, dumped in
rivers (yes, computers just dumped in a body of water as a disposal
method), buried in landfills, or just left in piles. While the
environment suffers in these areas, its really the inhabitants of that
area, the poorest residents that is, that actually live in a lot of that
trash, or make a living by digging through that trash, and subjecting
themselves to a lot of toxins and pollutants as they strip old computer
parts for valuable materials.
Critique of Whiteness can also serve to break down

environmental destruction and animal exploitation.
CONE 2000 JAMES H. Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary and the author of many books on black theology of
liberation, including Martin and Malcolm and America. WHOSE EARTH IS IT ANYWAY?, , http://www.crosscurrents.org/cone.htm accessed 6/29/12
the rule of white supremacy

throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation
of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and
instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms
of their contribution to the development and defense of white world
supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to
connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological -whether they know it or not. People who struggle against
environmental degradation but do not incorporate in it a disciplined
and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists -- whether
they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be
segregated but must be integrated with the fight for life in all its
forms
The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in Africa, and
. Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African American community. "Blacks don't care about the environment" is a typical comment by white
ecologists. Racial and economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream environmental movement. "White people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the
survival of young blacks in our nation's cities" is a well-founded belief in the African American community. Justice fighters for blacks and the defenders of the earth have tended to ignore each other in their public discourse and
Their separation from each other is unfortunate because they are

fighting the same enemy -- human beings' domination of each other
and nature
practice.
. The leaders in the mainstream environmental movement are mostly middle- and upper-class whites who are unprepared culturally and intellectually to dialogue with angry blacks. The leaders in
the African American community are leery of talking about anything with whites that will distract from the menacing reality of racism. What both groups fail to realize is how much they need each other in the struggle for "justice,

peace and the integrity of creation."(2) In this essay, I want to challenge the black freedom movement to take a critical look at itself through the lens of the ecological movement and also challenge the ecological movement to
we can
promote genuine
solidarity between the two groups and thereby enhance the quality
of life for the whole inhabited earth -- humankind and other kind.
critique itself through a radical and ongoing engagement of racism in American history and culture. Hopefully,
break the silence and
Environmental Regulations
Environmental antiblack racism is poisoning people of color
Bullard 02 (Robert D Bullard Ph.D, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism: Strategies for
Building Healthy and Sustainable Communities,Environmental Justice Center, Clark Atlanta University,
The United States is the dominant economic and military force in the world
today. The American economic engine has generated massive wealth,
high standard of living, and consumerism. This growth machine has also
generated waste, pollution, and ecological destruction. The U.S. has
some of the best environmental laws in the world. However, in the real world,
all communities are not created equal. Environmental regulations
have not achieved uniform benefits across all segments of
society. [2] Some communities are routinely poisoned while the
government looks the other way. People of color around the world
must contend with dirty air and drinking water, and the location of
noxious facilities such as municipal landfills, incinerators, hazardous
waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities owned by private
industry, government, and even the military.[3] These environmental
problems are exacerbated by racism. Environmental racism refers to
environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or
disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or
communities based on race or color. Environmental racism is reinforced
by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions.
Environmental racism combines with public policies and industry
practices to provide benefits for the countries in the North while shifting
costs to countries in the South. [4]
Failure to admit privilege

Being ignorant of your privilege and success in relation to whiteness
re-inscribes an unspoken and supplemental antiblackness.
Sullivan, 8
(Professor Philosophy, Womens Studies, and African and African American Studies @ Pennsylvania State University (Shannon Sullivan, Spring 2008,
Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, Vol. 44,
No. 2, Project Muse)
provincialism
tends to connote a healthy fondness for and pride in local traditions,
interests, and customs.
Royces definition
emphasizes conscious awareness of this rootedness
provincialism
is, the tendency for a group to possess its own customs and ideals
the totality of these customs
and
love and pride
Like critical conservationists regarding whiteness, Royce knows that he faces an uphill battle in convincing many of his interlocutors of the value of provincialism. Put positively,
More negatively, it means being restricted and limited, sticking to the narrow ideas of a given region or group and being indifferent, perhaps even violently
hostile to the ways of outsiders. What connects these different meanings is their sense of being rooted in a particular cultural-geographical place. In
, which
(an important point to which I will return), a province is a domain that
is sufficiently unified to have a true consciousness of its own unity, to feel a pride in its own ideals and customs, and to possess a sense of its distinction from other(s). And correspondingly,
first,
; secondly,
and ideals themselves;
thirdly the
which leads the inhabitants of a province to
cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs and aspirations (61). (End Page 238) Emphasizing unity, love, and pride, Royces definitions steer away from the negative connotations of provincialism. But in Royces dayand not
much has changed in this regardit was the negative, or false, form of provincialism that most often came to peoples minds when they thought about the value and effects of the concept. As Royce was writing in 1902, the false
provincialism, or sectionalism, of the United States Civil War was a recent memory for many of his readers. In the Civil War, stubborn commitment to one portion of the nation violently opposed it to another portion and threatened
to tear the nation apart. Provincialism, which appealed to regional values to disunite, had to be condemned in the name of patriotism, which united in the name of a higher good. Royces rhetorical strategy is to take the challenge of
defending provincialism head-on: My main intention is to define the right form and the true office of provincialismto portray what, if you please, we may call the Higher Provincialism, to portray it, and then to defend it, to extol
it, and to counsel you to further just such provincialism (65). Royce readily acknowledges that against the evil forms of sectionalism we shall always have to contend (64). But he denies that provincialism must always be evil.
the present state of civilization

is such as to define a new social mission which the province alone
is able to fulfil
.(T)he modern world has reached a point where it
needs
the vigorous development of a highly organized provincial
life. Such a life
will not mean disloyalty to the nation.
whiteness need not conflict with
membership in humanity as a whole. The two identities canand must
flourish together
embracing whiteness
might seem to be a step backward
Going against the grain of most post-Civil War thinking about provincialism, Royce urges that
, both in the world at large, and with us,
in America,
, but not the
nation,
(sic) . . .
, more than ever before,
, if wisely guided,
(64) Wisely developed, provincialism need not
conflict with national loyalty. The two commitments canand must, Royce insistsflourish together. Likewise,
. The relationship between provincialism and nationalism, as discussed by Royce, serves as a fruitful model for the relationship of whiteness and humanity, and critical
conservationists of whiteness should follow Royces lead by taking head-on the challenge of critically defending whiteness. Like embracing provincialism,
for the modern worldtoward limitation and insularity that breed ignorance, prejudice, and hostility toward others who are
different from oneself. Like having a national rather than provincial worldview, seeing oneself as a member of humanity rather than of the white race seems to embody an expansive, outward (End Page 239) orientation that is open
there is a new social mission with respect to racial justice that

whiteness
can fulfill. Race relations
have reached a
point where humanity needs a highly organized anti-racist whiteness,
that is, an anti-racist whiteness that is consciously developed and
embraced
to others. But
, and not humanity as a whole,
, especially in the United States,
. How then can we (white people, in particular) wisely guide the development of such whiteness so that it does not result in disloyalty to other races and humanity as a whole? Before addressing this
question, let me point out two important differences between whiteness and provincialism as described by Royce. First, while Royce calls for the development of a wise form of provincialism, he is able to appeal to existing
wholesome forms of provincialism in his defense of the concept. He addresses himself in the most explicit terms, to men and women who, as I hope and presuppose, are and wish to be, in the wholesome sense, provincial, and
his demand that the man of the future . . . love his province more than he does to-day recognizes a nugget of wise provincialism on which to build (65, 67). The development of wise provincialism does not have to be from scratch.
In contrast, it is more difficult to pinpoint a nugget of wholesome whiteness to use as a starting point for its transformation. Instances of white people who helped slaves and resisted slavery in the United States, for example,
certainly can be foundthe infamous John Brown is only one such examplebut such people often are seen as white race traitors who represent the abolition, not the transformation of whiteness.9 The task of critically conserving
whiteness probably will be more difficult than that of critically conserving provincialism since there is not a straightforward or obvious right form and true office of whiteness to extol. Second, true to his idealism, Royce describes
both provincialism and its development as explicitly conscious phenomena. Royce notes the elasticity of the term provinceit can designate a small geographical area in contrast with the nation, or it can designate a large
geographical, rural area in contrast with a city (5758)but it always includes consciousness of the provinces unity and particular identity as this place and not another. Put another way, probably every space, regardless of its size,
is distinctive in some way or another. What gives members of a space a provincial attitude is their conscious awareness of, and resulting pride in, that space as the distinctive place that it is. On Royces model, someone who is
provincial knows that she is, at least in some loose way. The task of developing her provincialism, then, is to develop her rudimentary conscious awareness of her province, to become more and not less self-conscious, well-
many white people

consciously think of themselves as members of this (white) race
established, and earnest in her provincial outlook (67). In contrastand here lies the largest difference between provincialism and whiteness
today
do not
and not another, not even
loosely. Excepting members of white militant groups such as the Ku (End Page 240) Klux Klan or the Creativity Movement, contemporary white people do not tend to have a conscious sense of unity as fellow white people, nor do they
consciously invoke or share special ideals, customs, or common memories as white people.
They often are perceived and perceive
themselves as raceless
such racelessness is one of the marks and privileges of
membership in whiteness
, as members of the human species at large rather than members of a particular racial group. This does not eliminate their whiteness or their membership in a
fairly unified group. Just the opposite:
, especially middle and upper class forms of whiteness. White people can feel a pride in the ideals and customs of whiteness and possess a sense of
distinction from people of other races without much, if any conscious awareness of their whiteness and without consciously identifying those ideals and customs as white. To take one brief example, styles and customs of
communication in classrooms tend to be raced (as well as classed and gendered), and white styles of discussion, hand-raising, and turn-taking tend to be treated as appropriate while black styles are seen as inappropriate.10 White
students often learn to feel proud and validated by their teachers as good students when they participate in these styles, and this almost always happens without either students or teachers consciously identifying their style (or
themselves) as white. Such students appear to belong and experience themselves as belonging merely to a group of smart, orderly, responsible students, not to a racialized group. In the United States and Western world more

whiteness tends to
operate more sub- and unconsciously than consciously
broadly, unconscious habits of whiteness and white privilege have tended to increase after the end of de jure racism.11 Unlike provincialism as described by Royce,
. But I do not think that this fact spoils wise provincialism as a
fruitful model for wise whiteness. First, and reflecting a basic philosophical disagreement that I have with Royces idealism, I doubt that provincialism always functions as consciously as Royce suggests it does. The unity, pride, and
love that are the hallmarks of provincialism could easily function in the form of unreflective beliefs, habits, preferences, and even bodily comportment. In fact I would argue that many aspects of our provincial loyaltieswhatever
type of province is at issueoperate on sub- or unconscious levels. In that case, provincialism and whiteness would not be as dissimilar in their operation as Royces description implies. Second, even if provincialism tends to
consciously unify people while whiteness does not, Royces advice that people should attempt to become more, rather than less self-conscious in their provincialism still applies to white people with respect to their whiteness.
Given whitenesss history as a racial category of violent exclusion and

oppression, one might think that white people need to focus less on their
whiteness
But just the opposite is the case. Given
that
distance from racial identification tends to be the covert modus operandi
for contemporary forms of white privilege, white people who wish to fight
racism need to become more intimately acquainted with their whiteness.
Rather than ignore their whiteness, which allows unconscious habits of
white privilege to proliferate unchecked, white people need to bring their
whiteness to as much conscious awareness as possible
so that they can try to change what it means.
, to distance themselves from it.
(End Page 241)
(while also realizing that complete self-transparency is never
achievable)
Fluid identity
supremacy
Mazzei 11
96)//LA
mobility
for analysis
social norms
of normativity'
Privilege remains
thereby reproducing
the notion of
(Sleeter, 2004).
the
If we think


This preserving and
interestssuch as
desires
(p. 91).

presence. This

By attempting to put yourself in the place of the slave you

erase their identity and further Antiblackness
Hartman and Wilderson 3 (professor at Columbia University specializing
in African American literature and history, and Wilderson III, professor of
African American Studies @ UC Irvine, Saidiya and Frank B, published
And there was a certain sense in
which the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as
a way of refashioning whiteness
this is just an
extension of the master's prerogative
. A body that you can do what you want with
. Here's a guy like the prototypical twentiethcentury white progressive anti-slavery and uses his powers of
observation to write for its abolition,
he
imagines that these slaves being beaten could be himself and his family.
Through this process it makes sense to him, it becomes meaningful. His
body and his family members' white bodies become proxies for real
enslaved black bodies and, as you point out, the actual object of
identification, the slave, disappears.
one of the fundamental ethical
ques tions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the
status of the other
in order to come to any recognition of common
humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly
displaced and effaced: "Only if I can see myself in that position can I
understand the crisis of that position."
the need
for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order
to see the racism of the racist state
- the moments of the sympathetic ally, who in some ways telling is
actually no more able to see the slave than the person who is exploiting
him or her as their property. That is the work Rankin does and I think it
suggests just how ubiquitous that kind of violence, in fact, is.
Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection, S. VH. - there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture and on minstrelsy in particular.
, and there were all these radical claims that were being made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no,
." It doesn't matter whether you do good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's why thinking
about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material relations of slavery was so key for me. F.W -Yes, that's clarifying
. In
your discussion of the body as the property of enjoyment, what I really like is when you talk about Rankin
even to his slave-owning brother. He's in the South, he's looking at a slave coffle, and
S.V.H. - I think that gets at
. It's as though
That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday
. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to .. . F.W. - [laughter] A nigga on the warpath! S. V.H. - Exactly! For me it was those moments that
were the most
The 1ac is the epitome of whiteness the universal understanding

of the world ironically shapes it in their image and an unwillingness
to recognize whiteness allows white privilege to reconstitute itself
Dyer 97 (Richard, Professor of Film Studies at Kings College, Matter of
Whiteness, P. 9, ESB)
It is this privilege and dominance that is at stake in analysing white racial
imagery. McIntosh starts from the recognition that white people dont see
their white privilege, which acts like an invisible weightless knapsack of
special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports,

visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank cheques (ibid.: 1-2). The
invisibility of these assets is part and parcel of the sense that whiteness is nothing in particular,
that white culture and identity have, as it were, no content. This is one of the
feelings most commonly expressed by the white women interviewed by Ruth Frankenberg in her study of white
identity'. She notes that many of the women said that they did not have a culture (Frankenberg 1993: 192):
culture, distinctive identity', one might say colour, tended to be felt as add-ons to an identity that is not itself
distinctive or coloured, that lacks flavour (ibid.: 197). As one woman (Cathy Thomas) vividly and wittily put it, To
be a Heinz 57 American, a white, class-confused American, land of the Kleenex type American, is so formless in and
Having no content, we cant see that we have anything that

accounts for our position of privilege and power. This is itself crucial to the
security with which we occupy that position. As Peggy' McIntosh argues, a white
person is taught to believe that all that she or he does, good and ill, all
that we achieve, is to be accounted for in terms of our individuality. It is
intolerable to realise that we may get a job or a nice house, or a helpful
response at school or in hospitals, because of our skin colour, not because
of the unique, achieving individual we must believe ourselves to be . But
this then is why it is important to come to see whiteness. For those in
power in the West, as long as whiteness is felt to be the human condition,
then it alone both defines normality and fully inhabits it . As I suggested in my
opening paragraphs, the equation of being white with being human secures a position of power. White
of itself (ibid.: 191),
people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for
all people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take
account of other peoples; white people create the dominant images of
the world and dont quite see that they thus construct the world in their
own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are
bound to succeed and others bound to fail.
Most of this is not done deliberately and
maliciously; there are enormous variations of power amongst white people, to do with class, gender and other
goodwill is not unheard of in white peoples engagement with others.

White power none the less reproduces itself regardless of intention, power
differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as
whiteness, but as normal. White people need to learn to see themselves
as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be
made strange. There is a political need to do this, but there are also
problematic political feelings attendant on it, which need to be briefly
signalled in order to be guarded against. The first of these is the green light problem. Writing
factors;
about whiteness gives white people the go-ahead to write and talk about what in any case we have always talked
about: ourselves. In, at any rate, intellectual and educational life in the West in recent years there have been
challenges to the dominance of white concerns and a concomitant move towards inclusion of non-white cultures
and issues. Putting whiteness on the agenda now might permit a sigh of relief that we white people dont after all
any longer have to take on all this non-white stuff.
Genealogy/Hauntology
Ill isolate a few reasons why genealogy as performed by the
aff is racist 1. Who is able to perform a genealogy? Africans entered
slave ships as Africans and exited as black, completely
dispossessed from our history and culture its impossible
to perform a genealogy - our identity is already decided
by a white society we cant fully participate in, meaning
their genealogy is incomplete because its impossible to
fully know black ancestry.
2. Their interpretation of American history is rooted in white
universality in order to be complicit in the impacts of the
1ac one has to willingly be here Africans were brought
over on slave ships and forced to be here and the
socioeconomic inequalities produced as a result of
antiblackness make it nearly impossible and pointless to
leave.
3. The ability of the aff team to just wait and analyze and
presence specters is the epitome of white privilege
while they get to contemplate oppression it is actually
happening
Yancy 8
George, Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. Black Bodies, White Gazes
THE CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE. 2008. Pgs. 231-232. PWoods.
"Bullshit!" functioned as a form of erasure of the experiences of

Black men who have indeed encountered the white gaze within the
contexts of elevators and other social spaces. She assumed no
"responsibility to marginalized people and to the understanding
developed from their lives." There was no suspension of her sense
of self-certainty regarding the dynamics and racism and how Black
men struggle daily to deal with issues of racism in their lives. She
did not listen to me and did not take any steps toward conceding my
understanding of the social world as legitimate.
''White
racism involves a massive breakdown of empathy,
In addition to the fact that "bullshit" functioned as a
form of erasure, not unlike the humiliating experiences that I have
had in the presence of certain white bodies, it also pointed to
various ways in which the manifest function of certain objections
may very well operate to obfuscate profound modes of living in bad
faith
she was lying to herself, concealing from view the reality
of her own racism
I am careful here to note that the epistemic validity of an
objection must not be reduced to its emotional delivery or aim to
insult
one philosopher pointed out to me that if he and I held very
different views regarding the ontology of numbers that an objection
from him ought to be judged on the basis of its validity and nothing
the human capacity to experience the feelings of
members of an out-group viewed as different.,,2
. In other words,
in relationship to those moments on, elevators or in other social spaces where she engaged in perceptual practices that criminalized or demonized the Black
body. However,
. In fact,

more. In the case of the white student, however
it was about race and racism. Discussions involving the ontology
of numbers,
do not implicate the self in the same way
discussions around race and racism do. The self is not similarly
exposed, made potentially vulnerable
aspects of her white self that she would rather avoid. She was far
more interested in protecting her sense of "goodness," which
functioned to mask how she is implicated in the subtle workings of
white racism. The white student's objection raised the issue of how
white interlocutors, when in discussions involving race and racism,
may
deploy theory as a way of not being forced to examine
aspects of their own white subject position.
Whiteness,
is a master of concealment; it is insidiously embedded
within responses, reactions, good, intentions, postural gestures,
denials, and structural and material orders
Whiteness as a form of ambushing is
not an anomaly. The operations of whiteness are by no means
completely transparent.
Rather than rest
assured that she is effectively fighting white privilege, when
engaging in resistance a person needs to continually be questioning
the effects of her activism on both self and world. Although there
are many white antiracists who do fight and will continue to fight
against the operations of white power, and while it is true that the
regulatory power of whiteness will invariably attempt to undermine
such efforts, it is important that white antiracists realize how much
is at stake. While antiracist whites take time to get their shit
together
Black bodies and bodies of color continue to
suffer, their bodies cry out for the political and existential urgency
for the immediate undoing of the oppressive operations of
whiteness the very notion of the temporal gets racialized. My point
here is that even as whites take the time to theorize the complexity
of whiteness, revealing its various modes of resistance to radical
transformation, Black bodies continue to endure tremendous pain
and suffering
Whites
who deploy theory in the service of fighting against white racism
must caution against the seduction of white narcissism, the
recentering of whiteness, even if it is the object of critical reflection,
and,
sequestration from the real world of
suffering
Black bodies impacted by the operations of white power.
The sheer
weight of this reality mocks the patience of theory
, the context of the, lecture was not about the ontology of
numbers,
. The white female student was not passionately invested in defending an ontological theory
regarding numbers, but
after all,
. Etymologically, the word "insidious" (insidiae) means to ambush-a powerful
metaphor, as it brings to mind images and scenarios of being snared and trapped unexpectedly.
This is partly what it means to say that whiteness is insidious. The moment a white person claims to have arrived, he/she often undergoes
a surprise attack, a form of attack that points to how whiteness ensnares even as one strives to fight against racism. Shannon Sullivan states, "
. Here,
weeping,
, and traumatized
As antiracist whites continue to make
mistakes and continue to falter in the face of institutional interpellation and habituated racist reflexes, tomorrow, a Black body will be murdered as it innocently reaches for its wallet.
.
4. Hauntology relies on a singular definition of the other that
forecloses on resistance and reifies privilege

O'Riley 7
Michael F., Ohio State University. Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated Encounter. Postcolonial Text, Vol 3, No 4 (2007). PWoods.
the advent of postcolonial consciousness has emphasized the

imperative of returning to occluded colonial history through a
reckoning with the specters of the nations colonial heritage.
In large part,

Postcolonial theory has relied
upon the idea of haunting in
order to bring awareness of colonial history to the present while
revising the conception of the contemporary nation and of cultural
relations. The haunting of the colonial frequently turns on what is
undoubtedly a well-intended desire to relate to the Other, the
silenced, and the hidden, but it also reveals a more problematic
inability to situate resistance, and mobilize memory for such
purposes, in relation to ever-increasing transnational conditions that
often deny or obfuscate forms of situated or positioned resistance
the
postcolonial is by and large characterized by a singular, rather
than relational, or plural, orientation is directly relevant to cultural
memory and its hauntings by the colonial.
the postcolonial
proceeds through a process of self-generation, becoming its own
absolute and exclusive point of reference (23). This is so, not
because it doesnt gesture toward a relation with the Other, but
because in doing so it ultimately creates singular definitions of the
Other and of difference, categories that are always inherently hybrid
and plural anyway.
they illustrate
how the impulse of returning to colonial memory sites as a means of
establishing a relational theory is often a singular project, one that
establishes its own privileged, oft situated, and frequently mythical
version of the Other that excludes those conditions in which others
find themselves today. The relational intent of a haunting memory
thus frequently excludes those encounters that really affect our
relationships with others. Often, such hauntings of cultural memory
by the colonial experience suggest an appropriation of the
experience of occluded history rather than a relation to its Other.
, to a great extent,
. In this
respect, Peter Hallwards examination of these postcolonial tendencies is most useful to my discussion. Although he does not discuss the hauntings of the colonial, Hallwards contention that
According to Hallward,
14 Hallwards observations are important to my discussion of the hauntings of the colonial because
5.
Govt. cultural engagement

Their top-down approach to engagement justifies racist and
colonialist legacy colonial strategies of engagement homogenize
cultural groups. We have an ethical obligation to preserve cultural
identity
Quijano, Peruvian Sociologist, 2k

(Anibal, Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having
developed the concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been
influential in the fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Duke
University Press, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,
http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
Parallel to the historical relations between capital and precapital, a similar
set of ideas was elaborated around the spatial relations between Europe and
non-Europe. As I have already mentioned, the foundational myth of the
Eurocentric version of modernity is the idea of the state of nature as the
point of departure for the civilized course of history whose culmination is
European or Western civilization. From this myth originated the specifically
Eurocentric evolutionist perspective of linear and unidirectional movement
and changes in human history. Interestingly enough, this myth was
associated with the racial and spatial classification of the worlds population.
This association produced the paradoxical amalgam of evolution and
dualism, a vision that becomes meaningful only as an expression of the
exacerbated ethnocentrism of the recently constituted Europe; by its central
and dominant place in global, colonial/modern capitalism; by the new validity
of the mystified ideas of humanity and progress, dear products of the
Enlightenment; and by the validity of the idea of race as the basic criterion
for a universal social classification of the worlds population. The historical
process is, however, very different. To start with, in the moment that the
Iberians conquered, named, and colonized America (whose northern region,
North America, would be colonized by the British a century later), they found
a great number of different peoples, each with its own history, language,
discoveries and cultural products, memory and identity. The most developed
and sophisticated of them were the Aztecs, Mayas, Chimus, Aymaras, Incas,
Chibchas, and so on. Three hundred years later, all of them had become
merged into a single identity: Indians. This new identity was racial, colonial,
and negative. The same happened with the peoples forcefully brought from
Africa as slaves: Ashantis, Yorubas, (End Page 551) Zulus, Congos, Bacongos,
and others. In the span of three hundred years, all of them were Negroes or
blacks. This resultant from the history of colonial power had, in terms of the
colonial perception, two decisive implications. The first is obvious: peoples
were dispossessed of their own and singular historical identities. The second
is perhaps less obvious, but no less decisive: their new racial identity,
colonial and negative, involved the plundering of their place in the history of
the cultural production of humanity. From then on, there were inferior races,

capable only of producing inferior cultures. The new identity also involved
their relocation in the historical time constituted with America first and with
Europe later: from then on they were the past. In other words, the model of
power based on coloniality also involved a cognitive model, a new perspective of
knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always
primitive.
Globalization
Globalization ushers in a new form of Apartheid that makes war and
antiblackness inevitable
Sexton, 8 [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film
and media studies @ UC Irvine, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and
the Critique of Multiracialism, page 239-244]
The immanence of global capital in no way prevents the drawing of

internal lines of exclusion. As Giovanni Arrighi (1995) states, Entire communities,
countries, even continents, as in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, have been declared
redundant, superfluous to the changing economy of capitalist
accumulation on a world scale. In the wake of the cold war, the unplugging of these
redundant communities and locales from the world supply system has
triggered innumerable, mostly violent feuds . . . over the appropriation of
resources that were made absolutely scarce by the unplugging (330).
Managing such feudsfueling them and containing them in order to profit from themhas
become a principal strategic concern of the new global hegemony and the
indispensable underside of its political economic globalization (Bhattacharyya
2005). It is carried forward by means of a brutal geopolitics, at the heart of
which lie black populations: north, south, east, and west. Achille Mbembe (1999) notes, for instance,
that the African experience shows that in the age of globalization bringing
the world climate under control involves of necessity the forcible
breaking-down of existing territorial frameworks . . . and the simultaneous
erection of shifting areas and areas in which populations judged to be
superfluous can be corralled and their mobility limited . For those consigned to
decomposition on the outskirts of the great technological changes going on today, deterritorialization
goes hand-in-hand with the setting up of a constraint economy, designed
quite simply to get rid of their unwanted populations and exploit their
resources in the raw state. In these circumstances, after the breakdown of the three worlds
heuristic, war seen as a general economic system no longer necessarily pits
those who have the weapons against each other. Preferably, it sets those who
have weapons against those who have none (Mbembe 1999). Weapons include
not only structural adjustment policies (SAP) and increased militarization, recently known in the United States as
the prison-welfare-industrial complex (Davis 2003; Wacquant 2005) but also, returning to our earlier point, the
new forms of apartheid intended for the spatial containment of AIDS (Dean
2000).3 Immobilization and exclusion: counterparts to the accelerated
mobility and intercourse of people, goods, and information that typically
register in descriptions of the new global context (Bauman 2000). From this vantage, it
is imperative to recall that the Grab for Africa . . . was the high-water mark of
European imperialism, and the frenzy for possessions was certainly underlain by the sense of the
closing of the world. It was, in other words, the great time of the tracing of lines in the chancelleries of Europe
(Parker 1998, 24-25n4). We reencounter this rehabilitated geopolitical inscription todaystill Eurocentricbut
underlain now by the sense of the closing of the world of a qualitatively different order. The effects of the
The catastrophic consequences

have now become generalized as the conditions of possibility
for human being. Capitalist power actualizes itself in a basically
uninhabitable space of fear. That much is universal. The particulars of the uninhabitable landscape
consummate geography of capital on subjectivity are titanic.
described by Gilroy
of fear in which a given body nevertheless dwells vary according to the socially valorized distinctions applied to it
by selective mechanisms of power im-planted throughout the social field (Massumi 1993, 24). For Brian Mas- sumi,

the paradigmatic subject of this universal fear is white, bourgeois,
metropolitan, and female; the paradigmatic source is public, unmediated,
anonymous, and sexualized. An urbanized North American woman dwells
in the space of potential rape and battering. Her movements and emotions
are controlled (filtered, channeled) by the immanence of sexual violence to every
coordinate of her socio-geographical space-time. This image is deliberately evoked as a
cliche. It is Massumis point to demonstrate its iconic status, its readymade legibility, its status as an omnipresent
screen of projection, circulating as ubiquitous collective fantasy in print media, television, and film culture.
there is a twist to the trope of the imperiled white woman

vulnerable to sexual violence. Capitalist power determines being a
woman as the future-past of male violence. . . . [Yet] the flow of stupidity in
contemporary society [perception and intellection restricted to a recognition reflex] consists in the
translation of the she to the we' of everywoman to everyone : a loss of the
However,
specificity of the landscape of fear (24; emphasis added). Massumi writes at some length about the fear-blur
produced in this situation, especially by the machinations of mass media. It is vague by nature, he claims. It
is
low-level fear. A kind of background radiation saturating existence. . . . It
may be expressed as panic or hysteria or phobia or anxiety. But , he
continues, these are to low-level fear what HIV is to AIDS: signs of
subjectivity in capitalist crisis. The self, like AIDS, is a syndrome (24-25): a complex of effects
coming from no single, isolatable place, without a linear history, and exhibiting no invariant character-istics (11).
the concept of the syndrome marks out a requisite shift in analytical

frameworks to the extent that syndromes, unlike symptoms, mark the limit of
causal analysis. They cannot be exhaustively understoodonly
pragmatically altered by experimental interventions operating in several
spheres of activity at once (31). To take up this challenge is to pursue a syndromatic analysis.4
Bearing in mind the difficulties for analysis engendered by the syndrome of capitalist subjectivity, the
generalization of the white womans fear of potential rape and
battering, we can still suppose that this ambient, low-level fear is
overdetermined by what Fanon calls the racial distribution of guilt in the
antiblack world (1967, 103). Here the Negro is the master, he remarks sardonically. He is the specialist
of this matter: whoever says rape says Negro (166). That AIDS, in its symbolic soldering to the black body, is
widely considered to be the privileged locus of biofear production (Massumi
The introduction of
1993, vii) only compounds this atmospheric dread. If, as Baxandall (1995) suggests, the fear of AIDS has made
sexual contact increasingly stigmatized (243), then this fear is amplified by the legacies of negrophobia in which,
as noted previously, the
Negro symbolizes the biological danger (Fanon 1967, 165). The

fear of AIDS reinvigorates a longstanding premise of antimiscegenation:
the fear that sexual contact with black bodies will turn over into violence,
that such contact in and of itself constitutes violence, a site of brutality or
morbid contamination or both. To speak of the fear of AIDS is , of course, to
understate the case, just as it is an understatement to speak simply of
negrophobia. The loathing relative to AIDS is far more radical than the affective condition of fear suggests.
We are facing, rather, what Dean (2000) describes as wholesale repudiation by a society
that refuses to admit a signifier for AIDS (99). By persistently representing itself as having a
general population that remains largely immune to incidence of AIDS, the United States [and global civil
society] pushes AIDSand the social groups seen as representing AIDSto the outside of its
psychic and social economies, treating them exactly like shit . (99) The fate of AIDS
and the fate of the black are fundamentally intertwined: rendered in the symbolic order as
abject, fecal objects. Symbolizing the danger faced by the body in the throes of globalization, the
confusion of boundaries marking inside from out, and a crisis in the scale
of cognitive mapping (Jameson 1998b); shuttled between disciplined mobility and the lethal economy of
constraint; AIDS, like blackness, should be understood as a condition of the body,
an index of the bodys vulnerability (Dean 2000, 98). The constitutive outside of
contemporary

societys political and libidinal economies is, of course, located differently
across the globe. In the deindustrialized urban areas of the North, particularly in the United States, it is
operated most prominently by the practices of policing and crystallized in
the overt use of the racial profile. It is put into effect much more powerfully by the virtual
expulsion of sub-Saharan Africa from the global political economy, a structural exile beneath what we might call
This continental prohibition, a demarcation internal to

the underdeveloped regions, may require reconfiguration of the global
imaginaryand the nomenclature of theory, culture, and politicsaway from the present
North-South axis, useful as it may be in some respects, toward an uneven
East-West partnership as the definitive vector in the movement of
globalization. In the United States, a fractal reflection of the global racial
formation (Winant 2001) is observable. Pierre Bourdieu notes, for instance, The Charitable
State, founded on the moralizing conception of poverty, tends to
bifurcate into a Social State which assures minimal guarantees of security
for the middle classes, and an increasingly repressive state counteracting
the effects of violence which results from the increasingly precarious
condition of the large mass of the population, notably the black (quoted in Bauman 2000, 103). I will
only mention the litany of social indicators for this increasingly precarious condition: unparalleled rates
of residential and educational segregation (Massey and Denton 1998),
unemployment (Wilson 1996), premature death by preventable disease and toxic
environments (Bullard 1994; Semmes 1996), homicide (Hutchinson 2002), imprisonment and
surveillance (Mauer 1999), and so forth. Within the politics of multiracialism, the isolation
and criminalization of blackness is transmuted into a concern for the
unwillingness of the black population to participate in the browning of
America (Root 1995).5 Conservative critics cite the clannishness of black community, its atavistic investment
in notions of black pride and the reproduction of the one-drop rule, that is, the internalization of
racist rules of identification that make blacks, at worst, more separatist
inspired than . . . the long-standing white power structure (Byrd 1996). Liberal
the arc of the global South.
critics, in turn, bemoan the tenacity of attitudinal barriers to intimate relations between blacks and nonblacks, but
This mainstream
apprehension finds its alter ego in the unwavering theater of panic staged
in explicit white supremacist discourse. If, as Ferber (1998) says, it is an understate-ment to
only to advance their forced assimilation in the name of national unity (Lind 1998).
claim that white supremacy is obsessed with interracial sexuality, then that compulsion to repeat finds its firmest
we find ourselves undergoing a

globalization without Africa, a multiracialism without blacks, a world
community in which the color line becomes etched more deeply even as it
is, in some quarters, dissolved.
moorings in the idea of the sex/violence of blacks. It is here that
Globalization and multiracialism shift the color line so that

Blackness is no longer biological
Sexton 8, [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film
and media studies, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique
of Multiracialism, page 231-234]
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Fredric Jameson (1998b) announced that the state of things the word globalization attempts
to designate will be with us for a long time to come; and . . . its theorization . . . will constitute the horizon of all theory in the years
any intellectual project accompanying the historical

movement of black liberationwhose intervention sustains the current position of enunciationmust
take as central the series of questions posed by the term . We might posit the reverse as
well: anyone thinking seriously about globalization , particularly those hoping to organize political
resistance to it, cannot afford to elide the question of black liberation without
ahead (xvi). It would thus seem that

missing something essential to its unfolding . It is my suspicion that this vital
consideration, made only more pointed by the ambivalent rendering of race mixture, forces an uncanny
encounter with the black bodyits capacities, its energies, its appearance
as well as its structured installation in the nexus of sexuality and violence .
In each case noted previously (the white supremacist movement, the global sex industries, the discourse of multiracialism), it is
the image of the black body that throws the apparatus of representation
into unmitigated crisis. The history of racism is a narrative in which the
congruency of micro- and macrocosm has been disrupted at the point of
their analogical intersection: the human body (Gilroy 1997, 192). This prescient point, offered by
Paul Gilroy in his essay Scales and Eyes, bears significantly on the present effort. The body presents a
problem, a point of disruption, for the historical narrative of racism. It has
failed to lend itself, once and for all, to a stable designation . As Gilroy asks, Has
anyone ever been able to say exactly how many races there are, let alone how skin shade should correspond to them (195)? Of
race in the order of active differentiation (192) has

not proved insurmountable, even if it is inescapable . Quite the contrary, this
perennial difficulty has given rise to a frenetic succession of methods
designed for specifying human difference that characterize the protean
nature of modernitys most pernicious signature (192). In the current moment, we confront
a novel question: What does that trope race mean in the age of molecular biology (192)? For Gilroy, we now inhabit
a space beyond comparative anatomy where the body and its obvious,
functional components no longer delimit the scale upon which
assessments of the unity and variation of the species are to be made (194).
Our collective estrangement from anatomical scale has rendered the eye
inadequate, if it ever was, to the tasks of evaluation and description demanded
by racial segregation. Thus, the ascendancy of what he terms nanopolitics departs from
the scalar assumptions asso-ciated with anatomical difference [and]
accelerates [a] vertiginous, inward movement towards the explanatory
power of ever-smaller scopic regimes (193). Indeed, this one-way movement, downwards and
inwards, locks the racializing project into a perpetual search for the zero
degree of difference. However, if racial difference cannot be readily correlated with genetic variation (194), the
course, the answer is no, but we have seen that the indeterminacy of
most basic level of differentiation known to date, at what level can it be asserted, maintained, legitimated? Or is it destined simply
to remain anxious and uncertain, forever suspicious? Gilroy is less than sanguine about these developments. Although skepticism
there
is no indication that the calibration of human sameness and human
diversity will diminish in political importance . The frustration of this procedure at one scale
about the status of visible differences is welcomed for the trouble it causes to the paradigm of comparative anatomy,
does not prevent its seeking refuge by burrowing deeper into the flesh, the viscera, the blood, the DNA. Gilroy asks, Can a different
sense of scale and scaling form a counterweight to the appeal of absolute particularity celebrated under the sign of race? Can it
the repudiation of
surface-level sameness by the proliferation of invisible differences
remains an object of aggravated fascination insofar as such differences
are understood to produce catastrophic consequences where people are
not what they seem to be (192). We are familiar with the vast literature
regarding the thematic of racial passing in and beyond the United States,
which often sensationally features the scandal of seeming to be white
when one is, in truth, something else (Ginsberg 1996; Sanchez and Schlossberg 2001). Today, the
fear of invisible blackness commingles with the global traffic in hypervisible
blackness, the premier consumer product. Across the globe, one can play at blackness,
selectively appropriating everything but the burden, to borrow Greg Tates (2003) apt
answer the seductions of self and kind projected onto the surface of the body? Scarcely:
phrase. Yet, Gilroys remarks on the crisis of visible difference invoke another catastrophic consequence not unrelated to an
Visible differences, he notes, not only prove unreliable in

determinations of race, they also do not . . . tell us everything we need to
know about the health- status of the people we want to have sex with (192).
unsuspected or invisible blackness.
They really never did, of course, but Gilroys comment here makes reference to another catastrophic consequence associated with

the age of molecular biology: AIDS. He concludes his essay as follows: With the body figured an epiphenomenon of coded
this aesthetics [of racial difference] is now residual. The skin may
no longer be privileged as the threshold of identity. There are good
reasons to suppose that the line between inside and outside now falls
elsewhere. (196) This other threshold of identity, this newly privileged elsewhere that
now houses the persistent dividing line, is located within the body,
tracking an invisible presence that demotes and denotes the significance
of the bodily surface. It is, in effect, a displacement of the skin as the
preeminent sign of race. Here we note a convergence with the project of multiracialism discussed at the outset:
for different reasons, both developments portend the obstruction or unraveling of
racialization in the field of vision one betting on the increasing difficulty of making clear discriminations
information,
on the surface, the other devaluing the surface altogether. However, nothing in Gilroys account alludes to the wholesale
we have an
augmentation of racial difference, an alloy of the inner and outer, by way
of the discourses of biotechnology and genetic science . Similarly, the blurring
of the color line prophesied by multiracialism provides the occasion,
within the imagination of white supremacy and antiblackness, for a
redoubled effort to police it. In this respect, the surface becomes a more
intense object of observation precisely because it has become more
unreliable as a sign of race.
replacement of the surface by the interior, wherein the latter simply supplants the former. More likely,
Global Warming
Environmental destruction is a side effect of the systemic norms
that protect our racial hierarchy- means the aff will inevitably
conform to the pressures of the SQ without a deconstruction of the
White-over-black hierarchy.
Mandell 08 [Bekah, * A.B., Vassar College; J.D., Boston College Law School,
RACIAL REIFICATION AND GLOBAL WARMING: A TRULY INCONVENIENT
TRUTH, Boston Thrid World Law Journal, Spring 2008, p. 3-5]
Lawmakers and politicians have not taken action to combat climate change
because effectively arresting climate change will challenge the
foundational values of American society. Meaningful action would
require changes in the way we live, which would undermine the
foundation of our hierarchical political and social structure. The
behaviors and lifestyles in the United States that emit the lion's share
of CO[2] into the atmosphere are the very same as those that have
actualized the idea of race and maintained the "white-over-black"
hierarchy that is the essence of our social, economic, and legal
structure. These environmentally destructive behaviors and
lifestyles have created and protected white privilege in American
society. Thus, meaningful action to combat [*294] climate change will
require a dismantling of the systemic policies and norms that have
both caused global warming and protected the racial hierarchy that
underlies contemporary America. This reality explains why meaningful
action on the issue of climate change has eluded policy-makers for
decades. The structures, practices, and ideologies of the suburban American
dream--with its detached single-family homes in spread-out neighborhoods,
far from commercial and urban areas--have been some of the strongest
forces in creating and perpetuating white privilege in American society.
Henry Holmes explains the role of the suburbs in that process: Suburbia, as
we know it today, became the preferred middle-class lifestyle. With it came
patterns of economic development, land use, real estate investment,
transportation and infrastructure development that reflected race, class and
cultural wounds deeply embedded in the psyche and history of the United
States. Jim Crow--institutionalized segregation and apartheid against
African Americans and other nonwhites--was reflected in urban and
suburban zoning codes, restrictive racial covenants in real estate
investment and lending practices, redlining by financial institutions,
discriminatory private business practices, and the distribution of
public investments. All these served the interests of the policy-makers,
usually the corporate elite who were typically European-American and middle
class or wealthy. In addition to concretizing the abstract concept of race in
American society, the growth of the suburbs has become a major factor in
[*295] changing the earth's climate. Transportation, electricity

generation, and deforestation represent the most harmful human
activities because they release large amounts of carbon dioxide, the
main greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Suburbanization and
private car-centered transportation policies require that more energy be
spent on transportation, demand far more electricity, and cause more
deforestation than any other lifestyle. Global warming is an unforeseen
side effect of the policies and behaviors that have been used to
"race" our society. Therefore, a meaningful response to the global climate
crisis requires a dismantling, or at the very least a reordering, of the spatial
systems we have created to construct and perpetuate the concept of race in
the United States.
Global warming is not a product of all humanity. It is caused by the
uneven development engendered by Whiteness. The affirmative
naturalizes the coercive racial politics at the heart of warming by
universalizing its source and projecting its impacts far into the
future. The imperial West started the process of warming, and the
American racial state perpetuated it in the quest to export
Whiteness. The affirmative only notices warming when it might
destroy white bodies, which papers over existing destruction caused
by whiteness.
Wynter 07 (Sylvia, Professor Emeritus in Spanish and Romance Languages
at Stanford University, The Human being as noun? Or being human as
praxis? Towards the Autopoietic turn/overturn: A Manifesto,
otl2.wikispaces.com/file/view/The+Autopoetic+Turn.pdf)
For if, as Time magazine reported in January 2007 (Epigraph 2), a U.N.
Intergovernmental panel of Natural Scientists, were soon to release "a
smoking-gun report which confirms that human activities are to
blame for global warming" (and thereby for climate change), and had
therefore predicted "catastrophic disruptions by 2100," by April, the issued
Report not only confirmed the above, but also repeated the major
contradiction which the Time account had re-echoed. This contradiction,
however, has nothing to do in any way with the rigor, and precision
of their natural scientific findings, but rather with the contradiction
referred to by Derrida's question in Epigraph 3i.e., But who, we? That is,
their attribution of the non-natural factors driving global warming
and climate change to, generic human activities, and/or to
"anthropocentric forcings"; with what is, in effect, this misattribution then determining the nature of their policy
recommendations to deal with the already ongoing reality of global
warming and climate change, to be ones couched largely in
economic terms. That is, in the terms of our present mode of knowledge
production, and its "perceptual categorization system" as elaborated by the
disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences (or "human sciences") and
which are reciprocally enacting of our present sociogenic genre of being
human, as that of the West's Man in its second Liberal or bio-humanist

reinvented form, as homo oeconomicus; as optimally "virtuous Breadwinner,
taxpayer, consumer, and as systemically over-represented as if it, and its
behavioral activities were isomorphic with the being of being human, and
thereby with activities that would be definable as the human-as-a-species
ones. Consequently, the Report's authors because logically taking
such an over-representation as an empirical fact, given that, as highly
trained natural scientists whose domains of inquiry are the physical and
(purely) biological levels of reality, although their own natural-scientific order
of cognition with respect to their appropriate non-human domains of inquiry,
is an imperatively self-correcting and therefore, necessarily, a cognitively
open/open-ended one, nevertheless, because in order to be natural
scientists, they are therefore necessarily, at the same time, middle
class Western or westernized subjects, initiated 15 as such, by means
of our present overall education system and its mode of knowledge
production to be the optimal symbolically encoded embodiment of the
West's Man, it its second reinvented bio-humanist homo oeconomicus, and
therefore bourgeois self-conception, over-represented as if it were isomorphic
with the being of being human, they also fall into the trap identified by
Derrida in the case of his fellow French philosophers. The trap, that is, of
conflating their own existentially experienced (Western-bourgeois
or ethno-class) referent "we," with the "we" of "the horizon of
humanity." This then leading them to attribute the reality of
behavioral activities that are genre-specific to the West's Man in its
second reinvented concept/self-conception as homo oeconomicus, ones that
are therefore as such, as a historically originated ensemble of behavioral
activitiesas being ostensibly human activities-in-general. This, in spite of
the fact that they do historicize the origin of the processes that
were to lead to their recent natural scientific findings with respect
to the reality of the non-naturally caused ongoing acceleration of
global warming and climate change, identifying this process as
having begun with the [West's] Industrial Revolution from about 1750
onwards. That is, therefore, as a process that can be seen to have been
correlatedly concomitant in Great Britain, both with the growing expansion of
the largely bourgeois enterprise of factory manufacturing, as well with the
first stages of the political and intellectual struggles the British bourgeoisie
who were to spearhead the Industrial Revolution, to displace the then ruling
group hegemony of the landed aristocracy cum gentry, and to do so, by inter
alia, the autopoetic reinvention of the earlier homo politicus/virtuous citizen
civic humanist concept of Man, which had served to legitimate the latter's
traditionally landed, political, social and economic dominance, in new terms.
This beginning with Adam Smith and the Scottish School of the
Enlightenment in the generation before the American, French, and Haitian
(slave) revolutions, as a reinvention tat was to be effected in now specifically
bourgeois terms as homo oeconomicus/and virtuous Breadwinner. 116 That
is as the now purely secular genre of being human, which although not to be
fully (i.e., politically, intellectually, and economically) institutionalized until

the mid-nineteenth century, onwards, when its optimal incarnation came to
be actualized in the British and Western bourgeoisie as the new ruling
class, was, from then on, to generate its prototype specific
ensemble of new behavioral activities, that were to impel both the
Industrial Revolution, as well as the West's second wave of imperial
expansion, this based on the colonized incorporation of a large
majority of the world's peoples, all coercively homogenized to serve
its own redemptive material telos, the telos initiating of global
warming and climate change. Consequently, if the Report's authors note
that about 1950, a steady process of increasing acceleration of the processes
of global warming and climate change, had begun to take place, this was not
only to be due to the Soviet Revolution's (from 1917 onwards) forced march
towards industrialization (if in its still homo oeconomicus conception, since a
march spearheaded by the 116 See the already cited essay by J.G.A. Pocock
"symbolic capital," education credentials owning and technically skilled
Eastern European bourgeoisie)as a state-directed form of capitalism, nor
indeed by that of Mao's then China, but was to be also due to the fact that in
the wake of the range of successful anti-colonial struggles for political
independence, which had accelerated in the wake of the Second World War,
because the new entrepreneurial and academic elites had already been
initiated by the Western educational system in Western terms as homo
oeconomicus, they too would see political independence as calling for
industrialized development on the "collective bovarysme "117 model of the
Western bourgeoisie. Therefore, with the acceleration of global warming
and climate change gaining even more momentum as all began to
industrialize on the model of homo oeconomicus, with the result that by the
time of the Panel's issued April 2007 Report the process was now being
driven by a now planetarily homogenized/standardized
transnational "system of material provisioning or mode of technoindustrial economic production based on the accumulation of capital; as
the means of production of ever-increasing economic growth, defined as
"development"; with this calling for a single model of normative behavioral
activities, all driven by the now globally (post-colonially and post-the-1989collapse-of-the-Soviet Union), homogenized desire of "all men (and women)
to," realize themselves/ourselves, in the terms of homo oeconomicus. In the
terms, therefore, of "its single (Western-bourgeois or ethno-class)
understanding" of "man's humanity," over-represented as that of
the human; with the well-being and common good of its referent
"we"that, not only of the transnational middle classes but even
more optimally, of the corporate multinational business industries
and their financial networks, both indispensable to the securing of
the Western-bourgeois conception of the common good, within the
overall terms of the behavior-regulatory redemptive material telos of everincreasing economic growth, put forward as the Girardot-type "cure" for
the projected Malthusian-Ricardo transumed postulate of a "significant ill" as
that, now, ostensibly, of mankind's threatened subordination to [the trope] of

Natural Scarcity, this in the reoccupied place of Christianity of its postulate of
that "ill" as that of enslavement to Original Sin."' With the result that the
very ensemble of behavioral activities indispensable, on the one
hand, to the continued hegemony of the bourgeoisie as a Western
and westernized transnational ruling class, is the same ensemble of
behaviors that is directly causal of global worming and climate
change, as they are, on the other, to the continued dynamic
enactment and stable replication of the West's second reinvented
concept of Man; this latter in response to the latter's existential imperative
of guarding against the entropic disintegration of its genre of being human
and fictive nation-state mode of kind. Thereby against the possible bringing
to an end, therefore, of the societal order, and autopoetic living Western and
westernized macro world system in it bourgeois configuration, which is
reciprocally the former's (i.e., its genre of being human, and fictive modes of
kind's condition of realization, at a now global level. This, therefore, is the
cognitive dilemma, one arising directly from the West's hitherto unresolvable
aporia of the secular, that has been precisely captured by Sven Lutticken in a
recent essay. Despite, he writes, "the consensus that global warming cannot
be ascribed to normal fluctuations in the earth's temperature... [the] social
and political components of this process have been minimized; manmade nature is re-naturalized, the new (un)natural history
presented as fate." And with this continuing to be so because (within
the terms, I shall add, of our present "single understanding of man's
humanity" and the unresolvable aporia which it continues to enact), "[t]he
truly terrifying notion is not that [global warming and climate
change] is irreversible, but that it actually might be reversibleat
the cost of radically changing the economic and social order..."119
The changing, thereby, of the now globally hegemonic biologically
absolute answer that we at present give to the question to who we
are, and of whose biohumanist homo oeconomicus symbolic life/death
(i.e., naturally selected/dysselected) code's intentionality of dynamic
enactment and stable replication, our present "economic and social
order" is itself the empirical actualization.
Extend our Mendell 08 evidence CO2 emissions have
disproportionately aeffected the black body therefore extending
white privelige. This is a direct solvency takeout if the aff attempt to
stop the injustices of racism theyll never solve for the root cause of
why climate change has been allowed to continue for decades
uninhibited
Hegemony
US hegemony is just the racial violence of America gone global
aff claims to benevolent control are symptoms of white
privilege
diwa, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048]
the notion of American globality I have begun discussing here already exceeds negri and
to the extent that it is a global racial formation, and more
pointedly a global mobilization of a white supremacist social
formation (read: a united States of America formed by the social-economic geographies of racial chattel slavery and their recodification through the post-13th
Amendment innovation of other technologies of criminalization and imprisonment). The US prison regimes production of human
immobilization and death composes some of the fundamental
modalities of American national coherence. It inscribes two forms of
domination that tend to slip from the attention of political theorists, including Negri and Hardt: first, the prison regime
strategically institutionalizes the biopolitical structures of white
racial/nationalist ascendancyit quite concretely provides a
definition for white American personhood, citizenship, freedom, and
racialized patriotism. Second, the prison regime reflects the moral,
spiritual, and cultural inscription of Manifest Destiny (and its
descendant material cultural and state-building articulations of
racist and white supremacist conquest, genocide, and population
control) across different historical moments. to invoke and critically rearticulate negri and Hardts
formulation, the focal question becomes: How does the right of the uS-as-global police to kill,
detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally
recoded? the structure of presumptionand therefore relative
political silenceenmeshing the prisons centrality to the logic of
American globality is precisely evidence of the fundamental power
of the uS prison regime within the larger schema of American
In fact,
Hardts formulation
hegemony . In this sense the uS prison regime is ultimately really not an institution. rather it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor of
institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of human immobilization address (while never fully
resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The US prison regime defines a global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various localities.
What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the self-contained means of American globality? I
am suggesting a conception of the prison regime that focuses on what cultural and political theorist Allen Feldman calls a formation of violence, which anchors the contemporary
articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of coercion and hegemony. Feldman writes, the growing autonomy of violence as a self-legitimating sphere of social discourse and
Violence itself both reflects and

accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as
something to be made. As a formation of violence that selfperpetuates a peculiar social project through the discursive
structures of warfare, the US prison regime composes an acute
formation of racial and white supremacist violence, and thus houses the capacity for mobilization
transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to totalize society.
of an epochal (and peculiar) white supremacist global logic. This contention should not be confused with the sometimes parochial (if not politically chauvinistic) proposition that American
state and state-sanctioned regimes of bodily violence and human immobilization are somehow self-contained domestic productions that are exceptional to the united States of
America, and that other global sites simply import, imitate, or reenact these institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the opposite: the
US prison

regime exceeds as it enmeshes the ensemble of social relations that
cohere uS civil society, and is fundamental to the geographic
transformations, institutional vicissitudes, and militarized/economic
mobilizations of globalization generally. to assert this, however, is to also argue that the constituting violence
of the US prison regime has remained somewhat undertheorized and objectified in the overlapping realms of public discourse, activist mobilization, and (grassroots as well as
it is not possible to conceptualize and critically

address the emergence and global proliferation of the (uS/global)
prison industrial complex outside a fundamental understanding of
what are literally its technical and technological premises: namely, its
complex organization and creative production of racist and white
supremacist bodily violence. It is only in this context, I would say, that we can examine the problem of how the Prison is a modality (and
professional) scholarly praxis. Here I am arguing that
not just a reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment. It is only a theoretical foregrounding of the white supremacist state and social formation of
the united States that will allow us to understand the uS prison regime as an American globality that materializes as it prototypes state violence and for that matter, state power itself
through a specific institutional site.
White racialized identity is the condition of possibility for US interventionism. The

cultural paranoia and consensus building based off of this paranoia of whiteness
is what fuels our messianism in other countries.
Martinot 2003 [Steve, lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for
Interdisciplinary Programs, The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the US, Social
Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), pp. 19-20]
Beneath the historical conflation of American nationalism and "white nationalism," of
representative democracy and "white democracy"that inhabits the American identity, the
need for a threat to instigate the renewal of a messianic project continually reoccurs to
confirm its "white racialized identity." This is the "higher responsibility" to which the
mainstream American responds when called upon by government violence against
others, and which would be abrogated by the absence of intervention. (This is not
determined by the color of a person's skin; we are speaking of "white supremacy" as a social
structure, a social ethos, to which one subscribes through one's subscription to the "white
nation.") The paranoia and self-valorizing violence through which that "higher responsibility"
expresses itself structures the foundations upon which American identity rests (in its land
emptying and labor-controlling endeavors). They constitute the structure of its
interventionist ethic. As different manifestations of the same cultural structure, white
racialized identity and the ethic of governmental intervention are parallel. Each operates
according to a prioritization of allegiance and consensus, a cultural paranoia that
criminalizes others to construct a defensive solidarity, and a violence that relies on
allegiance to self-referentially confirm the paranoia.The three aspects of the attack sequence
identification of a criminal national leader, decriminalization of U.S. violence in dealing
with that leader, and the self-consensualizing legitimacy of U.S. government strategies as
forms of legality reflect these dimensions. Theunderlying white racialized identity permits
U.S. interventionism to proceed without ethical crisis. The interventionary ethos appears
moral to white supremacy because it reproduces the structure that constitutes that white
supremacy. The assault on Afghanistan(retaliating for September 11 by destroying whole
towns and killing thousands of civilians) criminalized the Taliban, unleashed an
unprogrammatic military campaign to drive it off the land, and used an arbitrary degree of
violence against that land's peopleall as a measure of U.S. messianic rectitude. Yugoslavia
followed the same structure, with the demand for it to abandon its sovereignty, destruction
of its terrain with bombs and ecological disaster (depleted uranium and demolished
chemical plants), and the equation of Serbian existence with criminality. The assault
confirms a messianic purpose for the white American identity by signifying that the goal of
the destruction was "humanitarian." And now, again, Iraq. If interventionism requires no
political goal beyond rhetorical criminalization, then messianism (of "democracy") thrown
against the sovereignty of that perceived "threat" is sufficient. Indeed, the paranoid
inversion that sees the other's defense as aggression and its own interventionary aggression
as defense makes a programmatic political purpose all but impossible.25 The ability to

criminalize and manufacture international solidarity against the other achieves that goal and
confirms that its paranoid perception was real. If U.S. interventionism repeatedly proves
itself to be white supremacist, it is an exterminationist messianism. As Joy James (1996: 46)
puts it, there is always a genocidal dimension to white supremacy, as well as a violently
enforced allegiance to it
Hegemonic stability theory is racist its founded on a

narrative of the white mans burden
Kaplan 4
Amy, Department Chair in the Department of English and Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. American Quarterly, 56:1.
March. Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today. PWoods.
Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal

interventionists, is that of the "reluctant imperialist ."
the United
States never sought an empire
it had the burden thrust
upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern states,
which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn terrorism.
The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the
moral authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to
bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-interest merge in this
narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the United States can save the
people of the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an
uncivilized state
The purpose of power
is a fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key
characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic
political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for
property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally
understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American
power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide
expansion of liberal civil society.
In this version,
and may even be constitution ally unsuited to rule one, but
. As Robert Kaplan writes-not reluctantly at all-in "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "
is
not power itself; it
" This narrative does imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the
burden for others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the
This is also a narrative about race. The images of

an unruly world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed modernity, recycle
stereotypes of racial inferiority from earlier colonial discourses about
races who are incapable of governing themselves, Kipling's "lesser breeds
without the law,"
America's empire is not like empires of times
past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden." Denial and
exceptionalism are apparently alive and well.
future projects the end of empire only when the world is remade in our image.
or Roosevelt's "loosening ties of civilized society," in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his much-noted article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "The American
Empire," Michael Ignatieff appended the subtitle "The Burden" but insisted that "
I n American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the racism of empire and
examine the dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are becoming racialized through the interplay of templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial Orientalism. These narratives of the origins of the current empire-that is, the
its paradoxical claim to

uniqueness and universality at the same time. They share a teleological
narrative of inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the
embodiment of universal values of human rights, liberalism, and
democracy, the "indispensable nation,"
the United States
claims the authority to "make sovereign judgments on what is right and
what is wrong" for everyone else and "to exempt itself with an absolutely
clear conscience from all the rules that it proclaims and applies to others."
Absolutely protective of its own sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of
limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the entire world a potential
site of intervention. Universalism thus can be made manifest only through
the threat and use of violence. If in these narratives imperial power is
deemed the solution to a broken world, then they preempt any
neoconservative and the liberal interventionist- have much in common. They take American exceptionalism to new heights:
in Madeleine Albright's words. In this logic,

counternarratives that claim U.S. imperial actions
, past and present, may have something to do with the world's problems.
According to this logic, resistance to empire can never be opposition to the imposition of foreign rule; rather, resistance means irrational opposition to modernity and universal human values.
Humanism (K affs)
Their emphasis on humanism enacts a discursive violence against
the black body they cant account for the subject position of the
slave which means blacks remain excluded from civil society
Wilderson 10
Frank B., Seriously? You know who Wilderson is. Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. 2010. Pgs.1-3. PWoods.
we have seen how the aporia between Black being and

political ontology has existed since Arab and European enslavement of
Africans, and how the need to craft an ensemble of questions through
which to arrive at an unflinching paradigmatic analysis of political
ontology is repeatedly thwarted in its attempts to find a language that can
express the violence of slave-making, a violence that is both structural
and performative. Humanist discourse, the discourse whose
epistemological machinations provide our conceptual frameworks for
thinking political ontology, is diverse and contrary. But for all its diversity
and contrariness it is sutured by an implicit rhetorical consensus that
violence accrues to the Human body as a result of transgressions, whether
real or imagined, within the Symbolic Order
Humanism has no theory of the slave because it
imagines a subject who has been either alienated in language (Lacan)
and/or alienated from his/her cartographic and temporal capacities (Marx).
It cannot imagine an object who has been positioned by gratuitous
violence and who has no cartographic and temporal capacities to losea
sentient being for whom recognition and incorporation is impossible .
political ontology, as imagined through Humanism, can only produce
discourse that has as its foundation alienation and exploitation as a
grammar of suffering, when what is needed (for the Black, who is always
already a slave) is an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its
foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering
(Hartman). The violence of the Middle Passage and the slave estate
(Spillers), technologies of accumulation and fungibility, recompose and
reenact their horrors upon each succeeding generation of Blacks. This
violence is
not contingent upon transgressions against the
hegemony of civil society; and structural, in that it positions Blacks
ontologically outside of humanity and civil society. Simultaneously, it
renders the ontological status of humanity (life itself) wholly dependent
on civil societys repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented
machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence
upon the Blackthat civil society might know itself as the domain of
humans generation after generation.
The
explanatory power of Humanist discourse is bankrupt in the face of the
Black. It is inadequate and inessential to, as well as parasitic on, the
ensemble of questions which the dead but sentient thing, the Black,
struggles to articulate in a world of living subjects .
In the Introduction and the preceding chapter,
. That is to say, Humanist discourse can only think a subjects relation to violence as a
contingency and not as a matrix that positions the subject. Put another way,
In short,
both gratuitous, that is, it is
Again, we need a new language of abstraction to explain this horror.
My work on film, cultural theory, and political ontology marks my attempt
to contribute to this often fragmented and constantly assaulted quest to forge a language of abstraction with explanatory powers emphatic enough to embrace the Black, an accumulated and fungible object, in a human world of
The imposition of Humanisms assumptive logic has

encumbered Black film studies to the extent that it is underwritten by the
assumptive logic of White or non-Black film studies. This is a problem of
Cultural Studies writ large
exploited and alienated subjects.
. In this chapter, I want to offer a brief illustration of how we might attempt to break the theoretical impasse between, on the one hand, the
assumptive logic of Cultural Studies and, on the other hand, the theoretical aphasia to which Cultural Studies is reduced when it encounters the (non)ontological status of the Black. I will do so not by launching a frontal attack
against White film theory, in particular, or even Cultural Studies broadly speaking, but by interrogating Jacques Lacan because Lacanian psychoanalysis is one of the twin pillars that shoulders film theory and Cultural Studies.i

My problem with Cultural Studies is that when it theorizes the interface
between Blacks and Humans it is hobbled in its attempts to (a) expose
power relationships and (b) examine how relations of power influence and
shape cultural practice. Cultural Studies insists upon a grammar of
suffering which assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of
the Symbolic Order, what Lacan calls the wall of languageand as such
our potential for stasis or change (our capacity for being oppressed or
free) is overdetermined by our universal ability or inability to seize and
wield discursive weapons. This idea corrupts the explanatory power of
most socially engaged films and even the most radical line of political
action because it produces a cinema and a politics that cannot account for
the grammar of suffering of the Blackthe Slave. To put it bluntly, the
imaginative labor (Jared Sexton 2003) of cinema, political action, and
Cultural Studies are all afflicted with the same theoretical aphasia. They
are speechless in the face of gratuitous violence.
Iran
Threats of Iranian nuclear weapons are based off of western cultural
superiority from American racist policies.
Marandi 09 ( Seyed, prof, North American studies, U Tehran Western Media
Representations, Iran, and Orientalist Stereotypes, January 2009,
http://conflictsforum.org/briefings/western-media-representations.pdf)
When it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, however, the western
media becomes even more explicitly one sided and antagonistic. In a
disturbing article in the USA Today (September 14, 2008) titled U.S.
arsenal is adding more bunker busters, Tom Vanden Brook effectively
dehumanizes Iranians in order to help justify any act of aggression by the
American regime against the countrys sovereignty and its civilian
population. In the article, he states that Irans production of enriched
uranium, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons in Natanz is part of a
suspected program to make weapons of mass destruction. The fact
that the International Atomic Energy Agency has at no point made such a
claim seems to be irrelevant. He then goes on to say that: The
Pentagons Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which leads efforts
against weapons of mass destruction, has almost doubled its spending on
research into how to counter such weapons This sentence is
interesting, because it directs the reader to the idea that the United
States is sincerely trying to reduce or even eradicate a specific
threat to the well being of all human beings. The fact that they
carry out research implies scientific objectivity and honesty and
their efforts against weapons of mass destruction remind the
reader of efforts to eradicate Polio or Malaria. It is understandable if
the reader forgets that the United States has the worlds largest
stockpile of WMDs, that Israel the worlds only remaining apartheid
state and its key ally in the Middle East has such weapons, and that
the United Stated just a few years ago helped Saddam Hussein
acquire and use WMDs against Iranian and Iraqi civilians. In any
case, the story leaves the impression that through objective and
honest research one can conclude that Irans nuclear program is a
threat. This allows Brook to end his article with two sentences that one
would expect would create outrage and diust among ordinary American
readers (apparently there was none). After explaining Angel Fire technology
and how the American military could use it, he states: That would allow them
to target workers when they are congregated in one spot, such as a housing
complex. Killing those workers could set back their program for years.
According to USA Today, the intentional murder of hundreds if not thousands
of innocent Iranian civilians in housing complexes is legitimate and can be a
central objective of US military planning. Presumably, this is not a problem in
the eyes of most American readers, otherwise there would have been a
strong response to such a barbaric view of the Other. Through effectively

presenting Iran as a global threat that is comparable to a dangerous
disease, Brook has helped prepare public opinion with a justification
for mass murder. The Iranian nuclear program is one example where all
mainstream British and American news outlets report an issue almost
identically. On September 12, 2008 Reuters released a piece by Mark
Heinrich with the title IAEA probe stalls, Iran slowly boosts atom
enrichment. Regardless of the generally biased nature of the report, one
sentence in the story is particularly interesting as it is repeated almost
word for word in many other news reports. Iran says it is enriching
uranium not to yield atom bomb fuel, as Western powers suspect,
but only to run nuclear power stations The two key words are says
and suspect, which are sometimes replaced by states or claims for the
Iranian side and concern and fear on the western side. In such
sentences the balance is definitely tilted in favor of the Europeans and
Americans. In contrast to Irans statements or claims, which cannot
be judged or verified according to such reports, western
government officials who suspect or are concerned are depicted
as sincere. Western powers and politicians are presented as genuine in
their distrust towards the Iranians and their intentions and as a result the
reader is much more likely to accept the western account of the
conflict. A similar sentence can be seen in a provocative New York Times
piece (November 20, 2008) with a very misleading title Iran said to have
Nuclear Fuel for one weapon. Here again one reads: Iran insists that it wants
only to fuel reactors for nuclear power. But many Western nations, led by the
United States, suspect that its real goal is to gain the ability to make nuclear
weapons. These stories do not dwell at all on Iranian suspicions or
concerns about the American or Israeli fabrication of intelligence,
such as the dubious American claim that the CIA has acquired an
Iranian laptop computer which contains secret documents linked to
an Iranian nuclear weapons program. According to Scott Ritter a former
US military intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector who questions the
sources of the computer the CIA and the MEK (an anti Iranian terrorist
organization) as well as its veracity: Give it [the computer] the UNSCOM
treatment. Assemble a team of CIA, FBI and Defense Department forensic
computer analysts and probe the computer, byte by byte. Construct a
chronological record of how and when the data on the computer were
assembled. Check the logic of the data, making sure everything fits
together in a manner consistent with the computers stated function and
use. Tell us when the computer was turned on and logged into and how it
was used. Then, with this complex usage template constructed, overlay the
various themes which have been derived from the computers contents,
pertaining to projects, studies and other activities of interest. One should be
able to rapidly ascertain whether or not the computer is truly a key piece of
intelligence pertaining to Irans nuclear programs. The fact that this
computer is acknowledged as coming from the MEK and the fact that a
proper forensic investigation would probably demonstrate the fabricated

nature of the data contained are why the U.S. government will never agree
to such an investigation being done.12 From the Iranian perspective, western
intentions are suspect to say the least. However, as the media is Eurocentric
the Iranians like almost all other non-western countries, which have
legitimate grievances against oppressive western powers, are antagonized
by the western media. The titles of various news reports are themselves
quite revealing. Iran pushed for nuclear answers (BBC News, September 22,
2008), IAEA shows photos alleging Iran nuclear missile work (Reuters,
September 17, 2008), EU warns Iran close to nuclear arms capacity
(Associated Press, September 24, 2008), and Iran tests precision missile
able to reach Europe (Associated Press, November 12, 2008)are just a few
such headlines. In an Associated Press report (September 24) the reader
learns that while Iran insists its atomic activities are peaceful, the
European Union has warned that the country is nearing the ability to arm
a nuclear warhead. In fact, the article goes even further than Israeli, EU,
and American claims: Israel says the Islamic Republic could have enough
nuclear material to make its first bomb within a year. The U.S. estimates Iran
is at least two years away from that stage, and some experts say the country
could reach that stage in as little as 6 months through uranium enrichment.
The claims made by unnamed experts are reinforced by a series of
explanations from the head of the Washington-based Institute for
Science and International Security that increase fears about
Iran. Significantly, according to the Associated Press report, this
Institute closely tracks suspect nuclear proliferators. Hence, like
the November 20 New York Times piece the story is completely one
sided, as it merely reinforces the position of the American
government as well as the dominant discursive practices in western
countries regarding Iran as a threat to peace and security. Apparently,
Iran cannot be trusted even when it states that it has captured an Iranian
national that had spied for Israel. After his trial and execution, the BBC
(November 22, 2008) uses the headline Israel spy put to death in Iran. In
other words, the BBC uses scare quotes to express doubt about Irans
counterintelligence capability or its honesty in reporting such an event. One
of the problems of having a sensible discussion about relations between the
West and Iran, as well as developments inside the country, is that western
journalism is far from sensible. Iranian society is regularly depicted as
abnormal and irrational, which itself helps reinforce the claim that
Iran is a threat that cannot be dealt with through dialogue and
reason. Recently, for example, Hugh Sykes of the BBC offered the report
Iranian women battle the system (BBC News September 5, 2008). Amidst
the misleading statements he makes, which makes the report look like a
propaganda piece, one is particularly notable. Not only is it completely
untrue, but Sykes tries to convert that falsehood into a fact accepted
throughout Iran. This is Sykes text: There is little protection against so-called
honour killings for women who are raped; a husband - or a father who kills
the rape victim may face only a short jail sentence. This is inhuman, a law

professor at Teheran University, Rosa Gharachorloo, told me. Most of the
people I have spoken to here agree: they believe rape victims should be
comforted, not killed. First, the University of Tehran does not have a law
professor whose name is Rosa Gharachorloo. More important, however, is the
fact that everyone, not almost everyone, that I know believes rape victims
should be comforted, not killed and that is why such an honour killings
culture does not exist in Iran. Indeed, those who commit such a crime in Iran
can expect to face capital punishment, while their victims can expect state
support. Unfortunately, for Sykes, there is no known law in Iran that allows
leniency for the murder of rape victims. Hence, it is no wonder to see how in
the often upside down world of the western media, one can read the BBC
headline Israel agrees to free two killers(BBC NEWS, August 18, 2008).
While the Israeli armed forces carry our regular attacks on Palestinian and
Lebanese civilian and military targets alike, killing thousands of people as a
result, Muhammad Abu Ali who killed an Israeli army reservist and was jailed
for 28 years is labeled a killer by the BBC. The BBC does not view the Israeli
regimes daily acts of terror through air strikes, assassinations, torture, the
long term imprisonment of women and children, the imposition of hunger
through the siege of civilian populations, and the indiscriminate use of
weapons like cluster bombs, as terrorism. However, if a Palestinian kills an
Israeli soldier he is a murderer. Hence, it seems clear that policy making
and media circles in many Western countries regularly demonstrate
belligerent hostility and manufacture exaggerated stereotypes, which
even critics of Orientalism, such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky,
sometimes fail to recognize. This dominant strategy of discourse and
power does not merely produce West or East, rather the Other
becomes the millions of people whose lives are not only reduced to
caricatures and prejudices through this approach, but are often
destroyed as a result. While there are certainly issues of politics, class,
ethnicity, and gender within the East (like the West) as well as between
East and West, these issues are rarely objectively considered and are
regularly distorted by media presentations in both the past and present. This
phenomenon dominates discursive practices relating to the Muslim East and
is something that must be addressed by critics with a sense of urgency. It
seems that in order to bring about a more balanced and judicious
atmosphere for a comprehensive and productive dialogue among
civilizations and nations, these issues must be dealt with.
International relations
IR is a product of whiteness it ignores history, lacks specificity or
context and acts only to preserve state sovereignty
Krishna 9
Sankaran, teaches international relations and comparative politics as the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, HI. His most recent
book is Globalization and Postcolonialism: hegemony and resistance in the 21st century. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). PWoods.
Yet, after two world wars, the rising tide of anti-colonial nationalism
across three continents (Asia, Africa and Latin America), and the growing
refusal of those who were the objects of its inquiry to recognize
themselves in its descriptions, a decolonized Anthropology could no longer
be delayed, even as significant numbers of scholars resisted such an
effort. One could chart a similar trajectory with varying degree of
success- in disciplines such as History, Sociology, Political Science,
Economics and others
The realization that power and knowledge
were inextricably intertwined, and that western descriptions of the nonwest were never innocent of their own political, economic and other
interests
worked their way towards a still incomplete and ongoing
process of decolonization
the discipline of International
Relations (IR) has been extraordinarily resistant to a decolonizing impulse .
IR emerged within the United States, a society that is ferociously
amnesiac about its own (domestic) history as a settler-colony and an
(external) history as a colonizer in Latin America, the Pacific Islands, the
Far East, etc. The US has instead emphasized its post-colonial status in
that it broke away from Britain
and
supported decolonization
This assiduous forgetting of the genocide (of
Native Americans) and slavery (of Africans exported to the New World)
central to the founding of the United States has carried over into the
quintessentially American discipline of IR which often talks of the relations
between nations as if they were ahistorical entities which suddenly
emerged all identical and sovereign- sometime in the middle of the 20th
century.
IR has always focused on explaining the
conditions that lead to war and ways to prevent it. This has produced an
obsession with issues of national security, and especially of the need to
avoid irresponsible policy or idealism that could lower ones guard and
create the conditions for war. Historical issues such as colonialism were
deemed less relevant and priority accorded to a presentism that
continuously focused on threats to national security and opportunities to
enhance national interests.
governed by a
methodological nationalism that it is designed at every turn to avert all
threats to statist sovereignty.
IR has sought to construct itself in the
image of a scientific discipline, one that aims to uncover the invariant laws
that govern relations between nations. This emphasis on achieving a
universal science applicable in all situations has meant that IR has a
strong preference for abstract theory at the expense of historical contexts
and specificity.
as the 20th century unfolded.
in those spaces, gradually
of these disciplines. For a variety of reasons,
Firstly,
in the late 18th century
(intermittently)
efforts of third world countries seeking independence from England, France or Japan.
Second, emerging as it did in the interregnum between two horrific world wars,
In other words, IR discourse is predominantly a prose of counter-insurgency: it is
And thirdly,
the
Labor Link (Marxism, Dialetical Materialism)

Labor discourses obscure the root cause of anti-blackness,
fungibility, and improperly explores settler-colonialism
King, Tiffany, 6/10/14 (Tiffany King is an assistant professor of Womens,

Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University, Labors Aphasia:
Toward Antiblackness as Constitutive to Settler Colonialism,
http://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-towardantiblackness-as-constitutive-to-settler-colonialism/)
For the past few weeks a convergence of social media discussions on reparations, Shona Jacksons book Creole
Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean, and her recent post Humanity beyond the Regime of
Labor, as well as my own thinking about Black Studies engagement with Conquest have all compelled me to think
critically about the issue of Black labor.[1] I would like to take a moment to focus on the conceptual limits of labor
as an epistemic frame for thinking about Blackness (as bodies and discourse) and its relationship to settler
Black labor may crowd out Black

fungibility as a conceptual frame for thinking about Blackness within
settler colonial discourses. While many scholars who understand themselves as humanists have long
colonialism. I am particularly concerned about the ways that
ago conceded that strict or heavy-handed Marxian (political economic) analyses are generally impoverished and
labor as a discourse, or what Shona Jackson

would call a metaphysics and ontoepistemologya way of living and a
way of articulating this mode of living still haunts our critical theories
(Jackson, 2012, p. 217).[2] This is particularly true as scholars undertake
the difficult work of understanding and naming how racialized people are
situated within White settler colonial states. Configuring People of Color
into the calculus of settler colonial relations is onerous and in fact
laborious. It is especially difficult when trying to conceptualize the unique
location of Blackness. I commend scholars for taking on this task. In order to do this
cumbersome work, scholars tend to rely on the tried and true rubric of
labor. Labor becomes the site and mode of incorporating non-Black and non-Indigenous people into settler
colonial relations in White settler nation-states. People of Color scholars often rehearse
histories of arrival as populations of coerced labor as a way of explaining
their presence, as well as distance or proximity to the category of the
Settler. Labor also becomes a liberal discourse that allows immigrants and
migrants to narrate the terms of their belonging and citizenship within
White settler colonial states. In this way, labor functions as another discourse of inclusion. Recently,
wanting; labor as an analytic persists. Indeed,
Jamilah Martin in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates article The Case for Reparations made a similar and astute point in
her blog post On Reparations: Resisting Inclusion and Co-optation that reparations work as a discourse of inclusion
within the project of American Democracy within the U.S. anti-Black settler-imperial state. While the integrationist
project of reparations may be a liberal project of inclusion, it also relies on a teleology of modern labor (Jackson
Yet, despite
the claim of the Black laborer as subject, embedded within the
metaphysics of labor, the bill H.R. 40 (otherwise known as the Reparations
Bill) has not gained traction. H.R. 40s[The Reparations Bill] lack of
success partially speaks to the inability of Blackness to become fully
legible through human categories like the laborer/worker. Further, it
evinces the ways that laborer and worker do not explain the ontological
state of Blackness. In Red, White and Black, Wilderson attends to the ways that Afropessimists have
gone considerable lengths to show that, point of fact , slavery is and connotes an ontological
2012, p. 147). It holds out hope for Black inclusion into a human family of laborers/workers.

status for blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not
exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson
2010, 14). The alienation and exploitation that the human worker experiences through labor are
contingent conditions resulting from human conflicts. Many people can and have occupied these temporary and
conditional abased human coordinates. White, Asian and South Asian, Latina/o and Middle Eastern indentured and
other kinds of laborers have long inhabited White settler territories and nation-states and, as laborers, immigrants
and migrants have all helped build the settler nation. Black laboring bodies have even been used to build the settler
nation. However, Black labor is just one kind of use within an open, violent and infinite repertoire of practices of
One way that I have explained fungibility to my undergraduate

students in my course Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora, is to think about the slave
owner Madame Delphine LaLauries use of enslaved bodies in the FX television
series, American Horror Story: Coven. LaLaurie uses Black flesh to meet uses and
desires beyond those of labor and profit. She runs a torture chamber in order to satisfy lusts
making Black flesh fungible.
that include and exceed the sexual. In one episode, she murders and then uses the blood of an enslaved newborn
child as an elixir that wards off the aging process .
One gets a sense that the possibilities for

Black flesh are unending under her ownership. The infinite possibilities for
fungible Black flesh mark a fundamental distinction between fungible
slave bodies and non-Black (exploited) laboring bodies. Further, Black
bodies cannot effectively be incorporated into the human category of
laborers. If Black laboring bodies were incorporated into the category;
laborer would have no meaning as a human condition. Blackness is
constituted by a fungibility and accumulation that must exist outside the
edge and boundary of the laborer-as-human. If there were no Black
fungible and accumulable bodies there could be no wage laborer that
cohered into a proletariat. While labor as a discourse may work for non-Black and nonNative people of color as a way of interpellating themselves within settler colonial relations, it does not
explain Black presence, Black labor or Black use in White settler nationstates. Theories that attempt to triangulate Blackness into the
Settler/Native antagonism in White settler states do so by positing
Blackness as the labor force that helps make the settler landscape
possible.[3] It is true that Black labor literally tills, fences in and cultivates the settlers land. However,
this singular analysis both obscures the issue of Black fungibility and
reduces Blackness to a mere tool of settlement rather than a constitutive
element of settler colonialisms conceptual order. Fungibility represents a
key analytic for thinking about Blackness and settler colonialism i n White
settler nation-states. Black fungible bodies are the conceptual and
discursive fodder through which the Settler-Master can even begin to
imagine or think spatial expansion (King, 2013). The space making
practices of settler colonialism require the production of Black flesh as a
fungible form of property, not just as a form of labor. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya
Hartman argues that the enslaved embody the abstract interchangeability and replaceability that is endemic to
the commodity (Hartman, 1997, p. 21). Beyond, the captive bodys use as labor, the Black body has a figurative
and metaphorical value that extends into the realm of the discursive and symbolic. What Hartman names as the
figurative capacities of blackness, allows the Settler-Master to conceptualize Blackness as the ultimate sign for
expansion and unending space within the symbolic economy of settlement (Hartman, 1997, p. 7; and King,
forthcoming). Blackness is much more than labor within both slaverys and settler colonialisms imaginaries. Like
Hartman, I argue that Blackness figurative capacity and interchangeability has a lifeor afterlifewithin the
discursive and spatial projects of settler colonial expansion (King, forthcoming). Settler colonialism requires a
symbol of infinite flux in order to animate and imagine its spatial project (King, 2013). In my dissertation, In the
Clearing, I argue that Jennifer Morgans book Laboring Women: Women and Reproduction in New World Slavery,
configures Black women as spatial agents who are [symbolically] essential to the settlement of land during the
In fact, the Black female

body must be discursively constructed in order to make it possible to even
conceive of planting settlements during the first generations of
settlement and slave ownership in South Carolina and Barbados (Morgan,
colonial period in the coastal regions of the South and the West Indies.

2004). Morgan argues that 18th century settlement required particular symbolic constructions and particular
uses of the Black female body (Morgan, 2004, p. 26).[4] Black fungibility represents this space
of discursive and conceptual possibility for settler colonial imaginaries.
Black fungible bodies work beyond the metrics and metaphysics of labor
in White settler colonial states (Jackson, 2012, p. 215). Labor becomes a
limiting frame for conceptualizing Blackness on White settler colonial
terrain. Reimagining Blackness and theorizing anti-Black racism on
unusual landscapes requires that we rethink the usefulness of convenient
and orthodox epistemic frames. We must venture beyond labor and its
limits in order to think about settler colonialisms anti-Black modalities.
Fungibility and other frames deserve our attention as we continue to think
about anti-Black racism, Native genocide and the US settler-slave (e)state.
Lack of advocacy/plan text

The idea that you dont need advocacy that provides a stasis
point for the negative is the epitome of white privilege they
say they want you to vote for the aff because its a good
idea no matter how many good ideas we have as black
debaters, WE need a plan text. WE need to present a
pragmatic plan so that its fair for them to debate. Also, their
interpretation that something NEEDS to be productive in order
to be valid reinscribes Antiblackness blacks werent
productive enough in Africa so they had to be brought to
America to become slaves. Blacks arent productive to
society so they have to be imprisoned. And, they cannot no
link out of this the only reason they refuse to have an
advocacy is to be able to fuck us over in the 2ar with the perm
debate, this is the colonialist logic because they have
determined they will win BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, even if
that means that you destroy others.
Legalism
The Modern System of Anti-Blackness is Perfected through Legal
ActionThe Cycle of Domination is Completed When The Slaves
Bows Down to the System
Farley 5, Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at
Boston College Before Teaching at Albany Perfecting Slavery Page 221-222
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. Whiteover-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the
distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to
segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with postmodernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is
neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-overblack, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a
lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the
form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The
slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its
own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the
impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree. 3 When
exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master
when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it
cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer.
The law contains the pleasure of whiteness, and through it we see

ourselves as masters and slaves. Oppressors fall into the pattern of
enjoying the white-over-black dynamic. We need to remember that
it will be easy to fall back into the past.
Farley 02, Prof @ Albany Law School, 2002 (Anthony P., 2002, The Poetics
of Colorlined Space, p. 99)
Race is a form of bodily pleasure, akin to sexuality. Look, A Nigger! is a
sensation that both the tormentors and the tormented feel within their
bodies. Frantz Fanon writes: Look at the Nigger! My body was given
back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that
white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is
mean, the Negro is ugly. The legal expressions of the colorline are,
similarly, sensations that people have both in and about their bodies. The
master and his slave may both come to see and feel themselves through
the law that defines, commands, and is the expression of their situation.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: Oppression based on slavery was not at first
recognized by the law, but it soon becomes institutional. Thus a son of a
slaveholder, born amidst a regime based on oppression, not only considers
the fact of possessing slaves as natural but also as legitimate since this
fact is one part of the institutions of his homeland. And the more he is
raised to respect the authority of the State and recognize his duties
toward it, the more the right of possessing slaves appears sacred to him
and the more it will remain beyond discussion. There is an underlying tie

between the way of accepting and assuming different legal prescriptions
(matrimonial, civic, military duties, etc.) and the way of accepting the
right to possess slaves. It is the ensemble that is respected and
recognized. Whether race finds its expression as slavery, segregation, or
neo-segregation, the legal song remains the same. The pleasure of
whiteness is spread throughout the entire ensemble. The law is an organ of perceptiona
great ephemeral skinand through it we come to feel ourselves as masters and
slaves, segregators and segregated, neo-segregators and neo-segregated, white and black, subject and object,
and S/M. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers
at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one
hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is I desire you, and
releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the
other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make
The relationship of white-over-black

endures because people have learned to take pleasure in it. We ignore the sensual
aspects of colorlined space at our peril. We would do well to recall the warning
and the prophecy of the Great American Novel: So we beat on; boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.
the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.
Narratives
Hegemony brings increases forceful submission to the government,
especially in the context of blackness hegemonic celebration of
the oppressed also results in the loss of the ideal of consent
S.VH. - But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda
that subjects who are variously positioned on the
the attempt to make the

narrative of defeat into an opportunity for cel ebration, the desire to look
at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find
a way to feel good about our selves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the
project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history
undertaken by many leftists in the 1 970s, who were trying to locate the
agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory narratives of the
oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as if there was a space
you could carve out of the ter rorizing state apparatus in order to exist
outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in
partic ular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of
hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of
looking at the status of the slave. F W - That's very interesting, because it's something I've
been thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that
Gramsci breaks down hegemony into three categories: influence,
leadership, and consent.5 Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then, using
the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white antislavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's really interesting
is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only
explain how the positional ity of black women and white women differs,
but you also suggest how blackness dis articulates the notion of consent,
if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[B]eing forced to submit to the will
of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery " (S, 110). In
other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fun gible
object, which is to say that she is ontologically different than a white
woman who may, as a house servant or indentured labor er, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say,
"The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case, sex] is required
to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an
option.... Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of
sub jectivity is predicated upon the negation of will " (S, 111).
color line can
take up. And that project is something I consider obscene:
Nuclear energy
Nuclear energy is neocolonialism energy corporations steal
indigenous lands
Kuletz 1998
(Dr. Valerie Kuletz, Resident Scholar, academic research and lecturer at Oregon State University, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West, pg. 36-37).
The same
transnational energy corporations that played so significant a role in the
creation of the U.S. nuclear landscape are
, players in a larger global
military economy in which uranium mining remains a requirement for the
continuation of nuclear energy and weapons development The extractive
resources that fuel nuclear power are mined in many Fourth World
lands, demonstrating further that nuclear colonialism follows a global
pattern of exploitation
Transnational
energy corporations have reaped maximum profits at the expense of many
indigenous populations around the world. The uranium sacrifice zone has
not been limited to
the United States
large proportions of the
uranium production and reserves controlled within the five developed
nations are located either within internal colonies of those nations, such
as Indian reservations in the United States and aborigine reserves in
Australia, or in colonies or neocolonies which remain controlled by
developed nations All of these are colonies whose resources and labor are
being exploited considerably by energy resource corporations
The Global Picture By 1982 uranium production had been greatly curtailed in the Grants Uranium Belt, since even cheaper sources had been found outside the continental United States.
, of course
. For example, as of 1980 seventy percent of Frances uranium [came] from Niger and Gabon in west Africa.3"
the Grants Uranium Belt in
: Significantly,
. In Australia, it is estimated that 8o
percent of all uranium reserves lie on aboriginal lands. Aboriginal people in Australia, like American Indians, were pushed on to the least desirable lands within nations and have been virtually forced into accepting miserable
agreements with energy corporations. The 1978 agreement between the aborigines and the companies (Ranger Uranium Agreement) gave the aborigines only 4.25 percent of the revenues of the uranium mine royalties. For many
uranium mining is only a form of resource extraction

for export Because of this, native communities become raw materials
colonies for the uranium companies and their home nation-states.
Australia
Canada
Southwest Africa
United States
indigenous communities historically, as well as in many cases today,
.
The following list
shows the aboriginal communities with the most significant uranium reserves:
1.
particularly the Arnhem Land Area of the Northern Territory, home to a large existing aboriginal community; 2.
--particularly in a northern Saskatchewan area inhabited by Cree-Dene Native Americans; 3.
last colony in Africa; 4.
(Namibia) under South African mining concessions in the
on Navajo, Laguna Pueblo, Havasupai, and Colville Confederated Tribal Lands, along with pre-1848 Hispanic Land Grants at Cebolleta and San Mateo Springs.
Also included are the Sioux lands in the Black Hills of Dakota, and the Spokane Reservation (30 miles upstream from the Yakima Reservation) in the state of Washington.
Nuclear War
Their fear of nuclear extinction is a result of a flawed western
epistemology even the worst effects of nuclear will leave
large parts of the world unaffected, the only reason they care
is because the main places effected will be the US and Europe
Martin 82
Brian, decolonizer. Critique of nuclear extinction. Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4. 1982. pgs. 287-300. http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html. PWoods.
The idea that global nuclear war could kill most or all of the world's
population is critically examined and found to have little or no scientific
basis. A number of possible reasons for beliefs about nuclear extinction
are presented, including exaggeration to justify inaction, fear of death,
exaggeration to stimulate action, the idea that planning is defeatist,
exaggeration to justify concern, white western orientation, the pattern of
day-to-day life, and reformist political analysis. Some of the ways in which
these factors inhibit a full political analysis and practice by the peace
movement are indicated
The
possible crises that may arise for the world and for the peace movement
can be illustrated by a few scenarios. (a) Limited nuclear war in the
periphery. A war breaks out in the Middle East, and resort is made to
nuclear weapons
The United States and the Soviet Union
place their nuclear forces on the highest alert. As the tension continues to
build up, a state of emergency is declared
As well as
precipitating bitter political repression, the crisis contributes to an
increased arms race, especially among nonnuclear and small nuclear
powers, as no effective sanctions are applied to those who used nuclear
weapons. Another similar limited nuclear war and superpower crisis
becomes likely
or (b) Limited nuclear war between the
superpowers.
either due to accident or as part
of a threat-counterthreat situation. A sizable number of military or civilian
targets are destroyed
and perhaps 5 or 10 million people
are killed. As in scenario a, states of emergency are declared, political
dissent repressed and public outrage channelled into massive military and
political mobilisation to prepare for future confrontations and wars
(c) Global nuclear war. A massive nuclear exchange occurs, killing 200
million people in the US, Soviet Union and Europe. National governments,
though decimated, survive and apply brutal policies to obtain economic
and military recovery, brooking no dissent. In the wake of the disaster,
authoritarian civilian or military regimes take control in countries
relatively unscathed by the war, such as Australia, Japan and Spain. The
road is laid to an even more devastating World War IV
. Prevalent ideas about the irrationality and short duration of nuclear war and of the unlikelihood of limited nuclear war are also briefly examined.
, killing a few hundred thousand people.
in the US. Normal democratic procedures are suspended, and 'dissidents' are rounded up. A similar
process occurs in many countries allied militarily to the US, and also within the Soviet bloc. A return to the pre-crisis state of affairs does not occur for years or decades.
... or perhaps the scene shifts to scenario b
c.
A limited exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and the Soviet Union occurs,
, either in the US or the Soviet Union or in allied states,
. Scenario c becomes
more likely.
. Many other similar scenarios could be presented. One feature
of these scenarios is familiar: the enormous scale of physical destruction and human suffering, which is only dimly indicated by the numbers of dead and injured, whether this is hundreds, or hundreds of millions. This destruction and
suffering is familiar largely because many people have repeatedly warned of the human consequences of nuclear war. What has been almost entirely absent from peace movement analysis and planning is any consideration of the
political consequences of nuclear war. The available evidence suggests that a major global nuclear war, one involving the explosion of most of the nuclear bombs that exist, would kill 400 to 450 million people, mostly in the US,
ost of the deaths and injuries from a nuclear war

would be due to blast and heat in the neighbourhood of each explosion
and to exposure during the first few days to fallout deposited downwind of
explosions at or near the surface of the earth.
Europe and Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent China and Japan. M
[3] The number of people killed would be higher if population centres around the world
were systematically bombed[4] or if the cores of many nuclear power plants were dispersed.[5] The number would be lower if substantial numbers of nuclear weapons were used on military targets or if more than minimal civil
Global fallout. The main effect of long-term fallout would be to

increase the rate of cancer and genetic defects by a small percentage .
defence measures were used.

Tens of millions might be affected worldwide over a period of many
decades, but this would provide no threat to the survival of the human
species. Ozone. Nuclear war would cause an increase in ultraviolet light
from the sun which reaches the earth's surface, due to reductions in
stratospheric ozone caused by its catalytic destruction by nitrogen oxides
produced in nuclear explosions. This would increase the incidence of skin
cancer (which is mostly non-lethal) and possibly alter agricultural
productivity, but would be most unlikely to cause widespread death. Fires.
Extensive fires caused directly or indirectly by nuclear explosions would
fill the lower atmosphere in the northern hemisphere with so much
particulate matter that the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's
surface could be greatly reduced for a few months
Climatic changes. Such changes might be
caused, for example, by injection of nitrogen oxides or particulate matter
into the upper atmosphere. The more calamitous possibilities include a
heating trend leading to melting of the polar ice caps, the converse
possibility of a new ice age, and the changing of climatic patterns leading
to drought or unstable weather in areas of current high agricultural
productivity. The rate of impact of such climatic change is likely to be
sufficiently slow - decades, or years in some cases - for the avoidance of
the death of a substantial portion of the world's population through
climatic change. Agricultural or economic breakdown. A major possible
source of widespread death could be the failure of agricultural or
economic recovery in heavily bombed areas, followed by starvation or
social breakdown. Agricultural failure could occur due to reduced sunlight
due to fires or to induced changes in weather. An agricultural or economic
collapse would also increase the likelihood of epidemics. If agricultural or
economic breakdown followed by widespread starvation or epidemics
occurred in heavily bombed areas, and no effective rescue operations
were mounted by less damaged neighbouring areas, then it is conceivable
that many tens or even several hundred million more people could die,
mainly in the US, Soviet Union and Europe. Synergistic and unpredicted
effects. The interaction of different effects, such as weakened resistance
to disease due to high radiation exposure or to shortages of food, could
well increase the death toll significantly. These consequences would
mostly be confined to heavily bombed areas. Finally, there is the
possibility of effects currently dismissed or not predicted leading to many
more deaths from nuclear war. To summarise the above points, a major
global nuclear war in which population centres in the US, Soviet Union,
Europe and China ware targeted, with no effective civil defence measures
taken, could kill directly perhaps 400 to 450 million people. Induced
effects, in particular starvation or epidemics following agricultural failure
or economic breakdown, might add up to several hundred million deaths
to the total, though this is most uncertain. Such an eventuality would be a
catastrophe of enormous proportions, but it is far from extinction. Even in
the most extreme case there would remain alive some 4000 million
people, about nine-tenths of the world's population, most of them
unaffected physically by the nuclear war. The following areas would be
relatively unscathed, unless nuclear attacks were made in these regions:
South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian
. If this occurred during the northern spring or summer, one consequence
would be greatly reduced agricultural production and possible widescale starvation.

subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Oceania and large parts of
China. Even in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere where most
of the nuclear weapons would be exploded, areas upwind of nuclear
attacks would remain free of heavy radioactive contamination, such as
Portugal, Ireland and British Columbia.
Representations of future nuclear war rest on racist fears of

irrational non-whitesthe bomb is the epitome of the
destructive capacity of Whiteness, naturalizing structural
violence through the projection of a spectacular extinction.
Williams 11 [Paul, lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, Race,
Ethnicity, and Nuclear War, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies,
2011, p.1-3]
In this study, nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (1) the invention and
use of the first atomic bombs; (2) nuclear weapons testing stockpiling of the Cold War superpowers; and (3) nuclear war
(often referred to as World War Three) and life after such a
cataclysm. Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and
national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its
emergence (and deployment against Japan) was read by some
commentators as an act of genocidal racist violence, and by some as
the apex of Western civilizations scientific achievement. These opposing
perspectives are interpretative poles that have been central to nuclear representations. By posing white moral and technological
superiority against the destructive technology it supposedly invented, cultural producers have cited nuclear weapons as evidence
against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism. From this point of view, the scientific achievement of splitting the atom does not reveal
the enormity of nuclear weapons reminds one that the

technology first created by the white world imperils the whole Earth .
Through a range of media, from novels to poetry, short stories to film, comics to oratory, the terms that modern
European imperialism depended upon civilization, race, and
nation, in particular often recur in nuclear representations. Some of
white superiority; instead,
these representations, emerging when Europes empires were relinquishing direct control of their colonies, share the uncertainty
The historical
congruence of nuclear representations and decolonization intimates
the importance of this context to future visions of World war Three:
tropes of genocide, technological and and scientific modernity, and
the (re)population of the planet are relevant to this apocalyptic subgenre of SF as
well as being recurrent elements in colonial history. Several of the nuclear
representations discussed reproduce the justifications of the modern
imperial project. But an alternative tradition makes these justifications visible and demonstrates their corrosive,
that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent decolonizing preocess.
lingering presence in contemporary culture through the depiction of nuclear technology and its possible consequences. Significantly,
the idea that nuclear weapons are used to buttress a racial order
that privileges whiteness an idea that prohibits non-white peoples
from accessing such technology remains a potent current running
from 1945 until the present day. Having raised this point to emphasize the importance of the themes
in this study, I am mindful to repeat that my focus is literary, cultural and filmic texts. I am not seeking to explain how race and
ethnicity have structured Cold War history. If I may be excused a brief aside, I do think such moments have occurred. Civil rights and
US foreign policy had to negotiate the

American governments response to domestic systems of racial
discrimination, and vice versa. Recently decolonized nations whose populations had been excluded
Cold War historians have long understood that
along similar lines by European imperialism followed the narrrative of American desegregation closely, and the allegiances of these
nations played and important role in the Cold War. When the black student James Meredith was not permitted to join the University

of Mississippi in 1962, President Kennedy ordered federal marshals to force his registration through. This took place on 1 October
1962, after a night of fighting between demonstrators and troops. While not universally praised, Kennedys actions were widely
perceived in the international press as evidence to resolve to oppose racial discrimination. When the Cuban Missile Crisis took place
three weeks later, the presidents of Guinea and Ghaa denied refuelling facilities to Soviet planes flying to the Caribbean. Kennedy
aside Arthur Schlesinger directly attributed the African presidents actions to the intervention in Mississippi. The subject of this book
representations of nuclear
weapons and the world after nuclear war postulate meanings that
are not only fully activated when considered through a lens of race,
ethnicity, nationhood and civilization. In many of the texts discussed, a primary
consideration is whether the vestigial master narrative of white
supremacy, the narrative of racial superiority that underpinned
modern European colonization, is being resuscitated. I have in mind Fredric
is not the mechanisms of history. The subject of this book is the way that
Jamesons expression, if interpretation in terms of [] allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because
such master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them. For Jameson the interpretative
act runs the risk of being an act of hermeneutic bad faith the risk that the critic finds what they are looking for all along because
they gathered up a series of texts whose selection is far from arbitrary, and consequently the reading of said texts confirms the
ubiquity of the historical essence with which they were initially ascribed. Yet, as Jameson writes, one should not be too cynical about
the act of interpretation. If the critical analysis of a text finds evidence of the historical trends it set out to discover the success of
the interpretation is not in itself a reason to reject the idea that texts allow one to think closely and critically about historical
attitudes. The act of interpretation can sometimes be the imposition of a preconvieved set of ideas onto a series of texts chosen
precisely because they corroborate the hypothesis being tested, but it can also be credible because texts are inscribed by history
and by master naratives. As a way of referring to an explanation of the movement of history and its future direction, Jamesons
the master
narrative of white supremacism that proved so useful to European
colonialism and the settlement of North America. How do texts
come to be inscribed by master narratives? What justification do I have in reading the master
sense of master narratives is worth retaining. My usage here designates the explanation itself, specifically
narrative o white supremacism and related narratives of settlement through the literary, cultural and filmic texts analysed here?
Their characterization of nuclear peace in doomsday scenarios

separates the question of apocalyptic violence from racial justice,
ignoring that THE WORLD HAS ALREADY ENDED for people of color
and that their focus on mere survivability elides the nuclear
holocaust waged on a daily basis against non-white bodies.
Omolade 1984,
Barbara, Calvin College first dean of multicultural affairs, Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust, Womens Studies Quarterly vol. 12, No. 2
the movement for nuclear disarmament must overcome its reluctance
to speak in terms of power, of institutional racism, and imperialist
military terror. The issues of nuclear disarmament and peace have
been mystified because they have been placed within a doomsday
frame which separates these issues from other ones, saying, "How can we talk about struggles
struggles concerned with human life and change. In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a
general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet
Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African people who died between 1492
and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The
same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban
housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as
well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of
color the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for
example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of color
To raise these issues effectively,

throughout the world's urban areas is already blighted and
inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For
people of color, the world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its
own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to see with
increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for
it, and rebuild it in our, own image. The "death culture" we live in
has convinced many to be more concerned with death than with life,
more willing to demonstrate for "survival at any cost" than to
struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to
the daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear
holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs,
our housing, our schools, our families, and our lands.As women of color, we are warriors, not
pacifists. We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die
as a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba, in Guinea- Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and in
countless daily encounters with land- lords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions,
but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and
to provide for the future of our people.
Oceans
The affirmatives policy of ocean exploration is not neutral its
rooted in the same colonial paradigm as the middle passage
Kokontis 11
(Kate Menninger Kokontis, Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies University of California, Berkeley, Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity
in the American racial state , pg. 4-5)
The legacy of slavery rears its head in structural disparities between black
and non- black Americans
fraught relationship to civil society, and
in the notions of abjection and impossibility that are often associated with
blackness. These factors are
part of the fallout of the Middle
Passage, the hellish forced migration in which Africans were chained up in
coastal dungeons and then in steerage on ships and brought to the
Americas; this experience is understood to be symbolically crucial to the
transformation of humans into slaves, as there was a concerted effort on
the part of the Europeans to divest these Africans of their homes, mother
tongues, memories, cultural practices, families in short, of any shred of
their humanity.
this
momentous alchemical event is rhetorically positioned in contradistinction
to the relative knowability and the elective nature of immigration , and as
a lynchpin in discussions of whether and how structural and psychic
access to citizenship is available or is barred.
, in African Americans
often discussed, more specifically, as being
Of course, the success of this transformation is debated, and is indeed the explicit or subtextual subject of many performative returns. Either way,
The comparison to immigration (there is no Ellis Island for the descendents of slaves to
go to in order to learn about their ancestry, goes a popular refrain) is taken up by optimists (who claim that things are getting better and they can pull themselves up, can be like the immigrants and transcend) and pessimists (who
many whites are

very committed to the Ellis Island narrative of having left their home
countries under duress, traveled in steerage to America, experienced an
invasive and arbitrary inspection at the immigration station, suffered
through some time here with a lack of language proficiency and were
considered to be located in an interstitial racial category, had nothing, and
made something of themselves, rising up eventually (by virtue of having
pulled themselves up by their bootstraps without any sort of assistance,
or so many telling the story would have it) to become fully incorporated
citizens
claim that there is a fundamental if not ontological political, structural, and psychic distinction between what is possible for blacks and non-blacks) alike. Likewise,
ethnic
. This narrative, too, can be mobilized to a variety of ends: from an assertion that the mythic bootstrapping of yore means that contemporary immigrants and black Americans ought to be able to pull
themselves up as well and do not deserve a public safety net. That is, the Ellis Island narrative is used to justify the psychic exclusion of and the (ongoing) withholding of resources from non-whites. Or it can be mobilized in a more
generous and self-reflexive memory of having suffered, and having been offered various forms of assistance from communities, mutual aid societies, the government, and other entities, and this interpretation extends to an
the Ellis Island narratives emphasis on suffering

and racial interstitiality apparently compels an inevitable and ambivalent
disidentification with blackness: many ethnic whites use blackness as a
Manichean metaphor to describe the ways in which non-white or off-white
immigrants were and are positioned upon arrival to the U.S. in a racial
order in which they are interstitial subjects, suspended between
whiteness
and blackness
And
many ethnic whites not only disavow the ways in which they benefit from
structural and psychic manifestations of racial preference, but go so far as
to borrow the rhetoric of grievance from the civil rights struggle, often
indeed turning this language around to assert that it is ostensibly illdeserving blacks who are responsible for the grievance of depriving
ostensibly well-deserving whites of their entitlements through programs
like affirmative action
assumption that everyone else needs and deserves a safety net as well. Too,
(which is configured as citizenship, American-ness, and belonging)
(which is configured as abjection, impossibility, and otherness).
! Given the imbrication and conflicting stakes of these narratives, investigating the extent to which the descendents of these im/migrants have or have not had
access to American civil society and the ways that this disparity is reflected in each groups performative returns reveals some important aspects of the ways that the racial state enforces its terms.
The Ocean is painted red by the actions by the colonizers

Christopher, Emma; Pybus, Cassandra; and Rediker, Marcus 2007 (
Emma Christopher
is currently Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her book Slave Trade Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, was published in . She is also the author of several articles on the subject of the transatlantic slave trade and convict transportation to Australia, and her
forthcoming book tells the story of the British and Irish convicts transported to West Africas slave forts*, Cassandra Pybus is an eminent Australian writer and historian. She is author of many books, most recently The Woman Who Walked to Russia ( ); American Citizens, British Slaves (with Hamish
Maxwell-Stewart) (); Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaways Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty( ); and Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australias First Black Settlers ( ). She has won numerous literary awards and writers fellowships and is currently a
Professorial Fellow in History at Sydney University, Australia.**, Marcus Rediker is the author of several award-winning and influential works on maritime history, including his groundbreaking first volume, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime
World, (
). More recently he has written (with Peter Linebaugh) The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic( ) and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age( ). He is currently working on a history of the slave ship. He is Professor of History at
the University of Pittsburgh.***, Many Middle Passages forced migration and the making of the modern world pg. 12-13, http://libcom.org/files/[Emma_Christopher,_Cassandra_Pybus,_Marcus_Rediker(Bookos.org).pdf)
The middle passage is an old maritime phrase, dating to the heyday of

the Atlantic slave trade. It designated the bottom line of a trading triangle, between the outward
passage from Europe to Africa and the homeward passage from the Americas back to Europe. The Oxford
English Dictionary notes the first maritime usage as , by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. The phrase is older
than that, but by crediting Clarkson another truth is revealed: through a broad-based social movement, those who
campaigned to abolish the slave trade made the middle passage notorious and a part of popular vocabulary in their
own time and thereafter. Drawing upon and publicizing the gruesome social conditions and the fierce resistance by
enslaved Africans aboard the slave ships, the abolitionists managed to focus attention on a reality far beyond the
shores of most peoples experience and to make real the horrors of the middle passage to a metropolitan reading
This was in itself a great achievement, not least because most people
in the eighteenth century, like most people today, tended to regard as real
only the landand nationalspaces of the earths surface. The oceans
were vast, ahistorical voids. Of course, maritime exploration and discovery
showed that history happened on the oceans, as did the naval battles that determined the
public.
course of history. But explorers and admirals were incorporated into top-down, national, and terra-centric
narratives, even when the seaborne agents who made the discoveries and battles possible were a motley crew of
Because the abolitionist campaign demonstrated

that history happened on the high seas, many scholars have turned their
attention to the middle passage of the African slave trade and have built a
significant body of historical literature that transcends the land
boundaries of nation-states. This scholarship is the inspiration for our volume.
sailors who eluded national definition.1
Oil
The oil market is one that is foundational upon racist social norms,
the US forced whiteness upon the Middle East, and the only time oil
firms do anything for those in Africa is when it serves to improve
their public ratings.
Vitalis 2002 [Robert Vitalis is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and
has a PhD in Political Science from MIT
http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/2/185.full.pdf+html]
For readers who possess even a general familiarity with the works of Rex Casillas, Fred Halliday, Roger Louis,
it may be
reasonable to ask if there is much to add at this juncture to the many expert
accounts of the end of British hegemony in Saudi Arabia and the beginning of the U.S. Saudi
special relationship. Douglas Little, a fine practitioner of the craft in his own right, has surveyed
the state of recent Middle East diplomatic historiography, where it is now conventional to
begin the narrative of postwar imperial demise with the Saudi case,
because nowhere else in the Middle East was America's rise to
dominance so rapid, complete, and seemingly irreversible.4 It turns out,
however, that there are still things to learn about the pre-1973 decades,
before the oil shock that has exerted such profound influence on the way we interpret the past, on
what were then the frontiers of global capitalism. This essay, part of a work in progress on
state and market formation in Saudi Arabia, provides the first
account of American oil firms investments in a norm of white
supremacy and in a global institution or regime of ascriptive hierarchy known as
racism.5 Making this social or cultural historians move is necessary in the
interest of reviving the critical tradition of political economy. Much about
oil politics and emerging markets today is echoed in the history of state and
market formation on the eastern shores of the Saudi kingdom. The
pipeline battles in the Caspian Sea are eerily familiar scenes from World War II
Khaldun al-Naqeeb, Aaron David Miller, David Painter, Ghassan Salame, Michael Stoff, and others,
in the Gulf. Accounts of Baku as a boomtown resemble those that were once written about Dhahran and dozens of
Even the muckraking attacks on Chevron in the Niger River

Delta, where the firm admits to transporting Nigerian troops to put
down the rebellions in the oil camps, echo the past. Chevron once was Standard
Oil of California (or Socal). Its subsidiary in Saudi Arabia, the Arabian American Oil Company ( Aramco) had
transported Saudi soldiers to invade Israel in the 1948 war, and hauled
troops again in the war against Britain in the Burami oasis in the 1950s. In Africa, the oil giants
are now deeply invested in public identities as partners in
development, good guests helping with schools and roads, building hospitals, training workers, and
other places.
educating young people
Even when oil companies mess up, minority communities get turned
into sacrifice zones for the profit of white business owners.
Smith 10 [Jeff Smith, writer for GRIID, Great Rapids Institutes for
Information Democracy, August 1, 2010 BPs Environmental Racism,
http://griid.org/2010/08/01/bps-environmental-racism/]
Given the sad history of waste disposal in the southern United States, it should be no surprise to
anyone that the BP waste disposal plan looks a lot like Dumping in
Dixie, and has become a core environmental justice concern , especially among
low-income and people of color communities in the Gulf Coastcommunities
whose residents have historically borne more than their fair share
of solid waste landfills and hazardous waste facilities before and
after natural and man-made disasters. For decades, African American and
Latino communities in the South became the dumping grounds for
all kind of wastesmaking them sacrifice zones. Nowhere is this scenario more
apparent than in Louisianas Cancer Alley, the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi from Baton Rough to New
Gulf Coast residents, who have for decades lived on the fenceline with landfills and waste
sites, are asking why their communities are being asked again to
shoulder the waste disposal burden for the giant BP oil spill. They are
Orleans.
demanding answers from BP and the EPA in Washington, DC and the EPA Region 4 office in Atlanta and EPA Region 6
office in Dallastwo EPA regions that have a legacy of unequal protection, racial discrimination, and bad decisions
A large segment of the African

American community was skeptical of BP, the oil and gas industry,
and the government long before the disastrous Gulf oil disaster,
since black communities too often have been on the receiving end
of polluting industries without the benefit of jobs and have been used as a
repository for other peoples rubbish. It is more than ironic that black and other
that have exacerbated environmental and health disparities.
communities of color get BPs garbage, while mostly white companies rake in the millions in BP contracts. It does
An NAACP investigation
this month concluded that Community members and business
owners [of color] have been locked out of access to contracts for
cleanup and other opportunities related to addressing this disaster. Using the latest Federal Procurement
Data System (FPDS) information (July 9, 2010), environmental writer Brentin Mock reports that minorities
see little green in BP oil spill jobs. He finds only $2.2 million of $53 million in federal
not take a rocket scientist to figure out this inequitable flow of benefits.
contracts, a paltry 4.8 percent, has actually gone to small, disadvantaged businesses. Women-owned businesses
of the 212 vendors with contracts, just two are

African American, 18 are minority-owned, none are historically black
colleges or universities (HBCUs), despite the three in New Orleans alone:
received 4.2 percent of contracts. And
Xavier University, Dillard University and Southern University at New Orleans.
Sites of oil crises are always centered along the Black Atlantic, from
the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico to the Niger River Delta
oil frontiers are involuntary lands that involve the dispossession
and racialization of its inhabitants.
Watts 12 [Michael Watts is Michael Watts is Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and
Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley The author of fourteen books
and over two hundred articles, he has received awards and fellowships from such
organizations as the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the
National Science Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, September 2012,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/v064/64.3.watts.html]
At roughly 10 p.m. on April 20, 2010,
mud and water shot up and out of the derrick of BP's

Deepwater Horizon, located in deepwater in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM),
and was followed shortly by a massive explosion instantly converting the rig into a
drilling rig
raging inferno. Located almost fifty miles off the coast of southern Louisiana, Deepwater Horizon sank two days
later to the ocean floor, resting one mile below the sea's surface. As the rig sank, it ruptured the risers (the marine
drilling riser connects the floating rig to the subsea wellhead), and a mixture of oil and gas, under extreme
the Macondo
well discharge was hemorrhaging at a rate of over 200,000 gallons per
day; surface oil covered 3,850 square miles. When it was all over almost 5 million barrels had
been released and 35 percent of the Gulf Coast affected. Rarely
noted during the crisis was the long and deep history of spills and
blowouts in the Gulf, and the systematic destruction of the Gulf coastline, especially in the Mississippi
delta, over the previous century.25 In the midst of the Deepwater Horizon
catastrophe, Royal Dutch Shell released a report on its activities in
Nigeria, the jewel in the crown of the West African Gulf of Guinea, an oil-producing region of global significance
and a major supplier of high quality "sweet and light" crude to U.S. markets.26 During 2009 Shell
confirmed that it had spilled roughly 14,000 tons of crude oil into the creeks
of the Niger delta, the heart of Nigeria's oil economy. In other words, in one year, a single
oil company (Shell, incidentally, currently accounts for roughly one-third of Nigerian national output) was
responsible for 4.2 million gallons of spilled oil; in 2008 the figure was close to 3
pressure, was released into the warm and biologically rich waters of the Gulf. By mid-May 2010,
million gallons. In related figures released in April 2010, the Federal Ministry of the Environment released a tally
Since the late 1950s when oil

became commercially viable, over seven thousand oil spills have
occurred across the Niger delta oil fields. Cumulatively over a fifty-year period, 1.5
sheet of 2,045 recorded spill sites between 2006 and 2009.
million tons (4 billion gallons) of crude oil has been discharged in an area roughly one-tenth the size of the federal
this spillage is "on par with [an]

Exxon Valdez [spill] every year."27 Since 1960, to put it more concretely, each acre of the
Niger delta has been the recipient of 40 gallons of spilled crude oil. These two instances of
petrocalamityeach centered on exploration and production at
different points in the global value chain but with common points of
reference in the history of the Black Atlanticprovide an
opportunity [End Page 444] to explore the instabilities and contradictions
in the oil assemblage. Both are oil frontiers, understood not simply as a
territory peripheral to, or at the margins of the state in some way, but as a particular
spaceat once political, economic, cultural, and socialin which the conditions for a
new phase of (extractive) accumulation are being put in place (the
waters of the GOM. As an Amnesty International report put it,
establishment, in short, of the conditions of possibility for a new phase of capital accumulation). In the world of big
oil, a frontier has a specific set of connotations. A geological province, a large area often of several thousand square

kilometers with a common geological history, becomes a petroleum province when a "working petroleum system"
has been discovered.28 A commercial petroleum system (or "play") consists of several core features: a source rock
with rich carbon content and a geological depth capable of converting organic carbon to petroleum; a sedimentary
reservoir rock with sufficient pore space to hold significant volumes of petroleum and permeability to permit
petroleum to flow to a well bore; a nonporous sedimentary rock as effective barrier to petroleum migration; and a
structural trapping mechanism to capture and retain petroleum. Once these preconditions are met, the oil frontier
The discovery of a petroleum fielda play with commercial

potentialtriggers a process of appraisal and development, namely, drilling many new wells to
confirm the extent and properties of the reservoirs and fluid s and to
comes to life in the play.
determine whether the configuration warrants further investment. The development of the initial fields in a new
province is replete with technical uncertainties that collectively shape the ultimate volume of oil that can be
recovered. The properties of reservoir rock, the fluids it contains, and the fluid dynamics in the rock are key, but so
too are the fluids that vary in their composition, specific gravity, and viscosity. As Peter Nolan and Mark Thurber
point out,29 uncertainties around each of these field variables translate into uncertainty in ultimate recovery
volumes, peak production, the life of the field, and so on. The frontier, in sum, refers to the spatiotemporal
dynamics in which fields, in a petroleum province, are discovered, developed, and recovered; the process from socalled primary reserve creation to tertiary recovery from existing "mature" reservoirs. With the development of one
or more commercial fields, a frontier becomes "proven" and some uncertainties are reduced, which often induces
an influx of new entrant companies that were deterred when entry barriers were high, which includes state
companies and smaller independents. Another frontier emergesa function of new technologies and aging
reservoirsas aging oil fields attract investments through tertiary recovery. But the idea of the frontier captures
something else, namely, a process, covering many decades, through which the industry has seen the continual
discovery, [End Page 445] exploitation, and extension of the oil frontier from onshore sedimentary basins through
shallow offshore basins and into the deep and ultradeepwater basins. Recent and emergent frontiers include the
challenges of very deep Arctic water and the commercialization of vast resources of unconventional oil and gas like
The frontier within and between

provinces is thus permanent and dynamic, both geographically
expansionary and, as it were, involutionary. Frontiers are customarily seen as
spaces "beyond the sphere of the routine action of centrally located
violence-producing enterprises," in which typically land and property rights are contested,
the rule of law is in question, and frontier populations (often
racialized and excluded because of the coercive forms of capital accumulation in train) inhabit
a zone in which "violence and political negotiation [are] . . . at the
center of social and economic life."30 Frontiers, as I deploy the term for oil,
possess all of these qualities rather than be confined to the
technical relations of resource exploitation (as the industry understands frontiers).
Canadian tar sands and the U.S. oil and gas shales.
The permanent frontier marks the ongoing recursive construction of new spaces of accumulation (whether the
discovery of first oil in the 1950s in Nigeria or the explosion of offshore oil development off coastal Louisiana after
1938) and the creation of the conditions of possibility for the local operation of the oil assemblage.31
Oil
frontiers have their own temporalities and spatialitiesshaped naturally by

technological considerations unique to oilbut like frontiers everywhere, questions of
access to and control of land, property, the state as a prerequisite
for accumulation is key. As a territorial resource, oil is constantly in the
business of creating newand refiguring oldfrontiers; complex processes of dispossession,
compromise, violence, and engagement mark them. As a technologically dynamic industry, the frontiers
so created are "deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic territories."32
Eyal Weizman's extraordinary account of the Israeli occupation of Palestine comes close to what I have in mind: The
dynamic morphology of the frontier resembles an incessant sea dotted with multiplying archipelagoes of externally
alienated and internally homogenous . . . enclaves. . . . [It is] a unique territorial ecosystem (in which) various other
zonespolitical piracy, barbaric violence, . . . of weak citizenshipexist adjacent to, within or over each other.33
These oil frontiers are textbook cases of what Henri Lefebvre calls the "hyper-complexity" of global space in which
social space fissions and fragments, producing multiple, overlapping, and intertwined subnational spaces with their
own complex internal boundaries and frontiers.
The demand for oil has put poor communities in constant

danger.
Bullard 02
Building Healthy and Sustainable Communities,Environmental Justice Center, Clark Atlanta University,
Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between

nations and between transnational corporations. Increased globalization
largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. This is especially
true for the global resource extraction industry such as oil, timber,
and minerals. [7] Globalization makes it easier for transnational
corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental
regulations, best tax incentives, cheapest labor, and highest profit.The
struggle of African Americans in Norco, Louisiana and the Africans in
the Niger Delta are similar in that both groups are negatively impacted by
Shell Oil refineries and unresponsive governments. This scenario is
repeated for Latinos in Wilmington (California) and indigenous
people in Ecuador who must contend with pollution from Texaco oil
refineries. The companies may be different, but the community
complaints and concerns are very similar. Local residents have seen their
air, water, and land contaminated. Many nearby residents are "trapped"
in their community because of inadequate roads, poorly planned emergency
escape routes, and faulty warning systems. They live in constant fear of
plant explosions and accidents.Bhopal tragedy is fresh in the minds of
millions of people who live next to chemical plants. The 1984
poison-gas leak at the Bhopal, India Union Carbide plant killed thousands
of people--making it the world's deadliest industrial accident. It is not a
coincidence that the only place in the U.S. where methyl isocyanate
(MIC) was manufactured was at a Union Carbide plant in in
predominately African American Institute, West Virginia. [8] In 1985,
a gas leak from the Institute Union Carbide plant sent 135 residents to the
hospital. The environmental justice movement has its roots in the United
States. However, in just two decades, this grassroots movement has spread
across the globe. The call for environmental justice can be heard from the
ghetto of Southside Chicago to the Soweto township. The environmental
justice movement has come a long way since its humble beginning in 1982
in Warren County, North Carolina where a PCB landfill ignited protests and
over 500 arrests. The Warren County protests provided the impetus for a
1983 U.S. General Accounting Office study, Siting of Hazardous Waste
Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of
Surrounding Communities. [10] That study revealed that three out of
four of the off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in Region 4
(which comprises eight states in the southern U.S.) were located in

predominantly African-American communities, although AfricanAmericans made up only 20% of the region's population.
Omission
Their silence on race is not neutral its rooted in a power matrix of
white supremacy
Crenshaw 97
Carrie, Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, The University of Alabama. Summer 1997. Resisting whiteness' rhetorical silence. Western Journal of
Communication 61.3. PWoods.
In academic and political discourse, it is

rare for white people to
explicitly reference their whiteness.
Public political figures
avoid mentioning whiteness in
their discourse
even though the color of American politics is
implicit in current debates about welfare, affirmative action, crime, and
other issues.
such discourse tends to ignore the ways in which race,
gender, and class intersect with each other to perpetuate oppressive
human hierarchies
Because discursive constructions of
whiteness are typically unmarked and unnamed in personal, academic,
and public discourse, they present a constellation of challenges for
rhetorical scholars who are interested in the ideological role of whiteness
in intersecting discourses about race, gender, and class.
also
The strictures of the "approved identity" in academic writing often prevent us from revealing our personal social
locations and experiences (Blair, Brown and Baxter 402).
likewise
(Nakayama
and
Krizek
297)
a host of
Moreover,
(Crenshaw,
"Beyond";
Lorde).
Previous rhetorical scholarship has focused on racist
public discourse (e.g., Wander, "Salvation"; Wander, "The Savage"; Himelstein; Logue; Logue and Garner; Trank), but Nakayama and Krizek have recently taken our thinking a step further by mapping the terrain of whiteness. In a
provocative study which names whiteness as a strategic rhetoric, they ethnographically "map" the "everyday" strategies of the spoken rhetoric of whiteness from a cultural studies perspective. They are "interested in ... the
constructed space of whiteness, not the ways that it influences the margins" and "do[es] not address racism or racist ideology, although [they acknowledge that] these are closely aligned to many of the ways that whiteness is
constructed" (306n). Their conclusion invites us to move beyond their initial topological project to investigate how the rhetoric of whiteness functions in the context of other social relations, particularly gender (303-305). In this
essay, I accept their invitation and join the ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about whiteness (e.g., Allen; Dutcher; Dyer; Feagin and Vera; Frankenberg; Frye; Harris; hooks, Black; Mcintosh; Nakayama and Krizek; Roediger).
rhetoricians must do
the critical ideological work necessary to make whiteness visible and
overturn its silences for the purpose of resisting racism. To do this,
scholars must locate interactions that implicate unspoken issues of race ,
discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is invoked but its explicit
terminology is not, and investigate how these racialized constructions
intersect with gender and class.
Because whiteness and its intersections with gender and class are steeped in silence (hooks, Black; Mcintosh; Nakayama and Krizek), this essay argues that
One such interaction was the debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun (D-IL) and Jesse Helms (R-NC) over the U.S. Senate's decision
whether to grant a fourteen-year extension of the design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) insignia. Because the UDC insignia contains a representation of the Confederate flag, the debate centered on
whether a Senate approval of the patent would commend a charitable patriotic organization or commemorate an historical symbol of racism. Accounts of this debate were widely disseminated in the national news media and
described Moseley Braun's argument as a dramatic history-making challenge to racism in the U.S. Senate (e.g., Clymer; Lee; McGrory). "For once Senators changed their minds. Things that are usually decided in the cloakroom, were
settled on the floor in plain sight" (McGrory A2). Helms spoke first and Moseley Braun responded. After Helms' second speech, the motion to table the amendment was rejected 52 to 48. However, Moseley Braun was ultimately
victorious; after her final speech, the patent extension was denied on a 75 to 25 vote. / This debate is a uniquely interesting rhetorical artifact because it was a direct and public clash of arguments about race in political discourse. It
constitutes an important example of how two public political actors' discourse about race and how the personal dimensions of race, gender, and class entered into their public argument. In the next section, I argue that ideological
rhetorical criticism is an appropriate avenue for analyzing interactions like this one. / Ideological Rhetorical Criticism /
There is nothing essential, "natural,"
or biological about whiteness.

It is the historically located rhetorical meaning
of whiteness that assigns it social worth
Whiteness functions
ideologically when people employ it , consciously or unconsciously, as a
framework to categorize people and understand their social locations .
Because the overwhelming unity of our genetic makeup swamps any human differences that have historically been attributed to race
(Appiah 21; Shipman 269), race itself has been called a biological fiction (Gates 4).
(Nakayama and Krizek 292). /
Within this
framework, whiteness as a social position has value and has been treated legally as property (Bell; Crenshaw "Race"; Feagin and Vera; Harris). The term "white privilege" denotes a host of material advantages white people enjoy as a
Even though many white people sense

that privilege accompanies whiteness
they do not overtly
acknowledge their white privilege because they think of themselves as
average, morally neutral non-racists. They do not see racism as an
ideology that protects the interests of all white people; rather, they
envision racism in the form of white hooded Klansmen engaged in acts of
racial hatred
Because this ideology can be produced and
reproduced through spoken discourse
whiteness and its privilege
have both ideological and rhetorical dimensions.Ideological rhetorical
criticism reveals the vested interests protected by a particular rhetorical
framework for understanding social order. It assists the search for
alternatives to oppression and enables us to engage in right action for
good reasons
result of being socially and rhetorically located as a white person (Crenshaw, "Race"; Mcintosh; Wellman).
(Feagin
(Mcintosh
34;
Ezekiel
and
Vera),
1).
(van Dijk; Goldberg),
(Wander, "The Ideological" 2, 18). While cultural and ethnographic approaches that name the complexities of our racialized social locations make the rhetoric of whiteness visible and

an ideological approach helps to uncover the alliance
between the submerged or silent rhetoric of whiteness and white material
privilege. Ideological rhetorical criticism reveals how the public political
rhetoric of whiteness relies upon a silent denial of white privilege to
rationalize judicial, legislative, and executive decisions that protect the
material interests of white people at the expense of people of color .
Beyond the realm of "everyday" discourse, public political actors often
engage a submerged or silent rhetoric of whiteness to protect white
privilege, and their arguments are authorized by the powerful institutions
from which they speak. Those authorized arguments in turn sanction the
rhetorical frameworks through which white individuals make sense of and
justify their privileged social status
displace
its
centrality
(Nakayama
and
Krizek),
3]
(van Dijk; Wellman). / Stuart Hall's work is useful for grasping the rhetorical nature of ideology in general and racist
ideologies in specific. He defines ideology as "those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and 'make sense' of some aspect of social existence" ("The
Ideological struggles are struggles over meaning. Meaning is a social

production, a practice of making the world mean something, and this
meaning is produced through language.
language is the principle medium of ideologies, and ideologies are
sets or chains of meaning located in language
These chains
of meaning are not the products of individual intention even though they
are statements made by individuals. Instead, intentions are formed within
pre-existing ideologies because individuals are born into them. Ideologies
live within what we take-for-granted. They exist in our assumptions and
descriptive statements about how the world is. "Ideologies tend to
disappear from view into the taken-for-granted 'naturalised' world of
common sense. Since (like gender) race appears to be 'given' by Nature,
racism is one of the most profoundly 'naturalised' of existing ideologies "
Whites" 18).
Language is not a synonym for ideology because the same terms can be used in very different ideological
discourses. However,
("The Rediscovery" 67, 81; "The Whites" 18). /
(Hall,
"The Whites" 19). / To understand how racist ideologies operate, Hall draws upon the work of Antonio Gramsci. While Gramsci did not explicitly theorize about race, he did investigate the ideological and cultural implications of region
ideologies function hegemonically to preserve powerful

interests.
ideologies are taken-for-granted frameworks that naturalize
our descriptions of the way the world is, including its current power
structures. This power is not achieved solely by coercive might; it also
operates through the consent of those who are subjugated. Hegemony is
the production of consent that determines what is taken-for-granted. So,
our taken-for-granted, naturalized assumptions of what makes common
sense produce and reinforce our consent to the current social order and
its power structures.
hegemony is
historically contingent. Because hegemony is never stable and is always an
ongoing and fluid process of gaining consent, social transformation
through the critical examination of current relations of power is possible.
and nation. Hall embraces Gramsci's argument that
That is to say,
The advantage of Gramsci's position is that it makes room for an oppositional consciousness because it recognizes that
Following Gramsci, Hall also believes that it is essential to analyze the historical specificity of racist ideologies in a non-reductive manner. He rejects the gross form of economism in which everything is seen to be determined by class
structures, and instead he highlights the need to understand and conceptualize other oppressive forms of social differentiation including culture, region, nationality, and ethnicity. Doing so enables a productive reconceptualization of
the "class subject." The class subject is not homogenous; there is never simple unity among people said to be of the same "class." Rather, hegemony is a dynamic process of the production of consent within and between different
sectors and segments within classes. Thus, Gramsci's work can help us to understand how race and class intersect. We need not accept the false choice between class based explanations and race based explanations. In addition,
Hall argues that Gramsci's notion of hegemony helps us to understand one of the most common, least explained features of 'racism': the 'subjection' of the victims of racism to the mystifications of the very racist ideologies which
imprison and define them. He reveals how different, often contradictory elements can be woven into and integrated within different ideological discourses; but also, the nature and value of ideological struggle which seeks to
A
critical ideological approach to racialized discourse reveals the ongoing
struggle over the meaning of race. It makes room for oppositional
consciousness by helping us to "see" the meaning of racialized
constructions and the vested interests they protect so that we can contest
them. In addition
it enables our understanding of the
intersections among racialized, gendered, and class discourses.
transform popular ideas and the 'common sense' of the masses. All of this has the most profound importance for the analysis of racist ideologies and for the centrality, within that, of ideological struggle. ("Gramsci's" 440) /
, as the following analysis of the Braun-Helms debate illustrates,
The 1ac's silence on race allows racism to permeate politics

while remaining unseen
Bobo 13
(Lawrence D. Bobo, is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is a contributing editor for The Root., Quiet Bias: The Racism of
2013 Straight Up: Let's get real -- and start talking -- about the anti-black prejudice that infects the U.S. March 13, 2013 http://www.theroot.com/views/quiet-bias-racism-2013?
page=0,1 , //AR)
Our culture is still deeply suffused with anti-black bias,

despite an African-American president in office. National surveys (pdf)
continue to reveal commonly held stereotypes of African Americans as
less hardworking and less intelligent than whites. Political resentments
of blacks remain a centerpiece -- indeed, a genuine third rail -- of American domestic
politics: Do anything to seriously activate these resentments, and you
run the risk of immediate political electrocution. The last time we saw any major political
Let's be honest:
figure come close to touching the rail, of activating these political resentments against blacks, occurred when Obama offered his
off-the-cuff remarks about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root's editor-in-chief, by the Cambridge, Mass., police. The
level of negative stereotypes and attitudes tapped in polls and surveys may only reveal the most easily observable symptoms of
the illness.
A number of powerful psychological experiments show the extent

to which blackness for Americans is intimately tied to images of
violence and danger. Indeed, one of the most depressing lines of research suggests a core
underlining psychological association of blackness with apes, an ugly,
old racist trope from the age of the Great Chain of Being, in which the
African was seen as closer to primitive animals in the hierarchy of
species (pdf).To be sure, this whole issue of racism had a more straightforward quality in the past. We did not have to
resort to complex surveys and experiments to reveal its depth. There used to be something loud and obvious and terrible about
racism -- circumstances with some ironic virtues. A visible and openly declared enemy is so much more directly confronted than
one that operates stealthily.And that is the dilemma of racism in our times.
We have hints, suggestions,

indications, if you will, of racial bias all around us today. But it is typically unspoken,
if not altogether invisible, much of the time. And where it's not invisible, there is often a
plausible cover story that can be told as to why racially differential treatment
was somehow justifiable or legitimate. All of this makes waging the fight against racism much
tougher. It is now quiet -- or rationalized on some nonracial grounds and thereby hidden in plain view -- and seemingly, as a
There is plenty of
research showing that actual discrimination remains remarkably
common. For example, one major study of low-skilled workers in New York
found high rates of bias against black job applicants . Princeton
sociologist Devah Pager and her colleagues showed that otherwise
identical black job seekers were 50 percent less likely to achieve
success in a job search (pdf) than their white counterparts.The discrimination was
consequence, perhaps not such a bad thing after all.But it is a bad thing. Let's be clear:
so subtle that only a systematic experiment could reveal it. This was not the loud de jure discrimination of the era of "no blacks
need apply," but instead today's quiet bias of "Oh, we already filled that position" or "We were actually looking for someone with
more experience" or "Maybe you'd be better suited to this lower-paying job." There are few things as sickening as the
ongoing, well-known practice of stop-and-frisk policing in New York. Absent a

deep-rooted culture of anti-black bias, which is racism, the practice would not be tolerated, given the radically
disproportionate intrusion by state police power that it involves in identifiable minority communities. Records
for 2011 show almost 700,000 such incidents, with almost nine out of 10 incidents involving African Americans
In a city where blacks make up just under a quarter of the

population, blacks constitute more than half of those so detained by
police. Citywide polls show an enormous gap between blacks and whites in approval of the stop-and-frisk
or Hispanics.
practice, with a substantial number of blacks, at 80 percent (and even a plurality of New York's whites: 48
percent), saying that the police are biased in favor of whites.
It is unclear whether the tactic
has any meaningful impact on crime, but it is screamingly plain that it

adds to racial tension and misunderstanding while deepening minority
cynicism about the police . And so we get today's quiet bias of a majorcity mayor and police commissioner defending a dubious practice of
aggressive state intrusion into the lives of black and Hispanic youths on

an astonishing scale.
This quiet bias is a routine feature of our national politics as well. We are all
aware of how constrained President Obama is in terms of what he can say or do regarding race. I believe that
the culture of racism still alive in the U.S. remains potent enough that Obama must, in fact, routinely accomplish
a complex, three-part balancing act. He must consistently rise above prevalent stereotypes of blacks as less
capable and intelligent, thus always standing as the exception to the assumed rule. He must never be seen as
openly advocating policies that run against the third rail of resentment against blacks as a sort of untouchable
special-interest category in the body politic, who lack legitimate claims on the nation's resources. And he must
do all this while somehow keeping African Americans and other people of color highly politically mobilized
racism remains a living and highly

adaptive thing in our times. Yes, Jim Crow racism has effectively been defeated. An insidious
quiet bias remains today, however. And in this guise , racism is still distorting American
segments of his constituency. But make no mistake,
life.
The late Stanford University historian George Fredrickson wrote in Racism: A Short History,
"The
legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United States is more

like a bacillus that we have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only
continues to make some of us ill but retains the capacity to generate
new strains of a disease for which we have no certain cure."
We will make
little or no progress against this underlying illness by becoming complicit in ignoring the deep-rooted character
Racism is a powerful
word. Using it can quickly shut down a conversation. But such
sensitivity cannot excuse silence in the face of a real problem and
ongoing injustice. For me, a key element of the continued quest for racial
justice in America is the outing of today's "quiet bias." Like a patient told to take
of anti-black bias in our culture and in so many everyday practices and habits.
the full regimen of antibiotics or run the risk of the ailment coming back even more strongly in the future, we
must remain ready to challenge racism no matter how discreetly or politely it presents itself.
This debate held a radical potential for resistance that was

foreclosed by the 1acs glorification of America, the worlds
largest purveyor of white supremacy. Active and ever-present
consciousness raising and resistance is key; its about tearing
down anti-blackness
Goldberg 13 (Jesse, State University of New York, Do not act surprised by the verdict in the Zimmerman trial, 7/14/13,
http://liberaldogmablog.blogspot.com/2013/07/do-not-act-surprised-by-verdict-in.html)//LA
Black life is not worth as much as other life. Black death is not mourned
like other death. In fact, it is celebrated, as we saw in the post-verdict
press conferences and on Twitter (trigger warning: there are very painful Tweets collected in
that link). And for those who, be it consciously or unconsciously, retain a
commitment to American democracy and American justice systems
because of their protection within them thanks to the fact that both are
deeply entrenched in the ideology of white supremacy (and despite what SCOTUS
may think, white supremacy was not eradicated in the 1960s), this celebration
makes total sense. Celebrate the sacrificial expenditure that makes possible
the continuity of the community. Thats just whats done. Because in
order for American society to continue, blackness must be contained ,
and those bearing its mark must be ghettoized, stopped and frisked,
locked up, disenfranchised, and killed in order that the machine keeps
moving. But so many folks are already saying all of this, and saying it much better than I can. So what are
we to do? First of all, we cant do nothing, and we cant tell folks who are
doing something to slow down. If you dont want to change the system,
you are not being cautious or careful or moderate, you are being

actively oppressive. Because the system as it currently exists is unjust;
the status quo is morally unacceptable. So to call for a halt of attempts
to overhaul this status quo is to call for the continuity of oppression of
murder. Second, we all have skin in this game. Fellow white folks, dont you dare for a
minute believe that this isnt a fight for us as well. (Whiteness to me is oppression. And it oppresses not just
black people, but people who think it offers them something other than dominance over their fellow man. Poor
white people have been sold a bill of goods that offers them white supremacy and takes away jobs and
Dont you dare for a minute try to silence

movements which call attention to race by shaking your white liberal
finger at them and telling them that theyre nave and we should all really be talking
about class. Instead, we must ask ourselves what we can do to actively
resist a system that is set up to our advantage. And a word of advice along the way:
we must never forget our privilege as long as it exists. As tempting as it
will be to echo cries of We are Trayvon Martin or to take to the streets
wearing hoodies, we must remember that hoodies draped over our
white bodies do not hold the same meaning as hoodies draped over
black bodies. As long as that's true, we must fight. Third, we all can do
something. Not everyone has to become a street-marching activist, or a
politician, or a director of a non-profit, or a public defense attorney, or an academic, or a journalist.
But, to channel Fred Moten, and perhaps offer a different inflection, everywhere there is the
potential for performance (which is everywhere, because we are always performing, whether
were paid to do so or not), there is potential for resistance. My pessimism is a
resignation to the facts of history which create our contemporary
moment, facts which unequivocally demonstrate that America is a
country inextricably built upon an ideology of white supremacy and
anti-blackness, and that our current systems have not exorcised this legacy. Me pessimism is
an acknowledgement that anti-blackness is not a symptom of American
capitalism, but one of its fundamental principles, and one of the
foundations on which this country stands. I believe we have to
acknowledge the enormity of these things (especially white folks , since it is
our interests which are most clearly served by not acknowledging these things), but my pessimism is
not a resignation to a belief that things will always be this way. I retain
a profound commitment to working towards a Justice that does not yet
exist. I have no idea yet what it will look like, but I know it will look
nothing like this.
economic growth. Steve Locke).
Psychoanalysis
Lacanian psychoanalysis is racist the real is inaccessible to
blacks, reifies the white ego and cant account for violence
against blacks
Wilderson 10
Frank B., you know who it is. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Duke U Press. pgs. 101-104. PWoods.
Lacan and Fanon grappled with the question what does it mean to be
free? And its corollary what does it mean to suffer?
Jacques
Frantz
at the same moment in history. To say that they both appeared at the
same time is to say that they both have, as their intellectual condition of possibility, Frances brutal occupation of Algeria. It is not my intention to dwell on Lacans lack of political activism or to roll out Fanons revolutionary war
My intention is to interrogate the breadth of full speechs descriptive

universality and the depth of its prescriptive cureto interrogate its
foundation
hallucinatory whitening, and
decolonization and the end of the world
resonate with Lacans
categories of empty speech and full speech. There is a monumental
disavowal of emptiness involved in hallucinatory whitening, and disorder
and death certainly characterize decolonization.
the trauma of
Blackness lies in its absolute Otherness in relation to Whites. That is,
White people make Black people by recognizing only their skin color .
record.
by staging an encounter between, on the one hand, Lacan and his interlocutors and, on the other hand, Fanon and his interlocutors. To this end alone do I note the two mens relation to French
colonialism, as the force of that relation is felt in their texts. Frantz Fanons psychoanalytic description of Black neurosis,
his prescriptions
for a cure,
(BSWM 96)
For Fanon
Fanons Black
patient is overwhelmed...by the wish to be white (BSWM 100). But unlike Lacans diagnosis of the analysand, Fanon makes a direct and self-conscious connection between his patients hallucinatory whitening and the stability of
White society. If Fanons texts ratchet violently and unpredictably between the body of the subject and the body of the socius, it is because Fanon understands that outside [his] psychoanalytic office, [he must] incorporate [his]
conclusions into the context of the world. The room is too small to contain the encounter. As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory
Here we have a dismantling of all the fantasms that constitute the

patients ego and which s/he projects onto the analyst that resonates with
the process of attaining what Lacan calls full speech. But Fanon takes this
a step further, for not only does he want the analyzed to surrender to the
void of language, but also to act in the direction of a change ...with
respect to the real source of the conflictthat is, toward the social
structures
The other half of suffering and freedom is violence. By the time
Fanon has woven the description of his patients condition
into the prescription of a cure
he has extended the logic of
disorder and death from the Symbolic into the Real. Decolonization , which
sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of
complete disorder
structural,
or absolute, violence
is not a Black experience but a
condition of Black life. It remains constant, paradigmatically, despite
changes in its performance over time
There is an uncanny connection between Fanons absolute violence and
Lacans Real. Thus, by extension, the grammar of suffering of the Black
whitening...
(BSWM 100). As a psychoanalyst, Fanon does not dispute Lacans claim that suffering and freedom are produced and attained, respectively, in the realm of Symbolic; but this, for Fanon, is only half of
the modality of existence.
(i.e., his own life as a Black doctor in France)
(his commitment to armed struggle in Algeria),
...[I]t is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature...Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together...was carried on by
dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons...[T]his narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence. (The Wretched of the Earth 36-37) This is because the
or what Loic Wacquant calls the carceral continuum,
slave ship, Middle Passage, slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto, the prison industrial complex.xxviii
itself is on the level of the Real.
Fanon
raises within Lacans schema of
suffering and freedom a contradiction between the idea of universal unraced contemporaries and two forces opposed to each other, whose first
encounter and existence together is marked by violence. In short, he
divides the world not between cured contemporaries and uncured
contemporaries, but between contemporaries of all sorts and slaves.
If Lacans full speech is not, in essence, a cure
but a process promoting psychic disorder, through which the subject
In this emblematic passage,
does for violence what Lacan does for alienation: namely, he removes the negative
stigma such a term would otherwise incur in the hands of theorists and practitioners who seek coherence and stability. He also
He lays the
groundwork for a theory of antagonism over and above a theory of conflict.

comes to know her/himself, not as a stable relation to a true selfthe
Imaginarybut as a void constituted only by language, a becoming toward
death in relation to the Otherthe Symbolicthen we will see how this
symbolic self-cancellation
is possible only when the subject
and his contemporaries
are White or Human. The process of full
speech rests on a tremendous disavowal which re-monumentalizes the
(White) ego because it sutures, rather than cancels, formal stagnation by
fortifying and extending the interlocutory life of intra-Human discussions .
I am arguing that (1 civil society, the terrain upon which the analyze and
performs full speech, is always already a formally stagnated monument;
and (2) the process by which full speech is performed brokers
simultaneously two relations for the analyzed, one new and one old ,
respectively. The process by which full speech is performed brokers a
(new) deconstructive relationship between the analyzed and his/her
formal stagnation within civil society and a (pre-existing or)
reconstructive relationship between the analyzed and the formal
stagnation that constitutes civil society. Whereas Lacan was aware of how
language precedes and exceeds us
he did not have Fanons
awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks
The trajectory of Lacans full speech therefore is
only able to make sense of violence as contingent phenomena, the effects
of transgressions (acts of rebellion or refusal) within a Symbolic Order.
Here, violence, at least in the first instance, is neither sense-less
(gratuitous) nor is it a matrix of human (im)possibility: it is what happens
after some form of breach occurs in the realm of signification. That is to
say, it is contingent.
(Silverman, Male Subjectivity...63-65, 126-128)
(Lacan, Ecrits 47)
xxix
(Silverman 2000: 157),
. An awareness of this would have
disturbed the coherence of the taxonomy implied by the personal pronoun us.
Lacanian subjectivity is derived from Antiblackness in their

framework, blacks are in capable of achieving identity, blackness is
the signifier of lack and white identity is defined by differentiating
oneself from blacks
Ryder 2005
Andrew, Paper presented as part of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program Brownbag Lecture Series at Emory University on. Subjectivity, Mimicry, and Warfare: Fanon with Lacan. October 18.
Pgs. 4-9. PWoods.
Fanon writes vividly of the experience of the abjection of racism in a

famous scene from Black Skin, White Masks.
he encounters a small
white child who is frightened of him, white children of the time being
educated to find black men both terrifying and comical. Accused of being a
cannibal, his shivering from the cold misinterpreted as quaking with rage,
Fanon experiences an uncanny primal scene in which he sees himself from
the outside as a subhuman ngre. "What else could it be for me but an
amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with
black blood?"
This hemorrhage is a traumatic moment of
"seeing myself see myself," as a repulsive stain in the eye of the big
Other, as a fascinating objet petit a. The moment of mimicry, as Lacan
argues, is when the subject identifies with this stain
this
mimicry has militant consequences
When one has grasped the
mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the
real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man . And
conversely. Only for the white man the Other is perceived on the level of
In Lyons,
(Black Skin, White Masks 110-112)
(""La ligne et la lumire" 92). In Fanon's case,
. Fanon writes that "

the body image, absolutely as the not-self that is, the unidentifiable, the
unassimilable"
the black man aims to identify with the
white man, entering the symbolic and exiting the violent realm of
aggression and narcissism. The white man, however, derives his symbolic
position through his ability to differentiate himself from his black Other ,
the animal-child, who represents all the imaginary urges the white man
has repressed. This renders the presence of the black man a constant
stain in the anthropological picture a reminder of situated position,
governed by drives, cut off from the fantasy of omniscience. Fanon's
writings on the black man as phallic symbol underscore this notion of
blackness as signifier of the lack.
, this schema has the advantage
of being a radically anti-essentialist view of race, insofar as blackness is in
a sense the "truth" of whiteness. Those with white skin also wear white
masks, no more authentically embodying their role than their blackskinned counterparts. The strategy of racism is part of a desperate and
impossible attempt to amputate the truth of subjectivity , and the
experience of racial abjection is only a special instance of traumatic return
to the primal scene.
as Zizek suggests, we should resist reading a
Lacanized Fanon as suggesting that the answer to racism is a period of
introspection and soul-searching in which one realizes that racial
prejudice is in fact a projection of one's own failures and desires,
contributing to a project of self-betterment and renewed commitment to
getting along with others
we should, accepting the formal
distinction between ego and a as a necessary requirement of subjectivity,
question the historical and political circumstances which dictate the racial
content of this imaginary correlation of skin color and universal
narcissistic/aggressive drives. The means of resolving or eliminating the
existence of stereotypes would be impossible to find in personal selfexamination, because they are produced socially and could only be
changed socially
Only after the primal scene
of being cut off from symbolic recognition can Fanon fully identify with his
own negritude, a fact previously repressed in favor of an identification
with French identity.
Fanon
insists on
the materiality of race
Negritude is the
practice of rejecting the partial identification with the white master, and
the radically alternative gesture of recognizing oneself as the stain in the
picture.
(Black Skin, White Masks 161). In this racialized reading,
As Bhabha points out
However,
Slavoj
(Zizek 171). Rather,
. Fanon's revolutionary insight takes place in the militant identification with the objet petit a.
Martinicians thought of themselves as French and only continental Africans as ngres.
first, in Black Skin White Masks,
, a facticity more important to the consitution of the subject than, say, Judaism, which is comparatively invisible.
Lacan criticizes "l'homme moderne" for being trapped "dans l'impasse dialectique de la belle me qui ne reconnat pas la raison mme de son tre dans le dsordre qu'elle dnonce dans le monde"
("Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage" 280). ["in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who does not recognize his very reason for being in the disorder he denounces in the world."] Lacan identifies science as the
means of recognizing oneself as complicit in the world's chaos. Fanon's immersion in the struggle of the Algerian people, and the theory and practice of this struggle, leads him to modify the nature of his identification with the objet
the stain is the melanin present in the skin of a black person .

In the same passage that Fanon invokes Lacan in understanding the
psychic mechanism of racism, Fanon suggests that for "the black man, as
we have shown, historical and economic realities come into the picture
The historical and economic realities conspire to undo the binary
opposition between black and white
petit a. In Black Skin, White Masks,
" (Black
Skin, White Masks 161).
Fanon explores in his first book. After studying the radically different roles of subjective identification present in Africa
Africanism, Arabism, Islamism, bourgeois nationalism, varieties of socialism centered on the urban workers or the rural masses Fanon adopts a new mode of social practice. In Les damns de la terre, Fanon de-emphasizes the
quality of black skin and champions instead the lumpenproletariat and the landless peasantry. This political choice is comprehensible within the Lacanian framework we have set out. The formal quality of identifying with the abject
. Fanon speaks of
the colonial system as a self-contained and Manichaen world of internal
consistency, in which both the natives and the colonists are enmeshed at
the most intimate level.
For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who
perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the very fact of his existence,
remains; it only shifts from the situation of a single black man in Lyons to the site of the Algerian political scene, a microcosm of the struggle of the "wretched" worldwide
"C'est le colon qui a fait et qui continue faire le colonis. Le colon tire sa vrit, c'est--dire ses biens, du systme colonial" (Fanon, "De la violence" 40).
["

that is to say, his property, to the colonial system."]
the settler
gains his status by virtue of his European lineage,
white skin, and consequent economic advantage; and the colonized
whose identity is produced by differentiation
from the colonist and whose body and possessions are rendered inferior .
The colonized
is not fully accorded an identity in the
symbolic sense as defined by Lacan.
This existence outside the official
registers of birth and death leaves the natives effectively nameless and
without the necessary entry into the symbolic.
This statement introduces the dramatis personae which will struggle
throughout Fanon's writing
colon, who
indigne, who is
coded as French but not quite, the partial absence and distortion of Frenchness,
ngre is human in some partial sense, but
They are born in the native zone, but "On y nait n'importe o, n'importe comment. On y meurt n'importe o, de
n'importe quoi." (ibid. 42) ["are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how."]
Public Sphere
Public deliberation structurally cannot include the position of
the slave because they are denied personhood by definition
the structural violence of slavery cannot be articulated in the
political
Hartman 9 [Saidiya, professor of English and comparative literature and
women's and gender studies at Columbia University, Redressing the Pained
Body: Toward a Theory of Practice, in American Studies: An Anthology,
pp.343-344]
In order to illuminate the significance of performance and the articulation of
social struggle in seemingly innocuous events, everyday forms of practice
must be contextualized within the virtually unbounded powers of the slaveowning class, and whites in general, to use all means necessary to ensure
submission. Thus it is no surprise that these everyday forms of practice
are usually subterranean. I am reluctant to simply describe these
practices as a "kind of politics," not because I question whether the practices
considered here are small-scale forms of struggle or dismiss them as
cathartic and contained.' Rather, it is the concern about the possibilities
of practice as they are related to the particular object constitution
and subject formation of the enslaved outside the "political proper"
that leads me both to question the appropriateness of the political
to this realm of practice and to reimagine the political in this
context. (As well, f take seriously Jean Comaroff's observations that "the real
politick of oppression dictates that resistance be expressed in domains
seemingly apolitical.")" The historical and social limits of the political
must he recognized in order to evaluate the articulation of needs
and the forwarding of claims in domains relegated to the privatized
or nonpolitical. If the public sphere is reserved for the white
bourgeois subject and the public/private divide replicates that between the
political and the nonpolitical, then the agency of the enslaved, whose
relation to the state is mediated by way of another's rights, is invariably
relegated to the nonpolitical side of this divide. This gives us some
sense of the full weight and meaning of the slaveholder's dominion. In effect,
those subjects removed from the public sphere are formally outside
the space of politics. The everyday practices of the enslaved
generally fall outside direct forms of confrontation; they are not
systemic in their ideology, analysis, or intent, and, most important, the
slave is neither civic man nor free worker but excluded from the
narrative of "we the people" that effects the linkage of the modern
individual and the state. The enslaved were neither envisioned nor afforded
the privilege of envisioning themselves as part of the "imaginary sovereignty
of the state" or as "infused with unreal universality."" Even the Gramscian

model, with its reformulation of the relation of state and civil
society in the concept of the historical bloc and its expanded
definition of the political, maintains a notion of the political
inseparable from the effort and the ability of a class to effect
hegemony? By questioning the use of the term "political," I hope to
illuminate the possibilities of practice and the stakes of these dispersed
resistances. All of this is not a preamble to an argument about the
"prepolitical" consciousness of the enslaved but an attempt to point to
the limits of the political and the difficulty of translating or
interpreting the practices of the enslaved within that framework.
The everyday practices of the enslaved occur in the default of the
political, in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of
the self-possessed individual, and perhaps even without a "person,"
in the usual meaning of the term.
Role of the judge (Only read if white judge)

In this round, the role of the ballot is shaped by white
privilege
Wildman 5
Stephanie M., fighting antiblackness. The Persistence of White Privilege. 2005. Pgs. 244 245. PWoods.
judging is an inherently situated activity.

a judge
cannot escape the effects of his or her own particular situation in
performing the task of judging.
There is
in each of us a stream of tendency . . . which gives coherence and
direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any
more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not
recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at theminherited
instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions . . . . In this mental
background every problem finds its settings. We may try to see things as
objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any
eyes except our own
judges must pay attention to their
situation. But it is not only judges, but all of us with white privilege,
whether we are decision makers, part of decision-making bodies, or
comfortable individuals, who need to pay more attention. Paying attention
means becoming more self-conscious about the ways personal history,
character, and outlook impact the decisions and interactions with which
we engage the world. Reaching that self-consciousness is more difficult
from within the white comfort zone that emphasizes colorblindness and
individualism. Combating the persistence of privilege requires selfconsciousness about these socio-cultural patterns and the material
conditions that maintain the white privilege reality .
Catharine Wells explains that
88 According to Wells,
89 Wells relates Justice Benjamin Cardozos illuminating delineation of the situated nature of judging:
. Wells argues that if judging is situated,
Self-consciousness can be the first step toward action.
Reformism
Their reformism is anti-revolutionary historically, public social
investments like the aff are used to create a narrative of national
redemption from racism. The use of expansive taxation and market
mechanisms is used to incorporate and defuse anti-racist struggles
around issues like public transportation
Baca 08 (George, assistant professor of anthropology at Goucher College,
Neoliberalism and stories of racial redemption, Dialectical Anthropology,
2008, Volume 32, Number 3, Pages 219-241)
In the vacuum left by federal government cutbacks, city
governments like Fayetteville assumed greater responsibility for
providing basic urban services and physical infrastructure. Yet this
only intensified trends already put in place over the previous
decades. Rising responsibilities and decreased contributions of the
federal government encouraged city managers throughout the
South to reach out to the business interests to promote economic
development as an alternative to Federal support, and through this
rhetoric, to build a dominant coalition of civil leaders and business
interests. Changes under way earlier culminated in the move by
Fayettevilles business leaders and public officials to envision local
government as an economic development tool whose provisioning
responsibilities lay primarily with service to the business community.
Eschewing long held skepticism about governmental interference and taxes,
business leaders and governmental officials began to see Federal programs
and local revenue streams as means to further the objectives of a narrow segment
of Fayettevilles population. Their first major attempt at merging
government and business resulted in an industrial recruitment
project, which netted several industrial plants, including Rohm
Haas, Kelly Springfield Tire Co, and Black and Decker. These
companies added nearly 6,000 industrial jobs to the local tax base. And
success led to further expansion. By the early 1970 s, business leaders, city
officials, and economic boosters sought to broaden their appeal by remaking
the citys image, seeking to erase the notoriety of the towns label
Fayettenam, which made the city difficult to sell to outside businesses.
This effort to sanitize the citys reputation targeted what leaders believed to
be the epicenter of the problem: the 400 and 500 blocks of Hay Street.
Downtown revitalization came to the forefront of city politics in 1977 when a
group of private citizens, comprised largely of local architects, sought to
demolish this area, and several others, in the name of urban renewal. In
1981 the mayor ran on a program of Destroying the old image of
Fayetteville by closing adult businesses downtown, which he
described as a cancer in this city.19 By the fall of 1983, city
council began its own attack against Fayettenam by banning strip
bars and condemning downtown buildings as, together with the

mayor, they staged media events by bulldozing all the buildings on
the 500 block of Hay Street. Mayoral supporters heralded this as
the day the 500 Block took a tumble.20 These city-backed
projects represented both the transformation in the local elite as
well as the culmination of processes underway for several decades,
as business and political leaders began connecting the citys
reputation with projects designed to attract investment and grow
the economy. They designed public projects around the needs of
land developers and the merchant coalition in ways that connected
such things as education and crime prevention in black
neighborhoods. City management opened the citys administration
to the needs and interests of the business community and sought a
close relationship with ostensibly private business groups like the
Chamber of Commerce, the downtown revitalization group, and the
Fayetteville Economic Development Corporation. Increasingly, civic
leaders associated the use of public money with cleaning up the
citys image and economic development, aimed at growing the
tax base, improving the quality of life, and expanding urban
services. Fayettevilles political leaders also expanded the citys
authority at the timeincreasing its use of outside resources and
access to state and federal aidby connecting city government with
the needs of various community groups and the business
community, advocating public-private partnerships as a means of
meeting what had formerly been primarily city government
responsibilities. Throughout this period, Federal agencies and local
governments like that in Fayetteville quickly found that civil rights
groups like the NAACP could be configured to promote economic
development and technocratic models of service provision through
careful inclusion in processes like those above. Well before the
Reagan Revolution and popular talk of globalization, mainstream
black officials were being absorbed into a developing apparatus of
race relations management as either public officials or quasi public
functionaries (Reed 1999, p. 1). So successful were these programs
that now, nearly half a century later, expansion of the black political
sphere and the rise of significant black middle-classes have
cloaked fiscal policies that actually decreased federal spending on
public schools, healthcare, and public transport (Prashad 2006). And
ironically, celebration of these and other civil rights victories as the
benchmark of black progress helps legitimize economic policies that increase
inequality. Indeed, rhetoric about racial progress and reform amid
increasingly difficult economic times parallel rhetoric used by white leaders
in the transformation of cities like Fayetteville, and have emerged as a great
myth of national redemption that preserves the racial cleavages forged
during the white supremacy campaigns of the 1890s.21 Federal agencies,

like their local counterparts, have found that racial reforms could
not only defuse anti-racist struggles but recuperate these energies
to uphold an economic policy agenda aimed mainly at the growth of
business at the expense of public provisioning. The cunning of
recognition , as anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli describes this
use of political reforms, recognizes the injustices of previous forms
of racism. However, such recognition of the horrors of slavery is
cast in ways that reinvigorate the future of the nation and its
economic system (Povinelli 2002, p. 29; also see Williams 1991). Building
on the racial institutions designed to manage blacks during segregation,
racial reforms have come to embody economic policies that curtail public
goods in line with organizations like the World Bank, WTO, and IMF,
expanding a brokerage-style politics that has narrowed black politics within
the emerging system of neoliberal capitalism. Relations between Civil Rights
and Neoliberal reforms challenge anthropologists to dispense with ideas that
simultaneously glorify the civil rights movement and demonize conservative
reforms, and treat them as if they represent opposite trends or stand on two
sides of a historical rupture. Rather, much is to be gained by viewing
racial reforms as part of a machinery of governance that has
characterized bureaucratic inclusion and development of southern
cities like Fayetteville for much of the twentieth century, and which
have as their backdrop and precedent segregation and violent racial
militarism. Rather than treating racial reforms in the abstract, they must be
examined in terms of their implementation. As we can see, political leaders
in Fayetteville have used Federal authorities and race reforms to readjust the
citys racial system to the changing needs of its political and business system.
Nostalgic glorification of the bygone days of Fordism and Civil Rights has
muddied analysis of civil rights reforms. By the 1960s, federal agencies and
local governments like Fayetteville had already started reorienting civil rights
groups like the NAACP to economic development and technocratic models
of service provision. Well before the rise of Reagan-style neoliberalism, a
mainstream black political class had been absorbed into a developing
apparatus of race relations management as either public officials or quasipublic functionaries (Reed 1999, p. 1). The critical failures of anthropology
and other social sciences is unfortunate as the federal governments
adjustment to the protest of the 1960s served as a catalyst in universalizing
economic development and growth, a topic of much concern in todays
world, yet which is often dealt with in ahistorical terms. Civil rights reforms in
the U.S. fortified a new pattern of social management which has
incorporated opposition movements. Political and economic elites legitimate
their programs by integrating potentially antagonistic forces into the logic of
centralized administration. With the rise of civil rights management, these

forces have regulated domination and militated against disruptive political
strategies while steadily redirecting limited public resources. For nearly half a
century federal agencies and their local counterparts have incorporated
small numbers of African Americans in ways that have cloaked the very fiscal
policies that have decreased spending on public schools, healthcare, and
public transport. And while black economic success is novel and
commendable, the stories of redemption meant to explain their undoing
have unwittingly legitimized conservative politics by drawing attention away
from fiscal policies that have increased racial inequality and constricted
black politics to ever more narrow channels of business development. The
careful combining of racial reform and conservative fiscal policies have
defused struggles against racism and recuperated the energy of these
struggles to uphold liberal forms of power in Fayetteville and elsewhere in
the U.S. South (Baca 2006).
State reform fails- it looks to the government to arbitrate the
injustice its police agents first perpetuated. Only radical critique can
shatter traditional concepts of racism.
Martinot and Sexton 03- *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in
ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, Director, African American Studies at UC
Irvine (Steve and Jared, The Avant-garde of white supremacy,
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm//MGD)
In 1998, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, a
national conference and strategy-session, reposed the question of the
relations between white supremacy and state violence. Fascism was
the concept often used to link these two terms and the prison industrial
complex was considered to be its quintessential practice. The politicalintellectual discourse generated at and around Critical Resistance
shattered the narrow definitions of racism that characterize many
conventional (even leftist) accounts and produced instead a space
for rethinking radical alternatives. This sort of shift in the political
landscape has been imperative for a long time now. The police
murder of Amadou Diallo comes to mind as an event requiring such
re-conceptualization. The Diallo killing was really plural since it
involved other police murders as imminent in the same event. Diallos
killing was plural beyond his own many deaths in those few seconds, a killing
that took place in the eyes of his friends and family from as far away as
Guinea. In the immediate wake of his killers' acquittals, the NYPD
murdered Malcolm Ferguson, a community organizer who had been
active in attempting to get justice for Diallo. (The police harassed
Fergusons within the next year and arrested his brother on trumped up
charges). Two weeks after Fergusons murder, the police killed Patrick
Dorismund because he refused to buy drugs from an undercover
cop, because he fought back when the cop attacked. The police then
harassed and attacked Dorismunds funeral procession in Brooklyn a week
later, hospitalizing several in attendance. (The police took the vendetta all

the way to the grave). Tyisha Miller was murdered in her car in Riverside,
California by four cops who knocked on the window of her car and found that
she simply didn't respond. Angela Davis tells the story of "Tanya Haggerty
in Chicago, whose cell phone was the potential weapon that allowed
police to justify her killing," just as Daillo's wallet was the "gun" at
which four cops fired in unison. To the police, a wallet in the hand of
black man is a gun whereas that same wallet in the hand of a white
man is just a wallet. A cell phone in the hands of a black woman is a
gun; that same phone in a white womans hand is a cell phone.
There were local movements in each of these cities to protest acts of
police murder and in each case the respective city governments were
solicited to take appropriate action. Under conventional definitions of
the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon it for
protection from its own agents. But what are we doing when we
demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly
calling upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the
state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable
arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin. Narrow
understandings of mere racism are proving themselves impoverished
because they cannot see this fundamental relationship. What is
needed is the development of a radical critique of the structure of
the coin. There are two possibilities: first, police violence is a deviation from
the rules governing police procedures in general. Second, these various
forms of violence (e.g., racial profiling, street murders, terrorism)
are the rule itself as standard operation procedure. For instance,
when the protest movements made public statements they
expressed an understanding of police violence as the rule of the day
and not as a shocking exception. However, when it came time to
formulate practical proposals to change the fundamental nature of
policing, all they could come up with concretely were more oversight
committees, litigation, and civilian review boards ("with teeth"),
none of which lived up to the collective intuition about what the
police were actually doing. The protest movements readings of these
events didnt seem able to bridge the gap to the programmatic. The
language in which we articulate our analyses doesnt seem to allow
for alternatives in practice. Even those who take seriously the
second possibility (violence as a rule) find that the language of
alternatives and the terms of relevance are constantly dragged into
the political discourse they seek to oppose, namely, that the system
works and is capable of reform.
Social Contract/Individualism
Kandaswamy 2012, (Priya, Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Mills
College The Obligations of Freedom and the Limits of Legal Equality,
SOUTHWESTERN LAW REVIEW, Vol. 41, p. 266-272)
In order to illustrate these points, I turn first to the historical example of emancipation and the consequent conferral of citizenship to formerly enslaved people, a quintessential moment in the expansion of legal rights in U.S. history. I
look to Reconstruction Era struggles over the meaning of citizenship specifically because they mark a particularly defining moment in the reconfiguration of racial violence through the construct of the liberal subject. Given the ways
that U.S. citizenship had been defined against blackness, the Fourteenth Amendments extension of citizenship rights to freed people forced the nation to grapple with what racially inclusive citizenship in a nation forged through
racial violence would look like. Therefore, considering the legacies of this historical period raises crucial issues for contemporary struggles for inclusion, equality and the extension of legal rights, particularly given the role
emancipation has played as an important historical reference point for these struggles.
possibility
Emancipation marked a moment of great
, and freed people held broad and diverse visions of freedom that included reparations, land ownership, freedom of mobility, and other self-defined mechanisms of individual and collective self-
legal recognition as citizens worked to constrain and

curtail these more expansive possibilities of freedom by locking
freedom for black people into an idiom defined by obligation,
indebtedness, and responsibility
determination.1 However, as Saidiya Hartman shows,
.2 Rather than mitigate the significance of racial difference in the national imagination, the conferral of citizenship rights
collaborated in the persistent production of blackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious3 and obliged freed people to shoulder the responsibilities and burdens of perpetually having to
demonstrate their preparedness for and deservingness of citizenship in a context where their blackness marked them as otherwise.4 This was evident in the ways that state institutions prioritized enforcing labor and sexual discipline
amongst freed people.5 As the Virginia Freedmens Bureaus Assistant Commissioner Orlando Brown wrote, if freed people were to be citizens, it was necessary to make the Freedmen into a self-supporting class of free laborers, who
anti-black racism
fundamentally shaped recognition as a liberal subject
This was
particularly evident in the workings of contract
shall understand the necessity of steady employment and the responsibility of providing for themselves and [their] families.6 As Hartman shows,
.7 While for white male citizens liberal
individualism had afforded a kind of entitlement and self-determination, for freed people, recognition as a liberal subject rendered one responsible and therefore blameworthy.8
. A key distinction between the free person and the slave was self-
ownership signified primarily through the capacity to enter into contract.9 The understanding of legal freedom as self-possession meant that there was no inherent contradiction between subordination and freedom as long as
subordination was secured through a freely entered into contract, a phenomenon most clearly illustrated by the labor and marriage contracts.10 For freed people who had both been structurally denied access to other material
despite the
fact that they functioned to limit black peoples mobility, secure the
hyper-exploitation of black labor, and provided the ground for the
development of carceral institutions directed at the punishment of
black people,12 entering into the labor contract became discursively
understood as the quintessential sign of freedom
freed people
were called upon to demonstrate their independence and
deservingness of freedom by fulfilling the terms of the labor
contract
contract provided a rubric for
obscuring
national responsibility for the injustices of slavery and instead
displacing this responsibility onto the shoulders of the formerly
enslaved
resources through slavery and who were subject to vagrancy laws that criminalized the refusal to enter into long-term labor contracts, contracts were very much coerced.11 However,
.13 In fact,
.14 In this way,
reinventing relations of subordination by
.15 Freedom was rewritten as obligation and independence manifested as a burden.16 Liberal concepts of freedom also functioned as a mechanism of regulating gender and sexuality through the
marriage contract. While marriages and other kinship ties were not legally recognized under slavery, one of the first rights freed people gained was marriage recognition.17 However, as Katherine Franke points out, the extension of
marriage rights was grounded in the belief that marriage as an institution would help civilize freed people by instilling heteropatriarchal gender norms.18 A key element of the rationalization of slavery was the construction of black
early attempts to congeal

racist taxonomies of difference through anatomical investigation
and ethnographic observation produced the Black body as always
already variant and Black people as the essence of gender
aberrance, thereby defining the norm by making the Black its
opposite.
the belief in marriage as a
civilizing institution simultaneously reiterated and valorized white
supremacist beliefs that black peoples inferiority was evidenced in
their lack of appropriate gender and sexuality
As a result
of the legal recognition of black marriages, many freed people faced
convictions for adultery, fornication, cohabitation, and the failure to
provide for their legal dependents. 23 In this way, much like the
labor contract, the extension of rights in fact created new
inferiority as marked by a lack of the gender differentiation that was seen as characteristic of civilization.19 As Matt Richardson describes,
20 While marriage recognition did provide some tangible protections to married freed people,
.21 Additionally, the extension of marriage rights provided the ground upon
which alternative sexual arrangements were criminalized and rationalized state austerity toward black people by constructing the self-sufficient household as the means to economic security.22

obligations and new grounds upon which black people might be
punished.
Michel Foucault argues that one of the distinguishing features of the modern state is the emergence of biopower.24 Unlike sovereign power that is expressed in the capacity to take life, biopower
is invested in the production of knowledge about and regulation of populations, processes of normalization and regularization, and ultimately the capacity to make live in particular ways.25 However, Foucault also notes that
sovereign power does not simply disappear but rather that the state continues to exercise sovereign power alongside biopower.26 This process is delimited by state racism, which introduc[es] a break into the domain of life that is
under powers control: the break between what must live and what must die.27 As biopower becomes concerned with regulating the life of the population, racism marks the bodies upon which sovereign power must still be
exercised.28 Killing the internal or external racial threat becomes understood as a necessary element to making the population stronger.29 Scholars such as Ann Stoler and Scott Morgensen have elaborated on Foucaults rather
scant discussion of racism showing the ways in which biopower in fact emerges in relation to and as a function of colonial violence.30 Hartmans analysis of anti-black racism and the constitution of the liberal subject complicates
during Reconstruction,
black people were simultaneously subject to the normalizing and
violent powers of the state
normalizing processes became
yet another vehicle for state violence
hand, freed people were
subject to constant surveillance as their moral capacity for
citizenship was always in question, and any failure to comply with
labor or marriage contracts was read as evidence of this incapacity.
contractual freedom provided a basis for the states total
disinvestment in black life, thereby making it more or less
impossible to live up to the ideals of citizenship
the seeming
contradictions between racial inclusion and racial violence were
effectively displaced by locating responsibility for state violence in
those who suffered from its effects. The black subject was thus
brought into the fold of citizenship but as a subject always in need
Foucaults analysis and adds to scholarship that highlights the central role of racial violence in the elaboration of state power.31 As Hartman shows,
, or perhaps more accurately
.32 On the one
33
On the other hand,
.34 In this way,
of reform or punishment.
This historical example powerfully illustrates the ways in which inclusion into citizenship rights can operate as a technique of domination and
differentiated
structure of citizenship grounded in anti-black racism that Hartman
describes still operates.
contemporary political struggles over
marriage reflect the processes by which marriage can secure
entitlements for one social group while exacting social obligations
from another
the role the construct of the liberal subject plays in maintaining state racism.35 Certainly, laws have changed a great deal since Reconstruction. However, the
36 For example,
. On the one hand, a mainstream, predominantly white gay and lesbian movement seeks access to a wide array of property and social rights through same-sex marriage recognition.37 On
the other hand, marriage incentive programs and increasingly punitive welfare regulations cast marriage and the economic self-sufficiency that supposedly comes with it as an obligation for welfare recipients who are most frequently
Legislation that
has increasingly criminalized violence against women
holds out the promise of
freedom for some by expanding a
system of mass incarceration that targets women of color and queer
and transgender people of color.
, the increasingly punitive and
austere orientation of the U.S. welfare state and the expansion of
the prison industrial complex can be understood as the logical
extension of the processes of liberal subjection
On the one
hand, the state disinvests in black life On the other hand, processes
of criminalization hold individuals responsible for the effects of that
disinvestment, displacing responsibility for state violence onto
those who feel its effects most and punishing those bodies for their
structural location The assumption that legal equality strategies
are the most pragmatic
presumes that
recognition as a free and equal liberal subject by the state is
universally desirable, possible, and emancipatory A historical view,
however, demonstrates that the abstract construction of the liberal
subject has functioned in particular ways to secure continued antiblack violence
liberal subjecthood itself rationalizes and
begets state violence
represented as black women.38 Another terrain upon which racially stratified constructions of citizenship are evident is in struggles for state protection from violence.
and hate crimes against LGBT people
greater equality and
39 In fact
that Hartman outlines.40
.41
.42
pathways through which resistance movement might effect change
and that, for many,
. It is essential that the utility of the law for social change be assessed from the vantage point of people who live at this conjuncture. My point then is to insist

on the necessity of vociferously challenging hegemonic understanding of how the law works and what the law offers movements for social change by centering the experiences of those for whom legal citizenship and the extension of
rights have undermined rather than advanced struggles for freedom. Legal change is often construed as the benchmark of success for social movements. However, the case of Reconstruction clearly demonstrates how legal
While Reconstruction is
frequently narrated as the transition from slavery to freedom, it is
more accurate to recognize the ways in which the state reduced the
multiple possible meanings of freedom to the rubrics of liberal
individualism and contract. These rubrics produced black people as
both formally free and structurally subordinated thereby reconciling
state racism with the extension of citizenship
recognition can in practice produce a narrowing of political possibilities and a fixing of responsibility for social injustice onto the black bodies.
State action
Wilderson 2010 (Frank B., Professor of Drama @ UC Irvine- Red, White,
and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms pg. 1-5- [SG])
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 bigoted and out of step
with the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and rainbow coalitions. 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 precise, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides,
people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California at 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 they could settle the Land Lease Accounts that they had
neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was crazy. Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it
demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar.
Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to
would seem that
modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not
to the way in which space and time are used and abused by
enfranchised and violently powerful interests, 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
she
had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the worldand
not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself was
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
corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet
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 cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return
Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two

simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and
Turtle Island to the Savage.

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 thirteen words and two sentences,
one cannot but wonder why
questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of

political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations,
political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be
spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a
filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the
archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing

broadsides are anything to go byis that what can so easily be spoken
is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million
Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple
sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker crazy
but become themselves impossible to imagine . Soon it will be forty years since
radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In
the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship

were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even Would it be
overthrown? but rather when and howand, for some, whatwould come in its
wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a
discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of
the 1960s and early 1970s
everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond
were accountable, in their rhetorical

to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the
American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals
and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle
mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of
success, but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they
and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats)
machinations,
could not make a convincing case by way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S.
was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as
radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and
presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical
standing in the presence of Blacks.xix One could (and many did) acknowledge Americas
strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical
assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called
balance of forces. The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too
widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a
the power of Blackness and

Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose the question is
the greatest power of all retreated as did White radicals and
possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently,
progressives who retired from struggle. The questions echo lies

buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black
Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have
been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the
gates of the academy where the crazies shout at passers-by . Gone
are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift

on the political landscape , but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry,
and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary
polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist . Is it still possible for a dream
of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave
estatesxx destruction , to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse,
when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political
discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is no in the sense that,
as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon
even the most taciturn

historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red
suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical
in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes in the sense that in
symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural
antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness
Blackness and
Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political)
discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned
in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic
strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine
social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of
problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the
rubric of antagonism ( an irreconcilable struggle between entities , or
as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present,

obliteration of one of the positions ). In other words, even when films narrate a story in
which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually
having to do with poverty or the absence of family values), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the
film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontologyor
non-ontology.
The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of
conflict .
Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our
the
grammar of political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology
of sufferingwhich underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book,
grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.xxi Likewise,
discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book,
is also unspoken. This notwithstanding,

political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political
discourse, and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering,
regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized
Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present)
film theory,
by the political discourse in question . To put a finer point on it, structures of

ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual,
relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the
ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step
claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that
follows.

The affirmative relies on the government for solutions this creates
an illusion that we are making progressive action. Reform will
inevitably lead to the further retrenchment of racism.
Independently, this colonizes our education in the debate sphere
prior impact
Woan 11 (Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of Binghamton University) 2011
(Tansy, The value of resistance in a permanently white, civil society, http://gradworks.umi.com/14/96/1496586.html, August 2011,
pg 9-19)
reform plays the white

man's game in order to gain rights, i.e. appeal to a white supremacist government
that is the precise agent responsible for the original harms they are seeking to
alleviate
it maintains a hierarchical system between
whites and nonwhites, since the latter will have to continue to appeal to the former
to ask for rights they never should have been denied in the first place
attempting to resist white supremacy by working
within white supremacist institutions maintains a dangerous system of power
relations that lock in place the hierarchy between whites and nonwhites
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, in then influential Black Power, describe reformist strategies as "playing ball" with the white man. They argue that
.9 While this may very well result in the granting of new rights previously denied,
. This places the former in a position of
power to accept or deny such requests. Thus, in Carmichael and Hamilton's view,
. / It is unfortunate enough that
members of minority groups face public and private racial discrimination. It is worse, however, to place the burden of combating this discrimination on them. What Carmichael and Hamilton aptly point out is that the hierarchy
between races mentioned above is what is responsible for this undue burden. There is not only the constant physical struggle of protesting, writing letters, and being dragged through litigation that can often get expensive, but there
is the psychological struggle as well. Why am I not worthy of equal protection under the law? Why is it that others do not even notice the disparate impact of the law? Or, even worse, why is it that those who do notice, seem to not
reformist strategies is an emotional struggle, namely, an

inferiority complex that makes the victimized individual stop and wonder who put
the white man in charge of my body?
care? / What inevitably comes with these types of
Appeals to the federal government to repeal discriminatory acts that deny minorities rights becomes analogous to asking whites
to eliminate such policies and to allow others access to the same rights they enjoy every day. The racial state becomes in charge of what nonwhites can and cannot do, and when nonwhites continue to go to whites asking them to
It is difficult to see how true equality can be achieved

wider such a system. Missing the Root Cause: The Racial State
it is not merely individual policies passed by the United States federal government
that are racist, but that racial oppression is a structure of the government
the "racial state" to show that the state does not merely support racism, but
rather, it supports the concept of race itself.
the state is the
agent that has defined race, and that this definition has evolved over time, to
maintain the concept of race and support racism
Omi and Winant
critique reformist strategies as falling short of achieving normative goals of
eliminating racism since the reforms merely get re-equilibriated A look at the history
of racial victories in the United States further supports this critique. Racial victories
for one minority were often made possible only with the entrapment of another
racial minority.
many celebrate the racial victory of the 1954 Brown v. Board
decision, many fail to see this happened the same year as Operation Wetback,
which shifted the racial discrimination to a different population, removing close to
one million illegal immigrants
soon after the ratification of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granting citizenship and suffrage to Blacks.
Congress chose to deny citizenship to Chinese immigrants .12 In 1941, shortly after
the establishment of the Committee on Fair Employment Practices permitted Blacks
into defense industries, Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and sent
off to internment camps. Pei-te Lien argues that all of these "coincidences" support
critiques of reformist strategies that merely target individual policies, since without
challenging the racial state as a whole, even the elimination of these individual
policies will fail to eliminate racism, as they will simply replicate themselves or shift
elsewhere and target racial minorities in different ways
pass certain policies, nonwhites further legitimate this system of power relations.
/ B.
/ Omi and Winant further support this claim and explain
that
itself.10 They describe this
structure as
As will be discussed later in this paper, Omi and Winant explain how
. / Given the existence of the racial state,
For example, while
, mostly Mexicans, from the United States.11 Moreover,
.14 / C. Separatist Movements / This helps to explain why political activists
began adopting other more revolutionary strategies. Contrary to Martin Luther King Jr. and many of his followers during the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement emerged and began advocating for more separatist
When you take your case to

Washington D.C., you're taking it to the criminal who's responsible: it's like miming
from the wolf to the fox. They're all in cahoots together
strategies that rejected making reformist appeals to the United States federal government. In his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X argued: /
. They all work political chicanery and make you look like a chump before the

eyes of the world. Here you are walking around in America, getting ready to be drafted and sent abroad, like a tin soldier, and when you get over there, people ask you what you are fighting for, and you have to stick your tongue in
your cheek. No, take Uncle Sam to court, take him before the world. / Critics of reformist strategies, such as Malcolm X, understood the United States as being inherently racial and thus incapable of reform. They use the
"coincidences" listed above as evidence to support this claim. They view the United States federal government as a racial state that will merely continue to define race in new and more modernized ways, ensuring the permanence of
racism with the passage of new policies supporting these definitions. This is why they believe reformists are wrong to attack individual policies, rather than the racial state itself. / For example, the legal enforcement of a racially
discriminatory housing covenant may have been justified due to a racist belief that members of the minority race restricted from acquiring title within that neighborhood is inferior to the Caucasian race. More specifically, one might
support said covenant because one believes the inferiority of that minority race and the potential they might become your neighbor will result in a decrease in the fair market value of your property. After vigorous ongoing protests
from civil rights activists, that particular law enforcing those covenants might get repealed. However, the reason for the repeal of that law might arise not from an ethical epiphany, but rather an economic rationale in which the
Thus, that particular act may get repealed, but the

policymakers responsible for its original draft will still be in power, and will maintain
the same beliefs that motivated that piece of legislation in the first place.
homeowner is shown his property value will remain unaffected, or perhaps even increase.
Because there has been no
ethical realization of the injustice in their conduct, the chances remain high that they will construct new, apparently different but equally discriminatory policies that will force activists to join forces once again and continue the same
the government itself that is the "preeminent site of racial

conflict."
the "racial state" views the government as "inherently racial,"
meaning it does not simply intervene in racial conflicts, but it is the locus of racial
conflict
fight. / This is why it is not the individual policies, but
17 Omi and Winant's proposal of
.18 In addition to structuring conceptions of race, the government in the United States is in and of itself racially structured.19 State policies govern racial politics, heavily influencing the public on how race should
be viewed. The ways in which it does so changes over time, often taking on a more invisible nature. For example, Omi and Winant describe the racial state as treating race in different ways throughout different periods of time, first
as a biologically based essence, and then as an ideology, etc. These policies are followed by racial remedies offered by government institutions, in response to political pressures and in accordance to these different treatments of
achievements during the Civil Rights

Movement have served as a double-edged sword. While the reformist strategies
utilized during that period helped make certain advances possible, it also drove
other more overt expressions of racism underground. These more invisible
instantiations of racial injustice are far more difficult to identify than its previously
more explicit forms. Praising these victories risks giving off the illusion that the fight
is over and that racism is a description of the past .
Fifteenth
Amendment gave off the illusion that all citizens thereafter had equal access to the
right to vote.
voter
turnout today remains relatively low for Asian-Americans
This
however, ignores the way in which other more invisible practices serve to obstruct
Asian-Americans from being able to exercise their right to vote
restrictive voter identification requirements have
effectively served to disenfranchise Asian Pacific Islanders from voting
race, varying in degree depending on the magnitude of the threats those pressures pose to the order of society. Notable
/ For example, the ratification of the
Those who supported its ratification now felt entitled to the moral credentials necessary to legitimize their ability to express racially prejudiced attitudes.21 For example,
, and many blame this on cultural differences between Asians and
Americans.22 Asian-Americans are labeled as apathetic in the political community and they themselves have been attributed the blame for relatively low representation of Asian-Americans in the government today.23
. / Research by the United States Election Assistance
Commission by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, for example, indicates that
(APIs)
.24 In the 2004 election,
researchers found APIs in states where voters were required to present proper identification at the polls were 8.5% less likely to vote.25 This study confirmed that voter ID requirements prevented a large number of APIs from
voting.26 / Voter suppression tactics also play a large role in the disenfranchisement of APIs. According to a Voter Intimidation and Vote Suppression briefing paper by Demos, a national public policy center, an estimated 50 Asian
Americans were selectively challenged at the polls in Alabama during August of 2004, as being ineligible to vote due to insufficient English-speaking skills.27 Many states have allowed this selective challenging of voters to take place
at the polls, resulting in a feeling of fear, intimidation, and embarrassment among APIs, driving them away from the polls. / The danger in treasuring monumental victories such as the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment becomes
apparent when people interpret this ratification as an indication that voting discrimination is no longer a problem, and that if the voter turnout of Asian-Americans is consistently low, it must be because they are politically apathetic
.
The same can be seen after courts ordered the desegregation of public schools and
after affirmative action programs became more widespread. People began assuming
African-Americans now had an equal opportunity for education
or disinterested in American ideals. Because they originally supported the ratification of the amendment, whites can now feel as if they have the moral credentials to make conclusions such as the cultural differences rationale
and that if they did not succeed, it must be a reflection of
their intelligence or work-ethic, failing to see the ways the problem has not been solved, but rather disguised itself in other costumes, such as tracking programs in schools or teachers who view their presence as merely "affirmative
One might ask, then, why can we not change the racial state one
policy at a time?
, simply eliminating
discriminatory policies is insufficient for an overhaul of a racial institution.
action babies" and expect them to fail. /
Perhaps one could first work to gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat discriminatory identification requirements and political scare tactics. It would not seem entirely
implausible to assume that the success of individual piecemeal reforms within the government could eventually result in a transformation of the institution itself. However
/ Understanding the
motivating reasons for the elimination of individual racist policies is a critical factor in determining the success of a movement. While one justification for passing the Fifteenth Amendment might consist of arguments in favor of
the
government often seeks out ways to normalize society through eliminating
disruptions to preserve order
equality and exposing racial injustice, another justification might involve maintaining order and minimizing disruption, which is important to the federal government and its ability to run smoothly. Thus,
. When those being denied certain rights grow significantly discontent, they rebel and become disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society. This
can take the form of civil disobedience, such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more revolutionary measures, such as damaging government offices or violently harassing officials to
acknowledge the injustices and change policy. / All of these measures, however peaceful or violent, disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters are filling up the streets or blocking frequently-used road paths, and most
those in power may often compromise

and offer to rectify the situation at hand by granting rights to individuals through
changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the disruption
The lack of effort made towards protecting these rights bolsters Bell's
argument that these reforms serve more of a symbolic value rather than functional.
If still operating under the racial state, these piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the
original racial injustices in the long term, as they will only succeed in establishing a
new unstable equilibrium, only to be followed with the replication of new racial
problems
new problems will once again create resentment, generate protest,
and the cycle will begin to replicate itself, ensuring the permanence of racism
certainly cannot run smoothly if town halls are being lit on fire. Thus, in order to return to the desired homeostasis,
(the protests,
demonstrations, etc.).
.28 These
. Omi and Winant
term this cycle of continuous disruption and restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This trajectory supports the treatment of racism as inevitable since even if the racial state mitigates racial disruption over a

particular policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new definition of race will emerge triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics.
White society re-creates itself through manipulating knowledgeclaims of superficial understanding only play into the system. True
challenges require questioning of not only state policies but broader
societal structures.
Martinot and Sexton 03 *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm)
The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing
to the instability of white supremacy, the social structures of
whiteness must ever be re-secured in an obsessive fashion. The
process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved
the state, and the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the
civil rights movements that sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as
harbingers of sanity. Yet the states absorption and co-optation of that opposition for the reconstruction of
the white social order has been reoccurring before our very eyes. White
supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the social
paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of
racialization that it calls the "maintenance of order" all of which constitute its essential
dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law, religion, the twoparty systembecome the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalize throughout the
social field. It is not simply by understanding the forms of state violence
that the structures of hyper-injustice and their excess of hegemony will be addressed. If they foster policing as their
paradigmincluding imprisonment, police occupations, commodified governmental operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalization of race as their version of social orderthen
to merely catalogue these institutional forms marks the moment at

which understanding stops. To pretend to understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding. Instead,
we have to understand the state and its order as a mode of antiproduction that seeks precisely to cancel understanding through its
own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is
justice; however, the opposite of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of hyper-injustice implies that neither a consciousness of injustice nor the possibility of justice
any longer applies. Justice as such is incommensurable with and wholly exterior to
the relation between ordinary social existence and the ethic of impunity
including the modes of gratuitous violence that it fosters. The
pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass
incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where
we must begin our theorizing. Though state practices create and
reproduce the subjects, discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer
presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of political and class
forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary. This is not to debate the
traditional concerns of radical leftist politics that presuppose (and
close off) the question of structure, its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness. The
problem here is how to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves
rather than simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the
state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with de-centered agency, how the subjects of
state authorityits agents, citizens, and captivesare produced in the crucible of its

ritualistic violence.
State of Exception
The state of exception is premised on blackness as object this
legitimizes colonialized violence that is in-seperable from the
institutions founded on the juridical structure of slavery
Sexton 10 (Jared, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities.
Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities People of
Color Blindness; published in 1998; p. 32-33-BRW)
Agamben suggests
that under present conditions we will have to abandon decidedly, without
reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far
represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the
In Means without End, the theoretical prcis of his Homo Sacer tetralogy,1 Giorgio
sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only
The proposal derives from a paramount concern to counteract the

increasing institutionalization of the state of exception throughout the politicaljuridical order of the modern nation-states, and it is premised on an understanding of the
figure of the refugee.2
refugee as a limit-concept, a figure that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and
clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed.3 This urgent renewal of categories is
made possible by the conceptual crisis of the nation-state represented by the refugee insofar as she disarticulates
the trinity of state-nation-territory and the very principle of the inscription of nativity upon which it is based.4
The refugee is the contemporary political subject par excellence because she exposes to view the originary fiction
of sovereignty and thereby renders it available to thought.What is this fiction? It is not only
the presumed
identity between the human (zoe ) and the citizen (bios) the conceptual fissure
that makes possible the modern production of bare life and that between nativity
and nationality the conceptual distinction that makes possible the reciprocal
naturalization of propagation and property in the name of race. It is also
the conflation of the ruler (or ruling class) with sovereignty itself, the tautological claim that the
law (logos) is ontologically prior to the establishment of its jurisdictional
field, a space defined by relations of purely formal obedience. The state of exception would seem to betray the
mystical foundation of authority because the sovereign power operates in suspension of positive law, enforcing the
law paradoxically insofar as it is inapplicable at the time and place of its enforcement. However, the dynamic
stability of that foundation the space of obedience is demonstrated by the terrible fact that the state of
exception has been materialized repeatedly within a whole array of political formations across the preceding
century and in the particular form of the camp. With the birth of the camp, the exception becomes the rule,
consolidating a field of obedience in extremis in place of rule by law, a paradigm of governance by the
administration of the absence of order.5 However, if for Agamben the camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the
planet, its novelty does not escape a certain conceptual belatedness with respect to those repressed
topographies of cruelty that Achille Mbembe has identified in the formulation of necropolitics.6 On my reading,
of necropolitics is enabled by attending to the political and economic

conditions of the African diaspora in the historic instance both acknowledging the form
and function of racial slavery for any historical account of the rise of modern terror
and addressing the ways that the political economy of statehood [particularly in
Africa] has dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century in connection with
the wars of the globalization era.7 Necropolitics is important for the historicist project of provincializing
Agambens paradigmatic analysis, especially as it articulates the logic of race as
something far more global than a conflict internal to Europe (or even Eurasia).
Indeed, Mbembe initially describes racial slavery in the Atlantic world as one of the
first instances of biopolitical experimentation and goes on to discuss it, following the
work of Saidiya Hartman, as an exemplary manifestation of the state of exception in
the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath .8 Mbembe
the formulation
abandons too quickly this meditation on the peculiar institution in pursuit of the proper focus of his theoretical
project: the formation of colonial sovereignty. In the process, he loses track of the fact, set forth in the opening
pages of Hartmans study, that the crucial aspects of the peculiar terror formation that Mbembe attributes to

the emergence colonial rule are already institutionalized , perhaps more
fundamentally, in and as the political-juridical structure of slavery .9 More specifically, it
is the legal and political status of the captive female that is paradigmatic for
the (re)production of enslavement, in which the normativity of sexual
violence [i.e., the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially tolerable and
necessary violence] establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and
sexual subjection.10 This is why for Hartman resistance is figured through the black females sexual selfdefense, as exemplified by the 1855 circuit court case State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, in which the defendant
was sentenced to death by hanging on the charge of murder for responding with deadly force to the sexual assault
and attempted rape by a white male slaveholder. Having engaged Hartman, Mbembe must write the following
under the terms of a certain disavowal: The most original feature of this terror formation [the colony] is its
the colony represents

the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of
power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where peace is more likely to
take on the face of a war without end. 11 In the earlier text, Hartman describes the
particular mechanisms of tyrannical power that converge on the black body,
highlighting both the absoluteness of power under slavery in general and the
concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. . . .
particular ways that its gendered dimensions reveal that generality at its extreme: In this instance, tyranny is not a
Gender, if at all appropriate in this scenario,

must be understood as indissociable from violence , the vicious refiguration of rape as
rhetorical inflation, but a designation of the absoluteness of power.
mutual and shared desire, the wanton exploitation of the captive body tacitly sanctioned as a legitimate use of
black and
female difference is registered by virtue of the extremity of power
operating on captive bodies and licensed within the scope of the humane
and the tolerable.12 Mbembes formulation can suggest the originality of colonial sovereignty only insofar
property, the disavowal of injury, and the absolute possession of the body and its issue. In short,
as it bypasses Hartmans evidence and argument.13 In fact, it does so by artfully recuperating the very sources
that Hartman brings in for critique. In note 30 of Necropolitics, Mbembe cites affirmatively Hartmans Scenes of
Subjection (alongside Manuel Moreno Fraginals 1964 Marxist history of Cuban slavery, The Sugar Mill, and Susan
Buck-Morsss 2000 Critical Inquiry article, Hegel and Haiti) in support of his claim that the very structure of the
plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.14
In notes 34 and 36 of the same article, however, Mbembe cites affirmatively two sources in contradiction of
Hartmans position: the well-known passage from the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave in which the narrator describes the terrible spectacle of the torture of his Aunt Hester by the overseer, Mr.
Plumber; and the work of folklorist Roger Abrahams on the form and function of corn shucking as slave
performance in the antebellum United States.
State of Emergency
The discussion of civil society is forever tied to the discussion
of policing. The existence of a denigrated position allows and
structures violence and policing the existence of the nonhuman allows for the human and the world to exist
MR)
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to
civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only
in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of
Black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best,
limnitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to
follow Fanon's analysis, and the gestures toward this understanding in some
of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips
with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself- rather than
its abuses or shortcomings - is a state of emergency. For Fanon, civil
society is predicated on the Manicheasm of divided zones, opposed
to each other "but not in service of a higher unity" (Fanon, 1968: 3839). This is the basis of his later assertion that the two zones produce
two different "species," between which "no conciliation is possible"
(Ibid.). The phrase "not in service of a higher unity" dismisses any
kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis. In "The AvantGarde of White Supremacy," Martinot and Sexton assert the primacy
of Fanon's Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity),
even in the face of American integration facticity. Fanon's specific
colonial context does not share Martinot and Sexton's historical or
national context. Common to both texts, however, is the settler/native
dynamic, the differential zoning, and the gratuity (as opposed to the
contingency) of violence that accrues to the blackened position. The
dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and
its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical;
the two are incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak
about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into a discussion
of particular events - high-profile homicides and their related
courtroom battles, for instance (Martinot and Sexton, 2002: 6; emphasis
added).
Structural Violence
The violence that the aff solves can never account for the
objective violence inflicted on the black body
Wilderson 11 (Frank B., Professor of Drama @ UC Irvine, The Vengeance
of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php , [SG])
Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one
is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that ones
environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to
violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a
life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by
disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence.
Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the
intersection of performative and structural violence. Elsewhere I have
argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being.
The Blacks and the Humans disparate relationship to violence is at

the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human
suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists (or
is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of capital and/or
Oedipus. But Black peoples subsumption by violence is a
paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency . To be

constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped
simultaneously by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a
political ontology which is radically different from the political
ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and
disciplined by violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive
codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this
comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers,
women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective
vertigo when they meet the states disciplinary violence with the
revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective
vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are
induced by the struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over

competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such
as the American Indian Movements demand for the return of Turtle
Island vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas
Armadas de Liberacin Nacionals (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican
independence vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory.
But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no
conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are
analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the
dispossession of Human subalterns. The structural, or paradigmatic,
violence that subsumes Black insurgents cognitive maps and

conceptual frameworks, subsumes my scholarly efforts as well. As a
Black scholar, I am tasked with making sense of this violence without

being overwhelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, the writing
must somehow be indexical of that which exceeds narration, while being
ever mindful of the incomprehension the writing would foster, the
failure, that is, of interpretation were the indices to actually escape the
narrative. The stakes of this dilemma are almost as high for the Black
scholar facing his/her reader as they are for the Black insurgent facing
the police and the courts. For the scholarly act of embracing members
of the Black Liberation Army as beings worthy of empathic critique is
terrifying. Ones writing proceeds with fits and starts which have little to
do with the problems of building the thesis or finding the methodology
to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and anger of
my reader-ideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own
interventions and strategies for assembling my argument. Vertigo seizes
me with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and
swirl around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there
seems to be no other way to speak. I am speaking through the voice
and gaze of a mob of, lets just say it, White Americans; and my efforts
to marshal a mob of Black people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army
smack of compensatory gestures. It is not that the BLA doesnt come to
my aid, that they dont push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies
can make the case that we are worthy of our suffering and justified in
our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be
locked away forever. How can we be worthy of our suffering without
being worthy of ourselves? I press on, even though the vertigo that
seizes me is so overwhelming that its precise naturesubjective,
stemming from within me, or objective, catalyzed by my context, the
raging throngcannot be determined. I have no reference points apart
from the mob that gives no quarter. If I write freedom fighter, from
within my ear they scream terrorist! If I say prisoner of war, they
chant cop killer! Their denunciations are sustained only by
assertion, but they ring truer than my painstaking exegesis . No
firewall protects me from them; no liberated psychic zone offers me
sanctuary. I want to stop and turn myself in.
Terrorism
The fear of terrorism is an exportation of paranoia based out of
hegemonic whiteness. This framing is not benign, and justifies the
annihilation of marked racialized bodies.
Rodriguez 07 (Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of
diwa, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048)
To consider the US prison as a global practice of dominance, we might
begin with the now-indelible photo exhibition of captive brown men
manipulated, expired, and rendered bare in the tombs of the uScommandeered Abu Ghraib prison: here, I am concerned less with the
idiosyncrasies of the carceral spectacle (who did what, administrative
responsibilities, tedium of military corruption and incompetence, etc.) than I
am with its inscription of the where in which the worst of uS prison/state
violence incurs. As the bodies of tortured prisoners in this somewhere
else, that is, beyond and outside the formal national domain of the
United States, have become the hyper-visible and accessible raw
material for a global critique of the US statewith Abu Ghraib often
serving as the signifier for a generalized mobilization of sentiment against
the American occupationthe intimate and proximate bodies of those
locally and intimately imprisoned within the localities of the United
States constantly threaten to disappear from the political and moral
registers of US civil society, its resident uS establishment left, and
perhaps most if not all elements of the global establishment left, which
includes NGOs, political parties, and sectarian organizations. I contend in this
essay that a new theoretical framing is required to critically address
(and correct) the artificial delineation of the statecraft of Abu Ghraib
prison, and other US formed and/or mediated carceral sites across the
global landscape, as somehow unique and exceptional to places
outside the US proper. In other words, a genealogy and social theory of
US state violence specific to the regime of the prison needs to be
delicately situated within the ensemble of institutional relations,
political intercourses, and historical conjunctures that precede,
produce, and sustain places like the Abu Ghraib prison, and can
therefore only be adequately articulated as a genealogy and theory of
the allegedly domestic US prison regimes globality (I will clarify
my use of this concept in the next part of this introduction). Further, in
offering this initial attempt at such a framing, I am suggesting a
genealogy of US state violence that can more sufficiently
conceptualize the logical continuities and material articulations
between a) the ongoing projects of domestic warfare organic to the
white supremacist US racial state, and b) the array of global (or

extra-domestic) technologies of violence that form the premises of
possibility for those social formations and hegemonies integral to
the contemporary moment of US global dominance. In this sense, I am
amplifying the capacity of the US prison to inaugurate technologies of
power that exceed its nominal relegation to the domain of the
criminal- juridical. Consider imprisonment, then, as a practice of social
ordering and geopolitical power, rather than as a self-contained or foreclosed
jurisprudential practice: therein, it is possible to reconceptualize the
significance of the Abu Ghraib spectacle as only one signification of a regime
of dominance that is neither (simply) local nor (erratically) exceptional, but is
simultaneously mobilized, proliferating, and global. The overarching concern
animating this essay revolves around the peculiarity of US global dominance
in the historical present: that is, given the geopolitical dispersals, and
dislocations, as well as the differently formed social relations
generated by US hegemonies across sites and historical contexts, what
modalities of rule and statecraft give form and coherence to the
(sapatial-temporal) transitions , (institutional-discursive) rearticulations ,
and (apparent) novelties of War on Terror neoliberalism ? Put
differently, what technologies and institutionalities thread between
forms of state and state-sanctioned dominance that are nominally
autonomous of the US state, but are no less implicated in the global
reach of US state formation?
The War on Terror is fueled by American hegemony as an

outlet to export the violence of Whiteness, culminating in
racial dehumanization
Gordon 06 [Avery, professor in sociology at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror Race &
Class, Copyright 2006 Institute of Race Relations Vol. 48(1): 4259]
The ongoing news of torture and abuse of prisoners of war and socalled
enemy combatants, notably at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay (where
prisoners have been on a hunger/death strike), has given the US military
prison unprecedented public attention. Rarely do any prisons, much less the
especially secretive military prisons, emerge from the edge of geo-social
consciousness where they reside. Thus our ability today to name some of
their locations Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Diego Garcia, Kandahar,
Peshawar is significant, even if these are only a fraction of the estimated
1,000 US military and intelligence (CIA) installations worldwide. Its worth
pausing over this number a moment. At last count, in 2001, the US officially
reported a total of eighty-nine military prisons, fifty-nine in the US and thirty
outside, including recent prison acquisitions in Iraq (officially counted at
sixteen) and Afghanistan (officially counted at one), omitting the unknown
number of secret prisons.1 Chalmers Johnson argues that the official figures

from the Department of Defense for 2003, of 702 overseas military bases in
about 130 countries and 6,000 bases in the US and its territories,
significantly undercount the actual number of bases the US occupies globally
because the 2003 report omits bases in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel,
Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan. It lists only one Marine base at
Okinawa, Japan, failing to capture the size and scope of the American
military colony there. According to Johnson, an honest count (including
Royal Air Force bases in Britain which he claims are more properly US military
and espionage installations) of our military empire would probably top 1000
different bases in other peoples countries.2 If we make the reasonable
presumption that every military base has at least one prison or detention
facility, a brig in popular parlance, then the scope of military imprisonment is
staggering. Indeed, the expansion of the reach of the US military into
countries not its own, often with coerced or blackmailed permission,
and the expansion of its corollary carceral complex add up to an
extremely important and dangerous phenomenon. Secretive and
closed, with expulsion and discredit the penalty for whistle-blowing, this vast
military machine is little known. Some people are closer to its direct touch
than others, but the shape and skein of how the war on terror, an ongoing
security war, is changing the landscape slowly emerges. The attention
lavished on Abu Ghraib prison and more recently directed to the
discovery of US secret military and intelligence detention facilities
in other countries, particularly in eastern Europe, is thus significant and
laudable. However, it has, in the main, obscured and sometimes denied
the continuum between US military prisons abroad and territorial US
civilian prisons. It is that connection that I address briefly here. I begin with
Walter Benjamins famous statement that the tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception
but the rule and with two presumptions or starting points, which follow. First
presumption. While there is abundant cause for moral outrage and disgust,
there is no warrant for being surprised or shocked that citizens of
the US tortured, abused and ritually humiliated other human beings
and that the countrys political and military leaders covered up their
authorisation of it. There is no cause whatsoever for either angry or
startled or presidential assertions that abuse and torture are not
American, not things that American citizens do or condone.3
American exceptionalism the assertion that the US is an inherently more
democratic, egalitarian and just society than all others has always been a
lie.4 The current Bush government has indeed formulated a policy of
exceptionalism, claiming the right of the US, as a sovereign God-given
Christian nation, to exempt itself from the same laws that govern the
conduct of other nations, but this policy is closer to the governments own
definition of a rogue state than it is to a model democracy. You do not even
need to believe in the evidence of things not seen, as I do, to acknowledge
the truth of this lie.5 Certainly since the invention of photography, the visual
evidence is usually available; often, it is itself an artefact or a souvenir of the

presumed normalcy and legitimacy of the actions it shows. In this, the
amateur photographs of Abu Ghraib that we have seen or whose release
are still in dispute (those of army specialist Joseph Darby) most closely
resemble the photographs taken of lynchings in the US between the
1880s and the 1930s; resemble them not only in their images of
white women and men smiling and grinning at the mutilated bodies
of Black women and men hanging from trees and posts, but also in
the extent to which they were openly distributed and sold as
keepsakes of an afternoon well-spent.6 I note, as an important aside,
that though they have been demanded, there has been no state
acknowledgement or press interest in the official videotapes and
photographs, those from the CCTV surveillance cameras ubiquitous in all
prisons. As Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, two British citizens recently released
from Guantanamo Bay, stated: We should point out that there were and no
doubt still are cameras everywhere in the interrogation areas. We are
aware that evidence that could contradict what is being said officially is in
existence. We know that CCTV cameras, videotapes, and photographs exist
since we were regularly filmed and photographed during interrogations and
at other times, as well.7
Unconditional hospitality
Unconditional hospitality for who?! The conditions that make
unconditional hospitality possible result in xenophobia and
necessitate the creation of and violence against the black body
Ibrahim 2005
Awad, Dr. Ibrahim Awad is a Professor of Practice at the Public Policy and Administration Department of AUC. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, University of Cairo. He obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science from
the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and has researched and published in Arabic, English, French and Spanish in political economy, employment, international labour migration, human and labour rights, international relations, international organization and regional integration. Dr. Awad has held positions
with regional and United Nations organizations in Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Lebanon and Egypt, including, most recently as Director, International Migration Programme, ILO Headquarters, Geneva, 2005-2010, Director, Sub-regional Office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) for North Africa, in
Cairo, 2001-2005, and as Secretary of the Commission, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), 1999-2001. He has served on numerous international boards and has published widely. His most recent publications include: guest editor, Special Theme "Inter Migration in
Africa", African Yearbook of International Law, 2009. La question de lemploi entre la recherche arabe et les institutions financieres internationals, in Les sciences sociales en voyage. LAfrique du Nord et le Moyen-Orient vus dEurope, dAmerique et de linterieur, sous la direction dEberahrd Kienle. Paris,
IREMAM-CARTHALA, 2010, The Global Economic Crisis and Migrant Workers: Impact and Response. Geneva, ILO, 2009, Migration and Human Security in the Arab Region, as well as a background paper prepared for the Arab Human Development Report, 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab
Countries. New York, UNDP, 2009. The question of the question is the foreigner: towards an economy of hospitality. 12/22. Journal of Curriculum. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Journal-Curriculum-Theorizing/141753930.html. PWoods.
the foreigner is defined on the basis of the law which is laid

down and determined by: the family, civil society, and the State (or the
nation-state
the foreigner is the one who comes from abroad to a
land or a country that is not his or her own by birth.
By and
large, they tend to speak a different language (or languages) than the
host country, but because of globalization, especially with the spread of
the English language, more and more they speak the host country's
language fluently but with an accent.
The law of hospitality is a law of
tension.
Unconditional or absolute
hospitality is a law that breaks with the law of hospitality as right or duty.
Instead, it "requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the
foreigner ... but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I
give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take
place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity
(entering into a pact) or even their names"
It is an unquestioning
welcome, where a double effacement takes place: an effacement of the
question and the name. They both take a back seat, become unnecessary.
Following a Hegelian philosophy,
) (45). Within this law,
They either seek permanent residency in their new "home" through
immigration or for economic and/or political reasons, they seek asylum and political refugee status once in the host country. Increasingly, they could also come as students and then decide to stay.
They could even be native speakers of English, yet their accent will haunt and mark them forever as "foreigners."
The work by Alistair Pennycook and Bonnie Norton is particularly informative in addressing this contention.
In fact, Derrida argued, the law of hospitality is plural, it contains two laws: conditional and unconditional.
(OH, 25).
However, Derrida asked, "Is it more just and more loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name?" (OH, 29). His response is emphatic in that within the law of unconditional hospitality, "Let us say yes
to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new
unconditional hospitality calls for

suspending language, holding back the temptation to ask the other who
s/he is, what her/his name is, where s/he comes from, etc. Unconditional
hospitality, in sum, is a gracious act, a gift that is not governed by duty
(performed out of duty), and certainly not about paying a debt or
participating in an economy of exchange: my gift should not make you feel
that you owe me your life.
This gesture
of unconditional gift, this act of love is impossible without sovereignty of
oneself over one's home.
Ironically, if not tragically, one can become xenophobic in order to protect
one's sovereignty, one's own right to unconditional hospitality, the very
home that makes the latter possible. (Think about the Patriotic Act passed
by the U.S. Congress after the tragic events of 9/11, where conditional
laws are imposed not only on foreigners, but on the very idea of
democracy.)
the guest becomes an undesirable foreigner and as
host I risk becoming their hostage. Retaining the self as self, very
significantly, I need to be master at home, affirm my being there, and
retain authority over that place. I do so by "saying" (usually by passing
laws): this place belongs to me, we are in my home, welcome and feel at
home but on the condition that you obey the rules of hospitality.
arrival is citizen of another country, a human ... or a divine creature ... male or female" (OH, 77). To do so,
It is a law without law (83), where the stranger turns into an awaited guest and someone to whom you say not only "come," but "enter": "enter
without waiting, make a pause in our home without waiting, hurry up and come in, "come inside," "come without me," not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me" (123).
The law of hospitality therefore, for Derrida, is the law of one's home. The alien, the stranger other is welcomed as non-enemy.
Once this is the case,

Henceforth, the foreigner is allowed to enter the host's home under
conditions the host has determined
hospitality is conditioned by
language
name
and race
Before coming to North America
I was not considered
Black, as the term is defined in North America. Other terms served to
patch together my identity, such as tall, Sudanese, and basketball player.
In other words, my Blackness was not marked, it was outside the shadow
of the other North American Whiteness. However, as a refugee in North
America, my perception of self was altered in direct response to the social
processes of racism and the historical representation of Blackness
whereby the antecedent signifiers became secondary to my Blackness,
and I retranslated my being: I became Black. There, I narrated a significant
incident in my understanding of hospitality when one's skin color
determines who/what one "is."
a White policeman
who stopped me in Toronto, Canada, for no reason other than "We are
looking for a dark man with a dark bag,"
. As I already cited, my
(having an accent), (2) my
(assumed to be Muslim and from the Middle East),
politics of race first and then my name.
(3)
. Since I already addressed the language question, let me speak about the
, I argued elsewhere,
It happened in May 16, 1999, the day I was officially declared "Black," with
as he uttered it. After questioning him about my "darkness," he said, "We are looking for a Black man with
a dark bag." There is no need to mention that my bag is actually light-blue and now, however, I am metamorphosed from "dark" into "Black." Before asking for my ID, he asked me to lay down my (dark?) bag, which I did.
With his order, I widely opened my bag for anyone in the street to see.
Since it was a tourist area, everyone was looking into my bag.
After writing down my name
and date of birth, he then announced to the dispatcher telling her "All is
OK now." With no apologies, I was ordered to collect my affairs and my bag
and, as he uttered it, "You are free to go now
this was his way of
saying: Welcome to your new "home"! These incidents, including the one
with the police, invoke something larger than trivial letters, simple phone
calls, and routine police searches. Powerfully, they are telling me how my
body and name are already "read," "marked," "positioned," and
"imagined." They are imagined and read in ways that are beyond my
control.
given my name and my socially positioned "black"
body
, I become a tableau that people draw
and read through however they want to. I become a ghost, a glassy figure
to see through. These factors, henceforth, determine the nature of the
laws (of hospitality) extended not to "me," if I can be seen and heard, but
to what my accent, race, and name represent and invoke in the imaginary
of the host, the "lawmaker."
Some, I observed, were pitying my
plight and one White woman was smiling. I first gave him my citizenship card and after 10 minutes, I decided to use my professor identification.
." For me,
Here, Ibrahim is, and is is already known. That is,
, the Pastor, the police and the ICUP assumed their knowledge of me (almost with certainty). Thus
Unconditional hospitality is impossible they will always

demand assimilation of the other in order to preserve their
own sovereignty
Bahler 2010
Brock, University of Pittsburgh. Derridean Hospitality in an Age of Political Xenophobia. Spring. Pgs.6-7. PWoods.
Derrida called for

unconditional hospitality. This
involves a
radical, risk-taking welcoming of the strangera nation without borders,
that welcomes the immigrant rather than drawing lines of superiority and
inferiority based on nationality
open to someone who is neither
expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor,
as a new arrival,wholly other
Our understanding of nations, or of a
particular community, ought to involve a hospitality that does not merely
open itself to guests, but to strangers, (illegal) immigrants, and asylum
seekers, and allows the stranger to remain different from us rather than
be assimilated
a certain paradox is at play in the term
In contrast,
a democracy that involves
hospitality
. Pure hospitality is
(Borradori 129).
. Thus, it should be observed that

hospitality. For when I welcome someone into my home, I am situating
myself as the powerbroker, the owner of the house, the one who is the
master and sovereign of the place. a visitor to my abode, a guest in my
possession.
the notion of hospitality is supposed to be one of
welcoming and of an appreciation of the Other, but it is simultaneously
annulled by the power structure at work that keeps the guest at arms
length, fearfully works to protect the possessions of the owner, and even
expects a certain level of reciprocity or assimilation by the visitor
There is an essential selflimitation built right into the idea of
hospitality, which preserves the distance between ones own and the
stranger So there is always a little hostility in all hosting and hospitality
She is
In other words,
. As John Caputo
summarizes,
(Caputo 110).
War (Not nuclear)

white supremacy
Rodriguez 08 (Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of
California Berkeley and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of
California Riverside, ABOLITION NOW! TEN YEARS OF STRATEGY AND
STRUGGLE AGAINST THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AK Press 2008,
[SG])
unprecedented state-organized human capture and stateproduced physical/social/ psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million
imprisoned by the domestic and global US prison industrial complex to
the profound forms of informal apartheid and proto- apartheid that are
being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the
country. This condition presents a profound crisisand political
possibilityfor people struggling against the white supremacist

state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and
physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and
far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism,
militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination
in a legitimately "global" way, it is nothing short of
unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting
American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) when there are
geographies of "home." This time of crisis and emergency
necessitates a critical examination of the political and institutional

logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly
the "establishment" left that is tethered (for better and worse) to the
non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere
as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial
technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over
public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive
and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the
industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state
liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of
government-proctored non-profit organizations. It is in the context of the
formation of the NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to
address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and
disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines,
and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive

movements and organizations within the US establishment left (of

which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the left's willingness
to fundamentally tolerateand accompanying unwillingness to abolish

the institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and
imprisonment apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence
"normal" manifestations within the domestic "homeland" of the Homeland

Security state. Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist
struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law , and beneath the
infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of
racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist crirninalization, there is an
unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the
mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production
of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of Black,
brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and ESSENTIAL
VIOLENCE OF THE AMERICAN (GLOBAL) NATION-BUILDING PROJECT. To put it
and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of
our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond
the US) does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the
abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white
supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and
future. Our non-profit left, in particular, seems content to engage in
desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the
casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an
abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses
the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. Not long from
now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage,
suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion
against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary
questions of radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate,
and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and
openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially
neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our
people, given that ours are the very same populations that have
historically struggled to survive and overthrow such "classical" structures
of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other

generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging,
dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises
of this condition of domestic warfare in favor of short-term,
"winnable" policy reforms? (For example, why did we choose to

formulate and tolerate a "progressive" political language that reinforced
dominant racist notions of "criminality" in the process of trying to discredit
the legal basis of "Three Strikes" laws?) What were the fundamental
concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this
time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or

even viable opposition to the white supremacist state's terms of
engagement (that is, warfare)? 'this radical accountability reflects a
variation on anti- colonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon's memorable
statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation
must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the
underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously
resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the
emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of
combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our
forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness.
Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political

rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that fetishize and
fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the
worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long
overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical disidentification with the state, in the trajectory of an antinationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive
identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency (this is
to consider insurgency as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive

maneuvering of resistance). Reading a few lines down from our first
invoking of Fanons call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here:
For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our
historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and
every attack aborted or drowned in blood.
Wilderson
The perceived axiom of black = slave destabilizes the black
community permanently
Sexton 10 (Jared, Assoc Prof of African American Studies @ UC Irvine,
People of Color Blindness p. 33-34)
Not all free persons are white
(nor are they equal or equally free),
but slaves are
paradigmatically black. And because blackness serves as the basis of

enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture, it
permanently destabilizes the position of any nominally free black
population . Stuart Hall might call this the articulation of elements of a discourse, the production of a nonnecessary correspondence between the signifiers of racial blackness and slavery.27
But it is the
historical materialization of the logic of a transnational political and legal

culture such that the contingency of its articulation is generally lost to
the infrastructure of the Atlantic world that provides Frank Wilderson a
basis for the concept of a political ontology of race. 28 The United States provides
the point of focus here,
but the dynamics under examination are not restricted to
its bounds. Political ontology is not a metaphysical notion , because it is the Social
Text 103 Summer 2010 37 explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historic challenge through
collective struggle. But
it is not simply a description of a political status either,
even an oppressed political status, because it functions as if it were a

metaphysical property across the longue dure of the premodern,
modern, and now postmodern eras . That is to say, the application of the law of
racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its
operation across the better part of a millennium .29 In Wildersons terms, the libidinal
economy of antiblackness is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its political economy.
the application of slave law among the free
In fact,
(that is, the disposition that with respect to
the African shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh)
has
outlived in the postemancipation world a certain form of its prior

operation
the property relations specific to the institution of chattel and the plantationbased agrarian
economy in which it was sustained. Hartman describes this in her 2007 memoir, Lose Your Mother, as the afterlife of
slavery: a
measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be
undone . . . a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were

entrenched centuries ago .30 On that note, it is not inappropriate to say that
the continuing application of slave law facilitated the reconfiguration of
its operation with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, rather than its abolition
(in the conventional reading)
or even its
circumscription as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have

been duly convicted (on the progressive reading of contemporary critics

of the prison-industrial complex). It is the paramount value of Loc
Wacquants historical sociology, especially in Wildersons hands, that it
provides a schema for tracking such reconfigurations of anti-blackness
from slavery to mass imprisonment without losing track of its structural
dimensions, its political ontology.31
Zapatista
The critique perpetuates anti-blackness, ignoring its
epistemological and ontological underpinnings and making it
impossible to resolve genocide
Woods 7 teaches in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Sonoma State University. He has
worked in HIV/AIDS peer education and harm reduction in New York City, AIDS housing in Seattle, and police
accountability in Oakland. His current project examines captivity and social death across the African Diaspora.
(Tryon, "The Fact of Anti-Blackness: Decolonization in Chiapas and the Niger River Delta," 2007,
http://www.okcir.com/Articles%20V%20Special/TryonWoods.pdf)
In effect, the Zapatistas have scaled down the structural antagonism of genocide to a social conflict within the
Civil society cannot be ethically restored, however,

simply by shifting its paradigm of resource accumulation and
distribution; to produce, as Fanon would have it, a world of mutual human
recognition, also requires adjusting the societys epistemological and
ontological foundations. The living death of genocide for the indigenous figure, as with
enslavement for the Black, can only be grasped by way of a narrative
about something that it is notsovereignty. The point, however, is not that the
discursive space of the nation.
Zapatistas have retreated from the only ethical stance that genocide demands. Zapatismo is nuanced enough
that what appears at one juncture to be a disabling contradiction, turns out to have carved a space for singular
life-forms otherwise threatened with extinction in the homogenizing world of the market.6 The point is that there
was an alternative option available to them at all. This availability is the primary and enduring distinction
Although Zapatismo represents profoundly

troubling possibilities for the nation-state and international capital, it is
not an ethical restoration of humanity because it rests upon this silent
disavowal of the suffering of the slave and of the genocided indigenous.
While Zapatismo may not be an active form of anti-blackness, it
nevertheless activates its ontological structure by articulating with the
nation through the nameable loss of sovereignty. The gritty reality of this situation is
between the Niger Delta and Chiapas.
that as the Zapatistas access the universal language of liberal political community, the logos of modern
humanity, the Niger Delta recedes further into non-existence. In contrast to the Zapatistas, the discourse
coming out of the Delta has not prominently featured calls for greater rights and inclusion within the Nigerian
political body. Instead, it has explicitly linked the struggle against a neo-colonialist state and multinational
corporations to a longer history and broader picture of imperial conquest. A leader of the Ijaw-based Niger Delta
Peoples Volunteer Force recently explained: We were forced into Nigeria by the British colonialists. We are not
Nigeriansthere is no such nation as Nigeria (Al-Jazeera 2004). Direct challenges to the social order in the
Delta have taken the form of kidnapping or killing foreign oil workers, attacking and disabling oil production
infrastructure, and sabotaging pipelines for the illicit market in fuel. Military repression is intense, regular, and
extensivethe historical timeline is dotted with numerous massacres of Delta communities and constant
The
spectacle always obscures the mundane, however, and it is the banality
of violence that marks the post-colony in Africa. The form of power that
governs this space is carnivorous: killing a human being proceeds from
the same logic as killing an animal. Like that of the animal whose throat is cut, the death
clashes between the state, the security forces of the oil companies, and various private militia groups.
inflicted on a human being is perceived as embracing nothing. It is the death of a purely negative essence
without substance, the emptying of a hollow, unsubstantial object that, falling back into loss, finds itself only as
The neo-liberal
carnivore delegates the killing to the colonized themselves, the negated
subject who already experiences death at the very heart of his
a lost soul. In other words, the hollow object dies of its own accord. (Mbembe 2001: 200

existence (Mbembe 2001: 201). Under structural adjustment, debt is the ideological
mechanism through which the delegated killing in the Delta is
understood: the black becomes the locus of blame for the
inarticulable violence of colonialism and the site of aberrance for the
repressed violence of the post-colony (Hartman 1997: 133). It is an inversion
through which genocide appears as suicide.7 Irrespective of similar
positions in the political economy of global capital accumulation
leaving existence by the wayside, as Fanon puts itthe structure of
the worlds semantic field is bound together by anti-black solidarity.
Whereas the Zapatistas have generated an enormous transnational solidarity networkWe are all
Zapatistas!there is no analogous identification by global civil society with the situation in the Delta.8 By the
same token, whereas the taking up of arms by the EZLN effectively created a space for the Zapatista claims to
be heard, the specter of mass black violence in Africa generally elicits shock or revulsion from global civil
society. Black violence is illegible because it emerges as if from a void, the place of absence, where loss cannot
be named.
Focus on unitary approaches while ignoring our own racial biases

destroys effective social movements progressive spaces are just as
marginalizing
Wise 10 anti-racist activist and author, former adjunct faculty member at the Smith College School for Social
Work (Time Wise, 17 August 2010, With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on
the Liberal-Left, http://www.timwise.org/2010/08/with-friends-like-these-who-needs-glenn-beck-racism-and-whiteprivilege-on-the-liberal-left/)//KP
suggest that racism and discrimination are also significant problems

in more progressive spaces, even among self-proclaimed liberals and leftists themselves
and that it might be unearthed in our political movements and prepare to be met with icy
stares, or worse, a self-righteous vitriol that seeks to separate real
racism (the right-wing kind) from not-so-real racism (the kind we on the left sometimes
foster). And know that before long, someone will admonish you to focus on the real
enemy, rather than fighting amongst ourselves. What we need is unity, these
voices say, and all that talk about racism on the left just divides us
further. But such arguments, in addition to being terribly convenient for the white folks who
typically spout them since it relieves us of having to examine our own practices and rhetoric are also
horribly shortsighted. Only by addressing our own racism (however inadvertent
it may be at times) can we grow movements for social justice. By giving short
shrift to the subject, internally or in the larger society, we virtually guarantee the
defeat of whatever movements for social transformation we claim to support. Its
worth recalling that at the height of the civil rights movement it was not merely
conservatives and reactionaries who were the targets of the freedom struggle. Indeed, some of the
harshest criticism was reserved for moderates and even liberals, whether
the white clergy whom Dr. King was chastising in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, or
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In the case of the latter two, neither their
relative liberalism (when compared to their political opponents) or party affiliation
But

insulated them from the legitimate ire of peoples of color and their white
antiracist allies. Going back further we should recall that it was perhaps the nations most
progressive president, Franklin Roosevelt, who not only OKd the
internment of Japanese Americans, but who was also willing to cut out
virtually all African Americans from the key programs of the New Deal so
as to placate southern segregationists in his own party (1). Capitulating to
racism, and even practicing it, has a sad pedigree on the left of the spectrum as
with the right. And it is time we faced this fact honestly.
The left is not exempt from the racism they critique blackness
becomes tainted by implicit biases and excuses
Distinguishing Racism on the Left from Racism on the Right That said, and before detailing what liberal and
racism on the left is not exactly the

same as its counterpart on the right. Whereas conservative theory lends itself
almost intrinsically to racist conclusions, for reasons I explained in the first essay, liberal
theory is generally egalitarian and intuitively antiracist. Liberal and left-leaning folks
progressive racism often looks like, let me be clear:
typically endorse notions of equality in both the political and economic realms. Likewise, most all on the left
outwardly reject the attribution of biological or cultural superiority to racial groups. And
those on the left
are quick to acknowledge and decry the systemic injustices
that have been central

to the creation of racial disparities in the United States. So too, virtually all the activists in the civil rights
struggle, contrary to the revisionism of folks like Glenn Beck, were decidedly to the left. Liberals and left-radicals
populated the movement and provided its energy, while leading conservatives like William F. Buckley and his
colleagues at The National Review published paeans to white supremacy in which they advised that integration
Dr.
King even as conservatives like Beck have tried to co-opt his message and his legacy put forth a
consistently progressive and even leftist politics, in terms of his views on race, as well as
economics and militarism. But despite the overwhelming role of liberals and leftists
in the struggle for racial equity, and despite the antiracist narrative that
dovetails with left philosophy, liberal and left individuals and groups in
practice have manifested racism in a number of ways. Racism 2.0: White Liberals
and the Problem of Enlightened Exceptionalism For years, the insistence by whites that
some of (their) best friends were black was perhaps the most obvious if
unintentional way for these whites to expose their broader racial views as
anything but enlightened. Whenever we as white folks have felt the need to
mention our close personal relationships with African Americans, it has usually
been after having just inserted our feet into our mouths by saying
something racially intemperate or even racist in the presence of someone of color. Nowadays,
the assurance that some of my best friends are black as a way to demonstrate
ones open-minded bona fides has been supplanted by a more tangible and ostensibly political
should wait until blacks had progressed enough, in civilizational terms, to be mingled with their betters.

statement: namely, that I
voted for Barack Obama. Thus, imply the persons

stating it (often quite liberal in terms of their overall political sensibilities), dont accuse me of
racism. But as I explained in my 2009 book, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in
the Age of Obama, the ability of whites to support and vote for Obama says little
about our larger views regarding people of color generally, or black folks in particular.
Indeed, many white liberal Obama supporters openly admitted that what they
liked about the candidate was his ability to transcend race (which implicitly meant to transcend
his own blackness), to make white people feel good about ourselves, and
the fact that he didnt come with the baggage of the civil rights movement. In other words, many whites
liked Obama precisely because they were able to view him as
fundamentally different than other black folks. He was an exception. His blackness wasnt
problematic. It didnt make white people uncomfortable. But to view Barack Obama as different
from the black norm and to view this difference as a positive thing is to suggest
that normal blackness is tainted, negative, to be avoided, and certainly not supported
politically. It is to re-stigmatize blackness and the black community writ large, even as one
praises and identifies with one black individual writ small. It is to turn Barack Obama into the political equivalent
of Cliff Huxtable, from The Cosby Show: a black man with whom, despite his blackness, white America is able to
identify. Indeed,
polling data suggests that plenty of whites who voted for
Obama including many who are no doubt liberal on issues like abortion or the environment
nonetheless harbor deep-seated racial biases. For instance, one AP survey in
September of 2008 found that about a third of white Democrats were willing to
admit to holding negative and racist stereotypes about blacks, and that
about 60 percent of these nonetheless supported Barack Obama for president and
intended to vote for him. Considering the research on racial bias among whites, which finds that nearly all
of us continue to harbor certain anti-black stereotypes and biases, it is safe to
say that millions of otherwise liberal white folks are practitioners of racism,
albeit a 2.0 variety, as opposed to the old school, 1.0 type, to which we have cast most of our
attention.
Impacts
Social Death
Body/Flesh
The black body has no ontological resistance. Structured by the
machinations of civil society those in the non-human positionality are
relegated to the outside of the periphery
Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical
dilemmas-- simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.This, I submit, is the essence of being
for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global
common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of
ethical dilemmas for the Black: I am, Fanon writes, a slave not of an idea
others have of me but of my own appearance. Being can thus be thought
of, in the first ontological instance, asnon-niggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The
visual field, my own appearance, is the cut, the mechanism that
elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference between
the living and the dead.Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and
thus can become existentially present through some struggle
for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition
(West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions
the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The
violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through
tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the little family quarrels which for Fanon exemplify the
Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Blacks first ontological instance, the Middle Passage,
Jews
went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships
and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a
Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to
attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the
Dead have the Blacks among them. This violence which turns a body into
flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of
ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and
indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made
available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, the black has no
ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man (110) or, more
precisely, in the eyes of Humanity
wiped out [his/her] metaphysicshis [her] customs and sources on which they are based (BSWM 110).
Slave Narrative->History
Society erases the non-human and fosters fear of blackness
ANCs armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III Chapter One: The Ruse ofAnalogy Red, White, & Black:
Normally, in moments such as the present (with no such mass movement in the streets), the effect of delineating a
peculiar African American historiography (19) seems menacing and unbearable to the lone Black scholar; and so

the Black scholar labors unwittingly, Judy impliesto adjust the structure of his/her own nonrecuperable
negativity (96) in order to tell a story of an emerging subjectivitys triumphant struggle to discover its identity
The dread
under which such aspirations to Human capacity labor (a labor of disavowal) is
catalyzed by the knowledge, however unconscious, that civil society is
held together by a structural prohibition against recognizing and
incorporating a being that is dead, despite the fact that this being is
sentient and so appears to be very much alive. Civil society cannot
embrace what Saidiya Hartman calls the abject status of the will-less object (Scenes of
and thereby ascend from the abject muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity (88-89).
Subjection 52). Explicating the rhetorical and philosophical impossibility of such an embrace, Judy writes: The
assumption of the Negros transcendent worth as a human presupposes the Negros being comprehensible in
Western modernitys terms. Put somewhat more crudely, but nonetheless to the point, the humanization in writing
achieved in the slave narrative require[s] the conversion of the incomprehensible African into the comprehensible
Negro. The historical mode of conversion was the linguistic representation of slavery: the slave narrative [or Black
By providing heuristic evidence of the Negros humanity

the slave narrative begins to write the history of Negro culture in terms of
the history of an extra-African self-reflective consciousness. (Judy 92) But
this exercise is as liberating, as productive of subjectivity, as a dog
chasing its tail. For [p]recisely at the point at which this intervention
appears to succeed in its determination of a black agent, however, it is
subject to appropriation by a rather homeostatic thought: the Negro (97). And the
Negro, as Fanon illustrates throughout Black Skin, White Masks, is comparison, nothing more
and certainly nothing less, for what is less than comparison? Fanon strikes at the
heart of this tail-chasing circularity and the dread it catalyzes when he writes: No one knows yet who
[the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world
finds out. And when the world knows the world always expects something
of the Negro. He is afraid lest the world know, he is afraid of the fear that
the world would feel if the world knew. (BSWM emphasis mine 139)
film and Black film theory].
Humans->Ontology
We control the framing of the impacts and are a prior question because of
the qualitative difference between life chances
Jared Sexton 2010 (The Curtain of the Sky: An Introduction in Critical
Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African-American
studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine.)
To be sure, Humans do not live under conditions of equality in the modern

world. In fact, modernity is, to a large degree, marked by societies
structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white supremacy, settler
colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and
genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet , for
Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the
inferiorization or dehumanization of the masses of people in Asia in
America and the islands of the sea, including the colonization of their
land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their
extermination in whole or in part, and the singular commodification of
human being pursued under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous
violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and
exchanged.
Racialization
Non-humans
Those who are denigrated exist are in the world but not a part of the world,
they are subjects under erasure
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of
California, Berkeley,Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine:
In his seminal first book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon sets out to analyze the structure of anti-Black racism and
how best to confront it. Operating within-but-against a Hegelian framework (as he also operates within-but-against
both psychoanalysis and phenomenology), Fanon identifies what he deems the fundamental
barrier
to inter-racial recognition: racialized subjects, according to Fanon,
lack what he calls "ontological resistance in the eyes of the white
man."3 Black subjects are seen but not seen; they exist but they are
not (human). This is what philosopher Lewis Gordon deems "the hellish zone of nonbeing," "a zone neither
4
of appearance or disappearance." Not only does this "below-Otherness" render
politicsas publicity5impossible, but the same applies for ethics:"damnation
means that the black (or better, the blackened) lives the irrelevance
of innocencethe absence of a Self-Other dialectic in racist situations means the eradication of ethical
6
relations.Where ethics is derailed, all is permitted." Racialization, put simply, creates
a situation which lacks the necessary reciprocity for the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to operate.7 For equality to
be contemplated, for the obligation to recognize the other to have any traction at all, racialized subjects must first
seize access to ontology, storming the fortified heaven of being itself.
Black non -existence

The very appearance of denigrated is violent
But how can merely making oneself known constitute a violent act? Here we turn again to Gordon :the
blackened lives the both for disaster of appearance where there is no

room to appear nonviolently. Acceptable being is nonexistence,
nonappearance, or submergence To change things is to appear,
but to appear is to be violent since that group's appearance is
illegitimate. Violence, in this sense, need not be a physical
imposition. It need not be a consequence of guns and other
weapons of destruction. It need simply be appearance.20For racialized
subjects, the very act of appearing, of making oneself known, is a
violent act itsontological implications and for its inevitable reception. That is, it constitutes a
challenge to the prevailing structures of symbolic ontological
violencethe walls of exclusion which divide being from non-being
and as a result of this disruption, black appearance historically
appears as "violent" regardless of its content.21And were it not perceived as such,
for Fanon, then its ontological shock-value might dissipate, undermining the external element of its function.And
even when that content is nominally "violent," this often masks its ontological function. It is no accident that the
Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks had thought it suitable to cite Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute and Richard
Wright's Native Son on the same page.
"A feeling of inferiority?"
he asks himself, of himself:

"No, a feeling of nonexistence," he responds. The only response to the immobility of not being
able to bring oneself to kill the master is to "explode to shatter the hellish cycle." 22 Turning away from the master
(the internal function of symbolic decolonial violence), in practice, often coincides with
the realization
that that most basic proof of human equalityvulnerability to death
at the hands of anotheralso applies to whites. For this recognition to be put into practice often
entails at least the threat of actual violence as the mechanism for enforced recognition (the external function). To
the symbolic ontological violence of racialization, then, Fanon seems at first to respond in kind, with a violence
which is equally symbolic in its function, but one which rather than determining being undoes the exclusionary
barriers of ontology. This is a symbolic violence which operates toward the decolonization of being,23 and which is
utterly incommensurable in both its actual and (more fundamental) symbolic forms with the violence of the
racist/colonizer.
Ontological Barrier
The ontological barrier does not allow denigrated subjects full humanity.
Turning more directly to Hegel's master-slave dialectic in an appendix to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon concludes
that,
in the face of such ontological blockage, full humanity can only

emerge through the effort to impose one's existence (as "subjective
certainty") onto another (thereby converting it into "objective fact") .
In this "quest of absoluteness," the resistance of the other yields
desire, what Fanon calls "the first milestone on the road that leads to the dignity of the spirit."8 Desire,
moreover, requires that I risk my life in conflict for the object of that
desire,thereby pushing me beyond bare life and toward independent self-consciousness. Historically, however,
the black slave has been granted her freedom by the former slaveholder, who "decided to promote the machineanimal-men to the supreme rank of men," and as a result access to full humanitywhich can only appear by way of
mutual and conflictual recognitionremained blocked:"Say thank you to the nice man," the mother tells her little
boy but we know that often the little boy is dying to scream some other, more resounding expression. The white
man, in the capacity of master, said to the Negro, "From now on you are free." But the Negro knows nothing of the
cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it The former slave needs a challenge to his humanity, he wants a
conflict, a riot. But it is too late.9Since there has been no reciprocity in the process, since blacks are denied access
to ontology, they have not, according to Fanon, been able to follow the Hegelian path of turning
away
from the master and finding liberation in the object. Instead, lack of
reciprocity leads the slavein a gesture of internalized self-hatred
to turn toward the master and abandon the object, but this effort at mutual recognition remains unrequited, as the
master desires from the slave only work.10 We can already anticipate here the broad strokes of Fanon's theory of
self-consciousness as human requires symbolic

violence, it requires the assertion of reciprocity within a historical
situation marked by the denial of such reciprocity, and if necessary, the
violence: for the racialized subject,
provocation of conflict through the assertion of alterity. 11 Only then will the slave be freed from this two-sided
blockage of the dialectic,
enforcing recognition (externally) onto the master

while developing (internally) a degree of autonomy and selfconfidence.
White Supremacy
Environment
White supremacy leads to environmental harms

McCright, Associate Professor of Sociology in Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology,
and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University , Dulap, Regents
Professor of Psychological Sciences, Sociology. In addition to his empirical work, Dr. Dunlap regularly
2011.
(Aaron M., Riley E., Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change
Among Conservative White Males in the United States, Global
Environmental Change, Volume 21, October 2011, Pages 11631172, SJH)
writes assessments of theoretical developments in the field of environmental sociology,
We do find strong evidence for a conservative white male effect on climate

change denialism, whereby conservative white males are more likely than
are other adults to espouse climate change denial. Further, we find that
thoseconservative white males who self-report understanding global warming
very wellconfidentconservative white malesexpress an even greater degree of
climate change denial. The positive correlation between self-reported
understanding of global warming and climate change denial among
conservative white males is compelling evidence that climate change denial is
a form of identity-protective cognition, reflecting a system-justifying
tendency. While we have documented that conservative white males contribute
disproportionately to climate change denial in the U.S., our results
indicate that denialism is sufficiently diffuse within the American public
that it obviously cannot be attributed solely to conservative white males.
Even controlling for the denialism of conservative white males (and even confident conservative white males),
conservatives (and Republicans), males, more religious individuals, and those unsympathetic to the environmental
movement are still more likely to report denialist beliefs than are their respective counterparts. Finally ,
what is
most sobering, especially for the scientific community and climate change
communicators, is that climate change denial has actually increased in the
U.S. general public between 2001 and 2010 (Newport, 2010), although primarily due to a
significant increase in the past two years which may prove abnormal in the long run (Leiserowitz et al.,
forthcoming).
Human Rights
White Supremacy is the most vicious human rights violations because it
stems from antiblackness which creates the condition of possibility for
humans to exist in the first place by destroying the non-human
Rabaka 2007(Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Boiss Critique of White
Supremacy and Contributions to Critical White Studies,Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity
and Race in America (CSERA),University of Colorado-Boulder, Ketchum)
Even in its mildest and most unconscious forms, white supremacy is one of
the extremist and most vicious human rights violations in history because
it plants false seeds of white superiority and black inferiority in the fertile
ground of the future. It takes human beings and turns them into the
subhuman things, making them colored means to a white imperial end . Du
Boiss critique of white supremacy then, registers as not only a radical criticism of an increasingly illusive and nebulous racism, but
an affirmation of black humanity and an epoch-spanning assertion of Africana and other oppressed peoples inherent right to human
and civil rights. Acknowledgements
Colonialism
Whiteness/Colonialism->bodily disarticulation
The black body desires to participate in the world, inclusion would encroach
upon the territory of whiteness which seeks the ultimate destruction of
Blackness
Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of
Humanities,2003(Jared, The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised
Barriers and the Politics of Desire, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2,
2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
He goes on to speak of his own desire to refuse the dissembling (or
castrating) force of the white look, to avoid the mournful shroud of blackness, his desire for repair and resolution. I
That is, to
participate in the honourable world of whiteness, to be not animal,
bad, mean, and ugly. A desire to not be slashed, dissected, or cut
into slices. Yet, just as it seems that Fanon is situating whiteness on the
side of plentitude, wholeness, security, and integrity (and blackness on the
did not want this revision, he says. All I wanted was to be a man among other men.
side of lack), he offers a second statement to complicate matters. At the extreme, I should say that the Negro,
because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man at the point, naturally, at
So it
seems that the white man, too, has trouble with the solidity of his
body, the demarcation of its inside and outside. Whereas the white
look tears apart the black body, the black body, in turn, intrudes
upon the corporeal territory of whiteness itself, disturbing its function by
which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man(Fanon, 1967, p. 160)
definition and throwing its coordinates out of alignment at the extreme. What are we to make of this bizarre
scenario of inter-penetration? How are we to think about the simultaneous description of the white look as both
Fanon suggests, fixing, as both scattering and imprisoning,

both dislocating and objectifying? More to the point, how to contain or define something
an object, a body that is flung about, ripped to shreds, multiplying in at least three directions? The
colonial project of white supremacy, the very social and historical
forces that materially and symbolically invent and reproduce the
black body, also seek to destroy it. Conversely, the forces that seek to
(and do!) destroy the black body also seek to maintain it, to insist
that it be there, in its place, within boundsclassified tucked
away. Is it any surprise, then, that the very thing that ostensibly
grants and guarantees the social existence of whiteness , i.e., blackness, is
dissecting and,
the very thing that at the extreme, the edge, the verge prevents it from enjoying a secure and stable life? In
short, blackness gives [whiteness] its classification as seeming.8
Dispensability
Non-human world is seen as dispensable and dispensability leads to the
destruction of whole populations
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Boiss Critique of White
Moving beyond a strictly materialist (politico-economic and/or class-centered) account of race and racism, and hitting at the heart of
white supremacy, Du Bois, in
The Souls of White Folk, queried the colored world and those whites who would open themselves
How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of
to moral and materialist questions:

It is the duty of
white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europes
good (1995a, p. 459). Part of Du Boiss critique of white supremacy reveals his reliance on racial materialist arguments,
Europe which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this:
where the other portion of his critique revolves around his own homegrown cultural nationalism, which was more often later in his
life, what I will term, a cultural internationalism that sought to accent and highlight commonalities and kinships amongst
people of color based on their endurances and experiences of, and struggles against European imperial expansion and all out white
(cultural, social, political, legal, educational, religious, aesthetic and economic) domination and discrimination. Du Bois s critical
comments in
The Souls of White Folk
deserve quotation at length, as his argument is elaborated throughout several carefully
The European world is

using black and brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but
surely white culture is evolving the theory that darkies are born beasts
of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured world, with stronger and shriller accord.
constructed paragraphs that poignantly capture the crux of his critique of white supremacy:
The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary:
Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and
imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of
mausers and maxims; they have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they
are fools, illogical idiotshalf-devil and half-child. Such as they are civilization must,
naturally, raise them, but soberly and in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not men in
the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent of their
shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raise cotton, gather
rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamondsand let them be paid what men think
they are worth white men who know them to be well-nigh worthless . Such
degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of
their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been
to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide

mark of meannesscolor! Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culture in the later
left, however,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India
conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South
America, lynching her own Negroes the while. (p. 460)
Militarism
Whiteness produces a cultural paranoia that constructs certain
groups as threats that must be contained- this causes military
intervention based out of an ethic of white supremacy
Martinot 03 (Steve, lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for Interdisciplinary
Programs, The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the US, Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), pg.
19-20)
Beneath
American nationalism and "white nationalism," of representative

"white democracy" that inhabits the American identity, the need for
a threat to instigate the renewal of a messianic project continually reoccurs
to confirm its "white racialized identity." This is the "higher responsibility" to
which the mainstream American responds when called upon by government
violence against others, and which would be abrogated by the absence of intervention. (This is not
the historical conflation of
democracy and
determined by the color of a person's skin; we are speaking of "white supremacy" as a social structure, a social
The paranoia and selfvalorizing violence through which that "higher responsibility" expresses itself
structures the foundations upon which American identity rests (in its land emptying
and labor-controlling endeavors). They constitute the structure of its interventionist ethic. As different
manifestations of the same cultural structure, white racialized identity and
the ethic of governmental intervention are parallel. Each operates
according to a prioritization of allegiance and consensus, a cultural
paranoia that criminalizes others to construct a defensive solidarity,
and a violence that relies on allegiance to self-referentially confirm
the paranoia. The three aspects of the attack sequence identification of a criminal national leader,
ethos, to which one subscribes through one's subscription to the "white nation.")
decriminalization of U.S. violence in dealing with that leader, and the self-consensualizing legitimacy of U.S.
underlying white
racialized identity permits U.S. interventionism to proceed without
ethical crisis. The interventionary ethos appears moral to white supremacy
because it reproduces the structure that constitutes that white supremacy.
The assault on Afghanistan (retaliating for September 11 by destroying whole towns and killing
thousands of civilians) criminalized the Taliban, unleashed an unprogrammatic
military campaign to drive it off the land, and used an arbitrary degree of
violence against that land's peopleall as a measure of U.S. messianic
rectitude. Yugoslavia followed the same structure, with the demand for it to abandon its sovereignty,
government strategies as forms of legality reflect these dimensions. The
destruction of its terrain with bombs and ecological disaster (depleted uranium and demolished chemical plants),
The assault confirms a messianic

purpose for the white American identity by signifying that the goal of the
destruction was "humanitarian." And now, again, Iraq. If interventionism
requires no political goal beyond rhetorical criminalization, then messianism
(of "democracy") thrown against the sovereignty of that perceived "threat" is
sufficient. Indeed, the paranoid inversion that sees the other's defense
as aggression and its own interventionary aggression as defense
makes a programmatic political purpose all but impossible.25 The
ability to criminalize and manufacture international solidarity against the
and the equation of Serbian existence with criminality.

other achieves that goal and confirms that its paranoid perception was real.
If U.S. interventionism repeatedly proves itself to be white supremacist, it is
an exterminationist messianism. As Joy James (1996: 46) puts it, there is always a
genocidal dimension to white supremacy, as well as a violently
enforced allegiance to it.
Biopower
Mbembe 3
PWoods.
race
the Nazi
kill. This state,
state.
slavery
the
loss of a home
The
That
and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in
Foucaults terms,
clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In
doing so,
. In many respects,
. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of

Slave life
, in many ways,
suggested,
Whiteness create an unbreakable gaze upon the Black Body, causing

order and control of races, and internalized violence
Yancy 05 (George, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University works primarily in the areas of
critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience Whiteness and the
Return of the Black Body The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, accessed via MUSE, [SG])
On this score, it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze,
and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring
demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In
other words, given the three suppositions above, both the "Black body" and the "white body" lend themselves to
processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their alleged
To have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have
that body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation. The
experience presupposes an anti-Black lived context, a context within which
whiteness gets reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed. The late
objectivity.
writer, actor, and activist Ossie Davis recalls that at the age of six or seven two white police officers told him to get
into their car. They took him down to the precinct. They kept him there for an hour, laughing at him and eventually
pouring cane syrup over his head. This only created the opportunity for more laughter, as they looked upon the
"silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment, think of how the young Davis was
returned to himself: "I am an object of white laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt appeared to the white
police officers in ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and enjoyed
their sadistic pleasure without blinking an eye. Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain the
oppressed [Blacks] to certain approved modes of visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype) and then
gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created" (1998, 11). Davis notes that he "went along with the game of
black emasculation, it seemed to come naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the ritual was complete" (9). He
was then sent home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis knew at that early age, even without the words to
articulate what he felt, that he had been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the process of "niggerization." He
notes: The culture had already told me what this was and what my reaction to this should be: not to be surprised; to
expect it; to accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply I was scarred or affected by that, but it was a
part of who I was. (9) Davis, in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who he was, that "niggerized"
the
trick of white ideology; it is to give the appearance of fixity, where the "look
little Black boy, an insignificant plaything within a system of ontological racial differences. This, however, is

of the white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn,
bars the black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of
the white gaze" (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score, it is white bodies that are
deemed agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217] Black bodies
according to their will. But it is no mystery; for "the Negro is interpreted in
the terms of the white man. White-man psychology is applied and it is no
wonder that the result often shows the Negro in a ludicrous light" (Braithwaite
1992, 36). While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors locking as whites secure
themselves from the "outside world," a trope rendering my Black body ostracized, different, unbelonging. This
outside world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are rejected, because
they are deemed suspicious, vile infestations of the (white) social body. The locks on the doors resound: Click. Click.
Click. Click. Click. Click. ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already
accompanied by nervous gestures, and eyes that want to look, but are hesitant to do so. The cumulative impact of
the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition. The clicks begin to function as coded sounds,
reminding me that I am dangerous; the sounds create boundaries, separating the white civilized from the dark
savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they inscribe me, they materialize
my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish a form of recognition
that creates a space of trust and liminality, there are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to
becometheir Black monster, their bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise. You've just been carjacked by a
ghost, a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get the fuck out of the car." I have endured white women clutching their
purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of my approaching Black body. It is during such
moments that my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of my body as confiscated.
Davis too had the meaning of his young Black body stolen. The surpluses being gained by the whites in each case
are not economic. Rather, it is through existential exploitation that the surpluses extracted can be said to be
ontological"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry
1997, 33).
White supremacy acts through masking racialized institutional

norms meant to disguise the socioeconomic inequalities and
biopolitical exploitation of modern society
Ortiz 2013

influence
Unfortunately,

white
to change "faces."
incarceration
stronger.
. Specifically,
. In this way,
They are

white
. To this day,
In this way,

it would make
Extend our Mbembe 03 evidenceThe states right to determine who lives

and who dies is based off the premise of racim. The Nazi State proves that
racist assumptions creates a state of exeption where the population is
rendered socially dead because the state possesses the power to kill them
at any moment
Genocide
White supremacy is a global modality of genocidal violence
Slaverys operational logic continues today. Reformist measures
simply provide fuel for Whiteness
Rodriguez 11 (Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and
Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, The Black Presidential NonSlave: Genocide and the Present Tense of Racial Slavery, Political Power and Social Theory Vol. 22, pp.
38-43)
To crystallize what I hope to be the potentially useful implications of this provocation toward a retelling of the
slavery-abolition story: if we follow the narrative and theoretical trajectories initiated here, it should take little
the
singular institutionalization of racist and peculiarly antiblack social/state
violence in our living era - the US imprisonment regime and its conjoined
policing and criminalization apparatuses - elaborates the social logics of
genocidal racial slavery within the American nation-building project, especially in
stretch of the historical imagination, nor a radical distension of analytical framing, to suggest that
the age of Obama. The formation and astronomical growth of the prison industrial complex has become a
the fundamental
violence of this apparatus is in the prison's translation of the 13th
Amendment's racist animus. By "reforming" slavery and anti-slave violence,
commonly identified institutional marker of massively scaled racist state mobilization, and
and directly transcribing both into criminal justice rituals, proceedings, and punishments, the 13th Amendment
The state remains a "slave

state" to the extent that it erects an array of institutional apparatuses that are
specifically conceived to reproduce or enhance the state's capacity to
"create" (i.e., criminalize and convict) prison chattel and politically legitimate the processes
of enslavement/imprisonment therein. The crucial starting point for our narrative purposes is that the
permanently inscribes slavery on "post-emancipation" US statecraft.
emergence of the criminalization and carceral apparatus over the last forty years has not, and in the foreseeable
future will not build its institutional protocols around the imprisonment of an economically productive or
profitmaking prison labor force (Gilmore, 1999).16 So, if not for use as labor under the 13th Amendment's juridical
what is the animating structural-historical logic

behind the formation of an imprisonment regime unprecedented in human
history in scale and complexity, and which locks up well over a million Black people,
significantly advancing numbers of "nonwhite" Latinos as, and in which the white population is
vastly underrepresented in terms of both numbers imprisoned and likelihood to be prosecuted (and
mandate of "involuntary servitude,"
thus incarcerated) for similar alleged criminal offenses?17 In excess of its political economic, geographic, and
the contemporary US prison regime must be centrally

understood as constituting an epoch-defining statecraft of race: a historically
juridical registers,
specific conceptualization, planning, and institutional mobilization of state institutional capacities and state-
to reproduce and/or reassemble the social relations of power,

dominance, and violence that constitute the ontology (epistemic and conceptual
framings) of racial meaning itself (da Silva, 2007; Goldberg, 1993). In this case, the racial ontology of
influenced cultural structures
the postslavery and post-civil rights prison is anchored in the crisis of social meaning wrought on white civil society
by the 13th Amendment's apparent juridical elimination of the Black chattel slave being. Across historical periods,

the social inhabitation of
the white civil subject
- - its self-recognition, institutionally affirmed (racial)
sovereignty, and everyday social intercourse with other racial beings - is made legible through its
positioning as the administrative authority and consenting audience for the nation- and civilization-building
racial genocides. It is the bare fact of the white subject's access

and entitlement to the generalized position of administering and consenting to racial
genocide that matters most centrally here. Importantly, this white civil
subject thrives on the assumption that s/he is not, and will never be the target of
racial genocide.18 (Williams, 2010) .Those things obtained and secured through genocidal
processes - land, political and military hegemony/dominance, expropriated
labor - are in this sense secondary to the raw relation of violence that the
white subject inhabits in relation to the racial objects (including people,
ecologies, cultural forms, sacred materials, and other modalities of life and
being) subjected to the irreparable violations of genocidal processes. It is this
processes of multiple
raw relation, in which white social existence materially and narratively consolidates itself within the normalized
systemic logics of racial genocides, that forms the condition of possibility for the US social formation, from
"abolition" onward. To push the argument further: the distended systems of racial genocides are not the massively
deadly means toward some other (rational) historical ends, but are ends within themselves. Here we can decisively
depart from the hegemonic juridical framings of "genocide" as dictated by the United Nations, and examine instead
the logics of genocide that dynamically structure the different historical-social forms that have emerged from the
classically identifiable genocidal systems of racial colonial conquest, indigenous physical and cultural extermination,
and racial chattel slavery. To recall Trask and Marable, the historical logics of genocide permeate institutional
assemblages that variously operationalize the historical forces of planned obsolescence, social neutralization, and
Centering a conception of racial genocide as a dynamic set of

sociohistorical logics (rather than as contained, isolatable historical episodes)
allows the slavery-to-prison continuity to be more clearly marked: the continuity is
"ceasing to exist."
not one that hinges on the creation of late-20th and early-list century "slave labor," but rather on a reinstitutionalization of anti-slave social violence. Within this historical schema, the post-1970s prison regime
institutionalizes the raw relation of violence essential to white social being while mediating it so it appears as non-
This is where we can also narrate the

contemporary racial criminalization, policing, and incarcerating apparatuses
as being historically tethered to the genocidal logics of the post-abolition, postgenocidal, non-violent, peacekeeping, and justice-forming.
emancipation, and post-civil rights slave state. While it is necessary to continuously clarify and debate whether and
how this statecraft of racial imprisonment is verifiably genocidal, there seems to be little reason to question that it
is, at least, protogenocidal - displaying both the capacity and inclination for genocidal outcomes in its systemic logic
and historical trajectory. This contextualization leads toward a somewhat different analytical framing of the "deadly
symbiosis" that sociologist Loi'c Wacquant has outlined in his account of antiblack carceral-spatial systems. While it
would be small-minded to suggest that the emergence of the late-20th century prison regime is an historical
the structural bottom line of Black

imprisonment over the last four decades - wherein the quantitative fact of a Black prison/jail
majority has become taken-for-granted as a social fact - is a contemporary institutional
manifestation of a genocidal racial substructure that has been reformed, and
not fundamentally displaced, by the juridical and cultural implications of
slavery's abolition. I have argued elsewhere for a conception of the US prison not as a selfcontained
inevitability, we should at least understand that
institution or isolated place, but rather as a material prototype of organized punishment and (social, civil, and
biological) death (Rodriguez, 2006). To understand the US prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically,
and politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel through which technologies of racial
domin8ance institutionalize their specific, localized practices of legitimated (state) violence. Emerging as the
organic institutional continuity of racial slavery's genocidal violence, the US prison regime represents a form of

human domination that extends beyond and outside the formal institutional and geographic domains of "the prison
(the jail, etc.)." In this sense, the prison is the institutional signification of a larger regime of proto-genocidal
violence that is politically legitimized by the state, generally valorized by the cultural common sense, and
dynamically mobilized and institutionally consolidated across different historical moments: it is a form of social
power that is indispensable to the contemporary (and postemancipation) social order and its changing structures of
The binding
presence of slavery within post-emancipation US state formation is precisely why the liberal
multiculturalist narration of the Obama ascendancy finds itself compelled to posit an
official rupture from the spectral and material presence of enslaved racial
blackness. It is this symbolic rupturing - the presentation of a president who consummates the liberal dreams
racial dominance, in a manner that elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery.
of Black citizenship. Black freedom, Black non-resentment, and Black patriotic subjectivity - that constructs the
Black non-slave presidency as the flesh-and-blood severance of the US racial/racist state from its entanglement in
the continuities of antiblack genocide.
Against this multiculturalist narrative, our attention

should be principally fixated on the bottom-line Blackness of the prison's
genocidal logic, not the fungible Blackness of the presidency. CONCLUSION: FROM "POST-CIVIL
RIGHTS" TO WHITE RECONSTRUCTION The Obama ascendancy is the signature moment of the post-1960s White
Reconstruction, a period that has been characterized by the reformist elaboration of historically racist systems of
social power to accommodate the political imperatives of American apartheid's downfall and the emergence of
reforms have neither

eliminated nor fundamentally alleviated the social emergencies consistently
produced by the historical logics of racial genocide, the notion of White Reconstruction
hegemonic (liberal-to-conservative) multiculturalisms. Byfocusing on how such
departs from Marable's notion of the 1990s as the "twilight of the Second Reconstruction" (Marable. 2007. p. 216)19
and points toward another way of framing and narrating the period that has been more commonly referenced as
the "post-civil rights" era. Rather than taking its primary point of historical departure to be the cresting of the Civil
Rights Movement and its legacy of delimited (though no less significant) political-cultural achievements. White
Reconstruction focuses on how this era is denned by an acute and sometimes aggressive reinvention and
the recent
half-century has encompassed a generalized reconstruction of "classically"
white supremacist apparatuses of state-sanctioned and culturally legitimated
racial violence. This general reconstruction has (1) strategically and unevenly dislodged various formal and
reorganization of the structural-institutional formations of racial dominance. Defined schematically,
de facto institutional white monopolies and diversified their personnel at various levels of access, from the entrylevel to the administrative and executive levels (e.g., the sometimes aggressive diversity recruitment campaigns of
research universities, urban police, and the military); while simultaneously (2) revamping, complicating, and
enhancing the social relations of dominance, hierarchy, and violence mobilized by such institutions - relations that
broadly reflect the long historical, substructural role of race in the production of the US national formation and
socioeconomic order. In this sense, the notion of White Reconstruction brings central attention to how the
historical logics of racial genocide may not only survive the apparent
disruption of classical white monopolies on the administrative and
institutional apparatuses that have long mobilized these violent social logics,
but may indeed flourish through these reformist measures, as such logics are
re-adapted into the protocols and discourses of these newly "diversified"
racist and white supremacist apparatuses (e.g.. the apparatuses of the research university,
police, and military have expanded their capacities to produce local and global relations of racial dominance, at the
same time that they have constituted some of the central sites for diversity recruitment and struggles over equal
access). It is, at the very least, a remarkable and dreadful moment in the historical time of White Reconstruction
that a Black president has won office in an electoral landslide while well over a million Black people are incarcerated
with the overwhelming consent of white/multiculturalist civil society.

Racism is founded upon a logic that makes war and genocide
possible, and creates a foundation for total biopolitical domination
of entire populations.
Mendieta 02 (SUNY at Stony Brook, (Eduardo, To make live and to let die
Foucault on Racism, Meeting of the Foucault Circle, APA Central Division
Meeting Chicago, April 25th , 2002
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/emendieta/articles/foucault.pdf)
This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from
within, constitutively. For the emergence of biopower as the form of a new
form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic of
the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am
quoting: the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a
society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where
there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first
line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put
to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The
homicidal [meurtrire] function of the state, to the degree that the state
functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism
(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture The
Political Technology of Individuals which incidentally, echo his 1979
Tanner Lectures the power of the state after the 18 th century, a power
which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is
a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote
more directly, since the population is nothing more than what the state
takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to
slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.
(Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of
the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one
same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population,
the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of
racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault
has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a [text continues]
new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers,
which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now
turned into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and
threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power,
biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism
normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent
condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of
death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide
by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health
of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an
everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of
society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to
kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a
continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature.
Foundation of all violence
Objective anti-Black violence is the structural base for all conflicts Wilderson 11 (Frank, Associate Professor, African American Studies Dept.,
UC Irvine, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political
Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions, Vol 5,
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php#footxvii, )
[2] With only small arms and crude explosives at their disposal, with little of nothing in the way of logistical
support,iii with no liberated zone to claim or reclaim, and with no more than a vague knowledge that there were a
few hundred other insurgents scattered throughout the U.S. operating in largely uncoordinated and decentralized
units,iv the BLA launched 66 operationsv against the largest police state in the world. Vertigo must have seized
them each time they clashed with agents of a nuclear-weapons regime with three million troops in uniform, a
regime that could put 150,000 new police on the streets in any given year, and whose ordinary White citizens
Subjective vertigo, no doubt: a

dizzying sense that one is moving or spinning in an otherwise stationary
world, a vertigo brought on by a clash of grossly asymmetrical forces. There are suitable analogies, for this kind
frequently deputize themselves in the name of law and order.
of vertigo must have also seized Native Americans who launched the AIMs occupation of Wounded Knee, and FALN
Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the

sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment,
that ones environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to violence
that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by
disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is
structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a
crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and
structural violence. [4] Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human
insurgents who battled the FBI. [3]
being. The Blacks and the Humans disparate relationship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation
and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists (or is perceived to
Black peoples subsumption by

violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To
be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously
by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which
is radically different from the political ontology of a sentient being who is
constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence when s/he breaks with
the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this
comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and
lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the
states disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern;
but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because the most disorienting
aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from intraHuman conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed
cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movements demand for the
return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or
the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacin Nacionals (FALN) demand for Puerto
Rican independence vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a
territory. But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no
conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic
with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of
Human subalterns. [5] The structural, or paradigmatic, violence that
subsumes Black insurgents cognitive maps and conceptual frameworks,
subsumes my scholarly efforts as well. As a Black scholar, I am tasked with making sense of this
resist) the disciplinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But

writing must somehow
be indexical of that which exceeds narration, while being ever mindful of the
incomprehension the writing would foster, the failure, that is, of
interpretation were the indices to actually escape the narrative. The stakes of this
violence without being overwhelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, the
dilemma are almost as high for the Black scholar facing his/her reader as they are for the Black insurgent facing the
police and the courts. For the scholarly act of embracing members of the Black Liberation Army as beings worthy of
empathic critique is terrifying. Ones writing proceeds with fits and starts which have little to do with the problems
of building the thesis or finding the methodology to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and
anger of my reader-ideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own interventions and strategies for
assembling my argument. Vertigo seizes me with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and swirl
around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there seems to be no other way to speak. I am speaking
through the voice and gaze of a mob of, lets just say it, White Americans; and my efforts to marshal a mob of Black
people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army smack of compensatory gestures. It is not that the BLA doesnt come
to my aid, that they dont push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies can make the case that we are worthy of
our suffering and justified in our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be locked away
forever. How can we be worthy of our suffering without being worthy of ourselves? I press on, even though the
vertigo that seizes me is so overwhelming that its precise naturesubjective, stemming from within me, or
objective, catalyzed by my context, the raging throngcannot be determined. I have no reference points apart from
the mob that gives no quarter. If I write freedom fighter, from within my ear they scream terrorist! If I say
prisoner of war, they chant cop killer! Their denunciations are sustained only by assertion, but they ring truer
than my painstaking exegesis. No firewall protects me from them; no liberated psychic zone offers me sanctuary. I
want to stop and turn myself in.
Impact: Ableism
Whiteness is the root cause of ableism technologies of violence
and surveillance used against people with disabilities originated in
Eurocentric thought
Smith 4 [Phil, Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council, Whiteness, Normal
Theory, and Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly Spring 2004, Volume 24, No. 2, http://dsqsds.org/article/view/491/668]
This point, that ableism is created by those who define themselves as

able-bodied, as normal, and that it is a master status invisible to
themselves, calls out for the need to develop what might be called
normal theory and normal studies, similar to the development of
whiteness theory and whiteness studies, that can unpack more fully the
ideology of ableism and expose normality as a scopic site for the subjugation
of people labeled as having disabilities. It is also likely, given the
normative universalization of whiteness in modernist Western culture,
that the construction of whiteness is at the complex, multiple roots of
both racisms and ableisms. This is especially true given that
eugenic science is at the heart of current special education,
psychology, and the system of services and supports for people with
disabilities (Kliewer and Drake 1998). Clearly, whiteness is intimately
tied to modernist constructions of science (Kincheloe 1999). It would
seem, then, that the projects of developing multiple, postmodern, normal
studies may have as their subjects, at least in part, the complex ways in
which whiteness ideology creates ableisms. Kincheloe (1999) argues
cogently, when discussing the normative landscape of whiteness, that: This
norm has traditionally involved a rejection of those who did not
meet whiteness' notion of reason emerging from the European
Enlightenment. Whiteness deployed reason narrowly defined
Eurocentric reason as a form of disciplinary power that excludes those
who do not meet its criteria for inclusion into the community of the
socio-politically enfranchised. Understanding such dynamics, those
interested in the reconstruction of white identity can engage in the post
formal (a theoretical effort to redefine the Eurocentric notions of intelligence
and reason by examining such concepts in light of socio-psychological
insights from a variety of non-western cultures [see Kincheloe and Steinberg
1993; Kincheloe 1995]) search for diverse expressions of reason. Such a
project empowers white students seeking progressive identities to produce
knowledge about the process of White identity reconstruction, the
redefinition of reason, the expansion of what is counted as a manifestation of
intelligence, and the phenomenological experience of challenging the
boundaries of whiteness. (Paragraph 56) This analysis seems critical in
understanding the relationship of whiteness studies and disability studies.
The normative disciplinary power of whiteness undergirding the

rationality of Eurocentric culture and thought segregates not only
those defined as not-white from the terrains of equality, equity, and
justice, but also those defined as not-Able (body or mind). A project of
inclusion that reinvents whiteness by calculating freshly an ideology of
diverse reasons, intelligences, and experiences will, of necessity, involve an
exploration of the cartography of abled Normality. A broad whiteness studies
approach must shake hands with a broad disability studies approach if either
whiteness or ability is to be reconceptualized.
Root cause - The social death of blacks sets the preconditions

for all violence
Taylor 2013
Terrell Anderson, Faculty of the Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE.
March 19. Pgs. 4-6. PWoods.
African Americans experience social death as a consequence

of natal alienation. Because Africans lost access to culture, history, etc.
through the violence of slavery they were denied the being of non-black
entities and were understood by that lack of being (38-39). Wilderson and Patterson
emphasize the role that cultural practices, language, and values play in
constituting both subjectivity and agency. Patterson differentiates between two processes of social death, intrusive and
extrusive. Intrusive social death involves framing a slave as an external threat
made internal. Extrusive social death involves an internal presence that
has fallen from humanity that while not guilty, is still understood as
incapable of preventing the fall into slavery. From the perspective of
chattel slavery in America, the concept of the intrusive slave elaborates
the African American subject as a wild and dangerous African presence
that threatens society if not subdued and controlled through slavery (39-40). It
should be noted that Wilderson's use of the term "slave" to refer to African Americans is not a
simplification of the differences between chattel slavery and African
American experiences in the twenty first century, but is rather an
ontological claim. Slavery, for Wilderson, is a relationship to violence intrinsic to
blackness, as opposes to the condition of being the "human property" of another (an experience which Wilderson admits is possible for anybody regardless of
race)Wilderson explains that violence towards black people within American civil society is
"ontological and gratuitous" (Gramsci's Black Marx 229). First, that violence towards African
Americans "is the precondition for the existence" of American civil society
and of notions such as humanity, citizen, etc. this formulation sets
blackness in opposition to humanity. Second, this violence is gratuitous, or
lacking what one might call material explanation. Whereas the
transgressions experienced by workers in a capitalist setting (unbearable conditions, loss of
the fruits of labor, etc.) are explained by the generation of economic profit for the capitalist, it is
difficult to say what is gained by something like the prison industrial
complex, where more debt is incurred than reduced from the labor
produced by disproportionately black prisoners. Similarly, in cases of
police shootings like Ramarley Graham, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo, it is
difficult to point to a material incentive or motivation for these incidents.
When compounded, these two points, the first as ontological and second as gratuitous, imply that violence toward black bodies
within civil society differs from violence toward other oppressed groups
(other nonwhite races, working class people, etc.) in that there is a psychic, or what
Wilderson and other afro-pessimists call "libidinal," incentive at the core of the violence and its
perpetuation. In maintaining and enforcing a black/white binary, civil society and its human (or in Wilderson's formulation,
non-black) members of society gain a sense of coherence and stability on a psychological level.
Second, Patterson argues that

civil society functions
according to a logic of antiblackness that continue to function in the
present. Wilderson contends that this Anti-blackness is at the heart of American
institutions, even within those who are sympathetic to blackness . Wilderson looks
to the work of Antonio Gramsci as an example of a leftist emancipatory discourse that seeks to
explain alienation and exploitation. Noting that Gramsci explains oppression not as an
instance of coercion or use of force, but as a use of hegemony, where
institutions, norms, and apparatuses normalize oppression such that force
and coercion are not necessary, Wilderson claims that this framing does not account for
forceful and coercive act of enslaving Africans (Gramscis Black Marx228-229). This
shortcoming renders the structures of anti-blackness invisible, and
ensures that revolutions and politics that rely upon Gramsci's framework will replicate
antiblackness. Furthermore, violence towards black subjects is better
explained through a rubric of accumulation and fungibility. Accumulation
differs from exploitation, as accumulating black bodies does not imply a
rational gain of capital. Wilderson contends that the slave trade was not the most
economic option for free labor (noting that enslaving Europeans would
have been cheaper) (Red, White & Black 13-14). Fungibility differs from alienation in that
instead of lacking a familiarity with life or society, black subjects are
appropriated for the uses of others. Wilderson particularly notes that emancipatory discourses
use the metaphor of an entity denied freedom (the slave) to motivate and
explicate political projects (such as feminist aims for freedom from gender
roles and gendered violence, and Marxist goals for freedom from economic
injustice) and that such discourses use the slave as a vehicle for
exercising political agency (the pursuit of abolition provides a mode of
expression of freedom for the activist just as much as it pursues the
freedom of the slave)(Red, White & Black 23-24).
Hence, the moment where civil society is established through the violent act of slavery is not a historical incident. Rather,
Impact: Environment
Environmental destruction is caused by systemic racism
Bullard 04 [Robert, Bachelor's degree in Government at Alabama A&M
University, in 1968. His M.A. in Sociology was earned at Atlanta University, in
1972. Bullard obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Iowa State University, in
1976, under the supervision of urban sociologist Robert ("Bob") O. Richards
and Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at
Texas Southern University, Environment and Morality: Confronting
Environmental Racism in the United States, Geneva, October 1, 2004, p.8]
Environmental racism refers to any policy, practice or directive that
differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or
unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race or
colour. It combines with public policies and industry practices to provide
benefits for corporations while shifting costs to people of colour.
Government, legal, economic, political and military institutions
reinforce environmental racism, and it influences local land use,
enforce-ment of environmental regulations, industrial facility siting
and the locations where people of colour live, work and play. The
roots of environmental racism are deep and have been difficult to eliminate.
Environmental decision making often mirrors the power
arrangements of the dominant society and its institutions. It
disadvantages people of colour while providing advantages or
privileges for corporations and individuals in the upper echelons of
society. The question of who pays and who benefits from environmental and
industrial policies is central to this analysis of environmental racism.
Environmental racism reinforces the stratification of people (by race,
ethnicity, status and power), place (in central cities, suburbs, rural areas,
unincorporated areas or Native American reservations) and work (in that
office workers, for example, are afforded greater protections than farm
workers). It institutionalizes unequal enforcement, trades human
health for profit, places the burden of proof on the victims rather
than the polluters, legitimizes human exposure to harmful
chemicals, pesticides and hazardous substances, promotes risky
technologies, exploits the vulnerability of economically and
politically disenfranchised communities, subsidizes ecological
destruction, creates an industry around risk assessment, delays
cleanup actions and fails to develop pollution prevention and
precaution processes as the overarching and dominant strategy.
Environmental decision making and local land-use planning operate at the
intersection of science, economics, politics and special interests in a way that
places communities of colour at risk. This is especially true in Americas
Deep South, which, by default, has become a sacrifice zone, a sump for the

rest of the nations toxic waste, and is tarnished with the legacy of slavery,
Jim Crow and white resistance to equal justice There is a direct correlation
between exploitation of land and exploitation of people. Native Americans
have to contend with some of the worst pollution in the United States, and
the places where they live are prime targets for landfills, incinerators,
garbage dumps and risky mining operations. Pollution from industries is
showing up in the Akwesasne mothers milk in New York. Native American
reservations are under siege from radioactive colonialism. The legacy of
institutional racism has left many sovereign Indian nations without an
economic infrastructure to address poverty, unemployment, inadequate
education and health care, and a host of other social problems.
Environmental racism is also evident at the global level. Shipping
hazardous wastes from rich to poor communities is not a solution to the
growing global waste problem. (Transboundary shipment of banned
pesticides, hazardous wastes and toxic products, and export of
risky technologies from the United States, where regulations and
laws are more stringent, to nations with weaker infrastructure,
regulations and laws, smacks of a double standard). Unequal
interests and power arrangements have allowed poisons of the rich
to be offered as short-term remedies for poverty of the poor. This
scenario plays out domestically (in the United States, where lowincome and people of colour communities are disproportionately
impacted by waste facilities and dirty industries) and
internationally (where hazardous wastes move from countries of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/OECD to nonOECD states). Endangered people of colour in the industrialized
countries of the North have much in common with populations in
developing countries that are also threatened by industrial polluters.
For example, grassroots groups from Norco, Louisiana, to Ogoni, Nigeria,
identified Shell Oil as a common threat. Environmental justice activists have
mobilized in central city ghettos, barrios and villages from Atlanta to the
Arctic Circle, Alaska to South Central Los Angeles, South Africa to rural Native
American reservations and rainforests in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and
Brazil. These groups have organized, educated and empowered themselves
to challenge government and industrial polluters. Environmental racism
manifests itself in the substandard treatment of workers. Thousands
of farm workers and their families are exposed to dangerous pesticides on
the job and in the labour camps. These workers also have to endure
substandard wages and work conditions. Environmental racism also
extends to the exploitative work environment of garment district
sweatshops, the microelectronic industry and extraction industries.
A disproportionately large share of the workers who suffer under
substandard occupational and safety conditions are immigrants,
women and people of colour.
Impact: Ethics
Ignoring structural racism plays into the faade of white ethicsperpetuates racism through constant, seemingly normal policing,
without recognizing the evil of the system
Martinot and Sexton 03- *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm//MGD )
They prowl, categorizing and profiling, often turning those profiles
into murder violence without (serious) fear of being called to
account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination
is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realization that they are
simply people working a job, a job they secured by making an
application at the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of
Amadou Diallo, the true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of
the shooting, but in the fact that these cops were there on the
street looking for this event in the first place, as a matter of routine
business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil
of banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to
(well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings, a furtive protocol for
which this shooting is simply the effect. But they do more than prowl. They
make problematic the whole notion of social responsibility such that
we no longer know if the police are responsible to the judiciary and
local administration or if the city is actually responsible to them, duty
bound by impunity itself. To the extent to which the police are a law
unto themselves, the latter would have to be the case. This
unaccountable vector of inverted social responsibility would
resonate in the operating procedures in upper levels of civil
administration as well. That is, civil governmental structures would
act in accordance with the paradigm of policingwanton violence
legitimized by strict conformity to procedural regulations. For
instance, consider the recent case of a 12 year old African-American boy
sentenced to prison for life without parole for having killed a 6 year old
African-American girl while acting out the moves he had seen in professional
wrestling matches on TV. In demanding this sentence, the prosecutor argued
that the boy was a permanent menace to society, and had killed the girl out
of extreme malice and consciousness of what he was doing. A 12 year old
child, yet Lionel Tate was given life without parole. In the name of social
sanctity, the judicial system successfully terrorized yet another human being,
his friends, and relatives by carrying its proceduralism to the limit. The
corporate media did the rest; several "commentators" ridiculed Tate's claim
to have imitated wrestling moves, rewriting his statement as a disreputable
excuse: "pro wrestling made me do it." (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/25/01)

Thus, they transformed his nave awareness of bodies into
intentional weaponry and cunning. One could surmise, with greater
justification than surmising the malice of the child, that the prosecutor
made a significant career step by getting this high-profile
conviction. Beyond the promotion he would secure for a job well done,
beyond the mechanical performance of official outrage and the cynicism
exhibited in playing the role, what animus drove the prosecutor to demand
such a sentence? In the face of the prosecutions sanctimonious
excess, those who bear witness to Tates suffering have only
inarticulate outrage to offer as consolation. With recourse only to
the usual rhetorical expletives about racism, the procedural
ritualism of this white supremacist operation has confronted them
with the absence of a real means of discerning the judiciarys
dissimulated machinations. The prosecutor was the banal
functionary of a civil structure, a paradigmatic exercise of wanton
violence that parades as moral rectitude but whose source is the
paradigm of policing. All attempts to explain the malicious standard
operating procedure of US white supremacy find themselves
hamstrung by conceptual inadequacy; it remains describable, but
not comprehensible. The story can be told, as the 41 bullets fired to
slaughter Diallo can be counted, but the ethical meaning remains
beyond the discursive resources of civil society, outside the framework
for thinkable thought. It is, of course, possible to speak out against such
white supremacist violence as immoral, as illegal, even unconstitutional. But
the impossibility of thinking through to the ethical dimension has a hidden
structural effect. For those who are not racially profiled or tortured
when arrested, who are not tried and sentenced with the
presumption of guilt, who are not shot reaching for their
identification, all of this is imminently ignorable. Between the
inability to see and the refusal to acknowledge, a mode of social
organization is being cultivated for which the paradigm of policing
is the cutting edge. We shall have to look beyond racialized police
violence to see its logic. The impunity of racist police violence is the first
implication of its ignorability to white civil society. The ignorability of police
impunity is what renders it inarticulable outside of that hegemonic formation.
If ethics is possible for white civil society within its social
discourses, it is rendered irrelevant to the systematic violence
deployed against the outside precisely because it is ignorable.
Indeed, that ignorability becomes the condition of possibility for the
ethical coherence of the inside. The dichotomy between a white
ethical dimension and its irrelevance to the violence of police
profiling is the very structure of racialization today. It is a twin
structure, a regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror
and the seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a
double economy of terror, structured by a ritual of incessant performance.
And into the gap between them, common sense, which cannot account for

the double register or twin structure of this ritual, disappears into
incomprehensibility. The language of common sense, through which we
bespeak our social world in the most common way, leaves us speechless
before the enormity of the usual, of the business of civil procedures.
Exclusion
Blackness is social death and unimaginable exclusion

Vargas and James 13 (Joo Costa and Joy, University of Texas and
Williams University, Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon
Martin and the Black Cyborgs, Chapter 14 in Pursuing Trayvon Martin:
Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations ed. George Yancy
and Janine Jones)//LA
What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every

time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black
death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy ? What
will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least
consider) that the very notion of justice-indeed the gamut of political and
cognitive elements that constitute formal, multiracial democratic practices
and institutions-produces or requires black exclusion and death as
normative? To think about Trayvon Martin's death not merely as a tragedy or media controversy but as a
political marker of possibilities permits one to come to terms with several foundational and foretold stories,
we understand that death or killing to be prefigured by mass or

collective loss of social standing and life. One story is of impossible redemption in
the impossible polis. It departs from, and depends on, the position of the
hegemonic, anti-black-which is not exclusively white but is exclusively
non-black-subject and the political and cognitive schemes that guarantee
her ontology and genealogy. Depending on the theology, redemption requires deliverance from sin,
particularly if
and/or deliverance from slavery. 1 Redemption is a precondition of integration into the white-dominated social
universe2 Integration thus requires that the black become a non-slave, and that the black become a non-sinner.
The paradox or impossibility is that if blackness is both sin and sign of

enslavement, the mark of "Ham,'; then despite the legal abolition of juridical
enslavement or chattel slavery or the end of the formal colony, the sinner
and enslaved endure; and virtue requires the eradication of both . If we theorize
from the standpoint say of Frantz Fanon, through the lens of the fiftieth anniversary of the English publication, The
Wretched of the Earth (or Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Frank Wilderson's
from the perspective of the

dominant, white-inflected gaze and predisposition, blacks can be
redeemed neither from sin nor from slavery. 3 For a black person to be
integrated, s/he must either become non-black, or display superhuman
and/or infrahuman qualities. (In Fanonian terms she would become an aggrandized slave or
enfranchised slave-that is, one who owns property still nonetheless remains in servitude or colonized.) The
imagination, mechanics, and reproduction of the ordinary polis rely on the
exclusion of ordinary blacks and their availability for violent aggression
and/ or premature death or disappearance (historically through lynching and the convict
prison lease system, today through "benign neglect" and mass incarceration). The
ordinary black person can therefore never be integrated. The "ordinary negro" is
Jncognegro, etc.), we can follow a clear heuristic formulation:
never without sin. Thus, to be sinless or angelic in order to be recognized as citizenry has been the charge for
postbellum blackness. Throughout the twentieth century, movements to free blacks from what followed in the wake
of the abolition of chattel slavery ushered in the postbellum black cyborg: the call for a "Talented Tenth" issued by
white missionaries and echoed by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin's imploring a young Martin Luther King Jr.
to become "angelic" in his advocacy of civil rights and to remove the men with shotguns from his front porch
The angelic
negro/negress is not representative and his or her status as an acceptable
marker for U.S. democracy is predicated upon their usefulness for the
transformation of whiteness into a loftier, more ennobled formation. This
despite the bombings and death threats against King, his wife Corella, and their young children.

performance or service of the angelic black would be resurrected in the
reconstruction of Trayvon Martin as a youth worthy of the right to life , the
right of refusal to wear blackness as victimization; the right to fight back.
That is, the right to the life of the polis; so much of black life, particularly
for the average fellah, is mired in close proximity to the graveyard,
hemmed in by the materiality of social margins and decay, exclusion and
violence.
Self-Hatred/Ressentiment Impact
White supremacy harbors ressentiment in minorities
Worrill 2006
Dr. Conrad, national chairman of the National Black United Front. Dec 12, The impact of White supremacy
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3104.shtml accessed 6/28/12
How many times have you heard someone of African ancestry say that, Black people are our own worst enemy? If you have lived among African people in this country for any length of time, I am sure you have heard this remark
Unfortunately, the system of White supremacy developed in

the western world has caused far too many African people in
America to believe that the problem we face as a people is us.
made many times.
We must
remind ourselves, time and time again, that African people in America were captured from Africa and brought to America against our will. If African people are going to ever have a serious mental breakthrough in our analysis of our
we will have to resolve if we are our own worst enemy, or has

the system of White supremacy created a set of conditions that
continue to keep us in an oppressed state
condition in America,
? We must accept responsibility for answering this question as well as for solving all the
problems we face as a people. But we must also have a framework out of which to properly conceptualize our problems. In 1852, the great African thinker in America, Dr. Martin R. Delany, wrote one of the most important books that
our condition at that moment in history that is still applicable to our

condition today.
So accustomed are we to submission and
this kind of training, that it is with difficulty, even among the most
intelligent of the colored people, an audience may be elicited for
any purpose whatever, if the expounder is to be colored. Further,
he wrote, and the introduction of a subject is treated with
indifference, if not contempt, when the originator is a colored
person. Indeed, the most ordinary white person is almost revered,
while the most qualified colored person is totally neglected, nothing
from them is appreciated
accurately described
The title of the book is Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Mr. Delany wrote: Unfortunately for us as a body, we have been
taught that we must have some person to think for us, instead of thinking for ourselves.
. In resolving the question of whether we are our own worst enemy, we should reflect that for over 300 years White people openly discussed
African people as a problem (1600 - 1900). Today, they still discuss us as a problem, but the language is coded differently. On the discussions that White people have had on what they have historically called The Negro Problem, As
Dr. Anderson Thompson has written, There is a duality in the story of the western white man and his culture, which, paradoxically, is thrown into sharp relief wherever the Black man appears (or is dropped) on the scene. He says,
Whenever or wherever the white man exists in proximity to the Blacks, the Negro Question appears. The idea of the Negro Question is discussed further when Dr. Thompson writes, The Negro Question in Western society has
been a perennial subject of endless international debates, actions, decisions, wars, riots, lynchingsall of which flow out a recurring western dialogue: a conversation (for Europeans only) which for a long time took place between
white men over what should be done with, about or to the Blacks they found in their captured territories. Concluding on this point, Dr. Thompson informs us: The International Negro Question, or [N----r] Question has, for the most
part, been an integral past of European Civilization. Wherever in the world there existed. Europeans in proximity to the African, inevitably the question arose as to how (not why, I nor whether) the Black man should be exploited or
should be eliminated. We are not our own worst enemyeven though some African people in this country behave in manners that are not in our best interest. What we must continue to do is understand this negative African
. The enemy and problem is White supremacy and its

continued impact on us.
behavior and assume responsibility for changing it
Gratuitous violence
The objectification of blackness means that we are ontologically
murdered over and over again. Black flesh becomes the enslaved
profitthe whites make us disposable and distanced from humanity.
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987,Professor at Vanderbilt University The John
Hopkins University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American
Grammar Book, http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf,
7/6/14, KM)
Among the myriad uses to which the enslaved community was put, Goodell
identifies its value for medical research: Assortments of diseased, damaged,
and disabled Negroes, deemed incurable and otherwise worthless are bought
up, it seems by medical institutions, to be experimented and operated
upon, for purposes of medical education and the interest of medical
science [86-87; Goodells emphasis ]. From the Charleston Mercury for October 12, 1838, Goodell notes this
advertisement: To planters and others. Wanted, fifty Negroes, any person, having sick Negroes,
considered incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay
cash for Negroes affected with scrofula, or kings evil, confirmed hypochrondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver,
The highest
cash price will be paid, on application as above. At No. 110 Church Street, Charleston. [87; Goodells
emphasis] This profitable atomizing of the captive body provides another
angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of
ethics, of relatedness between human personality and cultural institutions. To
that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total
objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory.
The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well
as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and
figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the
captive flesh/body has been liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation
kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder and its appendages, diarrhea, dystentery, etc.
marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and
valuation remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time
the human subject is

murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and
anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. Faulkners young Chick
Mallison in The Mansion calls it by other names the ancient subterrene atavistic fear [227]. And I
would call it the Great Long National Shame. But people do not talk like that
anymore it is embarrassing, just as the retrieval of mutilated female
bodies will likely be backward for some people. Neither the shameface of
the embarrassed, nor the not-looking-back of the self-assured is of much
interest to us, and will not help at all if rigor is our dream. We might concede, at the
very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us.
nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as
The state of motherhood is reproduced through ideological and

legal acts of naming that dehumanize black women and transform
their bodies into flesh and offspring into slaves.
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Professor at Vanderbilt University The John

Hopkins University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American
Grammar Book, http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf,
7/6/14, KM)
Ethnicity perceived as mythical time enables a writer to perform a variety of conceptual moves all at once.
Under [ethnicitys] its hegemony, the human body becomes a defenseless

target for rape and veneration, and the body, in its material and abstract phase, a resource for
metaphor. For example, Moynihans tangle for pathology provides the descriptive strategy for
the works fourth chapter, which suggests that underachievement in black males of
the lower classes is primarily the fault of black females, who achieve out of all
proportion, both to their numbers in the community and to the paradigmatic example before the notion: Ours is
a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairsA
sub-culture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the
pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage [75]. Between charts and diagrams, we are
asked to consider the impact of qualitative measure on the black males performance on standardized
examinations, pact of qualitative measure on the black males performance on standardized examinations,
matriculation in schools of higher and professional training, etc. Even though Moynihan sounds a critique on his own
argument here, he quickly withdraws from its possibilities, suggesting that black males should reign because that is
the way the majority culture carries things out: It is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating
under one principle, while the great majority of the populationis operating on another [75]. Those persons living
according to the perceived matriarchal pattern are, therefore, caught in a state of social pathology. Even
though Daughters have their own agenda with reference to this order of Fathers (imagining for the moment that
Moynihans fiction and others like it does not represent an adequate one and that there is, once we dis-cover
these social and cultural subjects make doubles, unstable

transports us to a common historical ground, the
socio-political order of the New World. That order, with its human sequence
written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of
actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic
plight marked a theft of the body a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this
distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these
him, a Father here), my contention that
in their respective identities, in effect
conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a
territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from
the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence
biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join. This profound intimacy of
the captive body

becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same
time in stunning contradiction the captive body reduces to a thing,
becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the
captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of
otherness; 4) as a category of physical powerlessness that slides in to a more general
powerlessness, resonating through various centers of human and social meaning. But I would make
a distinction in this case between body and flesh and impose that distinction
as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense,
before the body there is the flesh, that zero degree of social
conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of
interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: 1)
iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodes some of them female out of West African
communities in concert with the African middleman, we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes
against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the
flesh as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ships hole, fallen,
or escaped overboard. One of the most poignant aspects of William Goodells contemporaneous study of the
North American slave codes gives precise expression to the tortures and instruments of captivity. Reporting an
instance of Jonathan Edwardss observations on the tortures of enslavement, Goodell narrates; The
smack of
the whip is all day long in the ears of those who are on the plantation, or in the

not only to lacerate the skin, but to
tear out small portions of the flesh at almost every stake [221]. The anatomical
vicinity; and it is used with such dexterity and severity as
specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose eyes
beaten out, arms backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of
These undecipherable markings on

the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe
disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if
this phenomenon of marking and branding actually transfers from one
generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat
iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet.
the initiating moments? As Elaine Scarry describes the mechanisms of torture [Scarry 27-59], these lacerations,
woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh create the distance
between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture, whose state apparatus, including judges,
attorneys, owners, soul drivers, overseers, and men of God, apparently colludes with a protocol of search
and destroy. This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the
flesh is the concentration of

ethnicity that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor
discourse away. It is this flesh and blood entity, in the vestibule (or pre-view) of a colonized North
marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside. The
America, that is essentially ejected from The Female Body in Western Culture [see Suleiman, ed.], but it makes
the African
female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape
in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind but also the topic of
specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar
good theory, or commemorative herstory to want to forget, or to have failed to realize, that
province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males. A female body strung from a tree limb, or bleeding
from the breast on any given day of field work because the overseer, standing the length of a whip, has popped
her flesh open, adds a lexical and living dimension to the narratives of women in culture and society [Davis 9]. This
materialized scene of unprotected female flesh of female flesh ungendered offers a praxis and a theory, a text
for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.
Since blacks are view as non-persons, it creates a view that any

crime against a black person is allowed because they are seen as
never having any opposition to the crimes committed against them.
Rodney King was accused of inviting his

own beating; you know, he shook his ass in an aggressive manner at a
white woman. So maybe you could sketch out the way in which the black woman functions
sim ilarly in slavery, as somehow outside the statutory, or inside it: she
cannot be raped because she's a non-person yet she is presumed to
invite the rapist. S. VH. - Yes. No crime can occur because the slave statutes
rec ognize no such crime. Often when I'm looking through the crimi nal
record of the nineteenth century, I'm seeing the text of black agency. The
people who are resisting their masters and overseers appear in the
records as they're prosecuted for their crime, creating this displacement
of culpability that enables white innocence. In the case of State of
Missouri v. Celia (1855), Celia is raped repeat edly by her owner from the
moment she's purchased. She begs him to stop; he doesn't, so she kills
him. Her crime is the crime on record: she is the culpable agent.18 So in this
FW. -And in those terms we might think about how

and its punishment, blackness is on the side of culpability, which
makes the crimes of property transparent and affirms the rights to
property in captives. And you're right, that displacement functions more generally. Who is the
responsible and culpable agent? For the most part, it's always the slave,
the native, the black.
formulation of law
Blackness constitutes an ontological marking that sets the basis for

mastery and exploitation
Farley, 8 (Anthony Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Paul Farley,
B.A., University of Virginia, J.D., Harvard Law School, 2008, The Colorline as
Capitalist Accumulation, p. 953-963, Accessed: 7/5/14) //AMM
We are all flesh and all flesh is common until it is marked . The marking of
flesh is accomplished by violence. Some are to have and others are to have not. Those who
want to possess must mark the others for dispossession. The haves must come
together as one, as Leviathan, because no one can rule another alone. The one must
sleep sometime, and the sleep of the master is the emancipation of the slave. Leviathan, the state, with its many
The masters
come together as one through the mark. Before the mark of dispossession, all we
have is the skin that holds us. Before the mark, the skin we are in holds all of us
in common and all is common. The mark must therefore be made or found
ready-made on the skin. The mark, written or found already-written on the skin, separates
those who are to have from those who are to have not. The mark splits the first
commons. The first commons is the skin that we are all in. Before the mark, we are. After the
mark, we are white-over-black. Ownership of things is first and last and
always ownership of people. The would-be owners must mark those whom they
would own for dispossession. The mark, white- over-black, is made on the flesh. The mark is made
with violence. The mark is a fatal wound. White-over-black is slavery and slavery is
death, death only, and that continually. The monopolization of things
needed to livefields, factories, forests and so onis instituted by the violence of the
mark. The mark shows who is to own and who is to be owned. The mark is the first
and last and enduring moment in the history of ownership because ownership of
eyes and rules, murders sleep. Law begins as the masters come together as one, as Leviathan.
things is first and last and always ownership of people. The flesh is marked and the would-be owners direct the
violence of dispossession against those marked for violent dispossession (Middle Passage, Manifest Destiny, Infinite
What was common to all fleshfields, factories, forests and so onis

violently enclosed within the horizon of the mark . The owner's ownership of a field or a
Justice and so on).
factory or a forest is treated as a right over non-owners. Ownership means ownership by some and not by all. And
ownership means that the entire world must come to be owned , otherwise
there would an exodus of the dispossessed from the spaces of their
dispossession. Those who own are owners. Those who do not own are themselves owned. The non-owners
are owned, like things, by the owners. The owners' will governs the owner's objects fields,
factories, forests and so onand the owned must surrender themselves to the class or collective will of the owners
This surrender or abdication of will is impossible for the living, for

living is nothing other than the choices by presented with a choice that is
not a life choice: Surrender to the will of the owner and die or surrender to
the elements and die. The dispossessed, marked as not-owning the fields, factories, forests or
any of the other things needed to keep the furies and fates, like hunger and exposure, at bay, are
destroyed. The destruction, however, is not all at once, it is endless. And
the endlessness of this destruction requires that they, the dispossessed,
are first made mad.
or die.
State of Exception
The state of exception is premised on blackness as object this
legitimizes colonialized violence that is in-seperable from the
institutions founded on the juridical structure of slavery
Sexton 10 (Jared, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities.
Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities People of
Color Blindness; published in 1998; p. 32-33-BRW)
Agamben suggests
that under present conditions we will have to abandon decidedly, without
reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far
represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the
In Means without End, the theoretical prcis of his Homo Sacer tetralogy,1 Giorgio
sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only
The proposal derives from a paramount concern to counteract the

increasing institutionalization of the state of exception throughout the politicaljuridical order of the modern nation-states, and it is premised on an understanding of the
figure of the refugee.2
refugee as a limit-concept, a figure that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and
clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed.3 This urgent renewal of categories is
made possible by the conceptual crisis of the nation-state represented by the refugee insofar as she disarticulates
the trinity of state-nation-territory and the very principle of the inscription of nativity upon which it is based.4
The refugee is the contemporary political subject par excellence because she exposes to view the originary fiction
of sovereignty and thereby renders it available to thought.What is this fiction? It is not only
the presumed
identity between the human (zoe ) and the citizen (bios) the conceptual fissure
that makes possible the modern production of bare life and that between nativity
and nationality the conceptual distinction that makes possible the reciprocal
naturalization of propagation and property in the name of race. It is also
the conflation of the ruler (or ruling class) with sovereignty itself, the tautological claim that the
law (logos) is ontologically prior to the establishment of its jurisdictional
field, a space defined by relations of purely formal obedience. The state of exception would seem to betray the
mystical foundation of authority because the sovereign power operates in suspension of positive law, enforcing the
law paradoxically insofar as it is inapplicable at the time and place of its enforcement. However, the dynamic
stability of that foundation the space of obedience is demonstrated by the terrible fact that the state of
exception has been materialized repeatedly within a whole array of political formations across the preceding
century and in the particular form of the camp. With the birth of the camp, the exception becomes the rule,
consolidating a field of obedience in extremis in place of rule by law, a paradigm of governance by the
administration of the absence of order.5 However, if for Agamben the camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the
planet, its novelty does not escape a certain conceptual belatedness with respect to those repressed
topographies of cruelty that Achille Mbembe has identified in the formulation of necropolitics.6 On my reading,
of necropolitics is enabled by attending to the political and economic

conditions of the African diaspora in the historic instance both acknowledging the form
and function of racial slavery for any historical account of the rise of modern terror
and addressing the ways that the political economy of statehood [particularly in
Africa] has dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century in connection with
the wars of the globalization era.7 Necropolitics is important for the historicist project of provincializing
Agambens paradigmatic analysis, especially as it articulates the logic of race as
something far more global than a conflict internal to Europe (or even Eurasia).
Indeed, Mbembe initially describes racial slavery in the Atlantic world as one of the
first instances of biopolitical experimentation and goes on to discuss it, following the
work of Saidiya Hartman, as an exemplary manifestation of the state of exception in
the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath .8 Mbembe
the formulation
abandons too quickly this meditation on the peculiar institution in pursuit of the proper focus of his theoretical
project: the formation of colonial sovereignty. In the process, he loses track of the fact, set forth in the opening
pages of Hartmans study, that the crucial aspects of the peculiar terror formation that Mbembe attributes to

the emergence colonial rule are already institutionalized , perhaps more
fundamentally, in and as the political-juridical structure of slavery .9 More specifically, it
is the legal and political status of the captive female that is paradigmatic for
the (re)production of enslavement, in which the normativity of sexual
violence [i.e., the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially tolerable and
necessary violence] establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and
sexual subjection.10 This is why for Hartman resistance is figured through the black females sexual selfdefense, as exemplified by the 1855 circuit court case State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, in which the defendant
was sentenced to death by hanging on the charge of murder for responding with deadly force to the sexual assault
and attempted rape by a white male slaveholder. Having engaged Hartman, Mbembe must write the following
under the terms of a certain disavowal: The most original feature of this terror formation [the colony] is its
the colony represents

the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of
power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where peace is more likely to
take on the face of a war without end. 11 In the earlier text, Hartman describes the
particular mechanisms of tyrannical power that converge on the black body,
highlighting both the absoluteness of power under slavery in general and the
concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. . . .
particular ways that its gendered dimensions reveal that generality at its extreme: In this instance, tyranny is not a
Gender, if at all appropriate in this scenario,

must be understood as indissociable from violence , the vicious refiguration of rape as
rhetorical inflation, but a designation of the absoluteness of power.
mutual and shared desire, the wanton exploitation of the captive body tacitly sanctioned as a legitimate use of
black and
female difference is registered by virtue of the extremity of power
operating on captive bodies and licensed within the scope of the humane
and the tolerable.12 Mbembes formulation can suggest the originality of colonial sovereignty only insofar
property, the disavowal of injury, and the absolute possession of the body and its issue. In short,
as it bypasses Hartmans evidence and argument.13 In fact, it does so by artfully recuperating the very sources
that Hartman brings in for critique. In note 30 of Necropolitics, Mbembe cites affirmatively Hartmans Scenes of
Subjection (alongside Manuel Moreno Fraginals 1964 Marxist history of Cuban slavery, The Sugar Mill, and Susan
Buck-Morsss 2000 Critical Inquiry article, Hegel and Haiti) in support of his claim that the very structure of the
plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.14
In notes 34 and 36 of the same article, however, Mbembe cites affirmatively two sources in contradiction of
Hartmans position: the well-known passage from the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave in which the narrator describes the terrible spectacle of the torture of his Aunt Hester by the overseer, Mr.
Plumber; and the work of folklorist Roger Abrahams on the form and function of corn shucking as slave
performance in the antebellum United States.
Societys structure prevents whites from assisting blacks the idea

of giving up white skin privilege does not allow whites to become
objects like blacks are when the relationship between the two races
will always be one of domination and submission.
Hartman 03. (Saidiya and Frank B, , professor at Columbia University
specializing in African American literature and history, and Wilderson III,
professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, published Spring/Summer
2003, The Position of the Unthought pg 189-190)
F.W - You've just thrown something into crisis, which is very much on the table today: the notion of allies. What
the ally is not a stable

category. There's a structural prohibition (rather than merely a willful refusal) against
whites being the allies of blacks, due to this - to borrow from Fanon's The Wretched of the
Earth again - "species" division between what it means to be a subject and what it means to be an object: a
structural antago nism. But everything in the academy on race works off of
the ques tion, "How do we help white allies?" Black academics assume
that there is enough of a structural commonality between the black and
you've said
(and I'm so happy that someone has come along to say it!) is that

the white (working class) position - their mantra being: "We are regardless of its historical or
geographic specificity. both exploited subjects" - for one to embark upon a
political ped agogy that will somehow help whites become aware of this
"com monality." White writers posit the presence of something they call
"white skin privilege," and the possibility of "giving that up," as their
gesture of being in solidarity with blacks. But what both ges tures disavow
is that subjects just can't make common cause with objects. They can
only become objects, say in the case of John Brown or Marilyn Buck, or further instantiate
their subjectivity through modalities of violence (lynching and the prison
industrial complex), or through modalities of empathy. In other words, the
essential essence of the white/black relation is that of the master/slave -
And masters and slaves, even today, are never allies
Whiteness amplifies all other impacts

White Supremacy amplifies all of their impacts the true costs of
war and the worst examples of impoverishment are found in nonwhite cultures and peoples.
Black 2009
Kofi Pan Africanist Scholar The Origin, Ramifications and Rectification of White Supremacy, Racism = White Supremacy = Globalization
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16206085/The-Origin Ramifications-and-Rectification-of-Racism-White-Supremacy-Revised accessed 6/28/12
the vast majority of the Earth's population exists

in poverty and desolation
The
differences in global rich and poor have become so big that, nearly
12% of the world suffer from undernourishment,
Today, the global power hierarchy has shifted in such a way, that
, while, according to world bank statistics, 20% of humans account for 75% of the worlds monetary wealth.
while, according to the world bank, the spending priorities amongst
the richest nations consist of Alcoholic drinks, Cigarettes, Perfumes, and Cosmetics. Even Ice cream, and pet-foods are of a higher priority than more globally needed services. To be more specific, in 1998, Europeans spent 11 billion
It's been estimated that over 1billion men women and

children, around 18% of the earth don't have access to clean
drinking water. Most of which are located in Asia, Africa, and South
America
. Since the establishment of EuroCentric global domination, any rising nations, which even remotely
threatened to shift the dynamics of the world, back to their precolonial positions have been dealt with swiftly, and particularly
harshly if the nations in action were non white The two world wars
saw Germany, and Eastern Europe destroyed and rebuilt
on ice cream, and 17 billion on pet food.
. The distance between people starving, and wealthy has never been so well defined
by programs like the Truman and Marshal
plans. The plans worked to repair Europe after the wars, and set them up so well economically, that they would no longer have to worry about revolutions that could potentially aid in any global switch of power. Help, through these
Although many North African, and Asian

countries were severely damaged, no non-white nations were
offered help This helped to set the European world far ahead of any
others, and gave them a head start in the race to the globalized
world
rising non-white nation
that was seen as a threat to the European power structure was
militarily dealt with. A few examples are Korea, Vietnam, Cuba,
Nicaragua, Grenada, and Angola The average historian
would say
all of the above were proxy wars aimed at containing the USSR
however all of these nations were non-white and suffered
hundreds of thousands, to millions of casualties
plans was offered to every European nation that suffered during the war, including the USSR.
, in which we find ourselves today. Even looking past the world wars, and subsequent economic plans, history tells us that any
or sociologist
(another white entity
vying for power)
. Also, while the war of words waged on between the West and the
eastern Soviet bloc, many European nations moved to social democracy without a drop of bloodshed. On the other hands, any countries that even attempted similar changes were quickly stopped. Those actions remain to this day.
Venezuela, a country without the power to do much to anyone is at the end of American threats on a regular basis. The same goes for Cuba, while extremely socialistic programs take place in the world capital White Supremacy the
While Israel beefs up its military and

hold
possibly hundreds of nuclear devices, Iraq, Iran and North Korea
suffer sanctions for attempting the same
United States.
, according to the Federation of American Scientists,
. Even this month (fall 2009) , the United States sees China strengthening its military, and are
weighing its options and planning ways to pit the PRC's neighbors against her. What could possibly the reason for this global hypocrisy? History shows us that it's the maintenance of Global European domination, for without it,
possibly in the minds of Europeans, the world would revert to its natural state, which existed before Europe dominated. No other explanation fits.
Alternatives
Alt = prior question


legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
activism on both self and world. Although there are many white antiracists
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,

suffering
Whites who
sequestration from
the real world of
suffering
patience of theory
. Here,
weeping,
, and traumatized
.
Paradigmatic analysis Alt (Kokontis)

ontological position of Blacknessthe very possibility of ethics and
freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives ratification of
democracy, the state and civil society. Resisting the lure of antiblackness through a genealogy of historys constitutive void is the
starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011
a sense of agency




enslaved
and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart
their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be

taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The kind of
freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...]
The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with

making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much more
than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of
society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is
the intimacy of our age with theirs an unfinished struggle. To what
end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes

of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical,
and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they
work to challenge and bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question
of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do,
work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically marginalized
these projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the
African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of
outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver
between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we
have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of
constitutive normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental
and unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical
narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social
death that it has yielded but the possibilities and necessities of
invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they present
groups of people? All three of
circumstances of
the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of
migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied.
Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of the future as well as more or less significant red flags.
Hartmans vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly

liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or
occlude the presence or significance of ongoing disparity and loss:
while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience have already
succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified
the fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still
struggling to make something from nothing; they have an urgency
in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that
excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates
is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch activist one that is
inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a
sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning,
and the possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction that emerge
when faced with profound absence and loss.
Paradigmatic Analysis Alt

Thus we should focus our energies and points of attention on an
unflinching paradigmatic analysis that calls for the end of America.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., I told you he was on some guerilla shit, Red,
White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages ix-x]
During the last years of apartheid I worked for
revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground
capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC
, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic
analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of
an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical
elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate
elements were due
our inability or unwillingness to hold the
moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an
unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies
and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic
considerations
we abdicated the power to pose the question
and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all.
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa.
in particular. During
this period
, in large part, to
. Simply put,
Elsewhere, I
have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates
that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and

in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of
qualifiers and irony
. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick
Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.
Burn it down alt (Wilderson)

The only ethical demand available to modern politics is the demand
for the end of the world. This exposes the grammar of the
Affirmatives calls for larger institutional access as a fundamental
fortification of White Settler and Slave Master civil society by its
diversionary focus on the ethicality of the policies and practices of
the United States as opposed to the a priori question its very
existence. This silence of the Affirmatives assumptive logic renders
them unaccountable to the revolutionary political ontology of
Redness and Blackness and thereby sets the stage for the various
dramas of conflictual relationships i.e. class struggle, gender
conflict, immigrants rights, etc. that are made possible by the
antagonism between Settler and Savage, Master and Slave.
Wilderson 2010
[Frank B., killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 1-5]
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 didn't wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos
of multicultural-ism and "rainbow coalitions." 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 precise, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides, people
said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California at 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 they could settle the "Land Lease Accounts" that
they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was "crazy." Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that
he grammar of their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their

sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps it is the only ethical grammar
available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for it draws our
attention not to how space
are used
by enfranchised and violently powerful
interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world's 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 on which
is to say the rebar, or better still t
and time
and abused
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 but
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
(the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a
triangulation between two things. On the one hand was 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,"1 the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale). On the
other was 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 worldnot 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
the world itself to account, and to account for them no less !
, a piece of the pie
claim. Instead, it calls her "crazy." And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity? "He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any
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 cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to
the "Savage." Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sen-tences,
fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global)
antagonisms would be dismantled. An "ethical modernity" would no longer
money out of us"? Surely, that doesn't make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun.

sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important
conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class
struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants' rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the
heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and
activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmogra-phies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars,
and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on)
these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only

render their speaker "crazy" but become themselves impossible to imagine .
so ubiquitously unspoken that
Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.2 In the 1960s
and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or even Would it be
when and howand, for some, what would come in its wake
overthrown? but
. Those steadfast
in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the United States writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin
Luther King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of Students for Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to Bobby Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic
Radicals and progressives

could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly
with respect to tactics and the possibility of "success," but they could not
dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case
by way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the United States was an ethical
formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives.
Zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground.
Even Bobby Kennedy (as a U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.3 One could (and
many did) acknowledge America's strength and power. This seldom rose to the level of an ethical assessment, however, remaining instead an assessment
of the "balance of forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics
the
power of Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the power to
pose the question is the greatest power of allretreated as did White
radicals and progressives who "retired" from the struggle. The question lies
buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM warriors, and Black
Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been
rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the "crazies" shout at passersby.
Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that effected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual
protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed
revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of
unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate's
destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse when
this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the
streets or of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is "no" in the sense that, as history has
credibly. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently,
shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in screenplays and in scholarly prose, but "yes" in the sense
that in even the most taciturn historical moments, such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the
somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as a symptom of awareness of the structural antagonisms. The
Neoliberalism with a
Black face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor the end of antiBlackness as a constituent element of U.S. antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama
election of President Barack Obama does not mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn historical moment.
enables a plethora of shaming discourses in response to revolutionary politics and "legitimates" widespread disavowal of any notion that the United States
itself, and not merely its policies and practices, is unethical. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinemati-cally and intellectually of Blackness and
Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. From 1980 to the present, however, Blackness and Redness manifest only in the rebar of
cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting,
camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of
conflict (i.e., a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between
even when
films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to
do with poverty or the absence of "family values"), the nonnarrative, or cinematic,
strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable
questions of Red and Black political ontologyor nonontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the
entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words,

Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our
grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the
labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics the
grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering which
underwrites film theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in
direct relation to radical action), and which underwrites cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the
mendacity of conflict.
mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure
of suffering. And this structure of suffering crowds out others, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political
, structures of ontological suffering stand in

antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists
discourse in question. To put a finer point on it
themselves may not be aware of the ontological position from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of
It is customary for a
book like this to end with a prescriptive gesture, at least the germ of a
new beginning if not a new world, a seed to be nurtured and cultivated by
Lenins question, What is to be done? Even when such seeds were not
sown throughout the book, an author might be tempted to harvest a yield,
however meager, in the conclusion. Not only have such seeds not been sown in this book, but
I have argued that anti-Blackness is the genome of this horticultural template for
Human renewal. Given the structural violence that it takes to produce and
reproduce a Slaveviolence as the structure of Black life, as opposed to
violence as one of many lived Black experiencesa concluding
consideration of the question, What is to be done? would ring hollow.
Fanon came closest to the only image of sowing and harvesting that befits this book.
Quoting Cesaire, he urged his readers to start the end of the world, the
only thing worth the effort of starting (Black Skin, White Masks 96), a shift from
horticulture to pyrotechnics. Rather than mime the restoration and/or
reorganization dreams which conclusions often fall prey to, however
unwittingly, Fanon dreams of an undoing, however implausible, for its own
sake. Still, there are moments when Fanon finds his own flames to be too incendiary. So much so that he momentarily backs away from the
this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.
comprehensive emancipation he calls for. Which is why one can find the Fanon of the Slave on the same page as the Fanon of the postcolonial subject.
Nonetheless, I am humbled by his efforts; and though I am freighted with enough hubris to extend his ensemble of questions beyond his unintentional
or even hint ata roadmap to

freedom so extensive it would free us from the epistemic air we breathe .
To say we must be free of air, while admitting to knowledge of no other
source of breath, is what I have tried to do here.
containment strategies, I know better than to underrate their gravitas by deigning to offer
Burn it down (Farley)

The alternative is to reject the affirmative as an act of burning down
the civil society that produces violence against the slave. Freedom
is an illusion created by the shackles of civil society, and
abandoning the pursuit for equality is the only way to break down
the way that whiteness maintains itself.
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-overblack. 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 Haiti. 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 colorline continues to belt the world.

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 . VIII. TRAINING We begin as children.
the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline.
Indeed,
We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves
The slaves are

called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling . The slave,
are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become.
then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The
The slaves begin as death,

not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no
slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die.
progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems.
narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from
slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite
The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the

end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions
direction of the pastpresent-future timeline.
of freedom , of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by

freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for
equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system of law is a
plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system,
hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself
as a slave through its prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and
the slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave
finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning
down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to
not be. 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
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
pursue a calling.
must become death . Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black,

death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is
not a calling.
The alternative is to revolt against the whitesonly revolution can
destroy the spectacle.
Farley, 99 (Anthony Paul, Boston College Law School professor, 7/1/99,
Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality, New York University Press,
7/6/14, AX)
Resistance is futile. It is futile so long as it takes place in a context that renders it
intelligible to the system. That which makes sense, that which is not a Zen slap in the face, is already defeated by the terrible anticipatory logic of
hierarchy. Hierarchy begets the very struggles that are raised up against it. Are you
oppressed because you are low caste? Gather together your brethren in
caste and demand caste rights. Demand equal rights. Negotiate for a new
era of understanding. Fine, and when you have changed the hearts and minds of your masters, look up at the banner of caste under which you have
fought. Are you still a creature of caste? Frankensteins monster, enslaved to the apostrophe long after the death of the physician who stitched him together. Who made
you this creature of caste? The system against which one fights is within and
without. Revolution must involve a destruction of ones self and ones
context. Revolution is total. Revolution is a break with reality: When you started in January, did
you ever think this movement would become so great and would capture all of Mexico? What would you have thought if I had said to you on December 31, Tomorrow morning were
going to launch an attack on eight municipalities. Were going to start a war with the objective of overthrowing the Mexican government and installing a transition government that ___.
The outcome of a revolution cannot be predicted or charted because

revolution requires the destruction of the very basis of predictions and
charts: revolution requires the destruction of the very basis of predictions
and charts: revolution requires the destruction of the spectacle. And it is only within the
Any strike against a spectacle, armed or otherwise, is a strike

experienced by our masters.
spectacle that the weary drama of the status quo becomes real.
against reality as
it is
We cannot work within the confines of civil society this binary is

too engrained, only an escape can give us any hope
Farley, 8(Anthony Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Paul Farley,
B.A., University of Virginia, J.D., Harvard Law School, 2008, The Colorline as

Capitalist Accumulation, p. 953-963, Accessed: 7/5/14) //AMM
The colorline marks the space of white-over-black. It has seemed to us that there is
no physical escape, no land of Canaan, because the colorline belts the world and
because the market has become the world and because the market is
always and only a slave market and because that means that this entire
flat earth is an auction block. Indeed, in the case of white-over-black, the map has indeed become
the territory. But the map is wrinkled in time, and that is what we have failed to understand. In fact,
the map is endlessly wrinkled in time. The map is a portrait of the original accumulation. Every movement
across its territories is a movement toward the original accumulation . The
original accumulation is the primal scene of white-over-black. There is no
time outside of the original accumulation. We live within the horizon of the original
accumulation and that is why our time is always already their time. When the slave prays for legal
relief, it authorizes its master to rule over its future. The slave gives the portrait it has
painted of tomorrow's equality to its master today. The slave is consciously aware of its
desire for equality as it paints. The future appears to us, if it appears at all, as through a glass,
darkly. What the slave has painted is the past, the past into which it flees, the past that contains slavery, slavery
only, and that continually. The slave gives the portrait to its master. The master is colorblind and sees in the slave's
artistic production white-over-black, white- over-black only, and that continually. That is why the master's
interpretation of the rule for equality is white- over-black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave
paints with knowing non-knowledge of what it is doing and every ruling, every legislative, administrative, judicial
victory brings the slave back to the past that it has in fact painted all the while dreaming that it was in fact painting
The gift is accepted only during moments of crisis . There are many crises.
The owners, desperate in their need for surplus value, capture and
consume the entirety of space. The owners include each other in their accumulations. Groups
of owners, groups of groups, combine and throw the dispossessed at each other
as they wage their endless wars of accumulation. The dispossessed have
no country, but they are trained to feel as if they do and thus trained they often willingly go to fight each
the future.
other in order to increase their master's mastery. Few recall the Wobblies' peace plan. Our bullets are reserved for
our own generals, and so there are always wars and rumors of war .
Owners must accumulate

surplus value or they perish as owners. The owners, then, are always
desperate and happy to leave the human condition behind in their quest
for die eternity of capitalist accumulation. Crises are the fruit of this desperate push beyond
the limits of reproduction. Beyond the limit, things fall apart. Limits can be exceeded in many
ways and the desperate owners always find new ways of breaking their
own system. One type of crisis occurs when the owners go beyond that which they have trained their slaves
to think of as 'fair' in terms of wages, hours and conditions. Another type occurs when the owners go beyond that
which they have trained their slaves to think of as 'fair' in terms of housing, education and welfare. Sometimes, as
with the flooding of New Orleans, the totality of oppression is unveiled. Masters, having successfully confined their
slaves' ambition for bread and roses within the horizon of the juridical sometimes, in capitalist desperation, get out
ahead of their slaves. In such moments the system of white-over-black experiences a crisis because the slaves see
the owners for what the owners are and they also see themselves and what it is they have been doing to
themselves. The slave is then welcomed into the master's house for negotiations. Negotiation requires the slave to
pretend that it has something in common with its master. Slaves and masters have nothing in common and there is
therefore nothing to negotiate. Negotiation is always already at its beginning the almost-escaped slave's surrender
to its almost-former master. There are many mansions in the master's house, each filled with the beauty of
yesteryear's dreams of legal emancipation. These legal dreams of equality are the endless prayers offered up by
the slaves during the endless crises of capital. These surrenders are the secret of capital time. The slaves have
knowing non-knowledge of their own breaking point, the point at which their refusal becomes a Great Refusal and
their strike becomes a General Strike and the time becomes a new time, their time, our time, the Commune. The
slave knows what will keep it unconscious of its situation and its inalienable freedom. The slave knows and yet does
We live inside the

accumulations. We are lived by the accumulations. We are lived by the accumulations
until and unless we seize the time. The General Strike of the slave power defeated the Union and
the Confederacy. The slaves streamed away from their plantations and seized
the time. Time and tide wait for no one. The stream became a flood and the entire
not know. Law is its way of not knowing. The Commune is goodbye to all that.
Confederacy might have drowned but for the capture of all that wide water within the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Reconstruction swiftly became Redemption, the

Confederacy joined the Union, and the self-emancipated proletariat became, once again, slaves, this time for
wages, to the whites.
Historicize Whiteness
The alternative is to vote negative to historicize racism. Whiteness
Supremacy is affectively and discursively produced it circulates
through an assumed grammar that produces Blackness as
ontologically abject. The alternative disrupts the attempt to ahistorically pass off the violence of the White Gaze.
Yancy 5 (George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the
Critical Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Accessed via Project Muse- )
The burden of the white gaze disrupts my first-person knowledge,

causing "difficulties in the development of [my] bodily schema"
(110). The white gaze constructs the Black body into "an object in the midst
of other objects" (109). The nonthreatening "I" of my normal, everyday body
schema becomes the threatening "him" of the Negro kind/type. Under
pressure, the corporeal schema collapses. It gives way to a racial epidermal
schema.6 "Below the corporeal schema," writes Fanon, "I had sketched a
historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me
not by 'residual sensations and perceptions of a primarily tactile, vestibular,
kinesthetic, and visual character,' but by the other, the white man [woman]"
(111). In other words, Fanon began to "see" himself through the lens of
a historico-racial schema. Note that there was nothing intrinsic to his
physiology that forced his corporeal schema to collapse; it was the "Black
body" as always already named and made sense of within the
context of a larger semiotics of privileged white bodies that
provided him with the tools for self-hatred. His "darkness," a naturally
occurring phenomenon,7 became historicized, residing within the purview of
the white gaze, a phenomenal space created and sustained by
socioepistemic and semiotic communal constitutionality. On this score, the
Black body is placed within the space of constitutionality vis--vis the racist
white same, the One. Against the backdrop of the sketched historico-racial
(racist) scheme, Fanon's "darkness" returns to him, signifying a new genus, a
new category of man: A Negro! (116). He inhabits a space of anonymity (he
is every Negro), and yet he feels a strange personal responsibility for his
body. He writes: I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race,
for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I
discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down
by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects,
slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "sho' good eaten'." (112)8 [End
Page 222] Fanon writes about the Black body and how it can be changed,
deformed, and made into an ontological problem vis--vis the white
gaze. Describing an encounter with a white woman and her son, Fanon
narrates that the young boy screams, "Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a
Negro!" (113).9 Fanon: My body was given back to me sprawled out,

distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is
an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a
Negro, it's cold, the Negro is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is
trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold,
that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome boy is trembling
because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy
throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me
up.. (11314) The white imagery of the Black as a savage beast, a primitive
and uncivilized animal, is clearly expressed in the boy's fear that he is to be
eaten by the "cannibalistic" Negro. "The more that Europeans dominated
Africans, the more 'savage' Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented
the nadir of savagery" (Brantlinger 1985, 203). Presumably, the young boy
does not know that his words will (or how they will) negatively affect Fanon.
However, for Fanon, the young white boy represents the broader
framework of white society's perception of the Black. The boy turns to
his white mother for protection from the impending Black doom. The young
white boy, however, is not simply operating at the affective level, he is not
simply being haunted, semi-consciously, by a vague feeling of anxiety.
Rather, he is operating both at the affective and the discursive level.
He says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." This locutionary act
carries a perlocutionary force of effecting a phenomenological return of
Fanon to himself as a cannibalistic threat, as an object to be feared. Fanon, of
course, does not "want this revision, this thematization."10 African-American
philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams notes: For Fanon, the boy's view of the
Negro (of Fanon himself in this case) as an object of fear is significant, as it
suggests (1) that the image (racial epidermal schema) of the Negro posited
by the boy's verbal performance has a narrative significance and (2) that
such images are available to the boy as elements of a socially shared stock
of images that qualify the historicity (the historical situatedness) both of the
boy and of the Negro he sees. (1993, 165) One is tempted to say that the
young white boy sees Fanon's Black body "as if " it was canniballike. The "seeing as if," however, is collapsed into a "seeing as is." In
Fanon's example, within the lived phenomenological transversal context of
white racist behavior, the "as if " reads too much like a process of "conscious
effort." On my reading, "youngwhiteboyexperiencesniggerdarkbodycannibalevokestrepidation" [End Page 223] is what appears in the
uninterrupted lived or phenomenological flow of the young white
boy's racist experience. There is no experience of the "as if."
Indeed, the young white boy's linguistic and nonlinguistic
performance is indicative of a definitive structuring of his own selfinvisibility as: "whiteinnocentselfinrelationshiptothedarkniggerself." This
definitive structuring is not so much remembered or recollected as it is
always present as the constitutive imaginary background within
which the white boy is both the effect and the vehicle of white
racism; indeed, he is the orientation of white epistemic practices,
ways of "knowing" about one's (white) identity vis--vis the Black

Other. The "cultural white orientation" is not an "entity" whose origin the
white boy needs to grasp or recollect before he performs whiteness. He is
not a tabula rasa, one who sees the Black body for the first time and
instinctively says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." On this score,
the boy does indeed undergo an experience of the dark body as
frightening, but there is no concealed meaning, as it were, inherent
in the experience qua experience of Fanon's body as such. Rather,
the fright that he experiences vis--vis Fanon's dark body is always already
"constructed out of . . . social narratives and ideologies" (Henze 2000, 238).
The boy is already discursively and affectively acculturated through
micro-processes of "racialized" learning (short stories, lullabies,
children's games,11 prelinguistic experiences, and so forth) to
respond "appropriately" in the presence of a Black body. The gap that
opens up within the young white boy's perceptual field as he "sees" Fanon's
Black body has already been created while innocently sitting on his mother's
lap.12 His mother's lap constitutes a "raced" zone of security. This point
acknowledges the fundamental "ways the transactions between a
raced world and those who live in it racially constitute the very
being of those beings" (Sullivan 2001, 89). The association of Blackness
with "nigger" and cannibalism is no mean feat. Hence, on my view, he is
already attending to the world in a particular fashion; his affective
and discursive performances bespeak the (ready-to-hand) inherited
white racist background according to which he is able to make
"sense" of the world. Like moving my body in the direction of home, or
only slightly looking as I reach my hand to retrieve my cup of hot tea that is
to the left of my computer screen, the young white boy dwells
within/experiences/engages the world of white racist practices in
such a way that the practices qua racist practices have become
invisible. The young boy's response is part and parcel of an implicit
knowledge of how he gets around in a Manichean world. Being-in a
racist world, a lived context of historicity, the young boy does not
"see" the dark body as "dark" and then thematically proceed to
apply negative value predicates to it, where conceivably the young boy
would say, "Yes, I 'see' the dark body as existing in space, and I recognize
the fact that it is through my own actions and intentions that I predicate evil
of it." "In order even to act deliberately," as philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus
maintains, "we must orient ourselves in a familiar world" (1991, 85). [End
Page 224] My point here is that the young white boy is situated within a
familiar white racist world of intelligibility, one that has already
"conceded" whiteness as "superior" and Blackness as "inferior" and
"savage." Involved within the white racist Manichean world, the young boy
has found his orientation, he has already become part and parcel of a
constituted and constituting force within a constellation of modes of being
that are deemed natural. However, he is oblivious to the historicity and
cultural conditionedness of these modes of being. Despite the fact
that "race" neither exists as a naturally occurring kind within the

world nor cuts at the joints of reality, notice the evocative power of
"being Black," which actually points to the evocative power of being
white. The dark body, after all, would not have evoked the response that it
did from the young white boy were it not for the historical mythos of the
white body and the power of white normativity through which the white body
has been pre-reflectively structured, resulting in forms of action that are as
familiar and as quotidian as my reaching for my cup of tea. His white racist
performance is a form of everyday coping within the larger
unthematized world of white social coping. On this score, one might say
that the socio-ontological structure that gives intelligibility to the young
white boy's racist performance is prior to a set of beliefs of which he is
reflectively aware. Notice that Fanon undergoes the experience of having his
body "given back to him." Thus Fanon undergoes a profound
phenomenological experience of being disconnected from his body schema.
Fanon experiences his body as flattened out or sprawled out before him. And,
yet, Fanon's "body," its corporeality, is forever with him. It never leaves. So,
how can it be "given back"? The physical body that Fanon has/is remains in
space and time. It does not somehow disappear and make a return. And, yet,
there is a profound sense in which his "corporeality" is interwoven with
particular discursive practices. Under the white gaze, Fanon's body is not
simply the res extensa of Cartesian dualism. Within the context of white
racist practices vis--vis the "Black" body, there is a blurring of boundaries
between what is "there" as opposed to what has been "placed there." Hence,
the body's "corporeality," within the context of lived history, is shaped
through powerful cultural schemata. This does not mean that somehow the
"body" does not exist. After all, it is my body that forms the site of
white oppression. To jettison all discourse regarding the body as
"real," being subject to material forces, and such, in the name of the
"postmodern body," is an idealism that would belie my own
philosophical move to theorize from the position of my real lived
embodiment. The point here is that the "body" is never given as such, but
always "appears there" within the context of some set of conditions of
emergence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 108). The conditions of emergence for
the phenomenological return of Fanon's body qua inferior or bestial are
grounded in the white social imaginary, its discursive and nondiscursive
manifestations. Having undergone a gestalt-switch in his body image, his
knowledge/consciousness of his body has become "solely a negating activity.
It is a third-person [End Page 225] consciousness. The body is surrounded by
an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (1967, 11011). Linda Alcoff discusses
this phenomenological sense of being disjointed as a form of "nearincommensurability between first-person experience and historico-racial
schema that disenables equilibrium" (1999, 20). What this points to is the
"sociogenic" basis of the "corporeal malediction"experienced by Blacks
(Fanon 1967, 111). On this score, "the black man's [woman's] alienation is
not an individual question" (11). In other words, the distorted
historico-racial schema that occludes equilibrium takes place within

the realm of sociality, a larger complex space of white social
intersubjective constitutionality "of phenomena that human beings
have come to regard as 'natural' in the physicalist sense of depending on
physical nature" (Gordon 1997, 38). Of course, within the context of colonial
or neocolonial white power, the objective is to pass off what is
historically contingent as that which is ahistorically given.
Debate Recognition
The debate space itself is organized around the governing rules of
whitenessthe alternative is to affirm an epistemological break that
can introduce a new fissure of knowledge into the closed system of
violent racialization. Unless we devise a radically new stance,
ongoing colonialism, genocides, and nuclear extinction become
inevitable.
Wynter84 (Sylvia, Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of
California at San Diego to be a visiting professor for 1974-75. She then became chairperson of African
and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at
Stanford University in 1977. She is now Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, "The Ceremony
Must Be Found: After Humanism" Boundary II, 12:3 & 13:1, Accessed via JSTOR- )
The social behaviors that were to verify this topos of iconicity which
yoked the Indo-European mode of being to human being in general,
and the new middle class model of identity to the exemplary Norm
of this new "empirico-transcendental doublet," man (Foucault, 1984)
(imagined/experienced as if a "natural being"), would be carried out by
the complementary non-discursive practices of a new wave of great
internments of native labors in new plantations orders (native wage labor), and
by the massacres of the colonial eraleading logically to their Summa in
the Auchwitz/Belsen and in the Gulag/Cambodia archipelagoes. Through all
this, different forms of segregating the Ultimate Chaos that was the
Blackfrom the apartheid of the South to the lynchings in both North
and South, to their deprivation of the vote, and confinement in an inferior
secondary educational sphere, to the logic of the
jobless/ghetto/drugs/crime/prison archipelagoes of todayensured
that, as Uspenskij et al note, the "active creation" of the type of Chaos,
which the dominant model needs for the replication of its own system,
would continue. It thus averted any effort to find the ceremonies which
could wed the structural oppositions, liberating the Black from his Chaos
function, since this function was the key to the dynamics of its own
order of being. As Las Casas had argued against Sepulvedawhen refuting
the latter's humanist theory that human sacrifice carried out by the New
World peoples was proof of the fact of their Lack of Natural Reason and,
therefore, that it was just to make war against them to protect the innocents
who were sacrificed and to take over their territory"to sacrifice innocents
for the good of the commonwealth is not opposed to natural reason, is not
something abominable and contrary to nature, but is an error that has its
origin in natural reason itself."" It is an error, then, not in the
speaking/behaving subjects, but in the ratiomorphic apparatus generic to the
human, the cognitive mechanism that is the "most recent superstructure in a
continuum of cognitive processes as old as life on this planet," and, as such,
"the least tested and refined against the real world" (Riedl/Kaspar, 1984).

And it is only with science, as Riedl and Kaspar (quoting Roman Sexl)
observe, that there is ever any true "victory over the ratiomorphic
apparatus"such as that of Galileo's and his telescope over the abductive
logic of the if/then sequence of inference dictated behind the backs of their
consciousness to the Aristotelian doctors of philosophy as the speaking
subjects of the Christian-medieval system ensemble. II. Re-enacting Heresy:
The New Studies and the Studia as a Science of Human Systems The main
proposal here is that the calls made in the 1960s and 1970s for new
areas/programs of studies, was, although non-consciously so at the time,
calls which re-enacted in the context of our times a parallel counter-exertion,
a parallel Jester's heresy to that of the Studia's. But because of our nonconsciousness of the real dimensions of what we were about, we asked at
first only to be incorporated into the normative order of the present
organization of knowledge as add-ons, so to speak. We became
entrapped, as a result, in Bantustan enclaves labelled "ethnic" and
"gender" and/or "minority studies." These enclaves then functioned,
as David Bradley notes, inter a/ia, to exempt English Departments from
having to alter their existing definition of American literature. Even more,
these enclaves functioned to exempt the callers for the new studies from
taking cognizance of the anomaly that confronted us, with respect to a
definition of American literature which lawlikely functioned to exclude not
only Blacks, but all the other groups whose "diverse modalities of protest"
(Detienne, 1979) in the 1960s and 1970s had fueled the call for new studies.
Thomas Kuhn points out that the recognition of anomalies is the first
step which leads to changes in the paradigms of the natural
sciences.38 And in the same context the linguistic scholar Whatmough has
argued that human observers are parts of the cosmos which they
observe, that since all the knowledge that orders our behavior is gained
from these human observers, such knowledge must either be solipsistic or
reduce man to a part of his environment. This knowledge is, therefore, not to
be trusted unless the observer in his role as knower finds the means to
convert himself into an "external observer." Among the means which he
proposes is the taking of the "all pervading regularity noted in language,"
rather than the speaking subject, as the object of investigation. And these
regularities appear "all along the road through the heirarchy of
language, from everyday chit chat through law, and religions, liturgy
and homily, poetry, `literature,' science and philosophy to logic and
mathematics."39 These regularities, he goes on, will enable the knower to
make use of what he calls the mathematike techne, which enables her/him to
treat languages like chemistry, for example, according to their grammars of
regularities, as if man, i.e. the speaking/thinking/representing subject, "did
not exist at all." One problem remained, however: that of the perception of
these regularities. For, because the regularities are, so to speak, "built in" to
the discourses, the users of these discourses cannot normally isolate the
existence of these regularities (Whatmough, 1967). And, as Foucault reminds
us, this problem is applicable not only for the boundary maintaining

"true discourse" of the positivism inherited from the nineteenthcentury episteme, but also for the eschatology of positivism's
counter-discourse, Marxism, both generated from the same ground
(Foucault, 1973) of a materialist metaphysics, and each dialectically the
condition of the post-atomic dysfunctional sovereignty of the "grammar of
regularities" of the other. The anthropologist, Legesse, has pointed to the
extent to which we are trapped in the ordering "categories and
prescriptions" of our epistemic orders. He notes, however, that the
liminal groups of any order are the ones most able to "free us" from
these prescriptions, since it is they who existentially experience the
"injustice inherent in structure" (Legesse, 1973), that is, in the very
ordering of the order which dictates the "grammar of regularities" through
which the systemic subjects perceive their mode of reality as isomorphic with
reality in general. The normative categories of any orderfor example
the aristocratic category of European feudalismare normative precisely
because the structure of their lived experience is isomorphic with
the representation that the order gives itself of itself. The liminal
categories like those of the bourgeoisie in the feudal order of things, on the
other hand, experience a structural contradiction between their lived
experience and the grammar of representations which generate the
mode of reality by prescribing the parameters of collective behaviors that
dynamically bring that "reality" into being. The liminal frame of
reference, therefore, unlike the normative, can provide what Uspesnkij et
al call the "outer view," from which perspective the grammars of
regularities of boundary and structure-maintaining discourses are
perceivable, and Whatmough's "external observer's position" made
possible. What the calls for New Studies at first overlooked, however,
was precisely the regularities which emerged into view in the wake
of the "diverse modalities of protest" whose non-coordinated yet
spontaneous eruption now brought into unconcealednessnot only the
lawlike rule-governed nature of the exclusion of the diverse protesting
groups/categories as group-subjects from any access to the means of
representation, but also the regularities of the exclusion of their frames of
reference and historical/cultural past from the normative curriculum, an
exclusion so consistent as to be clearly also rule-governed. This consistency
was reinforced by the emergence of the equation between the
group/categories excluded from the means of representation and the ratios
of their degrees of socio-economic empowerment/disempowerment in the
world outside. The dynamic presence of rule-governed correlations which
determined rules of in/exclusion, was, however, only perceivable by the nonorchestrated calls for New Studies, calls like "the diverse modalities of
protest" in the Greek city states analysed by Detienne, which, by breaching
parallel dietary and other rules, not only called the ontology of the religiopolitical order of the city-state into question, but made perceivable, through
what they protested against, the founding Order/Chaos oppositional
categories which underpinned the boundary/structure maintaining dynamics

of the polis (Detienne, 1979). These regularities pointed to a
fundamental question which, at the time, remained unasked. It had
to do with the anomalous implication that they were determined by
rules which transcended the conscious intention of the academics
who enacted the decision-making processes as to what to
in/exclude, just as the rules of inference of Galileo's doctors of philosophy
were dictated by the ratiomorphic apparatus or rational world view based on
the a priori of an order of value between the imperfect terrestrial and the
crystalline perfection of the lunar realm: the Order/Chaos opposition of the
autopoetic dynamics of the Christian medieval-system ensemble. What, in
this case, then, determined the rules which determined the
decisionmaking processes by which individual scholars, working with
integrity and according to the criteria of objective standards, in/excluded?
What determined what should and should not be defined as American
Fiction, and the mode of measure of the "objective" standards of
individual scholars? The question was not to be asked, however,
until the after side of the experience of disillusion which the callers all
underwent and which David Bradley traces in his article, "Black and
American in 1982." For it was to be a recognition, made by us all on
the other side of that experience, of the existence of objective limits
to the incorporation of Blacks into the normative order of
being/knowing of the present order, that would lead to our further
recognition of the need for an epistemological break. Bradley was one
of a group of Blacks for whom Affirmative Action, by countering the "inbuilt
distribution bias" of the dynamics of the order, had worked. The
interference of Affirmative Action with the normative functioning of
the order with respect to the distributionat the group category
levelof unequal ratios of access to educational empowerment, had
enabled Bradley, together with a group of young Blacks like himself, to
breach the rule-governed nature of the proscription which confined
Blacks-as-a-group to a secondary educational orbit, relative to their
White peers-as-a-group. Bradley at the time, observing his father's great joy,
had determined to do everything to prove his father's and his own private
hope true. His father's hope was that at long last Blacks were to be allowed
to break out of the secondary orbit to which their lives and dreams had been
confined, and if this hope would not be realized in time for his own life to be
graced by the change, it would in time at least be realized for his son's.
Bradley's own hope had been that once Blacks were included in vast
numbers in the highest levels of higher education, and had worked
hard and proved themselves, they would be so numerous, so no
longer the token exception, that they would eventually have to be
distinguished by criteria other than by "the uniform of skin."
However, he experienced on the campus both the overt and covert
forms of anathematization which met the breaching of the
interdiction that the black presence-as-a-group implied (since what
Hofstadter calls the category structure of the "representational system"

"America" is based on the dynamics of the contradiction between individual
equality and group heirarchy). These experiences slowly stripped away
the illusion of any fundamental change in the ordering of group
relations. The shouts of "Nigger! Nigger!" in the citadel of reason in the heart
of the non-redneck campus, the phoned bomb threats, the fragile
defenselessness of the Black students in the face of a mindless
hostility, the ineffective wringing of hands of concerned Liberal
Whites, were paralleled by the more discreet acts of partition
(Detienne, 1979) by university administrators, whose proscription of
the financially starved Black Culture Center, always a whitewashed
rotting house to be reached by a scramble up a muddy bank, mainly
always on the nether edge of campus, once again gave the rulegoverned regularity of the game away. Blacks would be allowed on
the campus as a group, admitted to have even a culture, as long as
this "culture" and its related enclave studies could be made to
function as the extra-cultural space, in relation, no longer to a Wasp,
but now more inclusively to a White American, normatively
Euroamerican intra-cultural space; as the mode of Chaos imperative
to the latter's new self-ordering. (The readapted Western culture
Core Curriculum is the non-conscious expression of this more
different terms, with the category homeostasis returning to its
"built in normalcy," the abuse and the bomb threats ceased. Order
and Chaos were once more in their relational interdefining places,
stably expressing the bio-ontological principle of Sameness and
Difference of the present order, as the rule-governed discourse of
Galileo's doctors of philosophy functioned to verify the physicoontological
mode of Sameness and Difference on which the Christian medieval order
rested before the Studia and Copernicus, before the Jester's heresy of the
figures of rogue/clown/fool, had pulled the "high seriousness" of its selfjustifying self-representation down to earth. Bradley now recognized that he
had been wrong to hope that Black lives, from his father's to his own, had to
"run along the same line ... one that rises and falls like a sine wave," one that
is "a graphed function not of a mathematical relation between sides and
angles but of a social relationship between Blacks and American society
itself." Sometimes the line could be "on the positive side of the base line," at
other times on the negative side. If the effects were different, the function
had always to remain the same. Thus his hope for the next generation of
Blacks, in this case for his young godson, would have to be cut down to
realistic size. His hope could only now be that by the time his godson came
of age, the "graph of black will once again be on the upswing," giving him, as
Bradley himself had had, "a little time to gain some strength, some
knowledge, some color to hold inside himself." For that would/could be, "all
the hope there is. 11 Yet the beginning of hope also lay here. The
recognition of the regularities pointed outside the "functional

rhetoric" of the Liberal creed to the existence of objective limits
and, therefore, of laws of functioning which, beyond the conscious
intentionalities of their subjectsWhite or Blackdetermined the
limits to the order's normative incorporation of those whose lives in
a "free" country had to be made to serve as the "graphed function" of
the boundary maintaining system, as its markers of Chaos, the NotUs. The Spanish historian Americo Castro had noted the existence of this
systemic function of Blacks in the comparison he made between their
function and that of Jew and Moor in sixteenth-century Spain. Although
converted Christians and, therefore, "according to the gospel and the
sacraments of the Church," forming a part of the "mystical Body of Christ
and His Church," these categories had been stigmatized as being of unclean
blood and heretical descent (i.e., not Spanish-Christian). Their proscribed
livesthey were excluded from jobs; many were burnt at the stake by the
Inquisition for "heresy"enabled them to function as the mode of Difference
from which the new secularizing bonding principle of limpieza, which came to
constitute the "boundary maintaining system" of the Statal Group Subject of
monarchical Spain, could be generated as an ontologized principle of
Sameness. Here Americo Castro pointed to the regularity of the parallel by
which the subordination of the lives of the category-bearers of difference to
their "grasped function" is repeated in the lives of present day American
Blacks, who are today re-enacting and "living a drama similar to that of the
Spanish moriscos and Jews," even though according to the Constitution they
form part of the American We (Americo Castro, 1977) or group-Subject. Only
with their complete strategic marginalization did the by now
bantustanized enclave studies begin to rethink their function: to
grasp a connection with that of the Liminal outsider Jester's role of
the original Studia, a role to which they were heir. This became clear as
they began to take as their parallel objects of inquiry the representations
which had been made of their groups by the order of discourse of
mainstream scholarship; as they began to find that these representations,
too, functioned according to across the board, objective rules. What was here
revealed, when taken all together, were the regularities of the
"figuring" of an Other excluded series, with the discourse functioning to
constitute them as a "human species" totemic operator which paralleled that
of the "animal species" totemic operator of traditional Neolithic societies as
well as the planetary grid of the Christian medieval order. This discourse,
then, operated to serve the same extra-cognitive function of Ptolemaic
astronomy in the Middle Ages. It re-enacted the celestial/terrestrial physicoontological principle of Difference in new terms: this time in terms of a
bioontological principle of Sameness/Difference, expressed, not in the
Spirit/Flesh order of value of the Christian-medieval order, but in the
rational/irrational mode of Order/Chaos of our own. Whatever the groupwomen,
natives, niggerswhatever the categorythe Orient, Africa, the tropicsthe
ordering principle of the discourse was the same: the figuration of
an ontological order of value between the groups who were markers

of "rationality" and those who were the markers of its Lack-State.
And the analyses which had begun to perceive the lawlike regularities of
these ordering discourses went from Virginia Woolf's observation of the
compulsive insistence by "angry male professors" on the mental inferiority of
women, through Carter G. Woodson's diagnosis (1935) of the lawlike manner
in which the curriculum in American schools distorted history so as to
represent the Whites as everything and the Blacks as nothing, to Aime
Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism, which again diagnosed the regularities
with which the colonizers rewrote the past to show themselves as having
done everything and the colonized nothing, and, more recently Abdel
Malek's/Edward Said's dissection of the phenomenon of Orientalism.4' What
began to come clear was the reality of the reflex automatic functioning of
rules of figuration, parallel to those of Galileo's doctors of philosophy, which
went beyond the intentionality of the objectively rational scholar, rules which
then revealed that the objectivity was that of the ratiomorphic apparatus or
cognitive mechanism of our present organization of knowledge, one by which
we are all, including the liminal Others, non-consciously governed. A parallel
suspicion of something automatic functioning beyond the conscious control
of the human had impelled the exchange of letters between Einstein and
Freud, which was to be published under the title, Why War?. In the early
decades of the century Einstein had written Freud, asking if his new
discipline could provide some hope with respect to, and in the context of, the
acceleration of the phenomenon of inter-human wars. Freud had responded
that there was his theory of the instincts but that as yet he had no overall
answer. Psychology as a discipline, however, was to confront the question by
focussing on the connection between the phenomenon of nationalism and
the processes of socialization which exacerbated nationalist allegiances as a
primary causal factor. And in his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
suggested that with the shift from the monarchical order of things to the
bourgeois order in its pure statethe transposition from a governing
figurative "symbolic of blood" to what might be called a "metaphorics of
naturality" in which the bourgeoisie comes to image its boundarymaintaining Group-Subject system on the analogy of a living organism
the imperative of the self-preservation of the "natural community"
(nation-Volk, race, culture) metaphorically ontologized as a "biological"
Body, had led to the acceleration of wars between men who were
now led to imagine themselves, for the first time in human history,
as "natural beings."42 Recently Lewis Thomas, the biologist, has again
focussed on the connection between nationalismwhich he sees as an
evolutionary blind alley for the human as a speciesand the threat of
nuclear extinction. Like Einstein earlier, Thomas has glimpsed that hope,
if it is to exist, would have to be found in a new order of knowledge.
And he suggests that the disciplines that were concerned with the
problems of human behavior, although still in a groping uncertain
stage, are the only ones capable of providing an answer to
mankind's quest for social hope; that one day there would emerge from

these uncertain attempts, a "solid" discipline as "hard" as physics, plagued
"as physics still is with ambiguities" yet with new rules "and new ways of
getting things done, such as for instance getting rid of patriotic rhetoric and
thermonuclear warfare all at once."" The proposal I am making is that such
a discipline can only emerge with an overall rewriting of knowledge,
as the re-enacting of the original heresy of a Studia, reinvented as a
science of human systems, from the liminal perspective of the "base"
(Dewey, 1950) new Studies, whose revelatory heresy lies in their definition of
themselves away from the Chaos roles in which they had been defined
Black from Negro, Chicano from Mexican-American, Feminists from Women,
etc. For these have revealed the connection between the way we
identify ourselves and the way we act upon/know the world. They
have made clear that we are governed in the way we know the world by the
templates of identity or modes of self-troping speciation, about which each
human system auto-institutes itself, effecting the dynamics of an
autopoetics, whose imperative of stable reproduction has hitherto
transcended the imperatives of the human subjects who collectively put it
into dynamic play. The proposed science of human systems, therefore,
decenters the systemic subject. Instead, it takes as the object of its inquiry
the modes of symbolic self-representation (Creutzfeld, 1979), about which
each human system auto-institutes itself, the modes of self-troping
rhetoricity through which the Subject (individual/collective) actualizes its
mode of being as a living entity. In addition, it takes the ratiomorphic
apparatus or episteme, which exists as the enabling rational world view of
the self-troping mode of being as an object of inquiry in the comparative
context in which it is definable as one of the cognitive mechanisms
determined by the "psychogeny" of the human rather than by the phylogeny
of purely biological organisms. Taking the connection that Thomas
makes between "patriotic rhetoric" and "thermo-nuclear warfare" as
a key linkage, a science of human systems will take most crucially
as an object of its inquiry the modes of cultural imagination of
human systemsJerison's "imagery systems"together with the laws of
functioning of the rhetorically coded mode of figuration, which, with its
internal mediation of the mimesis of Desire (Girard, 1965) and of Aversion
(Fanon, 1967), orients the normative seeking/avoiding/knowing behaviors of
the systemic subjects. For it is this governing system of figuration generated
from the mode of self-definition which integrates with the neurophysiological
machinery of the brain, that functions as the shared integrative mechanism,
determining not only the mode of consciousness or "world of mind" of the
order, but serving also, at the aesthetico-affective level of the order, to
stabilize the response to the target-stimuli of Desire for all that is the
Self/Order and of Aversion to all that is the Chaos of the Self, the Death of its
Life. It is by thereby securing shared and predictably functioning endogenous
waveshapes in the brain (Thatcher/John, 1977), of the normative Subject of
the order, that the system of figuration sets limits to that Subject's mode of
imagining its Self/Group-Self and, therefore, to the knowledge that it can

have of its world. A science of human systems which takes the laws of
figuration of human systems as its objects of inquiry must, therefore, adopt a
synthetic rather than categorized approach to its subject. In order to study
their rhetor-neurophysiological laws of functioning, it must above all breach
the distinction between brain/minds, the natural and the human sciences.
For one of its major hypotheses is that systems of figuration and their
group-speciating Figuration-Work essentially constitute the shared
governing rhetor-neurophysiological programs or abduction schemas through
which human Group Subjects realize themselves as boundary maintaining
systems. These governing rhetor-neurophysiological programs--which
can often function as regressive defects of social fantasy (Thatcher/John
1977), as in the case of limpieza de sangre and of Aryaness, as well as of
an ontologized whiteness--are the mechanisms which determine the
limit of the figuratively coded "boundary-maintaing" systems. They
then function, as in the case of the American order, to set objective
limits (such as those to Bradley's hopes) to the definition of its fiction; and
to the possible non-proscription of Black Culture Center at the nether
edge of the campus, as the physical expression of the rhetorical
configuration of the mode of chaos to the order's self-troping definition of
itself. Hence the paradox of the major proposal that we make: that it is the
literary humanities which should be the umbrella site for the transdisciplinary
realization of a science of human systems.
Three tier process

The alternative is the method of the three tier process. Our usage of
multiple forms of knowledge production within debate makes
alternative forms of knowledge production legitimate and checks
the homogenizing function of 'expert' discourse.
That is Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley in 2008

("THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL
PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pages 81-83) (ASIA)
The process of signifyin engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not
simply designed to critique the use of traditional evidence; their
goal is to challenge the relationship between social power and
knowledge. In other words, those with social power within the
debate community are able to produce and determine legitimate
knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to
maintain the dominance of normative knowledge-making practices,
while crowding out or directly excluding alternative knowledgemaking practices. The Louisville framework looks to the people
who are oppressed by current constructions of power. Jones and
Green offer an alternative framework for drawing claimsin debate
speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A way in which you
can validate our claims, is through the three-tier process. And we
talk about personal experience, organic intellectuals, and academic
intellectuals. Let me give you an analogy. If you place an elephant in
the room and send in three blind folded people into the room, and
each of them are touching a different part of the elephant. And they
come back outside and you ask each different person they gone
have a different idea about what they was talking about. But, if you
let those people converse and bring those three different people
together then you can achieve a greater truth. Jones argues that
without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular
perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic
power. The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per
se, instead they seek to augment or supplement what counts as
evidence with other forms of knowledge produced outside of
academia. As Green notes in the double-octo-finals at CEDA
Nationals, Knowledge surrounds me in the streets, through my
peers, through personal experiences, and everyday wars that I fight
with my mind. The thee-tier process: personal experience, organic
intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of
argumentation that taps into diverse forms of knowledge-making
practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and
organic intellectuals are placed on par with traditional forms of

evidence. While the Louisville debaters see the benefit of academic
research, they are also critically aware of the normative practices
that exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policy-oriented
discussions because of their lack of training and expertise. Such
exclusions prevent radical solutions to racism, classism, sexism,
and homophobia from being more permanently addressed.
According to Green: bell hooks talks about how when we rely solely
on one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory theory
becomes rootless. Thats the reason why we use a three-tiered
process. Thats why we use alternative forms of discourse such as
hip hop. Thats also how we use traditional evidence and our
personal narratives so you dont get just one perspective claiming
to be the right way. Because it becomes a more meaningful and
educational view as far as how we achieve our education. The use of
hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the
homogenizing function of academic and expert discourse . Note the
reference to bell hooks, Green argues that without alternative
perspectives, radical libratory theory becomes rootless. The term
rootless seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the material
circumstances that academics or experts study. In other words,
academics and experts by definition represent an intellectual
population with a level of objective distance from that which they
study. For the Louisville debaters, this distance is problematic as it
prevents the development of a social politic that is rooted in the
community of those most greatly affected by the status of
oppression.
Self Destruction
The suicide bomber is a metaphor for the slave, whose body is made
into a weapon by two irreconcilable logics of survival and of
martyrdom
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine People of Color
Blindness; published in 1998; p. 38-39)
The final object of contemplation
biopolitics
in Mbembes rewriting of Agambens rewriting of Foucaults
is the fin de sicle figure of resistance to the colonial occupation of
Palestine: the (presumptively male) suicide bomber . The slave , able to

demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly
possessed by another,
is thus contrasted subtly with the colonized native, whose
body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a

truly ballistic sense
a cultural politics in lieu of an armed struggle in which to large extent,
resistance and self-destruction are synonymous.35
Resistance to slavery in this account is
self-preservative and forged by way of a demonstration of the capabilities

of the human bond, whereas resistance to colonial occupation is selfdestructive and consists in a demonstration of the failure of the human
bond, the limits of its protean capabilities . One could object, in an empiricist vein, that the
slave too resists in ways that are quite nearly as self-destructive as an improvised explosive device and that the
colonial subject too resists through the creation and performance of music and the stylization of the body, but that
would be to miss the symptomatic value of Mbembes theorization.
Mbembe describes suicide
bombing as being organized by two apparently irreconcilable logics,

the logic of martyrdom and the logic of* survival,
and it is the express purpose of
the rubric of necropolitics to meditate upon this unlikely logical convergence.36 However, there is a discrepancy at
the heart of the enterprise. Rightly so,
the theorization of necropolitics as a friendly
critique of Agambens notion of bare life involves an excursus on certain

repressed topographies of cruelty, including, first of all, slavery, in
which the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and
redemption, martyrdom and freedom become blurred. 37 Yet, as noted, the
logic of resistance-as-suicide-as-sacrifice-as-martyrdom is for Mbembe
epitomized by the presumptively male suicide bomber at war with
colonial occupation , the most accomplished form of necropower in the contemporary world, rather
than Hartmans resistant female slave, Celia, engaged in close-quarters combat with the sexual economy of slave
society, Social Text 103 Summer 2010 3 9 the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.38
Why the unannounced transposition? Because the restricted notion of

homo sacer
alongside the related notions of bare life and the state of exception
is being used
in confusion to account for the effects of the biopolitics of race too

generally. The homo sacer, divested of political status and reduced to
bare life, is distinguished not by her vulnerability to a specific form or

degree of state-sanctioned violence but by her social proscription from
the honor of sacrifice .39 The homo sacer is banned from the witnessbearing function of martyrdom
therefore imperceptible or illegible as a rule.
(from the ancient Greek martys, witness). Her suffering is
It is against the law to recognize her
sovereignty or self-possession . This sort of conceptual conflation is pronounced in recent

discussions of racial inequality within the United States as well, where postcolonial immigration has become the
political watchword. Two figures are held up as exemplary: the immigrant worker from Mexico or Central America
profiled and harassed by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and terrorized by a militarized U.S.
Border Patrol (and various vigilante efforts) as her unskilled and semiskilled labor is exploited for the productive and
service sectors of the national economy; and the immigrant worker from the Middle East or South Asia profiled and
harassed by the Special Registration Program of the National Security Entry-Exit Registry System (now US-VISIT)
and terrorized by a militarized Transportation Security Administration (and various vigilante efforts) as her unskilled
and semiskilled labor is exploited for the productive and service sectors of the national economy.
The
various state agencies of this systematic discrimination are consolidated

within the Department of Homeland Security, and that institution serves
as the grand target of much immigrant rights activism .40 Indeed, Agamben himself
is not far from this position, given that the ethical elevation of the figure of the refugee is motivated by his analysis
of the dynamics of xenophobia in contemporary Europe (given too that the Eurocentric political exile of the refugee
remains a species of immigration that persists in the hope of justice under capitalism).41
Remembrance
Remembrance grants us a backwards lensestoo see into the past
to help us create new life and a new future
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history
professor, 02(Saidiya V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4, pp.757-777, CLF)
The point here is not to condemn tourism, but to rigorously examine the
politics of memory and question whether working through is even an
appropriate model for our relationship with history . In Representing the Holocaust,
Dominick LaCapra opts for working through as kind of middle road between
redemptive totalization and the impossibility of representation and
suggests that a degree of recovery is possible in the context of a
responsible working through of the past. He asserts that in coming to
terms with trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable aspects
of the past that might be used in rebuilding a new life . 23 While LaCapras arguments
are persuasive, I wonder to what degree the backward glance can provide us
with the vision to build a new life? To what extent need we rely on the past
in transforming the present or, as Marx warned, can we only draw our
poetry from the future and not the past? 24 Here I am not advancing the impossibility of
representation or declaring the end of history, but wondering aloud whether the image of
enslaved ancestors can transform the present. I ask this question in order to discover
again the political and ethical relevance of the past. If the goal is something more than
assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of memory , the
question is,Why need we remember ? Does the emphasis on
remembering and working through the past expose our insatiable desires
for curatives, healing, and anything else that proffers the restoration of
some prelapsarian intactness? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing history? Can
remembering potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror
and the routine of violence constitutive of black life in the United States ? Or
pressing
is it that remembering has become the only conceivable or viable form of political agency? Usually the injunction
to remember insists that memory can prevent atrocity, redeem the dead,
and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both individuals and
collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the
ease of grappling with terror, representing slaverys crime, and ably standing in the
others shoes. I am not proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence
of a public history of slavery rather than the saturation of representation that engenders these compulsive
performances, but instead pointing to the danger of facile invocations of captivity, sound bites about themillions
These encounters with

slavery are conditioned by the repression and erasure of the violent
history of deportation and social death in the national imagination , and the
plantation pastorals and epics of ethnicity that stand in their stead. In this respect, the journey
back is as much motivated by the desire to return to the site of origin and
the scene of the fall, as with the invisible landscape of slavery, the
unmarked ports of entry in the United States, and the national imperative
to forget slavery, render it as romance, or relegate it to some prehistory
that has little to do with the present. The restored plantations of the South reek with the false
lost, and simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement.
grandeur of the good old days, and the cabins dont appear horrible enough. Too easily, onemight conclude,Well,
things werent all that bad. The starkness of the dungeons seems to permit a certain dignity; their cavernous

emptiness resonates with the unspeakable. These blank spaces hint at the enormity of loss, the millions
disappeared, and what Amiri Baraka describes as the X-ed space, the empty space where we live, the space that is
left of our history now a mystery.
End of the world

Anti-Black terror sustains Human community and fragments the
Black psyche only the incomprehensible end of the world solves Wilderson 11 (Frank, PhD, Associate Professor, African American Studies
Dept., UC Irvine, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the
Political Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions, Vol 5, 2011)
Ritual murders
purge White aggressivity
despite
the fact that the filial cleansing and affilial stability proffered by the Black
imagos intrusion as a phobic object does not cut both ways. The Black
psyche emerges within a context of force, or structural violence, which is not
analogous to the emergence of White or non-Black psyches.
the
Black psyche is in a perpetual war with itself because it is usurped by a
White gaze that hates the Black imago and wants to destroy it. The Black self
is a divided self or, better, it is a juxtaposition of hatred projected toward a
Black imago and love for a White ideal
This state of being at
war forecloses upon the possession of elements constitutive of psychic
integration: bearing witness (to suffering), atonement, naming and
recognition, representation. As such, one cannot represent oneself, even to
oneself as a bona fide political subject, as a subject of redress. Black political
ontology is foreclosed in the unconscious just as it is foreclosed in the court.
the black ego, far from being too immature or weak to
integrate, is an absence haunted by its and others negativity. In this respect
the memory of loss is its only possible communication
loss is an
effect of temporality; it implies a syntagmatic chain that absence cannot
apprehend.
loss indicates a prior
plenitude
we all work together, how we all bond over the
Black imago as phobic object, that we might form a psychic community even
though we cannot form political community.
which
subtend Bukharis impeded mourning and my dissembling scholarship,
The upshot of this emergence is that
: hence the state of war (Marriott, Fanons War).
[I]t may not be too fanciful to suggest, Marriott writes, that
(425). It is important to note that
Marriotts psychoanalytic inquiries work through the word loss in order to demonstrate the paucity of its explanatory power. Again,
, absence does not. [29] Marriott explains how
He does so by recalling that exemplary moment in Black Skin, White Masks, when Fanon sees
himself through the eyes of a White boy who cries in terror, Look a Negro!
Symbolically, Fanon knows that any black man could have triggered the childs fantasy of being devoured that attaches itself to a fear of blackness, for
this fear signifies the racial epidermal schema of Western culturethe unconscious fear of being literally consumed by the black other. Neither the boy nor Fanon seems able to avoid this schema, moreover, for culture determines
This phobia is
comprised of affective responses, sensory reactions or presubjective
constellations of intensities, as well as representational responses, such as
the threatening imago of a fecal body which portends contamination. And
this affective/representational performance is underwritten by paradigmatic
violence; which is to say the fantasy secures what Marriott calls its objective
value because it lives within violence too pervasive to describe.
The
overwhelming psychic alienation that emerges from the literal fear and
trembling of the White boy when Fanon appears, accompanied by the foul
language that despoilsis traumatic for the Black psyche. One comes to
learn that when one appears, one brings with one the threat of cannibalism
and maintains the imago associated with blackness; cultural fantasy allows Fanon and the boy to form a bond through racial antagonism (Bonding over Phobia 420). [30]
xvi The picture of the black psyche
that emerges from this intrusion is one that is always late, never on time, violently presented and fractured by these moments of specular intrusion (Bonding over Phobia 420).
What a thing, writes Fanon, to have eaten ones father! (Black Skin, White Masks)And the Black psyche retains the memory of that eternal White fear of being eaten [and] turned into shit by an organic communion with the
black body [This] is one of the most depressing and melancholic fantasies ensuing from the psychodynamics of intrusion (Bonding over Phobia 421). [31] Again, though this is a bond between Blacks and Whites, it is produced
by a violent intrusion that does not cut both ways. Whereas the phobic bond is an injunction against Black psychic integration and Black filial and affilial relations, it is the life blood of White psychic integration and filial (which is to
say domestic) and affilial (or institutional) relations. [32] To add to this horror, when we scale up from the cartography of the mind to the terrain of armed struggle and the political trials, we may be faced with a situation in which the
eradication of the generative mechanism of Black suffering is something that is not in anyones interest. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering explored in this article, is not in the interest of the court, as Justice
Taney demonstrates as his ruling mobilizes the fantasy of immigration to situate the Native American within political community and to insure the Africans standing as a genealogical isolate. Taneys majority decision suggests that
juridical and political standing, like subjectivity itself, are not constituted by positive attributes but by their capacity to sidestep niggerization. Nor is the eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering in the interests of
the White political prisoners such a David Gilbert and Judith Clark, Kuwasi Balagoons codefendantstheir ideological opposition to the court, capitalism, and imperialism notwithstanding, because such ideological oppositions mark
conflicts within the world rather than an antagonism to the world.
Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black

suffering would mean the end of the world and they would find themselves
peering into an abyss (or incomprehensible transition) between epistemes;
between, that is, the body of ideas that determine that knowledge that is
intellectually certain at any particular time.
This
trajectory is too iconoclastic for working class, post-colonial, and/or radical
feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be liberated in the
world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world;
which is why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between
the living and the dead.
In other words, they would find themselves suspended between worlds.
Finally, if we push Marriotts findings to the wall, it becomes clear that eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering is also not in the interests of
Black revolutionaries. For how can we disimbricate Black juridical and political desire from the Black psyches desire to destroy the Black imago, a desire which constitutes the psyche? In short, bonding with Whites and non-Blacks
over phobic reactions to the Black imago provides the Black psyche with the only semblance of psychic integration it is likely to have: the need to destroy a Black imago and love a White ideal. In these circumstances, having a
white unconscious may be the only way to connect withor even containthe overwhelming and irreparable sense of loss. The intruding fantasy offers the medium to connect with the lost internal object, the ego, but there is also
no outside to this real fantasy and the effects of intrusion are irreparable (Bonding over Phobia 426). This raises the question, who is the speaking subject of Black insurgent testimony? Who bears witness when the Black
insurgent takes the stand? Black political horizons are singularly constrained, because the process through which the Black unconscious emerges and through which Black people form psychic community with Humans is the very
process which bars Black people from political community.
Solvency (Every alt)
Black Skinhead Alt

Play all of black skinhead by Kanye west
We should endorse the global thought experiment of being Kanye

West that solves black social death

actions validate black existence and combats black death
Curry 14 Dr. Tommy J. Curry is an associate professor of philosophy at Texas
A&M University. You Cant Stand the Nigger I See!: Kanye Wests Analysis of
Anti-Black Death. The Cultural Impact of Kanye West. 3/6/14. Fuck you if
youre offended by our language. PWoods.
Kanye West
knowledge.
For West,
s,
. Over two

deserving death
analysis
Kanye Wests
, through taxonomy,

Wests recent

rappers
possessions
Beautiful
Twisted
Dark
Fantasy
(2010).
Yeezus!
(2013)
is
an
accumulation
of
this
pessimistic
rendering
of
the
world.
(James, 2005)
(race)
(sex)
(pseudological)
Remembrance alt solvency

Standing in the shoes of ancestors provides a vessel of
remembrancereminding those peoples of todays oppressionsthe
broken promises of the civil rights movement, unrealized
aspirations and devalued lives
professor, (Saidiya V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic
Clearly, the primal scene that explains the origin of the subject is the event of captivity and enslavement, thus the
sites returned to are the dungeons, barracoons, and slave houses of the west coast of Africa. The journey through
the dungeons is a kind of time travel that transports the tourist to the past. Not only do these fantasies have
complicated and mixed origins, but their enactment is no less vexed; for the identification of origins, the drama of
return and the staging of recovery are shot through with an awareness of both the impossibility and the necessity of
redressing the irreparable. At the portal that symbolized the finality of departure and the impossibility of reversion,
the tensions that reside in mourning the dead are most intensely experienced. Mourning is both an expression of
loss that tethers us to the dead and severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming the place of the dead.
To the degree that the

bereaved attempt to understand this space of death by placing
themselves in the position of the captive, loss is Attenuated rather than
The excesses of empathy lead us to mistake our return with the captives.
addressed , and the phantom presence of the departed and the dead
eclipsed by our simulated captivity. You are back! We are encouraged to see
ourselves as the vessels for the captives return; we stand in the
ancestors shoes .We imaginatively witness the crimes of the past and cry
for those victimizedthe enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered . And the
obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ourselves, too. As we remember those
ancestors held in the dungeons, we cant but think of our own dishonored
and devalued lives and the unrealized aspirations and the broken
promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movement. The
intransigence of our seemingly eternal second-class status propels us to
make recourse to stories of origin, unshakable explanatory narratives, and sites of injurythe
land where our blood has been spiltas if some essential ingredient of ourselves can be
recovered at the castles and forts that dot the western coast of Africa, as
if the location of the wound was itself the cure, or as if the weight of dead
generations could alone ensure our progress.
Remembrance frames the crimes in such a way as to give a vantage

point to contemporary progress, as limited as that is, and turns
history into a museum.
professor, 02 (Saidiya V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic
Given the irreparable nature of this event, which Jamaica Kincaid describes as a wrong that can be assuaged only
by undoing the past, is acting out the past the best

approximation of working through available to us? By suffering the past
are we better able to grasp hold of an elusive freedomand make it
substantial? Is pain the guarantee of compensation? Beyond contemplating injury or
apportioning blame, how can this encounter with the past fuel emancipatory
by the impossible, that is,

efforts? Is it enough that these acts of commemoration rescue the
unnamed and unaccounted for from obscurity and oblivion, counter the
disavowals constitutive of the U.S. national community, and unveil the complicitous
discretion of the scholarship of the trade? Bluntly put, is there a necessary relation between
remembrance and Redress? Can the creation of a collective memory of
past crimes insure the end of injustice?22 Can monumentalizing the past
suffice in preventing atrocity? Or does it only succeed in framing these
crimes against humanity from the vantage point of contemporary
progress and reason, turning history into one great museum in which we
revel in antiquarian excess ? Can we get the merest hint of that event by spending half an hour in
the dungeons? I am not trying to make light of these engagements with the past, but only to shake our confidence
in commemoration and the accompanying conceits about world peace and universal history entailed in the
designation of thesemonuments asWorld Heritage sites and, as well, consider whether the imagined and simulated
captivity doesnt in fact operate to contrary purposes if it doesntminimize the very terror it sets out to represent
through these mundane reenactments.
Civil Society Destruction

The concept of civil society must be dismantled in order to have
black subjectivity
MR)
Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a
monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the
reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject
(whether a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration
of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the Black subject
beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims
Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of
"absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes
the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a
Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that
cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless
be pursued to the death. 26
Black = Center
Black positionality is at the center, it shapes the world
MR)
Any serious musing on the question of antagonistic identity formation - a formation, the mass mobilization of which
must
come to grips with the contradictions between the political demands
of radical social movements, such as the large prison abolition
movement, which seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex,
and the ideological structure that underwrites its political desire. I
contend that the positionality of Black subjectivity is at the heart of those
contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the
political limitations of several naturalized and uncritically accepted
categories that have their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci, namely, work or
can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and assumptive logic that undergird the United State of America -
labor, the wage, exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the symptoms of rage and resignation I
hear in the words of George Jackson, when he boils reform down to a single word, "fascism," or in Assata's brief
the
failure of radical social movements to embrace symptoms of all
three gestures is tantamount to the reproduction of an anti-Black
politics that nonetheless represents itself as being in the service of
the emancipation of the Black prison slave. By examining the strategy and structure
declaration, "i hated it," as well as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today,
of the Black subject's absence in, and incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come
The Black American subject imposes

a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of Gramscian
discourse and on today's coalition politics. In other words, s/he implies a scandal. (2)
The Black subject reveals the inability of social movements
grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy
(rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into question
their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism .
face to face with three unsettling consequences: (1)
Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that
transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations, formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage
slavery, exploitation, and hegemony, but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms
toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. (3) We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual
anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of
worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its
conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and insure the coherence of
Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other
The scandal, with which the Black subject

position "threatens" Gramscian and coalition discourse, is manifest
in the Black subject's incommensurability with, or disarticulation of,
and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the Black subject destabilize emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of historical materialism? How does the Black
subjectfunction within the "American desiring machine" differently
than the quintessential Gramscian subaltern, the worker?
postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e., idleness.
Antiblack Hierarchy
Solving for anti-blackness cannot occur within the affs paradigm it
can only happen when we get rid the human hierarchy
and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 17-18) GG
In The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, James Baldwin wrote about the terrible gap between [Norman Mailers]
life and my own (174). It is a painful essay in which he explains how he experienced, through beginning and ending
his friendship with Mailer, those moments when Blackness inspires White emancipatory dreams and how it feels
to suddenly realize the impossibility of the inverse: [T]he
really ghastly thing about trying to

convey to a white man the reality of the Negro experience has nothing
whatever to do with the fact of color, but has to do with this mans
relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing
to face in his (175). His long Paris nights with Mailer bore fruit only to the extent that Mailer was able to
say, Me too. Beyond that was the void which Baldwin carried with him into and, subsequently, outside of the
friendship. Baldwins condemnation of discourses that utilize exploitation and alienations grammar of suffering is
I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known

impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a
vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and
unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives (172). He is writing about
unflinching:
the encounters between Blacks and Whites in Paris and New York in the 1950s, but he may as well be writing about
the 18th century encounters between Slaves and the rhetoric of new republics like revolutionary France and
Baldwin puts his finger on the nature of the

impasse which allows the Black to catalyze White-to-White thought, without risking a White-to-Black encounter:
There is a difference, he writes, between Norman and myself in that I
think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have
never had anything to lose (172). It is not a lack of goodwill or the practice
of rhetorical discrimination, nor is it essentially the imperatives of the
profit motive that prevent the hyperbolic circulation of Blackness from
cracking and destabilizing civil societys ontological structure of empathy
even as it cracks and destabilizes previously accepted categories of
thought about politics (Dorsey 355). The key to this structural prohibition
barring Blackness from the conceptual framework of human empathy can
be located in the symbolic value of that something to save which Baldwin saw in
America (Dorsey 354-359). Early in the essay,
Mailer. It was not until 1967/68, with such books as Tell Me How Long the Trains Been Goneafter he had
Baldwin permitted himself to give up hope

and face squarely that the Master/Slave relation itself was the essence of
that something to save.
exhausted himself with The Fire Next Timethat
War Position
War with in civil society is a revolutionary movement,
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the
Slave in Civil Society?, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,
Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Students of struggle return, doggedly, to the Prison Notebooks for insights regarding how to bring about a
revolution in a society in which state/capital formations are in some way protected by the trenches of civil society.
It is this outer perimeter, this discursive trench, constructed by an ensemble of private initiatives, activities, and
an ensemble of pose-able questions (hegemony), which must be reconfigured before a revolution can take the form
But this trench called civil society is not, for Gramsci, in

and of itself the bane of the working class. Instead it represents a
terrain to be occupied, assumed, and appropriated in a pedagogic
project of transforming common sense into good sense. This notion of
destruction-construction is a War of Position which involves agitating within
civil society in a revolutionary movement that builds qualitatively
new social relationships (Sassoon, 1987, p. 15): [A War of Position] is a struggle that engages on a
of a frontal assault.
wide range of fronts in which the state as normally definedis only one aspect. [For Gramsci a War of Position is the
because it is the form in which bourgeois

power is exercised [and victory on] these fronts makes possible or
conclusive a frontal attack or War of Movement. (Sassoon, 1987, pp. 1517)
most decisive form of engagement]
Structural Analysis
Critiques of white supremacy provide analysis and understanding
Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State
University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 2003
(Steve and Jared, "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy", Social Identities,
Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-3-12, MR)
Like going to the state to protect us from the police,
these critiques approach a variety of

white ideologies and disciplines as a means of gaining insight into white
supremacy. It is a project dedicated to only looking so far at race, racism,
or white supremacy so as to avoid the risk of seeing oneself there,
implicated as either perpetrator or victim. In effect, all of these theories remain disguises for
the role of race and racism as social categorisation. Once one recognises that the power
relations that categorise as such are genocidal, as Joy James has demonstrated, then
the very discriminatory hierarchy that structures them must already
subsume as strategies for itself the class struggles, privileges,
educational facilities and juridical operations to which the left goes. The
task of the critique of white supremacy is to avoid these general
theoretical pitfalls and to produce new analyses, modes of apprehension,
and levels of abstraction.
War->Decolonize
War is the only way to decolonize
California, Berkeley,Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine)
There is perhaps a simple explanation for the distinction that most make between Fanon's two major works.
Violence, in Wretched of the Earth, does gain an additional aspect: whereas the external function of violence in
Black Skin, White Masks was largely one of enforced recognition (which, nevertheless, entails a perceived threat of
violence), in Fanon's later work he adds to this the practical function of eliminating the system of colonial privilege.
It is with regard to this practical objective that Fanon's insistence on actual violence emerges, in the claim that :
"The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets

and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall
be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive
struggle between the two protagonists."31 Here, violence is not a
strategy, but a "truth," the product of the insistence of the
privileged on maintaining the colonial system from which they
benefit.But isn't Fanon's claim that colonial privilege won't go without a fight relatively uncontroversial? In
fact, most criticism of Fanon's theory of violence focuses not on this straightforward and
practical external demand for violence, but rather on the internal
sideof the equation, and ironically it is here that we see more continuity than rupture vis--vis the more
overtly symbolic function of violencein Black Skin, White Masks.
Symbolic Decolonization
Decolonization creates humanity
The similarity to the ontological self-assertion of Fanon's earlier work is apparent from the outset of his discussion of
violence in Wretched, since as he puts it, "decolonization
is the veritable creation of

new men the 'thing' which has been colonized becomes a man
during the same process by which it frees itself." The violence of the colonizer
32
the "lines of force," the "rifle butts and napalm" which constitute the Manichean division of the colonial worldis
"claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he
surges into the forbidden quarters."33 But we should be clear here: what is crucial is the decision, and this is where
the importance of symbolic violence becomes apparent. Elsewhere, Fanon puts it as follows :
"it is
precisely at the moment he realized his humanity that he begins to
sharpen the weapons with which he will secure his victory." 34The
realization of one's own humanity is prior to the sharpening of the
weapons of liberation, and the mere promise of struggle is fundamental to the affirmation of
equality.
Shanara Reid-Brinkley alt

This Alternative form of knowledge production leads to a double
conscious. The inclusion of personal narratives allows us to reflect
on out own social location, while alternate forms of knowledge allow
us to understand the oppression of others. By teaching code
switching we allow intra-communal discussion.
Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley et al, 13

(Dr. Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Address and
Advocacy, Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union, Amber Kelsie,
M.A., Nicholas Brady, 2013, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/,
Accessed 1/25/14, NC)
Bankeys positioning of himself at the borderland while excluding (multiply
situated) black people in debate from that same space makes little sense to
those familiar with the history of race in America. Black people have never
not had to be in close relation to whiteness. This is Dubois theory of double
consciousness (which, though especially emblematic of black experience, is
a way of understanding the world that can be learned by non-blacks). Black
people have always existed in an in-between space of blackness and
whiteness with anti-blackness serving as the context for this relationship.
Black folks in America are always already in an interracial relationship
with whiteness; this is especially true in the context of debate. The tone
of Bankeys criticism assumes black people exclude white people from their
space, but MPJ and other debate practices demonstrate the direct manner
in which white people exclude black people from interracial dialogue in

the debate space. An even more recent example of how structural racism
functions is the exclusion of Elijah Smith, the reigning NDT champ, from the
Kentucky Round Robin, and the attempt to change the rules pertaining to
transfer students. We are disappointed by this addition to the consistent

complaint made by whites that black people must be constantly accessible
to whites even while white people disavow the structure of policed
segregation in supposedly common spaces. In fact, it seems quite likely that
this thesis will inspire debate arguments that produce exclusions of black
students rather than an inclusive space of participation. We find it highly
unlikely that it will produce an authentic communication or disalienation.
There are countless examples of the manner in which black people
attempt to meet the communicative and bodily expectations of dominant
culture and dominant debate. Code-switching is part and parcel of our
interracial romance with debate , an example of our commitment to
compromise. Black people often code-switch into white-people speak
when dealing with white people while using black language and tonal
intonations (regionally specific) when in majority black spaces (in fact, it
seems that it is when we speak authentically in the presence of whites

share ourselves with whitesthat we are charged with the crime of being
intentionally unintelligible). Within debates, (vis--vis framework for
example) there is a denial or a disavowal of even the possibility of an
engagement across rhetorical difference, which is the move Bankey makes.
He refuses to code switch in the thesis by not attempting to understand
the kinship networks in debate for black people or to engage in rhetorical
practices to demonstrate a commitment to engaging difference at the
level of method and performance.[ 9] How often do we encounter white
people who can code-switch (and no we dont mean the latest hip hop
slang) into the communicative and socio-political practices of black

culture? The black is always already at the borderland. But double
consciousness is something that for most peopleespecially non-blacks
must be learned and practiced. We believe that these kinds of practices
and attempts on the part of black people to meet whites more than half-way
are evident for those who choose to see. But also we must point out that in
communication studies code-switching, the vernacular, counter-publics,
and many other concepts evoke the double-sidedness of rhetorical
practice in ways that complicate the very notion that there could ever be
a pure communication . We therefore invite Bankey to read the
Communication Studies section of the library as well as the Black Studies

section.
Alt Solvency (Paradigm analysis

only)
Paradigmatic analysis allows us to change the mountain that is the
USFG
HALL vice-chancellor @ University of Salford 2k10
Martin-historical archaeologist; He was for a time President of the World Archaeological Congress and General
Secretary of the South African Archaeological Society. He moved to UCT (University of Capetown) in 1983, where he
led the Centre for African Studies and later became the Head of the Department of Archaeology. He was the
inaugural Dean of Higher Education Development between 1999 and 2002; was deputy Vice-Chancellor at UCT for
six years. Professor Hall is married with three children. His wife, Professor Brenda Cooper, is an academic
specialising in post-colonial and African literature; There Was An Ocean; Professional Inaugural Lecture at
University of Salford, September 29;
http://www.salford.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/73628/There-Was-anOcean-final.pdf
formal legislation, which tends towards

tradition, must be rendered malleable by lived experience in a recursive network
of stable change. It is an example which brings us back to Cape Town, in the circulating system of references
that has constituted this presentation. As with South Africa, British universities are subject to
legislation that seeks to advance equality for defined equality strands , broadly the
equivalent of designated groups in South African legislation. And, as with South Africa, there is a clear
danger that legislation, which is a vital site for resistance to the Apartheid past, will
remain at the formal level as an issue of compliance. Our Listen! strategy seeks to
address this by taking a development approach to equality and diversity. The
focus on listening evokes one of the founding values of the academy; a
constant openness to new possibilities and a willingness to challenge and debate
the status quo. Listening, in turn, leads to appropriate actions that advance
respect for the values of diversity. This has been expressed by Judith Butler in her essay, Giving an
Account on Oneself, our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves. Our knowledge of
ourselves is inevitably incomplete. Opportunities come from creating spaces for
new voices to be heard. For a university, where respect for new thinking and
expression is a founding value, the virtue of listening is paramount.
By taking a developmental approach, Listen! seeks the recognition of diversity
and difference as educational assets, the protection and advancement of minority
groups, and the provision of opportunities for all individuals to realize their full
potential. Whether in Cape Town or Salford, the university with its enshrined rituals,
customs, respect for debate and status, has the potential to drive the battle for
social justice. I have suggested that these processes of institutional transformation can
be analysed as the interplay between formal and substantive elements of making
meaning, traced as circulating systems of references. But thickening and
deepening this understanding of structures, both formal and substantive, at the
end of a long swim and a big climb, it is individuals who have to listen and learn
and change as part of their university education . This accounts for the slight, but
crucial change in the sameness of the repetition of Paul Simons ballad: Once upon a
time there was an ocean. But now its a mountain range. Something unstoppable
set into motion. Nothing is different, but everythings changed. I figure that once
upon a time I was an ocean. But now Im a mountain range. Something
unstoppable set into motion. Nothing is different, but everythings changed.
This leads in turn to a final example of the ways in which

Rejecting alternative forms of knowledge production continues
oppression instead of combating it-
Butler4
{Judith Butler; Prof of rhetoric and comp lit at Uc Berkeley Precarious Life:
The Powers of mourning and violence Introduction Pg XIX-XX; 2004;
http://programaddssrr.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/butler-judith-precariouslife.pdf} AvP
Dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical
views of state policy and civic culture remaining part of a larger public
discussion of the value of policies and politics. To charge those who voice
critical views with treason, terrorist sympathizing, anti-Semitism
moral relativism, postmodernism, juvenile behavior collaboration,
anachronistic leftism is to seek to destroy the credibility not the
views that are held but of the persons who hold them . It produces
the climate of fear in which to voice a certain view is to risk being
branded and shamed with a heinous appellation. To continue to voice
ones view under those conditions is not easy since one must not only
discount the truth of the appellation but brave the stigma that seizes up from
the public domain. Dissent is quelled in part through threatening the
speaking subject with an uninhabitable identification. Because it would be
heinous to identify as treasonous as a collaborator, one fails to speak, or one
speaks in throttled ways in order to sidestep the terrorizing identification that
threatens to take hold this strategy for quelling dissent and limiting the reach
of critical debate happens not only through a series of shaming tactics which
have a certain psychological terrorization as their effect but they work as
well by producing what will and will not count as a viable speaking subject
and a reasonable opinion within the public domain. It is precisely because
one does not want to lose ones status as a viable speaking being that one
does not say what one thinks. Under social conditions that regulate
identifications and the sense of viability to sense of viability to this
degree censorship operates implicitly and forcefully. The line that
circumscribes what is speakable and what is livable also functions
as an instrument of censorship. To decide what views will count as
reasonable within the public domain however, is to decide what will and will
not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that
are not in line with the nationalist norm that person comes to lack credibility
as a speaking person and the media is not open to him or her (through the
internet, interestingly is). The foreclosure of critique empties the public
domain of debate and democratic contestation itself so that debate becomes
the exchange of views among the like minded and criticism, which ought to
be central to any democracy becomes a fugitive and suspect activity.
Radical Politics demand the questioning of U.S ethics and existenceParadigmatic analysis resolves this as it poses the questions
Wilderson 2010
(Frank, Associate Professor at UC Irvines Department of Drama and African

American Studies, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 8-10, #JC)
Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to
the questions asked by radical politics

and scholarship were not Should the U.S. be overthrown ? or even
speak the unspeakable .ii In the 1960s and early 1970s
come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the
U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom
Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were
accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American
Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or
chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of success, but they
could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a

convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an
ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and
progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law
and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.iii One could (and many did) acknowledge
Americas strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather
The political discourse of Blacks,

and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the
U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of
ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the
retreated as did White radicals and progressives who retired from
struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black
remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces.
Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement)
for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not
only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual
revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist.
Paradigmatic analysis addresses the root cause of of antagonismrace and colonialism
Wilderson 2010

Unlike Dyer, I do not meditate on the representational power of Whiteness, that it be made strange, divested of
its imperial capacity, and thus make way for representational practices in cinema and beyond that would serve as
aesthetic accompaniments for a more egalitarian civil society in which Whites and non-Whites could live in
harmony. Laudable as that dream is, I do not share Dyers assumption that we are all Human. Some of us are only
part Human (Savage) and some of us are Black (Slave). I find his argument that Whiteness possesses the easiest
claim to Humanness to be productive. But whereas Dyer offers this argument as a lament for a social ill that needs
a paradigmatic analysis
that clarifies structural relations of global antagonisms and not as a step toward
to be corrected, I borrow it merely for its explanatory poweras a way into
healing the wounds of social relations in civil society. Hence this books interchangeable deployment of White,
Settler, and Master withand to signifyHuman. Again, like Lacan, who mobilizes the psychoanalytic encounter to
make claims about the structure of relations writ large, and like Marx who mobilizes the English manufacturer to
make claims about the structure of economic relations writ large, I am mobilizing three races, four films, and one
the Black/Human antagonism

supercedes the worker/capitalist antagonism in political economy, as
well as the gendered antagonism in libidinal economy. To this end, the book takes
sub-continent to make equally generalizable claims and argue that
stock of how socially engaged popular cinema participates in the systemic violence that constructs America as a
settler society (Churchill) and slave estate (Spillers). Rather than privilege a politics of culture(s)i.e. rather
than examine and accept the cultural gestures and declarations which the three groups under examination make
about themselvesI
privilege a culture of politics: in other words, what I am

concerned with is how White film, Black film and Red film articulate and/or disavow the matrix of
violence which constructs the three essential positions which in turn

structure Americas antagonisms.
The criticism is a disruption of the status quos paradigm.

ANCs armed wing, 2010(Frank B. III Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics Red, White, & Black:
Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the

Settlement and the Slave estates destruction, to manifest itself at the
ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a
constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual
discourse in the academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history
has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets
is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes
in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as
ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this
foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both
cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural
antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and
Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present,
Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and
intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars.This
grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image
composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator
to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems
that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an
irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution
of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the
positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or
Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are
conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of family values), the
non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this
coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political
ontologyor non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the
mendacity of conflict.
A2s
Hip hop commodified

Hip hop is critical to societal progress and a cathartic exposure of
the injustices in society
Viola 13 Michael, UCLA. "Hip - Hop and Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy:
Blue Scholarship to Challenge The Miseducation of the Filipino.
http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/04-2-08.pdf. PWoods.
the more conscious people become of
exploitative social relations
the more people
will
become active in changing society
At the forefront in theorizing revolutionary critical pedagogies, McLarens work upholds the belief that
that lie at the root of a global division of labor and the corporatization of our world,
in quantity
the
of
. Only through the imagination and creation of a world outside of the capitalist law of value,
will people come to realize that struggle is their historic right and work to attain the intense desires of freedom that burn within. Echoing this sentiment in his latest book, Rage and Hope, McLaren asserts:
Revolutionary critical pedagogy can assist us in understanding history as a

process in which human beings make their own society although in
,
conditions most often not of their own choosing
and therefore populated wit h the intentions of others...The actions of human beings
are what shapes history. History is not given form and substance by abstract categories. The idea that a future society comes into being as a negation of the existing one finds its strongest expression in class struggle (19). In their
lucid essay, Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies, Peter McLaren and Gustavo Fischman answer a crucial question presented in Gramscis Prison Notebooks, where he poses: "is it better to think,
McLaren and Fischman

highlight the importance of a collective critical consciousness that
transcends a social relation of domination
to not only
without having a critical awareness, ... or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically ones own conception of the world?" 30
as they support the capacity of human beings
understand the world but more importantly to transform it
. McLaren and Fischman recover Gramscis
notion of hegemony from theorists who employ its use but disregard the fundamental social contradictions between capital and labor. Furthermore, they make clear that the strategy to recreate society must take place not only in the
transformation of civil society but more comprehensively in the creation of proletari an hegemony. They state: The problem with [uncritical] view[s] of hegemony is that in their emphasis, to distance themselves from what they
consider to be a crude economism, they often seriously neglect the fundamental social contradictions between capital and labor and resecured the prohibitions on challenging th e contradictions of capitalism... 31 They go on to
argue that such exclusions in Gramscis notion of hegemony, have effectively caused domination to hemorrhage into a pool of relational negotiation s in which certain ideological positions are won through consent. Here, we need to
be reminded that intellectuals themselves are always the products of new forms of collective labor power brought about and consolidated by the forces of production. 3 2 Hip - Hop and the Naming of the World Gramsci believed that
ordinary men and women could be educated into understanding the coercive
and persuasive power of
hegemony over them Gramsci highlighted the
important roles of intellectuals who aligned with subalterns and acted to
transform the social existence of oppressed communities
The new
intellectual can
consist
in active
participation in practical life , as constructor, organizer, permanent
persuader, and not just a simple orator
the oral expression central to hip-hop comes from our nations
racialized youth, who are surviving in a system that mandates inequality and
exploitation. Hip-hop artists
speak in active participation in practical
capitalist
. 3 3
. He states,
no longer
...
in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but
. 3 4 As I have mentioned in my article, Filipino American Hip - Hop and Class Consciousness: Renewing
the Spirit of Carlos Bulosan,
33
often
life revealing peoples present needs for adequate food, shelter, and
hip-hop is an important musical outlet that possesses the

ability to leave a lasting imprint in the hearts and minds of the struggling
a revolutionary critical pedagogy
demystify the exploitative nature of capitalism while at the same time
sharpen the lens for social analysis , untie the tongue for cultural
critique , and strengthen the heart for activism among those who listen
security
. Furthermore,
instance, the Seattle based group Blue Scholars, contributesin the development of
and relate
. For
as they disseminate lyrical messages that
. Through their music, Blue Scholars assist in the development of a critical consciousness by naming the world and helping to uncover the material reality for many Filipinos and other oppressed
communities who are shack led in the chains of international capital gain. 3 6 In their song Southside Revival, Blue Scholars identify how the critique of capital and the satisfaction of human needs are at the roots of their musical
philosophy: Hungry is an adjective attached to my philosophy, You got to be, progress revolves around economy. I can see the consequences of capital first hand, Monorail construction push[es] the tenants off the land. The Word
Employed to Unveil and Transform The musical duo of Blue Scholars, consisting of Filipino - American, Geologic (vocals) and Sabzi (DJ) are examples of hip - hop artists who serve as intellectuals and permanent persuaders whose
purpose is to serve the social groups with whom they share fundamental interests. They use their music as an organizing tool to reclaim history, challenge what is viewed as natural, and engage with the masses in charting
alternativesto capitalism. Through their various performances in mainstream concerts, community organized benefits, and anti-imperialist conferences, Blue Scholars work to build relational knowledge of and with the masses to help
them develop a critical and collective reflectiveness. As Paulo Freire emphasized, critical inquiry and unveiling is not enough for social transformation. Freire asserts, If it was possible to change reality simply by our witness for
example, we would have to think that reality is changed inside of our consciousness. Then it would be very easy to be a liberatory educator! All we would have to do is an intellectual exercise and society would change! No, this is not
the question. To change the concrete conditions of reality mean a tremendous political practice, which demands mobilization, organization of the people...all these things, which are not organized just inside the school . 3 7 Freires
words remind us that the transformation of the society does not take place only within the individual basis of self - reflection but through the collective actions of people. Through their connection with the pro-democratic

Blue Scholars directly engage with youth, workers, and students in
translating theory into concrete strategies for improving their communities
organizations,
Demonstrating this commitment, Blue Scholars performed a benefit concert to financially support a national Filipino youth conference organized by the group Sandiwa. 35 The conference, in recognition of this years centennial of
Filipino migration to the United States, brought Filipino youth from around the country to critically examine the role Filipino s have played as cheap labor in the sugar plantations of Hawaii, the agricultural fields of California's Central
Valley, and the canneries of the Pacific Northwest. Sandiwa proclaims their hope that this conference connects our history with the ongoing s truggle millions of Filipinos face today in search of new homelands away from the existing
conditions in the Philippines. In a workshop organized by the youth collective, Anakbayan (whom Geo is an active member), to honor Filipino labor organizer, writer , and activist, Carlos Bulosan, Anakbayan proclaims: we hope to
improve our conditions by studying and educating others about the rich culture and proud revolutionary heritage of the Filipino peoples continuing struggle. We also work towards building anti - imperialist unity among all people to
Because their music isintimatelyconnected with

Seattlesworking class community of color who are politically active in
reflecting and acting up on the problems that engulf their lives ,
more significantly serving as committed agents to
make possible another world
Blue Scholars music substantiate the
testament that everyone is a philosopher and that it is not a question of
introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyones
individual life, but of renovating and making critical already
expose and oppose U.S. imperialist intervention in the Philippines . 3 9
Blue Scholars is not simply
employing resistance (which is largely passive and individual in focus) but
. Lyrical Examination
existing activity
. 40 In their song, Wounded Eyes, Blue Scholars reflect upon the conditions of their racialized and working class communities who they describe as poverty stricken
folks, constantly liv[ing] in hope. American dreams angling from a rope. Further exposing the difficult realities many people face in their communities, rapper, Geologic declares, I study to survive... ...where the struggle and the
hustle coincide. In this moment in time, a shift in the tide. Get the blindfold lifted from your eyes, and see what we see. And stop pretending its all right. 41 Paralleling the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Blue Scholars recognize that as
Blue Scholars utilize

their music as an outlet for study as well as a conduit to promote the
transformation of the systems that have left many without proper food,
housing, and education
Who am
I? A student. Observing my environment to see contradictions, In concrete
conditions. Evidence were living in an obsolete system
artists their music must not consist solely in eloquence [as] an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions. As permanent persuaders in their community,
. In the same song, the y state, My wounded eyes seen through the lies. Many brutalized, so we rise and fight for the future we strive. ...
. ...I got folks working in the public school sector, who lose one
youth to death per semester. I guess the cost of living is going up, While the chance of living is going down. 42 Supporting the dialectical process of praxis, Blue Scholars pull at the roots of a material relation (between labor and
capital) that dehumanize those left with no other option but to sell their labor power. Scrutinizing the personal effects of such a system, in his song Cornerstone vocalist, Geologic rhymes how he, like many people, dont really own
a damn thing, except for my labor. And maybe, a couple thousand pages of my rhymes. He goes on to assert that this system has placed our brains in a cage, unless ...knowledge itself is given proper prospective. To see how
politicians keep the dollars protected... [with their] false prophesy, promising we will all be free. As long as we fall in line with the flawed philosophy... [while]the ranks start to swell, in the hoods and jail cells. 43 Providing further
explanation of this f lawed philosophy I turn to the writings of Epifanio San Juan, Jr. At a talk he gave at the Carlos Bulosan Symposium in Washington D.C., San Juan lucidly provides the characteristics of the present social system
that dichotomizes society leaving the major ity deprived of land, tools or animals...confined to sell their labor - power and do manual labor while those free from laboring with their hands, supposedly educated, occupy a higher
position or status. He maintains that those who occupy the lower rungs in this division of labor are there not as a result of being uneducated, but of being dispossessed, racialized and colonized. 44 As I have shown with the
education policies in the Philippines and the United States,
the educational apparatus in its present form
legitimizes inequality by assigning individuals to unequal social positions
Blue Scholars provides further detail into this system that disseminates a false philosophy to the majority of the people in society. In their song Commencement Day, Blue Scholars sing, you know they made curriculums
designed to create obedient drones. They elaborate, They never tell you the conditions in which to apply the math. Only 65 percent of your peers, freshman year, are still here. And half that total will move on, But three out of four,
will drop out in two years. Add it up and it equals some shit has gone wrong. Now the snakes gave the education budget rollback, No Child Left Behind is just a backdoor draft... Its the next generation of miseducatedyouth , next
time ask them for proof. 4 5 Lyrics such as this strongly conflict with the endorsements made by educational bureaucrats who claim that privatization is the panacea for students, parents, and teachers. For instance, Education
Secretary, Margaret Sp ellings, recently defended the policy of No Child Left Behind stating that the law works. She argues that people who are critical of the law simply fear the results. 46 Ironically, Spellings is not entirely
wrong. Many youth of color, are fearful of r ecent education legislation as they witness their peers entering militarized zones as opposed to school zones. Authors such as Angela Davis and Mumia Abu - Jamal have already revealed
the harsh reality for many African Americans in the United States whose a ttendance in prisons exceeds the numbers for those in institutions of higher learning. Education, Economy, and War Education in the Philippines was
transformed in 1982 to further produce the necessary labor for an export - oriented economy. In the United S tates the economy does not evolve around export but rather a military - industrial complex. As the United States fights
its wars in the occupied countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, the countrys labor force must meet the demands of a war - based economy. Th e backdoor draft that Blue Scholars allude to in their song Commencement Day further
discloses how No Child Left Behind is utilized to serve the labor needs of the U.S armed forces. Currently, the U.S. ruling elites promoting the occupations in the Mi ddleEast are calling for an expansion of their wars on terrorism to
such places as Iran and Venezuela. However, public support for U.S imperial aggression dwindles reflected not only in the millions of people who have taken to the streets in protest bu t also in the militarys failure to maintain
monthly recruitment goals. Provisions in NCLB legislation assist the U.S. military with their recruitment problems. Buried on page 559 of the legislations 670 total pages, a small section requires that school s turn over names, phone
numbers, and addresses of all students to the military or risk losing NCLB funding. 47 Succinctly explaining this precarious connection between education policy and war, Blue Scholars explains that the elites solution for the poo r,
[is to] recruit them for the war. 48 The common denominator that links education and war is found in the system of capitalism. 4 9 This is not a new phenomenon. Author and social activist, Rosa Luxemburg, echoed these
sentiments at the turn of the 20 th century. She said, if we consider history as it was not as it could have been or should have been we must agree that war has been an indispensable feature of capitalist development. 50 It is
impossible to omit war and imperialism in the histories of F ilipino Americans. Echoing Luxemburgs words in their song, The Long March, Blue Scholars state, War? What the fuck is it good for? Absolutely everything that this
country has stood for. 51 The words of both Rosa Luxemburg and Blue Scholars, while ex pressed in two different centuries, embody a continuing past, which began with the conquest of the Philippines and carries on in its present
forms characterized by U.S. military training in the Philippines, secret prisons throughout Eastern Europe, and t he ongoing occupations in the Middle East. Ever - imminent Hope The central objective of education should be for the
formation of men and women with minds and attitudes that are in tune to the needs of its people. This is expressed wonderfully in the music of Blue Scholars as they state, My purpose as of now is to serve the people to the fullest.
Serving the people of all colors, genders, ages, and religions requires the
development of a consciousness critical of our present social order
Blue Scholars participates in the development of this
consciousness by naming the world
developing a critical consciousness
is the first step
Contrary to the widespread belief that
there are no alternatives to a system responsible for global
52
. As I have introduced
throughout this essay, the lyrics of
. Furthermore,
only
in a collective path towards equality and justice.
environmental degradation, widespread impoverishment, and perpetual

war , we must actively seek to attain what many believe to be impossible
The present system will not collapse on its own

For those who demand more, the lyrics of
. As it has transpired throughout history, the small group of elites will continue to make the
necessary changes of appeasement in order to accomplish their parochial objectives for profit and power.
Blue Scholars
provide a strategy. They
call us to look critical and begin to organize
quietly, underneath the sugar coated surface of society
. 53
Such messages

that inject the people with courage and hope are indispensable in the
long march ahead
. The obstacles in our path will continue to be great and for many they will seem be an unsurpassable. However, closing with the words of Blue Scholars,
No
uprising fails. Each one is a step forward towards the victory at the end of
the trail
. 54
A2: Eurocentrism
Black scholarship has historically presented an unceasing
critique of Eurocentrism
Davies 99
Carol Boyce, Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Comparative Literature and Director of the African-New World Studies Program at Florida International University in North Miami, available
from Project MUSE, Research in African Literatures, 30.2, pg. 99, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v030/30.2davies.html, Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences | ADM
easiest to mount a
critique of Eurocentrism in the academy
This critique
has been well advanced by
black scholars throughout black intellectual
history in the wake of Middle Passage enslavement and its aftermaths
the evidence of Eurocentrism is still all around us
One
recent contribution
pursues Eurocentricity in a
African-centered" manner Ani's
approach
has to claim a certain set of essential
meanings of
Let us therefore look at the assumptions of dominance in knowledge production that are at the center of Eurocentricity and its descendant US centricity.
It is
perhaps
as a great deal of literature has been amassed in this effort.
a variety of
. More
importantly,
and masquerades as universalism or "normalcy."
in the attempt to challenge Eurocentrism is Marimba Ani's Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (1997), which
detailed and, in her own words, "
. Still,
, in order to work,
(often geneticist)
Africanity and often gives over to Eurocentricity much that it should not
The entire
project of
Black Studies
was directed at challenging the
Euro centric bases of education
Black Studies
whittled away at the
assumptions of Eurocentricity This is not to suggest that Latin American,
. So
rather than invent these critiques of Eurocentricity, I want to briefly summarize some of them here with the aim of arriving at some understanding of its larger logic of unicentricity.
what began to be known as "
" in the late '60s and early '70s
/US-
under which the contemporary academy rested. Indeed, while "
" as a field assumed a
certain cohesion in the wake of entry into the institutions of black students (integration), prior generations of scholars had consistently
Asian, and Arabic thinkers have not been engaged in

Eurocentrism
this project of
challenging
and its construction of the other. Rather, the concern here is to identify some of the scholars in the "Black Studies" tradition. Among them, the generation that included W. E. B. DuBois
engaged in an unrelenting attack on the Eurocentric bases of knowledge and consistently advanced African peoples as worthy subjects of study. Scholars like Carter Woodson and a range of others subsequently pursued similar tasks
at the level of recognizing this "mis-education." Subsequently, historians like John Hope Franklin, in "The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar" (1963) identified how racism and Eurocentrism interfered with the ability of black
Thus, the entire enterprise that has come to be known as AfricanAmerican

Studies can be defined as the interrogation of knowledge
production in ways that challenged the epistemological violence that
Eurocentrism visited on
peoples
the entire edifice of
scholarship to flourish.
, African, or Africana
non-Western and Western
. The conclusion would be that
Western civilization operates on falsehood and perpetuates ignorance

and misinformation as it
99]
continues to assume this Eurocentric error
is assumed/
. [End Page
A2: Identity is fluid

The postmodernist critique of identity commodifies the
violence against otherized groups and reifies white supremacy
HOOKS 1994
BELL, Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from
her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. Tue, 19 Apr. POSTMODERN BLACKNESS. Oberlin College Copyright (c) 1990 by bell hooks, all rights reserved _Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html. PWoods.
The postmodern critique of "identity,

is often posed in
ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy
which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we
cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic
exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial
difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications
of a critique of identity for oppressed groups.
We must
engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful
chances of survival
Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply
appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its
discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the "politics of
difference" from the politics of racism . To take racism seriously one must
consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom
are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the
advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under
current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued
displacement, profound alienation and despair.
There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the
one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden, insecure,
willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be,
concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward
social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an
underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug
addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential
rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a
devastated black industrial working class.
This
hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that
can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation
struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many
other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation,
despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not
informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention
to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class,
gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of
empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments
and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.
" though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle,
Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance.
even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of
essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example.
Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective
plight:
We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness.
Fluidity is inaccessible to blacks, to be black is to alwaysalready be a problem

Yancy 5
George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body. 2005. Pgs. 215-241. PWoods.
The reader will note that the question regarding how it feels to be a problem does not apply to people who have at some point in their lives felt themselves to be a problem. In such cases, feeling like a problem is a contingent
disposition that is relatively finite and transitory.
When Black people are asked the same question by

white America, the relationship between being Black and being a
problem is non-contingent. It is a necessary relation. Outgrowing this
ontological state of being a problem is believed impossible.
temporality is frozen. One is a problem forever.
Hence, when regarding one's "existence
as problematic,"
However, it is important to note that it is from within the
white imaginary that the question "How does it feel to be a problem?" is given birth. To be human is to be thrown-in-the-world. To be human not only means to be thrown within a context of facticity, but it also means to be in
Within
the white imaginary, to be Black means to be born an obstacle at the
very core of one's being. To exist as Black is not "to stand out" facing an
ontological horizon filled with future possibilities of being other than
what one is. Rather, being Black negates the "ex" of existence. Being
Black is reduced to facticity
Hence, within the
framework of the white imaginary, to be Black and to be human are
contradictory terms.
whites remain
imprisoned within a space of white ethical solipsism
many whites would rather remain imprisoned within
the ontology of sameness,
The call of the Other
qua Other remains unheard within the space of whiteness's sameness.
whites occlude the possibility of developing new
forms of ethical relationality to themselves and to non-whites. It is
through
abandoning hegemonic
discourse
that
whites might
embrace the non-white Other
the mode of the subjunctive. It is interesting to note that the etymology of the word "problem" suggests the sense of being "thrown forward," as if being thrown in front of something, as an obstacle.
. For example, it is not as if it is only within the light of my freely chosen projects that things are experienced as obstacles, as Sartre might
say; as Black, by definition, I am an obstacle. As Black, I am the very obstacle to my own meta-stability and trans-phenomenal being. As Black, I am not a project at all.
[End Page 237] Substituting the historical constructivity of whiteness for "manifest destiny,"
(only whites possess needs and desires that are truly worthy of
being respected [Sullivan 2001, 100]). It would seem that
refusing to reject the ideological structure of their identities as "superior."
Locked within their self-enthralled structure of whiteness,
partly
the process of
their
, monologistic
(functioning as the "oracle voice")
reach across the chasm of (nonhierarchical) difference and
in his or her Otherness. "A true
and worthy ideal," as Du Bois writes, "frees and uplifts a people" (1995b, 456). He adds, "But say to a people: 'The one virtue is to be white,' and people rush to the inevitable conclusion, "Kill the 'nigger'!" Of course, the idea

material processes and circuits of desire and power
whiteness strives for totalization; it desires to claim the entire
world for itself and has the misanthropic effrontery to territorialize the
very meaning of the "human
that "the one virtue is white" is a false ideal, for it "imprisons and lowers" (456).
" (McLaren 1998, 66). On this score, reproduced through circuits
of desire and power,
."
Their Universalist interpretation of power relations and the

ability to obscure discussions of race are the epitome of white
privilege
Hays and Chang 3
White Privilege, Oppression, and Racial Identity Development: Implications for Supervision. December 1, 2003. Danica G. Catherine Y. critical race theorists.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-112211443.html. PWoods.
White privilege is the belief that only one's own standards and opinions
are accurate
and that these standards and opinions are
defined and supported by Whites in a way to continually reinforce social
distance between groups, thereby allowing Whites to dominate, control
access to, and escape challenges from racial and ethnic minorities
and that
individuality and mobility are available to all and are necessary to succeed
in society
White privilege is a complex social construct that is
hierarchical in nature, allowing individuals to be members of both
oppressive and oppressed groups
It manifests itself differently
on the basis of experience
desire for status
multiple group
membership
and level of self-identity. Because Whites
generally view their beliefs and actions as normative and neutral
),
they fail to identify Whiteness as a racial identity
and cite historical
examples of the inferiority of other racial or ethnic minorities in
government policies, academic assertions, and public opinion to sustain
(to the exclusion of all other standards and opinions)
. It is an ideology based on
the belief that allocation of resources is a result of the superiority of Whites, that minorities are responsible for their social and economic problems (Frye, 1983; Vodde, 2001),
(Sleeter, 1993).
(McIntosh, 1988; Vodde, 2001).
(Ancis & Szymanski, 2001),
(Hanna et al., 2000),
(Neville, Worthington, & Spanierman, 2001),
(Akintunde. 1999
(Lucal, 1996)

power
White privilege is an invisible and overlooked condition. It is
often lived but not recognized by Whites and greatly influences and limits
racial interactions
guides appropriate ways of living for society
and gives Whites entitlement to take the initiative in discussing or
refusing to discuss racism and oppression
In addition, Whites create
social and cognitive fictions to maintain, explain, and rationalize
differential treatment and subordination of other groups
) and to
sustain the myth of meritocracy, which is a myth of equality and
democracy for all
These
include the myths or beliefs that the White experience is desirable and
universal, power affects everyone the same, guilt is a sufficient response
to accountability for privilege, feelings of discomfort can be used to resist
change or accept privilege, and those with less power can be truly honest
with Whites without penalty or censure
(Vera et al., 1996).
(Lucal, 1996),
(Sleeter, 1993),
(Frye, 1983).
(Vera et al., 1996
(Lucal, 1996; McIntosh, 1988). Some obstacles to addressing and altering White privilege rest in faulty assumptions Whites use to validate privilege.
(Vodde, 2001).

supremacy
Mazzei 11
96)//LA
mobility
for analysis
social norms
of normativity'
Privilege remains
thereby reproducing
the notion of
(Sleeter, 2004).
the
If we think



This preserving and
interestssuch as
desires
(p. 91).

presence. This
A2: Social death bad

Identifying the Black Body as an object of social death creates
a program of incoherence and is necessary to avoid cooption
anything short of radical negativity is a project of Whiteness
Wilderson 10
(Frank - PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkely, Red, Red, White, &
Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 187-188)
If the structure of political desire in socially engaged film hopes to stake out an
antagonistic relationship between its dream and the idiom of power that
underwrites civil society, then it should grasp the invitation to assume
the positionality of objects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we
must admit that the Negro has been inviting Whites and civil societys
junior partners to the dance of death for hundreds of years . Cinema is just one
of many institutions that have refused to learn the steps. In the 1960s and 70s, as
White radicalisms (especially The Weather Undergrounds) discourse and political common sense was beginning
to be authorized by the ethical dilemmas of embodied incapacity (i.e. Blackness), White cinemas historical
proclivity to embrace dispossession through the vectors of capacity (alienation and exploitation) was radically
disturbed. In some films, this proclivity was so profoundly ruptured that while the films in question did not
surrender to the authority of incapacity (did not openly signal their having been authorized by the Slave), they
The
period of COINTELPROS crushing of the Black Panthers and then the
Black Liberation Army was also a period which witnessed the flowering
of the political power of Blacknessnot as institutional capacity but as a zeitgeist, a
demand capable of authorizing White (Settler/Master) radicalism. By 1980, White
were nonetheless unsuccessful in their attempts to assert the legitimacy of the White ethical dilemmas.lv
radicalism had comfortably re-embraced capacitythat is to say, it returned to the discontents of civil society
with the same formal tenacity as it had from 1532lvi to 1967, only now that formal tenacity was emboldened by
a wider range of alibis than just Free Speech or Vietnam; for example, womens, gay, anti-nuke, and
environmental movements.Cinema has been, and remains todayeven in its most politically engaged moments
invested elsewhere, away from the ethical dilemmas of beings positioned by social death. This is not to say
that the desire of all socially engaged cinema today is pro- White. But it is to say that it is almost always anti-
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes

radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. not because it raises the specter
of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but
because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance
function as both a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm; that is, it
functions as a program of complete disorder (Fanon Wretched...36). Bush Mama was
Blackwhich is to say it will not dance with death.
able to embrace this disorder, this incoherence and allow for their cinematic elaboration. For a brief moment in
history, Black film assumed the Black desire to take this country down.
A2 Cap
Because slavery is an ontological position, getting rid of
capitalism cannot solve.
and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
I raise Eltiss counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value
of slavery in order to debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that
workor alienation and exploitationis a constituent element of slavery.
Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, is the permanent, violent domination of natally
alienated and generally dishonored persons. Patterson goes to great lengths to delink his
three constituent elements of slavery from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved.
forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it

explains a common practice, it does not define the structure of the power
relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his
constituent elements of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience
(events) from ontology (the capacities of poweror lack thereoflodged
within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and
Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and
theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically
(paradigmatically), and the latter as a possible but not inevitable
experience of someone who is socially dead. The other misunderstanding I am attempting
to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the
slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense
The
Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact,
slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the
constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but
accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and
traded. As these Black writers have debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave
suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the
primary motive driving the African slave trade.
Capitalism is not the root cause of anti-blackness

and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, )GG
African slavery shows no internal

recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient
flesh. From Marxs reports on proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it
becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is
far too unconsciously invested in saving the symbolic value of the very
vagabonds such laws consciously seek to enslave. In other words, the law would
rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic development of the New
World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and
vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no
Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of

relational status to save. In this way, White-on-White violence is put in
check (a) before it becomes gratuitous, or structural, before it can shred
the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b) before conscious,
predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the
legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve . This is accomplished by the imposition
of the numerous on condition that and supposing that clauses bound up in the word if and also by claims
bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on
condition that s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24.
Cap/Marxism does not take into consideration white

supremacy, it ignores racism
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the
Slave in Civil Society?, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,
Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Any serious consideration of the question of antagonistic identity
formation a formation, the mass mobilisation of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and
assumptive logic which undergird the United States of America must come to grips with the
limitations of marxist discourse in the face of the black subject. This
is because the United States is constructed at the intersection of
both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix. And the privileged subject of
marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by variable capital a wage. In other words, marxism
assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy.
In this scenario, racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative
of political economy.This is not an adequate subalternity from which
to think the elaboration of antagonistic identity formation; n ot if we are
truly committed to elaborating a theory of crisis crisis at the crux of Americas institutional and discursive
The scandal with which the black subject position threatens

Gramscian discourse is manifest in the subjects ontological
disarticulation of Gramscian categories: work, progress, production,
exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-awareness. By examining the
strategy and structure of the black subjects absence in Antonio Gramscis
Prison Notebooks and by contemplating the black subjects
incommensurability with the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with
strategies.
three unsettling consequences.
A2 Whiteness
Indirect approaches to whiteness lead to passivity and acceptance
of white supremacy and forgetting
Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State
University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 2003
(Steve and Jared, "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy", Social Identities,
Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-3-12, MR)
Leftist approaches that come as close to radical critique as any already
fall short. The liberal ethos looks at racism as ignorance, something
characteristic of the individual that can be solved at a social level through
education and democratic procedure. For Marxist thought, racism is a divide-and-conquer
strategy for class rule and super-exploitation. However, the idea that it is a strategy assumes that it can be counterstrategised at some kind of local orindividual level rather than existing as something fundamental to class
relationsthemselves. For anti-colonialist thinking, racism is a social ideology that can be refuted, a structure of
privilege to be given up, again at the local orindividual level. Where liberalism subordinates the issue of racism to
thepresumed potentialities of individual development, Marxism subordinates the issue of race to class relations of
struggle, and anti-colonial radicalism pretends its mere existence as a movement is the first step toward
eradicating racism.But liberalisms social democracy pretends that state oligarchy is really interested in justice. And
the more radical critiques subsume the issue of racism in promises of

future transformations of the power relations to which de-racialisation is
deferred.This stumbling back and forth between the individual and the social is evenreflected in the social
scientific literature on race and racism. Most theorising proceeds by either psychologising intricate political and
historical processes, or by socialising questions of subjectivity and agency. The psychologising approach primarily
attributes the project of white supremacy to the lurid preoccupations of (white) individual or collective psychic or
biological pathologies.The socialising approach reduces white supremacy to mere racism, a subsidiary strategy for
the maintenance of social, political, and economic power by the (white) ruling class. Whereas the former locates the
genesis of racism in (projected) fear and anxiety, insecurity or (repressed) desire, the latter claims that the specific
pronouncements and practices of white supremacy are ideological subterfuge, rationalisations for or tactics of the
political economy. For the first, remedies can always be found within liberal capitalism: from psychological
counseling, moral and scientific education, legal prohibition, or even gene therapy to the self-righteous
championing of human rights in nations as far away as possible. For the second, it is assumed that if racism can be
made not useful to the relations of production or the security of territorial boundaries, it will fade from the social
landscape like the proverbial withering away of the state.
In either case, what needs to be

wrenched from the grasp of white supremacy is left entirely out of the
account in the name of the epiphenomenal or the overdetermining .In both
arenas a hidden depth, a secret drive, an unfathomed animus is postulated and a procedure derived that will plumb
that depth, excavate the problem, dredge out the muck that causes these aberrant behaviours that we call racism.
It is as if there were something at the center

of white supremacy that is too adamantine, off of which the utmost of
western analytic thought slides helplessly toward the simplistic, the
personal or the institutional. The supposed secrets of white supremacy
get sleuthed in its spectacular displays, in pathology and instrumentality,
or pawned off on the figure of the rogue cop. Each approach to race subordinates it to
And in both approaches an issue is skirted.
something that is not race, as if to continue the noble epistemological endeavour of getting to know it better. But
what each ends up talking about is that other thing. In the face of this ,
the lefts anti-racism

becomes its passion. But its passion gives it away. It signifies the passive
acceptance of the idea that race, considered to be either a real property of
a person or an imaginary projection, is not essential to the social
structure, a system of social meanings and categorisations. It is the same
passive apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise actively
forgets that it owes its existence to the killing and terrorising of those it
racialises for that purpose, expelling them from the human fold in the
same gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly

accepts as what goes without saying the postulates of white supremacy.
And it must do so passionately since what goes without saying is empty and can be held as a truth only through
an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and repetitive, just as the law is made by the
uniform.
A2 Other Races
We solve for more than just African American subjugation.
While not all Black Bodies have black skin color, all persons
with black skin color are Black Bodies .The reason all blacks
have Black Bodies is not a stupid pun, it is a result of the
middle passage. Slaves entered boats as Africans and left as
Blacks - there was a complete separation from their culture,
heritage, and everything they had grown accustomed to. In
that sense, the Black Body (the westernized ex-slave) has no
civil society because "Civil Society" is literally the society that
is defined AGAINST the slave. The slave is NOT civil, and so a
white, "civil society" is constructed to exclude the Black Body
(and requires that body to exist as a form of juxtaposition,
otherwise there is no means to define what a civil society is).
A2 Multiracialism
Multiculturalism claims are based on the idea that identity is
not fixed and is fluid and reifies racial otherness
Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities, 2003
(Jared, The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers
and the Politics of Desire, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2,
2003,Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
These epigraphs should be considered heretical to the project of the contemporary multiracial movement in the
proponents and intellectuals speak of the the

end(s) of race, the concept of multiraciality prides itself on the
trouble it supposedly causes to the white supremacist rage for
order, that is, its ostensible violation of racial discipline and its
alleged threat to spurious notions of racial purity.The multiracial, as it
were, cannot be fixed in place; by definition, it eludes the capture of a
pernicious schema of racial classification. Nevertheless, this reputed
disturbance of the colour line bears a cost. A self that is internally heterogeneous
United States1 Insofar as its
beyond repair or resolution becomes a candidate for pathology in a society where the integration of self is taken to
The multiracial is, then,

fundamentally convoluted essentially difficult and complicated
without end yet the seemingly inevitable link between such
radical otherness (other even to itself) and the pathology of disintegration
is, in fact, an effect of the labour of articulation. That is to say, the relation
be necessary for mental health. (Alcoff, 1995, p. 261)
between the terms can be re-inscribed in a gesture of more thoroughgoing deconstruction or, more likely, it can be
affirmed through simple inversion or reversal by the socially sanctioned desire for restoration.
Race mixture leads to multiculturalism which engages in the

identity binary and exclusionary politics
(Jared, The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the
Politics of Desire, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003,Accessed 8-412, MR)
The challenge posed by the new dispensation is grave. The attention now refocused by the
question of race mixture in the present conjuncture around both the
pressing matter of racial oppression in America and the tenuous and
ambivalent processes of racialisation, provides another opportunity for thinking critically
about the production of racialised difference itself. Moreover, in the wake of the biracial baby
boom (see Root, 1992 and 1996) we are forced to engage, yet again, with the
domain of sexuality as a crucial field for the historical invention of
race. For it is within the terms of sexual practice and predilection which, to be sure, are never reducible to
issues of reproduction that the imaginary bounds of race are forged with the greatest intensity (even as the
the
emergence of a popular multiracial consciousness in the post-civil
rights era in the US contains some (as yet unrealised) critical promise not
only for the politics of racial identity per se, but also for sustained
reflection on the vicissitudes of desire. Thus, we might say at present that any
multiracial constituency whatsoever occupies quite literally a prepost-erous space where it has to actualise, enfranchise, and
racialisation of sexuality remains a decidedly muted preoccupation of multiracial discourse to date).2 Thus,

empower its own identity and coextensively engage in the
deconstruction of the very logic of identity and its binary and
exclusionary politics. (my emphasis) In other words, we must carefully consider
precisely against what multiracial identity asserts its actualisation
and its empowerment in its purportedly affirmative moment. Anything
less than such a critical double duty can only result in the formation of [multiraciality] as yet another identical and
hegemonic structure within the regime of white supremacy, as well as a problematical elision of sexuality in its
discourse and politics (Radikrishnan, 1990, p. 50). The Body of Whiteness In Libidinal Economy, Jean-Francois
He
states tersely: capital cannot form a body. He argues further that
this lack of an organic unity for capital as a body and, moreover, for
those bodies that labour within its purview gives rise to two
divergent movements always associated in a single vertigo. He
Lyotard offers a provocative claim in the midst of his notoriously unorthodox analysis of historical capitalism.
distinguishes these movements as, on the one hand, a movement of flight, of plunging into the bodiless, and thus
of continual invention, of expansive additions or affirmations of new pieces a movement of tension. and, on the
other, a movement of [the] institution of an organism, of an organisation and of organs of totalisation and
unification a movement of reason. Crucially, he writes, both
kinds of movement are

there, effects as force in the non-finitoof capitalism (Lyotard, 1993, p. 102,
my emphasis). In his view, the double duty of criticism evokes these
parallels, and therefore must track, the twin forces of social
formation.
Multiculturalism/Identity politics are clich, this movement

does not fully engage or understand antiblackness
Of course, one would be justified in reading a strong resonance between Lyotards schematisation of capitalism and
the work of Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1985, 1987; for
critical introductions and overviews of these works see Goodchild, 1996 and Holland, 1999). Indeed, his meditations
in this case were largely in dialogue with the ferment of critical attention generated a` propos of the publication of
the first of their co-authored books.3 A detailed discussion of their inter-textual relations is, however, beyond the
scope of this essay. What I would like to borrow from each is a measure of the urgent attention brought to bear on
My objective is
to put such a sensibility to work in a discussion of the operations of
global white supremacy (which is inextricable from but not identical to the capitalist worldsystem).4 My focus in this essay is the dynamics of racialisation in the
post-war era United States, with particular attention to the politics
of interracial sexuality in the movement for civil rights and the postcivil rights affirmation of multiracial identity. Within this historical and political field,
this double movement of dispersion and regulation in the formation of power relations.
I present a critique of the emergent notion of multiraciality vis-a`-vis anti-miscegenation, a historical praxis that I
Such
comments are offered as a preliminary rejoinder to the cliches of
white supremacy against which the contemporary multiracial
movement currently does political and ideological battle. My contention is,
quite simply, that the movement to date fails to appreciate the nuance of
the logic of whiteness, that is to say, how it actually works with, and
not simply in opposition to, hybridity, complexity, process,
movement qualities typically attributed to the domain of
interracial sexuality and multiraciality.5
take to be a component of perhaps the fundamental feature of white supremacist racialisation.
Antiblackness deals with the particular and attempts to master

the trauma, multiculturalism cannot be mastered
Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities,
2003(Jared, The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the
I begin by rephrasing Lyotards maxim in this way: whiteness cannot form a body.
However, and despite this impossibility, it continues to make
attempts. In a sense, whiteness is the very attempt to form or
manufacture a delimited body of a particular type. Within the social formation of
white supremacy, whiteness serves as a means for mastering the trauma
of an experience without categories and without unity, which has no
positive content (Shaviro, 1990, p. 3). I will refer to this experience as the event of
miscegenation the abject order of excessive and violent
incoherence, traversed by affect and marked by the radical
impersonality of desire at work beyond or beneath the semblance of
racialised order. We feel its pressure as the outside of racialisation, so to speak. Put differently , it
refers to the fact (traumatic from the point of view of a racialised social formation) that we
are all of mixed origin, that the indifference (which is not simply sameness) of
the human corpus cannot be mastered, that the categories of
racialisation rest only upon convention. In short, the event of
miscegenation is strictly coextensive with the fundamental
insecurity of racist reasoning.6
Miscegenation deals with what cannot be represented, it

opens the doors to the thought behind the psychological
phenomenon that deals with the break in borders
I will state a few qualifications at the outset. First, miscegenation as event cannot be
confused with miscegenation as empirical acts of interracial sex, or
miscegenation as the social presence of mixed race people. Such
are the lures produced by the imaginary of white supremacy and
predictably mirrored by its liberal opposition. The event of
miscegenation, in this more radical sense, is what cannot be represented,
conceptualised, or apprehended in either the form of interracial
liaison or the multiracial body(i.e., intelligible via the grid of racialisation). Rather, it is that
which prevents either figure from attaining a coherent appearance or a fixed and stable meaning, whether as object
of aggression or desire.7 To be clear, I am attempting to supplement what have become commonplace assertions of
race as a social category. I am emphatically not interested in how the history of sex across the colour line or the
existence of people of mixed racial descent as such might trouble the fantasy of pure races or the tabulation of
I am talking in a more basic

sense about what I believe undermines and frustrates that fantasy
of transgression, the conventional fantasy of the subversive
multiracial. In other words, I am interested in what wards against our
discrete and rigid racial categories (see Hodes, 1999; Nash, 1999).

thinking of interracial sex or mixed race people as things in and of
themselves. To recall the epigraph from Barad: it makes no sense to talk about [such] independently
existing things. In this discussion of miscegenation and
antimiscegenation, then, I am introducing a critique of what Frantz Fanon
refers to as that psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that
the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken
down (Fanon, 1967, p. 21).
Cosmic race mixture is the ultimate form of eugenics, although

not drenched with white supremacy would call for the
extinction of the black and other nonhuman and savage races.
Whiteness as Anti-MiscegenationWe are often told that one of the most
fundamental oppositions in the racialised modern world is that
between the doctrine of race purity (characteristic of North American white supremacy)
(see, for instance, Pascoe, 1999) and some other arrangement that challenges
that position by accepting or even promoting the consequence of
race mixture. Davis (1995), for instance, refers to this other arrangement as the Hawaiian Alternative to
the One Drop Rule. Jose Vasconcelos described it in his influential 1925 essay, The Cosmic Race, as an epochal
battle between Anglo-Saxonism and Latinism. Where the former wants exclusive domination by the Whites, the
latter is shaping a new race, a synthetic race that aspires to engulf and to express everything human in forms of
constant improvement (1997, p. 19). Some sixty years later, Gloria Anzaldua draws from Vasconceloss work in
order to elabourate the concept of mestizaje in Borderlands/La Frontera. Her (admittedly critical) intellectual debt
and spiritual kinship are expressed in the following passage: Jose Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged
una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color la
primera raza sntesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza
cosmica, a fifth race embracing the four major races of the
world.Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices,
his theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with
chromosomes constantly crossing over, this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides
hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool .
From this racial,

ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an alien
consciousness is presently in the making a new mestiza
consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.
(1999, p. 99, my emphases) It would be a deliberate misreading to collapse Anzaldua with Vasconcelos or to
one must
wonder about the particular genealogy being invoked here and the
pressures it exerts despite the conscious intentions of those citing
it. In the space of a paragraph, we span a sixty-year divide; mestizaje, the new
consciousness of the Borderlands, is rendered as the effect or echo
of this early twentieth-century dream of global integration, a
product of its imaginative labour. Like her predecessor, Anzaldua opposes
race mixture to the doctrine of race purity, countering the image of
the Aryan with the image of the new mestiza. However, it is important to consult
conflate their intellectual work and political visions. That is not my point here. However,
the earlier text for any additional obstacles, abstract and concrete, to this most inclusive theorisation. Is the work of
this cross-pollination intended only as a corrective to the strict and devastating policies of Anglo-Saxon racial
ideology or is the scope of its enrichment cast more broadly? A word from Vasconcelos on this score:
The

lower types of the [human] species will be absorbed by the superior
type. In this manner, for example, the black could be redeemed, and
step by step, by voluntary extinction, the uglier stocks will give way
to the more handsome. Inferior races, upon being educated, would
become less prolific, and the better specimens would go on
ascending a scale of ethnic improvement, whose maximum type is not precisely white,
but that new race to which the white himself will have to aspire with the object of conquering the synthesis. The
Indian, by grafting onto the related race, would take the jump of millions of years that separate [him] from our
times, and in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the black may disappear In this manner, a selection of taste
would take effect, much more efficiently than the brutal Darwinist selection[It would be] a mixture no longer
accomplished by violence, nor by reason of necessity, but by the selection founded on the dazzling produced by
By this account, the

blacks disappearance is redemptive a redemptive selfannihilation, as it were brought about by the dazzling call of
human beautification. No longer an imposition or an assault, no
longer genocide per se, the elimination of blackness (and, importantly,
Indianness) has become a painless, even pleasurable duty to disappear. This edifying synthesis,
no doubt a dream of ethnic cleansing, is, however, decidedly not
white supremacist. That is, it does not elevate whiteness to its apex, its maximum type, or its ideal.
Rather, the doctrine of white superiority is dethroned, as a new
mixed race will have superseded the white, presenting itself as that
select taste toward which even the former rulers of the world
aspire. What is deemed most encouraging about the emergence of this new race the fruit of
racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization is
that it is forged in the pathos of love. Beyond violence and instrumental reason there is
the cosmic force of eros, the seemingly benevolent prime mover of global integration. The mode of
eugenics will have changed, but its ends remain frighteningly
consistent a selection more efficient than a brutal Social Darwinism. Less carnage, less coercion, and
beauty and confirmed by the pathos of love. (Vasconcelos, 1997, pp. 32 33)
less political controversy, this appears to be evolution at a discount. The Indian must modernise (or disappear);
the black (having already modernised) must certainly disappear too poor a gene pool, too ugly, too little
The aesthetic of mestizaje is, then, marked by a

profound ambivalence, a double life. Its eugenicist impulses,
ruefully unshakable, cast a long shadow over whatever threats it
might present to the ethnic absolutism12 of Anglo-Saxon white supremacy. For in
its unfolding it seeks to abolish not only the reign of whiteness, but
also the existence of those uglier stocks uneducated, inferior
races. Perhaps it cannot help itself since, in the name of consistency, it must integrate everything and
malleability, in a word, deficient.
everyone la primera raza sntesis del globo. The empowerment and enfranchisement of an emergent identity
can, it seems, incur not-so-hidden expenses. More recently, historian Gary Nash (who recognises, among others, the
work of Root et al. as an influence) has written a book about the secret history of mixed-race America, an account
of the America that could have been. Early on he claims that the union of [John] Rolfe and Pocahontas could have
become the beginning of an openly mestizo or racially intermixed United States (Nash, 1999, p. 8). His
extended essay is a chronicle of relatively anonymous Americans [that] have taken history into their own hands
and have defied the official racial ideology (p. 19). He finds that some Americans built racial classifications and
some Americans have defied the way society defined them and dared to dream of a mixed-race nation. (p. viii)
According to Nashs logic, one may defy the so-called official racial ideology of the US (an ideology that supposedly
aspires to keep people apart) by joining a long line of rebels and idealists, thereby becoming one of the many
daring boundary crossers.
Advocates for racial mixing/cosmic race argue that once race

distinctions are gone so will white supremacy.

This general conceptual distinction holds as a frame of intelligibility
for thinking about racialised difference in the US (and the West
more generally): border policing vs. border crossing, the heated
obsessions of race purity vs. the cool flexibility of mestizaje, hateful
prohibition vs. the noble defiance of forbidden love.13 It takes on an
additional urgency in the post-war era alongside the fabrication of a concept
of global community.14 As we will see, articulations of this pervasive heuristic
can be read in the political rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and its
traces noted in the discourse of the contemporary multiracial movement as
well. The hegemonic conception of the problem of white supremacy
in the US is, as a result, cast as some version of the racial divide or
a crisis of national identity. The proposed solution is, accordingly, a
closer drawing together of the races in America. The post-war, post-civil
rights United States is, in this way, imagined as the land of the coming
cosmic race (and not just the white ethnic melting pot), the proper title now
usurped from Latin America. (Vasconcelos is, I suspect, rolling over in his
grave upon this development, unsure of whether he resents the North for
stealing the thunder, so to speak). In the present moment, after the repeal of
anti-miscegenation laws, this national restoration entails an explicit
recognition of multiracial people and an open tolerance for, if not a
refreshing celebration of interracial dating and marriage as signs of an
historical triumph over the racism of old. Those who have looked to America
as a place of freedom and opportunity can see the rise of the idea of a
mixed-race America where interraciality is becoming something to regard as
a national strength. (Nash, 1999, p. 183) (Yet Nash submits a telling caveat:
few argue that universal intermarriage is needed to bring us together.)15
This is not a novel ideology of progress, of course, as the historical
example of Vasconcelos indicates. In fact, before him in the early
nineteenth-century US, there were small bands of radical
amalgamationists who agitated for the abolition of slavery while
proposing universal intermixture as the gateway to biracial
democracy (Nash, 1999, pp. 8489). Nearly a century later, a number
of prominent scholars associated with the Chicago School of
Sociology, including the work of its founder, Robert Park, and
Vasconcelos himself (who was in residence for several years), insisted
that racism would exist so long as supposedly visible markers of
racialised difference persisted. Rose Hum Lee,for instance, the first
woman and first Chinese American to head a sociology department in any US
university, was one of the most insistent on this point. A proponent of
complete integration in the face of virulent white racism, she
claimed that the final objective of integration is a culturally
homogenous population. Yet, she postulated, the [ultimate] barrier to
complete integration is racial distinctiveness (quoted in Yu, 1999, p. 456).

Today, as Nashs comments suggest, those who write in the recently founded
field of multiracial studies usually take a more moderate position (Few argue
that universal intermarriage is needed to bring us together). Nonetheless,
most do agree that increasing rates of intermarriage do indicate a
progressive development, namely, the erosion of racialised barriers
and a waning of racist sentiments. Even then President Bill Clinton, in
the 1997 commencement address to the University of California at San
Diego, noted rising levels of intermarriage as an encouraging symbol of our
progress as a nation, a multiracial population moving toward One America.
All of this optimism (however cautious) implies that white racism in the US is
(still) measured in important ways in its relation to degrees and types of race
mixture. In a sense, these approaches set up interracial sexuality as the final
frontier, the last hurdle in the American race for freedom, justice,
and equality. The multiracial question, in other words, is at the
heart of the politics of racial formation.
Prominent blackness scholars argue that sexual racism/

interracial are structured through antiblackness
In his contribution to a recent collection of essays on Fanon, cultural
theorist Kobena Mercer refers to sexual politics as the Achilles heel
of black liberation. As he puts it, My sense is that questions of
sexuality have come to mark the interior limits of decolonisation,
where the utopian project of [black] liberation has come to grief
(Mercer, 1994, p. 116, my emphasis). Among these questions of
sexuality, the figure of the interracial looms large.16 This is so not only
because, especially in the Anglophone world, whites (and others) have been
so profoundly repulsed by (and attracted to) the image of intimate relations
with black people. But also because, as Mercers statement in part
reminds us, the final frontier of white supremacy overlaps in
peculiar ways with the interior limits of black liberation. More than
ten years after Fanon first published Black Skin, White Masks (but two years
before its English translation), the text which provides the centre of attention
for Mercers critical meditation, sociologist and literary critic Calvin Hernton
penned a soon-to-be best-selling book of essays bearing a remarkable
similarity (of structure and object) to Fanons. Herntons book, Sex and
Racism in America, originally published in 1965, became an instant classic,
and was eventually translated into a half dozen languages and reprinted at
least three times. In response to his admittedly polemical (though no less
serious and thoughtful) commentary, literary personalities the likes of
Langston Hughes raved that Hernton exhibited an unparalleled temerity to
frankly tackle that old bugaboo S-E-X as it relates to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of [racial] integration. In what came to be known as his founding
scholarly achievement, Hernton claimed to explicate, in condensed form, the

fundamental relation of racism and sexuality in the United States. He
dubbed his conceptual centerpiece sexual racism, the sentiment of
anti-miscegenation. 17 Doubtless, none would dispute his central
thesis, that all race relations tend to be, however subtle, sex relations,
or put differently, that the race problem is inextricably connected with sex
(Hernton, 1988, p. 6). We can grant by this point that race is
unavoidably sexualised, that its operation always involves a sexual
politics, and that, concomitantly, sexualities in the modern world
are always already racialised (see Dyer, 1997). But for our purposes it
will be necessary to do more than reiterate theoretical and historical insights
that, taking James Weldon Johnson18 as a reference, are nearly a century old
(and much older if one considers the archive of colonial discourse) (see
McClintock, 1995; Said, 1979; Stoler, 1995; Zantopp, 1997). Having
established these deep structural connections in broad strokes, I
want to focus now upon one particular aspect of Herntons work as
part of the larger effort to illuminate the intricate entanglement of
race and sexuality. Though Hernton is quite sure that race relations are
always already in some sense sex relations, the nature of the relation
between the relations, as it were, presents itself as a persistent enigma (as is
the case for Fanon and Johnson before him). Early in his text, Hernton
describes the historical sexual involvement of whites and blacks in the US as
at once real and vicariousso immaculate and yet so perverse, so ethereal
and yet so concrete (Hernton, 1988, p. 6). He marvels at the ways in
which an apparition of sexual encounter in the social formation
mediates the sacred and the profane, the virtual and the actual.
This powerful and mysterious realm of interracial sexuality, a
historical relation that, as Hernton notes, is not always recognised when
it shows at the surface, serves as the paradoxical object of sexual racism.
As material as the bodies in question and as intangible as a spook,
the interracial occult gives the lie to the certainty of the colour line
and the boundaries demarcating inside from out. Sexual racism and
the spectre of interracial sexuality it both constructs and contains
forces, then, a recognition of sexuality as a point of access to
complexity in the sense that eros arises from chaos [That is to
say,] sexuality as that which constantly worries and troubles anything
supposedly fixed as an identity. (Mercer, 1994, p. 119) Hernton further
describes sexual racism as involving as the most degenerate and perverse
form of sexual turn-on (Hernton, 1988, p. xiii). It is, in his words, distorted
desire. One cannot help but hear echoes of Fanon here, particularly the
Fanon who describes (sexual) racism as anomalies of affect, or the Fanon
who writes, I believe in the possibility of love; that is why [in this sociodiagnostic of racism] I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions
(Fanon, 1967, p. 42). The imperiled possibility of interracial love, its fragile
balance and potential perfection, square off nobly against the degenerate
forces of racism and sexual perversion, or, more precisely, racism as a form
of sexual perversion. Says Fanon, if one wants to understand the racial

situation psychoanalytically considerable importance must be given to
sexual phenomena (p. 160). What is the link between the disturbance
of identity engendered by the complexity of sexuality and the
ascribed perversity of sexual racism, taken here as the desire to
regulate sexuality in the service of a paranoid politics of identity?
A2 Social Death vs. Social Life

Afro-optimism and pessimism dont compete; Moten and others rely
on a misconception of social death. Afro-pessimism is an affirmation
of a blackened world
Sexton, No Date, Director of African American Studies at UC Irvine (Jared,
ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS,
http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content/sexton.html)
Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic
In our anti-black world,

blacks are pathology
This conception would seem to support to
Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship
sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay
reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies they become them.
" (Gordon 2000: 87).
and thereby fortifies and
extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the
value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity
this acceptance
is active; it
to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black
This is not an accommodation to the dictates of
the anti-black world The affirmation of blackness
is a
refusal to distance oneself from blackness
In a
world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black
inferiority, of
the zero
degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness
resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'
To speak of black social life and black
social death
is to find oneself in
the midst of an argument that is
an agreement
Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afropessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by
vitalizing it.
living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests
that there is no black
life only that black life is not social life in the
universe formed by the codes of state and civil society
Black life is not
lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground
what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already
affirmed by afro-pessimism
between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive,
is a
willing or
willingness
or affirmation
, in other words,
, to
inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death.
.
, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being,
in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes
in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21).
white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative "above all, dont be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) in this world,
, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that
"
" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). [22] In this we might
create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.
, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death all of this
also a profound agreement,
that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and
(dis)belief.
A living death is a much a death as it is a

(social)
, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and
place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor the modern world system. [23]
, in outer space. This
is agreed. That is to say,
, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived
in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet)
proceed.
Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual
Moten is just that much more

interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law
labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But
, how it
frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible
precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it
polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense,
The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The

most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical
affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other
than" black optimism.
black social death is black social life.
A2 Manichean K
Resisting anti-Blackness is an active life affirming process
accepting and flipping pathology
Sexton 11(Jared, PhD, Director, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, The Social Life of
Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism, InTensions, Vol 5,

http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/notefromtheeditor/notefromtheeditor.php, Accessed: 01/22/12, OG)
[23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential
phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several books: Blacks
here
suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial

seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various
social pathologiesthey become them. In our antiblack world,
blacks are pathology (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Motens contention
that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay
and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would
this is
precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully
accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by
a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than
remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral,
etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in
culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this
acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in
other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to
inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow
of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the
antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an
affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself
from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one
closer to health, to life, or to sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin,
seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet,
White Masks, The Black Man and Language: A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of
alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment (Fanon 2008: 21).
In a
world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and
black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative above all, dont be
black (Gordon 1997: 63)in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the
turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that
resides in the idea that I am thought of as less than human (Nyongo
2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself,
something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.
Academy K
In this instance, academic work is key to liberation of the
oppressed
Gordon 2004
Lewis R., The Laura Carnell University Professor of Philosophy, Temple University, 4 Fanon and Development: A Philosophical Look Africa Development, Vol. XXIX,
No. 1,. pp. 71-93.PWoods.
There is, of course, the continued, resounding question from a

century ago: What is to be done? That the context of this discussion
is philosophical presents the role of the intellectual. Given the
nature of the problems at hand, it would be folly to presume a single
role for intellectuals to take. The Africana intellectual tradition has,
for instance, been guided by a healthy tension between concerns of
identity and liberation between questions of being and becoming
It is the task of some intellectuals to work out questions of
being, questions of what and how. And then there are those who
focus on why and other questions of purpose. Some do both. All
should consider their work
with the following considerations in
mind. Each epoch is a living reality. This is so because they are
functions of living human communities, which , too, are functions of
the social world. As living realities, they come into being and will go
out of being. What this means is that societies go through processes
of birth and decay.
The task faced by each
subordinated community, however, is how prepared it is for the
moment in which conditions for its liberation are ripe. When the
people are ready, the crucial question will be of how many ideas are
available for the reorganization of social life. The ideas, many of
which will unfold through years of engaged political work, need not
be perfect, for in the end, it will be the hard, creative work of the
communities that take them on. That work is the concrete
manifestation of political imagination. Fanon described this goal as
setting afoot a new humanity. He knew how terrifying such an effort
is, for we do live in times where such a radical break appears as no
less than the end of the world.
(cf.
Gordon 2000:chapters 14).
, I here submit,
An erroneous feature of most civilisations that achieve imperial status is the silly belief that such an achievement would assure their immortality. But we
know that no living community lasts forever, save, perhaps, through historical memory of other communities. Decay comes.
In the meantime, the task of building infrastructures for something new must be planned, and where there is some
room, attempted, as we all no doubt already know, because given the sociogenic dimension of the problem, we have no other option but to build the options on which the future of our species rest.
1. Their K turns itself YOU ARE IN A DEBATE ROUND. THIS

IS A PEDAGOGICAL ACTIVITY. YOU ARE DOING THE WORK
OF THE ACADEMY.
2. This argument is defensive at best things cant get any
worse, so theres only a risk that were beneficial
3. Nothing about their evidence is debate specific it only
concludes that society is social death, we reject the
concept of civil society which link turns the K
4. This is why you dont read a college K in high school, you

dont read the warrants this is university specific as in A
COLLEGE, not a high school. Even if they win that the
university itself is bad, that doesnt actually link to us.
5. Well concede squo educational paradigms are bad, but
none of their evidence assumes academia post-1ac, any
risk that we improve pedagogy is a link turn
6. This wasnt the only thing they read which proves either
theres no impact to the K or the impact is inevitable
A2: Objectivity/pragmatism

legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,
.,,3 A

suffering
. Here,
A2: Coalitional Politics

Social movement need to include the subject positional of the
black body as well as their social death
MR)
Indeed, it means all those things: aphobogenic object, apast withoutaheritage, the map
of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this
realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal - not at least,
If a social
movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of
structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to
assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with
ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as
well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death
for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They
for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition.
have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement -
This is not to say that all oppositional political desire

today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not
dance with death.
invested elsewhere.
Black Liberation feared because it causes complete disorder,

desire to take down the country
MR)
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to
the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative
polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its
condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a
negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a
"program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow
oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a
desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then
through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this
movement's lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the
The desire to be embraced, and elaborated,

by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself . No one, for
embrace of disorder and incoherence.
example, has ever been known to say "gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come
Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and

elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness
at all."
- and the state of

political movements in the U.S. today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "gee-whiz, if only Black rage could
be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of Black
than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain inorgasmic in the face of civil society - with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this stasis or
paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, that work will fail, for it is always work from a position of
on behalf of a position of incoherence of the Black

subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the
coherence (i.e., the worker)

Leftremain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers
and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as
revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration.
A2 Youre apolitical
A2 Reform
Reformist measures simply provide fuel for Whiteness.
California Riverside, The Black Presidential Non-Slave: Genocide and the
Present Tense of Racial Slavery, Political Power and Social Theory Vol. 22,
pp. 38-43]
To crystallize what I hope to be the potentially useful implications of this
provocation toward a retelling of the slavery-abolition story: if we follow the
narrative and theoretical trajectories initiated here, it should take little
stretch of the historical imagination, nor a radical distension of analytical
framing, to suggest that the singular institutionalization of racist and
peculiarly antiblack social/state violence in our living era - the US
imprisonment regime and its conjoined policing and criminalization
apparatuses - elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery
within the American nation-building project, especially in the age of
Obama. The formation and astronomical growth of the prison industrial
complex has become a commonly identified institutional marker of massively
scaled racist state mobilization, and the fundamental violence of this
apparatus is in the prison's translation of the 13th Amendment's racist
animus. By "reforming" slavery and anti-slave violence, and directly
transcribing both into criminal justice rituals, proceedings, and
punishments, the 13th Amendment permanently inscribes slavery
on "post-emancipation" US statecraft. The state remains a "slave
state" to the extent that it erects an array of institutional
apparatuses that are specifically conceived to reproduce or enhance
the state's capacity to "create" (i.e., criminalize and convict) prison
chattel and politically legitimate the processes of
enslavement/imprisonment therein. The crucial starting point for our
narrative purposes is that the emergence of the criminalization and carceral
apparatus over the last forty years has not, and in the foreseeable future will
not build its institutional protocols around the imprisonment of an
economically productive or profitmaking prison labor force (Gilmore,
1999).16 So, if not for use as labor under the 13th Amendment's juridical
mandate of "involuntary servitude," what is the animating structuralhistorical logic behind the formation of an imprisonment regime
unprecedented in human history in scale and complexity, and which locks up
well over a million Black people, significantly advancing numbers of
"nonwhite" Latinos as, and in which the white population is vastly
underrepresented in terms of both numbers imprisoned and likelihood to be
prosecuted (and thus incarcerated) for similar alleged criminal offenses?17 In
excess of its political economic, geographic, and juridical registers, the
contemporary US prison regime must be centrally understood as constituting

an epoch-defining statecraft of race: a historically specific conceptualization,
planning, and institutional mobilization of state institutional capacities and
state-influenced cultural structures to reproduce and/or reassemble the
social relations of power, dominance, and violence that constitute the
ontology (epistemic and conceptual framings) of racial meaning itself (da
Silva, 2007; Goldberg, 1993). In this case, the racial ontology of the
postslavery and post-civil rights prison is anchored in the crisis of social
meaning wrought on white civil society by the 13th Amendment's apparent
juridical elimination of the Black chattel slave being. Across historical
periods, the social inhabitation of the white civil subject - - its selfrecognition, institutionally affirmed (racial) sovereignty, and
everyday social intercourse with other racial beings - is made
legible through its positioning as the administrative authority and
consenting audience for the nation- and civilization-building
processes of multiple racial genocides. It is the bare fact of the white
subject's access and entitlement to the generalized position of administering
and consenting to racial genocide that matters most centrally here.
Importantly, this white civil subject thrives on the assumption that s/he is
not, and will never be the target of racial genocide.18 (Williams, 2010)
.Those things obtained and secured through genocidal processes - land,
political and military hegemony/dominance, expropriated labor - are in this
sense secondary to the raw relation of violence that the white subject
inhabits in relation to the racial objects (including people, ecologies, cultural
forms, sacred materials, and other modalities of life and being) subjected to
the irreparable violations of genocidal processes. It is this raw relation, in
which white social existence materially and narratively consolidates
itself within the normalized systemic logics of racial genocides, that
forms the condition of possibility for the US social formation, from
"abolition" onward. To push the argument further: the distended systems
of racial genocides are not the massively deadly means toward some other
(rational) historical ends, but are ends within themselves. Here we can
decisively depart from the hegemonic juridical framings of "genocide" as
dictated by the United Nations, and examine instead the logics of genocide
that dynamically structure the different historical-social forms that have
emerged from the classically identifiable genocidal systems of racial colonial
conquest, indigenous physical and cultural extermination, and racial chattel
slavery. To recall Trask and Marable, the historical logics of genocide
permeate institutional assemblages that variously operationalize the
historical forces of planned obsolescence, social neutralization, and "ceasing
to exist." Centering a conception of racial genocide as a dynamic set of
allows the slavery-to-prison continuity to be more clearly marked: the
continuity is not one that hinges on the creation of late-20th and early-list
century "slave labor," but rather on a re-institutionalization of anti-slave
social violence. Within this historical schema, the post-1970s prison regime

institutionalizes the raw relation of violence essential to white social being
while mediating it so it appears as non-genocidal, non-violent, peacekeeping,
and justice-forming. This is where we can also narrate the contemporary
racial criminalization, policing, and incarcerating apparatuses
as being historically tethered to the genocidal logics of the post-abolition,
post-emancipation, and post-civil rights slave state. While it is necessary to
continuously clarify and debate whether and how this statecraft of racial
imprisonment is verifiably genocidal, there seems to be little reason to
question that it is, at least, protogenocidal - displaying both the capacity and
inclination for genocidal outcomes in its systemic logic and historical
trajectory. This contextualization leads toward a somewhat different
analytical framing of the "deadly symbiosis" that sociologist Loi'c Wacquant
has outlined in his account of antiblack carceral-spatial systems. While it
would be small-minded to suggest that the emergence of the late-20th
century prison regime is an historical inevitability, we should at least
understand that the structural bottom line of Black imprisonment over
the last four decades - wherein the quantitative fact of a Black
prison/jail majority has become taken-for-granted as a social fact - is
a contemporary institutional manifestation of a genocidal racial
substructure that has been reformed, and not fundamentally
displaced, by the juridical and cultural implications of slavery's
abolition. I have argued elsewhere for a conception of the US prison not as
a selfcontained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material
prototype of organized punishment and (social, civil, and biological) death
(Rodriguez, 2006). To understand the US prison as a regime is to focus
conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module
or mobilized vessel through which technologies of racial domin8ance
institutionalize their specific, localized practices of legitimated (state)
violence. Emerging as the organic institutional continuity of racial slavery's
genocidal violence, the US prison regime represents a form of human
domination that extends beyond and outside the formal institutional and
geographic domains of "the prison (the jail, etc.)." In this sense, the prison is
the institutional signification of a larger regime of proto-genocidal violence
that is politically legitimized by the state, generally valorized by the cultural
common sense, and dynamically mobilized and institutionally consolidated
across different historical moments: it is a form of social power that is
indispensable to the contemporary (and postemancipation) social
order and its changing structures of racial dominance, in a manner
that elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery. The binding
presence of slavery within post-emancipation US state formation is precisely
why the liberal multiculturalist narration of the Obama ascendancy finds
itself compelled to posit an official rupture from the spectral and material
presence of enslaved racial blackness. It is this symbolic rupturing - the
presentation of a president who consummates the liberal dreams of Black
citizenship. Black freedom, Black non-resentment, and Black patriotic
subjectivity - that constructs the Black non-slave presidency as the flesh-and-

blood severance of the US racial/racist state from its entanglement in the
continuities of antiblack genocide. Against this multiculturalist
narrative, our attention should be principally fixated on the bottomline Blackness of the prison's genocidal logic, not the fungible
Blackness of the presidency. CONCLUSION: FROM "POST-CIVIL RIGHTS" TO
WHITE RECONSTRUCTION The Obama ascendancy is the signature moment
of the post-1960s White Reconstruction, a period that has been
characterized by the reformist elaboration of historically racist
systems of social power to accommodate the political imperatives of
American apartheid's downfall and the emergence of hegemonic
(liberal-to-conservative) multiculturalisms. Byfocusing on how such
reforms have neither eliminated nor fundamentally alleviated the
social emergencies consistently produced by the historical logics of
racial genocide, the notion of White Reconstruction departs from Marable's
notion of the 1990s as the "twilight of the Second Reconstruction" (Marable.
2007. p. 216)19 and points toward another way of framing and narrating the
period that has been more commonly referenced as the "post-civil rights"
era. Rather than taking its primary point of historical departure to be the
cresting of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy of delimited (though no
less significant) political-cultural achievements. White Reconstruction
focuses on how this era is denned by an acute and sometimes aggressive
reinvention and reorganization of the structural-institutional formations of
racial dominance. Defined schematically, the recent half-century has
encompassed a generalized reconstruction of "classically" white supremacist
apparatuses of state-sanctioned and culturally legitimated racial violence.
This general reconstruction has (1) strategically and unevenly dislodged
various formal and de facto institutional white monopolies and diversified
their personnel at various levels of access, from the entry-level to the
administrative and executive levels (e.g., the sometimes aggressive diversity
recruitment campaigns of research universities, urban police, and the
military); while simultaneously (2) revamping, complicating, and enhancing
the social relations of dominance, hierarchy, and violence mobilized by such
institutions - relations that broadly reflect the long historical, substructural
role of race in the production of the US national formation and socioeconomic
order. In this sense, the notion of White Reconstruction brings central
attention to how the historical logics of racial genocide may not only
survive the apparent disruption of classical white monopolies on
the administrative and institutional apparatuses that have long
mobilized these violent social logics, but may indeed flourish
through these reformist measures, as such logics are re-adapted
into the protocols and discourses of these newly "diversified" racist
and white supremacist apparatuses (e.g.. the apparatuses of the
research university, police, and military have expanded their capacities to
produce local and global relations of racial dominance, at the same time that

they have constituted some of the central sites for diversity recruitment and
struggles over equal access). It is, at the very least, a remarkable and
dreadful moment in the historical time of White Reconstruction that a Black
president has won office in an electoral landslide while well over a million
Black people are incarcerated with the overwhelming consent of
white/multiculturalist civil society.
The call for equality will always fail. Civil society produces a
perfected form of slavery, that masks violence through reform
Farley, 5
(Anthony Paul, Professor of Law at Boston College, Perfecting Slavery,
1/27/2005, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1028&context=lsfp, (SG))
The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.
And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth,
and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains
true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional
liberty. People will be able to liberate themselves only after the legal
superstructure itself has begun to wither away. And when we begin to
overcome and to do without these (juridical) concepts in reality, rather than
merely in declarations, that will be the surest sign that the narrow horizon of
bourgeois law is finally opening up before us. Slavery is with us still. We
are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-overblack is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every
situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods
follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may
come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The
movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the
movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is
neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery.
All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The
story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story
of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule
of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave
perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its
own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the
impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself
unfree. When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The
slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief,
when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law

hoping for an answer. The slaves free choice, the slaves leap of
faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after
emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself
as a slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to
enter the commons of reason or the kingdom of ends or the New England
town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss
equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for
law, these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting,
there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not
forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of
slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of
segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation.
The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and
neosegregation has not forgotten its origin; it remembers its father
and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it serves; it
knows what color to count. room,7 every great house, every
plantation, all of it, everything. Requests for equality and freedom
will always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the
request will fail. The request for equality and freedom, for rights,
will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The request is
produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for
lessless respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark
must be made on the flesh because that is where we start from.
Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that
childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates
our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the
mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of
those essencesrace, gender, class, and so onthat are said to
precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow
the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin
with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and
childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our
childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our
education cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies. If we are
successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and
our bodies vis--vis all the other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces.
We follow the call and move in the generally expected way. Whiteoverblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to
find our place, and therefore our way, in our institutional spaces.
This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is

why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for
rightsfor equalitywill always fail because there are always
ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less than zero,
to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the
slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is
called to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to
be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is
death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to
have all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always
ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized?
How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end
of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave
can only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The
perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its
master. The slaves final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights.
The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of
wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty
or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The
story, the law, the wolves table manners, do not matter. The story,
the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves, however, represents a
disguised or latent wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or
death. We are strangers to ourselves. The dream of equality, of rights, is
the disguised wish for hierarchy. The prayer for equal rights is the
disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal
rights, then, is the disguise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal
rights is the slaves perfect moment. The slaves perfect prayer, the prayer
of the perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows not what
it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its
own inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since
property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The
slave strives to produce the final commodity law. In other words, the slave
produces itself as a slave through law. The slave produces itself as a slave
(as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that prayer is
all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal
rights. The slave bows down before the law and then there is law.
There is no law before the slave bows down. The slaves fidelity becomes
the law, and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle for
the universal, through the slaves struggle for equality of right. The
slave prays for equality of right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect
prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities open, like the gates of

heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black
accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains down.
Whiteoverblack is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever.
The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond
the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever. There is a pleasure in this
death. It is the pleasure of hierarchy. If there is hierarchy, white-overblack, for example, there is an experience of pleasure in it. Bodies
are marked white-over-black. This is a pleasure and a desire.
Property is marked white-over-black. This too is a pleasure and a
desire. Law, following the system of marks and the system of
property, is white-over-black, and a pleasure and a desire. There are
always ambiguities. The ambiguities are vessels of our desires. Our pleasures
and desires follow the colorline. In a colorlined order, all institutions are
ordered by the colorline. A white-over-black orientation is required to
navigate the institutions that order life. In other words, a white-over-black
orientation is required to follow the colorline, and one must follow the
colorline or lose ones way. The ambiguities, then, are always white-overblack. White-over-black is the North Star. Every correct legal answer is whiteover-black. There is a pleasure and a desire in moving to the correct answer.
The pleasure and desire of moving to the correct answer is experienced as
the sublime pleasure of the legal method, as the sovereignty of death. The
commodity reaches its apogee in the black.11 There is no black, save for
white-over-black. White-over-black is slavery. Slavery is death. Death is the
end of it all. Death is the complete end. Death, then, is perfection, the end of
all things. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it prays for slavery. The
slave, being perfect in that moment of prayer, is one with that before which
it bows down in prayer. The slave prays to itself for itself to be transformed
into itself and so its perfect prayer is always already granted. The slave
prays for equal rights. Rights cannot be equal. If the slave were not hated,
lessened, then it would never experience itself as lessthan. Without the
experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not arise. To be a
slave is to become what one becomes through the experience of less-than.
The less-than experience may be expressed as white-over-black. White-overblack is an identity and an orientation. White-over-black is a form of training.
Our institutions, under the colorline, are forms of white-over-black. Every
institution is a form of training. Our institutions, under the colorline, are
forms of training in white-over-black. The sum of our institutions is
the sum of our training. The fact of white-over-black means that
white-over-black has become the form of our institutions and the
orientation required to move through them. White-over-black as

fact means that ambiguities are resolved into white-over-black. The
fact that the slave is hated means that hating the slave has become
a habit and a pleasure and a desire and a system of training (a
system of providing pleasure and cultivating desire).
A2 Patriarchy
Antiblack white supremacy serves as the glue to racism to
colonialism, racism to capitalism, and patriarchy
Rabaka 2007(Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Boiss Critique of White
The conception and critique of white supremacy that I develop here does not seek to sidestep socio-legal race discourse as much as
2002,
2003a,b,c,d, 2005a,b,c). One of the main reasons this supplemental approach to critical white studies (and critical race
it intends to supplement it with the work of Du Bois and others in radical politics and critical social theory (Rabaka
theory) is important is because typically legal studies of race confine theorists to particular national social and political arenas,
1999; Rabaka
2006a,b,c). whitenessis the ownership of the earth forever and ever,
Amen!(1995a, p. 454). Here he is sardonically hinting at the cardinal difference between white supremacy and most other
which is problematic considering the fact that white supremacy is an international or global racist system (Mills
White
supremacy serves as the glue that connects and combines racism to
colonialism, and racism to capitalism. It has also been illustrated that it
exacerbates sexism by sexing racism and racing sexism, to put it
unpretentiously. Thus, white supremacy as a global racism intersects and
interconnects with sexism, and particularly patriarchy as a global system
that oppresses and denies womens human dignity and right to be
humanly different from men, the ruling gender (Davis 1981, 1989; hooks 1981, 1984,
forms of racism: its worldwide historical, cultural, social, political, legal, and economic influence and impact.
1991, 1995; J.A. James 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999; Lorde 1984, 1988; Rabaka 2003e, 2004).
A2: Kanye west bad

actions embrace black existence and combats social death
Curry 14
Dr. Tommy J. Curry is an associate professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University. You Cant Stand the Nigger I See!: Kanye Wests Analysis of Anti-Black
Death. The Cultural Impact of Kanye West. 3/6/14. Fuck you if youre offended by our language. PWoods.
Kanye West
knowledge.
For West,
s,
. Over two

deserving death
analysis
Kanye Wests
, through taxonomy,
Wests recent

rappers
Beautiful
Twisted
Dark
Fantasy
(2010).
(James, 2005)
Yeezus!
(2013)
is
an
accumulation
of
this
pessimistic
rendering
of
the
world.

possessions
(race)
(sex)
(pseudological)
A2 Anthro
Environmentalist movements are racist
1.) Diverts and forecloses on discussions of race
2.) Intentionally ignores white privilege
3.) Activist groups ostracize minority groups
JMB 12
02/29/12, JMB is his pen name, he is a PhD student in Environmental Studies in Oregon, Hes citing numerous peer reviewed studies in his article. Colorblind
Racism and Environmentalism, http://ecesisfactor.blogspot.com/2012/02/colorblind-racism-and-environmentalism.html. PWoods.
a pervasive lack of deep cultural-ecological

understanding
among white activists. They begin with an anecdote
involving a vegan Slow Food activist who, despite professed commitment
to local foods, knows nothing of the indigenous culture where she lives.
She is unable to name whose land she lives on, or even any of the foods
they rely upon. When asked about these matters, the woman responds,
in Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multigenerational farmers who are
not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much
stake in this watershed as anyone else. This assertion displaces focus
from the question of Native foodways and attempts simultaneously to
legitimate the land tenure of white farmers, an issue which she was not
asked to defend
It seems unlikely that this activist would think of herself
as racist, even though her responses suggest unexamined privilege and
white racial allegiances. Additionally, this implied allegiance with farming
families over the concerns of indigenous fishing rights complicates not
only this persons claims of colorblindness but also her professed
relationship to food systems that support environmental and human
health
animal
rights activism and vegan praxis are coded as white, and how vegans of
color respond to such coding.
practices, institutions, and
spaces are coded as whiteor at least not blacknot only through
the bodies that tend to inhabit and participate in them but also the
discourses that circulate through them
veganism and animal
rights activism are generally associated with radically leftist and
progressive whites, incapable of participating in the overt racism one
can normally find within radical rightorganizations
Although their
political positioning may incline white vegans to avoid traditional forms of
racism, Harper notes that collectively, good whites tend to shy away
from antiracism and reflections on white and class privilege
this tendency to omit discussions of race, class, and
sexuality
In their analysis of food justice, Teresa M. Mares and Devon C. Pea (2011) point to
, particularly
food
. The woman goes on to describe conflict between Indians and farmers, an issue which she concedes she knows little about, though her earlier comment regarding the Skagit farmers
suggests where she might stand on the issue (2011).
(Norgaard 2011). While Guthmans surveys indicate white internalization and deployment of colorblind racism, work by vegan scholar Breeze Harper (2011) considers ways in which
Harpers work, like Guthmans asserts,
(Guthman 2011). Harper indicates that
(Harper 2011).
(2011). Through a quick exploration of
popular vegan books and websites, Harper illustrates
. Then, drawing on comments taken from the popular blog Vegans of Color, Harper illuminates the effects of colorblind discourses on activists of color and how some whites respond to the experiences of
fellow vegans (2011). Centrally, Harpers analysis focuses on how words like exotic presume "a white audience, marginalizing the subjectivities of vegans of color (2011). The white blogger responses to VOC posts regarding this
Kram goes on to
write, if I were ever to be called out on terms of white guilt or
colonialist or other terms for trying to go to events that are more
inclusive of POC [people of color], or run/by or sponsored by POC, then I
will not be inclined to participate in those events. Her tone denies
responsibility for any possible wrongdoing, and furthermore places
responsibility for her inclusion on people of color. This type of response
seems strongly indicative of colorblind racism. Kram asserts her white
issue highlight colorblind racism. Harper analyzes the response of a blogger, Kram, who conflates geographic food sources with the concept of foreign or exotic.

privilege, declaring her opinions on a blog for vegans of color, while
simultaneously undermining her fellow vegans experiences
. Another series of experiences recorded in the
Vegans of Color blog highlight how colorblind racism has a chilling effect (Guthman 2011) on people of color and shapes the responses of white vegans. Bloggers Nassim and Supernovadiva, relate the discomforts experienced by
vegans of color in white spaces. Nassim writes of a conference that leaves her feeling so frustrated with the population, the cause and like I could not call myself a vegan. As if vegan was a white word (Harper 2011).
the tendency of white animal rights activists to single her out

because of her race
Although overt racism tends
to be scarce in environmental and animal rights movements, colorblind
racism and other liberal forms of racist praxis are pervasive. Discourses
that ignore or dispute any critical analysis of race are likely to reaffirm
racism despite good intentions.
). These
concepts, even when unvoiced, shape policy decisions and the codification
of environmental activism, and environmental benefits as white .
Supernovadiva describes
. She writes, the colorblind thing comes up and how that person dont see color BUT you bee lined straight to me to tell me youre colorblind, seriously (Harper 2011).
These expressions of how colorblind racism effects vegans of color is met on the blog with further examples of the very same discourse.
Furthermore, contemporary uses of words such as exotic or foreign effectively reinforce white as the norm, and in some
cases affirm colonial legacies that equate dark skinned people and racialized others with dirt, filth, and uncleanliness placing them outside of civilized society (Park and Pello 2011
White Supremacy robs the denigrated of their rights to be

human
Rabaka 2007 (Reiland Rabaka, 4 August 2007, The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Boiss Critique of White
The civilized (read: whites) are simultaneously a race in a socio-cultural

and politico-economic sense, though they do not think of themselves in racial terms, and they throw temper
tantrums when they are thought of in racial terms or, as being racialized or raced. They can steal and kill the
uncivilized (read: people of color) without regard to rank or reason, and
they can at any moment change the rules of the racial hierarchy and racial
history because they alone are decidedly and definitively the authors of
human culture and civilization, and most certainly the architects of science and technology. As Du Bois
demonstrates above, white supremacy is not simply about racial domination and discrimination. Which is to say , white
supremacy cannot quickly be reduced to racism, and especially as it is
understood in contemporary racial discourse. Much more, white
supremacy robs the raced or people of color of their right to be human, of
their right to self-definition and self-determination. It reduces human
beings to the status of things, which is one of the reasons, as Frantz Fanon observes in The Wretched
of the Earth, when they are discussed in the discursive arenas of the white world, both academic and non-academic,
people of color are referred to, (re) presented and (re)imagined in

zoological termsin the terms in which animals are discussed, dissected
and dominated. In fact, the terms the [white colonial] settler uses when he mentions the native [the raced, or the
colored] are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow mans reptilian motions, of the stink of
the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of
gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary.
(Fanon
1968, p. 42) Critical White Studies and the Riddle(s) of Critical Race Theory
Du Boiss critique of
white supremacy also hits head-on the issue of white personhood and black (or people of color) subpersonhood. He asserted:
They
[the colored and colonized] are not simply dark white men. They are not men in the sense that Europeans are men. Whiteness
and maleness are prerequisites for personhood in the world that modernity made. A person, in this world, is one who is rational, self-
Since white males created the laws of

this world, none but white males are equal and given moral, legal and
extralegal consideration. Therefore, as the Dred Scott decision
demonstrates, a black man has no rights which a white man is legally
bound to respect (see Dred Scott 1857, pp. 403407). White rights are intimately
intertwined with the denial of black rights. Or, to put it another way, white personhood is
directing and morally and legally equal with a white male.
inextricable from black subpersonhood. In
The Racial Contract, Charles Mills contends:
Critique of Whiteness can also serve to break down
environmental destruction and animal exploitation.

CONE 2000 JAMES H. Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary and the author of many books on black theology of
liberation, including Martin and Malcolm and America. WHOSE EARTH IS IT ANYWAY?, , http://www.crosscurrents.org/cone.htm accessed 6/29/12
the rule of white supremacy

throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation
of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and
instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms
of their contribution to the development and defense of white world
supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to
connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological -whether they know it or not. People who struggle against
environmental degradation but do not incorporate in it a disciplined
and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists -- whether
they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be
segregated but must be integrated with the fight for life in all its
forms
The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in Africa, and
. Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African American community. "Blacks don't care about the environment" is a typical comment by white
ecologists. Racial and economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream environmental movement. "White people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the
survival of young blacks in our nation's cities" is a well-founded belief in the African American community. Justice fighters for blacks and the defenders of the earth have tended to ignore each other in their public discourse and
Their separation from each other is unfortunate because they are

fighting the same enemy -- human beings' domination of each other
and nature
practice.
. The leaders in the mainstream environmental movement are mostly middle- and upper-class whites who are unprepared culturally and intellectually to dialogue with angry blacks. The leaders in
the African American community are leery of talking about anything with whites that will distract from the menacing reality of racism. What both groups fail to realize is how much they need each other in the struggle for "justice,
peace and the integrity of creation."(2) In this essay, I want to challenge the black freedom movement to take a critical look at itself through the lens of the ecological movement and also challenge the ecological movement to
we can
promote genuine
solidarity between the two groups and thereby enhance the quality
of life for the whole inhabited earth -- humankind and other kind.
critique itself through a radical and ongoing engagement of racism in American history and culture. Hopefully,
break the silence and
A2: Jazz
Wilderson 2010 (Frank B., Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, p. 235)
Skins is disturbed not by the prospect of Black rage (or, in this case, Randall Robinsons subdued annoyance) but by the horrifying possibility that Black
fungibility might somehow rub off of the Slave and stick to the "Savage." The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that, through the Middle
African culture became Black "style," both a form of

"contraband" and one of civil society's many "spoils of war." The
object status of Blackness means that it can be placed and
displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by
whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can
do to either check or direct this process. Both jazz and hip-hop have
become known in the same way that Black bodies are known: as
forces "liberated" from time and space, belonging nowhere and to
no one, simply there for the taking. Anyone can say "nigger" because anyone can be a "nigger."8 What a
Passage,
nightmare indeed, reads the caution of Skins, should the fragile coherence of Indigenous sovereignty fall prey to such hopeless and totalizing deracination.
"Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.
A2: Racism Going Down

The very empirical framework in which they participate in
ignores the ontologically embedded nature of antiblackness.
Civil society cannot alleviate racism because civil society IS
racism.
Wilderson 2010 (Frank B. Wilderson, III, writer, filmmaker,
critical theorist, Red, White, and Black, p10-11)
successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist
on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political
theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of
Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today's Blacks
in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of
Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by
demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims
successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the
election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass
incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing,
astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned
away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of
Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the
wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which
would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be
forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical
markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their
head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral
into sociology, political science, history, and public policy debates
would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the
grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the
assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the
calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it.
The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty
ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates
how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of
slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery,
then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the
state"the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to
even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black
positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and
civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No
world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the
Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which
Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its

corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally
dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship
outside of re-lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached
through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state
and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains
how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the
Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a
distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where
did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits
an answer
Thats empirically false.

Yousman 2003 (Bill, doctoral candidate in the Department of
Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
and a visiting instructor in the School of Communication at the
University of Hartford.
Dubois's metaphor speaks to the perilous nature of a bifurcated society that
has reserved its riches and privileges for one category of people while
consigning another group to the leftovers and the dregs. Dubois's prophecy
certainly came true, as much of the history of the 20th century was a history
of racial hatred and racial conflict (see Malik, 1996), and despite the rhetoric
of conservative and neoliberal academics a nd politicians who attempt to
locate racism as a purely historical phenomenon, America in the 21st
century is sti ll a bifurcated land. This is a society in which, despite the
existence of all-too-real class barriers, Whiteness entails a particular access
route to socia l, cultural, economic, and political power, while Blackness
operates as an obstacle to these same privileges. For example, according to
the U.S. Bureau of the Census, nearly half of Black children grew up in
poverty duri ng the last decade of the 20th century (44.6%), whereas this
was true for less than a fifth (18.2%) of White children (figures cited in
Miringoff & Miringoff, 1999, p. 86). The infant mortality rate for Blacks and
Whites also serves as an indicator of unequal access to resources such as
health care and nutrit ion. During the last few years of the last century, the
infant mortality rate for Whites was 6.1 deaths per thousand and for Blacks
it was more than twice as high- 14.7 deaths per thousand (National Center
for Health Statistics, cited in Miringoff & Miringoff, 1999, p. 50). These and
other indicators serve as evidence that the problem of the 21st century is
still the problem of the color line. Contemporary America is a nation of
unofficial segregation. During the last decade of the 20th century, 86% of
suburban Whites lived in communit ies where less than 1% of their
neighbors were Black (West, 1994). A poll of high school seniors revea led
that only 4% of White youth believed that living in an all-White neighborhood
was not acceptable. Al)nost 30% stated that this was indeed desirable. Sixtythree percent of these youth reported that all or almost all of their close
friends were White (University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, cited

in Tuch, Sigelman, & MacDonald, 1999). Thus, both the White suburban
youth who voraciously consume Black culture and those who post messages
of hatred toward Blacks on websites may actually have extremely limited
contact with African Americans during their daily life experiences.
Furthermore, although the essential struggle for access to resources and
power is still the same, the situation is perhaps even more comple.x now
than it was in Dubois's day. As Winant (1998) argued, a lthough the days of
codified, monolit hic, White supremacy are gone, White supremacy itself still
lingers as a powerful, if somewhat stealthy, force that influences socia l,
cultural, economic, and political relationships. If anything, the tem1s of the
battle for ant iracists are more difficult now because, as America's military
history and recent terrorist attacks have shown, a guerri lla army is often
more dangerous than a dearly defined enemy. Despite the residual sort of
White supremacy that continues to prosper in the shape of far-right
extremist groups, White supremacy in the 21st century now operates
primarily "under the radar," in disguised, coded, and often subtle forms.
Winant (1998) defined the contemporary situat ion as "a period of universal
racial dual ism" (p. 87). By this he meant that Americans now live in a
society where White supremacy is a daily presence in all of our lives, and yet
it is simultaneously proclaimed that we have achieved the "end of racism"
ideal. Just as it has long been "conm10n sense" that America is a classless
society, it is now "common sense" that we have become a color-blind
society. This is, however, where the notion of dua lism applies, as Winant
pointed out that coexistent with the conm1onsense notion of America as a
colorless society is a deeply ingrained commonsense notion of race as a
biological determinant of people's ident ities. As West (1994) a lso has
argued, race continues to matter despite our wishes and proclamations that
it does not. Thus, Winant (1998) pointed out: Race matters ... not only as a
means of rendering the social world intelligible, but simultaneousl)' as a way
of making it opaque and mysterious. R:ace is nm only reaJ, but also illusory.
Not only is it common sense; it is also common nonsense. Nor only does it
esrablish our identity; ir also denies u.s our identity. Not only does it allocate
resources, power, and privilege; ir also provides means for cballenging rhar
alloc:arion. (p. 90)
AT: You biologize race

We dont biologize race, but instead place it in a sociopolitical
context.
Arnesen 01
(Eric Arnesen, Fall 2001, Professor of History at George Washington University, Whiteness and the Historians Imagination, Published at University of Illinois at Chicago,
http://webs.rps205.com/teachers/jsolberg/files/A125C20651D2406E873089EBFF386B49.pdf, 6/27/12, K.H.)
Rather, some writers perceive whiteness as

position, and perspective
Or is it? Being white and immersion in whiteness, in some constructions, are not equivalent.
an identity constituted by
power,
: Not all white people automatically exhibit the traits associated
with whiteness, cautions literary scholar AnnLouise Keating, who insists on the need to distinguish between literary representations of whiteness and real-life people classified as white. 20 A recurring hero in some versions of
race is
sociopolitical rather than biological, differentiating whiteness as
phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white
supremacy.
Whiteness is not
really a color at all, but a set of power relations. Neil Foley likewise
conceives of whiteness as relational: It represents both the pinnacle of
ethnoracial status as well as the complex social and economic matrix
wherein racial power and privilege were shared, not always equally, by
those who were able to construct identities as Anglo-Saxons, Nordics,
Caucasians, or simply whites. In this framework, not all whites were
equally white.
whiteness studies is the antiracist or race traitor, who essentially just says no to membership in the club that is the white race. 21 Philosopher Charles Mills emphasizes that
In a parallel universe, Mills muses, whiteness could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or alternatively phrased . . .
22
Early twentieth-century Southern poor whites, always low-ranking members of the whiteness club, found themselves banished on the grounds of imputed biological and cultural
inferiority. If whiteness could be conferred, Foley argues, it could also be taken away. 23
A2: No more slavery

Our argument is not that black people are literally slaves but
that they are reduced to a subhuman ontological position
Wilderson 2010 (Frank B. Wilderson, III, writer, filmmaker, critical
theorist, Red, White, and Black, p14-15) I raise Eltis's counterposing
of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to
debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that workor alienation
and exploitationis a constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes
Orlando Patterson, "is the permanent, violent domination of natally
alienated and generally dishonored persons"1* Patterson goes to great
lengths to delink his three "constituent elements of slavery" from the labor
that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. Forced labor
is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a
common practice, it does not define the structure of the power
relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of
his "constituent elements" of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate
experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of poweror lack thereof
lodged in distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and
Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and
labor so that we can theorize the former as a phenomenon that
positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the latter as a
possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially
dead.19 The other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is
the notion that the profit motive is the consideration in the
slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman,
Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have
gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and
connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent
elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but
accumulation and fungibility (as Hartman puts it):20 the condition of
being owned and traded. Patterson reminds us that though professional
athletes and brides in traditional cultures can be said to be bought and sold
(when the former is traded among teams and the latter is exchanged for a
bride price), they are not slaves because (1) they are not "generally
dishonored," meaning they are not stigmatized in their being prior to any
transgressive act or behavior; (2) they are not "natally alienated," meaning
their claims to ascending and descending generations are not denied them;
and (3) they have some choice in the relationship, meaning they are not the
objects of "naked violence." The relational status of the athlete and the
traditional bride is always already recognized and incorporated into
relationality writ large. Unlike the Slave, the professional athlete and
traditional bride are subjected to accumulation and fungibility as one
experience among many experiences, and not as their ontological
foundation.
A2: Fatalism DA
1. Link turn- Revolutionary suicide is key to hope- the chance
to escape the structures is a strong grasp on life- prefer our ev
because its comparative- thats Newton.
2. We control uniqueness- the current structures make black
people despair because theyre trapped in cycles of povertyresignation in the face of the state is the death of hope- again,
Newton
3. Evs not conclusive- just says that Wildersons wrong about
ontological death, it doesnt say that leads to fatalism
A2: Wilderson=Essentializing
1. No link Our evidence is indicative that everything works on the
stage of blackness which even if it is essentializing its still the
underlying structure for which otherization and exclusion occurs
2. The aff is essentializing:
3. The ALT solves a critical interrogation of blackness via

overthrowing the ontology of Americas founding can we explore
other methods of exclusion our 1NC Wilderson evidence speaks to
this question he indicates that only an unflinching rejection of the
system and an analysis of this founding can lead to openings in
dominant modes of thought
4. Only an unflinching and paradigmatic analysis of Blackness can

overturn anti-blackness its their burden to prove that Blackness is
anything but an ontological void
Wilderson 2010 (Frank, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms,
10-11- )
insist on posting an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and
todays Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the
exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions
by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims
successfully made on the State have come to pass. But that would
lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on solid
ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We
would be forced to appeal to facts, the historical record, and
empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on
their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral
into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates
would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the
grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the
assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in
the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who
acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already

dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where
he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a
constituent element of slavery. Once the solid plank of work is
removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of
claims against the statethe proposition that the state and civil
society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an
emancipatory project for the Black positiondisintegrates into thin
air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the
Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as
Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological
position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but
an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes,
maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the
Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually
open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is,
having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of
relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the
rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil
society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the
Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the
Master/Slave dichotomy, but on one who argues there is a
distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and
where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia
Afro-Optimism
The demand for political coherence and reformism obliterates
the position of the slave their integrationist optimism cannot
take into account the gratuitous violence directed towards
Blackness
Hartman and Wilderson 3 (Saidiya, professor of English and
comparative literature and women's and gender studies at Columbia
University, Frank, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Drama at
UC Irvine, THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT, Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2
Spring/Summer 2003, JSTOR, [SG])
What I mean, is that so often in black scholarship, people consciously or
unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of their
evidence in order to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution
to things. Your book, in moving through these scenes of subjection as
they take place in slavery, refuses to do that. And just as importantly, it
does not allow the reader to think that there was a radical enough
break to reposition the black body after Jubilee.' That is a tremendous
and courageous move. And I think what's important about it, is that it
corroborates the experience of ordinary black people today, and of
strange black people like you and me in the academy [laughter]. But
there's something else that the book does, and I want to talk about this
at the level of methodology and analysis. If we think about the
registers of subjectivity as being preconscious interest , unconscious
identity or identifications, and positionality, then a lot of the work in the
social sciences organizes itself around precon-scious interest; it
assumes a subject of consent, and as you have said, a subject of
exploitation, which you reposition as the subject of accumulation.2 Now
when this sort of social science engages the issue of positionality if
and when it does it assumes that it can do so in an un-raced
manner. That's the best of the work. The worst of the work is a kind of
multiculturalism that assumes we all have analogous identities that
can be put into a basket of stories, and then that basket of stories
can lead to similar interests. For me, what you've done in this book is
to split the hair here. In other words, this is not a book that celebrates
an essential Afrocentrism that could be captured by the multicultural
discourse. And yet it's not a book that remains on the surface of
preconscious interest, which so much history and social science does.
Instead, it demands a radical racialization of any analysis of
positionality. So. Why don't we talk about that? Saidiya V Hartman
Well! That's a lot, and a number of things come to mind. I think for me
the book is about the problem of crafting a narrative for the slave as
subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that narrative
enable?" That's where the whole issue of empathic identification is

central for me. Because it just seems that every attempt to employ the
slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration,
regardless of whether it was a leftist narrative of political agency
the slave stepping into someone else's shoes and then becoming a
political agent or whether it was about being able to unveil the
slave's humanity by actually finding oneself in that position. In many
ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a

certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the
limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the
enslaved. On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national
order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the
unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position into view
without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the

void? So much of our political vocabu-lary/imaginary/desires have
been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our claims are
more radical. This goes to the second part of the book that
ultimately the metanarrative thrust is always towards an integration
into the national project, and partic-ularly when that project is in
crisis, black people are called upon to affirm it. So certainly it's about
more than the desire for inclusion with-in the limited set of possibilities
that the national project provides. What then does this language the
given language of freedom enable? And once you realize its limits
and begin to see its inex-orable investment in certain notions of the
subject and subjection, then that language of freedom no longer
becomes that which res-cues the slave from his or her former
condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition , rather
than its transformation. F. W. This is one of the reasons why your
book has been called "pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.' But it's

interesting that she does-n't say what I said when we first started
talking, that it's enabling. I'm assuming that she's white I don't know,
but it certainly sounds like it. S.V.H. But I think there's a certain
integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are variously positioned
on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider
obscene: the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an
opportunity for cel-ebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the
brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good
about our-selves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually
the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social

revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were
trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory
narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as
if there was a space you could carve out of the ter-rorizing state
apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some
autonomy. My project is a different one. And in partic-ular, one of my
hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of

hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of
looking at the status of the slave. F.W. That's very interesting,

because it's something I've been thinking about also in respect to
Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that Gramsci
breaks down hegemony into three categories: influence, leadership, and
consent.' Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then,
using the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,' a white
anti-slavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's
really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of
Power," you not only explain how the positionality of black women and
white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness disarticulates
the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You
write: "[B]eing forced to submit to the will of the master in all things
defines the predicament of slavery" (S, 110). In other words, the female
slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say
that she is ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a
house servant or indentured laborer, be a subordinated subject. You go
on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case, sex]
is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is
not an option. . . . Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very
notion of subjectivity is predicated upon the negation of will" (S, 111).
Capitalism
Capitalism began as a result of white supremacy in order to
control black slaves
Ortiz 2013

influence
white
to change "faces."
incarceration
stronger.
Unfortunately,
. Specifically,

. In this way,
They are

white
it would make
. To this day,
In this way,
Racism is historically separate from capitalism but is crucial to

its operation and existence
Miles and Brown 3
(Robert and Malcolm, Robert Miles is the Director of Study Abroad and Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. Malcolm Brown is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter., Racism (Key Ideas), British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data, pg. 117-118- [SG])
We regard racialisation and racism as historically specific and necessarily

contradictory phenomena. Racism has appeared in a number of different
forms, but it has a varying interaction with economic and political relations
in capitalist and non-capitalist social formations. Racialisation and racism
are not exclusive products of capitalism but have origins in European
societies prior to the development of the capitalist mode of production and
have a history of expression within social formations dominated by noncapitalist modes of production in interaction with the capitalist mode. In

other words, racism is an ideology with conditions of existence that are, at
least in part, independent of the interests of the ruling class and the
bourgeoisie within capitalist societies. To define racism as functional to
capitalism is to presuppose the nature and outcome of its interaction with economic and political relations, and with other ideologies. Such a definition mistakenly
assumes that a homogeneous ruling class inevitably and necessarily
derives economic and/or political advantages from its expression. The use
of racism to limit the size of the labour market is not necessarily in the
interests of those employers experiencing a labour shortage, nor of those
who require skilled labour, while racism and exclusionary practices that
result in civil disturbance will not necessarily be welcomed by capitalists
whose business activity has been disrupted as a result, or by the state that
may need to increase expenditure to maintain social order. Hence, we
analyse racism as a necessarily contradictory phenomenon. The
expression of racism, and the subsequent structuring of political and
economic relations, has a variety of temporally specific consequences for
all those implicated in the process, and whether or not they are
advantageous will depend upon class position and conjuncture. Racism is therefore a
contradictory phenomenon because what is functional for one set of interests may be dysfunctional for another, and because the conditions that sustain its advantageous
The effectivity of racism is

therefore historically specific and hence knowable only as a result of
historical analysis rather than abstract theorising. The objective of this chapter is to illustrate and elaborate
these claims. Part of the explanation for this exclusionary practice lies in the fact that
the majority of migrants, including those who considered themselves
skilled in the context of relations of production in the Caribbean and the
Asian subcontinent, had few skills relevant to an industrial capitalist
economy (Wright 1968: 3040). On this criterion, they were likely to be excluded from any form of skilled manual or non-manual employment. Additionally, racism was
expression are rarely permanent, and changed circumstances may clash with the continued expression of racism.
a determining factor. Some employers explained their exclusionary practices by reference to the anticipated or real opposition of their existing workforce to working with
coloureds, opposition that they endorsed by acting in this manner. Others negatively stereotyped Asians as slow to learn, or African Caribbean people as lazy, unresponsive to
discipline and truculent, or coloured people generally as prone to accidents or requiring more supervision than white workers (Wright 1968: 89144). In all these instances,
migrants were signified by skin colour and attributed collectively with negatively evaluated characteristics. Not all employers in Wrights survey articulated such racist views, so
unanimity should not be assumed. Nevertheless, the interrelationship between the racialisation of migrants, racism and exclusionary practice limited the parameters of the labour
market open to migrants from the Caribbean and Asian subcontinent. Thus, while there existed a demand for an increase in the size of the British working class which thereby
stimulated migration racism and associated exclusionary practices placed those migrants in, and largely restricted them to, semi- and unskilled manual working-class positions.
Even if they win capitalism was the root cause of slavery, that
doesnt explain modern racism
Movements based on class are supplemented by antiblackness.
Solving for the exploitation of Capitalism can never solve for the
forced labor of the slave. The alternative is to refuse to affirm a
political program which ignores the positionality of the Black in the
US and entrenches this position thorough demands based on class
exploitation. It is not try OR die but try OR strengthen
antiblackness.
Wilderson. 2007. Frank B. Chap 1. The prison slave as Hegemonys (silent)

scandal. In Joy James Warfare in the American Homeland
The black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in
Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as
the base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a
comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian
discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a
mass of antagonistic identity formations-formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery,
exploitation, and hegemony-but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide
enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. 3. We

begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a
desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with the
imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual
anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation
This scenario crowds out other

postrevolutionary possibilities-that is, idleness.The scandal with which the
black subject position "threatens" Gramscian and coalition discourse is
manifest in the black subject's incommensurability with, or disarticulation of,
and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress.
and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the black subject destabilize-emerge as
the unthought, and thus the scandal of-historical materialism? How does the black subject function
within the "American desiring machine" differently from the quintessential Gramscian subaltern, the
worker? Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a
phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. According to Lindon

Barrett, something about the black body in and of itself made it the
repository of the violence that was the slave trade. It would have been far
easier and far more profitable to take the white underclass from along the
riverbanks of England and western Europe than to travel all the way to Africa
for slaves.The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early twenty-first century is
twofold. First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black
body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with
variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital's primal
desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of
hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original
desire, the direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of
slavery-that is, the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex-has once
again as its structuring metaphor and primary target the black body. The value of
reintroducing the unthought category of the slave by way of noting the absence of the black subject
lies in the black subject's potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital formations
because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism . In other
words, the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of the
demand made by the positionality of the worker. The worker demands that
productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony; Lenin's
dictatorship of the proletariat-in a word, socialism). In contrast, the slave
demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate
democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence
of black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of the
text's inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of
capitalism, the black body of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the
generative subject that resolves late capital's over-accumulation crisis , the black

(incarcerated) body of the twentieth century and twenty-first century, does not reify the
basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of
work and exploitation. Thus, the black subject position in America represents
an antagonism or demand that cannot be satisfied through a transfer of
ownership or organization of existing rubrics. In contrast, the Gramscian subject, the worker,
represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful war of position, which brings about the end of exploitation.
The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of
, the insatiability of the slave demand on 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 "generalized trust," the
precondition for the solicitation of consent, "equals racialized
whiteness"' Furthermore, as Orlando 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 labor power to
exchange.' A slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical),
but is subsumed by direct relations of force. As such, a slave is an articulation of a despotic
productivity itself. Thus
irrationality, whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. A metaphor comes into being through a
violence that kills the thing so that the concept may live. Gramscian discourse and coalition politics come to grips
with America's structuring rationality-what it calls capitalism, or political economy-but not with its
structuring irrationality, the anti-production of late capital, and the hyperdiscursive violence that first
kills the black subject so that the concept may be born. In other words, from the
incoherence of black death, America generates the coherence of

white life. This is important when thinking about the Gramscian paradigm
and its spiritual progenitors in the world of organizing in the United States today, with its overvaluation of hegemony and civil
. At some point, they require coherence

and categories for the record, meaning that they contain the seeds of
antiblackness. What does it mean to be positioned not as a positive term in the struggle for
society. Struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying
anticapitalist hegemony-that is, as a worker-but to be positioned in excess of hegemony; to be a

catalyst that disarticulates the rubric of hegemony; to be a scandal to its assumptive, foundational
logic; to threaten civil society's discursive integrity? In White Writing, J. M. Coetzee examines the literature of Europeans who encountered the South African Khoisan in
the Cape between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century.10 The Europeans faced an "anthropological scandal": a being without (recognizable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary habits, sexual mores,
significant, character (because, according to the literature, they did not work). Other Africans, such as the Xhosa, who were
agriculturalists, provided European discourse with enough categories for the record so that, through various strategies of articulation, they could be known
means of agriculture, and, most
the Khoisan did not produce the necessary

categories for the record, the play of signifiers that would allow for a
sustainable semiotics. According to Coetzee, the coherence of European discourse depends on two
by textual projects that accompanied the colonial project. But
structuring axes. A "Historical Axis" consists of codes distributed along the axis of temporality and events, while the
"Anthropological Axis" is an axis of cultural codes. It mattered very little which codes on either axis a particular
indigenous community was perceived to possess, with "possession" the operative word, for these codes act as a
kind of mutually agreed-on currency. What matters is that the community has some play of difference along both
axes, sufficient in number to construct taxonomies that can be investigated, identified, and named by the
discourse. Without this, the discourse cannot go on. It is reinvigorated when an unknown entity presents itself, but
its anxiety reaches crisis proportions when the entity remains unknown. Something unspeakable occurs. Not to
possess a particular code along the Anthropological Axis or the Historical Axis is akin to lacking a gene for brown
hair or green eyes on an X or Y chromosome. Lacking a Historical Axis or an Anthropological Axis is akin to the
absence of the chromosome itself. The first predicament raises the notion: What kind of human?
The
second
predicament brings into crisis the notion of the human itself.
Without the textual

categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts, physical appearance, and, most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of the
She or he was the void in discourse that could be

designated only as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan's status within discourse was
not that of an opponent or an interlocutor but, rather, that of an unspeakable
scandal. His or her position within the discourse was one of disarticulation, for he or she did little or nothing to
fortify and extend the interlocutory life of the discourse. Just as the Khoisan presented the
discourse of the Cape with an anthropological scandal, so the black subject
invitation to become Anthropological Man.

in the Western Hemisphere, the slave, presents Marxism and American
textual practice with a historical scandal. How is our incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis
germane to our experience of being "a phenomenon without analog"? A sample list of codes mapped out by an American subject's
Historical Axis might include rights or entitlements; here, even Native Americans provide categories for the record when one thinks
of how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the U.S. Constitution. Sovereignty is also included, whether a state is one the
subject left behind or, as in the case of American Indians, one taken by force and by dint of broken treaties. White supremacy
has made good use of the Indian subject's positionality, one that fortifies and extends the interlocutory
life of America as a coherent (albeit imperial) idea because treaties are forms of articulation :
Discussions brokered between two groups are presumed to possess the same
category of historical currency, sovereignty. The code of sovereignty can
have a past and future history, if you will excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that 15o Native American
tribes have applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for sovereign recognition so that they might qualify for funds harvested from land
stolen from them." Immigration is another code that maps the subject onto the American Historical Axis, with narratives of arrival
based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano subject positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of
America as an idea because racial conflict can be articulated across the various contestations over the legitimacy of arrival,
Both whites and Latinos generate data for this category. Slavery is the
great leveler of the black subject's positionality. The black American subject
does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and
immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the
cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a
heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that
which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally
impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However,
it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because-and this is key- our presence works
back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every
immigration.
subject-even the most massacred among them, Indians-is required to have analogs within the nation's structuring narrative, and the experience of one
subject on whom the nation's order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subject's presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes,
"Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."" If we take him at his word, then we must
.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its
magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous
violence through which civil society is possible-namely those bodies for
which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at
accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body
the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of
history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without
analog-a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the
Imaginary, for "whoever says `rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever says "AIDS" says black-the "Negro is a phobogenic object.""
means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage,

the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this
Indeed, it
realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal-not at least, for a true
revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition . If a social movement is to be neither
social-
Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the

invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be
democratic nor
honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior
partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have
been, and remain today-even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movement-invested
This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is prowhite, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death.
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the
United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity
(such as socialism or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of
possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a
politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder."
elsewhere.

One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be
elaborated by it if, indeed, one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to
take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the
word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even
unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in
and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all."
Yet
few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of
blackness-and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very
Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is
something more terrifying about the joy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro).
Perhaps
coalitions
today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society-with hegemony as a handy
prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition,
the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the
worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison

slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the
contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain
coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as
revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of black antagonisms,
simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker
(whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a
white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration
of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave
or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil
society. From the coherence of civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims
blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction ." It is a
"scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the
unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a black
specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied
(via reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the
death.
1.)
Makes the K a prior question refer to analysis
above
Color blindness
Colorblindness ignores inequalities created by racism
Liberal Colorblindness and the Perpetuation of Racism By liberal
colorblindness I am referring
to a belief that although racial disparities are certainly real and troubling and
although they are indeed the result of discrimination and unequal opportunity paying less attention
to color or race is a progressive and open-minded way to combat those
disparities. So, for instance, this is the type of colorblind stance often evinced by teachers, or social
workers, or folks who work in non-profit service agencies, or other helping professions . Its
embodiment is the elementary school teacher who I seem to meet in every town to which I
travel who insists they never even notice color and make sure to treat everyone exactly
the same, as if this were the height of moral behavior and the ultimate in progressive
educational pedagogy. But in fact, colorblindness is exactly the opposite of what is
needed to ensure justice and equity for persons of color. To be blind to color, as Julian
Bond has noted, is to be blind to the consequences of color, and especially the
consequences of being the wrong color in America. Whats more, when teachers and others resolve
to ignore color, they not only make it harder to meet the needs of the
persons of color with whom they personally interact, they actually help further racism
and racial inequity by deepening denial that the problem exists, which in turn
makes the problem harder to solve. To treat everyone the same even
assuming this were possible is not progressive, especially when some are contending with barriers
and obstacles not faced by others. If some are dealing with structural racism, to treat
them the same as white folks who arent is to fail to meet their needs. The same is
true with women and sexism, LGBT folks and heterosexism, working-class folks and the class system, persons
with disabilities and ableism, right on down the line.
Identity matters. It shapes our
experiences. And to not recognize that is to increase the likelihood that even the well-intended will
perpetuate the initial injury. Indeed, to be colorblind in the face of profound racial disparities can
encourage the mindset that whatever disparities exist must be the fault of
those on the bottom. As parents, for example, if we do not discuss racism and discrimination with our
children and white parents, including liberal ones, show a serious hesitance to do this they will grow up
without the critical context needed to process the glaring racial inequities they can see with their own eyes
quite clearly. So, white children may well come to conclude that the reason blacks, Latinos, and American Indian
folks are so much more likely to be poor, and live in less desirable neighborhoods or communities is because
there is something wrong with them. They must not try hard enough to succeed.
If colorblindness
encourages us to ignore color and its consequences, as it must almost by definition,

then we are left with explanations for inequity that are not only
conservative in nature, but racist too. For children of color, colorblindness, no matter the liberality
behind it, can lead them to be ill-prepared for discrimination when and if it occurs in their lives. It can also lead
them to internalize the blame for the inequities they too can see, and to conclude that black and brown folks
have less than whites, on average, because they deserve less.
Although many liberal and progressive

think colorblind child-rearing is the way to raise antiracist children,
the best and most recent research on the matter completely debunks this
popular notion. Beyond the personal and familial settings, colorblindness also proves
problematic in the realm of political activism. Within both liberal and further-left
political advocacy and organizing, colorblindness leads persons in these formations to
ignore the racial makeup of our own group efforts, and to pay no attention
to how white-dominated they can often be. This colorblindness, by blinding us to the way
parents
in which liberal and left groups come to be so white (even when data says people of color tend to be more
progressive than whites, and so, if anything, should be over-represented in these groups), makes it unlikely that
individuals will interrogate what it is about their own practices that brings about such a skewed demographic. In
while progressive formations should almost instinctively recoil from

overwhelming whiteness since it likely signals serious failings in coalition-building, strategy and
short,
tactics, as well as utter obliviousness to the way in which were going about our business and base-building
colorblindness trades this critical introspection for a bland and

dispassionate nonchalance. Oh well, some will say, We put up signs and sent out e-mails, and
liberal-left
we cant control who comes to the meetings/rallies/protests and who doesnt. End of story, end of problem. So
colorblindness means well ignore the obvious

questions we should be asking when trying to ensure a more
representative and diverse movement for change. Namely, questions like: When
are the organizing meetings being held and where? Are people of color in
on the planning at the beginning, or merely added to the agenda after the fact,
as speakers at the rally or some such thing? Are we organizing mostly online (which means well
in the case of progressive organizing,
miss a lot of folks of color who dont have regular internet access), or really building relationships across
Are we speaking to the immediate concerns in

communities of color, and linking these to whatever issue were organizing around (more on this
physical lines of community?
below)? Even cultural issues come into play. After all, if youre trying to build a multiracial formation for social
you cant evince a

cultural style at every event that reflects what white folks may be
comfortable with but which might seem distant to folks of color. So, for instance, to sing the same folk
justice, or multiracial antiwar coalition, or movement for ecological sanity,
songs at a rally that you were singing forty years ago, or to come to an antiwar rally decked out in tie-dye, but
not to include the music and styles of youth of color influenced by hip-hop, is to ensure the permanent
marginality of your movement in the eyes of black and brown folks (and truthfully, young people of all colors).
Put simply, freedom songs today are and must be different than in the sixties. But too often white-dominated
liberal-left events and organizations resemble holdovers from an earlier time ,

rather than a movement that has grown to include multiple voices, styles and cultural norms. This is what
happens when we dont pay attention to, or care enough about, who is included and who isnt at the table. It is
the result, at least in part, of liberal-left colorblindness.
The colormuteness of social movements reinforces racial divisions

and ignores root causes
Liberal Colormuteness and the Perpetuation of Racism But as troubling as colorblindness can be when
evinced by liberals, colormuteness may be even worse. Colormuteness comes into play in the way many on
the white liberal-left fail to give voice to the connections between a given issue about which they are

when environmental
activists focus on the harms of pollution to the planet in the abstract, or to nonhuman species, but largely ignore the day-to-day environmental issues facing
people of color, like disproportionate exposure to lead paint, or municipal, medical and toxic waste,
they marginalize black and brown folks within the movement, and in so doing, reinforce
racial division and inequity. Likewise, when climate change activists focus on the ecological costs of
passionate, and the issue of racism and racial inequity. So, for instance,
global warming, but fail to discuss the way in which climate change disproportionately affects people of color
around the globe, they undermine the ability of the green movement to gain strength, and they reinforce
How many climate change activists, for instance, really connect

the dots between global warming and racism? Even as people of color are
twice as likely as whites to live in the congested communities that
experience the most smog and toxic concentration thanks to fossil fuel use? Even as heat
waves connected to climate change kill people of color at twice the rate of their white
counterparts? Even as agricultural disruptions due to warming caused disproportionately by
the white west cost African nations $600 billion annually? Even as the
contribution to fossil fuel emissions by people of color is 20 percent
below that of whites, on average? Sadly, these facts are typically subordinated
within climate activism to simple the world is ending rhetoric , or predictions (accurate
white privilege.
though they may be) that unless emissions are brought under control global warming will eventually kill
warming is killing a lot of people now, and most of them are

black and brown. To build a global movement to roll back the ecological catastrophe
facing us, environmentalists and clean energy advocates must connect the dots
between planetary destruction and the real lives being destroyed
currently, which are disproportionately of color. To do anything less is
not only to engage in a form of racist marginalizing of people of color and their
concerns, but is to weaken the fight for survival. The same is true for other
issues, such as health care, where to ignore the specific racial aspects of the subject, as so many liberals
and progressives do, is to further a form of colorblind racism. So, for instance, in the American health
care debate, reform proponents typically focus on universal coverage
alone, without addressing the way that even people of color with
coverage receive inferior and often racist care, and the way that their
experiences with racism (even if they have insurance) have health consequences that
universal coverage cannot solve. To believe that universal coverage or even single payer
millions. Fact is,
could close racial health gaps between whites and people of color is to ignore the research on the primary
causes of those gaps: research that says money and access are not the principal problems. In fact, to be
blind to the importance of racism within the health care debate is to commit a huge strategic blunder as
research suggests that one of the principal reasons that the

United States has such a paltry social safety net (including less comprehensive
health care guarantees than those in other western industrialized nations ) is because of a
common belief that those people (meaning people of color) will take unfair
advantage of such programs. So to not connect the dots between the nations
broken health care system and racism is to miss one of the main reasons were in
well. After all,

such a position in the first place!
Their movement is the manifestation of white privilege coalitions
are impossible without confronting racism
Blatant White Privilege and Perspectivism on the Left But more disturbing than either liberal-left
the manifestation of blatant white privilege by

those who claim to be progressive. Whereas colorblindness and colormuteness on the left
colorblindness or colormuteness is
stem largely from ignorance on the part of otherwise well-intended persons, this final aspect of liberal-left
is so often assaultive and the result of

seemingly deliberate indifference to people of color. Perhaps the classic example
racism is far more pernicious, because it
of how liberal-left activists can manifest white privilege is that of the white-dominated womens movement.
Although women of color have long engaged in feminist theorizing, activism and advocacy, the predominant
strain of American feminism and that which has been largely responsible for setting the political agenda
for womens issues for the past five decades has been disproportionately white. As such, the way in which
that part of the movement framed issues, and made their case to an oftentimes hostile public, reflected first
and foremost the concerns of white (and, it should be noted, middle-class) women. Thus, to frame the fight
for womens liberation as a fight for the right to a career and to break free from the chains of domesticity (as
was so central to the early feminist writings of women like Betty Friedan), presupposed that women were not
currently working outside the home. But of course, most women of color in the United States had always
worked outside the home (as well as in it) and so the struggle as articulated in books like The Feminine
Mystique was implicitly white, and of little value to women of color whose lived realities were different. Even
the notion of sisterhood so central to Second-Wave white feminism was largely exclusionary to women of
color, who readily pointed out (and still do) how racism and white privilege limit the extent to which they
have been treated as true sisters, or heard as members of the larger community of women. Likewise, in the
struggle over reproductive freedom and choice, liberal white feminists have often been quicker to support
women who seek to terminate pregnancies than to support women who are having their ability to choose
when thousands of black

and Native American women were being involuntarily sterilized
throughout the 20th century (right up until the 1970s) as discussed by Thomas Shapiro in
motherhood restricted: women who are disproportionately of color. So
his 1985 book, Population Control Politics, and Harriet Washington in her 2006 award-winning volume,
few in the white feminist community made the restriction

of their reproductive freedom a central issue. Likewise, in 1991 when neo-Nazi (and
Medical Apartheid
state legislator) David Duke proposed bribing women on welfare to use NORPLANT contraceptive inserts as a
way to control their fertility and this he did, of course, for blatantly racist reasons, as his anti-welfare
rhetoric made clear Louisianas largest and most mainstream liberal pro-choice coalition (an affiliate of
By disregarding the
lived realities of people of color in this way, liberal-left activists elevate a
destructive white perspectivism to the level of unquestioned and unassailable universal
truth, and reinscribe the concerns of whites as those of paramount
importance. The same phenomenon can be observed in a range of liberal-left movements and issue
NARAL) refused to take a public stand against the proposed legislation (2).
causes. Among these one would have to again consider the environmental movement, in which large
numbers of otherwise liberal types in the Sierra Club have for years been pushing blatantly xenophobic and
racist resolutions against immigration from south of the United States border. Or, in the case of the New
Orleans area Sierra Club, extending a legislative leadership award to the St. Bernard Parish President so
as to honor him for his work on wetlands restoration even as he was also one of the main proponents of a
blood relative renter law passed after Katrina, which would have made it almost impossible for blacks to
return to the Parish and rent there. In fact, the Parish President even went to court to defend the law

which would have barred renting property to anyone who wasnt a blood relative in this 95% white Parish
despite its obvious racist intent. But to the white Sierra Club leadership, his racism was unimportant. What
mattered was his record on wetlands alone. Or consider animal rights activists, especially the folks at PETA,
who seem to go out of their way to appropriate the suffering of racialized minorities (as with their infamous
Holocaust on Your Plate, and Are Animals the New Slaves? campaigns, the latter of which compared
factory farming to the lynching of blacks). While trying to make a perfectly legitimate point about the way
that cruelty to non-human animals contributes to an ethic of exploitation that is connected to cruelty to
humans, such efforts disregard or minimize the suffering of racialized minorities, exploit that suffering to
score cheap emotional points, and do all of this with little or no regard for the strategic wisdom of alienating
millions of people deliberately. After all, to say (as PETA chief Ingrid Newkirk has) that At least the Nazis
didnt eat the objects of their derision as a way to convince people of the wisdom of vegetarianism,
suggests not only a level of indecency and a lack of perspective that is disturbing, but more to the point, a
strategic incompetence so mind-boggling as to defy rational description. Or consider the struggle for LGBT
Historically, the role of people of color in the movement

and LGBT community has been largely ignored, and the struggle for
queer liberation has been considerably whitewashed. From the whitening of the
rights and equality.
Stonewall Riots considered the first salvo in the gay lib movement, in which Puerto Rican drag queens and
trans folk like Sylvia Rivera played a central role, although mainstream white liberal remembrances of the
event often obscure this fact to the current focus on marriage equality, activists within the LGBT
community have presented a largely white face for the movement.
The celebrities who front
the movement are white, the publications and media that are used to define the community to
the larger society are white and affluent in orientation, and th e desire of much of the LGBT activist
community to present an image of normalcy (as in, were just like straight folks) is
based on a white middle class understanding of what constitutes
normal. While lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered folks of color have long spoken out against their
marginalization within the larger movement for queer liberation, the conflict between whites and people of
color in the movement has been elevated even more so during the fight for marriage equality. After the
passage of Proposition 8 in California which banned gay marriage many within the white LGBT
community blamed blacks for the outcome. Although black support for the measure was higher than that for
whites, early reports of 70 percent approval in the African American community were dramatically inflated
and based on a small number of precincts. And since blacks only comprise a small share of the electorate in
California, to blame the black community for the outcome is to ignore the much larger overall role played by
whites in the election. But despite these facts, liberal LGBT activists and writers like Dan Savage, and the
leading gay publication, The Advocate, played upon blatant racial imagery in their post-Prop 8 discussions.
The Advocate actually ran a cover story announcing that Gay Is the New Black, and Savage, for his part,
launched into a thinly veiled racist tirade, in which he insisted that black homophobia was a far greater
threat to gays and lesbians (presumably white ones, since he showed no recognition of the double-bind
identity of queer folks of color), than white LGBT racism was to the black and brown. That the Advocate
would float such an idea signaled the inherent whiteness of the publications perspective. To suggest that
gay might be the new black ignored the fact that for millions of LGBT black folks, black had never stopped
being an oppressed identity, and there was nothing at all new about their marginalization. As Maurice
Tracy explained in his comprehensive takedown of the Gay is the New Black meme, Gay can never be the
new black because first and foremost this phrase does not acknowledge the fact that there are those of us
who are already gay AND black. We live within the margins, not because we choose to but because society
places us there. And as for blaming the black community for the result on Prop 8, Tracy noted, people who
attended church regularly, regardless of race, were the ones who overwhelmingly supported Prop. 8.
Therefore, what we have here is not a case of black homophobia but religious homophobia. Black culture
therefore became an easy target for the lazy individual. The fact is that black culture is homophobic because
America is homophobic. Given the almost non-existent outreach to the black community by the No H8
campaign and the way in which the campaign relied on white celebrities and entertainers to make the
public case for them it is hardly surprising that African Americans may have come to see the LGBT
struggle in California as a white one, divorced from their day-to-day concerns. But that is not the fault of
people of color. Rather, the responsibility for this unhappy outcome rests almost entirely with the whitedominated LGBT movement, whose principal organizations (like the Human Rights Campaign) have only
nominal people of color involvement at the top levels of policy and decision making. As L.Z. Granderson

noted in his rebuttal to the Gay is the New Black notion, at the 2008 HRC national fundraiser in D.C., the
only black people who appeared on the stage in the entire three hour program were there as entertainers.
Even the way in which mainstream male gayness has been constructed in the mass media (with the open
collaboration of persons within the gay community), as a compendium of fabulousness, materialism,
fashion, and a unique ability to design ones home interior (or get favorable coverage and shout-outs on the
Bravo Network), alienates those who for reasons of race (and class status) have been left out of the reigning
imagery of what constitutes gay chic. Other
examples of liberal-left marginalizing of

folks of colors concerns and thus, people of color themselves include the way
many progressives seek to consciously downplay the role of race and racism
in particular political struggles, even when such matters are central to
the issue at hand. For instance, during the mid-1990s debate over welfare
reform, mainstream liberals and progressive policy advocates often engaged the
assault on poor folks without discussing the blatantly racist component
of the anti-welfare hysteria that had, by that point, gripped the nation for several decades. At a
national conference organized by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in which progressive
white liberals at
the upper echelons of the organization resisted any discussion of racism as a
central motivator for the conservative attack, or using anti-racist
organizing strategies as a mechanism of resistance. When the subject was raised, by myself and
messaging around budget, tax and welfare issues was being plotted and planned
several others (all of us, interestingly, southerners), the response was dismissive. We were assured that
bringing up racism was a sure-fire way to lose the fight. We had to stick to debunking common anti-welfare
myths and appealing to white people. Bringing up racism would only distract from that goal, we were told,
Not only did the

strategy of course fail, but in refusing to openly engage racism,
progressive activists forfeited the opportunity to build coalitions across
lines of race and class: coalitions that may have proven empowering in
years to come. And by allowing welfare critics to avoid being confronted by the racism that was so
and provoke more backlash. The needs and interests of whites were what mattered.
inherent to their position, liberal organizations allowed those critics to remain behind a veil of innocence and
evidence
from the field of psychology suggests it is better to openly confront
racism and call it out even at the risk of causing short-term backlash
and anger as doing so forces those being called out to contemplate
their real motivations, and occasionally to rethink their positions, once
confronted with the possibility that those motivations are less pure than
they had imagined. When racism is allowed to remain sublimated and
subtle, and isnt called out directly, it is actually more capable of controlling
individual and collective behavior. The same problem emerged in the mid-to-late 90s in
denial that, if anything, strengthened their resolve. As I discuss in my newest book, Colorblind,
California and Washington State, when white-dominated liberal activists and campaigners were trying to
save affirmative action from ballot initiatives that sought to eliminate it. In both cases, despite the obvious
centrality of white racial resentment to the issue, organizers avoided discussing racism, either as a
motivator for the anti-affirmative action movement, or even as a reason for why affirmative action was still
needed and should be defended. Rather, they chose to focus on the impact to women as women (and
especially white women) if affirmative action were ended. Believing against all evidence to the contrary
that this self-interest focus and colorblind approach would be the best way to convince whites to oppose the
initiatives, these activists marginalized the concerns of people of color, privileged white interests and
narratives, and weakened what could otherwise have been long-term cross-racial coalitions. The strategy not
only failed but furthered white privilege and racism within the liberal community and drove wedges between

forces that should have and could have been working together.
Communisms is class reductionism discussing racism first is a

prerequisite to class revolution
the most common way in which folks on the

left sometimes perpetuate racism is by a vulgar form of class reductionism, in
which they advance the notion that racism is a secondary issue to the
class system, and that what leftists and radicals should be doing is spending
more time focusing on the fight for dramatic and transformative economic change
(whether reformist or revolutionary), rather than engaging in what they derisively term
identity politics. The problem, say these voices, are corporations, the rich, the elite,
etc., and to get sidetracked into a discussion of white supremacy is to
ignore this fact and weaken the movement for radical change. But in fact,
racism affects the lives of people of color quite apart from the class
system. Black and brown folks who are not poor or working class indeed those who are
upper middle class and affluent are still subjected to discrimination
regularly, whether in the housing market, on the part of police, in schools, in the health care delivery
Class-Based Reductionism on the Left Perhaps
system and on the job. True enough, these better-off folks of color may be more economically stable that
their poor white counterparts, but in the class system
they compete for stuff against
whites in the same economic strata: a competition in which they operate at a decided and
unfair disadvantage. So too, poor and working class whites, though they suffer the indignities
of the class system, still have decided advantages over poor and working class
people of color: their spells of unemployment are typically far shorter, their ability to find affordable
and decent housing is far greater, and they are less likely to find themselves in resource-poor schools than
lower income whites are more

likely to own their own home than middle class blacks, and most poor
whites in the U.S. do not live in poor neighborhoods rather they are mostly to be
found in middle class communities where opportunities are far greater whereas most poor people
of color are surrounded by concentrated poverty. And black folks with college
even blacks and Latinos in middle class families. In fact,
degrees, professional occupational status and health insurance coverage actually have worse health
outcomes than white dropouts, with low income and low-level if any medical care, thanks to racism in health
care delivery and black experiences with racism, which have uniquely debilitating health affects at all
To ignore the unique deprivations of racism (as with sexism,

heterosexism, ableism, etc) so as to forward a white-friendly class analysis is
inherently marginalizing to the lived experience of black and brown folks
in the United States. And whats more, to ignore racism is to actually weaken
the struggle for class unity and economic transformation. Research on
this matter is crystal clear: it is in large measure due to racism and the
income levels.
desire of working class whites to maintain a sense of superiority over workers of color, as a psychological
wage when real wages and benefits have proven inadequate
that has divided the working

class. It is this holding onto the status conferred by whiteness, as a form of alternate property (to
paraphrase UCLA Law Professor, Cheryl Harris), which has undermined the ability of white and of-color
Unless we discuss the way in

which racism and racial inequity weakens our bonds of attachment, we will
never be able to forward a truly progressive, let alone radical politics. In
other words, unless all of our organizing becomes antiracist in terms of outreach,
messaging, strategizing, and implementation, whatever work were doing, around whatever
important issue, will be for naught. Only by building coalitions that look
inward at the way racism and white privilege may be operating within those
formations, and that also look outward, at the way racism and privilege
affect the issue around which were organizing (be that schools, health care, jobs, tax equity, the
environment, LGBT rights, reproductive freedom, militarism or anything else), can we hope to beat
back the forces of reaction against which we find ourselves arrayed. The
other side has proven itself ready and willing to use racism to divide us. In response, we must
commit to using antiracism as a force to unite.
working people to engage in solidarity across racial lines.
Liberal ideas of colorblindness and colormuteness perpetuates

systemic inequalities and white privilege extreme class
reductionism prevents effective reform
Beyond the personal biases that

exist to some extent within all of us (including those who are progressive), liberals and those on the left
operate within institutional spaces and even in our political activism in ways that
contribute to systemic racial inequity. This we do through four primary mechanisms.
The first is a well-intended but destructive form of colorblindness . The second is an
equally destructive colormuteness. These mean, quite literally, a tendency among many
on the white liberal-left to neither see nor give voice to race and racism as central
issues in our communities and the institutions where we operate, or their connection to
and interrelationship with other issues. Both liberal/left colorblindness and colormuteness
perpetuate the marginalization of people of color and their concerns, in the larger
society and within progressive formations for social change. The third
mechanism by which liberal and left activists and advocates perpetuate racism is by the blatant
manifestation of white privilege in our activities, issue framing, outreach and
analysis: specifically, the favoring of white perspectives over those of people of color, the
co-optation of black and brown suffering to score political points, and the
unwillingness to engage race and racism even when they are central to the issue being
addressed. And fourth, left activists often marginalize people of color by operating
from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the
real issue is class, not race, that the only color that matters is green,
Beyond Individual Bias: How Liberals and the Left Practice Racism

and that issues like racism are mere identity politics, which should take
a back seat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help
working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class
and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by
presuming that low income folks of color and low income whites are equally
oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges
white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even
more, as well see, it ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the
interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little
working class consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why classbased programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the
industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white
racism has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks. Only by
confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do)
can we ever hope to build cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for
the policies favored by the class reductionist to work be they social democrats or
Marxists or even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be
challenged directly. By way of all four of the above mechanisms which we will now explore in-depth
liberals and progressives reinforce the notion that persons of color are
less important, their concerns less central to the larger justice cause, and
that ultimately they are to be viewed as inferior junior partners in the
movement for social change.
Deracinating is indistinct from whiteness it just eliminates black
consciousness which is key
Gordon 7 Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, Director of the Center for AfroJewish Studies and a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and President of the Caribbean
Philosophical Association. Has written many works in race theory, Africana philosophy, postcolonial phenomenology,
etc. and has been a professor at both Yale and Brown (Lewis R., "Not Always Enslaved, Yet Not Quite Free:
Philosophical Challenges from the Underside of the New World," 10/15/07,
https://eee.uci.edu/12w/22500/homepage/gordon_not.always.enslaved.pdf)//AM
The phenomenology of Black Consciousness suggests , then, that such a

consciousness cannot properly function as a negative term of a prior
positivity. Its link to the political is such that its opposition would have
to be the chimera appealed to in retreats to neutrality and blindness .
Should we consider, for instance, the popular liberal model of cosmopolitanism, the
conclusion will be that such claims hold subterranean endorsements of
white normativity. This is because white consciousness is not properly a racial
consciousness. It is that which does not require its relative term , which
means, in effect, that it could simply assert itself, at least in political terms, as
consciousness itself. The effect would be an affirmation of status quo
conditions through an appeal to an ethics of the self: The cosmopolitanist, for instance, fails to see that
politics is at work in the illusion of transcending particularity. To point this out to the cosmopolitanist would
constitute an intrusion of the political in the dream world of ethical efficacy.
It would mean to

blacken the cosmopolitan world, or, in the suggestive language of Bikos critique, to
render it conscious of political reality, to begin its path into Black
Consciousness. This is to say that freedom, from such an Africana
perspective, requires the articulation of political life as a face-to-face
relationship.
Acknowledging whiteness in debate creates a new anti-racist

whiteness ignoring these problems enables the proliferation of
unconscious white privilege
Sullivan 8 Professor Philosophy, Womens Studies, and African and African American Studies @ Pennsylvania
State University (Shannon Sullivan, Spring 2008, Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of
a Racial Category, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, Vol.
44, No. 2, Project Muse)//KP
Like critical conservationists regarding whiteness, Royce knows that he faces an uphill battle in convincing
provincialism tends to
connote a healthy fondness for and pride in local traditions, interests,
and customs. More negatively, it means being restricted and limited, sticking to the narrow ideas of a
many of his interlocutors of the value of provincialism. Put positively,
given region or group and being indifferent, perhaps even violently hostile to the ways of outsiders. What
connects these different meanings is their sense of being rooted in a particular cultural-geographical place.
Royces definition, which emphasizes conscious awareness of this

rootedness (an important point to which I will return), a province is a domain that is sufficiently
In
unified to have a true consciousness of its own unity, to feel a pride in its own ideals and customs, and to
provincialism is, first, the

tendency for a group to possess its own customs and ideals ; secondly,
the totality of these customs and ideals themselves; and thirdly the love and pride
possess a sense of its distinction from other[s]. And correspondingly,
which leads the inhabitants of a province to cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs and aspirations
(61). [End Page 238] Emphasizing unity, love, and pride, Royces definitions steer away from the negative
connotations of provincialism. But in Royces dayand not much has changed in this regardit was the
negative, or false, form of provincialism that most often came to peoples minds when they thought about
the value and effects of the concept. As Royce was writing in 1902, the false provincialism, or
sectionalism, of the United States Civil War was a recent memory for many of his readers. In the Civil War,
stubborn commitment to one portion of the nation violently opposed it to another portion and threatened to
tear the nation apart. Provincialism, which appealed to regional values to disunite, had to be condemned in
the name of patriotism, which united in the name of a higher good. Royces rhetorical strategy is to take the
challenge of defending provincialism head-on: My main intention is to define the right form and the true
office of provincialismto portray what, if you please, we may call the Higher Provincialism, to portray it,
and then to defend it, to extol it, and to counsel you to further just such provincialism (65). Royce readily
acknowledges that against the evil forms of sectionalism we shall always have to contend (64). But he
denies that provincialism must always be evil. Going against the grain of most post-Civil War thinking about
the present state of civilization, both in the world at large,

and with us, in America, is such as to define a new social mission which the
province alone, but not the nation, is able to fulfil [sic] . . . .[T]he modern world
has reached a point where it needs, more than ever before, the vigorous
development of a highly organized provincial life. Such a life , if wisely
guided, will not mean disloyalty to the nation. (64) Wisely developed, provincialism
provincialism, Royce urges that
need not conflict with national loyalty. The two commitments canand must, Royce insistsflourish
whiteness need not conflict with membership in humanity

as a whole. The two identities canand mustflourish together . The
together. Likewise,
relationship between provincialism and nationalism, as discussed by Royce, serves as a fruitful model for the
relationship of whiteness and humanity, and critical conservationists of whiteness should follow Royces lead
by taking head-on the challenge of critically defending whiteness. Like embracing provincialism,

embracing whiteness might seem to be a step backward for the modern world
toward limitation and insularity that breed ignorance, prejudice, and hostility toward others who are
different from oneself. Like having a national rather than provincial worldview, seeing oneself as a member
of humanity rather than of the white race seems to embody an expansive, outward [End Page 239]
there is a new social mission with respect

to racial justice that whiteness, and not humanity as a whole, can fulfill. Race
relations, especially in the United States, have reached a point where humanity
needs a highly organized anti-racist whiteness, that is, an antiracist whiteness that is consciously developed and embraced . How then
orientation that is open to others. But
can we (white people, in particular) wisely guide the development of such whiteness so that it does not
result in disloyalty to other races and humanity as a whole? Before addressing this question, let me point out
two important differences between whiteness and provincialism as described by Royce. First, while Royce
calls for the development of a wise form of provincialism, he is able to appeal to existing wholesome forms
of provincialism in his defense of the concept. He addresses himself in the most explicit terms, to men and
women who, as I hope and presuppose, are and wish to be, in the wholesome sense, provincial, and his
demand that the man of the future . . . love his province more than he does to-day recognizes a nugget of
wise provincialism on which to build (65, 67). The development of wise provincialism does not have to be
from scratch. In contrast, it is more difficult to pinpoint a nugget of wholesome whiteness to use as a
starting point for its transformation. Instances of white people who helped slaves and resisted slavery in the
United States, for example, certainly can be foundthe infamous John Brown is only one such examplebut
such people often are seen as white race traitors who represent the abolition, not the transformation of
whiteness.9 The task of critically conserving whiteness probably will be more difficult than that of critically
conserving provincialism since there is not a straightforward or obvious right form and true office of
whiteness to extol. Second, true to his idealism, Royce describes both provincialism and its development as
explicitly conscious phenomena. Royce notes the elasticity of the term provinceit can designate a small
geographical area in contrast with the nation, or it can designate a large geographical, rural area in contrast
with a city (5758)but it always includes consciousness of the provinces unity and particular identity as
this place and not another. Put another way, probably every space, regardless of its size, is distinctive in
some way or another. What gives members of a space a provincial attitude is their conscious awareness of,
and resulting pride in, that space as the distinctive place that it is. On Royces model, someone who is
provincial knows that she is, at least in some loose way. The task of developing her provincialism, then, is to
develop her rudimentary conscious awareness of her province, to become more and not less self-conscious,
well-established, and earnest in her provincial outlook (67). In contrastand here lies the largest difference
between provincialism and whitenessmany
white people today do not consciously

think of themselves as members of this (white) race and not another, not even
loosely. Excepting members of white militant groups such as the Ku [End Page 240] Klux Klan or the
Creativity Movement, contemporary white people do not tend to have a conscious sense of unity as fellow
white people, nor do they consciously invoke or share special ideals, customs, or common memories as
white people.
They often are perceived and perceive themselves as
raceless, as members of the human species at large rather than members of a particular racial group.
This does not eliminate their whiteness or their membership in a fairly unified group. Just the opposite:
such racelessness is one of the marks and privileges of membership

in whiteness, especially middle and upper class forms of whiteness. White people can feel a pride in
the ideals and customs of whiteness and possess a sense of distinction from people of other races without
much, if any conscious awareness of their whiteness and without consciously identifying those ideals and
customs as white. To take one brief example, styles and customs of communication in classrooms tend to be
raced (as well as classed and gendered), and white styles of discussion, hand-raising, and turn-taking tend
to be treated as appropriate while black styles are seen as inappropriate.10 White students often learn to
feel proud and validated by their teachers as good students when they participate in these styles, and this
almost always happens without either students or teachers consciously identifying their style (or
themselves) as white. Such students appear to belong and experience themselves as belonging merely to a
group of smart, orderly, responsible students, not to a racialized group. In the United States and Western
world more broadly, unconscious habits of whiteness and white privilege have tended to increase after the
whiteness tends to
operate more sub- and unconsciously than consciously. But I do not think that
end of de jure racism.11 Unlike provincialism as described by Royce,

this fact spoils wise provincialism as a fruitful model for wise whiteness. First, and reflecting a basic
philosophical disagreement that I have with Royces idealism, I doubt that provincialism always functions as
consciously as Royce suggests it does. The unity, pride, and love that are the hallmarks of provincialism
could easily function in the form of unreflective beliefs, habits, preferences, and even bodily comportment.
In fact I would argue that many aspects of our provincial loyaltieswhatever type of province is at issue
operate on sub- or unconscious levels. In that case, provincialism and whiteness would not be as dissimilar
in their operation as Royces description implies. Second, even if provincialism tends to consciously unify
people while whiteness does not, Royces advice that people should attempt to become more, rather than
less self-conscious in their provincialism still applies to white people with respect to their whiteness.
Given whitenesss history as a racial category of violent exclusion and

oppression, one might think that white people need to focus less on
their whiteness, to distance themselves from it. But just the opposite is the case.
Given [End Page 241] that distance from racial identification tends to be
the covert modus operandi for contemporary forms of white privilege,
white people who wish to fight racism need to become more
intimately acquainted with their whiteness. Rather than ignore their
whiteness, which allows unconscious habits of white privilege to
proliferate unchecked, white people need to bring their whiteness to
as much conscious awareness as possible (while also realizing that complete selftransparency is never achievable) so that they can try to change what it means.
Racializing white spaces is critical to confront the implicit racism of

social-location. Raceless living forces living in an abstraction where
anti-racism is impossible
Royces eloquent pleas on the behalf of provincialism speak to my point about bringing whiteness to as
much conscious awareness as possible. As Royce appeals to his readers, he urges, I hope and believe that
you all intend to have your community live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the
life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general (67). On the same theme, he later compares the
problem of wise provincialism with the problem of any individual activity, which admittedly can become
narrow and self-centered. Acknowledging this problem, Royce counters, But on the other hand,
philanthropy that is not founded upon a personal loyalty of the

individual to his own family and to his own personal duties is notoriously a
worthless abstraction. We love the world better when we cherish our
own friends the more faithfully. We do not grow in grace by forgetting individual duties in behalf of
remote social enterprises. Precisely so, the province will not serve the nation best
by forgetting itself, but by loyally emphasizing its own duty to the
nation . . . . (98) The disappearance of the individual does not well serve larger social enterprises. Those
enterprises thrive only if the personal, passionate energies of individuals are poured into them. Large
enterprises and institutions tend to become anemic abstractions if they are not rooted in felt individual
commitments. Likewise, properly understood, the nation need not be in a competitive relationship with the
various communities that it shelters. Loyalty to and love for ones more local connections can be a powerful
source of meaningful loyalty to and love for ones nation. In both cases, the same pattern can be detected:
rich ties to the smaller entitythe individual or the communityare what sustain
meaningful connections to the larger entitythe philanthropic cause or the nation.
The two are not necessarily in conflict, as is often thought, and in fact the larger entity would suffer if ties to
the smaller entity were cut off. It is useful to anti-racist struggle to think of a similar relationship holding
between particular races, including the white race, and humanity at large. While it might initially seem

the larger entity of humanity can best be served by peoples
ties to smaller, more local entities such as their racial groups. A persons racial
paradoxical,
group is not the only smaller entity that provides the rich existential ties of which Royce speakshe rightly
mentions family, and we could add entities such as ones neighborhood, ones church, mosque or
synagogue, and even [End Page 243] groups based on ones gender or sexual orientation. But race also
belongs in this list of sites of intimate connection that can and often do sustain individual lives and that can
Forgetting ones duty to ones

particular race in the name of working for racial justice, for example, tends
to turn that goal into a remote abstraction. You cannot be loyal to
merely an impersonal abstraction, Royce reminds us.13 Effectively serving
the goal of racial justice is more likely to occur if one concretely
explores how racial justice could emerge out of loyalty to ones
particular race. This claim might not seem objectionable when considering racial
groups that are not white. Loyalty to other members of their race has
been an important way for African Americans, for example, to further the
larger cause of racial justice. Black slaves who helped each other escape their white masters
support rather than undermine the well being of humanity.
fought against slavery and thus helped humanity as a whole. But the history of whiteness suggests that
white peoples loyalty to their race not only would not help, but in fact would undermine struggles for racial
justice. How could white people serve the larger interests of the human race by being loyal to a race that
has oppressed, colonized, and brutalized other races? What possible duties or obligations to their race could
white people have, responsibilities that must be remembered if racial justice is to be a concrete, lived goal
for white people to work toward? On the one hand, these questions can seem outrageous, even dangerous.
Talk of duty to the white race smacks of militarist white supremacist movements, and indeed the first of the
Creativity Movements sixteen commandments in their White Mans Bible is that it is the avowed duty
and holy responsibility of each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race
upon the face of this planet, and the sixth is that your first loyalty belongs to the White Race.14 Noel
Ignatievs concern about the scholarly validation of white supremacy through the critical conservation of
whiteness could not be better placed than here. Temporarily setting aside the dangerous aspect of these
questions, they also can seem nonsensical if they do not refer to the goals of white supremacist movements.
What anti-racist duties, we might ask with some sarcasm, do white people have that must not be forgotten?
African Americans and other non-white people might be able to combine loyalty to their racial group with
loyalty to humanity, but white people cannot. Their situations are too different to treat their relationships to
their races as similar. Those relationships are asymmetrical, which means that white peoples loyalty to the
human race, including racial justice for all its members, conflicts with loyalty to whiteness. Loyalty to
humanity would seem to require white people to be race traitors. On the other hand, these questions present
a needed challenge to white people who care about racial justice. Rather than rhetorically or [End Page 244]
sarcastically, the questions can be asked in the spirit of Royces call for each community [to] live its own
life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in
For white people to fight white supremacy and white

privilege does not mean for them to attempt to shed their whiteness
and become members of the human species at large. Attempting to
become raceless by living the life of an abstraction called humanity
merely cultivates a white persons ignorance of how race, including
whiteness, and racism inform her habits, beliefs, desires, antipathies,
and other aspects of her life. It does not magically eliminate her white privilege for even if
general (67).
she succeeds in thinking of herself as a raceless member of humanity, she likely will continue to be
By allowing her
white privilege to go unchecked in this way, a white persons living the
life of abstract humanity actually tends to increase, not reduce her
racial privilege. To increase the chances of reducing her racial privilege, she must resist the
identified and treated as white, even if unreflectively or unconsciously, by others.
temptation to see herself as raceless and instead figure out what it could mean for her to live her own life as

Living as a racialized, rather than abstract person does not mean
attempting to take on a different race. Attempting to take on a
different race implicitly acknowledges that whiteness is problematic,
a racialized person.
and it can seem to be an expression of respect for non-white people. But it often is no better a response to
This is because a white persons

taking on the habits, culture, and other aspects of another race often
is an expression of ontological expansiveness, which is a habit of
white privileged people to treat all spaceswhether geographical, existential,
linguistic, cultural, or otheras available for them to inhabit at their choosing.15 Appropriating
another race in this way thus is closer to imperialist colonialism than
a gesture of respect. For this reason, white people need to stop trying to
flee the responsibilities and duties that come with being white and
figure out how to live their own racialized life , not the life of another race. Once
they no longer ignore or attempt to flee their whiteness, they can
then ask how work for racial justice fits with their duties and
responsibilities as a white person and how they might live their own
anti-racist white life.
white privilege than attempting to shed ones whiteness.
Failing to embrace debates racial identity disrupts community

leading to monotonous sameness and the mob spirit
Royce lists three specific problems in modern American life that cannot be solved without wise provincialism.
His discussion of these evils, as Royce calls them, also illuminates evils that a wise form of whiteness
The first evil is the neglect of and disruption to a

community when people are only loosely associated with it and do not
invest in, care about, or have a significant history with it . Royce argues [End
could help meliorate.
Page 245] that this problem is growing in frequency and significance as people are increasingly mobile,
changing their residency multiple times over their lifetime and often moving great distances from where
they were born and raised. This means that communities are increasingly dealing with a large number of
This is
a source of social danger, because the community needs well-knit
organization (73). Provincialism helps these newcomers care for their new home, and a wise
newcomers who do not (yet) have an intimate, caring connection to the new place they inhabit.
provincialism does so without generating any hostility toward either other provincial communities or larger
when white people who care about

racial justice have virtually no conscious or deliberate affiliation with
their whiteness, the meaning and effect of whiteness is left to
happenstance or, more likely, is determined by white supremacist groups.
social bodies such as the nation. In a similar fashion,
Royces primary concern is the dissolution of communities through neglect, and if well-intentioned white
people do not care about, invest in, or acknowledge a significant history with their whiteness, then whiteness
whiteness does not necessarily

unravel or wither away because of simple neglect by anti-racist white
people. Its neglect by anti-racists whites instead leaves it wide open
for racist white groups to develop. Like a garden, whiteness can easily grow tough weeds
will be neglected. But unlike provincial communities,
of white supremacy if it is not wisely cultivated. The evil of abandoning whiteness, allowing white

supremacists to make of it whatever they will, can be mitigated by a wise form of whiteness. In practice, this
white people who care about racial justice need to educate

newcomers to whitenessnamely, white childrento be loyal to and care
about their race. While Royces comments about the problem of newcomers due to increased
means that
geographical mobility do not apply directly to whiteness,16 white children can be thought of as newcomers
to the community of whiteness who do not (yet) have an intimate connection to their race or know how to
cultivate and care for it. Here again is an instance in which white supremacists have been allowed to corner
the market on whiteness: almost all explicit reflection and writing on how to raise white children as white has
been undertaken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, World Church of the Creator, and Stormfront.17 The
association is so tight that the mere suggestion of educating white children in their whiteness is alarming to
many people. But educating white children about their whiteness need and should not mean educating them
to be white supremacists. A wise form of whiteness would help train the developing racial habits of white
children in anti-racist ways.18 Royce calls the second problem addressed by provincialism that of the
leveling tendency of recent civilization (74), but more accurate, I think, would be to characterize the
the increase of
mass communication means that people all over the nation, indeed the
globe, are reading the same news stories, sharing the same ideas,
fashions, and trends, and more and more imitating one another. The rich diversity of
humankind, the independence of the small manufacturer, and distinctiveness of the
individual are being absorbed into a vast, impersonal social order . A
problem as one of monotonous [End Page 246] sameness. Royce is concerned that
wise provincialism is not wholly opposed to these tendencies. There is great value in large groups of people
coming to understand each other across their differences. But, Royce argues, there often also is great value
to be found in their differences, and those differences ought to be allowed to thrive. A wise provincialism
helps protect the variety of different places and communities so that they are not forced to be identical with
wise whiteness helps preserve racial differences

without treating people of various races as wholly alien to each other
each other. In a similar way,
and thus incapable of understanding each other across their differences. As Lucius Outlaw asks, Why is it,
after thousands of years, that human beings are not all light khaki instead of exhibiting the variety of skin
tones (and other features) more or less characteristic of various populations called races?19 The answer,
according to Outlaw, is not merely that racism and invidious ethnocentrism have worked to establish
different races are the

result of bio-cultural group attachments and practices that are
conducive to human survival and well-being.20 With W.E.B. Du Bois, Outlaw argues
inviolable boundaries between white and non-white races. It also is that
that racial differences can enrich everyone and that even if racism disappeared tomorrow, we should want
discernibly distinct races to continue to exist.21 The baby need not be thrown out with the bathwater.
The
rich variety of human racial and ethnic cultures need not be

eliminated to eliminate racism and invidious ethnocentrism. A wise whiteness also would
caution, however, that white peoples appreciation for racial diversity and variety also can be an insidious
form of whiteness in disguise. Too often, celebrations of multiculturalism and racial diversity function as a
smorgasbord of racial difference offered up for (middle-to-upper class) white peoples consumption and
enjoyment. They do this by acknowledging some differences while simultaneously concealing others. It is
very easy for white people to recognize and even celebrate racial difference in the form of different food,
dress, and cultural customs. It tends to be much more difficult for them to recognize racial difference in the
form of economic, educational, and political inequalities. Royces criticism of the leveling tendencies of
modern culture does not explicitly depoliticize the issue, and he does mention that variety is needed
particularly to counter the purely mechanical carrying-power of certain ruling social influences, an
example of which is the hegemony of white culture (76). But given the [End Page 247] tendency of white
(middle-to-upper class, in particular) people to see whiteness as cultureless and boring and thus want to
spice it up by dabbling in other, exotic cultures, care must be taken that appreciation of diversity is not
sanitized through an avoidance of the history and present of white privilege. When that happens,
appreciation of plurality and diversity tend to become a covert vehicle for white ontological expansiveness.
wise whiteness values and thus transactionally conserves

different races, as Outlaw does, without depoliticizing the meaning of those
In contrast, a

differences. The third evil discussed by Royce, the mob spirit, occurs when all
individual judgment has been given up and a person becomes totally
absorbed in a large social mass. Without discriminating individuals, the crowd or mob
is psychologically vulnerable to a strong leader, idea, or even a song
that enflames emotions and leads people to act in ways they
ordinarily would not act. This danger is closely related to the one of sameness for behind the
two dangers lay the same phenomenon: that of wide, inclusive human sympathy (9293). Openness to and
sharing in the lives and the feelings of others is not always a positive event, Royce cautions us.
Undiscriminating sympathy can lend support to base absurdities as

easily as to noble kindness, and as such sympathy is more of a
neutral base for psychological development than an automatic good
to be ubiquitously cultivated. Under certain conditions conditions that Royce
thinks are increasingly present in the modern worldwide, inclusive sympathy for others
can become not only monotonous, but also dangerous (95). Loss of the
smallthe particular, the local, the individualas it is absorbed into the large is
something to resist, and a wise provincialism helps prevent that loss. Royces concern about the
mob spirit does not directly speak to problems faced by a wise whiteness.22 But in this concern we can see
the streak of organic individualism that runs through Royces work, which can tell us something important
about the relationships of white individuals to their race. Royces legendary concern for community does not
sacrifice or dissolve the individual into the larger whole. Just as false forms of provincialism set up a false
false forms of individualism set up a

false opposition between individualism and community or social
causes. That kind of individualism fails because of its failure to
comprehend what it is that the ethical individual needs, which is a
cause greater than the individual that she can passionately serve (38). Here is where
opposition between provincialism and nationalism,
Royces individualism is distinctive: it insists that real individuality is found through personal choice of a
larger cause that one loyally serves, not through endless insistence that one is a single individual with
personal initiative. This insistence is empty if never acted upon, leaving the so-called autonomous individual
lost and floundering. Be an individual, Royce urges exasperatedly, [b]ut for Heavens sake, set about the
To be a real individual, a person needs something

larger than herself to be a part of. And as communities of meaning,
racial groups historically have developed as one of those things . In Lucius
Outlaws words, racial and ethnic identification in part develop[ed] as
responses to the need for life-sustaining and meaningful acceptable
order of various kinds (conceptual, social, political).24 Human beings need to
create conceptual, social, political and other structures, including individual
and social identities, to give their lives meaning and purpose . While
task.23 [End Page 248]
Outlaw talks about this need in terms of order and Royce speaks of it in terms of a cause to devote ones self
to, both point to an existential need that racial identity, including whiteness, can serve and historically has
served. And they both suggest that a theory of racial justice that ignores this need will not be effective in
practice.
We must hope we are always in a process of becoming make

debate a place of wise whiteness that recognizes the inherent
values associated with non-whites

How then, to quote Outlaw, might we work to critically conserve whiteness without letting it go
imperial?25 Royces four-part advice on how to cultivate wise provincialism is instructive on this question.
a wise form of whiteness must always be

considered an unachieved ideal, not a fait accompli. It should remain much
more a hope and an inspiration than it becomes a present
achievement (101). Conserving whiteness is not for the purpose of
giving white people something to boast about. Nor is its goal building white pride
through uncritical glorification of the heritage of white people. Considering wise whiteness
an unachieved ideal means that the critical process of creating an
anti-racist white identity is ongoing. It also means that the process
always can be improved. The difference here is the difference between vanity and self-respect
First, like wise provincialism,
(102). Treating wise whiteness as an inspiration for the future can give white people a way to respect
themselves as white people without succumbing to complacency and conceit. Royces second piece of
advice for cultivating wise provincialism is to realize that developing values, habits, and customs that are
distinctive to a particular province is not the same thing as thinking that those values, habits, and customs
are possessed only by that province. Making ideal values ones own is not necessarily equivalent to denying
those values to others: it is one thing to seek to make ideal values in some unique sense our own, and it is
quite another thing to believe that if they are our own, other people cannot possess such ideal values in
their own equally unique fashion (102). Possession need not function as exclusivity, Royce tells us. One
province can be beautiful in its own distinctive way, for example, without denying that other provinces are
beautiful in their own unique manner. This advice is especially appropriate for the development of a wise
form of whiteness since whiteness has a long history of oppressing through exclusive possession. Analyzing
the attempts of white nations [End Page 249] in World War I to divide up and exploit darker nations, for
White
people have appropriated the gifts of African Americans, ignoring the
economic, military, political, spiritual, and other contributions that
black people made to the building of the United States. They also
have usurped the land of Native Americans because of Native
Americans allegedly inappropriate use of (read: failure to appropriate) it.27 Even
more to the point, whiteness has defined itself through exclusive ownership
of values such as goodness, cleanliness, and beauty. Other races, by
example, Du Bois declares that whiteness is nothing less than ownership of the earth.26
comparison, tend to be characterized as the opposite: bad, dirty, and unattractive. Whitenesss definition
through opposition to a non-white other means that if whiteness possesses a particular value, then other
A wise form of whiteness would realize that developing

values, habits, and customs that are distinctive to anti-racist white
people does not mean that white people exclusively possess those
values, habits and customs. Different racial groups can possess the value of artistic and other forms of
races cannot.
beauty, for example, in unique ways and without canceling out each other. In 1923 Du Bois argued for the
physical beauty of black people, rhetorically asking can there be any question but that as colors bronze,
mahogany, coffee and gold are far lovelier than pink, gray and marble?28 The distinctive aesthetic value of
African American fiction, poetry, drama, and especially music is emphasized repeatedly in Alain Lockes
1925 edited collection on The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance.29 And similar messages were
at the heart of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s in the United States. But while relevant,
beauty in any of its forms tends to be too easy an example of different racial groups sharing the same, yet
distinctive values because the example does not disturb white confidence in its own values. It leaves
examples of
extending to non-white people ideal values that white people and
culture allegedly already possess risk collapsing into an apolitical
smorgasbord. White, black, Latino/a, Asian, Native/aboriginal, and so onall cultures possess artistic
whiteness fairly intact, backing down from significantly transforming it. Put another way,
and personal beauty in their own way, and appreciating the diversity of beauty is all that white people who
oppose racism need do. While it is important for white people to realize that other racial groups possess

this realization can be a way of artificially
flattening out unequal racial terrain. Even worse, it can increase
rather than reduce white privilege if recognizing the beauty of nonwhite cultures merely increases the amount of beauty in the world for
white people to enjoy and consume. A more challenging application of Royces second piece of
advice to the development of wise whiteness would be to read the sharing of ideal values
in the opposite direction, from non-white to white people . [End Page 250]
ideal values such as beauty, by itself
Rather than generously acknowledging that non-white cultures possess their own distinctive type of the
what if white people saw themselves as sharing an ideal value

that tends to be thought of as the sole possession of non-white
people? Consider humility. This is a trait often considered an ideal value; for example, it is one of the
beauty,
seven holy virtues in the Christian church. To be humble is to be modest, unassuming, and respectful toward
others. It can connote being meek, even insignificant and subservient, or more positively, the willingness to
give credit where credit is due rather than unfairly exalting oneself.
Empirics---Hammersly
We must free ourselves from the chains of history
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher,
revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 178-179
Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
The major purpose of this manuscript has been to reconstruct the sociology of entrepreneurship by giving a
The sociology of
entrepreneurship, which is concerned with the relationship
between ethnicity and business activity, has almost completely
ignored the Afro-American experience. Thus, the sociohistorical
examples which interact with theoretical ideas have stressed
the ethnic experience. Although this is certainly fine, it is quite ironic that most of the major
special consideration to the Afro-American experience.
ideas developed in theories-such as middleman, ethnic enclave, and collectivism-were already prevalent in
not only is the

Afro-American experience overlooked in the sociology of
entrepreneurship, but scholarship-mostly by Afro-Americanshas also been overlooked. This, in itself; is an interesting
comment on American societv, race. and scholarship. This manuscript
old books and manuscripts written about the Afro-American experience. Thus,
has also argued that, although all Afro-Americans have had to face racism, prejudice, and discrimination,
those of today who can trace their roots back to entrepreneurship and the self-help experience possess a set
Such an approach
means that we must reconstruct how we think about race and
economics in America, and about policy which relates to that
experience.
of values which are similar-if not identical-to middleman ethnic groups.
Essentialism
(((((Even though legislative activities result in some sort of
pragmatic changethat change will always come from a
perspective that ignores the state violence of the black body
that will never changethat is Wilderson)))))
Only an unflinching and paradigmatic analysis of Blackness can
overturn anti-blackness its their burden to prove that
Blackness is anything but an ontological void
Wilderson 10 (Frank, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of
US Antagonisms, 10-11- [SG])
insist on posting an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and
todays Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the
exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions
by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims
successfully made on the State have come to pass. But that would
lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on solid
ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We
would be forced to appeal to facts, the historical record, and
empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on
their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral
into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates
would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar
of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive
logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the
calculations between those who sell labor power and those who
acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already
dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death,

where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a
constituent element of slavery. Once the solid plank of work is
removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of claims
against the statethe proposition that the state and civil society are
elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an
emancipatory project for the Black positiondisintegrates into thin
air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the
Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition,
as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological

position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but
an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes,
maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the

Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually
open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is,
having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of
relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the
rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil
society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the
Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the
Master/Slave dichotomy, but on one who argues there is a distinction
between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a
split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an
answer.
A2: Gender
Simply adding race into their gender movement fails
Broeck 11 professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen. Her teaching and research focuses on
the intersections of race, class, gender and sexualities, on black diaspora studies, on the theorization of slavery,
and on the decolonial critique of transatlantic modernity (Sabine, "Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity:
Re-reading Gender Studies Epistemology Through Black Feminist Critique," 11/15/11,
https://eee.uci.edu/12w/22500/homepage/broeck_slavery.modernity.pdf)//AM
Thistlewood, the British slaveholder who wrote an extensive and self-indulgent account of his practice as an
the masterful
regime of New World slavery in its inseparable connection to early
modern investments in white western civilization, to wit, Hartman's oxymoronic
early modern owner of human beings on his plantation in Jamaica, here stands in for
conjunction of obscenity and Latin, via the tie-in of "brutal". As a cautionary tale, Thistlewood's recollection
- though easily despicable - amounts to quite a challenge for a white community of readers. Because
Thistlewood, if read epistemologically, not ethnographically, or 'historically,'' calls white

readers into a profound dis-identification with humanities'
trajectories rooted in modern Enlightenment's premises. Thistlewood's
freedom to transgress against human beings turns out to be quite commensurate with modern notions of
the sovereign subject - even though abolitionism duly used his writing as the kind of propagandistic
pornography Hartman also dissects. As Hartman argues, the slave barracoon must be looked at not just as
a holding cell, but more importantly, as a modern episteme which controlled as well the practices of history,
and collective white memory, creating a "second order of violence" which reached far into abolition.
Hartman's, Spillers' and Morrison's

work, among others, urges Gender Studies to move away from benevolently
thinking about race, as in "add race" to postmodern thinking about
the modern self, for the formation of which the gendering of subjects
- male and female- was essential. Instead, we need to discuss the modern
gendered subject as situated in a nexus of property versus
sovereignlessness, to take Hartman and Best's term, (as the sine qua non of black human beings),
of blackness as abjection outside all the defining categories of
modernity. Thus, Hartman's question becomes: How does the recognition of the creation of
(2007/8, 5) Faced with the regime of this episteme,
sovereignlessness "better enable us to chart the relation between pasts and presents, to think about the
relation between capitalism and slavery and the dilemmas of the present" (2006, 12)? That is to say, for me
the founding difference of early modern Euro-American societies was subject versus abject, of sovereign
self versus sovereignlessness, of thinged property versus the subject; gender as modern category, comes
to figure within that economy, that epistemology, as precisely a category to negotiate, for white European
and US women, towards a status of sovereignty, subjectivity and property rights.
Gender critiques are inherently white and ignore and exclude the
struggles black women have faced
The point I want to make is not that African societies did not organize themselves around different cultural
social and economic interpellations for men and women, neither that in new world slavery, and colonial
societies female beings were not subjected to particular politics and practices - most importantly - rape, and
enslaved
African-origin female beings never qualified as women (because of
the theft of motherhood. However, as Spillers has argued, and as Hartman's texts illuminate,

their non-humanness, it followed logically) in the Euro-American modern
world, and therefore were not interpellated to partake in the ongoing
social construction and contestation of gender. The point I do want to make is that
gender - a category that would have enabled a black female claim on
social negotiations did not apply to 'things', to what was constructed
as and treated as human flesh. Moreover, that very category gender emerged in
western transatlantic rhetoric precisely in the context of creating a space
for white women, who refused to be treated like slaves, like things. Modern gender, with early
modern feminism, constituted itself discursively precisely in the shift from 18th century female abolitionist
Christian empathy with the enslaved to the paradigmatic separation of women from slaves, a process that
repeated itself in the late 19th century American negotiations of, and between, abolitionism and suffrage.
The fact that black women have - in their long history in the western transatlantic world consistently fought for an access to the category gender to be able to
occupy a space of articulation at all, most famously, of course, in 19th century Sojourner
Truth's angrily subversive exclamation "Am I not a woman and a sister?", does not alter the
structural complicity of gender as a category with the formation of
the sovereign modern white self. That is to say to have, or to be of female gender which
could claim and deserved certain kinds of rights, and treatment, staked the claim of white 18th century
women to full human subjectivity, as opposed to thingness .
The infamous and very

persistent use of the analogy of women and slaves (Broeck) provided
a springboard for white women to begin theorizing a catalogue of
their own demands for an acknowledgement of modern, free subjectivity as antagonistic to
enslavement; as a discursive construct, then, modern gender served the
differentiation of human from property. White Feminism and gender
theory have thus played active roles in the constitution of modern
societies as we know them that need far more reflection in shaping
and negotiating the expectations of how to do gender properly, even
in its critical modes - roles that were claimed rather rarely in conjunction with, or based on an
acknowledgment of black people's agency. To me, the corruption inherent in this history demands a
bracketing of the category gender, a coupling of it to that history to lose its innocence. Making this kind of
connection will also support Gender Studies to go beyond the epistemologically restrictive gender-race
analogy which fired white female abolitionism - an ideological position that is untenable for gender studies in
a de-colonial moment.
An add-on approach toward race in gender movements fails to

overcome anti-blackness, instead adopting abolitionist
benevolence which cant resolve our impacts
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
(White)

splitting of African-origin women from gender . If, thus, the knowledge of the slave
trade and slavery will become the site of a re-reading of Enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity, a
revised theoretical, and material approach to an epistemology of emancipation like Gender Studies will be
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
possible.
commodification, that transgressive nexus of violence, desire and property which first formed the horizon of
the Euro-American modernity that US and European intellectuals, including Gender Studies, have known and
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 selfrepresentation 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
claimed.
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 play an active
role in the project of decolonizing (post)modern critical theory,
gender studies need to acknowledge and reckon with black decolonial 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
to become part of a second order abolitionist discourse must, however, be run.
appropriation of suffering, they derail us from a swift hate for the Thistlewoods (Mother, 61). Those texts
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
under scrutiny here do enact a kind of self-conscious parasitism,
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).
A2: Social death fake (Not Social life)

Their disavowal of black social death is a product of whiteness and
forces them to be complicit with the structures they criticize
Wilderson 10
Frank B., Seriously? You know who Wilderson is. Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. 2010. Pgs.60-61. PWoods.
the threat of discovering oneself in ones own scholarly or artistic

endeavors as comparison is not a fate that awaits White academics.
White academics disavowal of Black death as modernitys condition of
possibility (their inability to imagine their productive subjectivity as an
effect of the Negro
stems
from
save brief and infrequent conjunctures of large-scale Black violence
the socius provides no catalyst for White avowal: in
short, thoughtessential, ontological thoughtis all but impossible in
White cultural and political theorybut it is not
impossible
in the unconscious of the White film itself. This state of affairs, the
unbearable hydraulics of Black disavowal and the sweetness and light of
White disavowal, is best encapsulated in the shorthand expression social
stability, for it guarantees the civility of civil society.
Thus
(Judy 92, 93-94, 97))
not from the unbearable terror of that (non)self-discovery always-already awaiting the Black, but
the fact that,
(18th and 19th
century slave revolts and 20th century urban unrest),
(as we will see with Monsters Ball in Part IV)
Put anecdotally, but nonetheless to the point, when pulled
individually by the button, both inmate and guard might be in favor of criminal rehabilitation, both might even believe that the warden is a swell guy, and in their enthusiasm they both may even take for granted that by
criminal they are speaking of the inmates and not the guards, or for that matter the warden. However, while the shared experiences in the political economy of the prisona common policy agenda, i.e. rehabilitationor the shared
identifications in the libidinal economy of prisonthe unconscious captation of both inmate and guard by the image of the wardenmay certainly be important to any meditation on either prison economy, they are certainly not
This means that they cannot break in on the mutually exclusive

constituent elements that make the structure the positionality of inmate
and guard irreconcilable; at least, not with such a force as to rupture that
positional exclusivity and bring about the end of the (prison) world. This
holds true regardless of the fact that the mobility of symbolic material, i.e.
the idea of criminal rehabilitation and the agreement on who
constitutes a criminal, and the mobility of imaginary captation, i.e. the
image of the warden, are both without limit in their capacity for
transgression.
essential to such reflection.
Whiteness re-centers
The alternative needs to be done now as white people get to
theorize whiteness blacks continue to suffer

legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,
.,,3

suffering
Whites who
sequestration from
the real world of
suffering
patience of theory
. Here,
weeping,
, and traumatized
.
Guilt Bad
Our goal is not to create guilt instead, whiteness must be
transformed guilt leads to moral paralysis
Sullivan 8 Professor Philosophy, Womens Studies, and African and African
American Studies @ Pennsylvania State University (Shannon Sullivan, Spring
2008, Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a
Racial Category, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly
Journal in American Philosophy, Vol. 44, No. 2, Project Muse)//KP
I deliberately have refrained from using the term guilt when
sketching the contours of white humility. While white people have a
violent history (and sometimes present) as a race and continue to
benefit [End Page 251] from economic, psychological, geographical,
and other forms of racial privilege, I do not think that guilt is the most
helpful way to respond to white supremacy and hegemony. In part,
this is because white guilt tends to direct white people to their
feelings in a non-productive way. Let me elaborate this point. Some
critical race theorists, such as Ignatiev, have suggested that anti-racist
workshops for white people are problematic because they tend to
focus on helping white people feel good about themselves rather than
on political struggle against racism.32 I disagree that white peoples
feelings about their whiteness are irrelevant to anti-racist struggle, but I

agree that such struggle is the point. White guilt tends to produce a
self-focused, emotional wallowing that distracts white people from

political struggle while making it seem as if they are doing something
to counter racism.33 A related reason that I do not describe white
humility in terms of guilt is that white guilt can produce a kind of moral
paralysis in white people, especially with regard to issues of race.
Feeling guilty about past oppression of non-white people and the
ongoing racial privileges they enjoy, white people sometimes feel
demoralized and unworthy and thus incapable of making moral
judgments about racial matters since they are tainted by their
whiteness. Indeed, Shelby Steele has gone so far as to define white guilt
as the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that
ones race is associated with racism.34 Steele argues that white
people today who acknowledge the existence of white racism step
into a void of vulnerability ellipsis[that] leaves no room for moral

choice.35 One could say that white guilt humbles white people, but it
does so by obligat[ing] [them] to black people because they needed
the moral authority only black people could bestow.36 This kind of
humility merely reverses the previous situation in which only white
people could have moral authority. While that reversal might seem like
a good development from an anti-racist perspective, it tends to make
black and other non-white people solely responsible for white
redemption and deliverance from racism. Steeles analysis of white
guilt and racial discrimination more broadly is problematic in several

ways, including its atomistic individualism and dismissal of systemic
racism. But Steele accurately portrays a danger that faces many antiracist white people and that a wise whiteness should avoid. Understood
as taking responsibility for past and present forms of white oppression
of non-white people, then white guilt surely has a role to play in wise
whiteness. But if white guilt translates into the inability to make moral
and other judgments if issues of race are involved, it undermines
white attempts to fight racism. If white humility is to support those
efforts, it cannot take the form of ducking obligation to make
decisions about racial matters and positing non-white people as the
only possible moral agents, especially when it comes to race. [End
Page 252] My claim that white people should accept their moral agency
in racial situations does not mean that anti-racist white people always
know what the right thing is to do or that their decisions necessarily will
produce anti-racist effects. Refusing to be paralyzed by guilt does not
guarantee that a white person wont do something intended to

reduce racism that she later will judge to be a mistake. And that is
okaynot because acts with unforeseen racist effects are desirable,
but because a wise form of whiteness needs to challenge the quests
for purity and control that are at the heart of white privilege and
domination. A wise whiteness should seek to trouble the expectation
that we [white people] can know exactly what will count as antiracist
in every situation and thus can always act blamelessly.37 White
people often are unsure how to make a right decision when involved in a
situation infused with race and they nonetheless are responsible for
making the best possible decision that they can.
A2: Intersectionality
1. No link blackness is the stage for which other struggles happen,
ie class and gender the 1NC Rodreguiez evidence indicates that
its only this underlying issue of race that causes exclusion
2. The AFF links by explaining issues in terms of gender and class

that just sweeps race back under the rug for it to continue it are
these methods of thinking that recreate systems of oppression
3. The ALT solves only a critical engagement in a genealogy of

blackness and taking an Afro-Pessimistic approach to resolving
these issues can we overcome these dominant smokescreen
ideologies that allow for oppression to continue
4. Even if we dont solve they dont either there is only a risk that a
critical engagement with blackness will provide a better
methodology to overcome systems of oppression this is a
defensive argument at best
5. Foregrounding interlocking oppressions in a chain of equivalence

denies the structuring force of anti-blackness that dooms solvency
of the aff and perm
Sexton 10 (Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at
the University of California, Irvine, People-of-Color-Blindness, Social Text 2010 Volume 28, Number 2
103: 31-56)
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps

beyond, the United States seems conditional to the historic instance
and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued
the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely

impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the
demeanor of our political culture
Yet all of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence
in Left political and intellectual circles today: Dont play
Oppression Olympics!
amounting to little more than
a leftist version of playing the race card.
one notes in this catchphrase the
with some consistency,
. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task.
The Oppression Olympics dogma levels a charge
To fuss with details of comparative (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of
divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a callous immorality. 72 However, as in its conservative complement,

unwarranted translation of an inquiring position of comparison into
an insidious posture of competition, the translation of ethical
critique into unethical
they bear a common refusal to admit to significant dif
ferences of structural position born of discrepant histories between
blacks and their political allies
might, finally, name this
refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of colorblindness inherent
to the concept of people of color to the precise extent that it
misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness
obscuring
the structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably
undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical
opposition
Every analysis that attempts to
understand the complexities of racial rule and the machinations of
the racial state without accounting for black existence
which
does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents
is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation. Black
existence does not represent the total reality of the racial formation
but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the
(repressed) truth of the political and economic system
attack. This point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to black
suffering mentioned above:
, actual or potential. We
and presumes or insists upon the monolithic character of victimization
under white supremacy 73 thinking (the afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression among others. 74 The upshot of this predicament is that
and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion.
within its framework
or returning to it as an
afterthought
it is not the beginning and the end of the story
. That is to say, the whole range of positions
within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through
lenses that are feminist and queer. 75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, postblack paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of black suffering and of the struggles
political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so onthat have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power
every attempt to defend the rights and liberties of

the latest victims of state repression will fail to make substantial
gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks
Without blacks on board, the only viable
political option and the only effective defense against the
intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack
civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state
power.
relative to the category of blackness. 76 This is why
, the prototypical targets of the panoply of
police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them.
At the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails the necessarily total
revamping of the society. 77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new
world: I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a
history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was captivity without the possibility of flight, inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would
entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution. 78
Multiculturalism
Multiracialism is anti-black it frames blackness as the undesirable
position others compare themselves to
Ricks 11 doctoral student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. His work theorizes the performance of black
leadership in the 20th century US. He earned his B.A. in History, his M.A. in US History, and his M.F.A. in Drama.
(Omar, "Playing Games with Race," 6/3/11, http://thefeministwire.com/2011/06/playing-games-with-race/)
Moves like these might be easily bypassed, if they did not bear a close resemblance to a common trope
within multiracial discourse. As analyzed by Jared Sexton in his book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness
the thing that unifies a diverse (left, liberal, conservative,

and right) field of discourse around multiracial identity is the singular desire
to achieve distance from certain figures of blackness that
resurface in each instance of multiracial discourse and are generally
made to serve as a foil for the contemporary value of multiracialism
and the Critique of Multiracialism,
(Sexton, 2008). It would require an excessive degree of navet or willful disregard to ignore the same
symptoms of thought in Saulnys article series. In Sextons words, what
lends [multiracial
discourse] its coherence [...] is its obdurately unsophisticated
understanding of race and sexuality and its conspicuously negative
disposition toward what Fanon (1967) terms the lived experience of the black
(Sexton, 2008). Most essentially, then, in multiracial discourse, blackness stands in not as
an identity or identification to be rejected or worked through but, in the words of
Sexton, as a structural position against which all other subjects take
their bearings (Sexton & Copeland, 2003). In what might otherwise be an incomprehensible world
or a movement without a cause, blackness is so serviceable that it can be used to stand in
as that with which nobody wants to be associated, even by those who are partly
black. Even if multiracialism shifts us from the one-drop rule to a more graduated
mestizaje model of racialization, this changes nothing for black people because
blackness is still located at the undesirable end of the continuumor,
more accurately, hierarchy. In my view, it is necessary that we first understand the stability of that
unethical structural relation before we can say that multiracialism challenges racism by injecting into the
racist structure a more fluid sense of identity. Rainier Spencers 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education
article(Spencer, 2009, May 19), for example, asked, how
can multiracial identity

deconstruct race when it needs the system of racial categorization to
even announce itself? Posing this question as a statement would be to say that one needs
for there to be a structure of race in order to call oneself multiracial .
Small wonder, then, that so many celebrations of multiracial identity sound
antiblack. They are.
Link of Omissions Bad

New linkthe idea that omissions are unimportant causes
greater harm
Hanson 6 (Jon Hanson & Kathleen Hanson Harvard Law School Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties
Law Review Summer, 2006)
Lerner's experiment indicates just how ready we are to short-circuit potential perceptions of
injustice. When behavior that causes harm is perceived as normal--part
of the script, the way things are, the plan, nature, or an act of God--that behavior is
less likely to be viewed as blameworthy than is abnormal behavior . In a
related phenomenon, we often deem "omissions" that produce suffering far
less culpable than "acts" that lead to similar suffering. For example, some
parents are reluctant to vaccinate their child if the vaccination has

some mortality risk, even if the risk of death from foregoing the
vaccination is substantially greater. n22 Similarly, some people have argued that
hurricanes should not be seeded, even if seeding would likely reduce the storm's expected damage. n23 An
unseeded hurricane is perceived as an act of nature or God, to which blame does not generally attach. But a
person or institution that actively seeded a hurricane would likely be considered responsible for the actual
Thus risks "caused" by salient individual action

(choosing the vaccine or seeding a hurricane) are perceived as worse than the
greater risk posed by inaction (the virus or the flooded city). When individual
action is salient, we see choice (and sometimes intent n24) and attribute
causal responsibility accordingly, but where individuals fail to act, the
omissions tend to fade into the surrounding situation . n25 Policy and
policy analysis reflect that omission bias. For example, pharmaceutical
[*422]companies have never been held liable for failing to produce
vaccines, but have sometimes been liable for the harm caused even
by vaccines whose dangers are unavoidable. n26 Tort law traditionally has been
harm that hurricane caused.
reluctant to impose responsibility for doing nothing n27 and generally imposes no duty to
rescue. Thus, the "sunbather who watches a child going under the waves has no duty to dive in
the water, throw her a life ring, or even notify a nearby lifeguard." n28 Similar
techniques shield the legal regime itself from responsibility.
As
lawmakers engage in legitimating

subterfuges to avoid explicitly making "tragic choices" that would
cause suffering or death. n29 Policies ostensibly pursuing some
justified end, but having untoward consequences for some groups,
typically are viewed less as actions causing harm than as situationally
excused omissions. n30 Of course, a purported goal need not be the
actual motivation for an act or a policy in order to have the absolving
effect. Often a "cover story" need not be very strong to justify harmful
conduct. In the Lerner experiment, the subjects without a salient choice to end the shocking (the second
Philip Bobbitt and Guido Calabresi have argued,
group) could more easily excuse themselves from blame than the subjects who were presented an
alternative. The "optionless" subjects took cover behind their assigned roles in an ostensibly valuable,
scientific inquiry. Stopping the experiment would have required affirmative, abnormal actions--going against
the flow. In part because no one expects such actions to be taken, no blame attaches to not taking them.
And in part because such omissions would be blameless, no one acts. n31
Nietzsche
Link turn the status quo is ressentiment a new whiteness
overcomes this
Royces final suggestion does not directly relate to wise forms of
whiteness since whiteness is not literally a physical or architectural
spaceunless it applies negatively in that middle and upper class white
people, in particular, often have poured energy and money into
creating attractive and orderly all-white neighborhoods. When
residential gated communities first appeared in the United States in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, for example, they were
explicitly designed as [End Page 256] places for wealthy (white) people
to escape from the perceived ugliness and disorder of urban (nonwhite) industrializing centers.46 And while ostensibly not about race,
current urban processes of beautification through the restoration of
historical homes tend to be fueled by middle-to-upper class white
people, whose well-organized desire for such homes sometimes masks
an inchoate longing for a past that included white supremacy .47 With
this sort of history and present, a wise whiteness should discourage the
cultivation of white-only spaces, at least if those spaces are viewed
through an apolitical aesthetic lens. In the case of whiteness, aesthetics
rarely if ever can be neatly separated from politics, and so the question
of whether a white neighborhood is attractive is rarely a simple question
of whether its gardens have weeds, its buildings are well designed and
preserved, etc. To treat the question as merely aesthetic does not
eliminate its connection with political issues regarding race. It only
buries those issues, allowing covert forms of white privilege and
interests to operate unchecked. More interesting, I think, is to take
Royces final piece of advice about material adornment psychologically,
rather than architecturally. (The psyche is not divorced from the
material, after all.) As a psycho-ontological space, the souls of white
folk are fairly ugly and in need of beautification, as Du Bois tells us. I
see these souls undressed and from the back and side, he charges, I
see the working of their entrails . . . . they preach and strut and shout
and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to
hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see
them ever stripped,ugly, human.48 And in James Baldwins words,
the great, unadmitted crime is what [the white man (sic)] has done to
himself.49 While we might think that white people have spent too

much time adorning themselvesfor example, with praise and honors
for being the allegedly sole sources of beauty, truth, progress,
democracy, and so onthe opposite is the case. White people have
barely begun to adorn themselves with white habits of which they can
be proud. To this point, white psycho-ontological adornment too
often has been with the products of what Spinoza called the sad
passions: fear, hate, anger, envy, and aversion connected, in this case,
to anxiety about the possibility of contamination by the non-white
Other.50 Or with what Nietzsche described as ressentiment, which
results when a people has built itself up as good only by first
tearing another people down as evil.51 When whiteness operates
with passions and resentments such as these, it is toxic to people of
other races, as well as ultimately to themselves. To adorn their selves
qua white would mean for white people to embody joyful passions that
would not reduce the power of other races to act and thrive at the
expense of white people. It would mean for white people to become
healthy enough, in Nietzsches terms, that they do not poison other

races when interacting with them, but instead can [End Page 257]
reciprocally nourish each other. White people need to become more,
not less selfish in that they need to adorn their souls with genuine
treasures, rather than counterfeit gems. Only then will they be in a
psycho-ontological position that allows them to flow back [to others]
from [their] fountain, to fairly, generously, and even lovingly engage
with others rather than respond to them out of a soul-starved
stinginess.52
The risk must be taken transforming whiteness is necessary

to create an anti-racist body
While much more can and needs to be said about how to develop a wise
form of whiteness, the answer to the main question with which I began
this essay is yes: the racial category of whiteness can be concretely
transformed into wise whiteness, which means that efforts to critically
conserve whiteness need not inadvertently fuel white domination.
Efforts to rehabilitate the racial category of whiteness admittedly will
be politically and existentially dangerous. When words such as
loyalty are used in the context of whiteness, for example, there is
an inevitable and significant risk that they will be heard and/or used
as endorsements of white supremacy. But I think this risk should be
takenindeed, that it must be takenbecause even though there is
nothing ahistorically essential about whiteness, it is not likely to

disappear any time soon.53 Rejecting racial essentialism, as Royce did
and most contemporary philosophers do, does not mean that problems
associated with whiteness simply evaporate. White people do not
have sole control over their whiteness; other racial groups have
contributed and will continue to contribute to the meaning of
whiteness.54 But white people are uniquely responsible for their
whiteness. The question for them thus is how will they take up that
responsibility. And Royces essay on provincialism can help them begin

to figure out an answer.
Oppression Olympics
Claims that we play Oppression Olympics are used to shut down
critiques of anti-blackness and oppression
Sexton 10 associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of
California, Irvine (Jared, "People-of-Color-Blindness," 2010,
https://eee.uci.edu/12w/22500/homepage/sexton_POC.blindness.ST.pdf)//AM
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the
United States seems conditional to the historic instance and functions
at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant
and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that
the latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued with some consistency, the sort of
comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the
formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our
political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational
analysis more adequate to the task. Yet all of this is obviated by the silencing
mechanism par excellence in Left political and intellectual circles
today: Dont play Oppression Olympics! The Oppression Olympics
dogma levels a charge amounting to little more than a leftist version
of playing the race card. To fuss with details of comparative (or relational) analysis is
to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a
callous immorality. However, as in its conservative complement, one notes in this
catchphrase the unwarranted translation of an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture of
the translation of ethical critique into unethical attack. This

point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship
between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing
to black suffering mentioned above: they bear a common refusal to
admit to significant differences of structural position born of
discrepant histories between blacks and their political allies, actual or
potential. We might, finally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of colorblindness
inherent to the concept of people of color to the precise extent that
it misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or insists
upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy
competition,
thinking (the afterlife of ) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression
among others.
Pinn
Whiteness Supremacy is affectively and discursively produced
it circulates through an assumed grammar that produces
Blackness as ontologically abject.
Yancy 5 (George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University
and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and
the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4
(2005) 215-241, Accessed via Project Muse, [SG])
causing "difficulties in the development of [my] bodily schema " (110).
The white gaze constructs the Black body into "an object in the midst of
other objects" (109). The nonthreatening "I" of my normal, everyday
body schema becomes the threatening "him" of the Negro kind/type.
Under pressure, the corporeal schema collapses. It gives way to a racial
epidermal schema.6 "Below the corporeal schema," writes Fanon, "I had
sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been
provided for me not by 'residual sensations and perceptions of a
primarily tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,' but by the
other, the white man [woman]" (111). In other words, Fanon began to
"see" himself through the lens of a historico-racial schema . Note that
there was nothing intrinsic to his physiology that forced his corporeal
schema to collapse; it was the "Black body" as always already named
and made sense of within the context of a larger semiotics of
privileged white bodies that provided him with the tools for selfhatred. His "darkness," a naturally occurring phenomenon,7 became
historicized, residing within the purview of the white gaze, a

phenomenal space created and sustained by socioepistemic and
semiotic communal constitutionality. On this score, the Black body is
placed within the space of constitutionality vis--vis the racist white
same, the One. Against the backdrop of the sketched historico-racial
(racist) scheme, Fanon's "darkness" returns to him, signifying a new
genus, a new category of man: A Negro! (116). He inhabits a space of
anonymity (he is every Negro), and yet he feels a strange personal
responsibility for his body. He writes: I was responsible at the same time
for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an
objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic
characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism,
intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above
all else, above all: "sho' good eaten'." (112)8 [End Page 222] Fanon
writes about the Black body and how it can be changed, deformed, and
made into an ontological problem vis--vis the white gaze . Describing
an encounter with a white woman and her son, Fanon narrates that the
young boy screams, "Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!" (113).9
Fanon: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted,

recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an
animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a
Negro, it's cold, the Negro is shivering because he is cold, the little boy
is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering
with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome boy is
trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the
little white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the
nigger's going to eat me up.. (11314) The white imagery of the Black
as a savage beast, a primitive and uncivilized animal, is clearly
expressed in the boy's fear that he is to be eaten by the "cannibalistic"
Negro. "The more that Europeans dominated Africans, the more 'savage'
Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery"
(Brantlinger 1985, 203). Presumably, the young boy does not know that
his words will (or how they will) negatively affect Fanon. However, for
Fanon, the young white boy represents the broader framework of white
society's perception of the Black. The boy turns to his white mother for
protection from the impending Black doom. The young white boy,
however, is not simply operating at the affective level, he is not simply
being haunted, semi-consciously, by a vague feeling of anxiety. Rather,
he is operating both at the affective and the discursive level . He says,
"Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." This locutionary act carries a
perlocutionary force of effecting a phenomenological return of Fanon to
himself as a cannibalistic threat, as an object to be feared. Fanon, of
course, does not "want this revision, this thematization."10 AfricanAmerican philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams notes: For Fanon, the
boy's view of the Negro (of Fanon himself in this case) as an object of
fear is significant, as it suggests (1) that the image (racial epidermal
schema) of the Negro posited by the boy's verbal performance has a
narrative significance and (2) that such images are available to the boy
as elements of a socially shared stock of images that qualify the
historicity (the historical situatedness) both of the boy and of the Negro
he sees. (1993, 165) One is tempted to say that the young white boy
sees Fanon's Black body "as if " it was cannibal-like. The "seeing as
if," however, is collapsed into a "seeing as is." In Fanon's example,
within the lived phenomenological transversal context of white racist

behavior, the "as if " reads too much like a process of "conscious effort."
On my reading, "youngwhiteboyexperiencesniggerdarkbodycannibalevokestrepidation" [End Page 223] is what appears in the
uninterrupted lived or phenomenological flow of the young white
boy's racist experience. There is no experience of the "as if." Indeed,
the young white boy's linguistic and nonlinguistic performance is
indicative of a definitive structuring of his own self-invisibility as:
"whiteinnocentselfinrelationshiptothedarkniggerself." This definitive
structuring is not so much remembered or recollected as it is always
present as the constitutive imaginary background within which the
white boy is both the effect and the vehicle of white racism ; indeed,

he is the orientation of white epistemic practices, ways of "knowing"
about one's (white) identity vis--vis the Black Other. The "cultural
white orientation" is not an "entity" whose origin the white boy needs to
grasp or recollect before he performs whiteness. He is not a tabula
rasa, one who sees the Black body for the first time and instinctively
says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." On this score, the boy
does indeed undergo an experience of the dark body as frightening,
but there is no concealed meaning, as it were, inherent in the
experience qua experience of Fanon's body as such. Rather, the fright
that he experiences vis--vis Fanon's dark body is always already

"constructed out of . . . social narratives and ideologies" (Henze 2000,
238). The boy is already discursively and affectively acculturated
through micro-processes of "racialized" learning (short stories,

lullabies, children's games,11 prelinguistic experiences, and so forth)
to respond "appropriately" in the presence of a Black body . The gap
that opens up within the young white boy's perceptual field as he "sees"
Fanon's Black body has already been created while innocently sitting on
his mother's lap.12 His mother's lap constitutes a "raced" zone of
security. This point acknowledges the fundamental "ways the
transactions between a raced world and those who live in it racially
constitute the very being of those beings" (Sullivan 2001, 89). The
association of Blackness with "nigger" and cannibalism is no mean feat.

Hence, on my view, he is already attending to the world in a particular
fashion; his affective and discursive performances bespeak the
(ready-to-hand) inherited white racist background according to which
he is able to make "sense" of the world. Like moving my body in the
direction of home, or only slightly looking as I reach my hand to retrieve

my cup of hot tea that is to the left of my computer screen, the young
white boy dwells within/experiences/engages the world of white racist

practices in such a way that the practices qua racist practices have
become invisible. The young boy's response is part and parcel of an
implicit knowledge of how he gets around in a Manichean world.
Being-in a racist world, a lived context of historicity, the young boy
does not "see" the dark body as "dark" and then thematically proceed
to apply negative value predicates to it, where conceivably the young
boy would say, "Yes, I 'see' the dark body as existing in space, and I
recognize the fact that it is through my own actions and intentions that I
predicate evil of it." "In order even to act deliberately," as philosopher
Hubert L. Dreyfus maintains, "we must orient ourselves in a familiar
world" (1991, 85). [End Page 224] My point here is that the young white
boy is situated within a familiar white racist world of intelligibility , one
that has already "conceded" whiteness as "superior" and Blackness as
"inferior" and "savage." Involved within the white racist Manichean
world, the young boy has found his orientation, he has already become
part and parcel of a constituted and constituting force within a
constellation of modes of being that are deemed natural. However, he is
oblivious to the historicity and cultural conditionedness of these

modes of being. Despite the fact that "race" neither exists as a
naturally occurring kind within the world nor cuts at the joints of
reality, notice the evocative power of "being Black," which actually
points to the evocative power of being white. The dark body, after all,
would not have evoked the response that it did from the young white
boy were it not for the historical mythos of the white body and the
power of white normativity through which the white body has been prereflectively structured, resulting in forms of action that are as familiar
and as quotidian as my reaching for my cup of tea. His white racist
performance is a form of everyday coping within the larger
unthematized world of white social coping. On this score, one might
say that the socio-ontological structure that gives intelligibility to the

young white boy's racist performance is prior to a set of beliefs of which
he is reflectively aware. Notice that Fanon undergoes the experience of
having his body "given back to him." Thus Fanon undergoes a profound
phenomenological experience of being disconnected from his body
schema. Fanon experiences his body as flattened out or sprawled out
before him. And, yet, Fanon's "body," its corporeality, is forever with
him. It never leaves. So, how can it be "given back"? The physical body
that Fanon has/is remains in space and time. It does not somehow
disappear and make a return. And, yet, there is a profound sense in
which his "corporeality" is interwoven with particular discursive
practices. Under the white gaze, Fanon's body is not simply the res
extensa of Cartesian dualism. Within the context of white racist
practices vis--vis the "Black" body, there is a blurring of boundaries
between what is "there" as opposed to what has been "placed there."
Hence, the body's "corporeality," within the context of lived history, is
shaped through powerful cultural schemata. This does not mean that
somehow the "body" does not exist. After all, it is my body that forms
the site of white oppression. To jettison all discourse regarding the
body as "real," being subject to material forces, and such, in the
name of the "postmodern body," is an idealism that would belie my
own philosophical move to theorize from the position of my real lived
embodiment. The point here is that the "body" is never given as such,
but always "appears there" within the context of some set of conditions
of emergence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 108). The conditions of
emergence for the phenomenological return of Fanon's body qua inferior
or bestial are grounded in the white social imaginary, its discursive and
nondiscursive manifestations. Having undergone a gestalt-switch in his
body image, his knowledge/consciousness of his body has become
"solely a negating activity. It is a third-person [End Page 225]
consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain
uncertainty" (1967, 11011). Linda Alcoff discusses this
phenomenological sense of being disjointed as a form of "nearincommensurability between first-person experience and historico-racial
schema that disenables equilibrium" (1999, 20). What this points to is

the "sociogenic" basis of the "corporeal malediction"experienced by
Blacks (Fanon 1967, 111). On this score, "the black man's [woman's]
alienation is not an individual question" (11). In other words, the
distorted historico-racial schema that occludes equilibrium takes

place within the realm of sociality, a larger complex space of white
social intersubjective constitutionality "of phenomena that human
beings have come to regard as 'natural' in the physicalist sense of
depending on physical nature" (Gordon 1997, 38). Of course, within the

context of colonial or neocolonial white power, the objective is to pass
off what is historically contingent as that which is ahistorically given.
Pitcher
The debate space itself is organized around the governing
rules of whiteness. Unless we devise a radically new stance to
engage, ongoing violence become inevitable.
Wynter 84 (Sylvia, Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at
the University of California at San Diego to be a visiting professor for 197475. She then became chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies, and
professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at
Stanford University in 1977. She is now Professor Emeritus at Stanford
University, "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism" Boundary II,
12:3 & 13:1, Accessed via JSTOR- [SG])
The social behaviors that were to verify this topos of iconicity which
yoked the Indo-European mode of being to human being in general,
and the new middle class model of identity to the exemplary Norm of
this new "empirico-transcendental doublet," man (Foucault, 1984)

(imagined/experienced as if a "natural being"), would be carried out by
the complementary non-discursive practices of a new wave of great
internments of native labors in new plantations orders (native wage
labor), and by the massacres of the colonial eraleading logically to
their Summa in the Auchwitz/Belsen and in the Gulag/Cambodia
archipelagoes. Through all this, different forms of segregating the
Ultimate Chaos that was the Blackfrom the apartheid of the South to
the lynchings in both North and South, to their deprivation of the vote,
and confinement in an inferior secondary educational sphere, to the
logic of the jobless/ghetto/drugs/crime/prison archipelagoes of today
ensured that, as Uspenskij et al note, the "active creation" of the type
of Chaos, which the dominant model needs for the replication of its
own system, would continue. It thus averted any effort to find the
ceremonies which could wed the structural oppositions, liberating the
Black from his Chaos function, since this function was the key to the
dynamics of its own order of being. As Las Casas had argued against
Sepulvedawhen refuting the latter's humanist theory that human

sacrifice carried out by the New World peoples was proof of the fact of
their Lack of Natural Reason and, therefore, that it was just to make war
against them to protect the innocents who were sacrificed and to take
over their territory"to sacrifice innocents for the good of the
commonwealth is not opposed to natural reason, is not something
abominable and contrary to nature, but is an error that has its origin in
natural reason itself."" It is an error, then, not in the speaking/behaving
subjects, but in the ratiomorphic apparatus generic to the human, the
cognitive mechanism that is the "most recent superstructure in a
continuum of cognitive processes as old as life on this planet," and, as
such, "the least tested and refined against the real world" (Riedl/Kaspar,

1984). And it is only with science, as Riedl and Kaspar (quoting Roman
Sexl) observe, that there is ever any true "victory over the ratiomorphic
apparatus"such as that of Galileo's and his telescope over the
abductive logic of the if/then sequence of inference dictated behind the
backs of their consciousness to the Aristotelian doctors of philosophy as
the speaking subjects of the Christian-medieval system ensemble. II. Reenacting Heresy: The New Studies and the Studia as a Science of Human
Systems The main proposal here is that the calls made in the 1960s and
1970s for new areas/programs of studies, was, although non-consciously
so at the time, calls which re-enacted in the context of our times a
parallel counter-exertion, a parallel Jester's heresy to that of the
Studia's. But because of our non-consciousness of the real dimensions
of what we were about, we asked at first only to be incorporated into
the normative order of the present organization of knowledge as addons, so to speak. We became entrapped, as a result, in Bantustan
enclaves labelled "ethnic" and "gender" and/or "minority studies."
These enclaves then functioned, as David Bradley notes, inter a/ia, to
exempt English Departments from having to alter their existing

definition of American literature. Even more, these enclaves functioned
to exempt the callers for the new studies from taking cognizance of the
anomaly that confronted us, with respect to a definition of American
literature which lawlikely functioned to exclude not only Blacks, but all
the other groups whose "diverse modalities of protest" (Detienne, 1979)
in the 1960s and 1970s had fueled the call for new studies. Thomas
Kuhn points out that the recognition of anomalies is the first step
which leads to changes in the paradigms of the natural sciences.38
And in the same context the linguistic scholar Whatmough has argued
that human observers are parts of the cosmos which they observe ,
that since all the knowledge that orders our behavior is gained from
these human observers, such knowledge must either be solipsistic or
reduce man to a part of his environment. This knowledge is, therefore,
not to be trusted unless the observer in his role as knower finds the
means to convert himself into an "external observer." Among the means
which he proposes is the taking of the "all pervading regularity noted in
language," rather than the speaking subject, as the object of
investigation. And these regularities appear "all along the road
through the heirarchy of language, from everyday chit chat through

law, and religions, liturgy and homily, poetry, `literature,' science and
philosophy to logic and mathematics."39 These regularities, he goes on,
will enable the knower to make use of what he calls the mathematike
techne, which enables her/him to treat languages like chemistry, for
example, according to their grammars of regularities, as if man, i.e. the
speaking/thinking/representing subject, "did not exist at all." One
problem remained, however: that of the perception of these regularities.
For, because the regularities are, so to speak, "built in" to the
discourses, the users of these discourses cannot normally isolate the

existence of these regularities (Whatmough, 1967). And, as Foucault
reminds us, this problem is applicable not only for the boundary
maintaining "true discourse" of the positivism inherited from the

nineteenth-century episteme, but also for the eschatology of
positivism's counter-discourse, Marxism, both generated from the
same ground (Foucault, 1973) of a materialist metaphysics, and each
dialectically the condition of the post-atomic dysfunctional sovereignty

of the "grammar of regularities" of the other. The anthropologist,
Legesse, has pointed to the extent to which we are trapped in the
ordering "categories and prescriptions" of our epistemic orders . He

notes, however, that the liminal groups of any order are the ones
most able to "free us" from these prescriptions, since it is they who
existentially experience the "injustice inherent in structure" (Legesse,
1973), that is, in the very ordering of the order which dictates the
"grammar of regularities" through which the systemic subjects perceive
their mode of reality as isomorphic with reality in general. The
normative categories of any orderfor example the aristocratic
category of European feudalismare normative precisely because the
structure of their lived experience is isomorphic with the

representation that the order gives itself of itself. The liminal
categories like those of the bourgeoisie in the feudal order of things, on
the other hand, experience a structural contradiction between their
lived experience and the grammar of representations which generate
the mode of reality by prescribing the parameters of collective

behaviors that dynamically bring that "reality" into being. The liminal
frame of reference, therefore, unlike the normative, can provide what
Uspesnkij et al call the "outer view," from which perspective the
grammars of regularities of boundary and structure-maintaining
discourses are perceivable, and Whatmough's "external observer's
position" made possible. What the calls for New Studies at first
overlooked, however, was precisely the regularities which emerged
into view in the wake of the "diverse modalities of protest" whose
non-coordinated yet spontaneous eruption now brought into

unconcealednessnot only the lawlike rule-governed nature of the
exclusion of the diverse protesting groups/categories as group-subjects
from any access to the means of representation, but also the
regularities of the exclusion of their frames of reference and
historical/cultural past from the normative curriculum, an exclusion so
consistent as to be clearly also rule-governed. This consistency was
reinforced by the emergence of the equation between the
group/categories excluded from the means of representation and the
ratios of their degrees of socio-economic
empowerment/disempowerment in the world outside. The dynamic
presence of rule-governed correlations which determined rules of
in/exclusion, was, however, only perceivable by the non-orchestrated
calls for New Studies, calls like "the diverse modalities of protest" in the
Greek city states analysed by Detienne, which, by breaching parallel

dietary and other rules, not only called the ontology of the religiopolitical order of the city-state into question, but made perceivable,
through what they protested against, the founding Order/Chaos
oppositional categories which underpinned the boundary/structure
maintaining dynamics of the polis (Detienne, 1979). These regularities
pointed to a fundamental question which, at the time, remained

unasked. It had to do with the anomalous implication that they were
determined by rules which transcended the conscious intention of the
academics who enacted the decision-making processes as to what to
in/exclude, just as the rules of inference of Galileo's doctors of
philosophy were dictated by the ratiomorphic apparatus or rational

world view based on the a priori of an order of value between the
imperfect terrestrial and the crystalline perfection of the lunar realm:
the Order/Chaos opposition of the autopoetic dynamics of the Christian
medieval-system ensemble. What, in this case, then, determined the
rules which determined the decisionmaking processes by which
individual scholars, working with integrity and according to the criteria
of objective standards, in/excluded? What determined what should and
should not be defined as American Fiction, and the mode of measure of
the "objective" standards of individual scholars ? The question was not
to be asked, however, until the after side of the experience of
disillusion which the callers all underwent and which David Bradley
traces in his article, "Black and American in 1982." For it was to be a
recognition, made by us all on the other side of that experience, of
the existence of objective limits to the incorporation of Blacks into
the normative order of being/knowing of the present order, that
would lead to our further recognition of the need for an
epistemological break. Bradley was one of a group of Blacks for whom
Affirmative Action, by countering the "inbuilt distribution bias" of the

dynamics of the order, had worked. The interference of Affirmative
Action with the normative functioning of the order with respect to the
distributionat the group category levelof unequal ratios of access
to educational empowerment, had enabled Bradley, together with a
group of young Blacks like himself, to breach the rule-governed nature
of the proscription which confined Blacks-as-a-group to a secondary
educational orbit, relative to their White peers-as-a-group. Bradley at
the time, observing his father's great joy, had determined to do

everything to prove his father's and his own private hope true. His
father's hope was that at long last Blacks were to be allowed to break
out of the secondary orbit to which their lives and dreams had been
confined, and if this hope would not be realized in time for his own life
to be graced by the change, it would in time at least be realized for his
son's. Bradley's own hope had been that once Blacks were included in
vast numbers in the highest levels of higher education, and had
worked hard and proved themselves, they would be so numerous, so
no longer the token exception, that they would eventually have to be
distinguished by criteria other than by "the uniform of skin."

However, he experienced on the campus both the overt and covert
forms of anathematization which met the breaching of the
interdiction that the black presence-as-a-group implied (since what
Hofstadter calls the category structure of the "representational system"

"America" is based on the dynamics of the contradiction between
individual equality and group heirarchy). These experiences slowly
stripped away the illusion of any fundamental change in the ordering
of group relations. The shouts of "Nigger! Nigger!" in the citadel of
reason in the heart of the non-redneck campus, the phoned bomb
threats, the fragile defenselessness of the Black students in the face

of a mindless hostility, the ineffective wringing of hands of concerned
Liberal Whites, were paralleled by the more discreet acts of partition
(Detienne, 1979) by university administrators, whose proscription of
the financially starved Black Culture Center, always a whitewashed
rotting house to be reached by a scramble up a muddy bank, mainly
always on the nether edge of campus, once again gave the rulegoverned regularity of the game away. Blacks would be allowed on
the campus as a group, admitted to have even a culture, as long as
this "culture" and its related enclave studies could be made to
function as the extra-cultural space, in relation, no longer to a Wasp,
but now more inclusively to a White American, normatively
Euroamerican intra-cultural space; as the mode of Chaos imperative
to the latter's new self-ordering. (The readapted Western culture Core
Curriculum is the non-conscious expression of this more
different terms, with the category homeostasis returning to its "built
in normalcy," the abuse and the bomb threats ceased. Order and
Chaos were once more in their relational interdefining places, stably
expressing the bio-ontological principle of Sameness and Difference
of the present order, as the rule-governed discourse of Galileo's doctors
of philosophy functioned to verify the physicoontological mode of

Sameness and Difference on which the Christian medieval order rested
before the Studia and Copernicus, before the Jester's heresy of the
figures of rogue/clown/fool, had pulled the "high seriousness" of its selfjustifying self-representation down to earth. Bradley now recognized
that he had been wrong to hope that Black lives, from his father's to his
own, had to "run along the same line ... one that rises and falls like a
sine wave," one that is "a graphed function not of a mathematical
relation between sides and angles but of a social relationship between
Blacks and American society itself." Sometimes the line could be "on the
positive side of the base line," at other times on the negative side. If the
effects were different, the function had always to remain the same. Thus
his hope for the next generation of Blacks, in this case for his young
godson, would have to be cut down to realistic size. His hope could only
now be that by the time his godson came of age, the "graph of black will
once again be on the upswing," giving him, as Bradley himself had had,

"a little time to gain some strength, some knowledge, some color to
hold inside himself." For that would/could be, "all the hope there is. 11
Yet the beginning of hope also lay here. The recognition of the
regularities pointed outside the "functional rhetoric" of the Liberal
creed to the existence of objective limits and, therefore, of laws of
functioning which, beyond the conscious intentionalities of their
subjectsWhite or Blackdetermined the limits to the order's
normative incorporation of those whose lives in a "free" country had
to be made to serve as the "graphed function" of the boundary
maintaining system, as its markers of Chaos, the Not-Us. The Spanish
historian Americo Castro had noted the existence of this systemic

function of Blacks in the comparison he made between their function
and that of Jew and Moor in sixteenth-century Spain. Although
converted Christians and, therefore, "according to the gospel and the
sacraments of the Church," forming a part of the "mystical Body of
Christ and His Church," these categories had been stigmatized as being
of unclean blood and heretical descent (i.e., not Spanish-Christian).
Their proscribed livesthey were excluded from jobs; many were burnt
at the stake by the Inquisition for "heresy"enabled them to function as
the mode of Difference from which the new secularizing bonding
principle of limpieza, which came to constitute the "boundary
maintaining system" of the Statal Group Subject of monarchical Spain,
could be generated as an ontologized principle of Sameness. Here
Americo Castro pointed to the regularity of the parallel by which the
subordination of the lives of the category-bearers of difference to their
"grasped function" is repeated in the lives of present day American
Blacks, who are today re-enacting and "living a drama similar to that of
the Spanish moriscos and Jews," even though according to the
Constitution they form part of the American We (Americo Castro, 1977)
or group-Subject. Only with their complete strategic marginalization
did the by now bantustanized enclave studies begin to rethink their
function: to grasp a connection with that of the Liminal outsider
Jester's role of the original Studia, a role to which they were heir. This
became clear as they began to take as their parallel objects of inquiry
the representations which had been made of their groups by the
order of discourse of mainstream scholarship; as they began to find
that these representations, too, functioned according to across the

board, objective rules. What was here revealed, when taken all
together, were the regularities of the "figuring" of an Other excluded
series, with the discourse functioning to constitute them as a "human
species" totemic operator which paralleled that of the "animal species"
totemic operator of traditional Neolithic societies as well as the
planetary grid of the Christian medieval order. This discourse, then,
operated to serve the same extra-cognitive function of Ptolemaic
astronomy in the Middle Ages. It re-enacted the celestial/terrestrial
physico-ontological principle of Difference in new terms: this time in

terms of a bioontological principle of Sameness/Difference, expressed,
not in the Spirit/Flesh order of value of the Christian-medieval order, but
in the rational/irrational mode of Order/Chaos of our own. Whatever the
groupwomen, natives, niggerswhatever the categorythe Orient,
Africa, the tropicsthe ordering principle of the discourse was the
same: the figuration of an ontological order of value between the
groups who were markers of "rationality" and those who were the
markers of its Lack-State. And the analyses which had begun to
perceive the lawlike regularities of these ordering discourses went from

Virginia Woolf's observation of the compulsive insistence by "angry male
professors" on the mental inferiority of women, through Carter G.
Woodson's diagnosis (1935) of the lawlike manner in which the
curriculum in American schools distorted history so as to represent the
Whites as everything and the Blacks as nothing, to Aime Cesaire's
Discourse on Colonialism, which again diagnosed the regularities with
which the colonizers rewrote the past to show themselves as having
done everything and the colonized nothing, and, more recently Abdel
Malek's/Edward Said's dissection of the phenomenon of Orientalism.4'
What began to come clear was the reality of the reflex automatic
functioning of rules of figuration, parallel to those of Galileo's doctors of
philosophy, which went beyond the intentionality of the objectively
rational scholar, rules which then revealed that the objectivity was that
of the ratiomorphic apparatus or cognitive mechanism of our present
organization of knowledge, one by which we are all, including the liminal
Others, non-consciously governed. A parallel suspicion of something
automatic functioning beyond the conscious control of the human had
impelled the exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud, which was
to be published under the title, Why War?. In the early decades of the
century Einstein had written Freud, asking if his new discipline could
provide some hope with respect to, and in the context of, the
acceleration of the phenomenon of inter-human wars. Freud had
responded that there was his theory of the instincts but that as yet he
had no overall answer. Psychology as a discipline, however, was to
confront the question by focussing on the connection between the
phenomenon of nationalism and the processes of socialization which
exacerbated nationalist allegiances as a primary causal factor. And in
his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault suggested that with the shift
from the monarchical order of things to the bourgeois order in its pure
statethe transposition from a governing figurative "symbolic of blood"
to what might be called a "metaphorics of naturality" in which the
bourgeoisie comes to image its boundary-maintaining Group-Subject
system on the analogy of a living organismthe imperative of the
self-preservation of the "natural community" (nation-Volk, race,
culture) metaphorically ontologized as a "biological" Body, had led to
the acceleration of wars between men who were now led to imagine
themselves, for the first time in human history, as "natural beings."42

Recently Lewis Thomas, the biologist, has again focussed on the
connection between nationalismwhich he sees as an evolutionary
blind alley for the human as a speciesand the threat of nuclear
extinction. Like Einstein earlier, Thomas has glimpsed that hope, if it is
to exist, would have to be found in a new order of knowledge. And he
suggests that the disciplines that were concerned with the problems
of human behavior, although still in a groping uncertain stage, are the

only ones capable of providing an answer to mankind's quest for
social hope; that one day there would emerge from these uncertain
attempts, a "solid" discipline as "hard" as physics, plagued "as physics

still is with ambiguities" yet with new rules "and new ways of getting
things done, such as for instance getting rid of patriotic rhetoric and
thermonuclear warfare all at once."" The proposal I am making is that
such a discipline can only emerge with an overall rewriting of

knowledge, as the re-enacting of the original heresy of a Studia,
reinvented as a science of human systems, from the liminal
perspective of the "base" (Dewey, 1950) new Studies, whose revelatory
heresy lies in their definition of themselves away from the Chaos roles in
which they had been definedBlack from Negro, Chicano from MexicanAmerican, Feminists from Women, etc. For these have revealed the
connection between the way we identify ourselves and the way we act
upon/know the world. They have made clear that we are governed in
the way we know the world by the templates of identity or modes of

self-troping speciation, about which each human system auto-institutes
itself, effecting the dynamics of an autopoetics, whose imperative of
stable reproduction has hitherto transcended the imperatives of the
human subjects who collectively put it into dynamic play. The proposed
science of human systems, therefore, decenters the systemic subject.
Instead, it takes as the object of its inquiry the modes of symbolic selfrepresentation (Creutzfeld, 1979), about which each human system
auto-institutes itself, the modes of self-troping rhetoricity through which
the Subject (individual/collective) actualizes its mode of being as a living
entity. In addition, it takes the ratiomorphic apparatus or episteme,
which exists as the enabling rational world view of the self-troping mode
of being as an object of inquiry in the comparative context in which it is
definable as one of the cognitive mechanisms determined by the
"psychogeny" of the human rather than by the phylogeny of purely
biological organisms. Taking the connection that Thomas makes
between "patriotic rhetoric" and "thermo-nuclear warfare" as a key
linkage, a science of human systems will take most crucially as an
object of its inquiry the modes of cultural imagination of human
systemsJerison's "imagery systems"together with the laws of
functioning of the rhetorically coded mode of figuration, which, with its

internal mediation of the mimesis of Desire (Girard, 1965) and of
Aversion (Fanon, 1967), orients the normative seeking/avoiding/knowing
behaviors of the systemic subjects. For it is this governing system of

figuration generated from the mode of self-definition which integrates
with the neurophysiological machinery of the brain, that functions as the
shared integrative mechanism, determining not only the mode of
consciousness or "world of mind" of the order, but serving also, at the
aesthetico-affective level of the order, to stabilize the response to the
target-stimuli of Desire for all that is the Self/Order and of Aversion to all
that is the Chaos of the Self, the Death of its Life. It is by thereby
securing shared and predictably functioning endogenous waveshapes in
the brain (Thatcher/John, 1977), of the normative Subject of the order,
that the system of figuration sets limits to that Subject's mode of
imagining its Self/Group-Self and, therefore, to the knowledge that it can
have of its world. A science of human systems which takes the laws of
figuration of human systems as its objects of inquiry must, therefore,
adopt a synthetic rather than categorized approach to its subject. In
order to study their rhetor-neurophysiological laws of functioning, it
must above all breach the distinction between brain/minds, the natural
and the human sciences. For one of its major hypotheses is that
systems of figuration and their group-speciating Figuration-Work
essentially constitute the shared governing rhetor-neurophysiological
programs or abduction schemas through which human Group Subjects
realize themselves as boundary maintaining systems. These governing
rhetor-neurophysiological programs--which can often function as
regressive defects of social fantasy (Thatcher/John 1977), as in the case
of limpieza de sangre and of Aryaness, as well as of an ontologized
whiteness--are the mechanisms which determine the limit of the
figuratively coded "boundary-maintaing" systems. They then function,
as in the case of the American order, to set objective limits (such as
those to Bradley's hopes) to the definition of its fiction; and to the
possible non-proscription of Black Culture Center at the nether edge of
the campus, as the physical expression of the rhetorical configuration of

the mode of chaos to the order's self-troping definition of itself. Hence
the paradox of the major proposal that we make: that it is the literary
humanities which should be the umbrella site for the transdisciplinary
realization of a science of human systems.
Quiet
We control uniqueness racial categories are created by oppressive
policies theres only a risk responding to them solves.
Turn silence doesnt change the existence of racism.
Silence about the structures of Whiteness links back to the k

desire is productive
Mazzei 11 (Lisa A., Gonzaga U, Desiring Silence: Gender, Race,
and Pedagogy in Education, British Educational Research
Journal, Vol. 37, No. 4, August 2011, p. 657-96)//LA
In framing whiteness in the context of this paper, I am interested in how a lack of
cognition regarding one's racial identity/position as white serves to
explain away and in many cases perpetuate the existence of racial
barriers to social mobility (Sleeter, 2004). Since whiteness as a descriptor for
whites often goes unnamed, unnoticed and unspoken, the silence or
absence (that which is not spoken) of this racial identity continues to
provide a framework for the analysis of the conversations I have with white teachers at both
the preservice and inservice levels. If white teachers continue to effectively deny or
fail to see their whiteness as raced then they will continue to see
students of colour as 'Other' and respond to them from that perceptioni.e., they are raced, I am not. Such an orientation perpetuates a racially
inhabited silence that limits, if not negates, an open dialogue regarding
race and culture. In such an environment stereotypes are furthered
rather than confronted and perceptions of self and Other are allowed to
remain circumscribed in a protective caul. In short, education as a
means of transformation or change is subverted and silence as a means
of control and protection of privilege is accepted. If we think silence is an
enactment of a desire to be recognized as governed by social norms , then
we acknowledge that the desire on the part of these white preservice teachers is a desire to be recognized
'within the constraints of normativity' Jackson, 2009, p . 171). If they are recognized within
such constraints, then their mark as white teacher remains intact. Privilege remains
thereby reproducing what Seshadri-Crooks refers to as a 'neutral epistemology' .
Instead of asking, 'What is desire?' the impetus is instead to ask, 'What does desire ask of these students?' Not
what does it mean, but what does it do? Deleuze draws on Nietzsche for his theory of desire. For Nietzsche,
the notion of desire has to do with drive. 'What we call 'thinking' , 'feeling' , reason' is
nothing more than a competing of the passions or drives' (Smith, 2007). Deleuze rejects desire as
a lack, gap or what is missing and, instead, puts forth an immanent
concept of desire. As such, desire is primary, positive and not left
wanting but, instead, producing something. What matters for Deleuze is
not what desire means; instead, he wants to know 'whether it works,

and how it works, and who it works for' (Deleuze, 1990, p. 22). Through an
engagement with Deleuzian desire, I focus on what is producing the
silence and/or what the silence produces, in other words, a desiring
silence. Not as in 'to desire' silence, but silences that are produced and that produce an effect, emerging
from a 'production of production' (O'Sullivan & Zepke, 2008, p. 1, emphasis in original). Such silences may be
produced by resistance or the attempt to maintain power that resists the 'gravity of the circle of recognition and
What is desire? If desire does not begin from lack, in

other words, desiring what we do not have, then where does it begin or,
put differently, what spawns desire? Discussing Deleuzian desire, Claire Colebrook
(2002) writes, 'life strives to preserve and enhance itself and does so by
connecting with other desires' (p. 91). This preserving and enhancing of
desire coalesces with power, not in a 'repression of desire but the
expansion of desire' (p. 91). The task of Deleuze's own method is to 'explain how interests
such as humanism, individualism, capitalism or communismare
produced from desires: the concrete and specific connection of bodies'
(p. 92), in this case the bodies of white preservice teachers. The charge then becomes not to
define desire, but to understand the interests that produce desire and the interests
that desire seeks to produce and/or protect. In the case of white preservice
teachers, the visibleness of white as a marker of their bodies has
previously been deemed invisible because of its normative presence.
This failure to have previously named whiteness thereby produces a
whiteness as an unchallenged norm. 'Desire ilself is power, a power to
become and produce images' (Colebrook, 2002, p. 94, emphasis in original). A powerful
white presence is an unnamed and silent image that continues to be
masked in the power of that which will not be named. Desiring silence
then re-produces an unspoken white presence.
its representations' (p. 1).
The status quo supports silencing rage expressions of rage are

necessary for transformative revolutionary action.
hooks 95 [bell hooks is an author, activist, retired professor, and feminist
extraordinaire. She has held positions as Professor of African and AfricanAmerican Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of
Womens Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio,
and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New
York, killing rage: Ending Racism
http://www.cds.hawaii.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/resources/diversity/Ki
llingRageEndingRacism_part1.pdf //sb]
Currently, we are daily bombarded with mass media images of black
rage, usually personified by angry young black males wreaking
havoc upon the innocent, that teach everyone in the culture to see
this rage as useless, without meaning, destructive. This onedimensional misrepresentation of the power of rage helps maintain
the status quo. Censoring militant response to race and racism, it
ensures that there will be no revolutionary effort to gather that rage
and use it for constructive social change. Significantly,
contemporary reinterpretations and critiques of Malcolm X seek to
redefine him in a manner that strips him of rage as though this were
his greatest flaw. Yet his rage for justice clearly pushed him

towards greater and greater awareness. It pushed him to change. He
is an example of how we can use rage to empower. It is tragic to see
his image recouped to condone mindless anger and violence in black

life. As long as black rage continues to be represented as always and
only evil and destructive, we lack a vision of militancy that is
necessary for transformative revolutionary action. I did not kill the
white man on the plane even though I remain awed by the intensity of
that desire. I did listen to my rage, allow it to motivate me to take pen in
hand and write in the heat of that moment. At the end of the day, as I
considered why it had been so full of racial incidents, of racist
harassment, I thought that they served as harsh reminders compelling
me to take a stand, speak out, choose whether I will be complicit or
resist. All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of
complicity. What does our rage at injustice mean if it can be silenced,
erased by individual material comfort? If aware black folks gladly trade
in their critical political consciousness for opportunistic personal
advancement then there is no place for rage and no hope that we can
ever live to see the end of white supremacy. Rage can be consuming.
It must be tempered by an engagement with a full range of emotional
responses to black struggle for self-determination. In mid-life, I see
in myself that same rage at injustice which surfaced in me more than

twenty years ago as I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and
experienced the world around me anew. Many of my peers seem to feel
no rage or believe it has no place. They see themselves as estranged
from angry black youth. Sharing rage connects those of us who are
older and more experienced with younger black and non-black folks
who are seeking ways to be self-actualized, self-determined, who
are eager to participate in anti-racist struggle. Renewed, organized
black liberation struggle cannot happen if we remain unable to tap
collective black rage. Progressive black activists must show how we
take that rage and move it beyond fruitless scapegoating of any
group, linking it instead to a passion for freedom and justice that
illuminates, heals, and makes redemptive struggle possible.
Suppressing rage creates black-white paradigmatic thinking and

destroys positive potential robs the black body of the ability to
catalyze courageous action and normalizes oppression by the white.
hooks 95 [bell hooks is an author, activist, retired professor, and feminist
extraordinaire. She has held positions as Professor of African and AfricanAmerican Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of
Womens Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio,
and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New
York, killing rage: Ending Racism
http://www.cds.hawaii.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/resources/diversity/Ki
llingRageEndingRacism_part1.pdf //sb]
In the course on black women novelists that I have been teaching this
semester at City University, we have focused again and again on the

question of black rage. We began the semester reading Harriet Jacobss
autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, asking ourselves
where is the rage? In the graduate seminar I teach on Toni
Morrison we pondered whether black folks and white folks can ever be
subjects together if white people remain unable to hear black rage, if it
is the sound of that rage which must always remain repressed,
contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable. In Morrisons
first novel, The Bluest Eye, her narrator says of the dehumanized
colonized little black girl Pecola that there would be hope for her if only
she could express her rage, telling readers anger is better, there is
a presence in anger. Perhaps then it is that presence, the
assertion of subjectivity colonizers do not want to see, that
surfaces when the colonized express rage. In these times most
folks associate black rage with the underclass, with desperate
and despairing black youth who in their hopelessness feel no
need to silence unwanted passions. Those of us black folks who
have made it have for the most part become skilled at repressing our
rage. We do what Ann Petrys heroine tells us we must in that prophetic
forties novel about black female rage The Street. It is Lutie Johnson who
exposes the rage underneath the calm persona. She declares:
Everyday we are choking down that rage. In the nineties it is not
just white folks who let black folks know they do not want to
hear our rage, it is also the voices of cautious upperclass black
academic gatekeepers who assure us that our rage has no
place. Even though black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs
could write an entire book called Black Rage, they used their Freudian
standpoint to convince readers that rage was merely a sign of
powerlessness. They named it pathological, explained it away. They
did not urge the larger culture to see black rage as something other
than sickness, to see it as a potentially healthy, potentially
healing response to oppression and exploitation. In his most
recent collection of essays, Race Matters, Cornel West includes the
chapter Malcolm X and Black Rage where he makes rage
synonymous with great love for black people. West acknowledges that
Malcolm X articulated black rage in a manner unprecedented in
American history, yet he does not link that rage to a passion for justice
that may not emerge from the context of great love. By collapsing
Malcolms rage and his love, West attempts to explain that rage away,
to temper it. Overall, contemporary reassessments of Malcolm Xs
political career tend to deflect away from killing rage. Yet is seems
that Malcolm Xs passionate ethical commitment to justice
served as the catalyst for his rage. That rage was not altered by
shifts in his thinking about white folks, racial integration, etc. It is the
clear defiant articulation of that rage that continues to set
Malcolm X apart from contemporary black thinkers and leaders
who feel that rage has no place in anti-racist struggle. These

leaders are often more concerned about their dialogues with
white folks. Their repression of rage (if and when they feel it) and
their silencing of the rage of other black people are the sacrificial
offering they make to gain the ear of white listeners. Indeed,
black folks who do not feel rage at racial injustice because their own
lives are comfortable may feel as fearful of black rage as their white
counterparts. Today degrees and intensities of black rage seem to be
overdetermined by the politics of locationby class privilege. I grew up
in the apartheid South. We learned when we were very little that black
people could die from feeling rage and expressing it to the
wrong white folks. We learned to choke down our rage. This
process of repression was aided by the existence of our separate
neighborhoods. In all black schools, churches, juke joints, etc., we
granted ourselves the luxury of forgetfulness. Within the comfort of
those black spaces we did not constantly think about white supremacy
and its impact on our social status. We lived a large part of our lives not
thinking about white folks. We lived in denial. And in living that way
we were able to mute our rage. If black folks did strange, weird, or
even brutally cruel acts now and then in our neighborhoods (cut
someone to pieces over a card game, shoot somebody for looking at
them the wrong way), we did not link this event to the myriad abuses
and humiliations black folks suffered daily when we crossed the tracks
and did what we had to do with and for whites to make a living. To
express rage in that context was suicidal. Every black person knew it.
Rage was reserved for life at homefor one another. To perpetuate
and maintain white supremacy, white folks have colonized black
Americans, and a part of that colonizing process has been
teaching us to repress our rage, to never make them the targets
of any anger we feel about racism. Most black people internalize
this message well. And though many of us were taught that the
repression of our rage was necessary to stay alive in the days before
racial integration, we now know that one can be exiled forever from the
promise of economic well-being if that rage is not permanently silenced.
Lecturing on race and racism all around this country, I am always
amazed when I hear white folks speak about their fear of black people,
of being the victims of black violence. They may never have spoken to a
black person, and certainly never been hurt by a black person, but they
are convinced that their response to blackness must first and foremost
be fear and dread. They too live in denial. They claim to fear that black
people will hurt them even though there is no evidence which suggests
that black people routinely hurt white people in this or any other culture.
Despite the fact that many reported crimes are committed by black
offenders, this does not happen so frequently as to suggest that all
white people must fear any black person. Now, black people are
routinely assaulted and harassed by white people in white
supremacist culture. This violence is condoned by the state. It is

necessary for the maintenance of racial difference. Indeed, if
black people have not learned our place as second-class citizens through
educational institutions, we learn it by the daily assaults perpetuated by
white offenders on our bodies and beings that we feel but rarely publicly
protest or name. Though we do not live in the same fierce
conditions of racial apartheid that only recently ceased being
our collective social reality, most black folks believe that if they do
not conform to white-determined standards of acceptable behavior they
will not survive. We live in a society where we hear about white folks
killing black people to express their rage. We can identify specific
incidents throughout our history in this country whether it be Emmett
Till, Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, etc. We can identify rare incidents
where individual black folks have randomly responded to their fear of
white assault by killing. White rage is acceptable, can be both
expressed and condoned, but black rage has no place and
everyone knows it. When I first left the apartheid South, to attend a
predominantly white institution of higher education, I was not in touch
with my rage. I had been raised to dream only of racial uplift, of a day
when white and black would live together as one. I had been raised to
turn the other cheek. However, the fresh air of white liberalism
encountered when I went to the West Coast to attend college in the
early seventies invited me to let go some of the terror and mistrust of
white people that living in apartheid had bred in me. That terror keeps
all rage at bay. I remember my first feelings of political rage against
racism. They surfaced within me after I had read Fanon, Memmi, Freire.
They came as I was reading Malcolm Xs autobiography. As Cornel West
suggests in his essay, I felt that Malcolm X dared black folks to claim our
emotional subjectivity and that we could do this only by claiming our
rage. Like all profound repression, my rage unleashed made me
afraid. It forced me to turn my back on forgetfulness, called me out of
my denial. It changed my relationship with home-with the Southmade
it so I could not return there. Inwardly, I felt as though I were a marked
woman. A black person unashamed of her rage, using it as a catalyst
to develop critical consciousness, to come to full decolonized
self-actualization, had no real place in the existing social structure. I
felt like an exile. Friends and professors wondered what had come over
me. They shared their fear that this new militancy might consume me.
When I journeyed home to see my family I felt estranged from them.
They were suspicious of the new me. The good southern white folks
who had always given me a helping hand began to worry that college
was ruining me. I seemed alone in understanding that I was undergoing
a process of radical politicization and self-recovery. Confronting my
rage, witnessing the way it moved me to grow and change, I
understood intimately that it had the potential not only to destroy
but also to construct. Then and now I understand rage to be a
necessary aspect of resistance struggle. Rage can act as a

catalyst inspiring courageous action. By demanding that black
people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the
benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal
culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts
to colonize, oppress, and exploit. Those of us black people who
have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly
surrender our rage. Many of us have no rage. As individual black
people increase their class power, live in comfort, with money mediating
the viciousness of racist assault, we can come to see both the society
and white people differently. We experience the world as infinitely
less hostile to blackness than it actually is. This shift happens
particularly as we buy into liberal individualism and see our
individual fate as black people in no way linked to the collective
fate. It is that link that sustains full awareness of the daily impact of
racism on black people, particularly its hostile and brutal assaults.
Black people who sustain that link often find that as we "move on up
our rage intensifies. During that time of my life when racial apartheid
forbid possibilities of intimacy and closeness with whites, I was most
able to forget about the pain of racism. The intimacy I share with white
people now seldom intervenes in the racism and is the cultural setting
that provokes rage. Close to white folks, I am forced to witness firsthand
their willful ignorance about the impact of race and racism. The harsh
absolutism of their denial. Their refusal to acknowledge accountability
for racist conditions past and present. Those who doubt these
perceptions can read a white male documenting their accuracy in
Andrew Hackers work Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile,
Unequal. His work, like that of the many black scholars and thinkers
whose ideas he draws upon, highlights the anti-black feelings
white people cultivate and maintain in white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy. Racial hatred is real. And it is humanizing
to be able to resist it with militant rage.
Race isnt ontological

Whiteness Supremacy is affectively and discursively produced it
circulates through an assumed grammar that produces Blackness as
ontologically abject.
Yancy 5 (George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the
Critical Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Accessed via Project Muse, [SG])

causing "difficulties in the development of [my] bodily schema" (110). The
white gaze constructs the Black body into "an object in the midst of other objects" (109). The nonthreatening
"I" of my normal, everyday body schema becomes the threatening "him" of the Negro kind/type. Under
pressure, the corporeal schema collapses. It gives way to a racial epidermal schema.6 "Below the corporeal
schema," writes Fanon, "I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been
provided for me not by 'residual sensations and perceptions of a primarily tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and
Fanon began to
"see" himself through the lens of a historico-racial schema. Note that
there was nothing intrinsic to his physiology that forced his corporeal
schema to collapse; it was the "Black body" as always already named
and made sense of within the context of a larger semiotics of privileged
white bodies that provided him with the tools for self-hatred. His "darkness," a
visual character,' but by the other, the white man [woman]" (111). In other words,
naturally occurring phenomenon,7 became historicized, residing within the purview of the white gaze, a
phenomenal space created and sustained by socioepistemic and semiotic communal constitutionality. On
this score, the Black body is placed within the space of constitutionality vis--vis the racist white same, the
One. Against the backdrop of the sketched historico-racial (racist) scheme, Fanon's "darkness" returns to
him, signifying a new genus, a new category of man: A Negro! (116). He inhabits a space of anonymity (he is
every Negro), and yet he feels a strange personal responsibility for his body. He writes: I was responsible at
the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I
discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism,
intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "sho' good eaten'."
the Black body and how it can be changed,

deformed, and made into an ontological problem vis--vis the white
gaze. Describing an encounter with a white woman and her son, Fanon narrates that the young boy
(112)8 [End Page 222] Fanon writes about
screams, "Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!" (113).9 Fanon: My body was given back to me sprawled
out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad,
the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro, it's cold, the Negro is shivering because he is cold, the
little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes
through your bones, the handsome boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage,
the little white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up.. (11314)
The white imagery of the Black as a savage beast, a primitive and uncivilized animal, is clearly expressed in
the boy's fear that he is to be eaten by the "cannibalistic" Negro. "The more that Europeans dominated
Africans, the more 'savage' Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery"
(Brantlinger 1985, 203). Presumably, the young boy does not know that his words will (or how they will)
the broader
framework of white society's perception of the Black. The boy turns to his white
negatively affect Fanon. However, for Fanon, the young white boy represents
mother for protection from the impending Black doom. The young white boy, however, is not simply
operating at the affective level, he is not simply being haunted, semi-consciously, by a vague feeling of
anxiety. Rather, he is operating both at the affective and the discursive level.
He says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." This locutionary act carries a perlocutionary force of
effecting a phenomenological return of Fanon to himself as a cannibalistic threat, as an object to be feared.
Fanon, of course, does not "want this revision, this thematization."10 African-American philosopher Robert

Gooding-Williams notes: For Fanon, the boy's view of the Negro (of Fanon himself in this case) as an object of
fear is significant, as it suggests (1) that the image (racial epidermal schema) of the Negro posited by the
boy's verbal performance has a narrative significance and (2) that such images are available to the boy as
elements of a socially shared stock of images that qualify the historicity (the historical situatedness) both of
One is tempted to say that the young

white boy sees Fanon's Black body "as if " it was cannibal-like. The
"seeing as if," however, is collapsed into a "seeing as is." In Fanon's example,
the boy and of the Negro he sees. (1993, 165)
within the lived phenomenological transversal context of white racist behavior, the "as if " reads too much
like a process of "conscious effort." On my reading, "youngwhiteboyexperiencesniggerdark-
in the uninterrupted lived or

phenomenological flow of the young white boy's racist experience.
There is no experience of the "as if." Indeed, the young white boy's
linguistic and nonlinguistic performance is indicative of a definitive
structuring of his own self-invisibility as:
"whiteinnocentselfinrelationshiptothedarkniggerself." This definitive structuring is not so much
remembered or recollected as it is always present as the constitutive imaginary
background within which the white boy is both the effect and the vehicle
of white racism; indeed, he is the orientation of white epistemic practices,
ways of "knowing" about one's (white) identity vis--vis the Black Other.
bodycannibalevokestrepidation" [End Page 223] is what appears
The "cultural white orientation" is not an "entity" whose origin the white boy needs to grasp or recollect
before he performs whiteness.
He is not a tabula rasa,
one who sees the Black body for the first
the boy does

indeed undergo an experience of the dark body as frightening, but there
is no concealed meaning, as it were, inherent in the experience qua
experience of Fanon's body as such. Rather, the fright that he experiences vis--vis
time and instinctively says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." On this score,
Fanon's dark body is always already "constructed out of . . . social narratives and ideologies" (Henze 2000,
The boy is already discursively and affectively acculturated through

micro-processes of "racialized" learning (short stories, lullabies,
children's games,11 prelinguistic experiences, and so forth) to respond
"appropriately" in the presence of a Black body. The gap that opens up within the
238).
young white boy's perceptual field as he "sees" Fanon's Black body has already been created while
This
point acknowledges the fundamental "ways the transactions between a
raced world and those who live in it racially constitute the very being of
those beings" (Sullivan 2001, 89). The association of Blackness with "nigger" and cannibalism is no
mean feat. Hence, on my view, he is already attending to the world in a particular
fashion; his affective and discursive performances bespeak the (readyto-hand) inherited white racist background according to which he is able
to make "sense" of the world. Like moving my body in the direction of home, or only slightly
looking as I reach my hand to retrieve my cup of hot tea that is to the left of my computer screen, the
young white boy dwells within/experiences/engages the world of white
racist practices in such a way that the practices qua racist practices
have become invisible. The young boy's response is part and parcel of an
innocently sitting on his mother's lap.12 His mother's lap constitutes a "raced" zone of security.

implicit knowledge of how he gets around in a Manichean world. Beingin a racist world, a lived context of historicity, the young boy does not
"see" the dark body as "dark" and then thematically proceed to apply
negative value predicates to it, where conceivably the young boy would say, "Yes, I 'see' the
dark body as existing in space, and I recognize the fact that it is through my own actions and intentions that
I predicate evil of it." "In order even to act deliberately," as philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus maintains, "we
must orient ourselves in a familiar world" (1991, 85). [End Page 224] My point here is that the young white
a familiar white racist world of intelligibility, one that has

already "conceded" whiteness as "superior" and Blackness as "inferior"
and "savage." Involved within the white racist Manichean world, the young boy has found his
boy is situated within
orientation, he has already become part and parcel of a constituted and constituting force within a
he is oblivious to the
historicity and cultural conditionedness of these modes of being.
Despite the fact that "race" neither exists as a naturally occurring kind
within the world nor cuts at the joints of reality, notice the evocative
power of "being Black," which actually points to the evocative power of
being white. The dark body, after all, would not have evoked the response that it did from the young
constellation of modes of being that are deemed natural. However,
white boy were it not for the historical mythos of the white body and the power of white normativity through
which the white body has been pre-reflectively structured, resulting in forms of action that are as familiar
His white racist performance is a form

of everyday coping within the larger unthematized world of white social
coping. On this score, one might say that the socio-ontological structure that gives intelligibility to the
and as quotidian as my reaching for my cup of tea.
young white boy's racist performance is prior to a set of beliefs of which he is reflectively aware. Notice that
Fanon undergoes the experience of having his body "given back to him." Thus Fanon undergoes a profound
phenomenological experience of being disconnected from his body schema. Fanon experiences his body as
flattened out or sprawled out before him. And, yet, Fanon's "body," its corporeality, is forever with him.
It never leaves. So, how can it be "given back"? The physical body that Fanon has/is remains in space and
time. It does not somehow disappear and make a return. And, yet, there is a profound sense in which his
"corporeality" is interwoven with particular discursive practices.
Under the
white gaze, Fanon's body is not simply the res extensa of Cartesian dualism. Within the context of white
racist practices vis--vis the "Black" body, there is a blurring of boundaries between what is "there" as
opposed to what has been "placed there." Hence, the body's "corporeality," within the context of lived
history, is shaped through powerful cultural schemata. This does not mean that somehow the "body" does
it is my body that forms the site of white oppression. To

jettison all discourse regarding the body as "real," being subject to
material forces, and such, in the name of the "postmodern body," is an
idealism that would belie my own philosophical move to theorize from
the position of my real lived embodiment. The point here is that the "body" is never
not exist. After all,
given as such, but always "appears there" within the context of some set of conditions of emergence (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985, 108). The conditions of emergence for the phenomenological return of Fanon's body qua
inferior or bestial are grounded in the white social imaginary, its discursive and nondiscursive
manifestations. Having undergone a gestalt-switch in his body image, his knowledge/consciousness of his
body has become "solely a negating activity. It is a third-person [End Page 225] consciousness. The body is
surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (1967, 11011). Linda Alcoff discusses this
phenomenological sense of being disjointed as a form of "near-incommensurability between first-person
experience and historico-racial schema that disenables equilibrium" (1999, 20). What this points to is the
"sociogenic" basis of the "corporeal malediction"experienced by Blacks (Fanon 1967, 111). On this score,
"the
black
man's [woman's]
alienation is not an individual question"
(11). In other

the distorted historico-racial schema that occludes equilibrium
takes place within the realm of sociality, a larger complex space of white
social intersubjective constitutionality "of phenomena that human
beings have come to regard as 'natural' in the physicalist sense of depending on
words,
physical nature" (Gordon 1997, 38). Of course, within the context of colonial or neocolonial white power,
the objective is to pass off what is historically contingent as that which

is ahistorically given.
Roleplaying
Role Playing is only a disinterested form of spectatorship that
maintains structures of domination.
El Kilombo 7 (El Kilombo Intergalactico 2007 Collective in durham NC that
interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Beyond Resistance:
Everything p. 9-10, [SG])
Second, we must reassess the grounds for potential political change .
If we are to take the Zapatistas seriously and conclude that the politics
of the politicians is a sphere that functions through the simulation of
public opinionthrough polls and the circulation of sound bites and
imagesto administer the interests of transnational capital, it would be
near suicide to continue to do politics as a competition for influence
within that sphere. No matter how well-intentioned or progressive
a given party or platform may be, the proximity of politicians to the
vertical structure and logic of the State today assures only their
complete functionality to the larger system of inequalities. In
addition, we must remind ourselves that these politicians are not there
to simulate for just any power; they are there to simulate social
peace for a global power that is today greater than the collective
power of any particular state. Thus, any opposition that limits itself to
the level of a single state, no matter how powerful, may be futile. Yet,
at the same time that these futilities surface, other strategies and
tactics simultaneously emerge within this new situation , strategies

that rise to the challenge of the contemporary impasse faced by our
previous social visions. Consider for example the tremendous
inspiration provided by the following lines written by Subcomandante

Insurgente Marcos; what appears at first as poetic license should be
read more carefully as the outline of a brilliant strategy for our times:
The social ship is adrift, and the problem is not that we lack a captain.
It so happens that the rudder itself has been stolen, and it is not going
to turn up anywhere. There are those who are devoted to imagining that
the rudder still exists and they fight for its possession. There are those
who are seeking the rudder, certain that it must have been left
somewhere. And there are those who make of an island, not a refuge for
self-satisfaction but a ship for finding another island and another and
another11 5 The Fourth World War continues unabated and the
result has been a near total devastation of the earth and the misery of
the grand majority of its inhabitants. Given this situation and the sense
of despair it brings, it would be easy to lose a sense of purpose, to raise
our hands in defeat and utter those words that have been drilled into us
for the past thirty years: there is in fact no alternative. Despite the
new contours of the Fourth World War and the sense of social dizziness
that it has created, it is important for us to realize that this war shares
one fundamental constant with all other wars in the modern era: it has

been foisted upon us in order to maintain a division (an inequality)
between those who rule and those who are ruled. Since the attempted
conquest of the New World and the consequent establishment of the
modern state-form, we have so internalized this division that it seems
nearly impossible to imagine, let alone act on, any social organization
without it. It is this very act of radical practice and imagination that the
Zapatistas believe is necessary to fight back in the era of total war. But
how might this alternative take shape? In order to begin to address this
question, the Zapatistas implore us to relieve ourselves of the
positions of observers who insist on their own neutrality and
distance; this position may be adequate for the microscope-wielding
academic or the precision-guided T.V. audience of the latest bombings

over Baghdad, but they are completely insufficient for those who are
seeking change. The Zapatistas insist we throw away our microscopes
and our televisions, and instead they demand that we equip our ships
with an inverted periscope. 12 According to what the Zapatistas
have stated, one can never ascertain a belief in or vision of the future
by looking at a situation from the position of neutrality provided

for you by the existing relations of power. These methods will only
allow you to see what already is, what the balance of the relations of
forces are in your field of inquiry. In other words, such methods allow
you to see that field only from the perspective of those who rule at
any given moment. In contrast, if one learns to harness the power of
the periscope not by honing in on what is happening above in the
halls of the self-important, but by placing it deep below the earth,
below even the very bottom of society, one finds that there are
struggles and memories of struggles that allow us to identify not
what is but more importantly what will be. By harnessing the
transformative capacity of social movement, as well as the memories
of past struggles that drive it, the Zapatistas are able to identify the
future and act on it today. It is a paradoxical temporal insight that was

perhaps best summarized by El Clandestino himself, Manu Chao, when
he proclaimed that, the future happened a long time ago!13 Given
this insight afforded by adopting the methodology of the inverted
periscope, we are able to shatter the mirror of power,14 to show that
power does not belong to those who rule. Instead, we see that there
are two completely different and opposed forms of power in any
society: that which emerges from above and is exercised over people
(Power with a capital P), and that which is born below and is able to
act with and through people (power with a lower case p). One is set
on maintaining that which is (Power), while the other is premised on
transformation (power).
Shelby
Their evidence assumes whiteness as a cultural identity rather
than an invisible ideologywe dont posit whiteness as a
monolith we isolate instances where whiteness is reified in
civil society
There is a distinction between race which is what their Shelby

evidence is in the context of and anti-blacknesswestern
modernity has structured the black body as an antithesis to
civilityanything that is not white, male, or well educated is
seen as inferiorthis understanding does not preclude
intersectional forms of oppression.
Sheshadri-Crooks
Psychoanalysis results in fatalism, passivity, and inaction
Gordon 1 (Psychotherapist Paul, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics
of Defeat, Race Class 2001 42: 17)
The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with dis appointment. All the tragedies of
political project of emancipation the evils of Stalinism in particular are seen as the
the
inevitable
product of men and women trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a
critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they
discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it,
blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and
deconstruction and representation -- as though to interpret the world is more important
than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing
world'. 58 To justify their ight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity ,
the disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very
work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says
of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers à world-historical alibi' for
the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for
those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern human kind to be free . At every turn for
such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination , we are nothing
but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage
far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in
trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more
links to our chains; how ever, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax. 59 Cohen's political
defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be
contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities'
are always ìmagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class
organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufcient
combination'. 60 In this scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together
and act together as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure
fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in the rst place: `Community is a magical
device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of reenchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.' 61 Now,
this is not only non sense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history àlways false'? Did the Judeocide happen
or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people
resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always ìmagined'? Or, as Sivanandan
states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate
against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical
to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is
bad. But is it? No society can function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should
be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all times
accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's horrendous
prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely
personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen
reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other
rm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded ùnderstand
ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of ànti-racism' that portrays active racists
as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move
from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply
exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another, psychoanalysis . 62 For
psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which
recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the claimed radicalism of psycho analysis, in
the hands of the postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a
politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to
interpret it, need to look elsewhere.
Psychoanalysis only explains individual decisionsnot

applicable to social experiences
Gordon 1 (Psychotherapist, Paul, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics
of Defeat, Race Class 2001 42: 17)
The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to social institu tions is that there can be no testing of the
claims made. If someone says, for instance, that nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to replace the
body of the mother one has lost, or that the popular appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of
our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved? The pioneers of psychoanalysis,
from Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the context of their work with individual patients
and their ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic encounter
where the validity of an interpretation, for example, is a matter for dialogue between therapist and
patient. Outside of the con sulting room, there can be no such verification process, and the
further one moves from the individual patient, the less purchase psycho analytic ideas
can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything and everything can be true,
psychoanalytically speaking. But if every thing is true, then nothing can be false and
therefore nothing can be true.
Zero truth value to psychoanalysis cant make truth claims,

encourages infinite regress and transforms even the clearest
components of reality into a poetic phantasmagoria
Perpich 5 (Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Diane, Figurative

Language and the "Face" in Levinas's Philosophy, Philosophy & Rhetoric,
Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 103-121)
Levinas's hesitations about the value of psychoanalysisindeed, what might be called his allergic reactions to
Psychoanalysis, he writes, "casts a basic

suspicion on the most unimpeachable testimony of selfconsciousness" (1987b, 32). Psychological states in which the ego seems to have a "clear and distinct"
psychoanalysisare similarly based.
grasp of itself are reread by psychoanalysis as symbols for a "reality that is totally inaccessible" to the self and
that is the expression of "a social reality or a historical influence totally distinct from its [the ego's] own
the ego's protests against the interpretations

of analysis are themselves subject to further analysis, leaving no
point exterior to the analysis: "I am as it were shut up in my own portrait" (35).
Psychoanalysis threatens an infinite regress of meaning, a recursive
process that leads from one symbol to another, from one symptom
to another with no end in sight and no way to break into or out of
the chain of signifiers in the name of a signified. "The real world is
transformed into a poetic world, that is, into a world without beginning in which one thinks
intention" (34). Moreover, all of
without knowing what one [End Page 111] thinks" (35). Put less poetically, Levinas's worry is that
psychoanalysis furnishes us with no fixed point or firm footing

from which to launch a critique and to break with social and
historical determinations of the psyche in order to judge society
and history and to call both to account. Indeed, his uncharacteristic allusion to "clear
and distinct" ideas betrays his intention: to seek, against both religious and psychoanalytic participations, for a
relationship in which the ego is an "absolute," "irreducible" singularity, within a totality but still separate from it,
that is, still capable of a relation with exteriority. To seek such a relation is, Levinas says, "to ask whether a living
man [sic] does not have the power to judge the history in which he is engaged, that is, whether the thinker as
an ego, over and beyond all that he does with what he possesses, creates and leaves, does not have the
substance of a cynic" (35). The naked being who confronts me with his or her alterity, the naked being that I am

myself and whose being "counts as such" is now naked not with an erotic nudity but with the nudity of a cynic
who has thrown off the cloak of culture in order to present him- or herself directly and "in person" through "this
chaste bit of skin with brow, nose, eyes, and mouth" (41). Levinas picks up the thread of this worry about
psychoanalysis in "Ethics and Discourse," the main section of "The Ego and the Totality." To affirm humankind as
a power to judge history, he claims, is to affirm rationalism and to reject "the merely poetic thought which thinks
The impetus for

psychoanalysis is philosophical, Levinas admits; that is, it shares initially in this affirmation
without knowing what it things, or thinks as one dreams" (40).
of rationalism insofar as it affirms the need for reflection and for going "underneath" or getting behind
However, if its impetus is philosophical, its

issue is not insofar as the tools that it uses for reflection turn out
to be "some fundamental, but elementary, fables . . . which,
incomprehensibly, would alone be unequivocal, alone not
translate (or mask or symbolize) a reality more profound than
themselves" (40). Psychoanalysis returns one, then, to the irrationalism of
myth and poetry rather than liberating one from them. It resubmerges one
within the cultural and historical ethos and mythos in a way that seems to
Levinas to permit no end to interpretation and thus no power to judge. He
imagines psychoanalysis as a swirling phantasmagoria in which
language is all dissimulation and deception. "One can find one's bearings in all this
phantasmagoria, one can inaugurate the work of criticism only if one can begin
with a fixed point. The fixed point cannot be some incontestable truth, a 'certain'
statement that would always be subject [End Page 112] to psychoanalysis; it can only
unreflected consciousness and thought.
be the absolute status of an interlocutor, a being, and not a truth about beings" (41). In this last claim, the fate
of Heideggerian fundamental ontology that is an understanding of Being rather than a relation to beings (or to a
being, a face) is hitched to the fate of psychoanalysis and both linked to participation, the "nocturnal chaos" that
threatens to drown the ego in the totality.
Wrong Forum
Stop relegating us to protest zones
Elmer and Opel 8 (Greg Elmer, associate professor of communication and
culture at Ryerson University, PhD in communication from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson
University, Andy Opel, associate professor of communication at Florida State
University, PhD in mass communication from the University of North
Carolina, member of the International Communication Association, November
2008, Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future, pages 2941, GENDER MODIFIED) gz
SHORTLY AFTER THE LARGE-SCALE PROTESTS against the World Trade
Organization in Seattle in late November 1999, police, law enforcement
agencies, the military, and global weapons manufacturers began to
rethink their responses to public protests. Since the Seattle protests,
similar semiannual gatherings of government officials and corporate
trade lawyers have consistently attracted large public protests,
organized by public-interests groups denied participation in the
decision-making process of trade agreements such as the Global
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
Widescale protests were seen in Prague, Genoa, Cancun, Quebec City,
Miami, and, most recently, Mar Del Plata, Argentina. Moreover, as we
will see in this chapter, as the size and sophistication of resistance grew,
so too did political and legal responses to that resistance. Responses to
such protests have been greatly influenced by military and socalled
homeland security strategies enacted after the terrorist attacks of 9/11
and the initiation of the controversial second Gulf War. As we see in this
chapter, the combination of a changing political climate in response to
war and terrorism, particularly the expansion of preemptive forms of
social control and political containment, has resulted in a new set of
practices that have reconfigured public space and criminalized
multiple aspects of free speech and public assembly in the United
States. This chapter argues that in the shadow of 9/11, the war in Iraq,
and the ongoing War on Terror, a disturbing form of geopolitical
apartheid has emerged in the United States. At the core of this trend
is a set of micro-political strategies and technologies that attempt to
contain spaces of dissent and detain protestors (Boghosian, 2004).
Some activists and critics have labeled these anti-democratic

tendencies the Miami Model, after the strategies deployed in
November 2003 against Free Trade of the Americas protestors by
federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies stationed in Miami.
The Miami model of law enforcement was characterized by 1) the
deployment of overwhelming numbers of law enforcement officers, 2)

preemptive arrests of peaceful and lawabiding protestors, and 3)
widespread police surveillance techniques before, during, and after
protests (Getzan, 2004). And while these three pillarsoverwhelming
force, preemptive arrests, and surveillance-provide a good overview of
police and law enforcement strategies, in this chapter we focus on the
manner in which spaces of dissent, debate, and democracy are being
regulated and policed through the courts, going into more depth in the
next chapter, through a study of the introduction of weapons meant to
easily contain and detain protestors and, more broadly, immobilize
dissent. Of greater concern is the degree to which such strategies
systematically marginalize dissent, spatially and politically speaking.
From the creation of free speech zones and the proposal for protest
free Pedestrian Safety Zones2 to the political screening of
participants in political town hall meetings, space has increasingly
become a tool to limit open debate, freedom of speech, and political
dissent in the US. Part of our interest in exposing the strategies of
political segregation, first through the containment of protest spaces,

and second, through the deployment of preemptive hand-held weapons,
is theoretical. The segregation of deviance has often been influenced
by Foucaultian theories of panopticism and social control . An
increasing number of scholars, however, are arguing that Foucaults
panoptic prison, even deployed in metaphorical terms, has been
overextended, particularly when considering broader geographic
perspectives (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000; Elmer, 2004). Many scholars
arguing that panopticism must move beyond architectures or
institutions of social control, do so in large part to theorize emerging
technological, virtual, or simulated forms of surveillance and discipline
(e.g., Bogard; Gandy). While we find such arguments to be productive,
they typically juxtapose their ideas against corporeal surveillance and
monitoring of the past. Human surveillance and policing factors,
conversely, play a key role in monitoring political organizing activities
and training, peaceful protests, and acts of civil disobedience
(Boghosian, 2004, p. 29). Moreover, Foucaults metaphorical use of a
penitentiary as the historical trope or dispositif for social discipline,
reformation, and self-actualization, while providing a broad conceptual
framework for a dispersed theory of self-discipline, control, and
conformity, has little to say about that which escapes conformity,
namely public protest, civil disobedience, and other forms of social and
political dissent. Under the constant gaze of social mores and values,
Foucaults subjects are implored to change and police their own
behaviour. The proliferation of surveillance technologies (such as closedcircuit TV, CCTV), preemptive policing, programs that attempt to
anticipate future social and geopolitical risks (Elmer Opel, 2006), and
the presumption of guilt instead of innocence, are in part a response to
past intelligence failures. The inability to gain adequate and up-to-date
intelligence on domestic and international risks in the US, UK, Iraq,

Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., continues to highlight the limits and
shortcomings of surveillance programs and intelligencegathering
techniques. The recognition of decentred and distributed network
infrastructures and relationships among protesters, migrants, and
terrorists in the US and elsewhere, has similarly stretched conventional
thinking about the structure and deployment of surveillance programs
and technologies. In short, members of such feared networks are not
typically considered panoptic subjects, that is to say, they are not
clients, candidates, or inmates in need of reform, or self-discipline.
Rather, it is argued that such networked subjects have become
increasingly influenced by strategic and indefinite forms of containment
and detainment. Didier Bigos (2006) extension of Foucaults theories
of social control provides a helpful point of departure. While Bigo

shares the goal of extending theories of social and political control
outside of the prison and other social institutions, he maintains an
interest in the social control of populations, specifically through the
mobility, capture, and detainment of specific populations. By
introducing the concept of the ban-opticon, Bigo succeeds in
moving outside the panoptic walls of punishment, to question the
optics and governmentality of indefinite detainment, a questionable
spatial and legal tactic used in the War on Terror and with migrant
communities. Such detainees, be they in Guantanamo Bay or in
immigrant holding centres in the EU and elsewhere, have no intention
of turning their subjects into lawabiding, productive citizens (Miller,
1993), rather their goal is both to remove individuals from war, or to
merely return them to their previous locationto ban them . In both
cases, individuals are immobilized and excluded from participating in

war and/ or entering Western societies. Although political protestors
produce a different set of challenges from domestic law enforcement
and forces of political control in the USprimarily their visibility in the
media as increased evidence of opposition to the political status quo
they are similarly immobilized, contained, and in some cases detained
without charge. Such detainments, further, in many instances are not
subject to punishment (fines, etc.); rather, they are increasingly used to
preemptively, and temporarily remove protestors from public spaces
until the conclusion of protests (Boghosian, 2004, p. 29). The
operationalization of preemptive tactics in the US further highlights
the limitations of Foucaults decentred model of power, in which
sovereignty is manifest through dispersed disciplinary technologies.
Strategies of political containment and detainment, spatially and
individually speaking, are in large part enabled by what Gieorgio
Agamben (2005) refers to as the state of exception, the no mans
[humans] land between public law and political fact (p. 1). Ironically,
while conservatives in the US continue to argue against a living

constitution, where interpretations over the nations law change over
time,21 the Bush administration actively sought to reinterpret executive
powers during the so-called War on Terror. Following Agamben, Didier

Bigo (2006) argues that such interpretations are enacted through
explicit declarations by political rulers, a declaration that invokes an
exception to the rule of law. Broadly construed, the US administration
continues to invoke the War on Terror to blur the line between law
and politics. In defence of the secret wiretapping program, the Bush
administration has argued that an exception to the rule of law was

enacted by the legislation, giving the president preemptive powers to
carry out surveillance. Similar arguments have been made in the UK,
Canada, and France. The Boston Globe and other media in the US also
reported about the growing use of signing statements by the US
president, as a means to state his exception to the new law. For
example, after the signing of US Senator John McCains antitorture bill
in the January 2006, the president declared that The executive branch
shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional
authority of the President as Commander in Chief. He also added that
this interpretation will assist in achieving the shared objective of the
Congress and the President ... of protecting the American people from
further terrorist attacks (Savage, 2004). Of course, many American
laws that govern executive power, public debate, and, as we see next,
dissent and protest in public space, are so broadly written that they
practically cultivate political exceptionalism. For example, as an
adjunct to debates over the US Patriot Act, the spatial tactics of law
enforcement have recently produced a series of controversial rulings
about the accessibility of public spaces for the purposes of political
protest. Thus, at a time when public advocates and intellectuals have
reinforced the importance of understanding the democratic and political
aspects of various geographiesmost notably innovative and tolerant
ones (Florida, 2003) and environmentally sustainable ones (Gore, 2007)
the American legal system continues to downplay or altogether avoid
spatial considerations in First Amendment cases. Timothy Zick (2005),
for example, argues that The reason courts fail to properly scrutinize
spatial tactics is that they have accepted the common conception of
place as mere resa neutral thing, an undifferentiated mass, a
backdrop for expressive scenes (p. 3). Results of this legal
conception of place as a neutral thing include the protest zones
(some resembling cages) established at both the Democratic and
Republican national conventions during the summer of 2004 as well
as the now routine practice of keeping protestors many blocks and
often miles away from free trade, WTO, or GATT meetings. Later in
the same year the G8 summit was held on the tiny (private) Sea
Island, just off the coast near Savannah, Georgia, a choice that made
it nearly impossiblegiven the security noose around the island
to stage a meaningful and visible protest. In South Carolina, the well-
known activist Brett Bursey gained nationwide attention for a series of

attempts to protest against President Bush at Republican Party
organized rallies, the last of which, in 2004, resulted in his arrest and
conviction under a statute that enables the Secret Security to establish

a security perimeter or zone around the president. Mirroring Zicks
argument about the courts treatment of space as an objective or
neutral equation in contemporary politics, an aide to the former South
Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, was quoted on National Public Radio
as saying that: The statute under which Mr. Burseys been charged
alleges that he failed to vacate an area that had been cordoned off for a
visit by the president of the United States. It is a contentneutral
statute, and Mr. Bursey is charged not because of what he was doing
but because of where he was doing it. The US statute in question-USC
18: 1 752(a)(l)(ii), Temporary residences and offices of the President
and otherswhile not a new, post-9/11 law, nevertheless raises
obvious questions and concerns about its use as a political tool for
spatially and politically marginalizing dissent. The law in effect
establishes a temporary residence for the president as he goes about
his business across the country. The law forbids groups or individuals
from entering or remaining with an area (defined as building,
grounds, or any posted, cordoned off. . . area where the president is
visiting).24 Moreover, the law does not apply universally, only to those
who intend to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government
business or official functions. Interestingly, in the course of preparing
Burseys defence, lawyers were able to gain access to the Secret
Services policy manual on protests. The South Carolina Progressive
Network subsequently used the document to highlight the means by
which the Bush administration was interpreting the above mentioned
law to segregate protestors away from the presidents supporters and
the media. Moreover, The Progressive Network also maintained that
while the law did give the Secret Service the power to cordon off access
to the president, There is no limitation to the size of the restricted
area. Furthermore, In the Bursey case, the restricted area was
approximately 70 acres and stretched for a mile.25 With no spatial
limits on the separation of protestors from the US president, political
marginalization becomes a distinct possibility. The spatial segregation of
speakers according to the content of their messages all too easily
bifurcates voices and perspectives into two sides, mirroring the
dominant red/ blue political culture of the US. Thus in the absence of
political leaders, protests, and, perhaps more importantly, acts of civil
disobedience, lose their publicity, all too often becoming marginalized
spectacles distanced from the machinations of political parties,
candidates, and government. Zick put it this way: In these places,
protests and demonstrations become staged events, bland and

neutered substitutions for the passionate and, yes, sometimes
chaotic face-toface confrontations that have characterized our
countrys past (Zick, 2005, p. 45). The process of segregating public
space according to political message and turning public gatherings
into staged events is contrasted with the actual political strategy of
the staged event or town hall meeting, where pre-screened publics

appear to ask government officials authentic questions, a practice
that has many online examples as well.26 This illusion of public
participation is another quality of the spatial turn in free speech
politics where city streets are cordoned off to become de facto
stages for media cameras. By literally separating the
demonstrators from the object of their demonstration, the protest
zone becomes a way of controlling the content of the debate without
really acknowledging that is what is being done (Mitchell, 2003, p.
39). In addition to creating media frames and stages, protest zoning
also facilitates preemptive police tactics, placing all potential
protestors in one location in the name of security. Fencing in
protestors or zoning them away from a given site implies a threat or
danger that requires preemptive zoning, thus assuming guilt until
innocence is proven (Mitchell, 2003, p. 39). Mitchell refers to this
zoning as the ghettoization of protest; we prefer the South African
analogy of an apartheid as more accurate. Whereas a ghetto is often
viewed as the result of low-income people clustered together out of

necessity and a lack of resources, apartheid was an explicit legal and
spatial strategy that segregated settlements and produced a secondclass citizenry. Parallels can be drawn to the state of liberal democracy
in the United States, where protestors and political dissidents are legally
restrained and contained outside of the so-called mainstream political
stage. Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, preemptive arrests,
facilitated by segregationist spatial tactics and exceptionalist forms of
governmentality, often move beyond the realm of the panoptic to the
violent repressive use of weaponry, what are creatively termed lesslethal technologies. As we shall see, many new crowd control
technologies have incorporated decidedly preemptive logics that
explicitly reinforce our belief that the preemptive doctrine is as much
about controlling behaviours and seeking broader political compliance
as it is a technique for reducing actual risks and dangers.
A2: No Root Cause

Their no root cause arguments mask colonialism
Nhanenge 07 (Jytte Nhanenge, MA in development studies at the
University of South Africa, February 2007, Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating
the Concerns of Women, Poor People, and Nature into Development, pp 901)
The four crises are difficult to resolve individually because they are
interlinked and they therefore reinforce each other. Wars usually give the
effect of poverty, environmental damage and repression. Poverty often
results in environmental damage and can lead to revolts and repression.
Destruction of nature causes poverty, social upheaval and repression.
Abuses of human's rights are entangled in all of the other crises. In
addition and paradoxically, mainstream development activities, meant to
ameliorate poverty in the South, often also lead to environmental damage,
human's rights abuses, increased poverty and violence. Thus, the four
crises function in a web-like fashion and are difficult to ameliorate
individually. Should positive changes be made it is necessary to look beyond
a treatment of each crisis towards a more fundamental process of overall

healing. Hence, the crises may more correctly be seen as a symptom of a
more fundamental systemic "dis-ease". (Ekins 1992: 13). Hazel Henderson
(Capra 1989: 248) agrees with Ekins. The major problems of our time
cannot be understood in isolation. Whether a crisis manifests itself as
poverty, environmental degradation, war or human rights abuses does not
matter. The underlying dynamics are the same. Thus, the crises are
interconnected, interdependent and all are rooted in a larger systemic

crisis. Each crisis is therefore only a different aspect of the same crisis: a
crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that the Western world
subscribes to an outdated, reductionist world-view. Modern science,
technology, government structures, development agencies and academic
institutions are all using a fragmented methodology, which has proven to
be inadequate in dealing with a systemically interconnected world . Thus,
many scientifically educated people cannot understand and hence resolve

systemic crises. Most leaders also fail to see that the problems are interlinked. They therefore cannot recognize that their preferred reductionist
economic solutions have disastrous consequences elsewhere in the social
and natural system. The main aim for politicians, economists and
development experts is to maximize economic growth, but they cannot
perceive that this negatively affects women, Others, nature and future
generations. (Capra 1982: 6; Capra 1997: 3-4). 2.6.1. Modernity; a
reductionist perception of reality Richard B. Norgaard has arrived at a similar
conclusion in his book "Development betrayed; the end of progress and a
coevolutionary revisioning of the future". He argues that the reasons behind
the environmental crises relates to the Western philosophy of life . A good
life is seen to be modern and progressive. Modernity promised that humanity
with its superior science could control nature that all could have material

abundance through scientific technology and that life could be administered
effectively by rational social organisation. The combination would lead to
peace on Earth where all would be part of the new, collective, modern
culture. However, modernity betrayed development. Instead of unity, it led
to material madness, inequalities, depletion of natural resources,
degradation of the environment, increase in number of wars and refugees
and a bureaucratic deadlock where governments cannot find rational
solutions to the crises. (Norgaard 1994: 1-2). The problem is that
modernism is based on some false beliefs about scientific technology, social

structure and environmental interaction. It is assumed that progress will
come about as a linear process. Thus improved science will promote
improved technology, which leads to better rational social organisation, and
increased material well-being. This is perceived as an eternal activity, all
determined by science. However, such a view is too simple. Progress cannot
continue forever since the means, our natural resources, are finite. We do not
have an eternal source of energy, with which economists seem to calculate.
Thus in the name of progress we are depleting our natural resources and
destroying the planet Earth. In the end, modernity's progress will terminate
our existence. (Norgaard 1994: 32-34, 54-56). More fundamentally, the
crises relate to the philosophical premises underlying the Western
metaphysical and epistemological world-view . Norgaard (1994: 62) calls
them for atomism, mechanism, universalism, objectivism and monism. In

brief, they translate reality as follows: Systems (for example social or natural
ones) consist of unchanging parts, the sum of which equals the whole . The
relationship between the parts is fixed and possible changes are reversible.
Although systems may be diverse and complex, they all are based on a
limited number of underlying universal laws, which are unchanging and
eternal. These laws can be understood by observing the systems from the
outside. The knowledge derived at is objective and universal. Hence, this is
the only one way to understand systems. When a system's laws are known,
its actions can be predicted and the system can be controlled. In this way,
the system can be manipulated to benefit human beings. (Norgaard 1994:
6266).
A2: Cede The Political

FUCK politics were fine with being apolitical as politics is
incapable of representing the black body and critics of civil
society
Moten and Harney 13 Fred and Stefano, critical race theorists. Undercommons fugitive planning and Black study. 2013.
Pgs. 30-32. PWoods.
The settler, having settled for politics, arms himself in the name of
civilization while critique initiates the self-defense of those of us who see
hostility in the civil union of settlement and enclosure .
if our critical
eyes are sharp enough, that its evil and uncool to have a place in the sun
in the dirty thinness of this atmosphere; that house the sheriff was
building is in the heart of a fallout zone. And if our eyes carry sharpness
farther out we trail the police so we can put them on trial. Having looked
for politics in order to avoid it, we move next to each other, so we can be
beside ourselves, because we like the nightlife which aint no good life.
Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the
radiation of critique
Critique
endangers the sociality it is supposed to defend, not because it might turn
inward to damage politics but because it would turn to politics and then
turn outward, from the fort to the surround, were it not for preservation,
which is given in celebration of what we defend, the sociopoetic force we
wrap tightly round us, since we are poor. Taking down our critique , our
own positions, our fortifications, is self-defense alloyed with selfpreservation
We run looking for a weapon and keep
running looking to drop it. And we can drop it, because however armed,
however hard, the enemy we face is also illusory. Uncut devotion to the
critique of this illusion makes us delusional. In the trick of politics we are
insufficient, scarce, waiting in pockets of resistance, in stairwells, in
alleys, in vain. The false image and its critique threaten the common with
democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only
never to come, we will be more than what we are. But we already are.
Were already here, moving. Weve been around. Were more than politics,
more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracys false
image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision,
were undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, were unwilling.
Every time it tries to take root, were gone (because were already here,
moving).
We move through it and it moves with us, out beyond the settlements,
out beyond the redevelopment, where black night is falling, where we
hate to be alone, back inside to sleep till morning, drink till morning, plan
till morning, as the common embrace, right inside, and around, in the
surround. In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper
of our need for institutions, and all institutions are political, and all
politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional institutions in the
common, settling it, correcting us. But we wont stand corrected .
Moreover, incorrect as we are theres nothing wrong with us. We dont
want to be correct and we wont be corrected. Politics proposes to make
us better, but we were good already in the mutual debt that can never be
We say, rightly,
. So it matters how long we have to do it, how long we have to be exposed to the lethal effects of its anti-social energy.
. That takedown comes in movement, as a shawl, the armor of flight.
We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition. Were in a trance thats under and around
us.

made good. We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make
politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination
An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. Were just
anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We arent
responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming
outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance,
every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent
state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption.
Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the
enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its
actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves.
We cant be represented.
. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe
each other everything.
We preserve upheaval.
A2: Intervention Inevitable

They make it inevitable
Hoover 11 (Joseph Hoover, fellow at the department of international
relations at the London School of Economics, 2011, Egypt and the Failure of
Realism, published in the Journal of Critical Globalization Studies,
http://www.criticalglobalisation.com/Issue4/127_137_EGYPT_REALISM_JCGS4.
pdf)
My criticism does not apply only to those writers who self-identify as realists,
but to a brand of statist thinking that justifies the narrowness of its analysis,
the instrumentalisation of moral concerns, and its principled elevation of
order above all other values in the name of the undeniable realities of
international politics. 3 The fundamental claim shared by those who
privilege state interests and the preservation of order is that international

politics demands such qualities of us. Historically, this realist position has
been contrasted with putatively utopian views (whether internationalist,
idealist, socialist, or cosmopolitan) that cannot see the world of
international politics for what it is, which fail to see that focusing on state
interest and perpetual conflict is not immoral but the only sober response
to the imperatives of the world and because of that the moral policy
demanded of states (Cozette, 2008). What goes unchallenged is exactly
which reality realists are better able to grasp. The too-often-unspoken
truth is that they embrace the reality of powerful actors, of those seeking
to dominate, control, exploit and to render social reality into the means
for their various ends. Realism, as the dominant theory in International
Relations, requires a denial of this power-fetishism; its historical role as
counsel to imperial ambition (Long and Schmidt, 2005) is transformed into
an account of the necessary (and at times tragic) responsiveness states
must have to the constraints of political reality (Mearsheimer, 2001). This
act of elision is most clearly seen in realists adoption of Niccol Machiavelli

as a patron saint, as the 15th century author is wrenched from the complex
context in which he wrote his ironic and complex counsel for the new Prince
of renaissance Florence (Strauss, 1978, pp. 54-84), in order to provide insight
into the timeless nature of conflict in international politics (Fischer, 1996, pp.
248-279). Without considering the revolutionary account of the virtuous
political community articulated by Machiavelli (Berlin, 1997), which
celebrated a vigorous republicanism that denied the universal Christian
morality of his time and necessitated a space outside of political community
that was not constrained by ethical imperatives (Walker, 1993), the realist
tradition in International Relations has appropriated this antagonistic and
hierarchical vision as a scientific theory. No account of the inherent struggle
for power in international politics is more influential (or ungrounded) than
that of Hans Morgenthau, who simply asserted a psychological drive to justify
the inescapable reality of dominance: The tendency to dominate, in
particular, is an element of all human associations, from the family through
fraternal and professional associations and local political organizations, to

the state. On the family level, the typical conflict between the mother-in-law
and her childs spouse is in its essence a struggle for power, the defense of
an established power position against the attempt to establish a new one. As
such it foreshadows the conflict on the international scene between the
policies of the status quo and the policies of imperialism. (Morgenthau, 1985,
p. 39) While the reason that states face this imperative to dominate and
struggle has become more sophisticated, whether explained

psychologically or structurally (Waltz, 1979; Molloy, 2006), it remains a
view from a very particular viewpoint, from the perspective of established
and conservative power as it gives its (sometimes ambiguous) blessing
to the given reality of dominance no matter how fervently this politics of
preservation is denied. In politics, the belief that certain facts are
unalterable or certain trends irresistible commonly reflects a lack of desire
or lack of interest to change or resist them. The impossibility of being a
consistent and thorough-going realist is one of the most certain and most
curious lessons of political science. Consistent realism excludes four things
which appear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a
finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment and a ground for
action. (Carr, 1964, p. 89)
A2: Paradigm Wars

Paradigm wars are over you lost
Kurki 11 (Milja Kurki, lecturer in international relations theory at
Aberystwyth University, PhD from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth,
2011, The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and
Philosophical IR Scholarship Today)
Philosophical reflection is about gaining understanding of how knowledge

is generated and structured and what its relationship is to its producer,
their social context and society at large. It is about understanding the role
and structure of scientific or social knowledge: how it is constructed; what
objects exist in its purview; and why and how we do (or do not) come to
know our objects in specific ways. This might seem a rather abstract
interest; and indeed, for many, meta-theoretical or philosophy of science

research remains a rather abstract theoretical sub-field narrowly engaged in
detailed debates on epistemology, causation or prediction. Philosophically
informed IR research can, however, be much more than this. Indeed, for
many of its promulgators, philosophical research has arguably been a very
politically and socially important, as well as potentially influential, field of

study. While most philosophically inclined analysts acknowledge that
meta-theory is not everything in IR, most argue it is of crucial significance
in the discipline.8 This is because it shapes in crucial ways how we come
to understand the world, evaluate claims about it and, indeed, interact
with it. Depending on whether we are a positivist or a post-structuralist, we
seek different kinds of data, ask different kinds of questions and come to
engage with actors differently in international politics (which is also
conceived of in different ways).9 To use Patrick Jacksons language:
philosophical wagers matter.10 Philosophical research is not only of
significance in IR scholarship, of course. It is worth remembering that

some of the most well-known philosophers of science had at the heart of
their inquiries questions of values and politics . Thus, Popper and Kuhn, for
example, were socially and politically driven philosophers of science; and
sought through their philosophical frameworks to influence the interaction
of scientific practice and societal power structures.11 The same stands for
logical positivists in the social sciences. Biersteker describes this well:

European and American scholars embraced logical positivist, scientific
behavioralism in the post-war era in part as a reaction against fascism,
militarism, and communism. They were reacting against totalizing ideologies
and sought a less overtly politicized philosophical basis for their research.
Their liberalism stressed toleration for everything except totalizing
ideologies, and their logical positivist scientific approaches provided what
they viewed as a less politicized methodology for the conduct of social
research.12 Murphys detailed study of the rise of behaviouralist peace
studies confirms the same; the rise, in a specific context, of a specific type
of meta-theoretical argumentation, which is deployed to a social and, in
fact, political effect in order to criticise recent social dynamics and to

change the world in a preferable direction.13 There is, even when it is
sidestepped by scientists or philosophers themselves (as in the case of

behaviouralists), a politics to the philosophy of science, in the sense that
meta-theoretical concerns are tied up with concrete social and political
debates and struggles and specific normative and political visions of both
science and society, even if in indirect ways.14 This political edge of
philosophical debate has not been absent in IR scholarship, and arguably

it was precisely the political role of philosophies of science that critical
international theory was invented to deal with. It is important to bear in
mind that when meta-theory emerged as an important sphere of study
within IR theorising in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was moved to the
centre ground of IR research by a selection of key critical thinkers who
politicised this area. Cox, Ashley, Ashley and Walker, Hoffman, Linklater
and Steve Smith,15 for example, argued vehemently in favour of the
necessity for IR to consider its philosophy of science underpinnings
because of the political effects that epistemological and ontological
decisions IR theorists make have on their concrete research and resultant
policy proposals. Indeed, in a famous line, Steve Smith called his
epistemological work the most political of his career.16
AT: hooks
The Middle passage fundamentally changed the spectrum
negativity should be affirmed for blacks
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 10-11]
some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state
by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on posting an operational analytic for cinema, film
studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of
Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of todays Blacks in the US as
Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions
by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on
the State have come to pass. But that would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on
solid ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to
facts, the historical record, and empirical markers of stasis and
change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same.
Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates
would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of
suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic
whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between
those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando
Regarding the Black position,
Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why
labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the solid

plank of work is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent
notion of claims against the statethe proposition that the state and
civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an
emancipatory project for the Black positiondisintegrates into thin air.
The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle
Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no
slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a
laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity
establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence , its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is,
to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous
violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being
outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of
gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until
work, or forced
the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on
one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman
at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
AT: Self-Love
Unreflexive self-love is badit assuages white anti-racist allies of
their guilt and makes them feel better about themselves while
continuing to perpetuate oppressive structures.
Quintrospection, 7-20-2013, The Discursive Feast of Privilege: Towards a Theory of Self-Abjection,

http://quintrospection.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/the-discursive-feast-of-privilege-towards-a-theory-of-selfabjection/
the privileged ally feels

empowered and clean from condemning the similarly privileged but prooppression folks around them. It happens in the classroom, on the Internet, in social justice
organizations, on the street, across the dinner table, and everywhere else one finds white folks
talking about race, middle-class and wealthy folks talking about class,
men talking about sexism, cis folks talking about transphobia, straight
folks talking about heterosexism, and so on. Though the caller-outer may
mean perfectly well, they run the unique risk of losing their sense of self-reflexivity.
You can shout I am NOT Trayvon Martin from the rooftops all day. If you are white, you still
benefit from all the privileges attendant thereupon. Being right is not
enough when you still use your privilege like a blunt weapon, crudely
addressing complex issues of power and identity about which you have no
first-hand experience and simultaneously silencing the population for
whom you claim to speak. I believe that this phenomenon (and it most certainly is a
phenomenon) ties very closely to the language of self-love. If all of us should
love ourselves equally, and in an equally unqualified way, then those of us who society
has granted significant privilege already start out with more love to lavish
upon ourselves. As a white anti-racist ally, I gain significant psychic and
social benefits from claiming this status in many contexts, and in those
where it is not beneficial to me, I can hide it or ignore its immaterial
consequences. In either case, I can feel a smug sense of self-righteousness from
being one of the good whites, rather than one of those straightforward
racists, or those liberals of the colorblind variety. But no matter how good
I feel about myself, I have done little to either shift the consciousness of
my white peers, or to deconstruct material or ideological systems of racist
oppression.
Im going to call this scenario the call out high. It happens when
Util
util methodology is a form of hierarchy
Harris 10
American philosophy author, Co-founder/chief executive of project reasons and author of End of Faith (NY times best-seller for 33 weeks) and
One problem that people often have with consequentialism is

that it entails moral hierarchy: certain spheres of well-being (i.e.,
minds) will be more important than others. The philosopher Robert Nozick famously
observed that this opens the door to utility monsters: hypothetical creatures who
could get enormously greater life satisfaction from devouring us than
we would lose (Nozick 1974, p. 41). But, as Nozick observes, we are just such
utility monsters. Leaving aside the fact that economic inequality allows
many of us to profit from the drudgery of others, most of us pay others
to raise and kill animals so that we can eat them. This arrangement
works out rather badly for the animals. How much do these creatures actually suffer?
How different is the happiest cow, pig, or chicken from those who
languish on our factory farms? We seem to have decided, all things
considered, that it is proper that the well-being of certain species be
entirely sacrificed to our own. We might be right about this. Or we
might not. For many people, eating meat is simply an unhealthy source of fleeting pleasure. It is
very difficult to believe, therefore, that all of the suffering and death
we impose on our fellow creatures is ethically defensible. For the sake of
the moral landscape
argument, however, lets assume that allowing some people to eat some animals yields a net increase in
well-being on planet earth.
Bowing to a utilitarian methodology in debate is praying for slavery

which brings joy to death turning all extinction impacts as a pure
experience of joy
Farley 05
. "Perfecting Slavery."Loyola University Chicago Law Journal36,
(2005): 225-256.
There is a pleasure in this death. It is the pleasure of hierarchy. If there is

hierarchy, white-over-black, for example, there is an experience of pleasure in it.
Bodies are marked white-over-black. This is a pleasure and a desire.
Property is marked white-over-black. This too is a pleasure and a desire. Law, following the system of marks and
There are always

ambiguities. The ambiguities are vessels of our desires. Our pleasures and
desires follow the colorline. In a colorlined order, all institutions are ordered
by the colorline. A white-over-black orientation is required to navigate the
institutions that order life. In other words, a white-over-black orientation is
required to follow the colorline, and one must follow the colorline or lose
ones way. The ambiguities, then, are always white-over-black.
White-over-black is the North Star. Every correct legal answer is white-over-black. There is
the system of property, is white-over-black, and a pleasure and a desire.
a pleasure and a desire in moving to the correct answer. The pleasure and desire of moving to the correct answer
is experienced as the sublime pleasure of the legal method, as the sovereignty of death. The commodity reaches
White-over-black is slavery.
Slavery is death. Death is the end of it all. Death is the complete end.
Death, then, is perfection, the end of all things. The slave perfects itself as a
its apogee in the black. There is no black, save for white-over-black.

slave when it prays for slavery. The slave, being perfect in that moment of
prayer, is one with that before which it bows down in prayer. The slave prays
to itself for itself to be transformed into itself and so its perfect prayer is
always already granted
Their assumption that we all fear biological destruction is a tool to
erase difference and craft us into their image
Secomb 2000
Linnell, smart. Fractured community. Hypatia vol. 15, no. 2 Spring 2000. PWoods.
universalist model of community would be founded on a moral

conversation in which the capacity to reverse perspectives, that is, the
willingness to reason from the others point of view, and the sensitivity to
hear their voice is paramount
This reformulated
(1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a reasonable agreement can be
achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics,
politics, and community must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity,
a universalist community which recognizes the concrete other and

which allows us to view others as unique individuals
that vision still assumes the
desirability of commonality and agreement, which
ultimately destroy
difference vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes
sufficient similarity between alterities so that each can adopt the point
of view of the other and, through this means, reach a reasonable
agreement.
community, then,
while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a
commonality of purpose within community and implies a subjectivity that
would ultimately collapse back into sameness.
Benhabib formulates
(1992, 10). Benhabibs critique of universalist liberal theory and her
formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest
her
, I argue,
. Her
She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the reasonable agreement. Benhabibs
Non-unique and turn - the black body is always-already dead,

theres only a risk that death improves things
A2: commodification
Commodification is non unique- Doing nothing is worseKleinman et al 96
{Arthur and Joan Kleinman. The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering in
our times, Daedalus. Winter 1996. Vol.125, Iss. 1; pg. 1-24}AvP
It is necessary to balance the account of the globalization of commercial and professional

images with a vastly different and even more dangerous cultural process of appropriation:
the totalitarian state's erasure of social experiences of suffering through the
suppression of images. Here the possibility of moral appeal through images of human
misery is prevented, and it is their absence that is the source of existential
dismay. Such is the case with the massive starvation in China from 1959 to 1961. This story was not reported at
the time even though more than thirty million Chinese died in the aftermath of the ruinous policies of the Great
Leap Forward, the perverse effect of Mao's impossible dream of forcing immediate industrialization on peasants.
Accounts of this, the world's most devastating famine, were totally suppressed; no stories or pictures of the starving
or the dead were published. An internal report on the famine was made by an investigating team for the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It was based on a detailed survey of an extremely poor region of Anwei
Province that was particularly brutally affected. The report includes this numbing statement by Wei Wu-ji, a local
peasant leader from Anwei: Originally there were 5,000 people in our commune, now only 3,200 remain. When the
Japanese invaded we did not lose this many: we at least could save ourselves by running away! This year there's no
escape. We die shut up in our own houses. Of my 6 family members, 5 are already dead, and I am left to starve,
and I'll not be able to stave off death for long.(30) Wei Wu-ji continued: Wang Jia-feng from West Springs County
reported that cases of eating human meat were discovered. Zhang Sheng-jiu said, "Only an evil man could do such
a thing!" Wang Jia-feng said, "In 1960, there were 20 in our household, ten of them died last year. My son told his
mother 'I'll die of hunger in a few days.'" And indeed he did.(31) The report also includes a graphic image by Li Qinming, from Wudian County, Shanwang Brigade: In 1959, we were prescheduled to deliver 58,000 jin of grain to the
State, but only 35,000 jin were harvested, hence we only turned over 33,000 jin, which left 2,000 jin for the
commune. We really have nothing to eat. The peasants eat hemp leaves, anything they can possibly eat. In my last
report after I wrote, "We have nothing to eat," the Party told me they wanted to remove my name from the Party
Roster. Out of a population of 280, 170 died. In our family of five, four of us have died leaving only myself. Should I
say that I'm not broken hearted?(32) Chen Zhang-yu, from Guanyu County, offered the investigators this terrible
image: Last spring the phenomenon of cannibalism appeared. Since Comrade Chao Wu-chu could not come up with
any good ways of prohibiting it, he put out the order to secretly imprison those who seemed to be at death's door to
combat the rumors. He secretly imprisoned 63 people from the entire country. Thirty-three died in prison.(33) The
official report is thorough and detailed. It is classified neibu, restricted use only. To distribute it is to reveal state
secrets. Presented publicly it would have been, especially if it had been published in the 1960s, a fundamental
critique of the Great Leap, and a moral and political delegitimation of the Chinese Communist Party's claim to have
The official silence

is another form of appropriation. It prevents public witnessing. It forges a secret
history, an act of political resistance through keeping alive the memory of
things denied.34 The totalitarian state rules by collective forgetting, by denying
the collective experience of suffering, and thus creates a culture of terror. The absent image is also
a form of political appropriation; public silence is perhaps more terrifying than being
overwhelmed by public images of atrocity. Taken together the two modes of appropriation
improved the life of poor peasants. Even today the authorities regard it as dangerous.
delimit the extremes in this cultural process.(35) Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does not
mean that no appropriations are valid. To conclude that would be to undermine any attempt to respond to human
misery. It would be much more destructive than the problem we have identified;
social action. We must draw upon the images of

human needs and to craft humane responses .
it would paralyze
suffering in order to identify
human
A2: Brown
NO! This card is terrible. Literally it says that the only reason social
death didnt exist is cause they revolted. This isnt an argument.
This is a misunderstanding of the argument in total. Social death is
when you walk into a room and are looked at as the other.
Even If they win this argument you are going to still vote neg as a
way of solvency because we fight against the system
A2: No antiblackness in other countries

Blacks are being ontologically blackened literally that is the only
warrant in this whole evidence star this evidence as powertagged .
If even more this card is riducolous in the nonhighlited
nonunderlined portions its say literally of how anyone could be a
n word so then firstly - this is showing of how BA has no idea of
what he is writing about literally , of how the idea of lacking of the
idea of what is social death and what is being blackend .So then I
want you to defer to the Neg on the fact of how their BA author
has no clue what is Blackness a)offers no solution himself so then
even if they win some sort of Alternative Deficit, BA or at least the
card itself has no indication of how social death and how blacking
occurs . So then
Brazil proves your argument wrong
Millions 12 {JP, Political Possibilities in Times of Anti-Black Genocide, Cyborg Diaspora, 11/28.
http://cyborgdiaspora.com/2012/11/28/political-possibilities-in-times-of-anti-black-genocide}
This post is not written in innocent ink. Knowledge production always

comes at a cost. [W]e are haunted by the geopolitics, the walls, that
limit our political commitments within the confines of this fortified
enclave, within the confines of the University of Texas (Perry 2012;
151). Merely recounting the data marking the absolute dereliction of
black women & men in Brazil falls infinitely short of the necessary
and urgent forms of activist scholarship required to politically combat
a status quo of psychological terror and forced political silence (ibid).
In Brazil, democratization has occurred in fits in starts, not a straight
line. There exists a positive correlation between the expansion of civil
rights and the uptick in state condoned/mandated violence. While
seemingly counterintuitive, this trend is tragically predictable. The
vitriol of anti-black racism that resides within the fibers of a nations
political psychology does not dissipate quietly into the night. Instead,
as one pathway becomes blocked, anti-blackness seeks new outlets for
its sovereign consumption. As official forms of state violence lose
their legal sanction, unacknowledged and mystified forms of violence
pick up the slack. The form of state violence immediately
observable in Brazil is the brutal death tolls exerted by the UPP in Rio
de Janeiro and the death squads of Bahia. In preparation for the
World Cup and the Olympics the Brazilian government has enacted a
pacification campaign aimed at ridding the favelas of their criminal
recidivism. The police have not merely stepped up criminal

surveillance and enforcement, but have physically occupied
communities. Walking through pacified communities I couldnt help but
recall the vivid story, albeit of a nationalist tenor, of the resentment
toward the British occupation of American colonies during the
Revolutionary War. The dangerous fields in Brazil, however, reach
entirely differently levels of absurdity and injustice. The occupation, in
this instance, is by the countrys own government. A civil war is being
waged by an anti-black state upon entire communities and populations
for the sake of securing international commerce. There are
countless accounts of police entering communities guns a blazing;
firing first, asking questions later. The number of murders in many of
these communities by police now out number non-state based
homicides. Luciane Rocha, an activist scholar I worked with this
summer, has done extensive ethnographic work concerning Black
Mothers Experiences of Violence in Rio de Janeiro (Cultural Dynamics
2012 24:59-73). She described to me the ways that Black women in
pacified communities articulate experiences of state violence. Many of
the women described little discernable difference between the overall
levels of violence enacted by the traficantes vs. the UPP. Black mothers
have, however, experienced a rise in political agency, given their
exceptional status as mothers, and their relative freedom to publicly
grieve and articulate the irredeemable losses of black social death.
Lucianes ethnographic work corroborates Keisha Khan Perrys
description of the ways that: [C]ollective fear of police torture and
death exists side-by-side with black communities unwillingness to
accept routine forms of State violence. In other words, out of police
violence emerges black peoples agency and political will to survive,
their determination to defy individual and collective death (Perry 2012;
137). In her essay titled, Black Womens Narratives of Genocide in
Urban Rio de Janeiro Luciane describes some of the consequences of
anti-black racism in Brazil today: [W]e live in a state of genocide. The
probability of being a victim of homicide in Brazil is almost three times
higher for Blacks compared to Whites (SEDH-PR et al, 2009); and
although 92% of homicide victims are Black men, Black women are
direct victims of the consequences of those deaths (Rocha 2011; 1).
She further locates these specific acts of violence within the overall
context of anti-black racism and sexism that inform Brazils official
security policies. The enactment of genocidal practices emerges out of
the cluster of relations concerning crime, poverty, health (euphemized
eugenics) and citizenship. In general, Black Brazilian communities
experience the fact of their marginalized social position as
pathology. State violence is naturalized via the psychologization of

oppression. This situation produces a tautological discourse: Black
people are poor/criminals/unhealthy because they are irrational
or mentally deficient which is because they are
poor/criminals/unhealthy. Faced with such irrefutable logic, Michael
Mitchell and Charles Wood provide clarity to the situation: [t]he
vulnerability of Afro-Brazilians has its roots in a highly complex set of
issues, the more significant of which include a political justice system
prone to bias against individuals who are either poor or nonwhite (or
both); a police force that sees its members as soldiers in an unbridled
war against crime; a populace that endorses extreme action against
criminals, whose threat to the public is seen as proportional to the
darkness of their skin; and a cultural tradition in which the individuals
relationship to the state is often more based on clintelism or
paternalism than in terms of citizenship rights (Mitchell & Wood 1999;
1015).
A2: Starting Point Bad

A) The pure basis of Wilderson work is literally of how the idea of
Slavery and the master slave dichotomy is on the basis of how
it works the argument is quite contradictory to his work
Wilderson 10 (Red White and Black, 192-194
It began to go something like this: what kind of imaginative labor is

required to squash the political capacity of the human being so that we
might catalyze the political capacity of the Black ? If one were a Gramscian,
the word hegemony would spring to mind, and from that word, the
political ontologist would begin to meditate on and brainstorm around
various ethical dilemmas implied in the phrase hegemonic struggle .
This, of course, would be ontologically and ethically misguided, because
struggles for hegemony put us back on the terrain of Human beingsthe

ground of exploited and alienated subjects whereas we need to think this
question through not on the terrain of the living exploited and alienated
subject, but on that of the accumulated and fungible object. Again, a more
appropriate word than hegemony is murder. If, when caught between the
pincers of the imperative to meditate on Black dispossession and Black
political agency, we do not dissemble, but instead allow our minds to reflect
upon the murderous ontology of chattel slaverys gratuitous violence
700 years ago, 500 years ago, 200 years ago, last year, and today, then
maybe, just maybe, we will be able to think Blackness and agency together
in an ethical manner. This is not an Afro-Centric question. It is a question
through which the dead ask themselves how to put the living out of the
picture. Through its use of imagery, camera work, editing, mise-en-scene,
and its acoustic innovations, Bush Mama unflinchingly articulates the
Slaves descriptive ensemble of questions. In other words, it manages to

articulate the ethical dilemmas of the Slaves positionality withoutand
this is keyappeal to some shared proletarian or White feminist ensemble
of questions. One could say that its cinematic form shits on theinspiration
of the personal pronoun we. But how unflinchingly does the film
embrace the Slaves prescriptive ensemble of questions ? Clearly, Burnetts
cinematography, as it lingers and zooms in on Dorothys repeated stabbing

of the cop, claims for the Black the gratuitous violence which positions and
re-positions the Black. Here and elsewhere, the non-narrative work of the
film engages, in good faith, Fanons invitation to lay hold of the violence
(Wretched PAGE). But Gerimas script seems to want to work
contrapuntally to the films formal (that is, cinematic) embrace of the
structural antagonism. In other words, the script needs the event of police
brutality as a justification for Black on White violence. Whereas the
cinematic form is content with a structural and ontological argument for
Black on White violence (for instance, the repetition of the stabs and the
cameras fascination with that repetition), the narrative can only meet the
form halfway. The script requires the moral and juridical persuasion of the

event of police brutalitysomething Martinot and Sexton have argue is a
way of mystifying rather than clarifying the issue. The script thus responds to
and imagines White on Black violence as though such violence was
individuated and contingent; as though it had everything to do with the
police in Compton, and nothing to do with White women burning bras in
Harvard Square; and as though it were not structural and gratuitous.
Nonetheless, this tension between the complete antagonism of the films

cinematic form and the principled militancy of the films narrative is
important and not to be taken lightly or dismissed. It is a tension we cannot
even hope for anymore in the cinema of today, as our analysis of Antwone
Fisher suggests.
B) Wilderson himself critizces structures of Eurocenterism
structure so then the clash with their author occurs within
Wilderson himself
Wilderson 10 (Red ,white , and black

Pg 191-192
As sites of political struggle and loci of philosophical meditation, cultural
capacity, civil society, and political agency give rise to maps and
chronologies of loss and to dreams of restoration and redemption. The
Marxist, postcolonial, ecological, and feminist narratives of loss followed
by restoration and redemption are predicated on exploitation and
alienation as the twin constitutive elements of an essential grammar of
suffering. They are political narratives predicated on stories which they have
the capacity to telland this is keyregarding the coherent ethics of their

time and space dilemmas. The Slave needs freedom not from the wage
relation, nor sexism, homophobia, and patriarchy, nor freedom in the form
of land restoration. These are part and parcel of the diverse list of
contingent freedoms of the multitudes (Hardt & Negri, Empire). The Slave
needs freedom from the Human race, freedom from the world. The Slave
requires gratuitous freedom. Only gratuitous freedom can repair the
object status of his/her flesh, which itself is the product of accumulation
and fungibilitys gratuitous violence. But what does the Slaves desire for
gratuitous freedom mean for the Humans desire for contingent freedom ?
This difference between contingent freedom and gratuitous freedom brings

us to Bush Mama and the specter of the BLA, to the irreconcilable imbroglio
between the Black as a social and political being and the Human as a
social and political beingwhat Jalil Muntaquim termed, a bit too
generously, a major contradiction between the Black underground and
Euro-American [revolutionary] forces (109). The inability of the Humans
political discourses to think gratuitous freedom is less indicative of a
contradiction than of how anti-Blackness subsidizes Human survival in
all its diversity.
Christopher, Emma; Pybus, Cassandra; and Rediker, Marcus 2007 (Emma
Christopher is currently Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her book Slave Trade
Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, was published in . She is also the author of several articles on the
subject of the transatlantic slave trade and convict transportation to Australia, and her forthcoming book tells the
story of the British and Irish convicts transported to West Africas slave forts*, Cassandra Pybus is an eminent
Australian writer and historian. She is author of many books, most recently The Woman Who Walked to Russia

(); American Citizens, British Slaves (with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart) ( ); Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaways
Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty( ); and Black Founders: The Unknown Story
of Australias First Black Settlers (). She has won numerous literary awards and writers fellowships and is
currently a Professorial Fellow in History at Sydney University, Australia.**, Marcus Rediker is the author of several
award-winning and influential works on maritime history, including his groundbreaking first volume, Between the
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, (
).
More recently he has written (with Peter Linebaugh) The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic() and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age( ). He is currently
working on a history of the slave ship. He is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.***, Many Middle
Passages forced migration and the making of the modern world pg. 12-13, http://libcom.org/files/
[Emma_Christopher,_Cassandra_Pybus,_Marcus_Rediker(Bookos.org).pdf)
The middle passage is an old maritime phrase, dating to the heyday of

the Atlantic slave trade. It designated the bottom line of a trading triangle, between the outward
passage from Europe to Africa and the homeward passage from the Americas back to Europe. The Oxford
English Dictionary notes the first maritime usage as , by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. The phrase is older
than that, but by crediting Clarkson another truth is revealed: through a broad-based social movement, those who
campaigned to abolish the slave trade made the middle passage notorious and a part of popular vocabulary in their
own time and thereafter. Drawing upon and publicizing the gruesome social conditions and the fierce resistance by
enslaved Africans aboard the slave ships, the abolitionists managed to focus attention on a reality far beyond the
shores of most peoples experience and to make real the horrors of the middle passage to a metropolitan reading
This was in itself a great achievement, not least because most people
in the eighteenth century, like most people today, tended to regard as real
only the landand nationalspaces of the earths surface. The oceans
were vast, ahistorical voids. Of course, maritime exploration and discovery
showed that history happened on the oceans, as did the naval battles that determined the
public.
course of history. But explorers and admirals were incorporated into top-down, national, and terra-centric
narratives, even when the seaborne agents who made the discoveries and battles possible were a motley crew of
Because the abolitionist campaign demonstrated

that history happened on the high seas, many scholars have turned their
attention to the middle passage of the African slave trade and have built a
significant body of historical literature that transcends the land
boundaries of nation-states. This scholarship is the inspiration for our volume.
sailors who eluded national definition.1
Ethics
Their interpretation of ethics is mired in whiteness
Wilderson03 (The prisoner slave as a Hegonommys Silent Scandal, Social Justice;2003,30,2;Criminal Justice periodicals pg.18,
professor of African American studies @UC Irvine , and spent five and half years within South African within Underground structures ,and an elected official
of the ANC)
The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its
irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical ; the two are
incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of
policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events ? high-profile homicides and their related
courtroom battles, for in? stance (Martinot and Sexton, 2002: 6; emphasis added). It makes no
difference that in the U.S. the "casbah" and the "European" zone are laid
one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an isomorphic schematic relation? the
schematic interchangeability between Fanon's settler society and Martinot
and Sexton's policing paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier
(not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one
town white and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests
itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing that (re)produces,
repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world , by virtue of
the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and
those that do. "Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that
mandates it...the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom
it goes without saying" (Ibid.: 8). In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black
people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely
"represented"
as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but

must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do
not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an ^signifying absence; their
signifying presence is mani? fested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do
magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply "protected" by the police, they are ? in their very
corporeality ? the police. This ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of Black people accounts for
Martinot and Sexton's Manichean delirium in America.

What remains to be addressed, however, is the way in which the political
contestation between civil society's junior partners (i.e., workers, white women, and
Fanon's materiality, and
immigrants), on the one hand, and white supremacist institutionality, on the other hand, is produced by, and
reproductive of, a supplemental anti Blackness. Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of junior
social capital dependent upon on an anti-Black rhetorical structure

and a decomposed Black body?
partner
The totalizing dominance of whiteness makes ethical relations

impossible
Yancy 5 [George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University
and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and
the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4
(2005) 215-241, Muse]
The reader will note that the question regarding how it feels to be a problem does not apply to people who have at some point in their lives felt themselves to be a problem. In such
When Black people are asked the

same question by white America, the relationship between being
Black and being a problem is non-contingent. It is a necessary
relation. Outgrowing this ontological state of being a problem is
believed impossible. Hence, when regarding one's "existence as problematic," temporality is frozen. One
cases, feeling like a problem is a contingent disposition that is relatively finite and transitory.

is a problem forever. However, it is important to note that it is from within the white imaginary that the question "How does it feel to be a problem?" is
given birth. To be human is to be thrown-in-the-world. To be human not only means to be thrown within a context of facticity, but it also means to be in the mode of the subjunctive. It is
Within
the white imaginary, to be Black means to be born an obstacle at
the very core of one's being. To ex-ist as Black is not "to stand out"
facing an ontological horizon filled with future possibilities of being
other than what one is. Rather, being Black negates the "ex" of
existence. Being Black is reduced to facticity. For example, it is not as if it is only within the light of my freely
interesting to note that the etymology of the word "problem" suggests the sense of being "thrown forward," as if being thrown in front of something, as an obstacle.
chosen projects that things are experienced as obstacles, as Sartre might say; as Black, by definition, I am an obstacle. As Black, I am the very obstacle to my own meta-stability and
Hence, within the framework of the white

imaginary, to be Black and to be human are contradictory terms. [End Page
237] Substituting the historical constructivity of whiteness for "manifest destiny," whites remain imprisoned within a
space of white ethical solipsism (only whites possess needs and desires that are truly worthy of being respected [Sullivan 2001,
100]). It would seem that many whites would rather remain imprisoned within the
ontology of sameness, refusing to reject the ideological structure of their identities as "superior." The call of the
Other qua Other remains unheard within the space of whiteness's
sameness. Locked within their self-enthralled structure of whiteness, whites occlude the possibility of
developing new forms of ethical relationality to themselves and to
non-whites. It is partly through the process of abandoning their hegemonic, monologistic
discourse (functioning as the "oracle voice") that whites might reach across the chasm of (nonhierarchical) difference and
embrace the non-white Other in his or her Otherness. "A true and worthy ideal," as Du Bois writes, "frees and uplifts a people" (1995b,
trans-phenomenal being. As Black, I am not a project at all.
456). He adds, "But say to a people: 'The one virtue is to be white,' and people rush to the inevitable conclusion, "Kill the 'nigger'!" Of course, the idea that "the one virtue is white" is a

material processes and circuits of desire and power" (McLaren 1998, 66). On this score,
reproduced through circuits of desire and power, whiteness strives for totalization; it desires to
claim the entire world for itself and has the misanthropic effrontery
to territorialize the very meaning of the "human."
false ideal, for it "imprisons and lowers" (456).
Opposing racism is the precondition to moral coherence.
Memmi, 2000, Racism, p. 159-161

The struggle against racism will be long and probably
never totally successful. Humans [Vhomme] being what they are, one cannot for the moment hope for a total end
Albert
Evidently, I am a moderate optimist.
to racist behavior. Even mixed marriage is not a remedy; the example of Brazil is hardly encouraging. There, rather than disappear,
racism has created a more complex color hierarchy. In the Caribbean, social classes correspond to a scale of colors. It is as if racism
But yet, humans being what

they are, the job can and should be undertaken. People are both angels and beasts; the angel
must be assisted in prevailing over the beast. Or, more prosaically, reciprocal dependence must be
strengthened as the foundation of the social bond . Whatever the
importance of a conflict between individuals or groups, the relative
stability of social structures confirms a reciprocal need to engender an
inclusive common law of life. Racism represents precisely the inverse
process, since it is a temptation to exclude and the legitimation of
exclusion. / The pessimist will object that this is pure rhetoric designed to repackage the same old conduct. But even
can always find, in each case, the tactic or machination that will work.21 /
rhetorical effort is not wasted. Beyond its perversity, the racist discourse is a defense mechanism [plaidoyer] and an alibi. But every
Racism is a structure of
aggression that claims, and is given, a presupposed rationality. This
pretense is the sign of its cunning and its false assertion of its own
humanity. That is why no one wishes to own up to being racist; no one
search for an alibi also contains within it an implicit recognition of the law.

wishes to consent, in their heart, to renounce all humanity. The most hardened racists
at least have one ear that hears, a port directly connected to that part of themselves that does not totally approve of iniquity and
The mania and the horror of Nazism comes from what it had
renounced of all legitimization, that it had made racism a philosophy if not
a total conception of humanity. / Is that all there is? The infinite task before us can
be discouraging in that it must always be begun again. Up to now, all
peace has only been a truce between two wars , yet still we hope and long
for peace. Health is fragile, and death is always in the offing , yet still we
struggle to keep ourselves in good health. The struggle against racism is
the condition of our collective social health. It encompasses the
fundamental moral discussions of love or hate of the other , of justice or
injustice, equality or oppression, or, in a word, one's very humanity. The
essence of morality is respect for the other . Our honor as humans will be
to construct a more human world. In the meanwhile, so that even animals
may some day find a world of peace and security, let us act so that no one
is any longer treated like a beast.
oppression.
Destroying Whiteness Key

Destroying whiteness is Key
Wilderson03
(The prisoner slave as a Hegonommys Silent Scandal,
Social Justice;2003,30,2;Criminal Justice periodicals pg.18,
professor of African American studies @UC Irvine , and spent
five and half years within South African within Underground
structures ,and an elected official of the ANC)
something organic to black postionality that makes it essential to
destroy Civil Society .There is nothing speculative in this statement , for one
There is
could just as well make the claim the other way around;There is something organic to civil society that makes it
Blackness is a postionality of absolute

dereliction (Fanon),abandonment , in the face of civil societys many
junior partners cannont establish itself ,thourgh hegemonic interventions.
essential for the destruction of the black body .
Blackness is a cannot become society many junior partners :black citizenship, or Black civil obligations .In light of
this ,coalitions, and social movements, even radical social movements,like the prisoner abolition Movement,
bound in the socialtion of hegemony , so as to fortify and the extend the

interlocutory life of civil society ,ultimately accommodate,only the satiable and demands and the
finite antagonism of societies junior partners (i.e,immigrants, white women,and the working class),but forclosure
the insatiable demands and finite antagonisms, of the prisoner slave,

and the prisoner slave in waiting. In short, whereas coalitions and social
movements, even as such radical social movements cannot be called the
outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political
desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti-blackness. In her autobiography
Assata Shakurs comments vacillate between being interesting and insightful to painful programmatic
and responsible. The expository method of conveyance accounts for the
air of responsibility .However toward the end of the book, she accounts for coalition work by way of the
upon
extend narrative as opposed to exposition. We accompany her on one of Zayd Shakurs many panther
projects outside the groups, work dealing with white support groups
who were involved raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail
(Shakur,1987:224). With no more than three words, her recollection becomes fact and unfiltered. She writes I
hated it.
A2: Alt=Too Radical

1. This isnt an offensive argument it has nothing to do about the
strategy against fighting white supremancy it doesnt help
organize the way that we deal with structural vs conflict violence.
The position of whiteness vs the position of blackness is still based
off of the master slave dialect if youre a gay white male or a rich
white male that position is still based off of an underlying
foundation of blackness that allows for ongoing genocide to happen
2. This is a new link the notion that there are many different ways
to transcend blackness just obscures the underlying issues that this
country, transportation, and the plan are based off of race there is
only a risk of the alternative
3. [AT: Author]
4. The rush to declare Whiteness as a positive and heterogeneous

identity beyond structural oppression is the height of narcissism
and the privileged reassertion of privilegefragmenting whiteness
as an ontological position absolves everyone for racialized violence
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of
Anti-Racism, e-borderlands, 3.2)
Another risk is that in centering on whiteness, whiteness studies might
become a discourse of love, which would sustain the narcissism that
elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal. The reading of
whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The
whiteness of academic disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology
has been subject to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998;
Asad 1973). For example, a postcolonial critique of anthropology would argue
that the anthropological desire to know the other functioned as a form of
narcissism: the other functioned as a mirror, a device to reflect the
anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in
the very display of the colour of difference. So if disciplines are in a way
already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject,
then it follows that whiteness studies sustains the direction or
orientation of this gaze, whilst removing the detour provided by
the reflection of the other. Whiteness studies could even become a

spectacle of pure self-reflection, augmented by an insistence that
whiteness is an identity too. Does whiteness studies function as a
narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the subject as the
origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study,
which might mean that whiteness studies could get stuck on
whiteness, as that which gives itself to itself. Dyer talks about this
risk when he admits to another fear: I dread to think that paying attention to
whiteness might lead to white people saying they need to get in touch with
their whiteness (1997, 10). Whiteness studies would here be about
white people learning to love their own whiteness, by transforming
it into an object that could be loved. 6. Dyer is right, I think, to feel such
dread. Whiteness studies is potentially dreadful, and scholarship within the
field is full of admissions of anxiety about what whiteness studies could be
if was allowed to become invested in itself, and its own reproduction. We
should I think, pay attention to such critical anxieties, and ask what the
enunciation of such anxieties is doing. In terms of the constitution of the
field, for example, the anxiety is not so much that the borders will be
invaded by inappropriate others (as with traditional disciplines), but that the
borders will themselves be inappropriate. But at the same time, and
somewhat paradoxically, the anxiety about borders works to install
borders: whiteness becomes an object through the expression of
anxiety about becoming an object. The repetition of the anxious
gesture, that is, gestures toward a field. Fields can be understood,
after all, as the forgetting of gestures that are repeated over time.
Is there a relationship between the emergence of a field through the
enunciation of anxiety and the emergence of a new form of
whiteness, an anxious whiteness? Is a whiteness that is anxious
about itself its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its selfcenteredness better? What kind of whiteness is a whiteness that is
anxious about itself? What does such an anxious whiteness do? 7. Such an
anxious whiteness would be different to the worrying whiteness that
Ghassan Hage critiques in White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid
Nationalism (2003). This worrying whiteness is one that worries that others
may threaten its existence. An anxious whiteness would be one that is
anxious about such worrying: this white subject would come into existence in
its very anxiety about the effects it has on others, or even in fear that it is
taking something away from others. This white subject might even be
anxious about its own tendency to worry about the proximity of others. So
lets repeat my question: is an anxious whiteness that declares its own
anxiety about its worry better, where better might even evoke the promise of
"non-racism" or "anti-racism? 8. Before posing this question through an
analysis of the effects of how whiteness becomes declared, we could first
point to the placing of critical before whiteness studies, as a sign of this
anxiety. I am myself very attached to being critical, which is after all what all
forms of transformative politics will be doing, if they are to be
transformative. But I think the critical often functions as a place where we

deposit our anxieties. We might assume that if we are doing critical
whiteness studies, rather than whiteness studies, that we can protect
ourselves from doing or even being seen to do the wrong kind of
whiteness studies. But the word critical does not mean the
elimination of risk, and nor should it become just a description of what we
are doing over here, as opposed to them, over there. 9. I felt my desire to be
critical as the site of anxiety when I was involved in writing a race equality
policy for the university at which I work in the UK, where I tried to bring what
I thought was a fairly critical language of anti-racism into a neo-liberal
technique of governance, which we can inadequately describe as diversity
management, or the business case for diversity. All public organisations in
the UK are now required by law to have and implement a race equality policy
and action plan, as a result of the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000). My
current research is tracking the significance of this policy, in terms of the
relationship between the documentation it has generated and social action.
Suffice to say here, my own experience of writing a race equality policy,
taught me a good lesson, which of course means a hard lesson: the language
we think of as critical can easily lend itself to the very techniques of
governance we critique. So we wrote the document, and the university,
along with many others, was praised for its policy, and the Vice-Chancellor
was able to congratulate the university on its performance: we did well. A
document that documented the racism of the university became usable as a
measure of good performance. 10. This story is not simply about
assimilation or the risks of the critical being co-opted, which would
be a way of framing the story that assumes we were innocent and
critical until we got misused (in other words, this would maintain
the illusion of our own criticalness). Rather, it reminds us that the
transformation of the critical into a property, as something we
have or do, allows the critical to become a performance indicator, or a
measure of value. The critical in critical whiteness studies cannot
guarantee that it will have effects that are critical, in the sense of
challenging relations of power that remain concealed as institutional
norms or givens. Indeed, if the critical was used to describe the field, then
we would become complicit with the transformation of education into an
audit culture, into a culture that measures value through performance. 11.
My commentary on the risks of whiteness studies will involve an analysis of
how whiteness gets reproduced through being declared, within
academic texts, as well public culture. I will hence be reading Whiteness
Studies as part of a broader shift towards what we could call a politics of
declaration, in which institutions as well as individuals admit to
forms of bad practice, and in which the admission itself becomes
seen as good practice. By reading Whiteness Studies in this way, I am not
suggesting that it is a symptom of bad practice: rather, I think it is useful to
consider turns within the academy as having something to do with other
cultural turns. The examples are drawn from the UK and Australia, as the two
places in which my own anti-racist politics have taken shape. My argument is

simple: anti-racism is not performative. I use performative in Austins (1975)
sense as referring to a particular class of speech. An utterance is
performative when it does what it says: the issuing of the utterance is the
performing of an action (1975, 6). 12. I will suggest that declaring
whiteness, or even admitting to ones own racism, when the declaration is
assumed to be evidence of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what
it says. In other words, putting whiteness into speech, as an object
to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action,
and nor does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a
form of action that we could describe as anti-racist. To put this more
strongly, I will show how declaring ones whiteness, even as part of a project
of social critique, can reproduce white privilege in ways that are
unforeseen. Of course, this is not to reduce whiteness studies to the
reproduction of whiteness, even if that is what it can do. As Mike Hill
suggests: I cannot know in advance whether white critique will prove
politically worthwhile, whether in the end it will be a friendlier ghost than
before or will display the same stealth narcissism that feminists of color
labeled a white problem in the late 1970s (1997, 10).
were not racist

Whiteness is performed. Within debate space it is not simply
enough to be antiracist, but rather changing the way we perform
ourselves in the debate space is the only way to combat whiteness.
Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley et al, 13

(Dr. Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Address and
Advocacy, Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union, Amber Kelsie,
M.A., Nicholas Brady, 2013, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/,
Accessed 1/25/14, NC)
There is no racism without bodies coded and trained through practice .
are subjectivities that are raced which means that there are bodies that look white that are implicated in whiteness.
There
White privilege
in this frame can be recognized as an unearned benefit while offering a

position of redemption when privilege is used toward anti-racist efforts. Yet,
one can simultaneously be engaged in good anti-racist work as a white
person, while engaging in political and social actions that reproduce
privilege. And yet, we already recognize that whiteness is not just about skin color, though we cannot deny the existence of white-skin privilege.
Whiteness is normativeit produces behavioral and performative patterns
that sustain the significance of whiteness as a signifier. Bankey critiques what he calls ReidBrinkleys model for resistance in the flesh as a failed political project with dangerous implications for contemporary debate practice.
Queer theory
Queer politics push gender and sexuality to the point of
obscuring race altogether the division of queer identities and
even the use of queer as a label espouse more inclusive
holistic understanding of gender coming from culture.
Roen 1, Associate Professor of Psychology at Oslo University, 1 (Katrina,
Transgender Theory and Embodiment: the risk of racial marginalization,
Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, pg 257-258)JNF
Don
provides
an
example
of
reclaiming
a
traditional
sexuality/gender subject position which is very distinct from, but
in some respects resembles, transgenderism. He talks about the
importance of fa'afafine in Samoan culture, and how his own sense of selfesteem relates to being fa'afafine. To begin with, he describes the
relationship between his Samoan and fa'afafine identities by saying:
'for me culture is always first and then sexuality', and 'any
interaction I have with anybody, the two things I want them to
find out about me is the fact that I'm Samoan first and foremost
and ... [secondly] that I'm fa'afafine'. In stating his priorities thus, Don
sets himself in sharp relief to queer and transgender stances
which often highlight gender and sexuality to the point of
obscuring race altogether. Elaborating on this contrast Don describes
how, to him, fa'afafine simply 'means like a woman', whereas: All the
Palagi [4] [English] terms: gay, faggot, queer ... [they're] awful ... [Those
terms] actually tell you how that society views that person. My culture just
views it 'like a woman'. And it's like a special woman. It's a knowledgeable
woman but recognised [as] ... anatomically male. (Don, interviewed: May,
1996) He describes being taught from an early age that to be fa'afafine
was to be valued and respected, despite shifting to New Zealand as a child
and having to learn that fa'afafine were far less tolerated there. I was
never put down or anything ... I grew up with this really arrogant opinion of
myself: for some reason the world is rather special with me in it! Being
fa'afafine was really special. Jesus, when I came to New Zealand that was
soon cut out! ... I remember my mother saying: 'You mustn't walk like that,
Don'; I said: 'Why not?' [and she replied:] 'Well, they don't do that in New
Zealand'. ... That's something I never ever accepted. (Don, interviewed:
May, 1996) For Don, cultural identity precedes gender/sexuality
identity in political importance, but the two are intrinsically
linked: one does not make sense without the other. Although he
plays an active role in his local gaylesbitrans support networks, he is
highly sceptical about the Palagi system of dividing and labeling
sexualities and genders, preferring to espouse a more holistic
approach. He is also critical of Palagi attempts to reclaim words
such as queer, suggesting that this only reflects Palagi cultures'

intolerant attitudes towards sexuality and gender variance. Don
points out that the division-by-labels of sexuality and gender
categories makes it hard to talk about concepts of fa'afafine and
holism, for the language assumes categories which obscure the
importance of the inclusivity of fa'afafine. For Don, being fa'afafine
does not imply dissatisfaction with sexed embodiment nor does it make
specifications about partner-gender: fa'afafine is constructed across
sexuality and gender. However, he echoes his elders in expressing
concern about younger fa'afafine being attracted by the glamour and
lifestyle of cities where they come to think of themselves more in terms
of western transvestite and transsexual identities, rather than according to
traditional understandings of fa'afafine Some of these young fa'afafine opt
for sex reassignment surgery. Don hastens to add that he is not simply
opposed to sex reassignment surgery: he has some older fa'afafine friends
who have waited years, ensuring that they are making the right decision,
before going ahead with surgery. Nevertheless, he is concerned about the
general westernization and subsequent degradation of fa'afafine
identities, saying: 'I know of some of the traditional fa'afafines and each
time I've gone back to Samoa it's always been the case "Oh gosh, we're
being reduced to a ... cock in a frock" '. Don's willingness to accept that
some of his fa'afafine friends seek sex reassignment surgery,
accompanied by his concern for younger fa'afafine who are completely
seduced by Palagi understandings of sexuality and gender, remind me of
Besnier's comment: `Further discussion of gender liminality in Polynesia
cannot take place without locating the category in a specific historical
context and must address its relationship to modernization and change'
(1994, p. 328). To this I add that discussion of transgenderism would
benefit from further consideration of the effects of westernisation
on gender liminality: not for the sake of a simplistic reclaiming of
a 'third gender' [5] status, but for the sake of contextualising
transgender theorising with respect to cross-cultural understandings of gender as those understandings change over time.
Queer theory does not take into account issues of race. Quare
studies critiques the concept of race while also taking into
account differences between sexual and social groups that
queer theory does. Queer theory doesnt do enough to focus
on race issues, we need quare theory.
Yep 3, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp.
41-42, JCE)
Race Problems. Although the broad umbrella of queer may appear
to include queers of all races and social classes, it is a misleading
faade (Anzalda, 1991; Johnson, 2001). Calling it a queer blind spot,
Muoz (1999) observes, Most of the cornerstones of queer theory
that are taught, cited, and canonized in gay and lesbian studies
classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed
toward analyzing white lesbians and gay men. The lack of
inclusion is most certainly not the main problem with the
treatment of race. . . . When race is discussed by most white
queer theorists, it is usually a contained reading of an artist of
color that does not factor questions of race into the entirety of
their project. (p. 10, my emphasis) In light of this situation, Muoz
offers the notion of disindentifications as a lens to interpret
minoritarian politics based on interlocking components of race,
class, gender, and sexuality and discusses how such components
affect the social. Focusing on a critique of stable conceptions of
identity and committed to racialized and class knowledges,
Johnson (2001) introduces quare theory. He explains, Quare studies
. . . would not only critique the concept of race as historically
contingent and socially and culturally constructed/performed, it
would also address the material effects of race in a white
supremacist society. . . . As a theory of the flesh quare
necessarily engenders a kind of identity politics, one that
acknowledges difference within and between particular groups.
Thus, identity politics does not necessarily mean the reduction of
multiple identities into a monolithic identity or narrow cultural
nationalism. Rather, quare studies moves beyond simply
theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to
theorizing how that mediation may propel material bodies into
action. (p. 9) Both disindentifications and quare theory appear
productive points of engagement with mainstream queer theory
about racialized knowledges and experiences. (For a more detailed
explanation of these approaches, see Johnson [2001] and Muoz [1999].)
Queer erases the ethnic and racial ties that people have
ends up denying difference.
Gamson 95, Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco, 1995
(Joshua, Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from
the book Social Perspectives in Lesbian & Gay Studies: A Reader, republished
in 1998. pp. 593-594, JAR)
In the hands of many letter writers, in fact, queer becomes simply a short
hand for "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender," much like
"people of color" becomes an inclusive and difference-erasing short
hand for a long list of ethnic, national, and racial groups. And as
some letter writers point out , as a quasi-national shorthand "queer" is
just a slight shift in the boundaries of tribal membership with no
attendant shifts in power; as some lesbian writers point out, it is as likely
to become synonymous with "white gay male" (perhaps now with a nose ring
and tattoos) as it is to describe a new community formation. Even in its less
nationalist versions, queer can easily be difference without change,
can subsume and hide the internal differences it attempts to
incorporate. The queer tribe attempts to be a multicultural, multigendered,
multisexual, hodge-podge of outsiders; as Steven Seidman points out, it
ironically ends up "denying differences by either submerging them
in an undifferentiated oppositional mass or by blocking the
development of individual and social differences through the
disciplining compulsory imperative to remain undifferentiated "
(1993: 133). Queer as an identity category often restates tensions
between sameness and difference in a different language.
We must critique queer politics the history of the term

demonstrates the impossible conflicts between racial, ethnic,
or religious affliations and sexual politics.
Butler 93, noted for her studies on gender & teaches composition and
rhetoric at Berkeley, 93 (Dr. Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex) pp. 227 LRP
This view of performativity implies that discourse has a history7
that not only precedes but conditions its contemporary usages,
and that this history effectively decenters the presentist view of
the subject as the exclusive origin or owner of what is said.8 What
it also means is that the terms to which we do, nevertheless, lay
claim, the terms through which we insist on politicizing identity
and desire, often demand a turn against this constitutive
historicity. Those of us who have questioned the presentist assumptions
in contemporary identity categories are, therefore, sometimes charged
with depoliticizing theory. And yet, if the genealogical critique of the

subject is the interrogation of those constitutive and exclusionary
relations of power through which contemporary discursive
resources are formed, then it follows that the critique of the queer
subject is crucial to the continuing democratization of queer
politics. As much as identity terms must be used, as much as "outness" is
to be affirmed, these same notions must become subject to a critique of
the exclusionary operations of their own production: For whom is outness a
historically available and affordable option? Is there an unmarked class
character to the demand for universal "outness"? Who is represented by
which use of the term, and who is excluded? For whom does the term
present an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation
and sexual politics? What kinds of policies are enabled by what kinds of
usages, and which are backgrounded or erased from view? In this sense,
the genealogical critique of the queer subject will be central to
queer politics to the extent that it constitutes a self-critical
dimension within activism, a persistent reminder to take the time
to consider the exclusionary force of one of activism's most
treasured contemporary premises.
Queer politics cannot divorce itself from its past. Critiquing the
term queer will open up new possibilities for mobalization that
are not possible if only a presentist perspective is affirmed.
The affirmative ballot can signify a rejection of the 1NC
advocacy in favor of a historical review of QP. Wait for a better
criticism.
Butler 93, Judith Butler is a noted for her studies on gender, she teaches
composition and rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley, 93( Judith, Bodies That Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of Sex), pp. 228-229. LRP
It may be that the conceit of autonomy implied by self-naming is the
paradigmatically presenrist conceit, that is, the belief that there is a one
who arrives in the world, in discourse, without a history, that this one makes
oneself in and through the magic of the name, that language expresses a
"will" or a "choice" rather than a complex and constitutive history of
discourse and power which compose die invariably ambivalent resources
through which a queer and queering agency is forged and reworked. To
recast queer agency in this chain of historicity is thus to avow a set
of constraints on the past and the future that mark at once the
limits of agency and its most enabling conditions. As expansive as
the term "queer" is meant to be, it is used in ways that enforce a set
of overlapping divisions: in some contexts, the term appeals to a
younger generation who want to resist the more institutionalized
and reformist politics sometimes signified by "lesbian and gay"; in
some contexts, sometimes the same, it has marked a predominantly
white movement that has not fully addressed the way in which
"queer" playsor fails to playwithin non-white com-munities; and
whereas in some instances it has mobilized a lesbian activism, in
others the term represents a false unity of women and men . Indeed,
it may be that the critique of the term will initiate a resurgence of both
feminist and anti-racist mobilization within lesbian and gay politics
or open up new possibilities for coalitional alliances that do not
presume that these constituencies are radically distinct from one
another. The term will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to
the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term
precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized.
Model minority/Asian identity

1. Non-responsive Our argument is that civil society that
creates the model minority is founded upon antiblackness and that the only way to solve racial
discrimination is to (insert alternative)
2. We win root cause - our Mbembe 3 evidence specifically
outlines how the ability to enslave and discriminate
against blacks made all forms of biopolitics possible
3. Double bind A.) Because my partner and I are black and
considered inferior to them voting for us solves for the
model minority stigma because it breaks away from status
quo norms
Or, B.) The model minority stereotype and voting us down
is an affirmation of antiblackness
4. Theyre wrong The metric for Asian success and hard
work is based off of black failure and inability to work
the only reason why Asian people can be portrayed as
hard working as opposed to blacks is because no one will
hire blacks and so were forced to ask for handouts.
Foregrounding interlocking oppressions in a chain of equivalence
denies the structuring force of anti-blackness that dooms solvency
of the aff and perm
Sexton 10 (Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media
studies at the University of California, Irvine, People-of-Color-Blindness, Social Text 2010
Volume 28, Number 2 103: 31-56)
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps

beyond, the United States seems conditional to the historic
instance
the sort of comparative analysis outlined
above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy
and modify the demeanor of our political culture
Yet all of this is obviated by the
silencing mechanism par excellence in Left political and
intellectual circles today: Dont play Oppression Olympics!
amounting to little more than a leftist version of
playing the race card.
one notes in this catchphrase the
unwarranted translation of an inquiring position of comparison
into an insidious posture of competition, the translation of
ethical critique into unethical
they bear a common refusal to admit to
significant dif ferences of structural position born of
and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the
latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued with some consistency,
. In fact, it might denature the comparative
instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task.
The
Oppression Olympics dogma levels a charge
To fuss with details of comparative (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a
callous immorality. 72 However, as in its conservative complement,
attack. This point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship between the censure of black inquiry
and the recurrent analogizing to black suffering mentioned above:

discrepant histories between blacks and their political allies
might, finally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness,
a form of colorblindness inherent to the concept of people of
color to the precise extent that it misunderstands the
specificity of antiblackness
obscuring the
structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably
undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical
opposition
Every analysis that
attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the
machinations of the racial state without accounting for black
existence
which does not mean simply listing it among a
chain of equivalents
is doomed to miss what is
essential about the situation. Black existence does not
represent the total reality of the racial formation
but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed)
truth of the political and economic system
, actual or
potential. We
and presumes or insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy 73 thinking (the afterlife
of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression among others. 74 The upshot of this predicament is that
and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion.
within its framework
or returning to it as an afterthought
it is not the beginning and the end of the story
. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation
is most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are
feminist and queer. 75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, postblack paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of black suffering and of the struggles
political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so onthat have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and
every attempt to defend the rights and

liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to
make substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the
fate of blacks
Without blacks
on board, the only viable political option and the only effective
defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater
alliance with an antiblack civil society and further capitulation
to the magnification of state power.
symbolic power relative to the category of blackness. 76 This is why
, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them.
At the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote
in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails the necessarily total revamping of the society. 77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this
context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave
my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was captivity without
the possibility of flight, inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another
revolution. 78
A2: VIOLENCE
AT Violence = Alienation
Violence is the only way to spur large-scale political support for our
movement
Gelderloos 2007 (Peter, anarchist author, How Nonviolence

Protects The State.)
Closing out the list of common delusions is the all-too-frequent claim that
violence alienates people. This is glaringly false. Violent video games
and violent movies are the most popular. Even blatantly false wars
win the support of at least half the population, often with the
commentary that the US military is too humane and restrained to its
enemies. On the other hand, self-righteous candlelight vigils are
alienating to the majority of people who don't participate, who hurry
by and smirk to themselves. Voting is alienating for the millions of
people who know better than to participate and to some of the many
people who participate for lack of better options. Showing a
supposed "love" for "thy enemy" is alienating to people who know
that love is something deeper, more intimate, than a superficial smiley
face to be given out to six billion strangers simultaneously. Pacifism is also
alienating to the millions of lower-class Americans who silently
cheer every time a cop or (especially) federal agent gets killed. The real
question is who is alienated by violence, and by what kind of
violence? One anarchist writes: [E]ven if they were, who cares if the
middle and upper classes are alienated by violence? They already
had their violent revolution and we're living in it right now. Further,
the whole notion that the middle and upper classes are alienated by violence
is completely false...they support violence all the time, whether it is
strikebreaking, police brutality, prisons, war, sanctions or capital
punishment. What they really oppose is violence directed at
dislodging them and their privileges. Reckless violence that subjects
people to unnecessary risks without even striving to be effective or
successful will most likely alienate people-especially those who already have
to survive under the violence of oppression-but fighting for survival and
freedom often wins sympathy. I have recently been fortunate enough to
come into correspondence with Black Liberation Army prisoner Joseph
Bowen, who got locked up after the cop who tried to kill him ended up dead.
"Joe-Joe" won the respect of other prisoners after he and another
prisoner assassinated the warden and deputy warden and wounded
the guard commander at Philadelphia's Holrnesburg Prison in 1973, in
response to intense repression and religious persecution. In 1981, when a
mass-escape attempt he helped organize at Graterford Prison was
foiled and turned into a hostage situation, a huge amount of media
attention was paid to the horrible conditions of Pennsylvania's
prisons. During the five-day standoff, dozens of articles came out in the
Philadelphia Inquirer and the national press, shedding light on the

prisoners' grievances and underscoring the fact that these people who
had nothing to lose would continue to fight against the repression and the
bad conditions. Some corporate-media articles were even
sympathetic toward Joe-Joe, and in the end, the government agreed
to transfer a dozen of the rebels to another prison, rather than
storm in shooting their preferred tactic. In fact, in the aftermath of the
siege, Bowen had so upset the scales of political power that politicians were
on the defensive and had to call for investigations of conditions at Graterford
Prison. In this and many other examples, including the Zapatistas in 1994
and the Appalachian miners in 1921, people humanize themselves
precisely when they take up arms to fight against oppression.
Violence is the condition of society, and pacifism necessitates

its continuation- means all their turns are non-unique.
Feral Faun 92, (Insurgent Ferocity:The Playful Violence of Rebellion,
Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed" Issue #33 Summer 1992. http://antipolitics.net/feral-faun/insurgent-ferocity.html)
Social control is impossible without violence. Society produces systems of
rationalized violence to socialize individuals -- to make them into useful
resources for society. While some of these systems, such as the military,
the police and the penal system can still be viewed separately due to the
blatant harshness of their violence, for the most part these systems have
become so interconnected and so pervasive that they act as a single
totality- the totality which is the society in which we live.
This systemic violence exists mostly as a constant underlying threat a subtle, even boring, everyday terrorism which induces a fear of stepping
out of line. The signs and orders from 'superiors' which threaten us with
punishment or poverty, the armed, uniformed thugs who are there to
"protect and serve" (huh!?!), the barrage of headlines about wars, torture,
serial killers and street gangs, all immerse us in an atmosphere of subtle,
underlying, rationalized social violence which causes us to fear and
repress our own violent passions.
In light of the systematic social violence that surrounds us, it's no surprise
that people are fooled into viewing all violence as a single, monolithic entity
rather than as specific acts or ways of relating. The system of violence
produced by society does become a monolith which acts to
perpetuate itself.
In reaction to this monolithic system of violence, the "pathology of
pacifism" develops. Unable to see beyond social categories, the pacifist
creates a false dichotomy, limiting the question of violence to the
ethical/intellectual choice between an acceptance of violence as a
monolithic system or the total rejection of violence. But this choice
exists only in the realm of worthless abstractions, because in the world in
which we actually live, pacifism and systematic violence depend upon

each other. Pacifism is an ideology which demands total social peace as its
ultimate goal. But total social peace would require the complete
suppression of the individual passions that create individual incidences
of violence - and that would require total social control. Total social
control is only possible through the use of the constant threat of the
police, prison, therapy, social censure, scarcity or war. So the
pacifist ideal requires a monolithic system of violence and reflects the
social contradiction inherent in the necessity that authority strive to maintain
peace in order to maintain a smoothly running social system, but can only do
so by maintaining a rationalized system of violence.
AT Civil Rights Movement/MLK

Even if they win that the civil rights movement was effective, the
masquerade of non-violence propped up by Martin Luther King and
other peaceful activists was only possible due to the underground
success of militant black revolutionaries

The common projection (primarily by white progressives, pacifists,
educators, historians, and government officials) is that the movement
against racial oppression in the United States was primarily
nonviolent. On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther
King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable
power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially
among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant
revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Parry,"According to
a 1970 Harris poll, 66 percent of African Americans said the
activities of the Black Panther Party gave them pride, and 43
percent said the party represented their own views." In fact, militant
struggle had long been a part of black people's resistance to white
supremacy. Mumia Abu-Jamal boldly documents this history in his 2004
book, We Want Freedom. He writes, The roots of armed resistance run
deep in African American history. Only those who ignore this fact see
the Black Panther Party as somehow foreign to our common historical
inheritance. In reality, the nonviolent segments cannot be distilled
and separated from the revolutionary parts of the movement
(though between them). Pacifist, middle-class black activists, including
King, got much of their power from the specter of black resistance and
the presence of armed black revolutionaries. In the spring of 1963,
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham campaign was looking like it would be a
repeat of the dismally failed action in Albany, Georgia (where a 9 month
civil disobedience campaign in 1961 demonstrated the powerlessness
of nonviolent protesters against a government with seemingly bottomless
jails, and where, on July 24, 1962, rioting youth took over whole blocks for a
night and forced the police to retreat from the ghetto, demonstrating that a
year after the nonviolent campaign, black people in Albany still struggled
against racism, but they had lost their preference for nonviolence). Then, on
May 7 in Birmingham, after continued police violence, three thousand
black people began fighting back, pelting the police with rocks and
bottles. Just two days later, Birmingham-up until then an inflexible
bastion of segregation-agreed to desegregate downtown stores, and
President Kennedy backed the agreement with federal guarantees.
The next day, after local white supremacists bombed a black home
and a black business, thousands of black people rioted again, seizing a

9 block area, destroying police cars, injuring several cops (including the
chief inspector), and burning white businesses. A month and a day later,
President Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the Civil Rights
Act, ending several years of a strategy to stall the civil rights movement."
Perhaps the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the civil
rights movement came when black people demonstrated they
would not remain peaceful forever.
AT Vietnam
The withdrawal from Vietnam was a strategic, not moral decision
and even among the protests, only those which were actively
violence attained a shred of success.

The claim that the US peace movement ended the war against Vietnam
contains the usual set of flaws. The criticism has been well made by Ward
Churchill and others," so I'll only summarize it. With unforgivable self-
righteousness, peace activists ignore that three to five million
Indochinese died in the fight against the US military ; tens of
thousands of US troops were killed and hundreds of thousands
wounded; other troops demoralized by all the bloodshed had become highly
ineffective and rebellious." and the US was losing political capital (and
going fiscally bankrupt) to a point where pro-war politicians began
calling for a strategic withdrawal (especially after the Tet Offensive
proved the war to be "unwinnable," in the words of many at the time). The
US government was not forced to pull out by peaceful protests; it was
defeated politically and militarily. As evidence of this, Churchill cites the
victory of Republican Richard Nixon, and the lack of even an anti-war
nominee within the Democratic Party, in 1968, near the height of the antiwar movement. One could also add Nixon's reelection in 1972, after four
years of escalation and genocide, to demonstrate the powerlessness of
the peace movement in "speaking truth to power." In fact, the principled
peace movement dissolved in tandem with the withdrawal of US troops
(completed in 1973). The movement was less responsive to history's largestever bombing campaign, targeting civilians, which intensified after troop
withdrawal, or the continued occupation of South Vietnam by a US-trained
and -financed military dictatorship. In other words, the movement retired
(and rewarded Nixon with reelection) once Americans, and not Vietnamese,
were out of harm's way. The US peace movement failed to bring peace. US
imperialism continued unabated, and though its chosen military
strategy was defeated by the Vietnamese, the US still accomplished its
overall policy objectives in due time, precisely because of the failure
of the peace movement to make any domestic changes. Some pacifists
will point out the huge number of "conscientious objectors" who refused to
fight, to salvage some semblance of a nonviolent victory. But it should be
obvious that the proliferation of objectors and draft dodgers cannot
redeem pacifist tactics. Especially in such a militaristic society, the
likelihood of soldiers' refusing to fight is proportional to their
expectations of facing a violent opposition that might kill or maim
them. Without the violent resistance of the Vietnamese, there
would have been no need for a draft; without a draft, the self-

serving nonviolent resistance in North America would hardly have
existed. Far more significant than passive conscientious objectors were
the growing rebellions, especially by black, Latino, and indigenous
troops, within the military. The US government's intentional plan, in
response to black urban riots, of taking unemployed young black men off the
streets and into the military, backfired." Washington officials visiting Army
bases were freaked out at the development of "Black militant"
culture....Astonished brass would watch as local settler [white] officers would
be forced to return salutes to New Afrikans [black soldiers) giving them the
"Power" sign [raised fist]....Nixon had to get the troops out of Vietnam
fast or risk losing his army. Fragging, sabotage, refusal to fight, rioting in
the stockades, and aiding the enemy, all activities of US soldiers, contributed
significantly to the US government's decision to pull out ground troops. As
Colonel Robert D. Heinl stated in June 1971, By every conceivable indicator,
our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with
individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers
and non- commissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near
mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam the situation is nearly as serious. The
Pentagon estimated that 3 percent of officers and noncoms killed in
Vietnam from 1961 to 1972 were killed in fraggings by their own troops.
This estimate doesn't even take into account killings by stabbing or
shooting. In many instances, soldiers in a unit pooled their money to
raise a bounty for the killing of an unpopular officer. Matthew Rinaldi
identifies "working class blacks and Latinos" in the military, who did
not identify with the "pacifism-at-any-price tactics" of the civil rights
movement that had come before them, as major actors in the militant
resistance that crippled the US military during the Vietnam War. Arid though
they were less politically significant than resistance in the military in
general, bombings and other acts of violence in protest of the war on white
college campuses, including most of the elite universities, should not be
ignored in favor of the pacifist whitewash. In the 1969-1970school year
(September through May), a conservative estimate counts 174 anti-war
bombings on campuses and at least 70 off-campus bombings and
other violent attacks targeting ROTC buildings, government buildings, and
corporate offices. Additionally, 230 campus protests included physical
violence, and 410 included damage to property. In conclusion, what was a
very limited victory-the withdrawal of ground troops after many
years of warfare-can be most clearly attributed to two factors: the
successful and sustained violent resistance of the Vietnamese, which
caused US policy-makers to realize they could not win; and the militant
and often lethal resistance of the US ground troops themselves,
which was caused by demoralization from the effective violence of their
enemy and political militancy spreading from the contemporaneous black
liberation movement. The domestic anti-war movement clearly worried
US policy-makers." but it had certainly not become powerful enough
that we can say it "forced" the government to do anything, and, in any case,

its most forceful elements used violent protests, bombings, and
property destruction.
Nonviolence is racist
Their faade of nonviolence is not in any way radical but rather
props up the ultraconservative drive to safeguard white interests at
the expense of real social change. Black people do not have the
potential to distance themselves from violence because they are
always already immersed in it insofar as it is very condition of their
subjectivity. In other words, all of your disads to the alt are
massively nonunique violence is already widespread in the status
quo, its only a question of who is the perpetrator and who is the
victim of that violence. Yes, our alternative is violent, and yes, it
might result in some innocent people dying, but thats
comparatively better than holding hands and singing of the hope of
a better world when all the while a genocide is being waged against
black bodies on a global level.

I do not mean to exchange insults, and I use the epithet racist only after
careful consideration. Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position
in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite
clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a
privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence
is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social
hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that
violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the
suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people,
many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an
inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White
Father is swayed by the movement's demands or the pacifists achieve that
legendary "critical mass." People of color in the internal colonies of the US
cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate
the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude .
They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more
economic privilege (the "house slaves" of Malcolm X's analysis) and
conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and
sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin
America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white
activists in the US "bear witness" and write to Congress. People in
Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their
deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will,
one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war.
Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another
500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal
lands, until-well, they're not a priority right now, so perhaps they

need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and
sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage
in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already
unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the
system. Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have
fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other
genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent
resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was "as bad
as" Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped
the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those
who mutiniedwere as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of
violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more
enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work
for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the
perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy. Pacifists must know, at
least subconsciously, that nonviolence is an absurdly privileged position, so
they make frequent usage of race by taking activists of color out of their
contexts and selectively using them as spokespersons for nonviolence.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are turned into representatives for all
people of color. Nelson Mandela was too, until it dawned on white pacifists
that Mandela used nonviolence selectively, and that he actually was
involved in liberation activities such as bombings and preparation for
armed uprising. Even Gandhi and King agreed it was necessary to
support armed liberation movements (citing two examples, those in
Palestine and Vietnam, respectively) where there was no nonviolent
alternative, clearly prioritizing goals over particular tactics. But the mostly
white pacifists of today erase this part of the history and re-create
nonviolence to fit their comfort level, even while "claiming the mantle"
of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.' One gets the impression that if Martin
Luther King Jr. were to come in disguise to one of these pacifist vigils, he
would not be allowed to speak. As he pointed out: Apart from bigots and
backlashers, it seems to be a malady even among those whites who like to
regard themselves as "enlightened." I would especially refer to those who
counsel, "Wait!" and to those who say that they sympathize with our goals
but cannot condone our methods of direct-action in pursuit of those goals. I
wonder at men who dare to feel that they have some paternalistic
right to set the timetable for another man's liberation . Over the past
several years, I must say, I have been gravely disappointed with such white
"moderates." I am often inclined to think that they are more of a
stumbling block to the Negro's progress than the White Citizen's
Counciler [sic] or the Ku Klux Klanner .
Pacifism blows
Pacifists would also do well to examine the color of violence. When we
mention riots, whom do we envision? White activists committing property
destruction as a form of civil disobedience may stretch, but do not usually
lose, the protective covering of "nonviolence." People of color engaged in
politically motivated property destruction, unless strictly within the rubric of
a white activist- organized protest, are banished to the realm of violence,
denied consideration as activists, not portrayed as conscientious. The
racism of the judicial system, a major and violent component of our
society, though one rarely prioritized for opposition by pacifists, has had a
major impact on the American psyche. Violence and criminality are
nearly interchangeable concepts (consider how comfortable pacifists
are in using the terminology of statist moralityfor example,
justiceas their own), and a chief purpose of both concepts is to
establish blame. Just as criminals deserve repression and punishment,
people who use violence deserve the inevitable karmic violent
consequences; this is integral to the pacifist position. They may deny
believing that anyone deserves to have violence used against them, but a
stock argument common among pacifists is that revolutionaries should not
use violence because the state will then use this to "justify" violent
repression. Well, to whom is this violent repression justified, and why aren't
those who claim to be against violence trying to un-justify it? Why do
nonviolent activists seek to change society's morality in how it
views oppression or war, but accept the morality of repression as
natural and untouchable? This idea of the inevitable repressive
consequences of militancy frequently goes beyond hypocrisy to
outright victim-blaming and approval of repressive violence. People of
color who are oppressed with police and structural violence every
day are counseled against responding with violence because that
would justify the state violence already mobilized against them.
Victim-blaming was a key part of pacifist discourse, strategy even, in
the 1960s and 70s, when many white activists helped justify state
actions and neutralize what could have become anti- government
outrage at violent state repression of black and other liberation
movements, such as the police assassinations of Panther organizers
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Rather than supporting and aiding the
Panthers, white pacifists found it more fashionable to state that they
had "provoked violence" and "brought this on themselves. More
recently, at the previously mentioned anarchist conference, I charged that
the US anti-war movement deserved to share the blame in the deaths of
three million Vietnamese for being so accommodating to state power. A
pacifist, anarchist, and Christian Peacemaker responded to my charge by
stating that the blame belonged with (I expected him to say the US military

alone, but no!) Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese leadership for practicing
armed struggle. (Either this pacifist considers the Vietnamese people unable
to have made the highly popular step toward violent resistance themselves,
or he blames them as well.) One gets the impression that if more Gypsies,
Jews, gays, and others had violently resisted the Holocaust, pacifists would
find it convenient to blame that little phenomenon on the absence of an
exclusively pacifist opposition as well. By preaching nonviolence, and
abandoning to state repression those who do not listen obediently, white
activists who think they are concerned about racism are actually enacting a
paternalistic relationship and fulfilling the useful role of pacifying the
oppressed. The pacification, through nonviolence, of people of color
intersects with the preference of white supremacist power structures to
disarm the oppressed. The celebrated civil rights leaders, including King,
were instrumental to the government's "bullet and ballot" strategy in
isolating and destroying militant black activists and manipulating the
remainder to support a weakened, pro- government agenda centered around
voter registration. In fact, the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership
Council (SCLC) got paid by the government for their services." (And the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was largely dependent
on the donations of wealthy liberal benefactors, which it lost when it adopted
a more militant stance, a factor that contributed to its collapse.) A century
earlier, one of the major activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the years following
the Civil War was to disarm the entire black population of the South, stealing
any weapons they could find from newly "freed" black people, often with the
assistance of the police. In fact, the Klan acted largely as a paramilitary
force for the state in times of unrest, and both the Klan and modem US
police forces have roots in the antebellum slave patrols, which regularly
terrorized black people as a form of control, in what might be described as
the original policy of racial profiling. Today, with the security of the racial
hierarchy assured, the Klan has fallen into the background, the police retain
their weapons, and pacifists who think themselves allies urge black people
not to re-arm themselves, ostracizing those who do. A generation after the
failure of the civil rights movement, black resistance gave birth to hip-hop,
which mainstream cultural forces such as the recording industry, clothing
manufacturers, and for-profit media (that is, white-owned businesses)
capitalize and purchase. These capitalist cultural forces, which have been
protected by the disarming of black people and enriched by their evolving
slavery, wax pacifist and decry the prevalence of lyrics about shooting (back
at) cops. Hip-hop artists bonded to the major record labels largely abandon
the glorification of anti-state violence and replace it with an increase in the
more fashionable violence against women. The appearance of nonviolence,
in the case of black people not arming themselves or advocating struggle
against police, is, in fact, a reflection of the triumph of a previous violence.
The massive interpersonal violence of the Klan created a material shift that
is maintained by systematized and less visible police violence. At the same
time, the cultural power of white elites, itself gained and preserved through

all sorts of economic and government violence, is used to co-opt black
culture to foster a celebration of some of the same ideological constructs
that justified kidnapping, enslaving, and lynching black people in the first
place, while channeling the anger from generations of abuse into cycles of
violence within black communities, rather than allowing it to foment violence
against the all-too-deserving authorities. In the power dynamic described in
this brief historical sketch, and in so many other histories of racial
oppression, people who insist on nonviolence among the oppressed, if they
are to have any role, end up doing the work of the white supremacist power
structure whether they mean to or not. Robert Williams provided an
alternative to this legacy of disarmament. Sadly, his story is left out of the
dominant narrative found in state-sanctioned school textbooks, and, if
proponents of nonviolence have anything to say about it, is also excluded
from the movement's self-narrative and understanding of its own history.
Beginning in 1957, Robert Williams armed the NAACP chapter in Monroe,
North Carolina, to repel attacks from the Ku Klux Klan and the police.
Williams influenced the formation of other armed self-defense groups,
including the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which grew to include fifty
chapters throughout the South that protected black communities and civil
rights workers. It is exactly these stories of empowerment that white
pacifists ignore or blot out. Nonviolence in the hands of white people has
been and continues to be a colonial enterprise. White elites instruct the
natives in how to run their economies and governments, while white
dissidents instruct the natives in how to run their resistance. On April 20,
2006, a co-founder of Food Not Bombs (FNB), the majority-white anti-
authoritarian group which serves free food in public places through one
hundred chapters (mostly in North America, Australia, and Europe), sent out
a call for support for the new FNB chapter in Nigeria. This March Food Not
Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry and local Nigerian volunteer Yinka Dada
visited the people suffering in the shadow of Nigeria's oil refineries. While
conditions in the region are terrible, bombs are not a good way to improve
conditions. The crisis in Nigeria has contributed to oil prices hitting a record
$72 a barrel. It's understandable that people are frustrated that the profits of
their resources are enriching foreign companies while their environment is
polluted and they live in poverty. Food Not Bombs is offering a nonviolent
solution. The Food Not Bombs call for support condemned the actions of the
rebel militia, MEND, which is seeking autonomy for the Ijaw people of the
Niger Delta and an end to the destructive oil industry (whereas FNB
"welcomed Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo's announcement of new
jobs in the Delta Region" from oil revenues). MEND had kidnapped several
foreign (US and European) oil- company employees to demand an end to
government repression and corporate exploitation (the hostages were
released unharmed). Curiously, while they condemned the kidnapping, Food
Not Bombs failed to mention the bombing, by the Nigerian military under
President Obasanjo, of several Ijaw villages believed to support MEND. And
while there is no evidence that the "nonviolent solution" they say they are

"offering" will do anything to free Nigerians from the exploitation and
oppression they suffer, if nonviolence were implemented among Nigerians
that would surely avert the government's "crisis" and bring oil prices back
down, which, I suppose, makes things more peaceful in North America. Faced
with the total repression of the white supremacist system, the obvious
uselessness of the political process, and the shameless efforts of a dissident
elite to exploit and control the rage of the oppressed, it should be no
surprise or controversy at all that "the colonized man finds his freedom in
and through violence," to use the words of Frantz Fanon, the doctor from
Martinique who authored one of the most important works on the struggle
against colonialism. Most white people have enough privilege and latitude
that we may mistake these generously long, velvet-padded chains for
freedom, so we comfortably agitate within the parameters of democratic
society (the borders of which are composed of violently enforced racial,
economic, sexual, and governmental structures). Some of us are further
mistaken in assuming that all people face these same circumstances, and
expect people of color to exercise privileges they don't actually have. But
beyond the strategic necessity of attacking the state with all means available
to us, have those of us not faced with daily police intimidation, degradation,
and subordination considered the uplifting effect of forcefully fighting back?
Frantz Fanon writes, about the psychology of colonialism and of violence in
pursuit of liberation, At the level of individuals, violence [as a part of
liberation struggle] is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority
complex...and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and
restores his self respect. But proponents of nonviolence who come from
privileged backgrounds, with material and psychological comforts
guaranteed and protected by a violent order, do not grow up with an
inferiority complex violently pounded into them. The arrogance of pacifists'
assumption that they can dictate which forms of struggle are moral and
effective to people who live in far different, far more violent circumstances is
astounding. Suburban white people who lecture children of the Jenin refugee
camp or the Colombian killing fields on resistance bear a striking similarity
to, say, World Bank economists who dictate "good" agricultural practices to
Indian farmers who have inherited centuries-old agricultural traditions. And
the benign relationship of privileged people to global systems of violence
should raise serious questions as to the sincerity of privileged people, in, this
case white people, who espouse nonviolence. To quote Darren Parker again,
"The appearance, at least, of a nonviolent spirit is much easier to attain
when one is not the direct recipient of the injustice and may in fact simply
represent psychological distance. After all, it's much easier to 'Love thy
enemy' when they are not actually your enemy." Yes, people of color, poor
people and people from the Global South have advocated nonviolence
(though typically such pacifists come from more privileged strata of their
communities); however, only through a highly active sense of superiority can
white activists judge and condemn oppressed people who do not do so. True,
regardless of privilege, we should be able to trust our own analysis, but

when that analysis rests on a dubious moral high ground and a conveniently
selective interpretation of what constitutes violence, chances are our selfcriticism has fallen asleep on the job. When we understand that privileged
people derive material benefits from the exploitation of oppressed people,
and that this means we benefit from the violence used to keep them down,
we cannot sincerely condemn them for violently rebelling against the
structural violence that privileges us. (Those who have ever condemned the
violent resistance of people who have grown up in more oppressive
circumstances than themselves should think about this the next time they
eat a banana or drink a cup of coffee.) I hope it is well understood that the
government uses more violent forms of repression against people of color in
resistance than against white people. When Oglala traditionals and the
American Indian Movement stood up on Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970s
to assert a little independence and to organize against the endemic bullying
of the imposed "tribal government," the Pentagon, FBI, US Marshals, and
Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted a full-fledged counterinsurgency program
that resulted in daily violence and dozens of deaths. According to Ward
Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, "The principle of armed self-defense had, for
the dissidents, become a necessity of survival." The only proponents of
nonviolence I have ever heard reject even the legitimacy of self-defense
have been white, and though they may hold up their Oscar Romeros, they
and their families have not personally had their survival threatened as a
result of their activism. I have a hard time believing that their aversion to
violence has as much to do with principles as with privilege and ignorance.
And beyond mere self-defense, whether individuals have faced the
possibility of having to fight back to survive or to improve their lives
depends largely on the color of their skin and their place in various national
and global hierarchies of oppression. It is these experiences that nonviolence
ignores by treating violence as a moral issue or a chosen thing. The
culturally sensitive alternative within pacifism is that privileged activists
allow, or even support, militant resistance in the Global South, and possibly
in the internal colonies of the Euro/American states, and only advocate
nonviolence to people with a similarly privileged background. This
formulation presents a new racism, suggesting that the fighting and dying
be carried out by people of color in the more overtly oppressive states of the
Global South, while privileged citizens of the imperial centers may be
contented with more contextually appropriate forms of resistance such as
protest rallies and sit-ins. An anti-racist analysis, on the other hand, requires
white people to recognize that the violence against which people of color
must defend themselves originates in the white "First World." Thus,
appropriate resistance to a regime that wages war against colonized people
across the globe is to bring the war home; to build an anti-authoritarian,
cooperative, and anti-racist culture among white people; to attack
institutions of imperialism; and to extend support to oppressed people in
resistance without undermining the sovereignty of their struggle. However,
non- absolutist pacifists who allow for a little cultural relativism are typically

less likely to support armed revolution when the fighting gets close to home.
The thinking is that Palestinians, for example, may engage in militant
struggle because they live under a violent regime, but for the brutalized
residents of the nearest urban ghetto to form guerrilla units would be
"inappropriate" or "irresponsible." This is the "not in my backyard" tendency,
which is fueled by the recognition that a revolution there would be exciting,
but a revolution here would deprive privileged activists of our comfort. Also
present is the latent fear of racial uprising, which is assuaged only when it is
subordinated to a nonviolent ethic. Black people marching is photogenic.
Black people with guns evokes the violent crime reports on the nightly news.
American Indians holding a press conference is laudable. American Indians
ready, willing, and able to take their land back is a trifle disturbing. Thus,
white peoples' support for, and familiarity with, revolutionaries of color on
the home front is limited to inert martyrs-the dead and the imprisoned. The
contradiction in ostensibly revolutionary pacifism is that revolution is never
safe, but to the vast majority of its practitioners and advocates, pacifism is
about staying safe, not getting hurt, not alienating anyone, not giving
anyone a bitter pill to swallow. In making the connection between pacifism
and the self- preservation of privileged activists, Ward Churchill quotes a
pacifist organizer during the Vietnam era who denounced the revolutionary
tactics of the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground because those
tactics were "a really dangerous thing for all of us...they run the very real
risk of bringing the same sort of violent repression [as seen in the police
assassination of Fred Hampton] down on all of us." Or, to quote David
Gilbert, who is serving an effective life sentence for his actions as a member
of the Weather Underground who went on to support the Black Liberation
Army, "Whites had something to protect. It was comfortable to be at the
peak of a morally prestigious movement for change while Black people were
taking the main casualties for the struggle." The pacifist desire for safety
continues today. In 2003, a nonviolent activist reassured a Seattle
newspaper about the character of planned protests. "I'm not saying that we
would not support civil disobedience," Woldt said. "That has been part of the
peace movement that church people have engaged in, but we are not into
property damage or anything that creates negative consequences for us."
And on a listserv for a radical environmental campaign in 2004, a law
student and activist, after inviting an open discussion of tactics, advocated
an end to the mention of non-pacifist tactics and demanded a strict
adherence to nonviolence on the grounds that non-pacifist groups "get
annihilated." Another activist (and, incidentally, one of the other law
students on the list) agreed, adding, "I think that having a discussion about
violent tactics on this list is playing with fire, and it is putting everyone at
risk." She was also concerned that "two of us will be facing the star chamber
of the ethics committee of the Bar Association sometime in the near future."
Of course, proponents of militancy must understand that there is a great
need for caution when we discuss tactics, especially via e-mail, and that we
face the hurdle of building support for actions that are more likely to get us

harassed or imprisoned, even if all we do is discuss them. However, in this
example, the two law students were not saying that the group should
discuss only legal tactics or hypothetical tactics, they were saying that the
group should discuss only nonviolent tactics. Since it had been billed as a
discussion to help the group create ideological common ground, this was a
manipulative way of using threats of government repression to prevent the
group from even considering anything other than an explicitly nonviolent
philosophy. Because of the weighty self-interest of white people in
preventing revolutionary uprisings in their own backyard, there has been a
long history of betrayal by white pacifists who have condemned and
abandoned revolutionary groups to state violence. Rather than "putting
themselves in harm's way" to protect members of the black, brown, and red
liberation movements (a protection their privilege might have adequately
conferred because of how costly it would have been for the government to
murder affluent white people in the midst of all the dissension spurred by
heavy losses in Vietnam), conscientious pacifists ignored the brutalization,
imprisonment, and assassination of Black Panthers, American Indian
Movement activists, and others. Worse still, they encouraged the state
repression and claimed that the revolutionaries deserved it by engaging in
militant resistance. (Nowadays, they are claiming that the liberationists'
ultimate defeat, which pacifists facilitated, is proof of the ineffectiveness of
liberationists' tactics.) Revered pacifist David Dellinger admits that "one of
the factors that induces serious revolutionaries and discouraged ghettodwellers to conclude that nonviolence is incapable of being developed into a
method adequate to their needs is this very tendency of pacifists to line up,
in moments of conflict, with the status quo." David Gilbert concludes that
"failure to develop solidarity with the Black and other liberation struggles
within the US (Native American, Chicano/Mexican, Puerto Rican) is one of the
several factors that caused our movement to fall apart in the mid-70s."
Mumia Abu-Jamal questions, were white radicals "really ready to embark on
a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?" At first, nonviolence seems
like a clear moral position that has little to do with race. This view is based
on the simplistic assumption that violence is first and foremost something
that we choose. But which people in this world have the privilege to choose
violence, and which people live in violent circumstances whether they want
to or not? Generally, nonviolence is a privileged practice, one that comes out
of the experiences of white people, and it does not always make sense for
people without white privilege or for white people attempting to destroy the
system of privilege and oppression. Many people of color have also used
nonviolence, which in certain circumstances has been an effective way to
stay safe in the face of violent discrimination, while seeking limited reforms
that do not ultimately change the distribution of power in society. The use of
nonviolence by people of color has generally been a compromise to a white
power structure. Recognizing that the white power structure prefers the
oppressed to be nonviolent, some people have chosen to use nonviolent
tactics to forestall extreme repression, massacres, or even genocide.

Movements of people of color peacefully pursuing revolutionary goals have
tended to use a form of nonviolence that is less absolute, and more
confrontational and dangerous, than the kind of nonviolence preserved in
North America today. And even then, the practice of nonviolence is often
subsidized by whites in power," used by white dissidents or government
officials to manipulate the movement for their comfort, and usually
abandoned by large portions of the grassroots in favor of more militant
tactics. The use of nonviolence to preserve white privilege, within the
movement or society at large, is still common today. On inspection,
nonviolence proves to be tangled up with dynamics of race and power. Race
is essential to our experience of oppression and of resistance. A long
standing component of racism has been the assumption that Europeans, or
European settlers on other continents, have known what is best for people
they considered "less civilized." People fighting against racism must
unmistakably end this tradition and recognize that the imperative for each
community to be able to determine its own form of resistance based on its
own experiences leaves any priority given to pacifism in the dust.
Furthermore, the fact that much of the violence faced by people of color
around the world originates in the power structure that privileges white
people should lend white people greater urgency in pushing the boundaries
for the level of militancy that is considered acceptable in white communities.
In other words, for those of us who are white, it becomes our duty to build
our own militant culture of resistance, and, contrary to the role of teacher
historically self-appointed to white people, we have a great deal to learn
from the struggles of people of color. White radicals must educate other
white people about why people of color are justified in rebelling violently and
why we too should use a diversity of tactics to free ourselves, struggle in
solidarity with all who have rejected their place as the lackeys or slaves of
the elite, and end these global systems of oppression and exploitation.
Violence good
Fear of violence is a conservative political maneuver the
question is not whether or not there will be violence but
whether it will be directed at an unjust social order
Wilderson 2011 (Frank B., University of California Irvine African
American Studies/Drama Department, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia
and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions Journal,
Issue 5, Fall/Winter 2011- [SG])
Many pacifist scholars and activists consider the strategies and
tactics of armed revolutionaries in First World countries to be shortsighted bursts of narcissism.xvii What pacifist detractors forget,
however, is that for Gramsci, the strategy of a War of Position is one of
commandeering civic and political spaces one trench at a time in
order to turn those spaces into pedagogic locales for the
dispossessed; and this process is one which combines peaceful as well
as violent tactics as it moves the struggle closer to an all-out violent
assault on the state. The BLA and their White revolutionary co-
defendants may have been better Gramscians than those who critique
them through the lens of Gramsci. Their tactics (and by tactics I mean
armed struggle as well as courtroom performances) were no less
effective at winning hearts and minds than candle light vigils and
orderly protests. If the end-game of Gramscian struggle is the
isolation and emasculation of the ruling classes ensemble of
questions, as a way to alter the structure of feeling of the
dispossessed so that the next step, the violent overthrow of the
state, doesnt feel like such a monumental undertaking, then I would
argue the pedagogic value of retaliating against police by killing one
of them each time they kill a Black person, the expropriating of bank
funds from armored cars in order to further finance armed struggle as
well as community projects such as acupuncture clinics in the Bronx
where drug addicts could get clean, and the bombing of major centers
of U.S. commerce and governance, followed by trials in which the
defendants used the majority of the trial to critique the government

rather than plead their case, have as much if not more pedagogic
value than peaceful protest. In other words, if not for the pathological
pacifism (Churchill) which clouds political debate and scholarly
analysis there would be no question that the BLA, having not even read
Gramsci,xviii were among the best Gramscian theorists the U.S. has
ever known. But though the BLA were great Gramscian theorists, they
could not become Gramscian subjects. The political character of ones
actions is inextricably bound to the political status of ones
subjectivity; and while this status goes without saying for Gilbert and
Clark, it is always in question for Balagoon and Bukhari. [34] How does
one calibrate the gap between objective vertigo and the need to be

productive as a Black revolutionary? What is the political significance
of restoring balance to the inner ear? Is tyranny of closure the only
outcome of such interventions or could restoration of the Black
subjects inner ear, while failing at the level of conceptual framework,
provide something necessary, though intangible, at the level of blood
and sweat political activism? These unanswered questions haunt this
article. Though I have erred in this article on the side of paradigm as

opposed to praxis, and cautioned against assuming that we know or can
know what the harvest of their sacrifice was, I believe we are better
political thinkersif not actorsas a result of what they did with their
bodies, even if we still dont know what to do with ours. *
Perm
Generic Perm
Pedagogical colonialism acceptance and rejection are radically
opposed no in the middle. The permutation mystifies the
paradigm anti-blacknessthere is no way of incorporating Blackness
into a civil society or state founded on its constitutive negation
Pak 12 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside
Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage of
Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature,
Dissertation through Proquest)
I turn here to Hartmans work in African American cultural studies,
wherein she problematizes the notion of empathy as a useful or
neutral structure of feeling. In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman recounts
John Rankins letter to his brother, where he describes how deeply
moved he was after witnessing a slave coffle. He writes that his
imagination forces him to believe, for the moment, that I myself
was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of
terror. I began in reality to feel for myself, my wife, and my children
(Scenes of Subjection 18, emphasis mine). This notation of
beginning to feel, where the feeling supplants reality, is the
point of Hartmans contention and my intervention. As she writes,
in making the slaves suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for
himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination
presumably is designed to read. Or, in other words, the ease of
Rankins empathic identification is as much due to his good
intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility

of the captive body (19). Rankin can feel black because blackness
is fungible: blackness is simultaneously tradable and replaceable.
This is precisely what Wilderson critiques as the ruse of

analogy. He writes that this ruse erroneously locates Blacks in
the world a place where they have not been since the dawning of
Blackness, and continues that this attempt at analogy is not
only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blacknesss grammar of
suffering (Red, White & Black 37). In other words, Rankin is able to
feel for himself, his wife and his children precisely because the slave
is erased in that feeling. He reads himself as analogous to the slave
as a means of understanding his subject status when that analogy
misreads and misplaces blackness. I contend Himes is making the
same argument: by creating a figure that critically displaces the idea
of a shared humanity, by making Jimmy white, he negates an
identificatory practice which grounds itself on an eventual
recognition of subjectivity, or an insertion into civil society. Hence,
Himes voids the novel of blackness (except for the most periphery
figures) precisely because blackness is constituted through the

absence of relationality itself. Furthermore, I posit that Jimmys
whiteness is symptomatic of Afro-pessimism via the quandary David
Marriott poses in his scholarship, where he challenges us to question
how we can understand black identity when, through an act of
mimetic desire, this identity already gets constructed as white
(Haunted Life 208). Marriott re-reads Fanons seminal encounter with
a young white boy in Black Skin, White Masks, and an anecdote of a
little black girl attempting to scrub herself clean of racial markings,
not as encounters of interpellation, but as intensely fraught
moments of violent phobic recognition of the self as something
hateful and hated. Marriott states, [i]n these two scenes a
suppressed but noticeable anger and confusion arises in response to
the intruding other (the other being the little white child for Fanon,
and her own image for the little girl) and that this response has to
do with the realization that the other, as racial imago, has already
occupied and split the subjects ego (210).49 It is not that
blackness is set in Hegelian opposition to whiteness as the O/other,
but rather that blackness is dependent on whiteness always already
having been present. In other words, blackness is not something
missing, but rather the addition of something undesirable and

dirty that fragments the body by destroying all positive
semblances of the self. This addition of blackness results in
the selfs desire to hurt the imago of the body in a passionate bid
to escape it (210). In this reading of Fanon, Marriott offers his
contribution to the field of Afro-pessimism: even on a psychic level,
within the discourse of self and ontology, blackness is null and
void. The black body is occupied by a white unconscious, one that
loves his/herself as white, and hates his/herself as black. 50 As
Marriott writes in the introduction to On Black Men, [t]he black man

is, in other words, everything that the wishful-shameful fantasies of
culture want him to be, an enigma of inversion and of hate and this
is our existence as men, as black men (On Black Men x).
themselves, that indeed, this prototypical identification with
whiteness is a foundational culture and tradition which can be
neither avoided nor eluded (55 56). The absence of a black
interiority is also addressed by Kevin Bell as he examines the 1953
meeting between Himes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin at Les
Deux Magots in Paris. Bell writes that many of Himess literary
contemporaries, including Wright and Baldwin, are mostly invested
in sonorities, colors, and movements that... constitute little more
than added flavorings, punctuations and accents by which to
augment an already- established, normative white interiority
(Assuming 853). This is in contrast to Himes, who waylays
coherence and a structured black subjectivity for the suffocating
thickness of a crazy, wild-eyed feeling which is the discord always
present in the black unconscious, or the realization that one has

always been, and will always be, at war with oneself (856). Jimmy
thinks that he could see his mind standing just beyond his reach,
like a white, weightless skeleton (Yesterday 52). His mind is not his
to grasp, always just beyond his reach, and is imagined as a white
figure of death. It is impossible to incorporate Jimmy and his mind in
much the same way as it is impossible to bring blackness into
relationality, or to enfold him within civil society. To do so would
lead to the logical unfolding present in Wildersons work, and one
which Himes articulates forty years earlier during an interview:
[t]he black man can destroy America completely, destroy it as a
nation of any consequence. It can just fritter away in the world. It
can be destroyed completely (My Man Himes 46). In other words,
to make blackness relational is to lead to the incoherence and
dismantling of civil society as it currently stands.
The current order derives its ontological consistency in opposition

to blackness, trying to work within this system is impossible
Wilderson and Howard 10 (Frank, Assoc prof of African American
Studies, Percy, Psychotherapist, Frank Wilderson, Wallowing in the
Contradictions, Part 1 http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/frank-bwilderson-%E2%80%9Cwallowing-in-the-contradictions%E2%80%9D-part-1/
[SG])
FW Reparations suggests a conceptually coherent loss. The loss of
land, the loss of labor power, etc. In other words, there has to be some
form of articulation between the party that has lost and the party
that has gained for reparations to make sense. No such articulation
exists between Blacks and the world. This is, ironically, precisely why I
support the Reparations Movement; but my emphasis, my energies, my

points of attention are on the word Movement and not on the word
Reparation. I support the movement because I know it is a
movement toward the end of the world; a movement toward a
catastrophe in epistemological coherence and institutional integrity
I support the movement aspect of it because I know that repair is
impossible; and any struggle that can act as a stick up artist to the
world, demanding all that it cannot give( which is everything ), is a
movement toward something so blindingly new that it cannot be
imagined. This is the only thing that will save us. PH As a
Psychotherapist, I was very interested to see your contrasting Frantz

Fanon and Lacan concerning their conceptualizations of potential paths
to emancipation in the libidinal economy, as you put it. I am ashamed
to admit that I have never read Fanon, but have read Lacan. Please
illuminate your idea that the stark difference in their conceptualizations
of conflict/antagonism differ are based on the fact that Lacan would still
see Blacks as fundamentally situated in personhood, but that Fannon
(and yourself) see Blacks as situated a priori in absolute dereliction.

FW This is a big question, too big for a concise answerI think I take
about thirty to forty pages to try and get my head around this in the
book. But the key to the answer lies in the concept of contemporaries.
Fanon rather painfully and meticulously shows us how the human race is
a community of contemporaries. In addition, this community
vouchsafes its coherence (it knows its borders) through the presence
of Blacks. If Blacks became part of the human community then the
concept of contemporaries would have no outside; and if it had no
outside it could have no inside. Lacan assumes the category and thus
he imagines the analysands problem in terms of how to live without

neurosis among ones contemporaries. Fanon interrogates the category
itself. For Lacan the analysands suffer psychically due to problems
extant within the paradigm of contemporaries. For Fanon, the
analysand suffers due to the existence of the contemporaries
themselves and the fact that s/he is a stimulus for anxiety for those who
have contemporaries. Now, a contemporarys struggles are conflictual
that is to say, they can be resolved because they are problems that
are of- and in the world. But a Blacks problems are the stuff of
antagonisms: struggles that cannot be resolved between parties but
can only be resolved through the obliteration of one or both of the
parties. We are facedwhen dealing with the Blackwith a set of
psychic problems that cannot be resolved through any form of
symbolic intervention such as psychoanalysisthough addressing them
psychoanalytically we can begin to explain the antagonism (as I have

done in my book, and as Fanon does), but it wont lead us to a cure.
The affirmative neatly packages black resistance through

various logics of Whiteness ensuring co-option and closing off
the radical ethical possibilities of authentic abolitionism.
Hoescht 2008 (Heidi, PhD in Literature from UCSD, Refusable Pasts:
Speculative Democracy, Spectator Citizens, and the Dislocation of Freedom
in the United States, Proquest Dissertations)
Slavery is the other side of this coin. As with negotiations with
indigenous people, the fundamental dependence by the oppressors on
the oppressed conditioned the severe inequality in the south.
Speculative exchange and exploitation of human chattel also created
openings for rebellion and resistance. Interregional connections created
by the domestic U.S. slave trade enabled unpredictable circuits of rumor
through which enslaved African Americans imagined and
communicated. The violence and indignity of slavery made it necessary
for enslaved people to communicate inventively. Rebellions by Nat
Turner and others put pressure on slave owners, investors, bankers, and
complicit governments to justify the dehumanizing practice of marking
people with a price. Black abolitionists like David Walker, Sojourner
Truth, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and many others, staged

powerful struggles against Southern Slavery. In their related efforts to
desegregate the Jim Crow North, they also imagined and created black
networks of freedom to escape from pervasive white violence. This
freedom was built from black institutions, and was committed to

black survival, subsistence, resistance, affirmation, and education. It
did not necessarily depend on liberal precepts about law or market
participation. Black people's efforts to design and demand selfdetermination and freedom, however, also produced a class of
speakers, organizers, and writers who fit the needs of the white
abolitionist movement. The promises of freedom white abolitionists
offered were also committed to "restoring" democratic ideals, but by
preserving the property interests of white nationalists."' The
sentimental cultures of abolitionists emphasized the humanity of
slaves in a way that actually upheld plantation fantasies and
protected white privilege even while advocating the end of slavery.
The struggles over freedom that speculative networks enabled also
produced struggles over personhood that white nationalists
endeavored to manage. The freedoms African Americans and Native
Americans dreamed and struggled to retain during the Jacksonian period

are not necessarily reflected in the promises they secured." Liberal
translation from human rights to property rights is the recurring
pattern in the emancipatory movements that speculative climates make
possible. The broad social movements for labor unionization and against
fascism and lynching during the 1930s cultural front period brought
plebian artists and intellectuals together to imagine U.S. culture across
ethnic divisions. As Michael Denning has shown in his deservedly
influential text, the egalitarian social movements at the center of The
Cultural Front drew on popular cultural history to create multi-ethnic
alliances and renewed calls for democratic pluralism. The international
movement of the Popular Front provided a social foundation for
imagining democracy as a joint project waged through labor solidarities.
The emphasis on culture as a force that brought different groups
together also gave rise to the American Studies movement, restoring
intellectual faith in promises many had imagined had been irreparably
corrupted by the market. Yet as I argue at length in the opening
chapters of this project, the conditions of inclusion through cultural
conformity to liberal ideals in the democratic project of the cultural
front reproduced the terms of exclusion that refuse alternative
imaginaries for freedom. The national project that emerged during
the cultural front period elucidates how speculative logics extend
beyond economic practices in the United States. Scholarship in this
period obscured the social, political, and cultural mechanisms of

speculation by refusing to recognize the actual economic conditions of
the past in their reflections about the Jacksonian period for the "Lincoln
Republic."

Doesnt test the competition between the plan and the alt and
severs out of the entirety of the aff. This makes them a moving
target killing all stable ground for debate independent voter.
The link overwhelms the perm solves no offense, engagement with
civil society on any level, even constructively will perpetuate antiblackness thats Wilderson 10
A2: Perm-do the alt

Doesnt test the competition between the plan and the alt and
severs out of the entirety of the aff. This makes them a moving
target killing all stable ground for debate independent voter.
The link overwhelms the perm, solves no offense.
A2: Perm-do the plan THEN the alt

This is severance. The alt calls for a universal rejection with no
exceptions. You cant endorse an alternative that isnt compatible
with the aff, and then do the aff.
Doesnt test the competition between the plan and the alt their
perm changes the nature of the alternative by changing its
timeframe allowing them to add additions to the alt makes
generating competition extremely difficult killing neg ground
independent voter.
A2: Perm-do the plan and all non mutually

exclusive parts of the alt
1. The entirety of the alt is mutually exclusive to the plan Our alt is
to do nothing in the face of the affirmative.
2. Double bind, either A) They still do the aff and still link to the K,
or B) They sever out of their justifications- independent voter
because it makes the aff a moving target and kills neg K/CP ground.
AT time frame perms

Destroys all our ground no matter what we run, theyll always be
able to do it after the plan. There is no way we can win competition,
which proves the perm is a meaningless test on the K
Its intrinsic nowhere in the advocacy did do it after come up, so
the perm effectively adds new text onto the plan to do the perm.
That destroys all our ground because well never be able to win a
disad link, counterplan, or K if they can add new parts onto the plan
to take out our arguments. That means no ground for us.
Vote on it for ground, and vote neg even if they dont go for the
perm voting them down discourages running abusive perms as
time sucks on the block.
Extra Cards
Their attempt to say "we can be anti-racist too" coopts our images
of suffering as an advertisement used to guilt trip people into
backing their own political agenda, thus continuating the fungibility
of the black body and calcifying white supremacy
Mandell 2008, Bekah, Director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic
Opportunity Fair Housing Project, Racial Reification and Global Warming: A
Truly Inconvenient Truth, Boston Third World Law Journal, 28 B.C> Third
World L.J. 289, footnote.
Derrick Bell elaborates on the protection of white privilege by whites
through concessions and reforms that actually perpetuate and
maintain the legal status quo. In Silent Covenants, Bell explores the
interests that converge at a particular historical moment to offer
blacks some sort of concession or long-sought right in exchange for
a clear benefit for the nation or portions of the populace that
matter in the racial hierarchy. See Bell, supra note 51, at 49. He calls this
phenomenon interest convergence, and explains that any gains
made by blacks as a result of a momentary convergence of their
interests with those of whites, will be abrogated at the point that
policymakers fear the remedial policy is threatening the superior
social status of whites, particularly those in the middle and upper
classes. See id. at 69. He explains that the historic Brown v. Board of
Education Supreme Court decision was a prime example of this interest
convergence that served to quash black outrage over Jim Crow
racism with a largely symbolic reform that did nothing to undermine
the dominant white power structure, but made further advocacy for
real change politically and practically impossible.
Reformist measures simply provide fuel for Whiteness.
California Riverside, The Black Presidential Non-Slave: Genocide and the
Present Tense of Racial Slavery, Political Power and Social Theory Vol. 22,
pp. 38-43]
To crystallize what I hope to be the potentially useful implications of this
provocation toward a retelling of the slavery-abolition story: if we follow the
narrative and theoretical trajectories initiated here, it should take little
stretch of the historical imagination, nor a radical distension of analytical
framing, to suggest that the singular institutionalization of racist and
peculiarly antiblack social/state violence in our living era - the US
imprisonment regime and its conjoined policing and criminalization
apparatuses - elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery

within the American nation-building project, especially in the age of
Obama. The formation and astronomical growth of the prison industrial
complex has become a commonly identified institutional marker of massively
scaled racist state mobilization, and the fundamental violence of this
apparatus is in the prison's translation of the 13th Amendment's racist
animus. By "reforming" slavery and anti-slave violence, and directly
transcribing both into criminal justice rituals, proceedings, and
punishments, the 13th Amendment permanently inscribes slavery
on "post-emancipation" US statecraft. The state remains a "slave
state" to the extent that it erects an array of institutional
apparatuses that are specifically conceived to reproduce or enhance
the state's capacity to "create" (i.e., criminalize and convict) prison
chattel and politically legitimate the processes of
enslavement/imprisonment therein. The crucial starting point for our
narrative purposes is that the emergence of the criminalization and carceral
apparatus over the last forty years has not, and in the foreseeable future will
not build its institutional protocols around the imprisonment of an
economically productive or profitmaking prison labor force (Gilmore,
1999).16 So, if not for use as labor under the 13th Amendment's juridical
mandate of "involuntary servitude," what is the animating structuralhistorical logic behind the formation of an imprisonment regime
unprecedented in human history in scale and complexity, and which locks up
well over a million Black people, significantly advancing numbers of
"nonwhite" Latinos as, and in which the white population is vastly
underrepresented in terms of both numbers imprisoned and likelihood to be
prosecuted (and thus incarcerated) for similar alleged criminal offenses?17 In
excess of its political economic, geographic, and juridical registers, the
contemporary US prison regime must be centrally understood as constituting
an epoch-defining statecraft of race: a historically specific conceptualization,
planning, and institutional mobilization of state institutional capacities and
state-influenced cultural structures to reproduce and/or reassemble the
social relations of power, dominance, and violence that constitute the
ontology (epistemic and conceptual framings) of racial meaning itself (da
Silva, 2007; Goldberg, 1993). In this case, the racial ontology of the
postslavery and post-civil rights prison is anchored in the crisis of social
meaning wrought on white civil society by the 13th Amendment's apparent
juridical elimination of the Black chattel slave being. Across historical
periods, the social inhabitation of the white civil subject - - its selfrecognition, institutionally affirmed (racial) sovereignty, and
everyday social intercourse with other racial beings - is made
legible through its positioning as the administrative authority and
consenting audience for the nation- and civilization-building
processes of multiple racial genocides. It is the bare fact of the white
subject's access and entitlement to the generalized position of administering
and consenting to racial genocide that matters most centrally here.
Importantly, this white civil subject thrives on the assumption that s/he is

not, and will never be the target of racial genocide.18 (Williams, 2010)
.Those things obtained and secured through genocidal processes - land,
political and military hegemony/dominance, expropriated labor - are in this
sense secondary to the raw relation of violence that the white subject
inhabits in relation to the racial objects (including people, ecologies, cultural
forms, sacred materials, and other modalities of life and being) subjected to
the irreparable violations of genocidal processes. It is this raw relation, in
which white social existence materially and narratively consolidates
itself within the normalized systemic logics of racial genocides, that
forms the condition of possibility for the US social formation, from
"abolition" onward. To push the argument further: the distended systems
of racial genocides are not the massively deadly means toward some other
(rational) historical ends, but are ends within themselves. Here we can
decisively depart from the hegemonic juridical framings of "genocide" as
dictated by the United Nations, and examine instead the logics of genocide
that dynamically structure the different historical-social forms that have
emerged from the classically identifiable genocidal systems of racial colonial
conquest, indigenous physical and cultural extermination, and racial chattel
slavery. To recall Trask and Marable, the historical logics of genocide
permeate institutional assemblages that variously operationalize the
historical forces of planned obsolescence, social neutralization, and "ceasing
to exist." Centering a conception of racial genocide as a dynamic set of
allows the slavery-to-prison continuity to be more clearly marked: the
continuity is not one that hinges on the creation of late-20th and early-list
century "slave labor," but rather on a re-institutionalization of anti-slave
social violence. Within this historical schema, the post-1970s prison regime
institutionalizes the raw relation of violence essential to white social being
while mediating it so it appears as non-genocidal, non-violent, peacekeeping,
and justice-forming. This is where we can also narrate the contemporary
racial criminalization, policing, and incarcerating apparatuses
as being historically tethered to the genocidal logics of the post-abolition,
post-emancipation, and post-civil rights slave state. While it is necessary to
continuously clarify and debate whether and how this statecraft of racial
imprisonment is verifiably genocidal, there seems to be little reason to
question that it is, at least, protogenocidal - displaying both the capacity and
inclination for genocidal outcomes in its systemic logic and historical
trajectory. This contextualization leads toward a somewhat different
analytical framing of the "deadly symbiosis" that sociologist Loi'c Wacquant
has outlined in his account of antiblack carceral-spatial systems. While it
would be small-minded to suggest that the emergence of the late-20th
century prison regime is an historical inevitability, we should at least
understand that the structural bottom line of Black imprisonment over
the last four decades - wherein the quantitative fact of a Black
prison/jail majority has become taken-for-granted as a social fact - is

a contemporary institutional manifestation of a genocidal racial
substructure that has been reformed, and not fundamentally
displaced, by the juridical and cultural implications of slavery's
abolition. I have argued elsewhere for a conception of the US prison not as
a selfcontained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material
prototype of organized punishment and (social, civil, and biological) death
(Rodriguez, 2006). To understand the US prison as a regime is to focus
conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module
or mobilized vessel through which technologies of racial domin8ance
institutionalize their specific, localized practices of legitimated (state)
violence. Emerging as the organic institutional continuity of racial slavery's
genocidal violence, the US prison regime represents a form of human
domination that extends beyond and outside the formal institutional and
geographic domains of "the prison (the jail, etc.)." In this sense, the prison is
the institutional signification of a larger regime of proto-genocidal violence
that is politically legitimized by the state, generally valorized by the cultural
common sense, and dynamically mobilized and institutionally consolidated
across different historical moments: it is a form of social power that is
indispensable to the contemporary (and postemancipation) social
order and its changing structures of racial dominance, in a manner
that elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery. The binding
presence of slavery within post-emancipation US state formation is precisely
why the liberal multiculturalist narration of the Obama ascendancy finds
itself compelled to posit an official rupture from the spectral and material
presence of enslaved racial blackness. It is this symbolic rupturing - the
presentation of a president who consummates the liberal dreams of Black
citizenship. Black freedom, Black non-resentment, and Black patriotic
subjectivity - that constructs the Black non-slave presidency as the flesh-andblood severance of the US racial/racist state from its entanglement in the
continuities of antiblack genocide. Against this multiculturalist
narrative, our attention should be principally fixated on the bottomline Blackness of the prison's genocidal logic, not the fungible
Blackness of the presidency. CONCLUSION: FROM "POST-CIVIL RIGHTS" TO
WHITE RECONSTRUCTION The Obama ascendancy is the signature moment
of the post-1960s White Reconstruction, a period that has been
characterized by the reformist elaboration of historically racist
systems of social power to accommodate the political imperatives of
American apartheid's downfall and the emergence of hegemonic
(liberal-to-conservative) multiculturalisms. Byfocusing on how such
reforms have neither eliminated nor fundamentally alleviated the
social emergencies consistently produced by the historical logics of
racial genocide, the notion of White Reconstruction departs from Marable's
notion of the 1990s as the "twilight of the Second Reconstruction" (Marable.
2007. p. 216)19 and points toward another way of framing and narrating the
period that has been more commonly referenced as the "post-civil rights"
era. Rather than taking its primary point of historical departure to be the

cresting of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy of delimited (though no
less significant) political-cultural achievements. White Reconstruction
focuses on how this era is denned by an acute and sometimes aggressive
reinvention and reorganization of the structural-institutional formations of
racial dominance. Defined schematically, the recent half-century has
encompassed a generalized reconstruction of "classically" white supremacist
apparatuses of state-sanctioned and culturally legitimated racial violence.
This general reconstruction has (1) strategically and unevenly dislodged
various formal and de facto institutional white monopolies and diversified
their personnel at various levels of access, from the entry-level to the
administrative and executive levels (e.g., the sometimes aggressive diversity
recruitment campaigns of research universities, urban police, and the
military); while simultaneously (2) revamping, complicating, and enhancing
the social relations of dominance, hierarchy, and violence mobilized by such
institutions - relations that broadly reflect the long historical, substructural
role of race in the production of the US national formation and socioeconomic
order. In this sense, the notion of White Reconstruction brings central
attention to how the historical logics of racial genocide may not only
survive the apparent disruption of classical white monopolies on
the administrative and institutional apparatuses that have long
mobilized these violent social logics, but may indeed flourish
through these reformist measures, as such logics are re-adapted
into the protocols and discourses of these newly "diversified" racist
and white supremacist apparatuses (e.g.. the apparatuses of the
research university, police, and military have expanded their capacities to
produce local and global relations of racial dominance, at the same time that
they have constituted some of the central sites for diversity recruitment and
struggles over equal access). It is, at the very least, a remarkable and
dreadful moment in the historical time of White Reconstruction that a Black
president has won office in an electoral landslide while well over a million
Black people are incarcerated with the overwhelming consent of
white/multiculturalist civil society.
Hijacking disad - Their attempt to capture and redirect our
alternative is tantamount to Kennedy involving himself with the
Civil Rights Movement so that he could internally commandeer
resistance groups and strip out everything that posed an actual
threat to the interests of white elites. Just like Martin Luther King in
his later years, our alternative will be violently suppressed the
moment it no longer aligns with their model of comfortable,
peaceful, white-friendly, resistance a sovereign and violently
oppositional resistance movement is key to alt solvency.

And it must be added that privileged white people were instrumental in
appointing activists such as Gandhi and King to positions of leadership on a
national scale. Among white activists and, not coincidentally, the white-
supremacist ruling class, the civil rights-era March on Washington is
associated first and foremost with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream"
speech. Mostly absent from the white consciousness, but at least as
influential to black people, was Malcolm X's perspective, as
articulated in his speech criticizing the march's leadership. It was the
grassroots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death,
scared the white power structure in Washington, DC, to death; I was
there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come down
on the capital, they called in...these national Negro leaders that you respect
and told them, "Call it off." Kennedy said, "Look, you all are letting this
thing go too far." And Old Tom said, "Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't
start it." I'm telling you what they said. They said, "I'm not even in it, much
less at the head of it." They said, "These Negroes are doing things on their
own. They're running ahead of us." And that old shrewd fox, he said, "If you
all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it.
I'll welcome it.... This is what they did at the march on Washington. They
joined it...became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost
its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be
uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a
circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.... No, it was a sellout. It was
a takeover....They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes
what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what
song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they
couldn't make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown.
The end result of the march was to invest significant movement resources,
at a critical time, in an ultimately pacifying event. In the words of Bayard
Rustin, one of the chief organizers of the march, "You start to organize a
mass march by making an ugly assumption. You assume that everyone who
is coming has the mentality of a three-year-old.:" Demonstrators received
premade protest signs with government-approved slogans; the
speeches of several protest leaders, including SNCC chairman John
Lewis, were censored to take out threats of armed struggle and
criticisms of the government's civil rights bill; and, just as Malcolm X
described, at the end, the whole crowd was told to leave as soon as
possible. Though he enjoys comparatively little attention in mainstream
histories, Malcolm X was extremely influential on the black liberation
movement, and he was recognized as such by the movement itself and by
government forces charged with destroying the movement. In an internal
memo, the FBI addresses the need to prevent the rise of a black "messiah"
as part of its Counter Intelligence Program. According to the FBI, it is
Malcolm X who "might have been such a 'messiah'; he is the martyr of the
movement today." The fact that Malcolm X was singled out by the FBI as a

major threat raises the possibility of state involvement with his
assassination." certainly other non-pacifist black activists, who were
identified by the FBI as particularly effective organizers, were targeted for
elimination by means including assassination." Meanwhile, Martin Luther
King Jr. was allowed his celebrity and influence until he became more
radical, spoke of anti-capitalist revolution, and advocated
solidarity with the armed struggle of the Vietnamese. In effect, white
activists, particularly those interested in minimizing the role of militant and
armed struggle, assist the state in assassinating Malcolm X (and
similar revolutionaries). They perform the cleaner half of the job, in
disappearing his memory and erasing him from history.' And despite
their absurdly disproportionate professions of devotion to him (there were,
after all, a few other people who took part in the civil rights movement),
they similarly help assassinate Martin Luther King Jr., though in his
case a more Orwellian method (assassinate, reformulate, and coopt) is used. Darren Parker, a black activist and consultant to grassroots
groups whose criticisms have contributed to my own understanding of
nonviolence, writes, The number of times people quote King is one of the
most off-putting things for most black folk because they know how much his
life was focused on the race struggle...and when you actually read King, you
tend to wonder why the parts critical of white people, which are the majority
of the things he said and wrote, never get quoted." Thus King's more
disturbing (to white people) criticism of racism is avoided," and his
clichd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are
repeated ad nauseum, allowing white pacifists to cash in on an
authoritative cultural resource to confirm their nonviolent activism
and prevent the acknowledgement of the racism inherent in their
position by associating themselves with a noncontroversial black
figurehead.
Pacifists' revising of history to remove examples of militant struggles against
white supremacy cannot be divorced from a racism that is inherent in the
pacifist position. It is impossible to claim support for, much less solidarity
with, people of color in their struggles when unavoidably significant groups
such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement,
the Brown Berets, and the Vietcong are actively ignored in favor of
a homogeneous picture of anti-racist struggle that acknowledges
only those segments that do not contradict the relatively comfortable
vision of revolution preferred mostly by white radicals. Claims of support
and solidarity become even more pretentious when white pacifists draft
rules of acceptable tactics and impose them across the movement,
in denial of the importance of race, class background, and other contextual
factors. The point is not that white activists, in order to be anti-racist, need
to uncritically support any Asian, Latino, indigenous, or black resistance
group that pops up. However, there is a Eurocentric universalism in the idea
that we are all part of the same homogeneous struggle and white people at
the heart of the Empire can tell people of color and people in the

(neo)colonies the best way to resist. The people most affected by a
system of oppression should be at the forefront of the struggle
against that particular oppression," yet pacifism again and again
produces organizations and movements of white people illuminating
the path and leading the way to save brown people, because the
imperative of nonviolence overrides the basic respect of trusting people to
liberate themselves. Whenever white pacifists concern themselves
with a cause that affects people of color, and resisters among the
affected people of color do not conform to the particular definition
of nonviolence in use, the white activists place themselves as the
teachers and guides, creating a dynamic that is remarkably
colonial. Of course, this is largely a function of whiteness (a socially
constructed worldview taught diffusively to all people identified by society as
"white").
The perm is nothing more than white supremacist multiculturalism.

It is an attempt to take the alien body/presence and integrate it into
the localities of whiteness-this inclusion of the other is simpluy
another way in which white hegemony makes minorities take on the
white identity even if it is the so called enemy population-this
multiculturalist white supremacy is crucial to the project of white
supremacist globality.
Dylan Rodriguez 2009, University of California, Riverside, The Terms of Engagement:
Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition Critical Sociology, Vol. 36 Issue 1
It thus is within the confines of Homeland Security as white

supremacist territoriality a structure of feeling that organizes the
cohesion of racial and spatial entitlement that multiculturalism is
recognized as a fact of life, an empirical feature of the world that is
inescapable and unavoidable, something to be tolerated, policed, and
patriotically valorized at once and in turn. On the one hand, white locality is
a site of existential identification that generates (and therefore corresponds
to) a white supremacist materiality. As subjects (including ostensibly nonwhite subjects) identify with this sentimental structure a process that is
not cleanly agential or altogether voluntary they enter a relation of
discomforting intimacy with embodied threats to their sense of the local.
Those alien bodies and subjects, whose movement suggests the
possibility of disruption and disarticulation, become objects of a
discrete discursive labor as well as material/military endeavors. Most
importantly, they become specified and particularized sites for white
localitys punitive performances: racialized punishment, capture,
and discipline are entwined in the historical fabric of white

supremacist social formations from conquest and chattel
enslavement onward, and the emergence of white localitys hypermobility
has necessitated new technologies commensurate with the hyperpresence
actual and virtual of white subjectivities. As white bodies and subjects
exert the capacity to manifest authority and presence in places they
both do and do not physically occupy (call the latter absentee white
supremacy for shorthand), the old relations of classical white
supremacist apartheid are necessarily and persistently reinvented:
racial subjection becomes a technology of inclusion that crucially
accompanies and is radically enhanced by ongoing proliferations
of racist state and state-sanctioned violence. Further, this logic of
multiculturalist white supremacist inclusion does not exclusively
rely on strategies of coercion or punishment to assimilate others
such as in the paradigmatic examples of bodily subjection that formed the
institutional machinery of Native American boarding and mission schools
(Adams 1995; Smith 2005), but instead builds upon the more plastic
and sustainable platforms of consensus and collective identity
formation. I do not mean to suggest that either consensus building or
identity formation are benign projects of autonomous racial self-invention,
somehow operating independently of the structuring relations of dominance
that characterize a given social formation. Rather, I am arguing that the
social technologies of white supremacy are, in this historical
moment, not reducible to discrete arrangements of institutionalized
(and state legitimated) violence or strategies of social exclusion (Da Silva
2007) but are significantly altered and innovated through the crises
of bodily proximity that white locality bears to its alien (and even
enemy) populations. It is in these moments of discomfort, when
white locality is internally populated by alien others who have
neither immigrated nor invaded the space, but have in multiple
ways become occupied by the praxis of white locality construction,
that logics of incorporation and inclusion become crucial to the
historical project of white supremacist globality.
The permutation fails because it includes the destructive policing of
blackness as an afterthought or part of an exasperated laundry list
catalog of equivalents. This fails to center anti-black, white
supremacist policing as the constitutive condition of the entire
structural network of violent domination and thereby
misunderstands the truth of the social order. This failure of
centering structures the affirmative politics to the anti-blackness of
white civil society, leading to the inevitable amplification of state
power and white supremacist violence.
Jared Sexton 2010, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate
Professor of Film and Media Studies and one third of the Trifecta of Tough, People-of-ColorBlindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, Social Text, Vol. 28 No. 2
The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position

of the category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial
coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent,
force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion. Every
analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule
and the machinations of the racial state without accounting for
black existence within its frameworkwhich does not mean simply
listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an
afterthoughtis doomed to miss what is essential about the
situation. Black existence does not represent the total reality of the
racial formationit is not the beginning and the end of the storybut it
does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the
political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of
positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from
this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and
sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully
understood through lenses that are feminist and queer. 75 What is lost for
the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered,
postblack paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and
nature of black suffering and of the strugglespolitical, aesthetic,
intellectual, and so onthat have sought to transform and undo it. What is
lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper
analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic
power relative to the category of blackness. 76 This is why every
attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of
state repression will fail to make substantial gains insofar as it
forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical targets of the
panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around
them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option and
the only effective defense against the intensifying cross fire will
involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil society and further
capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of the
midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in
their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black
freedom entails the necessarily total revamping of the society. 77
For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this
context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more
appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world:I
knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to
leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of
person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a
history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was captivity without
the possibility of flight, inescapable violence, precarious life. There
was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going
beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet

another revolution. 78
Framework
Standards/Offense
Their fairness claims are a product of the hegemonic discourse
that re-enforces racism.
Delgado 1992 (Richard, Professor at Seattle University School of Law,
Shadowboxing: An Essay on Power, 77 CNLLR 813)
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of
conduct into the very term fair. [FN41] Thus, the stronger party is able to
have his way and see himself as principled at the same time. [FN42] Imagine,
for example, a man's likely reaction to the suggestion that subjective considerations-a woman's mood, her sense of pressure or intimidation, how she felt
about the man, her unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not go ahead [FN43]-ought to play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape.
Most men find this suggestion offensive; it requires them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. Why, they say, I'd have to be a mind
reader before I could have sex with anybody! [FN44] Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have been harboring? And what
if the woman simply changed her mind later and charged me with rape? [FN45] What we never notice is that women can read men's minds perfectly
well. The male perspective is right out there in the world, plain as day, inscribed in culture, song, and myth-in all the prevailing narratives. [FN46] These
narratives tell us that men want and are entitled*820 to sex, that it is a prime function of women to give it to them, [FN47] and that unless something
unusual happens, the act of sex is ordinary and blameless. [FN48] We believe these things because that is the way we have constructed women, men, and
normal sexual intercourse. [FN49] Notice what the objective standard renders irrelevant: a downcast look; [FN50] ambivalence; [FN51] the question, Do
you really think we should?; slowness in following the man's lead; [FN52] a reputation for sexual selectivity; [FN53] virginity; youth; and innocence.
[FN54] Indeed, only a loud firm no counts, and probably only if it is repeated several times, overheard by others, and accompanied by forceful body
language such as pushing the man and walking away briskly. [FN55] Yet society and law accept only this latter message (or something like it), and not the
The objective approach is not inherently

better or more fair. Rather, it is accepted because it embodies the sense
of the stronger party, who centuries ago found himself in a position
to dictate what permission meant. [FN56] Allowing ourselves to be
drawn into reflexive, predictable arguments about administrability,
fairness, stability, and ease of determination points us away from
what *821 really counts: the way in which stronger parties have
managed to inscribe their views and interests into external
culture, so that we are now enamored with that way of judging
action. [FN57] First, we read our values and preferences into the
culture; [FN58] then we pretend to consult that culture meekly and
humbly in order to judge our own acts. [FN59] A nice trick if you can get away with it.
former, more nuanced ones, to mean refusal. Why?
You are not a policy-maker and pretending you are absolves

individual responsibility for violence this ensures the affs impacts
are inevitable and is an independent reason to vote neg
Kappeler 95 Susanne, The Will to Violence, p. 10-11
We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society which would be equivalent to
exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of `collective irresponsibility', where people are no
longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal.' On the
contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a
war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them
our habit
of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take
place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of
competence, our own power and our own responsibility leading to
the well-known illusion of our apparent `powerlessness and its
accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens even more so
those of other nations have come to feel secure in their obvious nonresponsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina
or Somalia since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our
clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective àssumption' of responsibility. Yet
insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that
therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our
own sphere of action. In particular,
it seems to absolve us from having to try to see

any relation between our own actions and those events, or to
recognize the connections between those political decisions and
our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls òrganized irresponsibility',
upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences.
For we
tend to think that we cannot `do' anything, say, about a war, because we
deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions
are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with
politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of
`What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister
of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only
worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any
question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in
the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually no
possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the
It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers:
range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like Ì want to
'We are this war',

even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called
peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our `non-comprehension: our willed refusal to feel
responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring
innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments
stop this war', Ì want military intervention', Ì want to stop this backlash', or Ì want a moral revolution."
however,
or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we àre' the war in our ùnconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance
of the `fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't' our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for
We share in the responsibility for this war and its

violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way
we shape òur feelings, our relationships, our values' according to the
structures and the values of war and violence. destining of revealing
insofar as it pushes us in a certain direction. Heidegger does not regard
destining as determination (he says it is not a fate which compels), but rather as the implicit
project within the field of modern practices to subject all aspects of reality
to the principles of order and efficiency, and to pursue reality down to the finest detail. Thus,
insofar as modern technology aims to order and render calculable, the
objectification of reality tends to take the form of an increasing classification,
differentiation, and fragmentation of reality. The possibilities for how things appear are increasingly reduced to those that
enhance calculative activities. Heidegger perceives the real danger in the modern age to be that
human beings will continue to regard technology as a mere instrument
and fail to inquire into its essence. He fears that all revealing will become
calculative and all relations technical, that the unthought horizon of
revealing, namely the concealed background practices that make technological thinking possible, will be forgotten. He
remarks: The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be
consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the
unconcealedness of standing-reserve. (QT, 33) Therefore, it is not technology,
or science, but rather the essence of technology as a way of revealing that
constitutes the danger; for the essence of technology is existential, not
technological. It is a matter of how human beings are fundamentally oriented
toward their world vis a vis their practices, skills, habits, customs, and so forth. Humanism contributes to
refugees, one of our own and one for the òthers'.
10
11
this danger insofar as it fosters the illusion that technology is the result of a collective human choice and therefore subject to human control.
12

Their framework is just another form of exclusionary by the
colonizer created from flawed epistemology
Baker 2009 Grad Student Education and Human Development University of

Rochester, [Michael, June 2009, Unpublished Paper, Situating Modern
Western Education within the Modern/colonial World System,

https://www.academia.edu/1518842/Situating_Modern_Western_Education_in
_the_Modern_colonial_World_System, accessed 7-19-14, J.J.]
All forms of knowledge (both inside and outside of Europe) that did not fit
into the epistemic framework of modernity were classified as subordinate
and marginalized within the Eurocentric cultural-knowledge-power
complex that became known as modernity and rationality. The
hegemony of the modern western medical model of health care is one

prominent example of this epistemological regime of truth (Foucault, 1973,
1980, 1983). Again, according to Quijano, Eurocentrism is a specific
rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally

hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different
conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much
in Europe as in the rest of the world (Quijano, 2000, pp. 549-550). As the
epistemic framework of western modernity, Eurocentrism involves the
elimination and subordination of other ways of knowing and being through
the imposition of a system of power/knowledge relations that comprise
the project of capitalist modernity and modern education. With the
sixteenth century emergence of the modern/colonial system of social

classification came the need to transform and design institutions that would
maintain and expand the emerging knowledge/power relations. The
Eurocentric curriculum, along with the assimilating, civilizational ethos of
modern schooling, are among the most overt examples of modern
educations direct and ongoing complicity in this patriarchal and racial
system of domination and exploitation. Maintaining or reproducing these
racially organized knowledge/power relations is the heart of redemptivecivilizational missions of Eurocentric modernity. The production and
dissemination of knowledge, since the European Renaissance, is a
fundamental aspect of the western civilizational missions to save the
world by imposing an ideal model of society, economy, and being. The
constructions of modern/colonial schooling and the modern/colonial
curriculum are institutionalizations of this civilizational ideal .
Eurocentrism is a rationale that conceals the historical and contemporary
relations between knowledge and power the power of modern/colonial
oppression and domination. This Eurocentric cosmology is interlinked
historically and conceptually with the inherently violent racial
classification of humanity and the control of labor within the world
capitalist system (Quijano, 1999, 2000, 2008; Mignolo, 2003a; Dussel, 1993,
1995; Grosfoguel, 2002). Modern schooling is a necessary institution for

reproducing the cultural worldview that legitimates and conceals the
inherent violence of the modern/colonial world capitalist system. Through
imposition of a particular cultural worldview and the upholding of particular
Eurocentric knowledge standards, modern mass schooling provides an
effective selection and sorting mechanism for the colonial-capitalist racial

divisions of labor (Timmons, 1988).
Framework relies on a Eurocentric view of education education as

a process of restricting and creating limits is a Eurocentric idea
Baker 8
University of Rochester, Graduate Student School of Education and Human Development,
(Michael, Teaching and Learning About and Beyond Eurocentrism: A Proposal for the Creation of an Other
School, March 16, 2008, http://academia.edu/1516858/Teaching_and_Learning_About_and_Beyond_Eurocentrism_A_Proposal_for_the_Creation_of_an_Other_School, accessed 7/12/13)
Modernity
in the
modernity also
As the expansion and domination of the West, modernity is not simply the expansion of possibilities and choices. As new possibilities were constructed, old ones were destroyed (Asad, 1992, p. 337).
undoubtedly brought about numerous benefits

material, social, and political realms of everyday life
(particularly among Europeans and North Americans)
(Meyer, 2007). But,
brought about the conceptualization and universalization of the

legitimate ways of thinking and being
Western
education
, is also responsible for the hegemony
of the possibilities of conceiving and perceiving the world in the ongoing
reproduction of the Eurocentric social and political imaginary and
corresponding geo-culture
(Heidegger, 1977; Peters, 2002; Mignolo, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2007).
, commonly viewed as one of the most prized progressive benefits of modernity
. The imaginary of the modern/colonial world system is not only what is visible and in the ground but what has been hidden from view in the
underground by successive layers of mapping people and territories (Mignolo, 2000, p. 24). Until the 1960s, Eurocentrism, was the unquestioned narrative-cultural background in the social and political imaginary of the
Modern Western education systems are both products and

producers of Eurocentric modernity
modern/colonial world-system.
, understood in part as Western expansion and domination over the past five hundred years (Quijano, 1999; Dussel, 1993,
1995, 2002; Mignolo, 2000; Dirlik, 2003, 2005). Western modernity/coloniality includes the rise of European imperial/colonial state powers and the world-capitalist system, the modern interstate system, and three hundred years
mass
education systems became central to both the (re)formation of modern
subjectivities and the (re)formation and management of modern economic
and political organizations within and between Western and non-Western
nation-states throughout the world
The sphere of modern
education is thus a necessary and increasingly important issue in the
ongoing struggles over the principles and practices upon which the
political, economic, and cultural spheres are organized, ruled, and
enacted
Leaning beyond Eurocentrism is a
necessity now, if the self-destructive trajectory of the Western cultural
heritage is to be transformed
later, the formation of Western nation-states and the subsequent emergence of state sponsored schooling for the masses in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth century,
(Hunt, 1987; Manzer, 2003).
, worldwide (OECD, 1989; Cookson, Sadovnik & Semel, 1992; Daun, 2002).
(OSullivan, 2001).
Wrong Forum Debate is distinct from deliberative dialogue
Anderson, Professor of Philosophy, Babson College, 98

(Albert A.,, Why Dialogue?, http://www.wordtrade.com/philosophy/ancient/whydialogue.htm)
Dialogue is not debate. Debate differs from discussion in that the verbal
exchange usually has a limited number of positions stipulated at the
outset (such as affirmative vs. negative, liberal vs. conservative, or plaintiff vs. defendant), each
competing with the others with the clear goal of winning the contest.
Debate is a zero-sum game. If one side wins, the other side must lose. The goal in a debate is to
win the verbal contest by persuading others, often without concern for the truth of the matter. It
differs from discussion in its single-minded purpose of proving a
pre-established position in order to win; to change positions in a debate is
to lose the contest. The adversarial method frequently employed by lawyers is one familiar form of debate. Although it is not
necessary for the legal process to employ this method, when money and power are at stake it is not surprising that a win/lose strategy takes over. The
most important difference between dialogue and these other forms of oral exchange is its primary dedication to what is common or universal.
Conversation often depends on the tastes and inclinations of the participants without an agenda or clear objective. Discussion and debate, by contrast, are
Unlike
these other forms of verbal activity, dialogue makes no prior judgment
about the outcome of the process. It is serious inquiry that seeks to understand the nature and activity of whatever
subject matter is being considered. It searches for truth rather than taking it as given at the
outset of the inquiry. Participants in a dialogue are free to change their
mind in the course of the exchange.
dedicated to presenting and defending a specific position or point of view, usually determined by the context or the group being represented.
Contest debating rewards strategic behavior and domination via

attempts to win that make it impossible to use as a space for
deliberative democracy
Lovbrand, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Climate

Science and Policy Research at Linkoping University and Khan,
Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental and
Energy Systems Studies, Lund University, 2010
(Eva Lovbrand, and Jamil Khan, The deliberative turn in green political theory, Environmental Politics and
Deliberative Democracy: Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance, Ed. Backstrand)
Deliberative democracy can consequently be understood as an expression

of the Enlightenment devotion to reason as an arbiter of disagreement
(Baber and Bartlett, 2005. p. 231). Largely under the influence of Jurgen
Habermas, the theory defends a communicative account of rationality
based on free discussion, sound argument and reliable evidence . In
contrast to instrumental forms of rationality (for example administrative or

economic), which according to Habermas (1971) colonize the life-world and
repress individual freedom and creativity, communicative (or deliberative)
rationality has been described as a form of social interaction that
emancipates the individual from myth, illusion and manipulation (Dryzek,
1990). At the core of the theory are a number of procedural criteria that
boil down to two fundamental conditions; inclu-siveness and
unconstrained dialogue (Smith. 2003. p. 56). lnclusiveness requires that all
citizens are allowed to participate in public discourse and have equal
rights to advance claims and arguments. The discourse is in turn
unconstrained when the only authority is that of a good argument (Dryzek,

1990, p. 15). Hence, communicative rationality requires that social
interaction is free from domination, manipulation and strategic behaviour.
Their climate policy change impacts assume applied debate, not

educational debate
Freeley & Steinberg 8

Decision Making, p.19)
(Austin j. Freeley, Late, John Carroll University and David L Steinberg, University of Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned
Debate can be classified into two broad categories: applied and

educational. Applied debate is conducted on propositions, questions, and topics in which the advocates have a special interest, and the
debate is presented before a judge or an audience with the power to render a
binding decision on the proposition or respond to the question or topic in
a real way. Academic debate is conducted on propositions in which the
advocates have an academic interest, and the debate typically is
presented before a teacher, judge or audience without direct power to render a
decision on the proposition. Of course the audience in an academic debate does form opinions about the subject matter of the debate, and that personal transformation may
ultimately lead to meaningful action. However, the direct impact of the audience decision in an
academic debate is personal, and the decision made by the judge is
limited to identification of the winner of the debate. In fact, in academic debate the judge
may be advised to disregard the merits of the proposition and to render
her win/loss decision only on the merits of the support as presented in the
debate itself. The most important identifying characteristic of an academic
debate is that the purpose of the debate is to provide educational

opportunities for the participants.
No internal link to changing climate policy

Backstrand, 2010 Associate Professor at the Department of Political
Science, et al (Karin Backstrand, Associate Professor at the Department of
Political Science, Jamil Khan, Assistant Professor at the Department of
Environmental and Energy Systems Studies, Annica Kronsell, Associate
Professor at the Department of Political Science, all at Lund University and
Eva Lovbrand, Eva Lovbrand is Assistant Professor al the Centre for Climate
Science and Policy Research at Linkoping University, Environmental politics
after the deliberative turn, Environmental Politics and Deliberative
Democracy: Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance, Ed.
Backstrand, p.231
The
most significant and obvious finding is that the win-win rhetoric of new
modes fails to translate into practice Not surprisingly, the promise to
deliver more legitimate and effective environmental policies seems too
ambitious
there is no conclusive evidence that the
governance arrangements actually generate more effective environmental
problem-solving
This book has systematically examined the promise of new modes of environmental governance through eight case studies in policy fields such as climate, water, food safety, forestry and sustainable development.
. While many of the governance arrangements analysed in this book have indeed increased the participation of new actors in environmental politics, the procedural qualities of these new modes are
secondary to the quest for improved policy performance. At the same time
. Even in cases where environmental policy innovations, such as the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, have established an institutional structure for the monitoring of
performance, the environmental effectiveness remains uncertain. The extent to which new modes of environmental governance will in fact lead to marked improvement of the natural resource base or decreased pollution levels,
the concept of 'new' modes is misleading. The

shadow of hierarchy, which is the catchword for the continued influence of
states, intergovernmental organization and supranational organizations in
environmental politics, is prevalent in all governance arrangements
The state and international organizations often initiate, broker and
facilitate new modes of governance that can garner public legitimacy
therefore remains an open question. Another central conclusion of this book is that
of the
examined in this
book.
. This finding
does not, however, challenge the claim that environmental politics has taken a deliberative turn in recent decades. It merely questions the assumption that such a turn is enacted in the absence of government. In general we have
found evidence of a governance trend towards increased public participation, openness and dialogue. Although the deliberative turn primarily seems to engage organized societal groups in collaborative decision-making, some of our
cases also indicate that the 'softer* forms of steering can enable more inclusive reason-giving among a diversity of actors. Encouraging examples are to be found in the implementation of the EU Water Directive and deliberations
these deliberative encounters

may add legitimacy to decision-making processes.
around GMOs in the EU. While far from the ideal model of deliberative democracy,
to representative democracy that
emerge as an important, albeit piecemeal, complement
Debate Key
The debate space has failed in breaking down the structures of
race by excluding discussion-now is the time for change to
occur
Brinkley 12 (Dr. Shanara Reed-Brinkley, An Assistant Professor in the
Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where
she also serves as the Director of Debate for the William Pitt Debating
Union. She is a national award winner for her published work on critical
theory, black feminist theory, gender, black culture and history, and
hip hop culture and theory, Resistance and Debate, An Open Letter to
Sarah Spring
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letterto-sarah-spring/)//BG
Lack of community discussion is neither random nor powerneutral. We have tried to have discussions. These discussions
have been regularly derailedin wrong forum arguments, in the
demand for evidence, in the unfair burdens placed on the
aggrieved as a pre-requisite for engagement. Read the last ten years of these
discussions on edebate archives: Ede Warner on edebate and move forward to Rashad Evans diversity
discussion from 2010 to Deven Cooper to Amber Kelsies discussion on CEDA Forums and the NDT CEDA
Traditions page. We have been talking for over a decade, we have been reaching out for years, we have been
We will
no longer wait for the community to respond, to relinquish
privilege, to engage in authentic discussion, since largely the
community seems incapable of producing a consensus for
responding to what we all agree is blatant structural inequity. It
listening to the liberal, moderate refrain of we agree with your goals but not with your method.
seems that meta-debates/discussions about debate are generally met with denial, hostility andmore often
silence. This silence is in fact a focused silence. It is not people in the Resistance Facebook group that comprise
We have been quite

vocaland we believe that it is this very vocalness (and the
development of a diversity of tactics in response to status quo
stalling tactics) that has provoked response when response was
given. Sarah Springs cedadebate post is a case in point. The decision to change our speaker point scale is
not in order to produce a judging doomsday apparatus (this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric
might more aptly be applied to the current racist/sexist/classist
state of affairs in this community), though we must admit that we are flattered that our
these silent figuresit is (as has been described) the old boys club.
efforts have affected the community enough to result in such a hyberbolic labeling. It indicates that civil
the debate community should take it as an

indication that our calls for change are serious. We will continue to innovate
disobedience is still an effective tactic;
and collaborate on tactics of resistance. This crisis in debate has no end in sight. The rationale for changing
the point scale was not simply to reward people for preferring the unpreferred critic. We recognize that MPJ
produces effects, and we hoped that changing our point scale was a small but significant tactic that was
available to the disenfranchised in this community. MPJ: A) Limits judging opportunities for blacks, browns, and
womyn B) Limits opportunities for debaters who are (and are not) black, brown, and womyn to be judged by
such critics. The effect is: A) That the evaluations of these categorically marginalized critics are deemed not

valuable or costly. B) That the debate efforts of categorically marginalized debaters are deemed not valuable.
We believe that debaters deserve to have black, brown, and womyn critics (in general debaters should be
judged by multiply situated critics across varying social locations). We think the community deserves to know
what we have to say. Therefore, it seemed appropriate in this context to play the discriminative logics at work
against themselves by demonstrating just what value or cost our evaluations could have. We worked with
It seems this system works as long as it is

comfortable for the majority or the major powerbrokers. The
community pays lip service to, or simply ignores, the concerns of
those for whom this system is not working. Now it is everyones concern. To be
the limited options available to us.
clear: we did not alter our point scale because we believe we are not preferred for unjust reasons (we know we
are not preferred for unjust reasons), but because the system produces the effect of magnifying and enforcing
on a social scale the delegitimation of blacks, browns, and womyn. We think this is a question of ethics and a
question of pedagogy; it is something that stunts the growth of all members of this community regardless of
identity or social positioning.
There is a crisis in the community because of the selfsegregation-only discussions can solve
Sarah Spring
Stuart Hall said crisis
occur when the social formation can no longer be

reproduced on the basis of the pre-existing system of social
relation. This community is in crisis because the reality of
debate has changed. The backlash we have faced in response to this crisis (breaking up with
the K, unethical engagements with arguments, resentment, refusing to listen to certain arguments, and even
Blacks, browns, and

womyn face micro-aggressions in this activity constantly.
Sometimes it is outright hostility. We are always already uncomfortable in this space
refusing to listen to particular teams, etc.) is reactionary conservativism.
that many so easily call a community. We are always already aware that this community would prefer an empty
In
these kinds of hostile environments, self-segregation is a selfprotective measure. We produce safe-spaces where we may
gather, discuss, regroup, lift spirits and figure out how to resist
while maintaining sanity. We see nothing wrong with this. In fact, any review of the history of
celebration of diversity without the critical re-interrogation of the activity that our very presence demands.
social movements and activism would demonstrate the necessity of building spaces for the disenfranchised to
speak and plan resistance to a powerful majority. The Resistance Facebook group is such a forum. To even
describe the gathering of people in the group as a clique demonstrates the very invisibility and lack of concern
that people of color face in this community. Our experiences of discomfort and horror stories of blatant hostility
are invisible in this framing. If our experiences were real to the majority, rather than just what some students
are using to win debate rounds, then the necessity for the Resistance Facebook group would be clear. The group
is a forum for ally building. Often it is a rare place where the K v K or Performance v Performance debate can be
considered in its practical and ethical implications. It is precisely the kind of place for open discussion that
Sarah Spring calls forthe kind of place where discussion that needs to take place often does. But those
discussions also do not stop there.
Discussions that begin in the group are often

taken to wider groups within the debate community to broaden
the discussion and yet they are often derailed and then we must
retreat and regroup, review our strategies, discuss potential
options, and seek advice. Note that the example of the active and lively debate about the
hotel architecture at the Clay mentioned in Sarahs post, was hashed out for months on the resistance page
before many of us began to speak publicly about the issue. It was through that vibrant debate in the Resistance
The
Resistance Facebook page is a response to the increasing
ghettoization of some bodies and some discursive forms in debate
not the other way around. The fact that the existence of the
group was what was critiqued rather than the necessity of the
group is deeply troubling to us.
Facebook group that produced the very conditions for the open discussion you mention.
It is the job of the whites to solve for the social segregation

Sarah Spring
It is unclear what the bright line is between group discussions or backchannels or facebook groups and a
discussion group (articulated as closed backroom discussion which is by the way, homophobic) which
produces disenfranchized discussion As far as we can tell, Sarah Spring is upset that she has not been able to
see what mischief the slaves are hatching in the slave quarters on the plantation. The Resistance Facebook
group has a wide range of members. It includes current debaters, former debaters, coaches, judges, high school
students, academics (with no relationship to debate), radical community activists. All members of the group are
granted administrative access once they are admitted, so people request admission through the relationships
they have cultivated with already existing members. If someone has not been invited to the group, it is because
they lack authentic relationships with any of the membersperhaps the perceived secrecy of the group could be
better understood as a symptom of the lack of social relations you have with a wide group of differently situated
The argument here is likened to the question, why are all

the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?an argument
meant to imply that it is the burden of the black students to make
friends with the whites, and that the whites cannot be faulted for
choosing to maintain distance. There are a number of issues that marginalized members
people.
of the community simply do not know about. For example, many of us did not discover the existence of Sarahs
post until the last round of the evening, although we have since learned that people have been talking about it
If you are excluding yourself from usvia MPJ, on the

quad, in the hallway, at the hotelthen you should hold yourself accountable,
not us. We are not secret. We are not hiding. We are just
invisible to you P.S. It is no longer called the Dixie Classic.
(not to us) throughout the day.
The debate space is key to stopping racism- it begins with

ending intellectual alienation
revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 61

Intellectual
alienation is a creation of middle-class society. What I call middle-class
society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined
forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery .
In this connection, I should like to say something that I have found in many other Writers:
call middleclass a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men
a man (person) who takes a stand against

this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
(people) are corrupt. And I think that
Tag
Johnson & Henerson 5
(E. Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of

Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson
performs nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and
performance, Mae G. Henderson, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is
the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural
criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In
Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer
Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John
Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 18171871 (1980). Henderson has also published the Critical Foreword and Notes to the Modern Library edition of
Nella Larsen's Passing (2002).Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005, p.4)//BG
Given the status of women (and class not lagging too far behind) within black studies, it is not surprising that
sexuality, and especially homosexuality, became not only a repressed site of study within the Held, but also one
with which the discourse was paradoxically preoccupied, if only to deny and disavow its place in the discursive
sphere of black studies. On the one hand, the category of (homo)sexuality, like those of gender and class,
remained necessarily subordinated to that of race in the discourse

of black studies, due principally to an identitarian politics aimed
at forging a unified front under racialized blackness. On the other hand,
the privileging of a racialist dis-course demanded the deployment
of a sexist and homophobic rhetoric in order to mark, by contrast,
the priority of race. While black (heterosexual) womens
intellectual and community work were marginalized, if not erased,
homosexuality was effectively theorized as a White disease
that had in-fected the black community? In fact, sexuality as an
object of discourse circulated mainly by way of defensive
disavowals of sexual deviance, fre-quently framed by outspoken heterosexual black
male intellectuals theoriz-ing the black male phallus in relation to the black (w)hole and other priapic riffs
sounding the legendary potency of the heterosexual black man or, alternatively, bewailing his historical
emasculation at the hands of over-bearing and domineering black women.4 It would be some time, as Audre
Lorde discovered in the bars of New York during her sexual awakening, before black studies would come to
realize that [its] place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular
difference.
Tag
Johnson & Henerson 5
(E. Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of

Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson
performs nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and
performance, Mae G. Henderson, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is
the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural
criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In
Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer
Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John
Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 18171871 (1980). Henderson has also published the Critical Foreword and Notes to the Modern Library edition of

Nella Larsen's Passing (2002).Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005, p.4)//BG
queer studies, like black studies,

disrupts dominant and hegemonic discourses by consistently
destabilizing fixed notions of identity by deconstructing binaries
such as heterosexual/homosexual, gay/ lesbian, and masculine/
feminine as well as the concept of heteronormativity in general.
Despite its theoretical and political shortcomings,
Given its currency in the academic marketplace, then, queer studies has the potential to transform how We
theorize sexuality in conjunction with other identity formations? Yet, as some theorists have noted ,
the
deconstruction of binaries and the explicit unmarking of

difference (e.g., gender, race, class, region, able-bodiedness, etc.)
have serious implications for those for whom these other differences
matter.9 Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people of
color who are committed to the demise of oppression in its
various forms, cannot afford to theorize their lives based on
single-variable politics. As many of the essays in this volume
demonstrate, to ignore the multiple subjectivities of the minoritarian
subject within and without political movements and theo-retical paradigms
is not only theoretically and politically naive, but also potentially
dangerous. In the context of an expansive American imperialism in which
the separation of church and state (if they ever really were separate)
remains so only by the most tenuous membrane and in which a sitting
president homophobically refers to as sinners certain U.S. citizens
seeking the protection of marriage, the so-called axis of evil is likely to cut
across every identity category that is not marked White, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, heterosexual, American, and male.
FW Cards
Tag
Chase & Dowd 12
(Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School
of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the
University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr.
Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational effectiveness,
and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy Transfer
Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States, p.5, 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
Traditional methods of policy analysis, referred to as rational scientyic approaches,

treat policy creation as a logical step-by- step process in which
facts are analyzed to arrive at the best policy solution (Bacchi, 1999).
Proponents of this approach assume that policy creation and analysis are value-neutral processes (Allan,
Iverson, & Roper-Huilman, 2010; Martinez-Aleman, 2010). Until the mid- 1980s, the most influential approach for
understanding the policy process was the stages heuristic or textbook approach (J. Anderson, 1975;
Nakamura, 1987). This approach divided the policy process into a series of stages-typically agenda setting,
policy for-mulation and legitimation, implementation, and evaluation (Sabatier, 2007, p. 6). Researchers
working from this perspective focused on the technical properties of the policy or the extent to which a policy
is delivered to the targeted population in the mamier intended by policy designers (ODom1ell, 2008; Plunty,
1985).
This approach
allowed for the examination of distinct decision-making moments (Mulholland &
neglected the policys social or cultural context

More specifically, traditional policy
approaches tended to view the actor from the political economy
perspective, which assumed the actors behavior was guided by
weighing costs and benefits and using information in a rational
way to maximize material self-interest (Ostrom, 1999). Such an actor used
information as a tool to ensure beneficial economic outcomes tor
the self Rarely had weight been given to the actors values,
beliefs, resources, information, information processing
capabilities, or their external environment (Ostrom, 1999). Although a thorough
discussion is beyond the scope of this article; in the past 30 years, a number of new theoretical
frameworks of the policy process have either been developed or modified to address the criticisms of
Shakespeare, 2005), but often
(Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1988).
the textbook approach to policy research (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Kingdon, 1984; Ostrom; 1999; Sabatier &
moved away from the more

functionalist views; adding more complexity to how actors create
and implement policy. For example multiple streams theory (Kingdon, 1984), views policy as
Jenkins-Smith; 1988). These frameworks have since
being unpredictable and complicated to manage, and suggests that policy streams come together during
windows of opportunity. The punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgaltner & Jones, 1993) attempted to explain
how policy domains are characterized by long periods of stability and incremental change but still experience
short periods of great change. Finally, the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier &. Jenkins-Smith, 1988)
focuses on the interaction of advocacy coalitionseach consisting of actors from a variety of institutions who
policy
frameworks, still rely on several rationalist undertones, fail to capture the full
complexity of policy environments, and do not account for all the
components that influence policy creation and implementation
over time. More specifically, these frameworks have been critiqued for
failing to account for the oppression and often marginalization of
racialized populations written into policies (Marshall, 1997; Spillane, Reiser, &
Reimer, 2002; Stein, 2004).The more traditional approaches assume that
race and ethnicity are not rele-vant in policy, and thus camouflage
share a set of policy beliefs-within a policy subsystem. These, along with other contem-porary

the differential impact of educational policy on minoritized and
White students (Iverson, 2007; Parker, 2003; Rivas, Prez, Alvarez, & Solorzano, 2007; Young, 1999).
Tag
Chase & Dowd 12
(Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School
of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the
University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr.
Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational effectiveness,
and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy Transfer
Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States, p.6, 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
critical policy analysis (CPA), have been advanced to

acknowledge policy as a political and value-laden process(Allan et
Alternative models, such as
al., 2010, p. 22). The critical approach to educational policy emerged in the 1980s as a critique of social
reproduction and discourse and detines policy as the practice of power (Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead,
Critical researchers tend to view the process of knowledge

generation as subjective, where truth is believed to be socially
constructed, usually in a manner that supports certain racial,
classes, and gender groups (Crotty, 2003; Dumas &Anyon, 2006). This policy
approach has been used to study multiple issues pertaining to
education, such as social reproduction (Bowles & Gintis, 1976), welfare and other reform (Shaw,
2012).
2004), university diversity policy (Iverson, 2007), school finance (Aleman, 2007), boys education policy
(Weaver-Hightower, 2008), community college mission statements (Ayers, 2005), tracking (Oakes, 1985),
and cultural assumptions within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Stein, 2004).
Critical policy analysts work to illuminate the ways in which

power oper-ates through policy by drawing attention to hidden
assumptions or policy silences and unintended consequences of
policy practices (Allan et al., 2010, p. 24). Pusser and Marginson (2012) argue that, to date,
scholars have gener-ally failed to understand postsecondary higher education due to a lack of attention to
Rather than focusing

policy analysis on how to create more effective policies,
applying a critical perspective requires analysts to assess policy
by asking questions such as Who benefits?, Who loses?,
and How do low-income and minoritized students fare as a
result of the policy? (Bacchi, 1999; Marshall, 1997). Young (i 1999) demonstrates the
theories that address the nature and sources of power (p. 2).
limitations of the traditional rationalist approach to policy analysis in her bi-theoretical study ofthe failure of
a parental involvement policy.
The rationalist approach did not reveal, as her

how the inequitable distribution of power and knowledge of parents at the school was implicated in the policys
failure.
critical analysis,
Critical policy analysis exposes the
Chase & Dowd 12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center

for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of
education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of
Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr.

Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college
finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the
factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational
Policy Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy
Analysis of Seven States, 7 December 2012, p.7,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
using CPA is especially
important in a highly stratified society like the United States
because otherwise the impact of status differentials such as race,
class, and gender remain hidden. For scholars concerned with exposing and ameliorating
The work of Young (1999) and others demonstrates how
the ways in that educational policy and practice subordinate racial and ethnic minority groups, CPA provides a
lens to formulate research questions, interpret data, and propose changes to policies, practices, and institutions
(Heck, 2004).
A critical analysis is useful because it provides a lens

that helps us see the ways in that everyday policies and practices,
such as those having to do with transfer, perpetuate racial and
gender inequity (Harper, Patton, & Wooden, 2009). For example, Iverson (2007) conducted a study
that exam-ined how university diversity policies shape the reality of students of color on campus. She found that
dominant discourses in diversity plans construct students of

color as outsiders, concluding that such policies serve to (re)produce the subordination of students of color. In addition, Shaw (2004) ana-lyzed
welfare reform legislation from a critical policy perspective, where she found that welfare policy
perpetuates social stratification by creating onerous barriers to
education for women on welfare. These examples highlight how utilizing a
critical policy framework can aid researchers in understanding
how well-intentioned policy can potentially harm marginalized
populations.
the
Only a critical approach to policy making can solve for racial

equality

Analysis of Seven States, p. 7 December 2012,

A critical approach to policy analysis emphasizes the need to
counter the policies, structures, practices, and allocation of
resources that result in or reinforce racial inequity (Chesler & Crowfoot,
2000). As Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) argue our history of racial injustice is maintained through contemporary
policies and practices, and is reflected in the dramatic dif-ferentials . . _ in opportunity and other outcomes that
transfer poli-cies
and practices can be discriminatory and function as a form of
institutionalized racism, where institutionalized racism is defined
as racism that occurs in structures and operations at the
organizational level (Jones, 2000). This notion emphasizes how largescale institutional structures and policies operate to pass on and
reinforce historic patterns of privilege and disadvantage, such as
still exist between people of color and White persons (ip. 436). From this view,
deciding which groups gain access to the baccalaureate and which do not (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000, p. 441).
However, it is important to note that institutionalized racism in the form of policy is most often uninten-tional.
indirect institutionalized discrimination, this form of

racism occurs with no prejudice or intent to harm, despite its
negative and differential impacts on minoritized populations (Chesler
& Crowfoot, 2000). Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) note that,organizational procedures can
have discriminatory impact even if individual actors are unaware
of such impacts or are non-discriminatory in their personal
beliefs, and even if their behavior appears to be a fair-minded
application of race-neutral or color-blind rules (p. 442).
Referred to as
Policy making omits the fact that it is institutionalized and racist

Analysis of Seven States, 7 December 2012, p.8
Racism in organizational policy can also include acts of omission,
such as failing to recruit minority students or hiring policies that exclude scholars of color. As an example,
transfer policies can be enacted without conscious discriminatory intent, yet can produce results with
Demonstrating how to critically

evaluate policies in terms of their potential for discriminatory
impact provides the basis for redesigning policies in a more
equitable manner. In this study, CPA includes the examination of state transfer policies with the
inequitable and negative effects on students of color.
goal of understanding if such policies are a form of institutionalized rac-ism. CPA was chosen as the preferred
method of analysis because, as other authors have indicated,
written texts contribute to

the construction of social reality; thus, by analyzing texts (in the case of
this study, written policies), we were able to examine what is missing from
enacted policy and who is privileged as a result (Allan et al., 2010; Fairclough,
1989). In addition, CPA is used to identify indirect forms of institutional
discrimination. Knowing that policies do not fully drive behaviors,
we recognize problem identification is a necessary but insufficient
step toward reducing structural barriers to transfer for
minoritized students.
Fanon Cards
The consciousness of the past shapes the consciousness of the
future, therefore we must reject the consciousness of the past
and shape a new consciousness
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and
author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 64 Written in 1952, new edition
published in 2008)//BG
There are times when the black man is locked into his body.
Now,
for a being who has acquired consciousness of himself and of his body, Who has attained to the dialectic of
the body is no longer a cause of the structure of

consciousness, it has become an object of consciousness. The
Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past. None the less I am a man, and in this
subject and object,
sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass. Face to face with the White
the
contemporary White man feels the need to recall the times of
cannibalism. A few years ago, the Lyon branch of the Union of Students From Overseas France
man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a Vengeance to exact; face to face With the Negro,
asked me to reply to an article that made jazz music literally an irruption of cannibalism into the modern
World. Knowing exactly what I Was doing, I rejected the premises on which the request was based, and I
suggested to the defender of European purity that he cure himself of a spasm that had nothing cultural in it.
A German philosopher
described this mechanism as the pathology of freedom . In the
Some men Want to H11 the World with their presence.
circumstances, I did not have to take up a position on behalf of Negro music against white music, but rather
to help my brother to rid himself of an attitude in which there was nothing healthful. The problem
Those Negroes and White men will be

disalienated Who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the
materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other
Ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to
accept the present as definitive.
considered here is one of time.
The black human carries the black mans burden, a burden to

prove themselves human
revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 178-179
The black man Wants to be like the White man. For the black man there is
only one destiny. And it is White. Long ago the black man admitted the
unarguable superiority of the White man, and all his efforts are
aimed at achieving a White existence. Have I no other purpose on earth, then, but
to avenge the Negro of the seventeenth century? In this World, which is already trying to disappear, do I
have to pose the problem of black truth? Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial conformation?
I as a man of color do not have the right to seek to know in what respect my race is superior or inferior to
I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in

the White man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the
past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek Ways of stamping down the
another race.
pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of
my ancestors. There is no Negro mission;
there is no White burden. I find myself

suddenly in a World in which things do evil; a World in which I
am summoned into battle; a World in which it is always a
question of annihilation or triumph. I find myself-I, a man-in a World Where Words
Wrap themselves in silence; in a World Where the other endlessly hardens himself. No, I do not
have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the White man. I
do not have the duty to murmur my gratitude to the White man.
My life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me
back on myself. No, I do not have the right to be a Negro. I do not have the duty to be this or
that .... If the White man challenges my humanity, I Will impose my
Whole Weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that sho good
eatin that he persists in imagining.
Solving the problem of racism does not mean to rewrite history, but
rather to redraw the image of the black being
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary,

and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p.179 Written in 1952,
new edition published in 2008)//BG
There is no White World, there is no White ethic, any more than
there is a White intelligence. There are in every part of the World men who search. I am
not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind
In the World
through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am a
part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it. And, through a private
problem, We see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this World, in
myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.
a situation, embarked, as Pascal would have it, am I going to gather Weapons? Am I going to ask the
contemporary White man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to ask the
contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by
every possible means to cause Guilt to be born in minds? Moral anguish in the face of the massiveness of
the Past? I am a Negro, and tons of chains, storms of blows, rivers of expectoration flow down my
I do not have the right to allow myself to bog down. I

do not have the right to allow the slightest fragment to remain
in my existence. I do not have the right to allow myself to be
mired in what the past has determined.I am not the slave of the
Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.
shoulders.But
The black being has no home because their civilization has

been ruined
revolutionary, and author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 180
Too many colored intellectuals European culture has a quality of exteriority. What is more, in human
the Negro may feel himself a stranger to the Western World.

Not Wanting to live the part of a poor relative, of an adopted son, of
a bastard child, shall he feverishly seek to discover a Negro
civilization? Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it Would be of the greatest interest to
relationships,
be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be
very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I
can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who
labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.
We must free ourselves from the chains of history

Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and
author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 178-179 Written in 1952, new
edition published in 2008)//BG
No attempt must be made to encase man (humans), for it is his
(their) destiny to be set free. The body of history does not
determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by
going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I Will
initiate the cycle of my freedom. The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that
he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the White man lie
in the fact that somewhere he has killed man. And even today they
subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of
color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself
I, the man of color, Want only this: That

the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man
by man Cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and
into a World of retroactive reparations.
to love man, Wherever he may be.
Ologies
Ontology informs all levels of political life and is inescapable
Dillon 99 (Michael Dillon, professor of politics at the University of
Lancaster, 1999, Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, pp 978)
Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake
of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the
deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never
tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of
thinking is fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything

about anything that is, without always already having made assumptions
about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries
an ontology sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other
regional modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they

operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire
mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal
ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire
foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered
problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it
does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of

science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when
it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and
corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its
foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in
which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what
kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts
as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in
which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged
Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and
inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment.
In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or
unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you
know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the
problem of action for you in one way rather than another. You may think
ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and
Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but
a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in
short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an
understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being
within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock innocent
political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.

Discursive framing underpins reality
Mutimer 2k (David Mutimer, associate professor of political science at York
University, director of the centre for International and Security Studies, editor
of Critical Studies on Security, 2000, The Weapons State: Proliferation and
the Framing of Security page 19-25) gz
It is not entirely common to think that metaphor has much to do with the
making of policy in general and of security policy in particular. Security policy
concerns the serious matter of war; its subject is troops, not tropes.
Nevertheless, it would seem even policymakers bent on waging war
recognize the occasional utility of an apt metaphor. Hidden in a footnote is
a report by Chris Hables Gray on a small change in the language surrounding
the war in the Gulf: Originally, the attack on Iraq and occupied Kuwait was
to be called Desert Sword, but it was decided to portray the war as more
of a natural force.22 Grays contention rings true, as Desert Sword fits
more obviously with the prior operation, Desert Shield, than does Desert
Storm. Somebody in the Pentagon, however, recognized that swords are
wielded by hands whose owners can then be held responsible; storms are
acts of nature or of God, not of people. Although the clear intention of this
use of metaphor is political in the narrowest sensewe might even say it is

meant as public relationsthe means by which metaphors function is
independent of such intention. Swords and storms carry different
meanings; that is, they have different entailments and as such shape a
labeled object, such as a military action, in different ways."-3 Paul Chilton
recently used metaphor as an analytic starting point to examine the heart of

Cold War security discourse. In the conclusion to Security Metaphors, Chilton
explains how metaphor relates to policy: Metaphor is an element in the
discourse of policymaking; it does not drive policy. . . . It would be absurd to
reduce the Cold War to the influence of metaphor. However, both cognitive
analysts of policymaking and historians of the Cold War have noted the part
played by analogical reasoning and by metaphor. Whatever distinctions
might be drawn between the two terms analogy and metaphor, they can
both be treated as manifestations of the cognitive process whereby one thing
is seen in terms of another.24 The common understanding of metaphor is
that it is a literary technique, allowing an author to provide descriptive depth
and allegorical commentary by establishing a relationship between two
separate objects or ideas. Chilton argues that metaphors are much more
than this, that metaphor is an indispensable ingredient of thought itself.25
Policymakers address problems by means of what I have called images
that is, the student or policymaker constructs an image of a problem, of an
issue, or even of other actors. This image relates the thing imagined to
another, in terms of which the first is understood . This act of relation is
crucial both to understanding and to the scholarly act of interpretation that

follows. Metaphors compose the images used to structure and support our
understanding of a problem and therefore our response to that problem. The
choice of Desert Storm over Desert Sword is designed to foster political

support for a policy problem by imagining the operation in terms of a
force of nature it would be nonsensical to oppose. We might decry the
devastation caused by weather, but we would look a bit foolish marching
on Washington to bring an end to hurricanes. The general relationships
among the image of a policy problem, the condition of the problem itself, and
the policy solution to that problemhowever, allow these ideas to be given a
much wider scope than they would receive as a form of public relations. In
Security Metaphors Chilton provides a detailed and rigorous examination of
the role of metaphor in Cold War security. Specifically, he explores the way in
which three metaphors were central to the understandings that gave rise
first to the Cold War and later to its end. He looks first at how the metaphor
of security and then the related metaphor of containment emerged from
attempts within the U.S. state to make sense of the postwar era. In the final
part of his book, Chilton turns to the end of the Cold War and to the place of
architectural metaphors, particularly the common house, in producing the
Cold Wars end. The metaphors of security, containment, and the common
house did more than simply support a policy choice; they structured the way
in which we can think about problems and thus shape that choice in the first
place. I am not a professional linguist, and I do not intend to provide the kind
of detailed analysis of metaphor in political discourse Chilton gives of the
opening and closing phases of the Cold War. I am concerned, however, with
the way in which discursive images frame security problems, constituting
them as problems of a particular kind and thereby making possible certain
policy options while precluding others. This productive function of frames is
most readily seen through the role of metaphor in producing understandings

and actions. To show how this happens, I will consider an example provided
by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in a work that has been central to the
use of metaphor as an analytic tool in the social sciences, which forms an
important basis for Chiltons later work.26 The image and the metaphors
contained within that image frame a problem in a particular way , so as to
highlight certain possibilities while precluding others. Lakoff and Johnson
argue: Every description will highlight, downplay, and hidefor example: Ive
invited a sexy blonde to our dinner party. Ive invited a renowned cellist to
our dinner party. Ive invited a Marxist to our dinner party. Ive invited a
lesbian to our dinner party. Though the same person may fit all of these
descriptions, each description highlights different aspects of the person.
Describing someone who you know has all of these properties as a sexy
blonde is to downplay the fact that she is a renowned cellist and a Marxist
and to hide her lesbianism.27 It is not difficult to imagine a similar set of
descriptors of direct relevance to international relations: I have invited a

Nobel Prize winner to the discussion. I have invited a prime minister to the
discussion. I have invited a noted freedom fighter to the discussion. I have
invited a former terrorist to the discussion. These four descriptors could
all be applied to a single individual, and indeed they have been applied to
at least one individual. Just as each of the epithets Lakoff and Johnson apply
to their hypothetical dinner guest highlights and downplays or hides various

parts of the person in question, so do those of my discussant. The

description, given to another member of the group, forms a key part of the
image of her fellow discussant. Indeed, having no other image on the basis
of which to frame behavior toward this person, she will base her actions
on the image created by that description. The first epithet downplays the
high political office of the individual in question and hides her former terrorist
activity. Similarly, the epithet terrorist downplays or hides the persons prime
ministerial role, as well as her status as a Nobel laureate. Not only will the
image of the other discussant be altered in relation to each descriptor, but so
will that persons conversational strategies and interests. Indeed, it is not
difficult to imagine that someone who would happily sit at a table with a
person described as a Nobel Prize winner might refuse the invitation to sit
with a former terrorist. There is a fairly serious concern with Lakoff and
Johnsons formulation of the role of metaphor in our understanding. They
speak of grounding our conceptual system in terms of simple elements of
our everyday lives that we can experience directly, without social mediation.
Thus. for example, spatial metaphors of up and down, in and out are
based on our experiences of the worldwe have an inside and an outside,
we stand erect, we sleep lying down and rise when we awaken.28 Lakoff and
Johnson have been criticized for betraying a biological bias, and although
they clearly want to ground metaphors in part on our unmediated
physiological grounding: In other words, these natural kinds of experience
are products of human nature. Some may be universal, while others will vary
from culture to culture.29 Nevertheless, the very idea of grounding tends to
assume a hierarchy of knowledge and the possibility of preconstituted
experience that is not socially mediated. We do not need to accept this
possibility of presocial knowledge, however, to make use of their insights
into metaphor. Earlier I quoted Paul Chilton to the effect that analogy and
metaphor . . . can both be treated as manifestations of the cognitive
process whereby one thing is seen in terms of another.30 This formulation
the relationship between metaphor and cognition precisely echoes a passage
from David Campbells Politics Without Principle, in which he argues that as
understanding involves rendering the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar,
there is always an ineluctable debt to interpretation such that there is
nothing outside discourse.31 Both Chilton and Campbell argue that we
confront new phenomena by establishing relationships to old phenomena
that we understand, or at least understand in a particular way. Campbells
further point is that these relations are relations between discourses
that is, the familiar is not preconstituted but rather enters into knowledge
through its discursive construction. There is therefore no possibility of
grounding our understanding in the manner Lakoff and Johnson suggest,

because no hierarchy of truth exists to provide a ground for metaphorical
reference. Nevertheless, the role of metaphor cannot be discounted but
rather must be slightly refigured. Instead of being seen as the linguistic link
between levels of experience (or between the literal and the figurative),32
metaphor becomes a bridge between realms of discourse. Metaphor is a
central tool for the act of rendering to which Campbell refers: the unfamiliar

is related to the familiar, in part, through the creation metaphorical links. *1
Consider again the earlier example I derived from Lakoff and Johnson: the
individual described as a Nobel Prize winner, a prime minister, a freedom

fighter, or a terrorist. We might expect that this example means there is a
person who is each of these things, that her characteristics are
prediscursive. Even if we reject the possibility of the prediscursive, however,
in other words, if we accept that nothing exists outside discourse, we can
retain all that is important in this argument. Each epithet relates to a
particular discourse or set of discourses and can be seen as an indicator of
a discursively constituted identity. This is most obvious in the relation
between terrorist and freedom fighter. These labels are identity markers
constituted in particular discourses rather than in any particular features of
the individual in question or her activities. In other words, we can think of the
distinctions among highlighting, downplaying, and hiding in terms of the
evocation of particular discursive representations. To use the epithet
terrorist is to evoke one discourse with a certain set of entailments that
go along with it, whereas using the epithet freedom fighter evokes a
different discourse and a different set of entailments. Generally, the use of
freedom fighter downplays the role of the individual in perpetrating acts of

violence, a role highlighted by the entailments of terrorist. This is not always
the case, however. The use of freedom fighter by the Reagan administration
in the 1980s meant that in certain circles the term has come to be a
pejorative and not only entails the role of the individual so named in
perpetrating acts of violence but marks those acts as violence in the cause of
a reactionary politics. This difference in the entailments of the same label in
different Circumstances is important, because it demonstrates that not only
does metaphor link discourses but that the production of those links depends
on the discursive context in which the metaphor is evoked. Metaphors are
not grounded in a real or literal experience; further, even the discursive
connections they create are never entirely stable. Clearly, such a conception
of understanding, and of the discursive construction of knowledge, carries its
own problems. The most commonly raised concern is with the conclusion
Campbell stated earlier as there is nothing outside discourse. Certainly, to
a community of security scholars and practitioners, the idea that there is
only language is anathema. As Stephen Walt warned in a noted article,
Issues of war and peace are too important for the field to be diverted into a
prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world.33
The implication is obvious: there is a real world out there with which security
scholars must be concerned because it gives rise to war if we are not careful.
However, Campbell does not say there is nothing but discourse but rather
that there is nothing outside discourse. Although the difference between
the two seem insignificant, it is far from it. If we want to assert a real world
entirely divorced from discourse, our own bodies are a likely place to
start. Those who argue for unmediated access to the real world, argue, in
fact, for access through our bodies whether that is sight, touch, or smell. To
continue with the example I have been using, although it might be accepted

that Nobel laureate, prime minister, freedom fighter, and terrorist refer to
socially constituted roles or identities, surely there is still a persons body on
which these labels are hung and that exists without and prior to the labels.
Judith Butler has examined the way in which the body is constituted in
discourse. She argues that the body is no more outside discourse than
anything else, but that does not deny the materiality of the body: to
claim that discourse is formative [of the body] is not to claim that it
originates, causes, or exhaustively composes the body.34 Butler is not
arguing that there are no bodies or that our material bodies come into being
only when they are named in discourse; her argument is that any reference
to that material body in discourse constructs it in a particular way. To refer
to a particular body as terrorist or prime ministerial is to situate it in a
particular discourse. Importantly, to refer to that same body as man,
woman, or, indeed, even as body is to situate it in a particular

discourse and to construct it as that object. Butler makes this case in its
strongest possible terms by arguing that any attempt to identify the
extradiscursive in order to ground discourse is to boundary between the
discursive and the extradiscursive. This boundary, however, is a product of
our act of identification; that is, the so-called extradiscursive is also created
through discourse.35 This point causes considerable confusion, and so the
argument is worth stating at some length. The point is that any reference,
even reference to the label body, is an act of saying that the object is this
kind of thing and not that kind of thingbut the kinds in question are
always ultimately conventional. Consider, for instance, the limits that
define a particular body as a womans body. The most obvious convention

is that defining the lower age limit: at what point does a body cease being
a girls body and become a womans body? It is impossible to answer this
question without reference to a set of malleable norms. In some societies a
womans body is determined by the capacity to reproduce. In
contemporary British society that body emerges in stages, depending on
the context in which the question is posed. For the purposes of consensual
sexual relations, the body emerges at 16; however, in terms of its capacity
to exercise political franchise, the body becomes a womans body when it
is 18 years old. For a male body the situation has been even more strange;
until 1999 in terms of its sexual capacity the body became a man's body
instead of a boys body at different ages depending on the sex of its partner
the body was a mans body for purposes of sexual relations with women at
age 16 but only at age 18 for sex with another man. We can ask similar
questions about the limits between womens and mens bodies: What sort of
body is that of the transsexual or the hermaphrodite? It is even possible

to see the discursive limitations of the body itself, without considering it
as a sexed body of any kind Are prostheses parts of the body? In the case
of eyeglasses, I expect most of us would say no. In the case of artificial
limbs, I expect we would be less likely (and less inclined) to say no
automatically. In the case of artificial organs, we would be hard-pressed to
say no. None of these answers is certain, however, and none can be
answered with reference to some extradiscursive truth. There is therefore

no need to deny the materiality of bodies, or of any other object, to assert
that there is nothing outside of discourse. Rather, we must recognize that to
know an object or to act on it or in relation to it, that object must enter
into discourse. Arguing from a rather different position from that of
Campbell or Butler, George Lakoff comes to remarkably similar conclusions in

his more recent work: Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly.
There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought,
perception, action and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of
thing, for example, a tree, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason about
kinds of thingschairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind of thing at are

employing categories. Whenever we intentionally perform any kind of action,
say something as mundane as writing with a pencil, hammering with a
hammer, or ironing clothes, we are using categories. . . . Without the ability
to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or
in our social and intellectual lives.36 It is through this act of
categorization, or naming, that an object is constituted as an object for
the purposes of engagement. How we act toward an object depends on
what kind of object it is. How we act in such a relationship also depends on
what kind of we we are. That is, our identity that The way in which other
discussants will engage with the prime ministerial terrorist will vary just as
much by how each identifies herself as by which epithet is used to
characterize the other. It is important to recognize, however, that identity is
also the result of categorization, of grouping those like as self and
those different as other. If we want to understand a particular; form of
engagementfor example, international engagement with weapons

proliferationwe need to look at the way the objects and identities of those
engaged have been constructed: What kind of thing is weapons proliferation,
and what is it not? Who is involved in the proliferation agenda, and of what
kind are they? How are the various elements of the proliferation agenda
referred to, and therefore into what discursive contexts are they set? These
are questions I address in the remaining chapters of this book.
Tricks
Coherence bad
Civil society is defined in negation to the black body the focus on
coherent and contingent impacts is complicit with Whiteness
Wilderson 10
Frank the realest. Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. pgs. 108-118. PWoods.
before the healthy rancor and repartee that represent the

cornerstone of civil society
can get underway,
civil society must be relatively stable. But how is this stability to be
achieved, and for whom? For Black people, civic stability is a state of
As noted above,
(be it in the boardroom, at the polling booth, in the bedroom, or on the analysts couch)
emergency
the stability of civil society is
a state of emergency for Blacks
the zone of the
Human (or non-Black
it the zone of the
[postcolonial native]) has rules within the zone that allow for existence
of Humanist interactioni.e., Lacans psychoanalytic encounter and/or
Gramscis proletarian struggle. This stems from the different paradigms of
zoning mentioned earlier in terms of Black zones (void of Humanist
interaction) and White zones (the quintessence of Humanist interaction ).
The zone where the native lives is not complementary to the zone
inhabited by the settler. The two zones are opposed,
. Frantz Fanon (Wretched) and Martinot and Sexton (The Avant-garde of White Supremacy) explain why
. Fanon writes of zones. For our purposes, we want to bear in mind the following:
notwithstanding the fact that Fanon is a little too loose and liberal with his language when he calls
but not in the service of higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure
Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluousThe settlers town is a town of white people, of foreigners. (Wretched 38-39) This is the
basis of his assertion that two zones produce two different species. The phrase not in service of higher unity dismisses any kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis. Fanons specific context does not share the same
historical or national context of Martinot and Sexton, but the settler/native dynamic, the differential zoning and the gratuity (as opposed to contingency) of violence which accrue to the blackened position, are shared by the two
The dichotomy
between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its irrelevance to
the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are
incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of
policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events
texts. Martinot and Sexton assert the primacy of Fanons Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity) even when faced with the facticity of American integration:
high profile homicides and
their related courtroom battles, for instance [emphasis mine]. (Martinot and Sexton 6) It makes no difference that in the USA the casbah and the European zone are laid one on top of the other, because what is being asserted
here is the schematic interchangeability between Fanons settler society and Sexton and Martinots policing paradigm. (Whites in America are now so settled they no longer call themselves settlers.) For Fanon, it is the policeman and
the US
paradigm of policing (re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the
civil society/Black void, by virtue of the difference between those bodies
that dont magnetize bullets and those bodies that do
White
people are
deputized in the face of Black people
soldier (not the discursive, or the hegemonic agents) of colonialism that make one town White and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of
which
. Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself
and the elsewhere that mandates itthe distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying (Martinot and Sexton 8). In such a paradigm
, ipso facto,
, whether they know it (consciously) or not.
Until the recent tapering
off of weekly lynching in the 1960s, Whites were called upon as individuals to perform this deputation. The 1914 Ph.D. dissertation of H. M. Henry (a scholar in no way hostile to slavery), The Police Control of the Slave in South
Carolina, reveals how vital this performance was in the construction of Whiteness for the Settlers of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, as well as for the Settler-scholar (Henry himself) of the 1900s: The evolution of the patrol system is
interesting. The need of keeping the slaves from roving was felt from the very first. Among the earliest of the colonial acts in 1686 is one that gave any person the right to apprehend, properly chastise, and send home any slave who
might be found off his masters plantation without a ticket. This plan was not altogether effective, and in 1690 it was made the duty of all persons under penalty of forty shillings to arrest and chastise any slave [found] out of his
home plantation without a proper ticket. This plan of making it everybodys business to punish wandering slaves seems to have been sufficient at least for a time. (28-29) But today this process of species division does not turn
Blacks into species and produce Whites with the existential potential of fully realized subjectivity in the same spectacular fashion as the spectacle of violence that Henry wrote of in South Carolina and that Fanon was accustomed to
Algeria. In fact, Martinot and Sexton maintain that attention to the spectacle causes us to think of violence as contingent upon symbolic transgressions rather than thinking of it as a matrix for the simultaneous production of Black
death and White civil society: The spectacular event camouflages the operation of police law as contempt, police law is the fact that there is no recourse to the disruption of [Black] peoples lives by these activities. (6) By no
Black people themselves serve a vital function as the living

markers of gratuitous violence
to be Black is to be beyond the limit of contingency
This
gives the bodies of the rest of society
some form of coherence (a
contingent rather than gratuitous relationship to violence
recourse the authors are suggesting that
. And the spectacular event is a scene that draws attention away from the paradigm of violence. It functions as a crowding out scenario.
Crowding out our understanding that, where violence is concerned,
thereby
(Humans)
):
In fact, to focus on the spectacular event of
police violence is to deploy (and thereby affirm) the logic of police profiling itself. Yet, we cant avoid this logic once we submit to the demand to provide examples or images of the paradigm [once we submit to signifying practices].
As a result, the attempt to articulate the paradigm of policing renders itself non-paradigmatic, reaffirms the logic of police profiling and thereby reduces itself to the fraudulent ethic by which white civil society rationalizes its
existence [emphasis mine]. (6-7) The fraudulent ethic by which white civil society rationalizes its existence endures in articulations between that species with actual recourse to the disruption of life (by the policing paradigm)
and another member of the same species, such as the dialogue between news reporter and a reader, between a voter and a candidate, or between an analyzed and his/her contemporaries. Recourse to the disruption of life is the
first condition upon which a conflict between entified signification and a true language of desire, a non-egoic language of contemporaries, full speech, can be staged: one must first be on the policing side, rather than the policed
side, of that division made possible by the violence matrix. In other words, where violence is concerned, one must stay on this side of the wall of contingency (just as one must stay on this side of the wall of language by operating
Whiteness, then, and by extension

civil societys junior partners, cannot be solely represented as some
monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must , in the first
ontological instance, be understood as a formation of contemporaries
who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction
within the Symbolic) to enable full speech. Both matrixes, violence and alienation, precede and anticipate the species.

through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifest in
the fact that they are
deputized against those who do magnetize
bullets
White people are not simply protected by the police, they are
the police
, if only by default,
: in short,
Martinot and Sexton claim that the White subject-effects of todays policing paradigm are more banal than the White subject-effects of Fanons settler paradigm. For Martinot and Sexton, they cannot
be explained by recourse to the spectacle of violence. Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform that is producing re-racialization (Martinot and Sexton 8). This re-racialization echoes
Fanons assertion that the cause is the consequence. You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich (Fanon Wretched40). Whereas in Fanons settler paradigm this White/rich/rich/White circularity
It marks the
difference between those who are alive, the subjects of civil society, and
those who are
socially dead
the species of absolute
dereliction
the subject of civil society is the species that does

not magnetize bullets, though s/he does not necessarily perform any
advocacy of police practices or of the policing paradigm
the civic stability of the 21st century U.S. slave estate is no
longer every White persons duty to perform. In fact, many Whites on the
Left actually perform progressive opposition to the police, but each
performance of progressive opposition encounters
internal
limitation The supposed secrets of white supremacy get sleuthed in its
spectacular displays
It
signifies the passive acceptance of the idea that race, considered to be
either a real property of a person or an imaginary projection, is not
essential to the social structure, a system of social meanings and
categorizations. It is the same passive apparatus of whiteness that in its
mainstream guise actively forgets [in a way in which settlers of the first
three centuries simply could not] that it owes its existence to the killing
and terrorizing of those it racializes for the purpose, expelling them from
the human fold in the same gesture of forgetting
manifests itself in the automatic accrual of life producing potential, in Martinot and Sextons paradigm of policing it manifests itself in the automatic accrual of life itself.
fatally alive (Marriott 16), or
(Fanon, Wretched).
(Patterson),
Again,
the way s/he had to in the H.M. Henrys 19th century
South Carolina. As Martinot and Sexton argue,
what Martinot and Sexton call
a certain
, in pathology and instrumentality, or pawned off on the figure of the rogue cop. Each approach to race subordinates it to something that is not race, as if to continue
the noble epistemological endeavor of getting to know it better. But what each ends up talking about is that other thing. In the face of this, the lefts anti-racism becomes its passion. But its passion gives it away.
. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as what goes without
saying the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since what goes without saying is empty and can be held as truth only through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and
repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform. (7-9) A truth without depth, flat, repetitive, on the surface? This unrepresentable subject-effect is more complex than H.M. Henrys early Settler performances of communal
The gratuitousness of its repetition bestows upon white

supremacy an inherent discontinuity
Its acts of repetition are its
access to unrepresentability; they dissolve its excessiveness into
invisibility as simply daily occurrence
There is no dark corner that, once brought to the light of reason, will
solidarity in part because:
. It stops and starts self-referentially, at whim. To theorize some political, economic, or psychological necessity for its
repetition, its unending return to violence, its need to kill is to lose a grasp on that gratuitousness by thinking its performance is representable.
. Whatever mythic content it pretends to claim is a priori empty. Its secret is that it has no depth.
unravel its system
[I]ts truth lies in the rituals that sustain its circuitous contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but its very practices [emphasis mine]. (10) To claim that the paradigm of
policing has no mythic content, that its performance is unrepresentable, and that there is no political, economic, or psychological necessity for its repletion is to say something more profound than merely civil society exists in
an inverse relation to its own claims. It is to say something more than what the authors say outright: that this inversion translates today in the police making claims and demands on the institutionality of civil society and not the
gratuitousness violencea
violence that cannot be represented but which positions species
nonetheless
, for Blacks, violence is a matrix of (im)possibility, a
paradigm of ontology as opposed to a performance that is contingent
upon symbolic transgressions
other way around. The extended implication of Sexton and Martinots claim is much more devastating. For this claim, with its emphasis on the
of
rearticulates Fanons notion that
Alienation, however, that Lacanian matrix of symbolic and imaginary castration, on which codes are made and broken and full (or empty)
speech is possible, comes to appear, by way of the psychoanalytic encounter, as the essential matrix of existence. We are in our place, Lacan insists, on this side of the wall of language. (Ecrits 101) It is the grid on which the
analysand can short circuit somatic compliance with hysterical symptoms and bring to a halt, however temporarily, the egoic monumentalization of empty speech. Thus, the psychoanalytic encounter in general, and Lacanian full
speech in particular, work to crowd out the White subjects realization of his/her positionality by way of violence. It is this crowding-out scenario that allows the analysand of full speech to remain White, but cured (a liberated
the slave
represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation
of values
he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive
element, destroying
master?). And, in addition, the scenario itself weighs in as one more of civil societys enabling accompaniments (like voting, coalition building, and interracial love) for the production of
that entity:
insensible to ethics; he [sic]
. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense
all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious
and irretrievable instrument of blind forces (Fanon, Wretched 41)

Their emphasis on coherence reifies civil society
Wilderson 2002
Frank B III, killed white supremacists in S. Africa A.K.A. The realest. The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal. Presented at the
Imprisoned Intellectuals Conference Brown University. April 13 th, 2002. PWoods.
Decolonization
is
, a program of
complete disorder
we must accept the fact that no other body functions
in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository
of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute
dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the
Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil
society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is , or
can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the
level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for
the chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or
Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog a past, without a heritage .
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary
for whoever says rape says Black,
whoever says prison says Black, and
whoever says AIDS says Black
the Negro is a phobogenic object
Indeed a phobogenic object & a past without a heritage & the map of
gratuitous violence &a program of complete disorder. But whereas this
realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for
lament, or worse, disavowal not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a
truly revolutionary movement
Black liberation, as a prospect,
makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the
specter of some alternative polity
but because its
condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a
negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm , a program
of complete disorder. One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence and
allow oneself to be elaborated by it
If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes,
, which sets out to change the order of the world,
, obviously
(37) then
(Fanon),
(Sexton)
(Fanon).
such as prison abolition.
(like socialism, or community control of existing resources)
, if indeed ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If this is not the desire which
underwrites ones politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word prison being linked to the word, abolition? What are this movements lines of political accountability? Theres nothing foreign, frightening, or even
The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by

disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one , for
example, has ever been known to say gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would
end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. But few so-called radicals
desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence
of Blackness and the state of political movements in America today is
marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: gee-whiz, if only Black rage could
be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. Perhaps theres something
more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex
(unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer
to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society with hegemony as a
handy prophylactic
But if
they try to do the work of
abolition that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of
coherence
on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject
social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of
coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions opera ting
within the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary
promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms they
simply feed our frustration.
the positionality of the Black subject
gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence
of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war.
unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence.
, just in case.
(i.e. the worker)
, through this stasis, or paralysis,
prison
, or
prison slave. In this way,
Whereas the positionality of the worker be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a
social wage gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society,
be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting

A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a
politically enabling site
of absolute dereliction: a scandal which rends
civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never
forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings,
an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation)
but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.
, to quote Fanon,
Desensitization (K affs)
Their focus on solely physical violence is a product of
whiteness and desensitizes us to violence
Green and Shahjahan 13
Qiana and Riyad A., Professors at Michigan State U. Unpacking Desensitization, Whiteness, and Violence, Journal of Curriculum and
Pedagogy. 10(2). pgs. 130-133. PWoods.
As we, two scholars of color, learned about the Boston marathon bombings
recently, we simultaneously felt both indifferent and guilty for not feeling
muchdesensitization. We experienced a similar desensitization following
the Sandy Hook school shootings. Why did we feel desensitized?
over time the racially minoritized in U.S. society
become indifferent toward these violent events by repeatedly seeing and
hearing the same types of victims.
this repeated coverage
discourages any form of advocacy against violence since our emotional
responses to violent events lessen over time. Due to Whiteness
the racially majoritized become desensitized to the
experiences of people of color, and people of color become desensitized to
their own and the dominant groups experiences. To address this
desensitization, we suggest a more holistic definition of violence that
moves beyond an exclusively physical focus to also include non-physical
forms that many of us
experience daily
portraying physical violence appears the priority .
such representation
leaves out the non-physical forms of violenceincluding
misrepresentation, invisibility, lack of resources, forced assimilation,
invalidation of ones history, absence of diverse perspectives,
microaggressions, and bodily misrecognitionsthat comprise the daily
racially minoritized experience
Put together, we believe these nonphysical forms of violence as vestiges of colonial domination are
significant and detrimental to the experiences of the racially minoritized.
Yet, by not representing or discussing these other forms of violence
we increasingly become desensitized to mainstream physical
violence as we increasingly feel negated or unheard
Whiteness continues to carry the power to define violence and allocate
value among social groups
, Black males are perceived as
threatening and continue to suffer devastating consequences, such as
racial profiling, mistaken incarceration, and death
while the media
focused on George Zimmerman, stereotypes and assumptions leading to
the killing of 17-year old Trayvon Martin remained unquestioned. Through
biased stories, the media exacerbates paranoia, reinforces existing fear,
and justifies the logic of expendability toward people of color
Unchallenged, the racially minoritized internalize the effects of Whiteness,
furthering selfharm and contributing to a community of violence against
people of color
Not questioning this behavior supports the exclusion
of our experiences, not just via news media, but within spaces designed to
protect and serve all people, such as legislation, political systems, and
educational environments.
Why didnt we sympathize or
empathize with the victims of these two events? We suggest that
More significantly,
(a particular system of racial
domination that elevates White people over people of color),
(i.e., the racially minoritized)
(albeit in varying degrees due to our social positionality). Among media outlets,
However,
(Smith, 2005).
(which interconnect
with physical violence),
. Due to a history of colonial hegemony,
. For instance, because of colonial histories
. Most recently,
(Smith, 2006).
(Smith, 2005).
Impact Calc
Policy
The gratuitous violence against the black body shatters
traditional impact calculus
1. Root Causality
Social death is modeled and perfected on black body
the ability to oppress, manipulate, and exploit is
outwardly applied to all bodies since the dawn of
Europes landing on this continent
2. The ability to police and mark bodies one of the biggest
modern examples is the National Security Agency
policing of bodies justified by the external desire to
secure and protect society from threats to society this
macro level policing of bodies was first utilized to secure
the slave psychological manipulation and brutalize tools
meant to strike fear into the human stripped of its rights
3. Perfection of modern enslavement ie the Prison
Industrial complex Black bodies are incarcerated at a
rate of double that of white bodies regardless of if they
are Latino or European. This institutional normalization of
violent imprisonment furthers a culture
4. Magnitude civil society, since its forced engagement on
this continent has been defined by Black Death and red
genocide this violence hasnt been progressively
removed, merely relabeled. From the fields to factories
exclusion hasnt changed. It doesnt matter how much
money you make or how many degrees you have if you
are the wrong shade of black you can be stopped and
frisked.
Their impacts are non-unique blacks are always-already socially
dead
Wilderson8
{Frank B; Professor at UC IRVINE and member of ANC; Absence of subjective presence Biko Lives; pg 97-98; Other sections are by Andile Mngxitama; Amanda Alexander and Nigel
Gibson; Published by Palgrave Macmillan; July 8 2008}AvP


the evasive aspects of affect from interpretation of reality. Building on lewis gordons ontological
schema of absence and presence that is a reconstruction and elaboration of fanons ontological arguments in Black skin White masks, I designate three
layers of black absence subjective, cartographic and political, through which
we might read the cheering that erupted as affective (rather than discursive)
symptoms of an ontological discovery. The world cannot accommodate a
blackened relation at the level of bodies subjectivity. Thus, Black presence
is a form of absence for to see a black is to see the black an ontological
frienze that waits for a gaze, rather than a living ontology moving with
agency in the field of vision. The Blacks moment of recognition by the other
is always already blackness upon which supplements are lavished- American,
Caribbean, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. But the supplements are superfluous rather
than substantive they dont unblacken. As Gordon points out, there is
something absent whenever blacks are present. The more present a black is
the more absent is this something. And the more absent a black is, the more
present is this something. Blackness, then, is the destruction of presence, for
blacks seem to suck presence into themselves as a black hole, pretty much
like the astrophysical phenomenon that bears that name.
Kritikal
The ontological violence against the black body turns and
outweighs the aff Root cause - The social death of blacks sets the preconditions
for all violence
Taylor 2013


Hence, the moment where civil society is established through the violent act of slavery is not a historical incident. Rather, civil society functions
1. Even if you dont buy our root cause arguments, well win
the K magnifies the risk of their impacts and guts
solvency any risk of a link proves the affs impacts are

inevitable as dehumanization is always-already occurring
against blacks
Their discourse of emancipation reifies the fungibility of the slave
by transforming images of suffering into an advertisement for the
advancement of their own political agenda.
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one

of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent
in the ANCs armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics Red, White, &
Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 26-28) GG
Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is that the pre-Columbian period, the Late Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on these three questions as
they might be related to that massive group of Black-skinned people south of the Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led to Britain
taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the Virginia
Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late-18th century emancipatory thrustintra-Human disputes such as the French and American
Revolutionsthat swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this. Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the
. It is highly conceivable that the discourse

that elaborates the justification for freeing the slave is not the
product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously
recognized the slave. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses
present themselves to us as further evidence of the Slaves
fungibility: [T]he figurative capacities of blackness enable white
flights of fancy while increasing the likelihood of the captives
disappearance (Scenes22). First, the questions of Humanism were
elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the Africanqua-chattel (the 1200s to the end of the 17th century). Then, as the presence of Black chattel
in the midst of exploited and un-exploited Humans (workers and
bosses, respectively) became a fact of the world, exploited
Humans (in the throes of class conflict with un-exploited Humans)
animated the evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as
un-exploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase
their profits. Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that
marks everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it
starts to mark the Black ontologically, the so-called great
emancipatory discourses of modernitymarxism, feminism,
postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement
political discourses predicated on grammars of suffering and
whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation,
might not have developed. Chattel slavery did not simply
reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the
Human out of culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East.
Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses
K Prior (K affs)
Blackness is the prior ontological void upon which the rest of
society is constructed.
Pak 12 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary
Lineage of Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, 2012. Dissertation through Proquest)
Hartmans work in African American cultural studies, wherein she problematizes the notion
of empathy as a useful or neutral structure of feeling. In Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
I turn here to
Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman recounts John Rankins letter to his brother, where he describes
how deeply moved he was after witnessing a slave coffle. He writes that his imagination forces him to believe, for the moment,
that I myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for myself, my
This notation of beginning to feel,

where the feeling supplants reality, is the point of Hartmans contention
and my intervention. As she writes, in making the slaves suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather
than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to read. Or, in other words, the ease of Rankins
empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt
opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body (19). Rankin can feel
black because blackness is fungible: blackness is simultaneously tradable and replaceable. This is precisely what
Wilderson critiques as the ruse of analogy . He writes that this ruse
erroneously locates Blacks in the world a place where they have not
been since the dawning of Blackness, and continues that this attempt at
analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blacknesss
grammar of suffering (Red, White & Black 37). In other words, Rankin is able to feel for himself, his wife and his
wife, and my children (Scenes of Subjection 18, emphasis mine).
children precisely because the slave is erased in that feeling. He reads himself as analogous to the slave as a means of
understanding his subject status when that analogy misreads and misplaces blackness. I contend Himes is making the same
argument: by creating a figure that critically displaces the idea of a shared humanity, by making Jimmy white, he negates an
identificatory practice which grounds itself on an eventual recognition of subjectivity, or an insertion into civil society. Hence, Himes
voids the novel of blackness (except for the most periphery figures) precisely because blackness is constituted through the absence
of relationality itself. Furthermore, I posit that Jimmys whiteness is symptomatic of Afro-pessimism via the quandary David Marriott
poses in his scholarship, where he challenges us to question how we can understand black identity when, through an act of
mimetic desire, this identity already gets constructed as white (Haunted Life 208). Marriott re-reads Fanons seminal encounter with
a young white boy in Black Skin, White Masks, and an anecdote of a little black girl attempting to scrub herself clean of racial
markings, not as encounters of interpellation, but as intensely fraught moments of violent phobic recognition of the self as
something hateful and hated. Marriott states, [i]n these two scenes a suppressed but noticeable anger and confusion arises in
response to the intruding other (the other being the little white child for Fanon, and her own image for the little girl) and that this
response has to do with the realization that the other, as racial imago, has already occupied and split the subjects ego (210).49 It
is not that blackness is set in Hegelian opposition to whiteness as the O/other, but rather that blackness is dependent on whiteness
blackness is not something missing, but

rather the addition of something undesirable and dirty that fragments
the body by destroying all positive semblances of the self. This
addition of blackness results in the selfs desire to hurt the imago of
the body in a passionate bid to escape it (210). In this reading of Fanon, Marriott offers his
contribution to the field of Afro-pessimism: even on a psychic level, within the discourse of
self and ontology, blackness is null and void. The black body is occupied
by a white unconscious, one that loves his/herself as white, and hates
his/herself as black.50 As Marriott writes in the introduction to On Black Men, [t]he black man is, in other words,
always already having been present. In other words,
everything that the wishful-shameful fantasies of culture want him to be, an enigma of inversion and of hate and this is our
existence as men, as black men (On Black Men x). themselves, that indeed, this prototypical identification with whiteness is a
foundational culture and tradition which can be neither avoided nor eluded (55 56). The absence of a black interiority is also
addressed by Kevin Bell as he examines the 1953 meeting between Himes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin at Les Deux Magots in
Paris. Bell writes that many of Himess literary contemporaries, including Wright and Baldwin, are mostly invested in sonorities,
colors, and movements that... constitute little more than added flavorings, punctuations and accents by which to augment an
already- established, normative white interiority (Assuming 853). This is in contrast to Himes, who waylays coherence and a
structured black subjectivity for the suffocating thickness of a crazy, wild-eyed feeling which is the discord always present in the
black unconscious, or the realization that one has always been, and will always be, at war with oneself (856). Jimmy thinks that he
could see his mind standing just beyond his reach, like a white, weightless skeleton (Yesterday 52). His mind is not his to grasp,
always just beyond his reach, and is imagined as a white figure of death.
It is impossible to incorporate Jimmy and his

mind in much the same way as it is impossible to bring blackness into relationality, or

to enfold him within civil society. To do so would lead to the logical unfolding present in Wildersons work,
and one which Himes articulates forty years earlier during an interview: [t]he black man can destroy
America completely, destroy it as a nation of any consequence. It can just
fritter away in the world. It can be destroyed completely (My Man Himes 46). In other
words, to make blackness relational is to lead to the incoherence and
Radical Politics demand the questioning of U.S ethics and existenceParadigmatic analysis resolves this as it poses the questions
Wilderson 2010

Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to
the questions asked by radical politics

and scholarship were not Should the U.S. be overthrown ? or even
speak the unspeakable .ii In the 1960s and early 1970s
come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the
U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom
Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were
accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American
Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or
chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of success, but they
could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a

convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an
ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and
progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law
and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.iii One could (and many did) acknowledge
Americas strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather
The political discourse of Blacks,

and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the
U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of
ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the
retreated as did White radicals and progressives who retired from
struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black
remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces.
Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement)
for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not
only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual
revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist.
Paradigmatic analysis addresses the root cause of of antagonismrace and colonialism
Wilderson 2010

Unlike Dyer, I do not meditate on the representational power of Whiteness, that it be made strange, divested of
its imperial capacity, and thus make way for representational practices in cinema and beyond that would serve as
aesthetic accompaniments for a more egalitarian civil society in which Whites and non-Whites could live in
harmony. Laudable as that dream is, I do not share Dyers assumption that we are all Human. Some of us are only
part Human (Savage) and some of us are Black (Slave). I find his argument that Whiteness possesses the easiest
claim to Humanness to be productive. But whereas Dyer offers this argument as a lament for a social ill that needs
a paradigmatic analysis
that clarifies structural relations of global antagonisms and not as a step toward
to be corrected, I borrow it merely for its explanatory poweras a way into

healing the wounds of social relations in civil society. Hence this books interchangeable deployment of White,
Settler, and Master withand to signifyHuman. Again, like Lacan, who mobilizes the psychoanalytic encounter to
make claims about the structure of relations writ large, and like Marx who mobilizes the English manufacturer to
make claims about the structure of economic relations writ large, I am mobilizing three races, four films, and one
the Black/Human antagonism

supercedes the worker/capitalist antagonism in political economy, as
well as the gendered antagonism in libidinal economy. To this end, the book takes
sub-continent to make equally generalizable claims and argue that
stock of how socially engaged popular cinema participates in the systemic violence that constructs America as a
settler society (Churchill) and slave estate (Spillers). Rather than privilege a politics of culture(s)i.e. rather
than examine and accept the cultural gestures and declarations which the three groups under examination make
about themselvesI
privilege a culture of politics: in other words, what I am

concerned with is how White film, Black film and Red film articulate and/or disavow the matrix of
violence which constructs the three essential positions which in turn
structure Americas antagonisms.
Fiat Bad/K prior (Policy aff)

Nothing about voting aff actually does anything in the real world,
fiat disconnects you from your agency because youre pretending to
be something else
Polson 2012

the real world


foreign policy
changes
performance

this position:
. Kenneth explained

And I guess
like back
it takes
to like the
. Like
Their framework causes ressentiment
Antonio 95
(Robert J Antonio, PhD in sociology, professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, July 1995, Nietzsches Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History, American Journal of
Sociology Volume 101 Number 1, GENDER MODIFIED)
the "subject" is Socratic culture's most central, durable

foundation. This prototypic expression of ressentiment, master reification,
and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass discipline
"separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a
neutral substratum . . . free to express strength or not to do so
According to Nietzsche,
. But there is no such substratum;
there is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's "objective" foundations makes its "subjective" features all the
more important. For example, the subject is a central focus of the new human sciences, appearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as causes, and selves as entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and
targets of care (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 47-54). Arguing that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a "remarkable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and
an exterior which fails to correspond to any interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78-79, 83). The "problem of the actor,"
Nietzsche
said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He
considered

"roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed
close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement
persons
in specialized
occupations overidentify with their positions
They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating
effective role players that they have trouble being anything but
actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly
subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity.
The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's
already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integ- rity, decisiveness, spontaneity,
and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible
causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal
dialogue
Nervous rotation of
socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows,"
"abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly
and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play."
"Are you
genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented?
social selves "prefer the copies
to the originals"
Their inwardness and
aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor
cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring networks of
interdependence
Superficiality
rules in the arid subjectivized landscape
''Rather do anything than nothing':
this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture Living in a
constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the
point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and
anticipating others
. While
modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that
(especially male professionals)
and engage in gross fabrica- tions to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the
opinion of others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?"
about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17).
Nietzsche asked,
. . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article;
(Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27).
; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94).
. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday
meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something.
....
."
Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role
attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most medio- cre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socra- tes, and praised their ability to
these impostors amplify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, exploitative, scheming
Social selves are fodder for the
masses
the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely
The deadly combination of desperate conforming and
overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new
type of tyrant
redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities,
, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances. "
man [person] of the
"great
." Nietzsche held that "
- a god, prince,
class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.
(Nietzsche 1986, pp. 137, 168; 1974, pp. 117-18, 213, 288-89, 303-4).
Means you assess the K first and view it through a lens of portability
weve proven the aff doesnt actually cause action which makes
the round a question of scholarship, the entire 1nc was proof that
they produce a flawed, racist scholarship. The only way they can win
policy education is good is if they can prove govt. policies are
completely inclusive every time a policy is enacted. Ill do more
work on this on the K proper.
Random root cause stuff

Root cause - The social death of blacks sets the preconditions
for all violence
Taylor 2013


Anti-Blackness structurally underpins all violencewhile racialized

violence is still a daily reality for people caught in the position of
the slave, the rhetoric of oppression or exploitation alone asks
only how we might redeem this failed American experiment. There
is no analogy for the structural suffering of the slave, meaning
authentic engagement with social violence must begin with the antihuman void known as Blackness
Pak, 12
(Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside Relationality:
Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage of Afro-pessimism in
20th and 21st Century African American Literature, Dissertation through
Proquest)
Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in autobiographical narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by
queer theory and performance studies, as the structural organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being inter in between... intergenric (sic), interdisciplinary, intercultural and therefore
inherently unstable (What is Performance Studies Anyway? 360). My abstract ideation of the dissertation was one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors respective texts from the ways in which they have been read
in particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my research redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes, Baldwin and Jones novels, a despondency and sorrow that seemed to reach beyond the
What does it mean,

to suffer beyond the
individual, beyond the collective, and into the far reaches of paradigmatic
structure What does it mean to exist beyond social oppression and veer
into
structural suffering
Wilderson refutes the possibility of analogizing
blackness with any other positionality in the world. Others may be
oppressed, indeed, may suffer
but only the black, the paradigmatic
slave, suffers structurally
The structural suffering of
blackness seeps into all elements of American history, culture, and life
To theorize blackness is
to begin with the slave ship, in a space that is in actuality no place
individual and collective purportedly represented in these works.
they seem to speculate,
instead
what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls
(Red, White & Black 36)? Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanons splitting of the hair(s) between
social oppression and structural suffering; in other words,
experientially,
. Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I attempt to answer this query, provides the integral term and parameters with which I bind together
queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts.
, and thus I
begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers concept of an American grammar in Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book.
.7 In discussing the

transportation of human cargo across the Middle Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies was a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active
in this mass gathering and transportation, what becomes

illuminated is not only the complete and total deracination of native from
soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness, the
evacuation of will and desire from the body; in other words, we see that
even before the black body there is flesh
Black flesh, which arrives in the United States to be
manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is a primary narrative with its
seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ships hole, fallen, or
escaped overboard These markings
are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed
against blackness
, in the same
moment they are (re)born as blacks, they are doomed to death as slaves
desire (Spillers 67). She contends here that
, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of
discourse, or the reflexes of iconography (67).
(67).
lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh
, and from this beginning Spillers culls an American grammar that grounds itself in the rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation, a grammar that is the
fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes, Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks (Red, White & Black 38). In other words
. This
rupture, I argue, is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal alienation, general dishonor and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which
is constructed with torn flesh, is laid bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not align slavery with labor. The slave can and did work, but what defines him/her as such is
the slaves powerlessness is

heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by
social death and the permanent, violent domination of their selves
that as a dishonored and violated object, the masters whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather,
(Patterson 13).
Spillers radically different kind of cultural continuation finds an articulation of the object status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of slave and black. As Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland
Blackness
functions as a scandal to ontology because
black suffering forms
the ethical backbone of civil society.
slavery
created the Human
the world gave birth
and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of
political discontent, and with these joys and struggles, the Human was
born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between
the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks
It is not my intention (nor of other
Afro-pessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been committed
against black individuals
but rather that the structural
suffering that defines blackness, the violence enacted against blackness
to maintain its positioning outside of civil society, that demarcates the
black as slave, has no horizontal equivalent and, indeed, provides the
logical ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities
other
subjects
retain a body and not the zero degree of flesh
inquire, (h)ow might it feel to be... a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the final analysis, does it mean to suffer? (Sexton and Copeland 53).
, as Wilderson states,
He writes, (c)hattel
did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also
out of cultural disparate identities from Europe to the East... Put another way, through chattel slavery
. (Red, White & Black 20 21)
Again, the African is made black, and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence.
and communities in the United States, or in the world,
; by this I mean that all
(and I use this word quite intentionally)
. As Sexton writes, we
might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not lose your mother (Hartman 2007) (The Curtain of the Sky 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as a political
Afro-pessimists contest the idea

that the modern world is one wherein the price of labor determines the
price of being equally for all people. In this capitalistic reading of the
world, we summon blacks back into civil society by utilizing Marxism
While it is undeniable, of course, that black
bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United
States, we return again to the point that what defines enslavement is
accumulation and fungibility, alongside natal alienation, general dishonor,
and openness to gratuitous violence; the slave, then, is not constituted as
part of the class struggle
The
slave cannot be defined as loss as can the postcolonial subject, the
woman, or the immigrant but can only be configured as lack, as there is
no potential for synthesis within a rubric of antagonism
antagonism
is an irreconcilable
struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not
ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way (The Social Life of Social Death 23). Furthermore,
to assume a
subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy (Gramscis Black Marx 1).
.8 While it is true that labor power is exploited and that the worker is alienated in it, it is also true that workers labor on the commodity, they are not
the commodity itself is, their labor power is (Red, White & Black 50). The slave is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely.
. Wilderson sets up the phrase rubric of
in opposition to rubric of conflict to clarify the positionality of blacks outside relationality. The former

dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions,
whereas the latter is a rubric of
problems that can be posed and conceptually solved (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, (i)f a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject... then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on
the part of institutions (9). Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the slave is not a laborer but what he calls anti- Human, against which Humanity establishes,
In contrast to imagining the black other in opposition

to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists theorize blackness as
being absent in the dialectic, as anti-Human.
maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity (11).
Narratives = prerequisite
Their objectivist observation of reality result in incomplete
knowledge production instead we need personal experience
as well as objective facts
Collins 90
(Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, Former head of the Department of African
American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and the past President of the American Sociological Association Council, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the
Politics of Empowerment, p. 62-65)
A second component of the ethic of caring concerns the appropriateness of emotions in dialogues. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of an argument. Consider Ntozake Shanges description of one of the goals
Im trying
to change the idea of seeing emotions and intellect as distinct faculties
personal expressiveness heals this
dichotomous rift
separating emotion and intellect
of her work: "Our [Western] society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone elses feelings, and yet be very respectable. This, to me, is a travesty
." The
Black womens blues traditions history of
either/or
. For example, in her rendition of "Strange Fruit," Billie Holidays lyrics blend seamlessly with the emotion of her delivery to
render a trenchant social commentary on southern lynching. Without emotion, Aretha Franklins cry for "respect" would be virtually meaningless. A third component of the ethic of caring involves developing the capacity for empathy.
Harriet Jones, a 16-year-old Black woman, explains to her interviewer why she chose to open up to him: "Some things in my life are so hard for me to bear, and it makes me feel better to know that you feel sorry about those things
and would change them if you could." Without her belief in his empathy, she found it difficult to talk. Black women writers often explore the growth of empathy as part of an ethic of caring. For example, the growing respect that the
Black slave woman Dessa and the white woman Rufel gain for one another in Sherley Anne Williams Dessa Rose stems from their increased understanding of each others positions. After watching Rufel fight off the advances of a
white man, Dessa lay awake thinking: "The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadnt knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same
as they could with us." As a result of her newfound empathy, Dessa observed, "it was like we had a secret between us." These components of the ethic of caring: the value placed on individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of
emotions, and the capacity for empathy-pervade African-American culture. One of the best examples of the interactive nature of the importance of dialogue and the ethic of caring in assessing knowledge claims occurs in the use of
the call-and-response discourse mode in traditional Black church services. In such services both the minister and the congregation routinely use voice rhythm and vocal inflection to convey meaning. The sound of what is being said is
it is impossible to filter out the

strictly linguistic-cognitive abstract meaning from the sociocultural
psychoemotive meaning
just as important as the words themselves in what is, in a sense, a dialogue of reason and emotion. As a result
nearly
. While the ideas presented by a speaker must have validity (i.e., agree with the general body of knowledge shared by the Black congregation), the
the ethic of caring may be part of womens

experience
two
contrasting epistemological orientations characterize knowing an
epistemology of separation based on impersonal procedures for
group also appraises the way knowledge claims are presented. There is growing evidence that
as well. Certain dimensions of womens ways of knowing bear striking resemblance to Afrocentric expressions of the ethic of caring. Belenky et al. point out that
: one
establishing truth and

emerges through care
the other,
an epistemology of connection in which truth
. While these ways of knowing are not gender specific, disproportionate numbers of women rely on connected knowing. The emphasis placed on expressiveness
and emotion in African-American communities bears marked resemblance to feminist perspectives on the importance of personality in connected knowing. Separate knowers try to subtract the personality of an individual from his or
her ideas because they see personality as biasing those ideas. In contrast, connected knowers see personality as adding to an individuals ideas and feel that the personality of each group member enriches a groups understanding.
The significance of individual uniqueness, personal expressiveness, and empathy in African-American communities thus resembles the importance that some feminist analyses place on womens "inner voice." The convergence of
Afrocentric and feminist values in the ethic of caring seems particularly acute. White women may have access to a womens tradition valuing emotion and expressiveness, but few Eurocentric institutions except the family validate
this way of knowing. In contrast, Black women have long had the support of the Black church, an institution with deep roots in the African past and a philosophy that accepts and encourages expressiveness and an ethic of caring.
must resolve the contradictions that confront

abstract, unemotional notions
imposed
in access to institutional support valuing one type of
Black men share in this Afrocentric tradition. But they
models of
them in searching for Afrocentric
masculinity in the face of
race/gender groups thus hinge on differences
of masculinity
their
knowing over another
on them. The differences among
. Although Black women may be denigrated within white-male-controlled academic institutions, other institutions, such as Black families and churches, which
encourage the expression of Black female power, seem to do so, in part, by way of their support for an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. The Ethic of Personal Accountability
An ethic of
personal accountability is the final dimension of an alternative

epistemology . Not only must individuals develop their knowledge claims
through dialogue and present them in a style proving their concern for
their ideas but people are expected to be accountable for their
,
knowledge claims
. Zilpha Elaws description of slavery reflects this notion that every idea has an owner and that the owners identity matters: "Oh, the abominations of slavery! ... Every case of
slavery, however lenient its infliction and mitigated its atrocities, indicates an oppressor, the oppressed, and oppression." For Elaw abstract definitions of slavery mesh with the concrete identities of its perpetrators and its victims.
African-Americans consider it essential for individuals to have personal positions on issues and assume full responsibility for arguing their validity.
Assessments of an
individuals knowledge claims simultaneously evaluate an individuals

character, values, and ethics
. African-Americans
reject the Eurocentric, masculinist
belief that probing into an individuals personal viewpoint is outside

the boundaries of discussion
. Rather,
all views expressed and actions taken are

thought to derive from a central set of core beliefs that cannot be other
than personal
. "Does Aretha really believe that Black women should get respect, or is she just mouthing the words?" is a valid question in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology.
Knowledge claims made by individuals respected for their moral and ethical
connections to their ideas will carry more weight
than those offered by less respected figures. An example drawn from an
undergraduate course composed entirely of Black women which I taught might help to clarify the uniqueness of this portion of the knowledge validation process. During one class discussion I asked the students to evaluate a
prominent Black male scholars analysis of Black feminism. Instead of severing the scholar from his context in order to dissect the rationality of his thesis, my students demanded facts about the authors personal biography. They
By requesting data on
dimensions of personal life
excluded in positivist approaches to
knowledge validation, they invoked concrete experience as a criterion of
meaning
were especially interested in concrete details of his life, such as his relationships with Black women, his marital status, and his social class background.
his
routinely
. They used this information to assess whether he really cared about his topic and drew on this ethic of caring in advancing their knowledge claims about his work. Furthermore, they refused to evaluate the
rationality of his written ideas without some indication of his personal credibility as an ethical human being. The entire exchange could only have occurred as a dialogue among members of a class that had established a solid enough
community to employ an alternative epistemology in assessing knowledge claims. The ethic of personal accountability is clearly an Afrocentric value, but is it feminist as well? While limited by its attention to middle-class, white
women, Carol Gilligans work suggests that there is a female model for moral development whereby women are more inclined to link morality to responsibility, relationships, and the ability to maintain social ties. If this is the case,
then African-American women again experience a convergence of values from Afrocentric and female institutions. The use of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology in traditional Black church services illustrates the interactive nature
of all four dimensions and also serves as a metaphor for the distinguishing features of an Afrocentric feminist way of knowing. The services represent more than dialogues between the rationality used in examining bible texts and
Neither
emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason
emotion, ethics, and reason
are used as interconnected , essential components in assessing knowledge
claims
Alternative knowledge
claims
are routinely ignored, discredited, or
simply absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms
stories and the emotion inherent in the use of reason for this purpose. The rationale for such dialogues involves the task of examining concrete experiences for the presence of an ethic of caring.
. Instead,
. In an Afrocentric feminist epistemology, values lie at the heart of the knowledge validation process such that inquiry always has an ethical aim.
in and of themselves are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such claims
, Much more threatening is the challenge
that alternative epistemologies offer to he basic process used by the powerful to legitimate their knowledge claims.
If the epistemology used to validate
knowledge comes into question, then all prior knowledge claims validated
under the dominant model become suspect An alternative epistemology
.
challenges all certified knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. The existence of a self-defined Black womens standpoint using an
Afrocentric feminist epistemology
calls into question the content of what currently passes as
truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at the truth.
Alt = prior question


legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
position.
Whiteness,
. In other words,
. In fact,
after all,
.,,3 A

suffering
Whites who
sequestration from
the real world of
suffering
patience of theory
. Here,
weeping,
, and traumatized
.
Black suffering 1st

We acknowledge the suffering of other races but their impacts are
terminally non-unique blacks have experienced the same injustices
on a broader scale and longer periods of time
Sexton 5
(Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control Jared Sexton Forthcoming in Joy James (ed.) Warfare in the Homeland: Incarceration
in the United States (Durham: Duke UP),
It no doubt strikes one as counterintuitive to think about the proliferation of multiracial coalition politics, or rather the political mobilization of non-black people of color, as either an index of black powerlessness or, worse, a
There is
an almost universal
acknowledgement among activists and organizers in Latino, Asian
American, and more recently, Arab and Muslim communities that the Civil
Rights and Black Power movements were seminal to their current efforts
and
successes
consistent attempts are made to link
rhetorically,
analogically the struggle for immigrant rights
with the
ongoing black struggle for racial justice This is
done in order to promote
collaboration
upon closer examination one detects in the public

commentary both the histories
and contemporary forms of racial
discrimination faced by non-black people of color not only a certain
carelessness
but also a
subtext of antiblackness that appears to be both gratuitous
and utterly indispensable
We do not find
a
coherent rationale for the animus that seems to lace the strategic calls for
multiracial coalition or the conceptual deployment of metaphor between
the station of blacks in US society and culture and the evolving attacks on
the welfare of non-black minorities
a claim is made that, say
skepticism of
government investigative agencies and the corporate media toward the
loyalties of Asian Americans as such (from Japanese internment
. are offenses more
egregious than those which have been happening to blacks in far greater
proportion for nearly indefinite periods of time
Black suffering, in other words, is utilized as a convenient point of
component of an active black disempowerment instituted via large-scale domestic structural adjustments.
occasional
, after all,
), both as practical training grounds for many a veteran political worker and as a continuing source of inspiration and instruction for younger generations now moving into the
ranks of leadership. More importantly,
, at least
(to use admittedly deficient shorthand)
.1
a more effective and lasting spirit of
usually
among different communities of color; an antidote for the destructive dynamics of Black/Asian conflict or Blacks vs. Browns and so on, and a
precondition for viable coalition, a search for common ground. 2
However,
about
(a point Ive already made),
of oppression
the
strong undercurrent of open disdain toward the recent career of blacks in the US, a
(because it is not logically required by the arguments at hand, one can simply present the
case as is, sans analogy)
(because it is never not present in discernible form).
. In each case,
, in other words,
, the vicious assault on
immigration reform (from bilingual education programs to health and human services for the undocumented to the militarization of the border), or the spectacular
to the Democratic campaign
contribution fracas to the Wen Ho Lee affair), or the implementation of aggressive policing against an Arab-Muslim-Middle Eastern terrorist profile, etc
; in part because all of this is ostensibly unacknowledged as such, not by whites so
much as by blacks.
Quiroz-Martnez, Julie, Missing Link, Colorlines 4:2 (2001). Available online:

(http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story4_2_01.html).
2
Conflicts arise between the native born black population and black immigrant groups as well,
however black immigrants do not have available to them the racial capital of non-black
immigrants of color. They find themselves, in other words, consistently folded back into the
spaces of homegrown blackness, as it were, and subject to the same protocols of violence,
especially in subsequent generations. It gets worse, not better, as is the case with most
immigrants. Moreover, a good number of the most sensational conflicts between blacks and
immigrants, as the dichotomy is typically drawn, involve black immigrants against other nonblack immigrant groups. Black immigrants do not, then, so much disrupt the paradigm as
demonstrate why it is correct, at this level, to speak of an irresolvable discrepancy between
blackness and immigrant status.

reference
in such a way that the specificity of anti-blackness
which is to say its inexorableness and fundamentality to racial formation
in the United States is almost entirely obscured
blacks are faulted for
failing to validate
and embrace the political claims of non-black people
of color
What the multiracial approach fails to appreciate
is the highly contingent
nature of the injustices in question
whether one is
talking about
Homeland Security or even harkening back
to the internment of Japanese Americans
these
undeniably reprehensible and tragic events were nonetheless inessential
to the operations of the US state and civil society
The mass imprisonment of citizens and non-citizens of
Japanese descent
was dependent upon both the hysteria of the
Second World War and the foreign policy objectives of the Roosevelt
Administration
the necessary condition was
the history
of anti-Asian racism
the putative bottom line
. Meanwhile,
, as it were,
. (We might be forgiven for wondering how its is that blacks are constituted here as a court of appeal or an audience, even, in the first place, a question preliminary to any investigation of whether or to what
extent blacks do or should or can recognize such claims.)
aside from the
inherent injury and insult to the usual suspects of becoming concerned about a problem only when it happens immediately to you and yours
. This is, perhaps, the most tendentious point of the present argument:
the attack on immigrants or the special registrations of
during WW II, it is not unreasonable to conclude that
though clearly not unimportant
(i.e., it could have done otherwise without
fear of crisis, catastrophe or collapse).
, for instance,
as a sufficient condition of possibility;
, to put it crudely,
in the US. The harassment, deportation, and demonizing effected by Homeland Security is fully entangled in the geopolitics of the post-Cold War US Grand Strategy and
the unabated warfare required for capturing outstanding oil reserves, illicit drug markets, and natural resources that are becoming absolutely scarce. 4 The anti-immigration movement likewise must be understood as a key
component of the regional integration of the Americas and Pacific Rim (to recite the acronyms: NAFTA, FTAA, APEC, etc. viz. IMF/World Bank and WTO) and reflects not only political concessions to the obsessions of hard-line white
supremacy but also the dominant tendency a disciplinary apparatus to regulate (not end or reverse) the migration of tractable labor pools, secure trade relations and so on. 5
We see this contingency at work again in the fact
racial profiling
is operative for blacks anywhere and anytime
whereas for Latinos or certain Asian Americans it is more or less confined
to poor or working class neighborhoods Residential segregation as well is
a class-bound issue for Latinos and Asian Americans; for blacks it is a
cross-class phenomenon, so much so that even the most segregated Asian
Americans
are more integrated than the most integrated
middle class blacks Poverty is principally transitional for immigrants, but
trans-generational and deeply entrenched for blacks
that
, to return to our central point,
.6
including many Southeast Asian refugees

.7
(underclass signifying a segment of the black population
Robinson, Greg, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003).
4
Deffeyes, Kenneth, Hubberts Peak: The Impeding World Oil Shortage (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2003); Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York:
Owl Books, 2002); Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan,
Columbia, and Indochina (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
5
Estevedeordal, Antoni et al, eds., Integrating the Americas: FTAA and Beyond (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2004); Peter Hakim & Robert Litan, eds., The Future of North American
Integration: Beyond NAFTA (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2000); John
Ravenhill, Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation: The Construction of Pacific Rim Regionalism
(New York: Cambridge UP, 2001).
6
Goldberg, Jeffrey, The Color of Suspicion, The New York Times Magazine (July 20, 1999).
Available online: (http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990620mag-racecops.html).
7
Massey, Douglass, The Residential Segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, 1970-1990,
Gerald Jaynes, ed., Immigration and Race: New Challenges for American Democracy (New
Haven: Yale UP, 2000).

permanently expelled from the political economy). 8 Nationally, Latinos are incarcerated at more than twice the rate of whites but blacks are incarcerated at nearly three times the rate of Latinos. 9 This is all to say that whereas
the suffering of non-black people of color seems conditional to the historic

instance
and
functions at a different scope and scale the
oppression of blacks seems to be invariant
This
sort of comparative analysis
is
roundly discouraged
by the silencing mechanism
dont play Oppression Olympics
One notes readily in this catchphrase the translation of a
demand for or question of comparison
into an insidious posture
of a priori competition
this effort to repress a

sustained examination of black positionality
will only
undermine multiracial coalition as politics of opposition Every analysis
that attempts to account for the vicissitudes of racial rule and the
machinations of the racial state without centering black existence within
its framework which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of
(even if long-standing)
, even empirically speaking,
(which does not mean that it is simply unchanging, it mutates constantly).
which would unquestionably impact the formulation of political strategy and the demeanor of our political culture
, however,
of choice today in progressive political and intellectual circles:
!10 To tarry with such details, runs the dogma, is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and, moreover, to engage a
shameful, callous immorality.11
our conditions are alike or unlike
we will win so that you will lose. I suspect a deep relationship between this pervasive rhetorical strategy and the aggressive analogizing mentioned above (all of
which all boil down to assertions about being like blacks or worse, the new niggers). 12
The good news, if it can be called that, is that
the position of the unthought13

.
equivalents is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation,

because what happens to blacks indicates the truth (rather than the
totality) of the system, its social symptom, and all other positions can
(only) be understood from this angle of vision
every attempt
to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of racial profiling
will inevitably fail to make substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or
sidelines the fate of blacks
Without
blacks on board, the only viable option, the only effective defense against
the crossfire will entail forging greater alliances with an anti-black civil
.14 More important for present purposes,
, the prototypical targets of this nefarious police practice and the juridical infrastructure built up around it.
Wilson, William Julius, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public
Policy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).
9
Human Rights Watch, Race and Incarceration in the United States: Human Rights Watch Press
Backgrounder (2002). Available online: (http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/race/). This fact
is mediated by longstanding US imperial interventions across Latin America for the purposes of
regulating drug production, distribution, and consumption. See Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The
Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004), for a detailed
treatment of this history.
10
See, for instance, Elizabeth Martnez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a MultiColored Century (Boston: South End Press, 1998).
11
Of course, this dogma is aided and abetted by certain black leaders as well. Take, for instance,
the chastising statement made recently by the longtime civil rights activist, Rev. Richard Lowery,
on the occasion of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride: We may have come over on different
ships but were all in the same damn boat now. Chris McGann, Busloads of Activists, Seattle
Post-Intelligencer (July 8, 2003). Available online:
(http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/129926_freedom08.html).
12
13
See, for instance, Hasham Aidi, Jihadis in the Hood, included in this volume.
Hartman, Saidiya, The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Frank Wilderson, Qui
Parle 13:2 (2003).

society and capitulating further to the magnification of state power: a bid
that carries its own indelible costs, its own pains and pleasures.
14
Something similar can be said about hip hop as a multiracial culture of resistance. The ubiquity
of nigga as a term of address among non-blacks, including many whites, may provide a potent
enjoyment of ones defiant sense of marginalization degradation measured by ones proximity
to blacks, literally or figuratively but it has only contributed to the loss of clarity, not a
refinement, and the blunting of analysis, not an expansion. No doubt, hip hop brings people
together, particularly young people one love but so do football games and Young
Democrats meetings. If we are being honest, we must concede that, as a rule, hip hop promotes
political obscurantism, even when self-described as conscious. Political radicalism in this
realm is exceptional.
Competition theory
Affirmatives that do not defend a stable, topical plan text alter
the grounds for negative competition, since there is no action
or process with which to compete; therefore, the 1ac must be
understood as a stable, exclusive, and completed political
statement. This has several implications:
First, the affirmative does not get a permutation of course
they are consistent with a litany of alternatives, but that is
irrelevant because the important question is whether they are
consistent with the justifications for those alternatives, which
is the link debate. Additionally, a permutation wouldnt be
offense it would be a recognition that theres a better way to
write their 1ac.
Second, any and every word, in a vacuum, is viable link ground
they have to be able to defend their individual semantic
choices, regardless of the overall political message. Word pics
are uniquely justified word choice is essential to effective
political writing, and pics are necessary to garner sufficient
offense.
Third, omission is promission the affirmatives political
statement is just as notable for its silences as it is for its noise,
and their exclusions are viable negative ground
Aff = view from nowhere

The aff is a view from nowhere that reifies whiteness
Yancy 5
George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory
Speaker Series. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body. 2005 The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241. Muse.
I write out of a personal existential context This context is a profound

source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body Hence, I write from a
place of lived embodied experience
In philosophy, the only thing
that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument a fallacy, or someone's
"inferior" reasoning power The embodied self is bracketed and deemed
irrelevant to theory
It is best we are told, to reason
from nowhere Hence, the white philosopher presumes to speak for all of
"us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity Selfconsciously writing as a white male philosopher
Sartwell observes Left
to my own devices, I disappear as an author That is the "whiteness" of my
authorship This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority to
speak
from nowhere
is empowering though one wields power here
only by becoming lost to oneself But such an authorship and authority is
also pleasurable it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting
and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a
range of materials
To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the
[Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience
It is
important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens
through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's
"racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of
the "raced" white body
my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's
subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white
imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of
the Black body." These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out
of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at selfconstruction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people
.
, a site of exposure.
, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth.
, or so
/author
, Crispin
(apparently)
, for everyone,
or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane
and the particular,
. (1998, 6)
" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1
. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper,
. These acts of self-
construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black]
How I understand and theorize the body relates to the

fact that the bodyin this case, the Black bodyis capable of undergoing
a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis--vis white
embodiment The body's meaningwhether phenotypically white or black
its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its
"raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation
The body" is positioned by historical practices
and discourses The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings
that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of
negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological
interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes
Hence: a) the
body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning
that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is
to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that
preexists "its relations with the world and with others b) the body's
demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4).
. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its
"truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "

.
. The
historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics.
"3 ;

meaning is fundamentally symbolic
and its meaning is congealed
through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and
presupposes certain norms and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is
fought over again and again across particular historical moments and
within particular social spaces
(McDowell 2001, 301),
. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something [End Page 216]
fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score, it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence,
through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In other words, given the
To
have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have that
body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation The
experience presupposes an anti-Black lived context a context within which
whiteness gets reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed
three suppositions above, both the "Black body" and the "white body" lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their alleged objectivity.
. The late writer,
actor, and activist Ossie Davis recalls that at the age of six or seven two white police officers told him to get into their car. They took him down to the precinct. They kept him there for an hour, laughing at him and eventually pouring
cane syrup over his head. This only created the opportunity for more laughter, as they looked upon the "silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment, think of how the young Davis was returned to
himself: "I am an object of white laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt appeared to the white police officers in ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and enjoyed their sadistic
Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain

the oppressed [Blacks] to certain approved modes of visibility
and then gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created
pleasure without blinking an eye.
(those set out in the template of
stereotype)
" (1998, 11). Davis notes that he
"went along with the game of black emasculation, it seemed to come naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the ritual was complete" (9). He was then sent home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis knew at that early age, even
without the words to articulate what he felt, that he had been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the process of "niggerization." He notes: The culture had already told me what this was and what my reaction to this should be:
not to be surprised; to expect it; to accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply I was scarred or affected by that, but it was a part of who I was. (9) Davis, in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who he
This, however, is the trick of white

ideology it is to give the appearance of fixity, where the "look of the white
subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the
black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the
white gaze
Black bodies according
to their will. But it is no mystery; for "the Negro is interpreted in the
terms of the white man. White-man psychology is applied and it is no
wonder that the result often shows the Negro in a ludicrous light
While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors
locking as whites secure themselves from the "outside world,"
was, that "niggerized" little Black boy, an insignificant plaything within a system of ontological racial differences.
;
" (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score, it is white bodies that are deemed agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217]
" (Braithwaite 1992, 36).
a trope rendering my Black body
ostracized, different, unbelonging. This outside world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are rejected, because they are deemed suspicious, vile infestations of the (white) social body. The
locks on the doors resound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already accompanied by nervous gestures, and eyes that want to look, but are hesitant to
do so. The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition. The clicks begin to function as coded sounds, reminding me that I am dangerous; the sounds create boundaries, separating the white
civilized from the dark savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they inscribe me, they materialize my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish
You've
just been carjacked by a ghost, a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get
the fuck out of the car."
The surpluses
being gained by the whites in each case are not economic. Rather, it is
through existential exploitation that the surpluses extracted can be said
to be ontological
a form of recognition that creates a space of trust and liminality, there are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to become their Black monster, their bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise.
I have endured white women clutching their purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of my approaching Black body. It is during such
moments that my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of my body as confiscated. Davis too had the meaning of his young Black body stolen.
"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry 1997, 33). When I was about seventeen or eighteen, my white math teacher
initiated such an invasion, pulling it off with complete calm and presumably self-transparency. Given the historical construction of whiteness as the norm, his own "raced" subject position was rendered invisible. After all, he lived in
the real world, the world of the serious man, where values are believed anterior to their existential founding. As I recall, we were discussing my plans for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this
choice, spending a great deal of time reading about the requirements involved in becoming a pilot, how one would have to accumulate a certain number of flying hours. I also read about the dynamics of lift and drag that affect a
plane in flight. After no doubt taking note of my firm commitment, he looked at me and implied that I should be realistic (a code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals. He said that I should become a carpenter or a
bricklayer. I was exposing myself, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, and he returned me to myself as something [End Page 218] that I did not recognize. I had no intentions of being a carpenter or a bricklayer (or a janitor
or elevator operator for that matter). The situation, though, is more complex. It is not that he simply returned me to myself as a carpenter or a bricklayer when all along I had this image of myself as a pilot. Rather, he returned me to
the voice of a
larger anti-Black racist society that "whispers mixed messages in our
ears"
the ears of Black people who struggle to think of themselves
as a possibility
myself as a fixed entity, a "niggerized" Black body whose epidermal logic had already foreclosed the possibility of being anything other than what was befitting its lowly station. He was
(Marable 2000, 9),
. He mentioned that there were only a few Black pilots and that I should be more realistic. (One can only imagine what his response would have been had I said that I wanted to be a
philosopher, particularly given the statistic that Black philosophers constitute about 1.1% of philosophers in the United States). Keep in mind that this event did not occur in the 1930s or 1940s, but around 1979. The message was
clear. Because I was Black, I had to settle for an occupation suitable for my Black body,4 unlike the white body that would no doubt have been encouraged to become a pilot. As with Davis, having one's Black body returned as a
source of impossibility, one begins to think, to feel, to emote: "Am I a nigger?" The internalization of the white gaze creates a doubleness within the psyche of the Black, leading to a destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance
and self-interrogation. This was indeed a time when I felt ontologically locked into my body. My body was indelibly marked with this stain of darkness. After all, he was the white mind, the mathematical mind, calculating my future by
factoring in my Blackness. He did not "see" me, though. Like Ellison's invisible man, I occupied that paradoxical status of "visible invisibility." Within this dyadic space, my Black body phenomenologically returned to me as inferior. To
describe the phenomenological return of the Black body is to disclose how it is returned as an appearance to consciousness, my consciousness. The (negatively) "raced" manner in which my body underwent a phenomenological
More specifically, when my

body is returned to me, the white body has already been constituted over
centuries as the norm, both in European and Anglo-American culture, and
at several discursive levels from science to philosophy to religion
It is important to
keep in mind that white Americans, more generally, define themselves
around the "gravitational pull," as it were, of the Black
return, however, presupposes a thick social reality that has always already been structured by the ideology and history of whiteness.
. In the case of my math
teacher, his whiteness was invisible to him as my Blackness was hyper-visible to both of us. Of course, his invisibility to his own normative here is a function of my hyper-visibility.
.5 The not of white America is the Black of white America. This
not is essential, as is the invisibility of the negative relation through which whites are constituted. All of embodied beings have their own "here." My white math teacher's racist social performances (for example, his "advice" to me),
within the context of a [End Page 219] white racist historical imaginary and asymmetric power relations, suspends and effectively disqualifies my embodied here. What was the message communicated? Expressing my desire to be,

to take advantage of the opportunities for which Black bodies had died in order to secure, my ambition "was flung back in my face like a slap" (Fanon 1967, 114). Fanon writes: The white world, the only honorable one, barred me
A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to

behave like a black manor at least like a nigger I shouted a greeting to
the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within
bounds, to go back where I belonged
"perception and discoursewhat we see and the symbols and meanings of
our social imaginariesprove inextricably the one from the other"
the white math teacher's perception, what he "saw," was inextricably
linked to social meanings and semiotic constructions and constrictions
that opened up a "field of appearances" regarding my dark body There is
nothing passive about the white gaze There are racist sociohistorical and
epistemic conditions of emergence that construct not only the Black body
but the white body as well So, what is "seen" when the white gaze "sees"
"my body" and it becomes something alien to me?
from all participation.
. (11415) According to philosopher Bettina Bergo, drawing from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas,
(2005, 131). Hence,
View from nowhere (Long)

The aff is a view from nowhere that reifies whiteness
Yancy 5 George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory
Speaker Series. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body.
2005
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241. Muse.
I write out of a personal existential context This context is a profound

source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body Hence, I write from a
place of lived embodied experience
In philosophy, the only thing
that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument a fallacy, or someone's
"inferior" reasoning power The embodied self is bracketed and deemed
irrelevant to theory
It is best we are told, to reason
from nowhere Hence, the white philosopher presumes to speak for all of
"us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity Selfconsciously writing as a white male philosopher
Sartwell observes Left
to my own devices, I disappear as an author That is the "whiteness" of my
authorship This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority to
speak
from nowhere
is empowering though one wields power here
only by becoming lost to oneself But such an authorship and authority is
also pleasurable it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting
and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a
range of materials
To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the
[Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience
It is
important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens
through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's
"racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of
the "raced" white body
my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's
subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white
imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of
the Black body." These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out
of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at selfconstruction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people
.
, a site of exposure.
, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth.
, or so
/author
, Crispin
(apparently)
, for everyone,
or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane
and the particular,
. (1998, 6)
" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1
. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper,
. These acts of self-
construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black]
How I understand and theorize the body relates to the

fact that the bodyin this case, the Black bodyis capable of undergoing
a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis--vis white
embodiment The body's meaningwhether phenotypically white or black
its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its
"raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation
The body" is positioned by historical practices
and discourses The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings
that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of
negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological
interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes
Hence: a) the
body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning
that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is
to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that
preexists "its relations with the world and with others b) the body's
demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4).
. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its
"truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "

.
. The
historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics.
"3 ;

meaning is fundamentally symbolic
and its meaning is congealed
through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and
presupposes certain norms and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is
fought over again and again across particular historical moments and
within particular social spaces
(McDowell 2001, 301),
. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something [End Page 216]
fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score, it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence,
through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In other words, given the
To
have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have that
body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation The
experience presupposes an anti-Black lived context a context within which
whiteness gets reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed
three suppositions above, both the "Black body" and the "white body" lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their alleged objectivity.
. The late writer,
actor, and activist Ossie Davis recalls that at the age of six or seven two white police officers told him to get into their car. They took him down to the precinct. They kept him there for an hour, laughing at him and eventually pouring
cane syrup over his head. This only created the opportunity for more laughter, as they looked upon the "silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment, think of how the young Davis was returned to
himself: "I am an object of white laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt appeared to the white police officers in ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and enjoyed their sadistic
Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain

the oppressed [Blacks] to certain approved modes of visibility
and then gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created
pleasure without blinking an eye.
(those set out in the template of
stereotype)
" (1998, 11). Davis notes that he
"went along with the game of black emasculation, it seemed to come naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the ritual was complete" (9). He was then sent home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis knew at that early age, even
without the words to articulate what he felt, that he had been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the process of "niggerization." He notes: The culture had already told me what this was and what my reaction to this should be:
not to be surprised; to expect it; to accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply I was scarred or affected by that, but it was a part of who I was. (9) Davis, in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who he
This, however, is the trick of white

ideology it is to give the appearance of fixity, where the "look of the white
subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the
black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the
white gaze
Black bodies according
to their will. But it is no mystery; for "the Negro is interpreted in the
terms of the white man. White-man psychology is applied and it is no
wonder that the result often shows the Negro in a ludicrous light
While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors
locking as whites secure themselves from the "outside world,"
was, that "niggerized" little Black boy, an insignificant plaything within a system of ontological racial differences.
;
" (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score, it is white bodies that are deemed agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217]
" (Braithwaite 1992, 36).
a trope rendering my Black body
ostracized, different, unbelonging. This outside world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are rejected, because they are deemed suspicious, vile infestations of the (white) social body. The
locks on the doors resound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already accompanied by nervous gestures, and eyes that want to look, but are hesitant to
do so. The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition. The clicks begin to function as coded sounds, reminding me that I am dangerous; the sounds create boundaries, separating the white
civilized from the dark savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they inscribe me, they materialize my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish
You've
just been carjacked by a ghost, a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get
the fuck out of the car."
The surpluses
being gained by the whites in each case are not economic. Rather, it is
through existential exploitation that the surpluses extracted can be said
to be ontological
a form of recognition that creates a space of trust and liminality, there are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to become their Black monster, their bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise.
I have endured white women clutching their purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of my approaching Black body. It is during such
moments that my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of my body as confiscated. Davis too had the meaning of his young Black body stolen.
"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry 1997, 33). When I was about seventeen or eighteen, my white math teacher
initiated such an invasion, pulling it off with complete calm and presumably self-transparency. Given the historical construction of whiteness as the norm, his own "raced" subject position was rendered invisible. After all, he lived in
the real world, the world of the serious man, where values are believed anterior to their existential founding. As I recall, we were discussing my plans for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this
choice, spending a great deal of time reading about the requirements involved in becoming a pilot, how one would have to accumulate a certain number of flying hours. I also read about the dynamics of lift and drag that affect a
plane in flight. After no doubt taking note of my firm commitment, he looked at me and implied that I should be realistic (a code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals. He said that I should become a carpenter or a
bricklayer. I was exposing myself, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, and he returned me to myself as something [End Page 218] that I did not recognize. I had no intentions of being a carpenter or a bricklayer (or a janitor
or elevator operator for that matter). The situation, though, is more complex. It is not that he simply returned me to myself as a carpenter or a bricklayer when all along I had this image of myself as a pilot. Rather, he returned me to
the voice of a
larger anti-Black racist society that "whispers mixed messages in our
ears"
the ears of Black people who struggle to think of themselves
as a possibility
myself as a fixed entity, a "niggerized" Black body whose epidermal logic had already foreclosed the possibility of being anything other than what was befitting its lowly station. He was
(Marable 2000, 9),
. He mentioned that there were only a few Black pilots and that I should be more realistic. (One can only imagine what his response would have been had I said that I wanted to be a
philosopher, particularly given the statistic that Black philosophers constitute about 1.1% of philosophers in the United States). Keep in mind that this event did not occur in the 1930s or 1940s, but around 1979. The message was
clear. Because I was Black, I had to settle for an occupation suitable for my Black body,4 unlike the white body that would no doubt have been encouraged to become a pilot. As with Davis, having one's Black body returned as a
source of impossibility, one begins to think, to feel, to emote: "Am I a nigger?" The internalization of the white gaze creates a doubleness within the psyche of the Black, leading to a destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance
and self-interrogation. This was indeed a time when I felt ontologically locked into my body. My body was indelibly marked with this stain of darkness. After all, he was the white mind, the mathematical mind, calculating my future by
factoring in my Blackness. He did not "see" me, though. Like Ellison's invisible man, I occupied that paradoxical status of "visible invisibility." Within this dyadic space, my Black body phenomenologically returned to me as inferior. To
describe the phenomenological return of the Black body is to disclose how it is returned as an appearance to consciousness, my consciousness. The (negatively) "raced" manner in which my body underwent a phenomenological
More specifically, when my

body is returned to me, the white body has already been constituted over
centuries as the norm, both in European and Anglo-American culture, and
at several discursive levels from science to philosophy to religion
It is important to
keep in mind that white Americans, more generally, define themselves
around the "gravitational pull," as it were, of the Black
return, however, presupposes a thick social reality that has always already been structured by the ideology and history of whiteness.
. In the case of my math
teacher, his whiteness was invisible to him as my Blackness was hyper-visible to both of us. Of course, his invisibility to his own normative here is a function of my hyper-visibility.
.5 The not of white America is the Black of white America. This
not is essential, as is the invisibility of the negative relation through which whites are constituted. All of embodied beings have their own "here." My white math teacher's racist social performances (for example, his "advice" to me),
within the context of a [End Page 219] white racist historical imaginary and asymmetric power relations, suspends and effectively disqualifies my embodied here. What was the message communicated? Expressing my desire to be,

to take advantage of the opportunities for which Black bodies had died in order to secure, my ambition "was flung back in my face like a slap" (Fanon 1967, 114). Fanon writes: The white world, the only honorable one, barred me
A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to

behave like a black manor at least like a nigger I shouted a greeting to
the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within
bounds, to go back where I belonged
"perception and discoursewhat we see and the symbols and meanings of
our social imaginariesprove inextricably the one from the other"
the white math teacher's perception, what he "saw," was inextricably
linked to social meanings and semiotic constructions and constrictions
that opened up a "field of appearances" regarding my dark body There is
nothing passive about the white gaze There are racist sociohistorical and
epistemic conditions of emergence that construct not only the Black body
but the white body as well So, what is "seen" when the white gaze "sees"
"my body" and it becomes something alien to me?
from all participation.
. (11415) According to philosopher Bettina Bergo, drawing from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas,
(2005, 131). Hence,
While they waste time performing thought experiments blacks

continue to suffer

legitimate.
empathy,
bad faith
her own racism
I
one philosopher
however
deploy theory
. In other words,
. In fact,

position.
Whiteness,
suffering
Whites who
sequestration from
the real world of
suffering
patience of theory
after all,
.,,3
. Here,
weeping,
, and traumatized
..
Link = No defense
Any risk of a link means you ignore their defense complicity in
white structures of power kills critical potential
Yancy 8
George, Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black
experience. Black Bodies, White Gazes THE CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE. 2008. Pgs. 231-232. PWoods.
Michael Richards
may not have realized the
significance of his insight when he attempted a televised apology for his
explosive racist tirade at the Laugh Factory in 2006. Pointing to a group of
Blacks in the audience who allegedly had been talking during his
performance, with a great deal of anger and vitriol he shouted: "Shut-up.
Fifty years ago, we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your
ass. You can talk, you can talk, you can talk. You brave now motherfucka.
Throw his ass out, he's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger,
look it's a nigger!" After this tirade, people actually began to leave the
show. On his way out, one of the Black men shouted back at Richards,
saying how unfair it was that he used such language. Richards responded,
"That's what happens when you interrupt a white man, don't you know?,
Particularly revealing about Richards's language is his reference to the
spectacle of lynching Black male bodies with themes of unashamed
sodomy, in this case with a fork. Moreover, as a white man, he marked his
identity as a site of threatening power over and against the inferior,
uncultured, and disruptive identity of the "nigger." . In short, to interrupt
a white man, to look a white man in the eyes, to disagree with a white
man, is to forget one's place in the natural scheme of things. To think that
you are more than a "nigger" requires some reminding
His
question reminded the "niggers" in the audience that they should have
known better than to interfere with a white man, whose voice and
presence are sacrosanct and hegemonic.
Later, he
offered an apology, saying "I'm not a
racist. That's what's so insane about this." How does one reconcile his
understanding of himself as not a racist in the light of his blatant racism?
he adds, "And yet, it's said. It comes through. It fires out ofme
Richards could be lying about not being a racist in order to redeem his
image. In short, he simply got caught. My sense though is that he was
ambushed. Even as he thinks he is not a racist-perhaps because he has
Black friends and other "friends of color" and does not use the notorious
"n-word" on a daily basis, and because he does not identify as a skinhead
or associate with Klan groups-his remarks belied his self-understanding. In
fact, he may see himself as a "good white."
being
antiracist does not mean that the white self has arrived. There are many
good whites who continue to participate in structures of racial power from
which they benefit, who fear for their lives while walking down the street
with Black young men walking in their direction, and who have conniptions
when their young daughters (and sons) bring home "persons of color" as
potential dates
This form of
self-understanding actually obstructs the necessary deeper critical work
required to unearth the various ways in which one is actually complicit in
terms of racist behavior
Comedian
(known as the character "Cosmo Kramer" on the sitcom Seinfeld)
11
. Richards asked, "Don't you know?"
Richards used the "n-word" six times, seven if you include where he pronounced it "nigga."
appeared via satellite on the Dave Letterman Show (with Jerry Seinfeld on the show) and
Insightfully,
.,,12
Being a good white, however, does not mean that one has arrived. In fact,
. For many, embedded within the construction of the notion of the "good white" and the antiracist white is the sense of stasis and self-glorification.
. Monique Roelofs echoes this point when she is suspicious of "a supposedly achieved 'insightful,' 'sophisticated,' 'cool,' 'courageous,' 'humorous,' 'morally

remediable,' 'humane' whiteness." She worries "about the capacities of self-aestheticization to pass off my whiteness as more critical than it can be.'13
Objectivity Bad
THEIR DISCONNECTED OBJECTIVE NARRATION HAS REAL IMPACTS
STONE-MEDIATORE 2k7 (Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U
Shari, Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U - Challenging Academic
Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Even if objectivity is a myth, the valorization of traits associated with objectivity
can have realand dangeroushistorical effects. In particular, an
unqualified valorization of distance and detachment promotes the
kind of moral numbness that facilitates institutionalized violence .
Certainly, a theorist should have some degree of distance from her subject matter insofar as her knowledge claims
should not be immediate personal reactions but well considered and publicly accountable reflections. However,
when we confuse absolute emotional and geographic distance from

one's subject matter with "objectivity," we forget that such distance
is itself a social location, namely, one of isolation from social
problems. As a result, when we sanctify sheltered social standpoints
as "professional distance," we privilege the voices of those who can
remove themselves from social ills while we undervalue the voices
of those who experience social suffering more directly. Likewise,
when we valorize detachment, we overlook the qualities of the
world that are known through physical and emotional closeness.
4
Dedicated forest defender Joan Norman indicated the importance of knowledge gained through closeness to
phenomena when she attributed her appreciation for forests to her walks in the woods with her grandson. "You
cannot [End Page 57] just read about wild places," she says, "you have to go there" (O'Shea 2005, 42). Social critics
Arundhati Roy and Paul Farmer practice a similar creed when they travel, respectively, to Adivasi communities in
India and to rural Latin America to walk among and offer support to people subjected to economic violence. Only
"compassion and solidarity," says Farmer, allow a writer to break the conditioned silence of subjugated people and
Ultimately, when we
confuse distance and detachment with rigor, we promote, under the
guise of professional responsibility, an irresponsible inattention to
living beings and a concomitant ethics of callousness and
indifference. Nazi administrators exemplified such contradictions of objectivity when they assumed an
to hear expressions of pain and struggle that await sympathetic ears (2003, 27). 5
"objective attitude" toward the death camps, attending to technicalities of mass execution as coolly as if they were
managing a bank (Arendt 1992, 69). Although ordinary academics and bureaucrats are less directly involved in
our disciplined aloofness can similarly bury violence in technical

abstractions while our conscience defers to "professionalism." For
murder,
instance, purportedly objective French reporters and United Nations members refrained from taking a stand on
French colonialism in Algeria, only to model apathy in the face of colonial violence, while today's "experts, from
anthropologists to international health specialists choose to collude" with economic violence by ignoring it in the
name of "neutrality" (Fanon 1963, 778; Farmer 2003, 10, 17).
"Objective" discourses
facilitate this charade, as when planners of India's big dams shield themselves from ethical questions raised
by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of individuals by reducing these people to the category "Project
Affected People," or simply "PAP," a term which conveniently "mutate[s] muscle and blood into cold statistics" (Roy
1999, 32). For Nazi bureaucrats, French colonial reporters, and contemporary analysts alike, objectivity provides
convenient alibi for turning our back to pain and suppressing

compassionate impulses that would otherwise be troubled by
violence.

FALSE OBJECTIVITY produces the WORST type of subjectivity as
judges pick and choose what evidence to call for at the end of the
round and piece back together the voices of participants through a
personal preference that prioritizes academic data published in peer
reviewed articles over the personal testimony of people who have
experienced life and dictated rhetoric through their social location.
WE STRAIGHT TURN THEIR NOTION OF OBJECTIVITY
Granted, accurate empirical analysis of the measurable dimensions of our world is a crucial component of credible
knowledge. Thus, even critics of objectivity, including Fanon, Farmer, Arendt, Roy, and Galeano support their claims,
when we treat empirical

data not merely as one element of knowledge but as the hallmark of
objectivity, we favor the perspective of those groups who more
often have their concerns documented in data and their worldviews
institutionalized in the frameworks that structure data. Significantly, for
insofar as possible, with carefully documented historical data. However,
instance, the U.S. government has ample data on economic growth rates but no central data on police violence, the
human costs of war, the relation between health and poverty, or the destructive effects of industry waste products,
When we consider a text

replete with statistics to be objective and dismiss personal
testimony, we not only silence perspectives unpopular with official
record-keeping institutions but suppress questions about why some
phenomena have been registered in data while others have not. The
with the latter having left their marks mainly in unofficial testimonies. 7
Bush administration's failure to record civilian casualties in the Iraq War 8 attests to the urgency of looking beyond
The confusion of ample data with

objectivity also tends to privilege the perspective of dominant
groups insofar as the latter have greater influence over the
conceptual frameworks in which data are interpreted . For instance, French
"hard data" to the politics that underlie data availability.
medical, psychiatric, and legal professionals in colonial Algeria viewed data on Algerian violent crime in terms of a
worldview that abstracted social phenomena from history and naturalized social communities, thereby allowing
them to regard the data as evidence "that the Algerian was a born criminal" (Fanon 1963, 296). When the same
data were viewed by Algerians in the context of their resistance to colonialism, it could be seen as a symptom of
colonial social relations. Nevertheless, [End Page 59] the interpretation of the French professionals (and not the
Furthermore,
even before data are framed historically, they are structured by the
categories and procedures by which "the raw material of the world"
is "processed as data," and such research processes tend to be
formulated by scholars and bureaucrats with a view to
implementing policies and regulating people (Smith 1987, 1614; 1990, 535, 85
92, 11630). This dependence of hard data on ruling ways of dividing up
and governing people is evident, for instance, when newscasters report on the number of
Algerians) informed the seemingly objective medical societies and legal institutions.
"illegal aliens" crossing the border, working "American" jobs, and attending "American" schools, for these supposed
"facts" are produced by agencies concerned to regulate the activities of Mexican immigrants and whose category
"illegal alien" reflects the dominant culture's assumptions about the sanctity of national borders and the
dependence of rights on national citizenship.

DISCONNECTED OBJECTIVE NARRATION EXCLUDES MARGINALIZED
GROUPS BECAUSE IT PRIVELAGES THE OPINIONS OF THOSE
PRIVELAGED TECHNOCRATS WHO CREATED OBJECTIVITY IN THE
FIRST PLACE
Objectivity is also stacked against women and marginalized groups
insofar as it demands an abstraction from personal experience and
restriction to generalized and public-sphere analysis. Texts with such a focus
may appear perspective-free, but they tend to reflect the perspective of people who have greater access to public
institutions and who relate to the world through abstract analysis. At the same time, they overlook the perspective
of those whose knowledge is based on direct experience, who endure the harms of public policies in their private
lives, and who, when they protest such harms, are denied access to the public arena and can express their
resistance only through "unofficial" channels, such as community speak-outs, hunger strikes, or even suicide. 11
When we mystify abstract discourses as objective, we not only

privilege the detached standpoints of scholars and technocrats but
also insulate their standpoints from critical feedback. For when abstract
accounts of the social world are treated as reality, people who are positioned to test abstract theory against
everyday experience, such as nurses, mothers, social workers, and research assistants, must fit the world they
experience into received categories, with the result that "[e]verything going on in the everyday settings . . . that
Moreover, when
the institutions that determine the "prescribed frameworks of
reporting" regularly neglect the human costs of social policies, on
the one hand, and the social causes of human ailments, on the
other, social suffering and its systemic causes tend to be the
"unsaid." The mystification of abstract, depersonalized analysis
likewise allows scholars who use detached technical discourses to
appear dignified and "self-confident" while writers who turn to more
engaged and creative, nontechnical language to recover "unsaid"
human aspects of the social world tend to have their work dismissed
as "unprofessional" or even "an injury to human dignity" (Cohen 2003, 65;
does not fit the prescribed frameworks of reporting is left unsaid" (Smith 1990, 100).
12
Marx 1997, 280, emphasis in original). For instance, World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay convey
authority, in part, by virtue of their distance from the social processes they study and their reduction of the latter to
abstract public indices. Granted, statements such as, "[t]he aggregate annual per capita growth rate of the
globalizing group accelerated steadily from one percent in the 1960s to five percent in the 1990s" can offer relevant
information about countries that have joined the global economy (Dollar and Kraay 2002, 121); however,
when
we mistake such technocratic statements for objective truth, we

obscure the diverse and contested human implications of the global
economy for specific communities, while we allow people who try to
express those human meanings to be summarily dismissedas Roy was,
when the Supreme Court charged her with "pollut[ing] the [End Page 61] stream of justice," upon her attempt to
express some of the human costs of India's "economic growth" (Roy 2001b, 97)
.
Reps 1st
Debate should focus on the assumptions behind the affirmative
arguments rather than the specific proposals this is the only
effective approach to the alternative
Zizek 2004 Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana
[ Slavoj Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, page 71-71] //Manoj
The stance of simply condemning the postmodern Left for its
accommodation, however, is also false, since one should ask the obvious
difficult question: what, in fact, was the alternative? If todays post-politics
is opportunistic pragmatism with no principles, then the predominant leftist
reaction to it can be aptly characterized as principle opportunism: one
simply sticks to old formulae (defence of the welfare state, and so on) and
calls them principles, dispensing with the detailed analysis of how the
situation has changed and thus retaining ones position of Beautiful Soul.
The inherent stupidity of the principled Left is clearly discernable in it
standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of
the situation, renouncing any simple prescriptions on how to act: there is no
clear political stance involved in your theory and this from people with no
stance but their principled opportunism. Against such a stance, one should
have the courage to affirm that, in a situation like todays, the only way
really to remain open to a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile
calls to direct action, which necessarily involve us in an activity where things
change so that the totality remains the same. Todays predicament is that, if
we succumb to the urge of directly doing something (engaging in the antiglobalist struggle, helping the poor) we will certainly and undoubtedly
contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the
foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to
act, to do nothing thus opening up the space for a different kind of
activity.
Organized 2NC
OV
The affirmatives call to action is rooted in the grammar of civil
society- this instantiates a semiotic of work and productivity that
sees inaction as idolatry this grammar of action is underpinned by
a fundamentally anti-black rhetorical structure that refuses to
recognize the legitimacy of idleness as a positive positionality. The
alternative affirms this idleness- the incapacity for action in the face
of a grammar of action that is entirely sutured by white supremacy.
When the political itself garners coherence through the discursive
registers of whiteness, ceding the political is the only ethical option.
Only this absolute refusal of the semiotics of whiteness allows for a
revolutionary rupturing of white supremacist civil society capable of
attuning for the black bodys grammar of suffering. The affs moral
calculus the idea that we should take action to save lives is
ethically bankrupt because it protects the status of white subjects
as those who are only contingently subject to violence- maintaining
the norms through which the black body is gratuitously and
ontologically constructed as the object of social death.
Framework
Fiat is illusory
Fiat is illusory which means you assess the K first and view it
through a lens of portability weve proven the aff doesnt actually
cause action which makes the round a question of scholarship, the
entire 1nc was proof that they produce a flawed, racist scholarship.
The role of the ballot is to position yourself as an ethical
decisionmaker by engaging in complete rejection of racist politics
Their framework is just another form of exclusion by the

colonizer created from flawed epistemology
Baker 2009 Grad Student Education and Human Development University of
Rochester, [Michael, June 2009, Unpublished Paper, Situating Modern
Western Education within the Modern/colonial World System,

https://www.academia.edu/1518842/Situating_Modern_Western_Education_in
_the_Modern_colonial_World_System, accessed 7-19-14, J.J.]
All forms of knowledge (both inside and outside of Europe) that did not fit
into the epistemic framework of modernity were classified as subordinate
and marginalized within the Eurocentric cultural-knowledge-power
complex that became known as modernity and rationality. The
hegemony of the modern western medical model of health care is one

prominent example of this epistemological regime of truth (Foucault, 1973,
1980, 1983). Again, according to Quijano, Eurocentrism is a specific
rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally
hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different
conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much
in Europe as in the rest of the world (Quijano, 2000, pp. 549-550). As the
epistemic framework of western modernity, Eurocentrism involves the
elimination and subordination of other ways of knowing and being through
the imposition of a system of power/knowledge relations that comprise
the project of capitalist modernity and modern education. With the
sixteenth century emergence of the modern/colonial system of social

classification came the need to transform and design institutions that would
maintain and expand the emerging knowledge/power relations. The
Eurocentric curriculum, along with the assimilating, civilizational ethos of
modern schooling, are among the most overt examples of modern
educations direct and ongoing complicity in this patriarchal and racial
system of domination and exploitation. Maintaining or reproducing these
racially organized knowledge/power relations is the heart of redemptivecivilizational missions of Eurocentric modernity. The production and
dissemination of knowledge, since the European Renaissance, is a
fundamental aspect of the western civilizational missions to save the
world by imposing an ideal model of society, economy, and being. The
constructions of modern/colonial schooling and the modern/colonial
curriculum are institutionalizations of this civilizational ideal .
Eurocentrism is a rationale that conceals the historical and contemporary

relations between knowledge and power the power of modern/colonial
oppression and domination. This Eurocentric cosmology is interlinked
historically and conceptually with the inherently violent racial
classification of humanity and the control of labor within the world
capitalist system (Quijano, 1999, 2000, 2008; Mignolo, 2003a; Dussel, 1993,
1995; Grosfoguel, 2002). Modern schooling is a necessary institution for

reproducing the cultural worldview that legitimates and conceals the
inherent violence of the modern/colonial world capitalist system. Through
imposition of a particular cultural worldview and the upholding of particular
Eurocentric knowledge standards, modern mass schooling provides an
effective selection and sorting mechanism for the colonial-capitalist racial

divisions of labor (Timmons, 1988).
Their fairness claims are a product of the hegemonic

discourse that re-enforces racism.
Delgado 1992 (Richard, Professor at Seattle University School of Law,
Shadowboxing: An Essay on Power, 77 CNLLR 813)
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of
conduct into the very term fair. [FN41] Thus, the stronger party is able to
have his way and see himself as principled at the same time. [FN42] Imagine,
for example, a man's likely reaction to the suggestion that subjective considerations-a woman's mood, her sense of pressure or intimidation, how she felt
about the man, her unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not go ahead [FN43]-ought to play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape.
Most men find this suggestion offensive; it requires them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. Why, they say, I'd have to be a mind
reader before I could have sex with anybody! [FN44] Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have been harboring? And what
if the woman simply changed her mind later and charged me with rape? [FN45] What we never notice is that women can read men's minds perfectly
well. The male perspective is right out there in the world, plain as day, inscribed in culture, song, and myth-in all the prevailing narratives. [FN46] These
narratives tell us that men want and are entitled*820 to sex, that it is a prime function of women to give it to them, [FN47] and that unless something
unusual happens, the act of sex is ordinary and blameless. [FN48] We believe these things because that is the way we have constructed women, men, and
normal sexual intercourse. [FN49] Notice what the objective standard renders irrelevant: a downcast look; [FN50] ambivalence; [FN51] the question, Do
you really think we should?; slowness in following the man's lead; [FN52] a reputation for sexual selectivity; [FN53] virginity; youth; and innocence.
[FN54] Indeed, only a loud firm no counts, and probably only if it is repeated several times, overheard by others, and accompanied by forceful body
language such as pushing the man and walking away briskly. [FN55] Yet society and law accept only this latter message (or something like it), and not the
The objective approach is not inherently

better or more fair. Rather, it is accepted because it embodies the sense
of the stronger party, who centuries ago found himself in a position
to dictate what permission meant. [FN56] Allowing ourselves to be
drawn into reflexive, predictable arguments about administrability,
fairness, stability, and ease of determination points us away from
what *821 really counts: the way in which stronger parties have
managed to inscribe their views and interests into external
culture, so that we are now enamored with that way of judging
action. [FN57] First, we read our values and preferences into the
culture; [FN58] then we pretend to consult that culture meekly and
humbly in order to judge our own acts. [FN59] A nice trick if you can get away with it.
former, more nuanced ones, to mean refusal. Why?
Nothing about voting aff actually does anything in the real world,
fiat disconnects you from your agency because youre pretending to
be something else
Polson 2012


the real world


foreign policy
changes
performance

this position:
. Kenneth explained

And I guess
like back
it takes
to like the
. Like
The only way they can win policy education is good is if they can
prove govt. policies are inclusive* when [developing/exploring] the
earths oceans
1. Predictability Kritiks are insanely predictable on this topic
affirmatives literally expand our philosophies to the universe.
2. Plan focus Our interp still allows for plan focus. We attack the
justification and methodology of the plan
3. Our interp is not unlimiting there are always 2 constraints which
make the debate predictable otherwise the argument shouldnt be

hard to beat 1 is the germaneness of the link to the resolution and
the plan specifically and 2nd is competition.
Offense
1. Key to neg ground Checks unpredictable and barely topical affs
2. Placing the possibility of radically restructuring our political

economy off-limits is another link- their framework arguments
promote a form of ideological dominance for capitalism.
3. Our education comes first. In the SQ black bodies are dying we
need discussion right now
a. neg ground we should be able to test all parts of the aff on a

topic as huge as this its key to neg generics because there are so
many possible aff mechanisms
b. fairness they chose the 1AC and got infinite prep time to research
it they should be prepared to defend it theres no offense for
them they still get to weigh their advantages as long as they can
justify them,
c. education impact turn: prefer critical education teaches us to be
better, more informed thinkers rather than just policy wonks who
dont know about anything unless its under the purview of the USFG
d. predictability pretty much every K on this topic is going to talk
about ecological discourses you should be ready to engage this by
now defend your representations
e.
depth we can have an in depth debate

depth we can have an in depth debate about different policy
alternatives like the kritik and educate
Reject the argument not the team even if they win the debate
should be focused on USFG policy you still vote neg because the link
and impact outweigh the case.
K priori
Blackness is the prior ontological void upon which the rest of
society is constructed.
Pak 12 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary
Lineage of Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, 2012. Dissertation through Proquest)
Hartmans work in African American cultural studies, wherein she problematizes the notion
of empathy as a useful or neutral structure of feeling. In Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
I turn here to
Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman recounts John Rankins letter to his brother, where he describes
how deeply moved he was after witnessing a slave coffle. He writes that his imagination forces him to believe, for the moment,
that I myself was a slave, and with my wife and children placed under the reign of terror. I began in reality to feel for myself, my
This notation of beginning to feel,

where the feeling supplants reality, is the point of Hartmans contention
and my intervention. As she writes, in making the slaves suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather
than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to read. Or, in other words, the ease of Rankins
empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt
opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body (19). Rankin can feel
black because blackness is fungible: blackness is simultaneously tradable and replaceable. This is precisely what
Wilderson critiques as the ruse of analogy . He writes that this ruse
erroneously locates Blacks in the world a place where they have not
been since the dawning of Blackness, and continues that this attempt at
analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blacknesss
grammar of suffering (Red, White & Black 37). In other words, Rankin is able to feel for himself, his wife and his
wife, and my children (Scenes of Subjection 18, emphasis mine).
children precisely because the slave is erased in that feeling. He reads himself as analogous to the slave as a means of
understanding his subject status when that analogy misreads and misplaces blackness. I contend Himes is making the same
argument: by creating a figure that critically displaces the idea of a shared humanity, by making Jimmy white, he negates an
identificatory practice which grounds itself on an eventual recognition of subjectivity, or an insertion into civil society. Hence, Himes
voids the novel of blackness (except for the most periphery figures) precisely because blackness is constituted through the absence
of relationality itself. Furthermore, I posit that Jimmys whiteness is symptomatic of Afro-pessimism via the quandary David Marriott
poses in his scholarship, where he challenges us to question how we can understand black identity when, through an act of
mimetic desire, this identity already gets constructed as white (Haunted Life 208). Marriott re-reads Fanons seminal encounter with
a young white boy in Black Skin, White Masks, and an anecdote of a little black girl attempting to scrub herself clean of racial
markings, not as encounters of interpellation, but as intensely fraught moments of violent phobic recognition of the self as
something hateful and hated. Marriott states, [i]n these two scenes a suppressed but noticeable anger and confusion arises in
response to the intruding other (the other being the little white child for Fanon, and her own image for the little girl) and that this
response has to do with the realization that the other, as racial imago, has already occupied and split the subjects ego (210).49 It
is not that blackness is set in Hegelian opposition to whiteness as the O/other, but rather that blackness is dependent on whiteness
blackness is not something missing, but

rather the addition of something undesirable and dirty that fragments
the body by destroying all positive semblances of the self. This
addition of blackness results in the selfs desire to hurt the imago of
the body in a passionate bid to escape it (210). In this reading of Fanon, Marriott offers his
contribution to the field of Afro-pessimism: even on a psychic level, within the discourse of
self and ontology, blackness is null and void. The black body is occupied
by a white unconscious, one that loves his/herself as white, and hates
his/herself as black.50 As Marriott writes in the introduction to On Black Men, [t]he black man is, in other words,
always already having been present. In other words,
everything that the wishful-shameful fantasies of culture want him to be, an enigma of inversion and of hate and this is our
existence as men, as black men (On Black Men x). themselves, that indeed, this prototypical identification with whiteness is a
foundational culture and tradition which can be neither avoided nor eluded (55 56). The absence of a black interiority is also
addressed by Kevin Bell as he examines the 1953 meeting between Himes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin at Les Deux Magots in
Paris. Bell writes that many of Himess literary contemporaries, including Wright and Baldwin, are mostly invested in sonorities,
colors, and movements that... constitute little more than added flavorings, punctuations and accents by which to augment an
already- established, normative white interiority (Assuming 853). This is in contrast to Himes, who waylays coherence and a
structured black subjectivity for the suffocating thickness of a crazy, wild-eyed feeling which is the discord always present in the
black unconscious, or the realization that one has always been, and will always be, at war with oneself (856). Jimmy thinks that he
could see his mind standing just beyond his reach, like a white, weightless skeleton (Yesterday 52). His mind is not his to grasp,
always just beyond his reach, and is imagined as a white figure of death.
It is impossible to incorporate Jimmy and his

mind in much the same way as it is impossible to bring blackness into relationality, or

to enfold him within civil society. To do so would lead to the logical unfolding present in Wildersons work,
and one which Himes articulates forty years earlier during an interview: [t]he black man can destroy
America completely, destroy it as a nation of any consequence. It can just
fritter away in the world. It can be destroyed completely (My Man Himes 46). In other
words, to make blackness relational is to lead to the incoherence and
The debate space has failed in breaking down the structures of

race by excluding discussion-now is the time for change to
occur
Sarah Spring
Lack of community discussion is neither random nor powerneutral. We have tried to have discussions. These discussions
have been regularly derailedin wrong forum arguments, in the
demand for evidence, in the unfair burdens placed on the
aggrieved as a pre-requisite for engagement. Read the last ten years of these
discussions on edebate archives: Ede Warner on edebate and move forward to Rashad Evans diversity
discussion from 2010 to Deven Cooper to Amber Kelsies discussion on CEDA Forums and the NDT CEDA
Traditions page. We have been talking for over a decade, we have been reaching out for years, we have been
We will
no longer wait for the community to respond, to relinquish
privilege, to engage in authentic discussion, since largely the
community seems incapable of producing a consensus for
responding to what we all agree is blatant structural inequity. It
listening to the liberal, moderate refrain of we agree with your goals but not with your method.
seems that meta-debates/discussions about debate are generally met with denial, hostility andmore often
silence. This silence is in fact a focused silence. It is not people in the Resistance Facebook group that comprise
We have been quite

vocaland we believe that it is this very vocalness (and the
development of a diversity of tactics in response to status quo
stalling tactics) that has provoked response when response was
given. Sarah Springs cedadebate post is a case in point. The decision to change our speaker point scale is
not in order to produce a judging doomsday apparatus (this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric
might more aptly be applied to the current racist/sexist/classist
state of affairs in this community), though we must admit that we are flattered that our
these silent figuresit is (as has been described) the old boys club.
efforts have affected the community enough to result in such a hyberbolic labeling. It indicates that civil
the debate community should take it as an

indication that our calls for change are serious. We will continue to innovate
disobedience is still an effective tactic;
and collaborate on tactics of resistance. This crisis in debate has no end in sight. The rationale for changing
the point scale was not simply to reward people for preferring the unpreferred critic. We recognize that MPJ

produces effects, and we hoped that changing our point scale was a small but significant tactic that was
available to the disenfranchised in this community. MPJ: A) Limits judging opportunities for blacks, browns, and
womyn B) Limits opportunities for debaters who are (and are not) black, brown, and womyn to be judged by
such critics. The effect is: A) That the evaluations of these categorically marginalized critics are deemed not
valuable or costly. B) That the debate efforts of categorically marginalized debaters are deemed not valuable.
We believe that debaters deserve to have black, brown, and womyn critics (in general debaters should be
judged by multiply situated critics across varying social locations). We think the community deserves to know
what we have to say. Therefore, it seemed appropriate in this context to play the discriminative logics at work
against themselves by demonstrating just what value or cost our evaluations could have. We worked with
It seems this system works as long as it is

comfortable for the majority or the major powerbrokers. The
community pays lip service to, or simply ignores, the concerns of
those for whom this system is not working. Now it is everyones concern. To be
the limited options available to us.
clear: we did not alter our point scale because we believe we are not preferred for unjust reasons (we know we
are not preferred for unjust reasons), but because the system produces the effect of magnifying and enforcing
on a social scale the delegitimation of blacks, browns, and womyn. We think this is a question of ethics and a
question of pedagogy; it is something that stunts the growth of all members of this community regardless of
identity or social positioning.
There is an ethical obligation to reject racism at all times; opening

up the debate space and voting negative is the only ethical
response. The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best
challenges racist rhetoric in the debate community
The only way they can win policy education is good is if they can
prove govt. policies are completely inclusive every time a policy is
enacted make them defend their justifications
1. Predictability Kritiks are insanely predictable on this topic
affirmatives literally expand our philosophies to the universe.
2. Plan focus Our interp still allows for plan focus. We attack the
justification and methodology of the plan
3. Our interp is not unlimiting there are always 2 constraints which
make the debate predictable otherwise the argument shouldnt be

hard to beat 1 is the germaneness of the link to the resolution and
the plan specifically and 2nd is competition.
Offense
1. Key to neg ground Checks unpredictable and barely topical affs
2. Placing the possibility of radically restructuring our political

economy off-limits is another link- their framework arguments
promote a form of ideological dominance for capitalism.
3. Better education Kritiks allow us to investigate the
philosophical and ethical implications of our actions, this is
important in understanding policy
a. neg ground we should be able to test all parts of the aff on a

topic as huge as this its key to neg generics because there are so
many possible aff mechanisms
b. fairness they chose the 1AC and got infinite prep time to research
it they should be prepared to defend it theres no offense for
them they still get to weigh their advantages as long as they can
justify them,
c. education impact turn: prefer critical education teaches us to be
better, more informed thinkers rather than just policy wonks who
dont know about anything unless its under the purview of the USFG
d. predictability pretty much every K on this topic is going to talk
about ecological discourses you should be ready to engage this by
now defend your representations
e.
depth we can have an in depth debate

depth we can have an in depth debate about different policy
alternatives like the kritik
Reject the argument not the team even if they win the debate
should be focused on USFG policy you still vote neg because the link
and impact outweigh the case.
Link
Extend Wilderson number 1 evidence: State action is our link -- it
will always make anti blackness worse, the Aff will never be able to
solve police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and
substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV
still constitute the lived experience of Black life. The aff puts blacks
in the black body in the state of a slave as perpetuated by civil
society
Extend Wilderson number 2 evidence: The promotion of civil

society creates a state of emergency in the black body with
advancements of civil society preconditioned on the abuse of
the black body the endorsement of the state is our link
because the state is no ethical actor of OURS!
[Link Cards To Advantages/Advantage specific analytics]
Impact
Extend our 3 Wilderson evidence: Addressing Anti-Blackness

outweighs they scandalize ethicality and set the stage for all
violence Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews.
Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The black
has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man
or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.
rd
Their impacts are created from flawed impact analysis choosing

impacts deemed by civil society to be deservant of attention. On a
massive scale XXX does not have a proportional effect on the black
body
Blackness is social death and unimaginable exclusion

Vargas and James 13 (Joo Costa and Joy, University of Texas and
Williams University, Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon
Martin and the Black Cyborgs, Chapter 14 in Pursuing Trayvon Martin:
Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations ed. George Yancy
and Janine Jones)//LA
What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every

time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black
death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy ? What
will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least
consider) that the very notion of justice-indeed the gamut of political and
cognitive elements that constitute formal, multiracial democratic practices
and institutions-produces or requires black exclusion and death as
normative? To think about Trayvon Martin's death not merely as a tragedy or media controversy but as a
political marker of possibilities permits one to come to terms with several foundational and foretold stories,
we understand that death or killing to be prefigured by mass or

collective loss of social standing and life. One story is of impossible redemption in
the impossible polis. It departs from, and depends on, the position of the
hegemonic, anti-black-which is not exclusively white but is exclusively
non-black-subject and the political and cognitive schemes that guarantee
her ontology and genealogy. Depending on the theology, redemption requires deliverance from sin,
particularly if
and/or deliverance from slavery. 1 Redemption is a precondition of integration into the white-dominated social
universe2 Integration thus requires that the black become a non-slave, and that the black become a non-sinner.
The paradox or impossibility is that if blackness is both sin and sign of

enslavement, the mark of "Ham,'; then despite the legal abolition of juridical
enslavement or chattel slavery or the end of the formal colony, the sinner
and enslaved endure; and virtue requires the eradication of both . If we theorize
from the standpoint say of Frantz Fanon, through the lens of the fiftieth anniversary of the English publication, The
Wretched of the Earth (or Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Frank Wilderson's
from the perspective of the

dominant, white-inflected gaze and predisposition, blacks can be
redeemed neither from sin nor from slavery. 3 For a black person to be
integrated, s/he must either become non-black, or display superhuman
and/or infrahuman qualities. (In Fanonian terms she would become an aggrandized slave or
Jncognegro, etc.), we can follow a clear heuristic formulation:

The
imagination, mechanics, and reproduction of the ordinary polis rely on the
exclusion of ordinary blacks and their availability for violent aggression
and/ or premature death or disappearance (historically through lynching and the convict
prison lease system, today through "benign neglect" and mass incarceration). The
ordinary black person can therefore never be integrated. The "ordinary negro" is
enfranchised slave-that is, one who owns property still nonetheless remains in servitude or colonized.)
never without sin. Thus, to be sinless or angelic in order to be recognized as citizenry has been the charge for
postbellum blackness. Throughout the twentieth century, movements to free blacks from what followed in the wake
of the abolition of chattel slavery ushered in the postbellum black cyborg: the call for a "Talented Tenth" issued by
white missionaries and echoed by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin's imploring a young Martin Luther King Jr.
to become "angelic" in his advocacy of civil rights and to remove the men with shotguns from his front porch
The angelic
negro/negress is not representative and his or her status as an acceptable
marker for U.S. democracy is predicated upon their usefulness for the
transformation of whiteness into a loftier, more ennobled formation. This
performance or service of the angelic black would be resurrected in the
reconstruction of Trayvon Martin as a youth worthy of the right to life , the
right of refusal to wear blackness as victimization; the right to fight back.
That is, the right to the life of the polis; so much of black life, particularly
for the average fellah, is mired in close proximity to the graveyard,
hemmed in by the materiality of social margins and decay, exclusion and
violence.
despite the bombings and death threats against King, his wife Corella, and their young children.
Their impacts are non-unique blacks are always-already

socially dead
Wilderson8
{Frank B; Professor at UC IRVINE and member of ANC; Absence of subjective presence Biko Lives; pg 97-98; Other sections are by Andile Mngxitama; Amanda Alexander and Nigel
Gibson; Published by Palgrave Macmillan; July 8 2008}AvP

the evasive aspects of affect from interpretation of reality. Building on lewis gordons ontological
schema of absence and presence that is a reconstruction and elaboration of fanons ontological arguments in Black skin White masks, I designate three
layers of black absence subjective, cartographic and political, through which
we might read the cheering that erupted as affective (rather than discursive)
symptoms of an ontological discovery. The world cannot accommodate a
blackened relation at the level of bodies subjectivity. Thus, Black presence
is a form of absence for to see a black is to see the black an ontological
frienze that waits for a gaze, rather than a living ontology moving with

agency in the field of vision. The Blacks moment of recognition by the other
is always already blackness upon which supplements are lavished- American,
Caribbean, Xhosa, Zulu, etc. But the supplements are superfluous rather
than substantive they dont unblacken. As Gordon points out, there is
something absent whenever blacks are present. The more present a black is
the more absent is this something. And the more absent a black is, the more
present is this something. Blackness, then, is the destruction of presence, for
blacks seem to suck presence into themselves as a black hole, pretty much
like the astrophysical phenomenon that bears
This outweighs and turns case the aff is only afraid of impacts that have already rendered
the blackbody dead. The prior question is how we view the black body because its impacts
are real and happening right fucking now as indicated by the: Trayvon Martins, Eric
Garners, Ezell Fords, and countless, nameless other unarmed black men and black boys
Alt
Our alternative is rejection - Extend Wilderson Number 4

evidence: The only way to solve for the subjugation of the
black body is to to reject all instances of racism. During the
Apartheid movement the neoliberal compromises that the
radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the
moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or
unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a
political agenda predicated on pure rejection of the state.
Even if we its unlikely to produce change, you still vote neg
because its better than endorsing racist politics that have
failed the black body time and time again
Filter the alternative through the framework debate. We dont
have to win that we end racism everywhere or in-round, but
that rejection is a better starting point than the affs implicit
assumptions beliving the state to be good.
There is an ethical obligation to reject racism at all times
Memmi 00 [2000, Albert is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris, Albert-;
RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165]
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very
reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be
indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to
augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree
is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in
which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself]
himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism
illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated ; that is it illuminates
anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the
prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it
remains true that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always
debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a
human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order,
in a certain sense the entire human condition. The
on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence
and domination. From an ethical point of view , if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is the truly
capital sin.
fn22
It is not an accident that almost all of humanitys spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of
theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the
safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice
engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and
oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed.
All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall,
says the bible, that you were once a stranger in Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once
again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism
is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in
political choice.
the end, the ethical choice commands the
A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict,
violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are
irresistible.
Kritikal
The ontological violence against the black body turns and

outweighs the aff 1. Root cause - The social death of blacks sets the
preconditions for all violence
Taylor 2013


the work of Antonio Gramsci as an example of a leftist emancipatory discourse that seeks to
to
2. Even if you dont buy our root cause arguments, well win
the K magnifies the risk of their impacts and guts
solvency any risk of a link proves the affs impacts are
inevitable as dehumanization is always-already occurring
against blacks
3. Their discourse of emancipation reifies the fungibility of
the slave by transforming images of suffering into an
advertisement for the advancement of their own political
agenda.
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one
of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent
in the ANCs armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics Red, White, &
Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 26-28) GG
Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is that the pre-Columbian period, the Late Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on these three questions as
they might be related to that massive group of Black-skinned people south of the Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led to Britain
taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the Virginia
Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late-18th century emancipatory thrustintra-Human disputes such as the French and American
Revolutionsthat swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this. Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the
. It is highly conceivable that the discourse

that elaborates the justification for freeing the slave is not the
product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously
recognized the slave. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses
present themselves to us as further evidence of the Slaves
fungibility: [T]he figurative capacities of blackness enable white
flights of fancy while increasing the likelihood of the captives
Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses

disappearance (Scenes22). First, the questions of Humanism were
elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the Africanqua-chattel (the 1200s to the end of the 17th century). Then, as the presence of Black chattel
in the midst of exploited and un-exploited Humans (workers and
bosses, respectively) became a fact of the world, exploited
Humans (in the throes of class conflict with un-exploited Humans)
animated the evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as
un-exploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase
their profits. Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that
marks everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it
starts to mark the Black ontologically, the so-called great
emancipatory discourses of modernitymarxism, feminism,
postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement
political discourses predicated on grammars of suffering and
whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation,
might not have developed. Chattel slavery did not simply
reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the
Human out of culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East.
2NR OV
A mostly dropped case with no impacts
FW
It is illusory destroys real agency
State action and environmental tha
Our argument is that fiat is illusiory you must evaluate these
real world impacts first before their arguments of
ressitantment. Their framework arguments promote exclusion.
The gratuitous violence against the black body shatters
traditional impact calculus
1. Root Causality
Social death is modeled and perfected on black body
the ability to oppress, manipulate, and exploit is
outwardly applied to all bodies since the dawn of
Europes landing on this continent thats Wilderson 10
2. The ability to police and mark bodies one of the biggest
modern examples is the National Security Agency
policing of bodies justified by the external desire to
secure and protect society from threats to society this
macro level policing of bodies was first utilized to secure
the slave psychological manipulation and brutalize tools
meant to strike fear into the human stripped of its rights
3. Perfection of modern enslavement ie the Prison
Industrial complex Black bodies are incarcerated at a
rate of double that of white bodies regardless of if they
are Latino or European. This institutional normalization of
violent imprisonment furthers a culture
4. Magnitude civil society, since its forced engagement on
this continent has been defined by Black Death this
violence hasnt been progressively removed, merely
relabeled. From the fields to factories exclusion hasnt
changed. It doesnt matter how much money you make or
how many degrees you have if you are the wrong shade of
black you can be stopped and frisked.
We also access genocide and social death in round bc exclusion
Rejection in every instance is the only ethical option
2NR OV
The Kritik outweighs and turns case first:
The deciding factor of this round will be framework. The fact
that we are not real policy makers destroys individual
advocacy resulting in a blindness for structural violence and
anti-blackness in the civil society thats Kappler 95. Because
fiat is illusory assess the K as the first thing in this round
because its impacts are real and happening now, but voting aff
does nothing. Cross apply the role of the ballot, which is to
position yourself, judge, as an ethical decisionmaker by
engaging in complete rejection of racist politics. ??RANT Link
and Impact outweigh case??
Second is the Link
All of our wilderson evidence indicates that civil society is
against the black body, all of societys actions and motivations
are preconditioned on its abuse encouraging police brutality
and mass incarceraction. The aff uses this actor to perputate
their abuse (2nd Link Here)
Third is the Impact
Wilderson says anti-blackness is a precondition for violence
the ontological death taking place is due to the fact that blacks
have no state-given right to life. Assess systemic impacts first
because theyre occureencne in the SQ gives them precedence.
1) Magnitude- The loss of a right to life for nearly 40 Million,
social death outweighs, X
2) Probability- Its occurring now cases like Mike Brown,
Trayvon Marton and countless others prove
3) Timeframe- Right fucking now. I could be killed in the
name of self-defense and the USFG will see it as though
no crime took place. This applies to countless others
Fourth is the Alt

Our alternative is rejection in every instance [Wilderson and
Memmi] say this is key and the only ethical option, a vote for
the affirmative would be a vote for the indulgence in the
capital sin which is RACISM. Were not arguing to solve for
racism everywhere, but its rejection can solve for in-round
racism by punishment of the aff team with the ballot
2NR Round 4 OV
The Kritik outweighs and turns case first:
The deciding factor of this round will be framework. The fact
that we are not real policy makers destroys individual
advocacy resulting in a blindness for structural violence and
anti-blackness in the civil society thats Kappler 95. Because
fiat is illusory assess the K as the first thing in this round
because its impacts are real and happening now, but voting aff
does nothing. Cross apply the role of the ballot, which is to
position yourself, judge, as an ethical decisionmaker by
engaging in complete rejection of racist politics. ??RANT Link
and Impact outweigh case??
Second is the Link
All of our wilderson evidence indicates that civil society is
against the black body, all of societys actions and motivations
are preconditioned on its abuse encouraging police brutality
and mass incarceraction. The aff uses this actor to perputate
their abuse. Our Kokontis 11 evidence predicates that all
attempts to go into the ocean are based on a colonialistic
paradigm b
Third is the Impact K O/W a case with no extended impacts
Wilderson says anti-blackness is a precondition for violence
the ontological death taking place is due to the fact that blacks
have no state-given right to life. Assess systemic impacts first
because theyre occureencne in the SQ gives them precedence.
1) Magnitude- The loss of a right to life for nearly 40 Million,
social death outweighs
2) Probability- Its occurring now cases like Mike Brown,
Trayvon Marton and countless others prove
3) Timeframe- Right fucking now. I could be killed in the
name of self-defense and the USFG will see it as though
no crime took place. This applies to countless others
Fourth is the Alt

Our alternative is rejection in every instance [Wilderson and
Memmi] say this is key and the only ethical option, a vote for
the affirmative would be a vote for the indulgence in the
capital sin which is RACISM. Were not arguing to solve for
racism everywhere, but its rejection can solve for in-round
racism by punishment of the aff team with the ballot
Notes
All fairness claims against the K are based on a flawed and racist power
structure; only people with enough power are allowed to claim things are
unfair thats Delgado 92. Their framework embraces Eurocentric modernty,
which destroys alternative forms of knowledge production created from a
flawed epistemology rendering all aff truth claims unverifiable Baker 09.
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
Antiblackness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the power relations established

during colonialism are ever-present today and make possible the sovereign right to kill
Mbembe 3
xiv
Achille, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Necropolitics. 2003. Pgs. 6-22. PWoods.
race
figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so
than class-thinking
race has been the ever present shadow in Western political
thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign
peoples
the politics of race is ultimately linked to
the politics of death
biopower, that old sovereign right of death. In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to
regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state .
and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the
way all modern states function; indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in
That
(the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes),
. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in Foucaults terms,
It is, he says, the condition for the
acceptability of putting to death. Foucault states clearly that
(droit de glaive)
modernity.
the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This
state,
made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to
kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its
adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened
the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the final
solution.
it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist
state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state .
slavery
one of the first
instances of biopolitical experimentation
the very structure of the plantation system and its
aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception
in
the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow the
loss of a home rights over his or her body, and loss of political status.
This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death
The extreme patterns of
communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognize the antidiscursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts. There may,
after all, be no reciprocity on the plantation outside of the possibilities of rebellion and suicide , flight and
silent mourning, and there is certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate communicative reason.
As an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a
value. His or her labor is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury , in a
phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent tenor of the slaves life is
manifested through the overseers disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner and in the
Slave
life
the slave condition produces a contradiction between
freedom of property and freedom of person. An unequal relationship is established along with the
inequality of the power over life. This power over the life of another takes the form of commerce: a
persons humanity is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slaves life is
it is notably in the colony and under the apartheid regime that there comes into being a peculiar
terror formation I will now turn to. The most original feature of this terror formation is its concatenation
of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. Crucial to this concatenation is, once again, race
the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the
extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world. Here we
see the first syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality.
he claims,
In doing so,
. In many respects,

. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of
(expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a
political-juridical structure, the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought. As Paul Gilroy says,
In
many respects, the plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.31
Violence, here, becomes an element in manners, like whipping or taking of the slaves life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror.
, in many ways,
As Susan Buck- Morss has suggested,
Because the slaves life is like a thing, possessed by another person, the slave existence appears as a perfect figure of a shadow. If the relations between life and death, the politics of cruelty, and the symbolics of profanity are blurred in the
plantation system,
In fact, in most instances,
Arendt develops the
thesis that there is a link between national-socialism and traditional imperialism. According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a potential for violence previously unknown. What one witnesses in World War II is the extension to the civilized peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the
savages.
Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the ontological position of

Blackness the very possibility of ethics and freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives
ratification of the state and civil society. Resisting the lure of anti-blackness through a genealogy
of historys constitutive void is the starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative toward the pursuit of social
reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology, particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their
common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of
a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of

presupposes a set
of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial, religious, sexual,
social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to behave according to an ostensibly correct set of
moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying terms of the state and
civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize antiblackness and/or policies that
adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle class, rather than to critique or
subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state and civil society: for her, they are
possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of the story enabled
despair and disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that
inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered centuries of black social death
and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward freedom demands an unflinching
critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of these institutions and the terms
on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I
interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might

struggle has the potential to open the door to invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling
together something from nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable
freedom dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and absence and the history of processes
of dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic, social,
political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of its persistence rather than
being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption.
Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and the possibilities
and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say that the
past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker
interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort of
teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from
a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she calls
for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component of the black
freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of psychic structures
and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic in the (racial) order
of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a ghost story, an
excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process toward understanding. Hartman
constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching.
Projects that make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional or poetic devices cant rest with not-knowing: the
encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions of a conservative social gospel:
imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of
The imaginative devices dont exist for the

sake of being imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being imaginative, they allow
for radical possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different
some large-scale sense of collective responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both.
keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but encouragement of what uncertainty can yield.
Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of
making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to
genealogy as an object. A different version is used in order to understand the gaps,

to underscore or illuminate the negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the
context around the blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship
between the past, present, and future. This I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or
even radical in roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most
slip into a gaping negative space. This I would call
interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages in worldmaking and invention;
the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that
it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present
(which has devolved in some way) or a future that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a
very elegant example: it is a wished-for, utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of its adherents
To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is

to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they
accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line, and to imagine
a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something
that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken
back. [...] The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the
promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires
the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the
intimacy of our age with theirs an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost
of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not
toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomel 1991). Hartman writes:
necessarily critical, and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and
bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical
practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for
these projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of
African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive
rather than an aberration. But they waver between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we
have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity ; and trying to
underline the fundamental and unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical
narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the
possibilities and necessities of invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they
historically marginalized groups of people? All three of
present the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of
complacency, forging a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of the future
Hartmans vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly liberating

articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or significance of
ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience have already
succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the fundamental terms on
which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something from nothing; they have
an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that excludes or violates
their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch
activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a sensitive and
equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the possibilities for reinvention and
reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence and loss.
as well as more or less significant red flags.
xv
xvi
Antiblackness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the power relations

established during colonialism are ever-present today and make possible the sovereign
right to kill Mbembe 3
xvii
Achille, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Necropolitics. 2003. Pgs. 6-22. PWoods.
race
figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so
than class-thinking
race has been the ever present shadow in Western political
thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign
peoples
the politics of race is ultimately linked to
the politics of death
biopower, that old sovereign right of death. In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to
regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state .
and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the
way all modern states function; indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in
modernity.
the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This
state,
made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to
kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its
adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened
the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the final
solution.
it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist
state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state .
slavery
one of the first
That
(the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes),
. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that
.18 Indeed, in Foucaults terms,
It is, he says, the condition for the
acceptability of putting to death. Foucault states clearly that
(droit de glaive)
he claims,
In doing so,
instances of biopolitical experimentation

the very structure of the plantation system and its
aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception
in
the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow the
loss of a home rights over his or her body, and loss of political status.
This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death
The extreme patterns of
communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognize the antidiscursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts. There may,
after all, be no reciprocity on the plantation outside of the possibilities of rebellion and suicide , flight and
silent mourning, and there is certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate communicative reason.
As an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a
value. His or her labor is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury , in a
phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent tenor of the slaves life is
manifested through the overseers disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner and in the
Slave
life
the slave condition produces a contradiction between
freedom of property and freedom of person. An unequal relationship is established along with the
inequality of the power over life. This power over the life of another takes the form of commerce: a
persons humanity is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slaves life is
it is notably in the colony and under the apartheid regime that there comes into being a peculiar
terror formation I will now turn to. The most original feature of this terror formation is its concatenation
of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. Crucial to this concatenation is, once again, race
the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the
extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world. Here we
see the first syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality.
. In many respects,

. Indeed,
a triple loss:
, loss of
(expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a
political-juridical structure, the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought. As Paul Gilroy says,
In
many respects, the plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.31
Violence, here, becomes an element in manners, like whipping or taking of the slaves life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror.
, in many ways,
As Susan Buck- Morss has suggested,
Because the slaves life is like a thing, possessed by another person, the slave existence appears as a perfect figure of a shadow. If the relations between life and death, the politics of cruelty, and the symbolics of profanity are blurred in the
plantation system,
In fact, in most instances,
Arendt develops the
thesis that there is a link between national-socialism and traditional imperialism. According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a potential for violence previously unknown. What one witnesses in World War II is the extension to the civilized peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the
savages.
Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the ontological position of

Blackness the very possibility of ethics and freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives
ratification of the state and civil society. Resisting the lure of anti-blackness through a genealogy
of historys constitutive void is the starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative toward the pursuit of social
reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology, particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their
common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of
a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of

despair and disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that presupposes a set
of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial, religious, sexual,
social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to behave according to an ostensibly correct set of
moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying terms of the state and
civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize antiblackness and/or policies that
adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle class, rather than to critique or
subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state and civil society: for her, they are
inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered centuries of black social death
and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward freedom demands an unflinching
critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of these institutions and the terms
on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I
possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of the story enabled
interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might

struggle has the potential to open the door to invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling
encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions of a conservative social gospel:
together something from nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable
freedom dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and absence and the history of processes
of dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic, social,
political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of its persistence rather than
being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption.
Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and the possibilities
and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say that the
past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker
interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort of
teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from
a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she calls
for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component of the black
freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of psychic structures
and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic in the (racial) order
of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a ghost story, an
excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process toward understanding. Hartman
constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching.
Projects that make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional or poetic devices cant rest with not-knowing: the
imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of
The imaginative devices dont exist for the

sake of being imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being imaginative, they allow
for radical possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different
some large-scale sense of collective responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both.
keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but encouragement of what uncertainty can yield.
Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of
making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to
genealogy as an object. A different version is used in order to understand the gaps,

to underscore or illuminate the negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the
context around the blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship
between the past, present, and future. This I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or
even radical in roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most
slip into a gaping negative space. This I would call
interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages in worldmaking and invention;
the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that
it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present
(which has devolved in some way) or a future that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a
very elegant example: it is a wished-for, utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of its adherents
To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is

to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they
accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line, and to imagine
a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something
that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken
back. [...] The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the
promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires
the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the
intimacy of our age with theirs an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost
of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not
toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomel 1991). Hartman writes:
necessarily critical, and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and
bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical
practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for
these projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of
African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive
rather than an aberration. But they waver between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we
have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity ; and trying to
underline the fundamental and unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical
historically marginalized groups of people? All three of
narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the
possibilities and necessities of invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they
present the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of
complacency, forging a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of the future
Hartmans vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly liberating

articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or significance of
ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience have already
succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the fundamental terms on
which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something from nothing; they have
an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that excludes or violates
their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch
activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a sensitive and
equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the possibilities for reinvention and
reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence and loss.
as well as more or less significant red flags.
Strictly using objectivism is a product of whiteness intended to mask the oppression of the
black body while theyre busy calling our social reality bullshit and contemplating their
own whiteness, the black body continues to suffer
Yancy 8 George, Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. Black Bodies, White Gazes
THE CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE. 2008. Pgs. 231-232. PWoods.
"Bullshit!" functioned as a form of erasure of the experiences of Black men who have indeed encountered
the white gaze within the contexts of elevators and other social spaces. She assumed no "responsibility to
marginalized people and to the understanding developed from their lives." There was no suspension of
her sense of self-certainty regarding the dynamics and racism and how Black men struggle daily to deal
with issues of racism in their lives. She did not listen to me and did not take any steps toward conceding
my understanding of the social world as legitimate.
''White racism involves a massive
breakdown of empathy,
In addition to the fact that "bullshit" functioned
as a form of erasure, not unlike the humiliating experiences that I have had in the presence of certain
white bodies, it also pointed to various ways in which the manifest function of certain objections may very
well operate to obfuscate profound modes of living in bad faith
she was lying to herself, concealing
from view the reality of her own racism
I am
careful here to note that the epistemic validity of an objection must not be reduced to its emotional
delivery or aim to insult one philosopher pointed out to me that if he and I held very different views
regarding the ontology of numbers that an objection from him ought to be judged on the basis of its
validity and nothing more. In the case of the white student, however
it was about
race and racism. Discussions involving the ontology of numbers,
do not implicate the self in
the same way discussions around race and racism do. The self is not similarly exposed, made potentially
vulnerable
conceivably invested in protecting hidden and
threatening aspects of her white self that she would rather avoid. She was far more interested in protecting
her sense of "goodness," which functioned to mask how she is implicated in the subtle workings of white
racism. The white student's objection raised the issue of how white interlocutors, when in discussions
involving race and racism, may
deploy theory as a way of not being forced to examine aspects of
their own white subject position.
Whiteness, is a master of concealment; it is
insidiously embedded within responses, reactions, good, intentions, postural gestures, denials, and
structural and material orders
Whiteness as a
form of ambushing is not an anomaly. The operations of whiteness are by no means completely
transparent.
Rather than rest assured that she is effectively fighting white privilege, when engaging in resistance a
person needs to continually be questioning the effects of her activism on both self and world Although
there are many white antiracists who do fight and will continue to fight against the operations of white
power, and while it is true that the regulatory power of whiteness will invariably attempt to undermine
such efforts, it is important that white antiracists realize how much is at stake. While antiracist whites
. In other words,
. In fact,
. The white female student was not passionately invested in defending an ontological theory regarding numbers, but
after all,
. Etymologically, the word "insidious" (insidiae) means to ambush-a powerful metaphor, as it brings to mind images and scenarios of being snared and trapped unexpectedly.
This is partly what it means to say that whiteness is insidious. The moment a white person claims to have arrived, he/she often undergoes a surprise attack, a form of attack that points to how whiteness ensnares even as one strives to fight against racism. Shannon Sullivan
states, "
.,,3
take time to get their shit together

Black bodies and bodies of color continue to suffer, their
bodies cry out for the political and existential urgency for the immediate undoing of the oppressive
operations of whiteness the very notion of the temporal gets racialized. My point here is that even as
whites take the time to theorize the complexity of whiteness, revealing its various modes of resistance to
radical transformation, Black bodies continue to endure tremendous pain and suffering
. Here,
. Doing theory in the service of undoing whiteness
comes with its own snares and seductions, its own comfort zones, and reinscription of distances. Whites who deploy theory in the service of fighting against white racism must caution against the seduction of white narcissism, the recentering of whiteness, even if it is the object of critical reflection, and, hence,
the process of sequestration from the real world of weeping, suffering, and traumatized Black bodies impacted by the operations of white power. As antiracist whites continue to make mistakes and continue to falter in the face of institutional interpellation and habituated racist reflexes, tomorrow, a Black body
will be murdered as it innocently reaches for its wallet. The sheer weight of this reality mocks the patience of theory.
xviii
xix
xx
xxi

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DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

THIS FILE BURNS THE

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

- If the proper impact cards are read in the 1nc or block,

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

Fungibility being seen as a commodity

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

condition). The reason all blacks have Black Bodies is not a

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

knowledge, the very knowledge which was responsible for the

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

- Add 2nc tricks

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

Their silence on race is not neutral its rooted in a power

Communication 61.3. PWoods.

In academic and political discourse, it is

locations and experiences (Blair, Brown and Baxter 402).

Previous rhetorical scholarship has focused on racist

There is nothing essential, "natural,"

(Nakayama and Krizek 292). /

Even though many white people sense

(van Dijk; Goldberg),

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

Ideological struggles are struggles over meaning. Meaning is a social

("The Rediscovery" 67, 81; "The Whites" 18). /

ideologies function hegemonically to preserve powerful

, as the following analysis of the Braun-Helms debate illustrates,

Their doomsday scenarios separate the question of apocalyptic

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

ALREADY ENDED for people of color and that their focus on

IR is a product of whiteness it ignores history, lacks

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

in those spaces, gradually

of these disciplines. For a variety of reasons,

in the late 18th century

In other words, IR discourse is predominantly a prose of counter-insurgency: it is

Whiteness is the historical foundation of biopolitics the

(or for that matter racism)

(the ideology that defines history as an economic

and suggests that

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address

, which could be considered

. This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First,

(expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the

In many respects, the plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.31

As Susan Buck- Morss has

. In fact, in most instances,

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

The alternative is to reject the affirmative as an act of burning

The colorline continues to belt the world.

The slaves are

The slaves begin as death,

The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

Freedom is the only callingit alone contains all possible

must become death . Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black,

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File

Addressing Anti-Blackness is a prioirity scandalizes ethicality

DJ Williams Payton Woods Wilderson File