1NC Black Humanity Studies

You should reject their affirmation of Blackness-as-pollutant--that form of studying Blackness as an anti-human through the
lens of oppression, pathology and suffering ignores the history
of Black resistance as a creation and reformulation of
humanity and distills lived experience and complex emotional
and cultural networks into political heuristics which deny
agency and directly turns their WYNTER evidence.
Ebony A. Utley and Curry 16, associate professor, Department of
Communication Studies @ CSU Long Beach, and Tommy J. Curry, associate professor
of philosophy @ Texas A&M, 7-29-2016, Humanizing Blackness: An Interview with
Tommy J. Curry, Southern Communication Journal, Vol 81:4, pg. 263-265
Most people think of Blackness and how we study Blackness as a negative
endeavor. Its always associated with oppression, pathology, suffering. Theres
another way that we could look at Blackness as an alternate version of the human
being. Like a human being thats made within history, that really stands within the
courage and enduring of slavery, suffering, and povertyan evolved kind of
humanity thats of the world and not something that stands outside of it. We
usually associate humanity with whiteness, reason, virtue , and all of these things that we
havent really realized in the world. With Blackness you get that quality of the human that is
found within triumph, struggle, and resistance. Resistance is a human quality that
Black people possess because theyre human, but there is something else about Black
humanity that is unique, that comes about because of slavery, Jim Crow, rape, castration.
These types of things are peculiar to Black people, and because of that, their
humanity, as it interacts with the world, has created this unique thing that we now think of
in terms of Blackness. Utley: Can anyone who accepts the definition of Blackness as the condition of being
Curry:

a human being, consider themselves Black? Curry: No. When we talk about the quality of Blackness what were
actually talking about is awareness about the conditions that have been brought about through colonization through
racism, through poverty, through disease, through wretchedness. The question is: Do you have it? Do you have the
history or the trauma of slavery, or colonization, or genocide? Of being marked, targeted, and exposed? Do you
experience the world as a social death, always able to be killed because of the continuous violence towards Black
people? Utley: If an individual is phenotypically Black, but does not experience the word this way, is this person still
Black per your definition? Curry: Yes, because its not about the consciousness of this is the life Ive lived, its the
possibility of existence in this world. I can walk off the cliff and say that I dont believe in gravity, but Im not less
affected by gravity. If I walk off the cliff, Im still dead. Thats what I mean. Consider whiteness, even if youre a poor
white person that could be killed by the cops, the question is Do you live your life as if the very condition of living

White people, even poor white people, dont go through moments of life
where they know that their disposability is fundamentally necessary for everyone
elses existence. Young black men certainly do. The exploitation of black women
certainly makes that true. Theyre the disposable and the exploitable. People can say that
is formulated on death?

bad shit happens to other people too, and Im in complete agreement with that. It doesnt disown that there are

when you talk about Blackness in America, youre talking

about how groups of people who are descendants of slaves and colonialism whose
existence within the empire is conditioned by death. Thats a very different thing. And
yet, theres something in Black people that says resist. Thats the question of how
humanity is being created and reformed. We dont get that complexity. We
study Blackness and Black people as if they were a reflection of certain
different kinds of experiences, but

political ideologies, not the consciousness of a people who think that they
should actually be able to live, to be citizens, husbands, or wives. These are all
complex emotions that exist in human societies that are studied across the world,
but are never utilized to study Black people. Utley: How should we study Black people?
Curry: In my work I refer to that as the culture-logican idea to frame how Black people create the world through a

How does the human being interact with the world, not as a
distant object, but literally how do they make it, form it, contour it so that it
reflects their own existence? This replaces things that we talk about now like phenomenology,
critical theory, or even basic concepts of metaphysics like ontology or epistemology. Because
what were talking about is how the world and the human are necessary to create
social reality. They dont exist separate from each other. When we study Blackness we like to
study it as a material artifact thats outside of our perception. So racism
becomes an object of our study. It doesnt become something that is created and cocreated. We see Black peoples problems when we study Black people in that way,
and it reproduces some of the assumptions of inhumanity. Because if we thought
of ourselves as human, then we would create realities just like white people create
co-authoring of the world.

realities. Utley: How do white and Black reality creation processes differ? Curry: White people project themselves
into the future all the time. Theyre building ideas that are going to set the foundation, like in technology, in

White people fundamentally

believe theyre human, so their advances are grounding for future generations centuries
later. Black people cant speak in that way because we dont fundamentally
believe that Blackness is a foundation to humanity, such that it has anything to
contribute to civilization. Thats a very different intellectual space to produce
knowledge if you believe that you are simply a fleeting contingent of an
environmental circumstance. That you have no separate history, aspiration , or
vision for what the world could or could not be. We dont expect this for other groups of people, but ask
astrophysics etc., that set the foundations for generations ahead of them.

Black people what they contribute besides reform of the empire? And theyre like, We dont know because thats
not what we teach our scholars to think towards.

way.

We have to refocus our lens in a very serious

Utley: Is there one academic discipline that refocuses Blackness better than others? Curry: No. Utley: Theyre

Disciplines are the specific articulations of how weve divvied up

Western concepts of the human. Sociology is a reflection of how the European man
exists within colonial society. Economics is how the European man rationalizes self-interest profiting in
all equally failing? Curry: Yes.

colonial societies. Philosophy, how do Western men fit themselves in relationship to all other people who are not as
rational or human? Disciplines are merely reflections of different pieces or aspects of one concept of the human.

When writing about Blackness we have to challenge ourselves to not study

Blackness or race-theory as if its one aspect of how Western bourgeois man
rationalizes Black lives, which is what I think a lot of our work turns into. The issue is how do
we separate from a study based on that separation, not how we regret the distance
race puts us from an ideal white notion of humanity.

Their move to merge with the non-human object is the

ultimate retreat into political disempowerment that greases
the wheels of capital rather than engaging in collective
potential organizing that is necessary for environmental
justice and the dismantlement of fossil fuel infrastructure.
Jodi Dean 16, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus

University, The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change, January 2016,

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-anamorphic-politics-of-climate-change/
[Edited for language]
Some use climate change as a vehicle for jouissance, for enjoying destruction, punishment, and knowing.

current of left anthropocenic enjoyment circulates through evocations of

unprecedented, unthinkable catastrophe : the end of the world, the end of the human
species, the end of civilization. Theorists embrace extinction, focus on deep time,
and displace a politics of the people onto the agency of things . Postmodern Augustinians
announce the guilt or hypocrisy of the entire human species. Hubris is humanitys, all of humanitys, downfall.
Philosophers and cultural critics take on the authoritative rhetoric of geoscientists and evolutionary biologists.

We
cant do anything about climate change, but this lets us off the hook when we
stop trying. Getting to name our new era, marking our impact as the
Anthropocene, provides a compensatory chargehey, we changed the world after
all. Even better than coming up with a name for our era is the jouissance that comes
from getting to judge everyone else for their self-absorbed consumerist pleasureswhy
didnt you change when you should have? Anticipatory Cassandras, we watch from within our
melancholic pre-loss, to use Naomi Kleins term, comforted by the fantasy of our future
capacity to say we knew it all along. We told you so. Your capitalism, instrumental reason, or
Those of us who follow the reports of emissions, extreme weather, and failed states enjoy being in the know.

Cartesian dualism killed us all. Or so we fantasize, screening out the unequal distribution of the effects of warming

The perfect storm of planetary

catastrophe, species condemnation, and paralyzed incapacity allows the Left a form of
jouissance that ongoing deprivation, responsibility, and struggle do not allow.
Overlooked as too human, these products and conditions of capitalisms own continuity can be
dismissed as not mattering, as immaterial. Organized political movement appears
somehow outmoded, its enduring necessity dispersed into individuated ethicospiritual orientations on a cosmos integrated over eons. This left anthropocenic enjoyment
of destruction, punishment, and knowing circulates in the same loop as capitalist
enjoyment of expenditure, accumulation, and waste, an enjoyment furthered by fossil fuels, but not
reducible to them. Left anthropocenic enjoyment thrives on the disaster that capitalist
enjoyment produces. In this circuit, captivation in enjoyment fuels the exploitation,
expropriation, and extraction driving the capitalist system: more, more, more; endless
Russia doesnt worry about it as much as, say, Bangladesh.

circulation, dispossession, destruction, and accumulation; ceaseless, limitless death. Incapacitated by magnitude,

the Left gets off on moralism, complexity, and disaster even as the politics
of a capitalist class determined to profit from catastrophe continues. The circulation of left
anthropocenic enjoyment through capitalist currents manifests in a diminished
capacity for imagining human subjectivity. Even as things, objects, actants, and the
nonhuman engage in a wide array of lively pursuits, the anthropocenic perspective seems to
confine humans to three roles: observers, victims, and survivor s. Observers are the
boggled by scale,

scientists, their own depression and loss now itself a subgenre of climate writing. Scientists measure and track, but

Observers also appear as the

rest of us as moral audience, enjoined to awareness of human-nonhuman
entanglements and the agency of microbes. In this vein, our awareness matters not just as an
cant do anything about the unfolding catastropheaction is for others.

opportunity for spiritual development but also because multiple instances of individuated moral and aesthetic
appreciation of fragility and the limits of human agency could potentially converge, seemingly without division and

When the scale is anthropocenic, the details of political organization fall

away in favor of the plurality of self-organizing systems. The second role, victims, points
struggle.

to islanders and refugees, those left with nothing but their own mobility. They are, again, shorn of political

subjectivity, dwarfed by myriad other extinctions, and reduced to so much lively matter. The third role is as
survivors. Survivors are the heroes of popular cultures dystopic futures, the exceptional and strong concentrations
of singular capacity that continue the frontiersmanship and entrepreneurial individualism that the US uses to deny
collective responsibility for inequality. I should add here that Kleins most significant contribution with This Changes
Everything is her provision of the new, active, collective figure of Blockadia. As is well-known, Blockadia
designates organized political struggles against fracking, drilling, pipelines, gas storage, and other projects that
extend the fossil fuel infrastructure when it should in fact be dismantled. With this figure, Klein breaks with the
anthropocenic displacement of political action. If fascination with climate changes anthropocenic knot of
catastrophe, condemnation, and paralysis lures the Left into the loop of capitalist enjoyment, an anamorphic gaze
can help dislodge us. Anamorphosis designates an image or object that seems distorted when we look at it head
on, but that appears clearly from another perspective. A famous example is Hans Holbeins 1533 painting The
Ambassadors, in which a skull in the painting appears as such only when seen from two diagonal angles; viewed
directly, its a nearly indistinguishable streak. Lacan emphasizes that anamorphosis demonstrates how the space of
vision isnt reducible to mapped space but includes the point from which we see. Space can be distorted, depending
on how we look at it. Apprehending what is significant, then, may require escaping the fascination of the picture
by adopting another perspectivea partial or partisan perspective, the perspective of a part. From this partisan
perspective, the whole will not appear as a whole. It will appear with a hole. The perspective from which the hole
appears is that of the subject, which is to say of the gap opened up by the shift to a partisan perspective. When we
try to grasp climate change directly, we end up confused, entrapped in distortions that fuel the reciprocal fantasies
of planetary scale geoengineering and post-civilizational neo-primitivism. The immensity of the calamity of the
changing climatewith attendant desertification, ocean acidification, and species lossseemingly forces us into

some theorists
insist that the Anthropocene urgently requires us to develop a new ontology, new
concepts, new verbs, entirely new ways of thinking , yet I have my doubts: geologic times
exceeding of human time makes it indifferent even to a philosophy that includes the nonhuman. If there is a
need, it is a human need implicated in politics and desire, that is to say, in power
and its generation and deployment. The demand for entirely new ways of thinking
comes from those who accept as well as those who reject capitalism, science, and
technology. Big thinkers in industry and economics join speculative realists and new materialists
in encouraging innovation and disruption. Similarly, the emphasis on new forms of
interdisciplinarity, on breaking down divisions within the sciences and between the sciences and the
humanities isnt radical, but a move that has been pursued in other contexts . Modern
environmentalism, as Ursula Heise observes, tried to drive home to scientists, politicians, and the
population at large the urgency of developing a holistic understanding of ecological
connectedness.1 The Macy Conferences that generated cybernetics and the efforts of the Rand
Corporation and the Department of Defense to develop more flexible, soft, and
networked forms of welfare, as well as contemporary biotech, geotech, and biomimicry, all echo the
same impulse to interlink and merge. The philosopher Frdric Neyrat has subjected the
seeing all or nothing. If we dont grasp the issue in its enormity, we miss it entirely. In this vein,

goosphere that results from this erasure of spacing to a scathing critique, implicating it in the intensification of
global fears and anxieties: when everything is connected, everything is dangerous. Neyrat thus advocates an
ecology of separation: the production of a distance within the interior of the socio-political situation is the
condition of possibility of real creative response to economic or ecological crisis.2 Approaching climate change

Rather than
trapped by our fascination with an (always illusory) anthropocenic whole, we cut across
and through, finding and creating openings. We gain possibilities for collective
action and strategic engagement. Just as it inscribes a gap within the supposition of ecological
anamorphically puts such an ecology of separation to work. We look for and produce gaps.

connectedness, the anamorphic gaze likewise breaks with the spatial model juxtaposing the molar and the
molecular popular with some readers of Deleuze and Guattari. Instead of valorizing one pole over the other (and
the valued pole is nearly always the molecular, especially insofar as molecular is mapped onto the popular and the
dispossessed rather than, say, the malignant and the self-absorbed), the idea of an anamorphic perspective on
climate change rejects the pre-given and static scale of molar and molecular to attend to the perspective that
reveals a hole, gap, or limit constitutive of desire and the subject of politics. Here are some examples of
approaching climate change from the side. In Tropics of Chaos, Christian Parenti emphasizes the catastrophic
convergence of poverty, violence, and climate change. He draws out the uneven and unequal impacts of planetary
warming on areas already devastated by capitalism, racism, colonialism, and militarism. From this angle,

policies

aimed at redressing and reducing economic inequality can be seen as necessary for
adapting to a changing climate. In a similar vein but on a different scale, activists focusing on pipeline
and oil and gas storage projects target the fossil fuel industry as the infrastructure of climate change, the central
component of global warmings means of reproduction. But instead of being examples of the politics of locality

infrastructure struggles pursue an anamorphic politics. They dont try to

address the whole of the causes and effects of global warmin g. They approach it
from the side of its infrastructural supports. The recent victory of the campaign against the
dominant in recent decades,

Keystone Pipeline, as well as of the anti-fracking campaign in New York State, demonstrate ways that an

politics is helping dismantle the power of the oil and gas industry and
produce a counterpower infrastructure. The new movement to liberate museums and cultural
anamorphic

institutions from the fossil fuel sector supplies a third set of examples, modeling a politics that breaks decisively
with the melancholic catastrophism enjoyed by the anthropocenic Left. As the demonstrations at the Louvre
accompanying the end of the Paris COP made clear, artists and activists have shifted their energy away from the
promotion of general awareness and participation to concentrate instead on institutions as arrangements of power
that might be redeployed against the oil and gas industry. Pushing for a fossil-free culture, an array of groups have
aligned in a fight against the sector that supplies capitalism with its energy. They demonstrate how the battle over
the political arrangement of a warming planet is in part a cultural battle, a struggle over who and what determines
our imagining of our future and the future of our imagining. In this vein, Liberate Tate works to free art from oil by
pushing the Tate to drop the sponsorship of British Petroleum. For the past five years, the group has performed art
interventions in Tate buildings as well as other UK arts institutions that support (and are supported by) BP. Actions
include unauthorized performances such as Birthmark, from late November 2015. Liberate Tate activists occupied
the 1840s gallery at the Tate Britain, tattooing each other with the number of C02 emissions in parts per million
corresponding to the day they were born. Hidden Figures, from 2014, featured dozens of performers standing along
the sides of a hundred-square-meter black cloth which they held chest high, raising and lowering in arches and
waves. Taking place in Tate Moderns Turbine Hall, the performance pointed to Malevichs Black Square, part of an
exhibit that opened the same summer that carbon concentrations exceeded four hundred parts per million, a fact
parallel to and omitted from the exhibit, much like BPsand by implication the Tatesinvolvement in the climate
crisis. Hidden Figures invokes the Tates release of the minutes of meetings from its ethics committee in the wake of
numerous freedom of information requests. Black rectangles blocked out multiple sections of the released
documents. Hidden Figures reproduced an enormous black square within the museum, placing the fact of redaction,
hiding, and censorship at its center. As Liberate Tate explains, the redactions reveal a divide, a split between the
ostensible public interest of the Tate and the private interest it seeks to protect.3 Occupying this split via its
demonstration of the museums incorporation into BPs ecocidal infrastructure, Liberate Tate disrupts the flow of
institutional power. Rather than fueling BPs efforts at reputation management, it makes the museum into a site of
counterpower. The Natural History Museum, the new project of the art, activist, and theory collective Not An
Alternative (of which I am a member), similarly adopts an anamorphic politics. The Natural History Museum
repurposes the generic form of the natural history museum as a set of institutionalized expectations, meanings, and
practices that embody and transmit collective power. It puts display on display, transferring our attention to the
infrastructures supporting what and how we see. The Natural History Museums gaze is avowedly partisan, a
political approach to climate change in the context of a museum culture that revels in its authoritative neutrality.
Activating natural history museums claim to serve the common, The Natural History Museum divides the sector
from within: anyone tasked with science communication has to take a stand. Do they stand with collectivity and the
common or with oligarchs, private property, and fossil fuels? Cultural institutions such as science and natural
history museums come to appear in their role in climate change as sites of greenwashing and of emergent
counterpower. Operating as a pop-up peoples museum, The Natural History Museums exhibits and tours provide a
counter-narrative that combats the influence oil and gas industry on science education. The Natural History
Museum also serves as a platform for political organizing, the ostensibly neutral zone of the museum turned into a
base camp against the fossil fuel sector. It moves beyond participatory arts creation of experiences and valuation
of participation for its own sake to the building of divisive political power. In March 2014, The National History
Museum released an open letter to museums of science and natural history signed by dozens of the worlds top
scientists, including several Nobel laureates. The letter urged museums to cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry
and with funders of climate obfuscation. After its release, hundreds of scientists added their names. News of the
letter appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times and featured in scores of
publications, including the Guardian, Forbes, Salon, and the Huffington Post. Later that spring, The Natural History
Museum delivered a petition with over 400,000 signatures to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC
demanding that the museum kick fossil fuel oligarch David Koch off its board. The premise of Liberate Tate and Not

institutions matter as combined and intensified expressions of

power. More than just the aggregation of individuals, they are individuals plus the force of their
aggregation. Because institutions remain concentrations of authority that can be
salvaged and put to use, it makes political sense to occupy rather than ignore or
An Alternative is that

abandon them. We can repurpose trusted or taken-for-granted formsa possibility

precluded by the anthropocenic preoccupation with a n imaginary whole figured in
geologic time. Just as the museum is a site in the infrastructure of capitalist class powerwith
its donors and galas and named hallsso can it be a medium in the production of a
counterpower infrastructure that challenges, shames, and dismantles the very class and sector that
would use what is common for private benefit. The movement to liberate museums and cultural institutions from
fossil fuel interests does not try to present climate change directly or nature as a whole. Instead, it approaches the

We are within the

systems and institutions the effects of which scientists measure and chart . And that
the people as the collective subject of politics are in them means that they are not
fully determined. There are gaps that we can hold open and force in one direction
rather than another. In too many contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene, the organization of people
processes contributing to global warming as processes in which we are already implicated.

our institutions, systems, and arrangements of power, production, and reproductionappears only as a distortion.
Everything is active except for us, we with no role other than that of observers, victims, or lone survivors. In

the strategic coming together

of organized opposition to the fossil fuel sector points to the continued and
indispensable role of collective power. Just as a class politics without ecology can support
contrast with emphases on nonhumans, actants, and distributed agency,

extractivism, so can an ecology without class struggle continue the assault on working people that has resulted in
deindustrialization in parts of the North and West and hyperindustrialization in parts of the South and East (we

we shouldnt undermine
collective political power in the name of a moralistic horizontalism of humans
and nonhumans. We should work to generate collective power and mobilize it in an
emancipatory egalitarian direction, a direction incompatible with the continuation of capitalism and
might call such an ecology without class struggle green neoliberalism). So

hence a direction necessarily partisan and divisive.

black humanity studies

Ebony A. Utley and Curry 16, associate professor, Department of
Communication Studies @ CSU Long Beach, and Tommy J. Curry, associate professor
of philosophy @ Texas A&M, 7-29-2016, Humanizing Blackness: An Interview with
Tommy J. Curry, Southern Communication Journal, Vol 81:4, pg. 265-267
Curry: Independent research institutes on concepts of life. The same thing that happened when the Frankfort school

We have to build up our own organizations. We need new schools of

thought. Utley: What do you want to call it? Curry: Black humanity studies. We have not yet even
begun, even though were in the twentyfirst century, we have not reached a point where Black
people could identify humanity studies as just the study of Black people. Black people
are like Can we use the masters tools? But why is that a goddamn
argument? We write for whites to recognize what we say about Blackness. If you
write things about cultural or alternative visions of humanity, then you dont get the same
cachet because its unrecognizable to white audiences. We need re-education. A
school of thought that literally reformulates the way that we see Blackness itself.
Were taught to look at Blackness as that thing, like were going to study race, but you have to
came out.

go out there and study that thing over there, and theres not a lot of people here that study it, so heres what you
have to do. Nobody in our committee studies race, so if youre going to do this make sure you have enough
emotional distance, make sure youre still objective, make sure you got that gender thing to add diversity to this

How were told to study ourselves as objects away from ourselves is

not how any other discipline has started. Think about how racist the disciplines were. They werent
concept.

racist because they were objective; they were racist because they were intimately connected to the social and
cultural aspirations of the white people who were studying society. But then those very same aspirations tried to be

when Black men are taught to

study themselves, theyre taught to study themselves as problems, criminals,
disowned and measured when Black people were taught to study race. So

pathologies. Whats that alternative vision, that spark within the scholar thats pushing them to create
different things, ideas, and models that cant be captured within these disciplines? Utley: I like lists, so lets outline

were actually trying to capture is how does the persons particular or

peculiar social position, how does their group relationship, how does their position
within society or institutions, how does that reflect the larger institutions or historical
questions? Utley: So weve got the acceptability of subjectivity as one of the first steps. Whats next? Curry: If
it. Curry: What

we understand the subject, if we understand that position, then second, we must understand the humanity of that
subject. There has to be an understanding of the historical issues, which impress or impose upon the humanity of

What would it look like for

Black humanity to exist within capitalistic or communal economic structures?
What are the different aspects of Black rationality? And then lastly or next (not like this would be
last), but how do we theorize the aspirations of the Black human within these
social, material, and historical relationships? Because I think thats the work
that theory actually has to do. We could describe the world as Black humans see or
experience it, but then what do we aspire for the world to become? Where do
we see the world leading? That job has been turned over to artists and our poets, which is fine, but
we also have to give that to our theorists. We must support the creativity and
innovation of Black scholarship. What were trying to do is create new conditions for
new possibilities of how people can think by eliminating the barriers and obstacles to
Black humanity and Black aspirations as much as possible. Utley: Whats at stake
if we dont create these new possibilities for thinking? Curry: I did an interview with NASA about this
question of extraterrestrial and microbial life. Think about what that does for young white college
students. Theyre debating whether or not if these things are actual possibilities for
their civilization. Theyre actually thinking, How do we formulate ethics or
relationship to a foreign entity or alien life on another planet? In the twenty-first century,
white people are engaging the galaxy, and Black people are arguing about hands up dont shoot. Im not
saying that we shouldnt worry about things, but were not even taking a
planetary assessment of how Americas empire relates to other colonial
strategies throughout the world. Thats not even the question on the table. Its
really an intellectual regression. All we care about is an argument about identity.
Weve become lost within the mantras of our time, without any conceptualization of either the
structures that make this possible throughout the universe, or what the future
even looks like. Utley: What should the mindset be for the future of writing about Blackness ?
Curry: Blackness is humanity unrealized. Thats what it is. Its not perfect, but its the
version of humanity that humanizes what rational man was. Because its
compassionate, its built from the wretchedness of all of experience, it survives, and
its resilient. Blackness is the human possible; the human thats possible.
Black subjects. The third thing would then be the production of knowledge.