Black Nihilism - Wake 2016

Black Nihilism/Swag Swag
Would you kill the world to save ya self?

From ya boy Kenneth Globama Guy. If you have any questions, email memalikfamilyguy31@gmail.com
Notes/Info
1. This is a critique of our orientation to the political and how the political
economy is built upon the accumulation of black flesh. Black nihilism
critiques the reliance on legality as a metric for the constant hope of
producing change thats never gonna come.
2. Black Nihilism is both an epistemic break and radical reorientation to the
political sphere where hope becomes incoherent and complete rejection of
white liberalism is in full effect
3. When it comes to the specific links- these are links from the case negs of
policy affs- you can place them on case as both case turns and serial policy
failure args or have them as links for why procedural policy frameworks are
only a continuation of a hope to never come
4. Also, try not to get into the ontology debate, Warren critiques the structures
of the political as a regime opposed the ways in which it shapes social death
upon the black subject. If using Wilderson, utilize his structuring of blackness
in the political claims. Warren doesnt necessarily conclude pessimism and
easily stands on his own
5. Explanation of Black nihilism/alt and how it works
Warren 15 [Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington
University, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume
15, Number 1, Spring 2015] Kguy
This essay argues that the logic of the Politicallinear temporality, biopolitical futurity,
perfection, betterment, and redresssustains black suffering. Progress and perfection are worked
through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will
ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of violence that pulverize black being.
This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from discursive and intellectual obliteration; rather
than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies in need of treatment, this essay
considers black nihilism a necessary philosophical posture capable of unraveling the Political
and its devastating logic of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that
assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political apostasy
as the only ethical response to black suffering.
1NC:
Sustaining the coherence of the American political framework reproduces
discourses of progress that result in the further accumulation of injured and
murdered black bodies --- black nihilism is the only metaphysical framework
capable of addressing this antagonism and unraveling the political
Black humanity was rationalized as an imaginary number- purely speculative and never intended
to actually translate into something (3/5 of human) don't worry our faith in the political will
alleviate us from our oppression and restore that remaining 2/5ths because eventually everything
gets better. the American dream is realized through black suffering- MLK warranted freedom
through the experience of black suffering- no matter how many times they tried to kil us and beat
us we will love them and transform our own situation. black death acts as a signer against the
idea of progress and hope, if it is true that we are becoming a better nation why are black people
still being murdered by the police? every generation will shift attitudes and become more
conscious, supposedly we are a better generation that the generation that murdered Emmet Till.
progess and linearity will only reproduce metaphysical strucutres of violence that kill black
people
Perverse juxtapositions structure our relation to the Political. This becomes even more apparent
and problematic when we consider the position of blacks within this structuring.1 On the one hand, our
Declaration of Independence proclaims, All men are created equal, and yet black captives were
fractioned in this political arithmetic as three-fifths of this man. The remainder, the two-fifths, gets
lost within the arithmetic shuffle of commerce and mercenary prerogatives. We, of course, hoped that the Reconstruction
Amendments would correct this arithmetical error and finally provide an ontological equation, or an existential variable, that would restore fractured and fractioned
Black humanity became somewhat of an imaginary number in

this equation, purely speculative and nice in theory but difficult to actualize or translate into
something tangible. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and extra-legal and legal violence made a mockery of the 14th Amendment, and the
convict leasing system turned the 13th Amendment inside out for blacks. Yet, we approach this political perversity with a certain
apodictic certainty and incontrovertible hope that things will (and do) get better. The Political, we
are told, provides the material or substance of our hope; it is within the Political that we are to find, if
we search with vigilance and work tirelessly, the answer to the ontological equationhard work, suffering, and
diligence will restore the fractioned three-fifths with its alienated two-fifths and, finally, create
One that we can include in our declaration that All men are created equal. We are still
awaiting this event.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed great emphasis on the restoration of black being through suffering and
[End Page 215] black being. This did not happen.
diligence in his sermon The American Dream (1965): And I would like to say to you this morning what Ive tried to say all over this nation,
what I believe firmly: that in seeking to make the dream a reality we must use and adopt a proper method. Im more convinced than ever before
that violence is impractical and immoralwe need not hate; we need not use violence. We can stand up against our most violent opponent and
say: we will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to
us what you will and we will still love youwe will go to in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and
human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after night and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and
leave us half dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. [T]hreaten our children and bomb our churches, and as difficult as it is, we
will still love you. But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our 3freedom, but we will not only
win it for ourselves, we will so appeal to your hearts and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be double. The
American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated,
mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to
come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the Political without black suffering. According to
this logic, corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic saturated with
violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its promise of coherence,
progress, and equality. We find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride, Jordon
Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick Jermain Carter, Chavis
Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade,
Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these
signifiers, stained in blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political
discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justicethe metaphysical
organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking accumulation of injured and
mutilated black bodies, particularly young black bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable
question mark in the political field: if we are truly progressing toward this society-that-is-tocome (maybe), why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In response to this inquiry, we are
told to keep struggling, keep hope alive, and keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering
Trayvon Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to keep fighting for change because each successive generation seems to be making
progress in changing attitudes toward race and, if we work hard enough, we will move closer to becoming a more perfect union. Despite Martins corpse lingering
in the minds of young people and Zimmermans smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting better. Supposedly, the generation that
Black suffering, here, is

instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathartic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow,
the growing number of dead black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our
progress toward perfection. Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more [End Page 217] black bodies must be lynched, mutilated,
burned, castrated, raped, dismembered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this more perfect union? In many ways, black suffering and death
become the premiere vehicles of political perfection and social maturation. This essay argues that the
logic of the Politicallinear temporality, bio-political futurity, perfection, betterment, and
redresssustains black suffering. Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political
and its discourse of hope will ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of
violence that pulverize black being. This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from
discursive and intellectual obliteration; rather than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies in need of treatment, this
essay considers black nihilism a necessary philosophical posture capable of unraveling the
Political and its devastating logic of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory
rhetoric that assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances
political apostasy as the only ethical response to black suffering.
murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till.
Voting negative is to adopt nihilism as the centerpiece to politics this rupture in the
terrain of liberalism's will-to-action finds itself outside the struggle for political
representation In other words, to "hope for the end of political hope". This is the
only metaphysically coherent response to the constant slaughter of black bodies
15, Number 1, Spring 2015] kguy
V. Conclusion
Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. This preservation amounts to an
exploitation of hopewhen the Political colonizes the spiritual principle of hope and puts it in the service of extending the will to power of an anti-black
organization of existence. The Politics of hope, then, is bound up with metaphysical violence, and this violence masquerades as a solution to the problem of anti-
Temporal linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle, work, and utopian futurity are
conceptual instruments of the Political that will never obviate black suffering or anti-black
violence; these concepts only serve to reproduce the conditions that render existence
unbearable for blacks. Political theologians and black optimists avoid the immediacy of black
suffering, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief in a not-yet-but-is (maybe)-to-come-social order that, itself, can
do little more but admonish blacks to survive to keep struggling. Political hope becomes a
vicious and abusive cycle of struggleit mirrors the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an object (black freedom, justice, relief, redress,
blackness.
. The political theologian and black optimist, then, propose a

collective Jouissance as an answer to black sufferingfinding the joy in struggle, the victory in toil, and the
satisfaction in inefficacious action. We continue to struggle and work as black youth are slaughtered
daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates are
soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of desperate black youth . In
short, these conditions are deep metaphysical problemsthe sadistic pleasure of metaphysical dominationand work and
struggle avoid the terrifying fact that the world depends on black death to sustain itself.
Black nihilism attempts to break this driveto stop it in its tracks, as it wereand to end the cycle of insanity
that political hope perpetuates. The question that remains is a question often put to the black
nihilist: what is the point? This compulsory geometrical structuring of thoughtall knowledge
must submit to, and is reducible to, a pointit is an epistemic flicker of certainty, determination,
and, to put it bluntly, life. The point exists for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains knowledge.
Thought outside of this mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the episteme of life and its grammar
will require a position outside of this point, a position somewhere in the infinite horizon of
thought (perhaps this is what Heidegger wanted to do with his reconfiguration of thought). Writing in this way is inherently subversive and refuses the geometry
equality, etc.) that is inaccessible because it doesnt really exist
of thought. Nevertheless, the [End Page 243] nihilist is forced to enunciate his refusal through a point, a point that is contradictory and paradoxical all at once. To
say that the point of this essay is that the point is fraudulentits promise of clarity and life are inadequatewill not satisfy the hunger of disciplining the nihilist
Black nihilistic hermeneutics resists the point but is

subjected to it to have ones voice heard within the marketplace of ideas. The point of this
essay is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and
placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will
never resolve anything. This is why the black nihilist speaks of exploited hope, and the black nihilist attempts to wrest
hope from the clutches of the Political. Can we think of hope outside the Political? Must
salvation translate into a political grammar or a political program? The nihilist, then, hopes for
the end of political hope and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it
does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is the foundation of the black nihilistic
hermeneutic. In Blackness and Nothingness, Fred Moten (2013) conceptualizes blackness as a pathogen to
metaphysics, something that has the ability to unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If
we read Vattimo through Motens brilliant analysis, we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche
were really after. It is a blackened world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but putting an
end to metaphysics will also put an end to the world itselfthis is the nihilism that the black
nihilist must theorize through. This is a far cry from what we call anarchy, however. The black nihilist has as little faith
and insisting that one undermine the very ground upon which one stands.
in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy than he does in traditional forms of political existence. The black nihilist offers political apostasy as the
The act of renouncing will not

change political structures or offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the
spiritual concept of hope from the captivity of the Political. Ultimately, it is impossible to end
metaphysics without ending blackness, and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw
from the Political completely without a certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is
the essence of black suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the tormenting
complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a coherent grammar to articulate
these dilemmas.After contemplating these issues for some time in my office, I decided to take a train home. As I awaited my train in the station, an older
spiritual practice of denouncing metaphysical violence, black suffering, and the idol of anti-blackness.
black woman asked me about the train schedule and when I would expect the next train headed toward Dupont Circle. When I told her the trains were running slowly,
They dont care anything about us, you know, she said. We elect
these people into office, we vote for them, and they watch black people suffer and have no
intentions of doing anything about it. I shook my head in agreement and listened intently. Im going to stop voting, and
supporting this process; why should I keep doing this and our people continue to suffer, she said. I looked at her and
said, I dont know maam; I just dont understand it myself. She then laughed and thanked me
for listening to heras if our conversation were somewhat cathartic. You know, people think
she began to talk about the government shutdown.
youre crazy when you say things like this, she said giving me a wink. Yes they do, I said. But I am a free woman, she
emphasized and I wont go back. Shocked, I smiled at her, and she winked at me; at that moment I realized that her wisdom and courage
penetrated my mind and demanded answers. Ive thought about this conversation for some time, and it is for this reason I had to write
this essay. To the brave woman at the train station, I must say you are not crazy at all but thinking
outside of metaphysical time, space, and violence.
Ultimately, we must hope for the end of political hope.
The 1AC is constitutive of the politics of hope and in this usage, denaturalizes hope
that is directly tied to the spiritual concept of hope that is then exchanged in the
political economy as an investment in the spiritual substance in the political which
relegates all other forms of hope to the Outside. This is exposed through
blackness and its relation to the political. At the center piece of African American
participation is irrational fidelity. Black folks tie to politics and voting is constituted
by a historical conscious that makes black folk desire political subjectivity because
of those who died for the right to vote, but is anti-ethical rational calculus because
black folk get nothing in return through civic engagement. That means the 2AC is
too late in its attempt to say that political engagement is good because it only reifies
the accumulation of black flesh
To speak of the Politics of Hope is to denaturalize or demystify a certain usage of hope. Here I want to
make a distinction between hope (the spiritual concept) and the politics of hope(political hope). The
relationship between the spiritual concept of hope and its use as a political instrument is the focus of the
black nihilist critique.2 Following Kant and other postmetaphysical philosophers, the critical field
questions (and in some circles completely denounces) a certain spiritual predisposition to
the worldthat unknowable noumenon that limits Reason but provides the condition of possibility for
its organization of the world of perception, phenomenon. The problem with the critical questioning of the
spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then, insidiously, translates the min to
the scientific or the knowable, as a way to both capitalize on the mystic power of
the spiritual and to preserve the spiritual under the guise of enlightened
understanding. We find this deceptive translation and capitalization of spiritual substance within
the sphere of the Politicalthat organization of social existence through political
institutions, mandates, logics, and grammarsas a way to govern and discipline beings.
If we think of hope as a spiritual concepta concept that always escapes confinement within scientific
discoursethen we can suggest that hope constitutes a spiritual currency
that we are given as an inheritance to invest in various aspects of existence. The issue, however,
is that there is often a compulsory investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. This is the
forced destination of hopeit must end up in the Political and cannot exist outside of it (or
any existence of hope outside the political subverts, compromises, and destroys
hope itself. Like placing a fish out of water. It is as if hope only has intelligibility and efficacy
within and through the Political). Put differently, the politics of hope posits that one
must have a politics to have hope; politics is the natural habitat of hope itself. To reject
hope in a nihilistic way, then, is really to reject the politics of hope, or
certain circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing, practicing, and
conceiving of hope. In the essay A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote in
the 2004 Election, Grant Farred (2006) exposes a kernel of irrationality at the center of
African American political participation. Traditionally, political participation is
motivated by self-interested expectancy; this political calculus assumes that political participation,
particularly voting, is an investment with an assurance of a return or political dividend. The structure of
the Politicalthe circular movement between self-interest, action, and reward is sustained through
what Farred calls the electoral unconscious. It historicizes the subject in relation to
the political in that it determines the horizon of what is possible it maps,
through its delimitation or its (relative) lack of limits, what the constituency and its members
imagine they can, or, would like to expect from the political (217). In this way, the electoral
unconscious, as the realm of political fantasy, mirrors the Lacanian notion of fantasy; it maps the
coordinates of the political subject and teaches it how exactly to desire the Political. For Farred, there is
a peculiar logic (another scene) operating as the motivation for African American participation in the
Political. Unlike the traditional political calculus, where action and reward determine civic engagement,
African American participation does not follow this rational calculusbecause if it did, there would
actually be no rational reason for African Americans to vote , given the historicity of voting as an
ineffective practice in gaining tangible objects for achieving redress, equality, and political subjectivity.
African Americans, according to Farred, havean irrational fidelity to a practice that, historically, has
yielded no concrete transformations of antiblackness . This group is governed not by the electoral
unconscious but by the historical conscious, which is the intense [and incessant] understanding of
how the franchise has been achieved, of its precarious preciseness as well as their (growing)
contemporary liminality, their status as marginalized political subjects (217). African Americans
are a faithful voting block not because of votings political efficaciousness
but as a way to contend with a painful (and shame-full) history of exclusion
and disenfranchisement. Political participation becomes an act of historical commemoration
and obligation; one votes because someone bled and died for the opportunity to participate, and duty
and indebtedness motivate this partial political subject .
Reliance on legality as a metric of progress fuels a violent temporal narrative that

materializes the permanency of whiteness Western common law demands a series
of affective attachments to the law, which ensures bodies come to desire the
structure that produces violence against them do you find yourself trapped within
the auspices of hope, or do you desire to craft yourself otherwise, affirming the
imperceptible politics of refusal. Their arguments about bringing some measure of
relief or change constitute cruel optimism --- they rely on a trick of time that
retreats to could be or maybe later --- refusing the blackmail of doing politics
in a rejection of this trickery
rejecting politics of hope means that we get to see that 1/ it posits itself as the only alternative to
antiblackness (i.e. using the state) 2/ shiediling this alternative from historical critique by placing
it in an unknown future (i.e. the future is a better place and we should always be optimistic) 3/
delimited the field of action to be legitimiated by the poltical (i.e. only politics that is meaningful
is through the state) and 4/ demonizing critique (i.e. every policy team) black political
participation is not predicated off a rational action because it sustains a system that does not
better itself- a cruel attachment to a means of subjugation between historical reality and
fantastatical ideal- in other words it ignores the materiality of history antagonizing against black
people and uses that same history to justify the belief in that process i.e. people have died for you
to vote so you have to- it is not based on being an active citizen but necessity because of history.
you need an alternative or nothing changes. no alternative ensures that hegemony and dominance
of political hope maintain itself because there has to be a solution to the problem or action
because inaction is worse- all problems have solutions and hope helps us actualize those
solutions

The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call cruel optimism for blacks (Berlant 2011). It
bundles certain promises about redress, equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political
object that always lies beyond reach. The objective of the Political is to keep blacks in a relation
to this political objectin an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it
strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the
object certainly has an irrational aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without expectation; instead, it is a means
that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued
Black nihilism is a demythifying practice, in the

Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its
fantastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological and ethical veneer, we see that
it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only alternative to the problem of anti-blackness,
2) shielding this alternative from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an unknown
future, 3) delimiting the field of action to include only activity recognized and legitimated by the
Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical perspectives. The politics of hope masks a
particular cruelty under the auspices of happiness and life. It terrifies with the dread of
no alternative. Life itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes
untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternativea discursive and political organization
widening of the gap between historical reality and fantastical ideal.
beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary alternative/no-alternative ensures the hegemony and dominance of political
The terror of the no alternativethe ultimate space of decay, suffering, and deathdepends
on two additional binaries: problem/solution and action/inaction. According to this politics, all problems have
solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the
elimination of the problem; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegels aufheben in
its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the problem with the pristine being of the
solution. No problem is outside the reach of hopes solutionevery problem is connected to the kernel of its own
eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the solution is , in fact, another
problem in disguised form; the idea of a solution is nothing more than the repetition and
disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might call the trick of time to
fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time not-yet-realized, a future
tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope
cleverly shields its solutions from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that
these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the
rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or analysis because they do not reside
within the horizon of the past or present. Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the
proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to
a not-yet and could-be temporality. This trick of time offers a promise of possibility
that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only
imagined. In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very
condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony
through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing)
any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then,
depends on the incessant (re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence.
Solutions cannot really exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a
future tense. The trick of time and political solution converge on the site of action. In critiquing the politics of hope, one
encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. But we cant just do nothing! We have to
hope within the onto-existential horizon.
do something. The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between
action/inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary operations
rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of
engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action takes place in the politicalthe political not only
claims futurity but also action as its property. To do something means that this doing must translate into
recognizable political activity; something is a stand-in for the word politicsone must do
politics to address any problem. A refusal to do politics is equivalent to doing nothing
this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a zerostate as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black nihilism rejects this trick of time and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To
refuse to do politics and to reject the fantastical object of politics is the only hope for
blackness in an anti-black world.
Extinction is the status quo: Institutional structures create every day holocaust.
Singular impacts like the ones of the 1AC silence the structural ongoing extinction
of People of Color. Why save the world when weve come to hate it?
Omolade 89 [1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years
and an organizer in both the womens and civil rights/black power movements, We Speak for
the Planet in Rocking the ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics, pp. 172-176]
efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear testing, stockpiling, and
weaponry, while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to countries and factions around the world, vividly demonstrate how
"peace" can become an abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly
blind to the constant wars and threats of war being waged against people
of color and the planet by those who march for "peace" and by those they march against . These pacifists,
like Gorbachev and Reagan, frequently want people of color to fear what
they fear and define peace as they define it. They are unmindful that our lands and
peoples have already been and are being destroyed as part of the "final
solution" of the "color line." It is difficult to persuade the remnants of Native
American tribes, the starving of African deserts, and the victims of the
Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the major danger to human
life on the planet and that only a nuclear "winter" embodies fear and
futurelessness for humanity. The peace movement suffers greatly from its lack of a historical
and holistic perspective, practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of people of color;
the movement's goals and messages have therefore been easily coopted and expropriated
by world leaders who share the same culture of racial dominance and
arrogance. The peace movement's racist blinders have divorced peace from freedom,
from feminism, from education reform, from legal rights, from human
rights, from international alliances and friendships, from national
liberation, from the particular (for example, black female, Native American male) and the general (human
being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-black power movement in the United States have always
demanded peace with justice, with liberation, and with social and economic reconstruction and cultural freedom
at home and abroad. The integration of our past and our present holocausts and our struggle to define our own
lives and have our basic needs met are at the core of the inseparable struggles for
world peace and social betterment. The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always
Recent
been its whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is axiomatic that
basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who are oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the
most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized and struggled-most especially, because of their particular
history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination,
movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history

mobilized against women of color. The political advancements of white men have grown
directly from the devastation and holocaust of people of color and our lands. This
technological and material progress has been in direct proportion to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the daytoday survival,
enlightened science, and
political struggles, and rising up of women of color, especially black women in the United States, reveal both complex
resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often conflicted responses to the military and war . The
Holocausts Women of color are survivors of and remain casualties of holocausts , and we
are direct victims of war-that is, of open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. But
women of color were not soldiers, nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to the white man for guns , nor
did we sell or lease our lands to the white man for wealth . Most men and women of color resisted and
fought back, were slaughtered, enslaved, and force marched into plantation
labor camps to serve the white masters of war and to build their empires and war machines . People of
color were and are victims of holocausts-that is, of great and widespread destruction, usually by fire . The
world as we knew and created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The
experience of Jews and other Europeans under the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of
torture, and the demonical apparatus of war aimed at the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain death at Auschwitz
and said, "You will be a remembrance-You tell the story. You survive." She lived. He died. Many have criticized the Jews for forcing non-Jews to remember
women of
color, we, too, are "remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the world. We must remember
the names of concentration camps such as Jesus, Justice, Brotherhood, and
Integrity, ships that carried millions of African men, women, and children
chained and brutalized across the ocean to the "New World." We must remember the Arawaks,
the Taino, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware , and the other Native
American names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for tribes of people who are no more . We must
remember the holocausts visited against the Hawaiians , the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pacific
Island peoples, and the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . We must remember the
slaughter of men and women at Sharpeville, the children of Soweto, and the men of Attica .
We must never, ever, forget the children disfigured, the men maimed, and the
women broken in our holocausts-we must remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the
stories and teach them to our children and our children's children so the world can never forget our
suffering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis is over, our holocausts
continue. We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in the Argentinian square silently demanding
news of our missing kin from the fascists who rule. We are the children of El
Salvador who see our mothers and fathers shot in front of our eyes . We are the
Palestinian and Lebanese women and children overrun by Israeli,
Lebanese, and U.S. soldiers. We are the women and children of the
bantustans and refugee camps and the prisoners of Robbin Island. We are the starving in
the Sahel, the poor in Brazil, the sterilized in Puerto Rico. We are the brothers and sisters of
the 6 million Jews who died under the Nazis and for etching the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds. Yet as
Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring to speak of it with our lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by
men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have developed the Nazi techniques of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and stars. Skin
color is the ultimate badge of persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and the elderly-the "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid
bantustans without resources for survival have replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites
achieve two objectives: The work camps destroy black family and community life, a presumed source of resistance, and attempt to create human
automatons whose purpose is to serve the South African state's drive toward wealth and hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any
democratic rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful assembly, to free speech, and to political representation. The
regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such as Stephen
Biko; penal colonies such as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely arrested without cause, detained without limits, and confronted
with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation. Legally and economically, South African apartheid is structural and
institutionalized racial war. The Organization of African Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to review and appraise
the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The meeting considered South Africa's racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is
an affront to the dignity of all Africans on the continent and a stark reminder of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of
institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who have used nonviolent resistance charged that
those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as their oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary movements have used organized violence.
This is especially true of national liberation movements that have obtained state power and reorganized the institutions of their nations for the benefit of
the people. If men and women in South Africa do not use organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be
that pacifism and nonviolence cannot become a way of life for the oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and limited use for protecting people from
further violence? For most people in the developing communities and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who
have and use nonviolent weapons will refrain from using them long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political battles. To survive, peoples in
developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom
in South Africa; sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting of black teenagers by a white
Peace is not merely an absence of 'conflict that

enables white middleclass comfort, nor is it simply resistance to nuclear
war and war machinery. The litany of "you will be blown up, too" directed by
a white man to a black woman obscures the permanency and
institutionalization of war, the violence and holocaust that people of color
face daily. Unfortunately, the holocaust does not only refer to the mass murder of Jews, Christians, and
man, such as happened in New York City.
atheists during the Nazi regime; it also refers to the permanent institutionalization of war
that is part of every fascist and racist regime. The holocaust lives. It is a
threat to world peace as pervasive and thorough as nuclear war.
K Aff specific Links:
Intercommunalism:
The politics of hope offers up the trick of time through a false historical analysis of
progress for blacks. Any serious consideration of blackness cannot have a solution,
any serious consideration of blackness requires a rejection of the problem/solution
binary and the recognition that any alternative ultimately feeds the cycle of
antiblackness. The political is terrified of this idea of no alternative, a prospect that
represents the ultimate space of suffering and death, the stand-in for blackness that
policy debate cant but bear a visceral phobia towards.
Warren 15 (Calvin L. Warren,Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope. Spring 2015.
Assistant Professor of American Studies, and has a Ph.D, @ Yale University)
The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of happiness and life. It terrifies with the
dread of no alternative. Life itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this
logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternativea
discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary
alternative/no-alternative ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the
ontoexistential horizon. The terror of the no alternativethe ultimate space of decay, suffering, and deathdepends on two additional binaries: problem/ solution
and action/inaction. According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution
establishes itself as the elimination of the problem; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegels aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the
dirtiness of the problem with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hopes solution every problem is connected to the kernel of its
own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the solution is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a solution is
The solution relies on what we might call the trick of

time to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time not-yet-realized, a
nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself.
future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its solutions from critiques of impossibility or
repetition. Each insistence that these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not
subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the past or present. Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the
This trick of time

offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is
a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, the politics of
hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility,
proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a not-yet and could-be temporality.
never to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing)
politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant

(re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really exist
within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future tense. The trick of time and political solution converge on
any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The
the site of action. In critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. But we cant just do nothing! We have to do
something. The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/ inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These
exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action
takes place in the politicalthe political not only claims futurity but also action as its property. To do something means that this doing must translate into
A refusal to do
politics is equivalent to doing nothingthis nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of
life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a zero-state as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black nihilism rejects
this trick of time and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To refuse to do politics and to reject
the fantastical object of politics is the only hope for blackness in an antiblack world.
recognizable political activity; something is a stand-in for the word politicsone must do politics to address any problem.
Gender Disability:
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://dsq-sds.org/article/view/491/668] Kguy
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.
The Third dimension uses concepts of hybridity- you blend the cultures
together and expect the past to be forgotten. There is already natal alienation,
now you ask everyone to experience the same. This maintains white
supremacy, to forget past struggles in hope of the future, forgetting
importance that is impossible to disregard.
Dehdari et.al 13 (Ali Dehdari, MA in English Literature Tehran Azad Central Branch University 11,
Masoumi Alley, Jeihoun St., Azadi St., Tehran, Iran. and Bita Darabi, MA in English Literature Department of
English literature Karaj branch, Islamic Azad University Karaj, Iran and Mehdi Sepehrmanesh, M.A in English
Literature Karaj Azad University 11, Masoumi Alley, Jeihoun St., Azadi St., Tehran, Iran. ) International Journal of
Humanities and Social Science Vol. 3 No. 3; February 2013 (A Study of the Notion of Bhabhasque's Hybridity in
V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State) pg. 137 [http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_3_No_3_February_2013/12.pdf]
Accessed: 7/5/16 LGF
One further point of significance concerning the true nature of interaction between the colonizer and the colonized is
that apparently, the colonized are the only victims of colonial system; however, there is a problem in front of the
colonizer which makes them victim as well. This problem may be: fading identity. Discourse over the problem
of fading identity is where most of the postcolonial controversies encounter. This may be one of the reasons Paul Jay
states that all cultural forms are hybrid (Jay 2009, p. 186) or Kwame Anthony Appiah says that we are all
already contaminated by each other (Ball 2003, p. 11). Fading identity can be a direct result of hybridity in
culture. Fading identity may lead to identity crisis both in the colonizing and colonized cultures. The fact
that hybridity threatens the authority which is based on categorizations of difference is among the most
dramatic aspects of Bhabhaesque hybridity. Hybridity confuses the signs of difference as signs of authority
(Rothenburger 2001, p. 3-4).
Many of Bhabhaesque definitions of the notion of hybridity locate in The
Location of Culture. In this study, it plays the role of the main point of reference. Although Hans Bertens (2001)
provides a thorough account of the dramatic factors concerning the formation of cultural hybridity in Literary
Theory: The Basics, the researcher should deal with Paul Jays more comprehensive description: the necessity of
cultural conversion led to the creation of indigenous subjects who, forced to absorb Western cultural
practices and religious beliefs, subtly transformed them to accord with the vestiges of their own.
Colonizing forces, while seeking to wipe out indigenous or slave cultures, sometimes missed but often
tolerated and even exploited this phenomenon, since it served to ease the transformation of both indigenous
peoples and transported slaves into Western subjects. The result was a mixed one for both colonizer and
colonized. For the colonizer, this kind of syncretism helped smooth the cultural conquest of indigenous and slave
populations, but it at the same time gave some measure of control over that culture to these populations, a control
which often transformed the colonizers own culture. This kind of syncretism had mixed results for the colonized as
well, who found their cultures virtually wiped out but were nevertheless able to incorporate vestiges of it into the
one forced upon them.
Pan
Chinese perceptions of blackness operates on the black/white binary where
everything black is the complete antagonism to anything that is considered white.
This operates on a western phenomenon that has been applied to China that makes
phenotypical blackness the subset for all existing categories of the non-white i.e. the
non-human that is only possible due to the ontological condition of blackness
Souza 12 (JOSETTE SOUZA. Can We Call the Anti-Blackness in China Racism?
http://africanareading.tumblr.com/post/36727028397/can-we-call-the-anti-blackness-in-chinaracism) Kguy
Part I: Common Chinese Assertions About Blackness and Western Perceptions of Such
In order to determine whether or not Chinese anti-blackness is a form of racism or if racism is a
Western phenomenon that is being applied to Asia when something else is actually going on, a
few things need to be looked at. What are some of the most widespread Chinese perceptions of
black people and blackness? How have Westerners (black, white, and Asian) perceived of these
perceptions? Where does responsibility for acts of anti-black discrimination lie? What is racism
and does it fit the Chinese context? I will say up front that I do not have a definitive answer to the question Is China racist?,
but I will say that I am leaning heavily towards an emphatic yes. I think the subject needs to be addressed repeatedly before I can say one thing
or another definitively, but after living through Chinese anti-black behaviors and attitudes and studying racism for the last 2.5 years, I can say that
it certainly walks and talks like a racist duck, and you know how that saying goes But before any answers can be found or determined, some
recently asked Don Wyatt, a scholar on very early Afro-Asian

encounters, whether he thinks Chinese economic activity in Africa can be considered a form of
colonialism or neocolonialism and he told me its too early to tell. Time will surely tell us
something, but in the mean time I will be using my own experiences to mull over these questions.
Over the last three and a half years Ive informally (and formally, once) interviewed dozens of
people all around the world about Chinese perceptions of blackness. This has included Chinese
persons in mainland China who have never left China, Chinese nationals living in the US,
Chinese-Americans, non-Chinese Asian Americans, Vietnamese persons, Thai persons, Japanese
persons, Filipino persons, Hong Kongers and some other Cantonese-speaking persons, white
Americans, black Americans, white French persons, one Hmong person, and I think a Malaysian
person, although that one is a bit fuzzy now. Interestingly enough, I have only ever met one other Latina/o outside of myself who has ever
lived in China or speaks Mandarin or Cantonese and I have not had the chance to interview her yet . I will divide their responses
into two broad categories: Chinese responses to Chinese perceptions of blackness and Western
responses to Chinese perceptions of blackness. I dont think the totality of everyones responses fits exactly into one or
the other category, but these are the general trends in the feedback I have gotten. In this case, the AsianAmerican responses mostly fit into the Western response category. Common themes in Chinese
explanations are as follows: black people are violent, ugly/not beautiful, scary because theyre
big and muscly, commit crimes, dont work hard/dont work well, weve always liked white skin,
Chinese families wont accept black people into their families, and black people cant be
American/European. Common themes in Western explanations: its more about classism than
racism, they wanna take pictures with black people so they cant be racist/black people are also
treated like superstars, white people get treated poorly too/its a xenophobia problem not a race
problem. Before I look at these assertions more closely, I have to make a note about race in China. Race looks a lot different in
China than it looks in the North America, in Africa, and Im sure in Europe (although as of now I dont
know much about race politics in Europe) and this makes an impact on experienced race and racism in China.
serious studies needs to happen in this field. I
Whereas in the US, race generally includes black, white, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/Native Alaskan, and biracial/multiracial and in
Ghana, where
Im living now, race seems to operate solely on the white/black binary with white
including everything not considered black. In my Afro-Puerto Rican upbringing, I grew up with categories that included
mulatto and mestizo as well as some other terms specifically describing racial mixes, with anything not mostly white being considered black.
In Taiwan, people referred to me as Black Girl yet many people mistook me for Filipino (especially when I was walking with my evil host
grandmother, but thats another story for another time). I
was shocked to be considered black by other people for

the first time in my life (outside of some family members) but it quickly dawned on me that black was not
just a racial markera whole lot of people were included in the category of black because of
their skin tone. Taiwanese girls who are 100% Taiwanese would be referred to as black if their
skin was anything darker than extremely pale. Filipino persons and some other Southeast Asian
persons with darker skin tones were considered black, except of course for the ruling classes which tend to be paler.
While this inclusiveness, if you will, of the term black in Chinese discourse does not erase the racial
implications of the word, it is important to note that it does not do the same kind of referencing
as it does in the US and that when Chinese people spoke to me about their anti-blackness, they
were referring to black people and Asian people with tanner skin. These are from my own experiences and
interviews, but for a more scholastic study in the subject, see Don Wyatt and Frank Dikotter. I will now take a closer look at responses I have
gotten over the years. First, the Chinese responses. I have combined ones that are related or similar.
This creates a violent assortment of black imagery- the unjustified representation of

China constructs the black body as anti-aesthetic where this pits the black in a
constant state of fundamental racism that is attributed to an I love Whiteness
ideology that underpins structures of domination
Souza 12 (JOSETTE SOUZA. Can We Call the Anti-Blackness in China Racism?
http://africanareading.tumblr.com/post/36727028397/can-we-call-the-anti-blackness-in-chinaracism) Kguy
Chinese Responses to Blackness
1. Black people are violent/big and scary/commit crimes
This one should ring a big bell for us Americans, right? This has been pretty much the defining
image of black people, particularly black men, in the United States since white colonizers first
started enslaving black bodies way back when (oh, but I forget, slaverys not relevant anymore). This kind of
violent, scary, criminal imagery is fundamental to a racist state. We must justify the widespread
discrimination, murder, mass incarceration, and dehumanization of black people somehow,
otherwise our actions suddenly start looking kind of suspicious. I am not going to get into the particularities of
racist imagery as that has been done many times before by people with actual expertise in the subject (check out Tricia Rose, Michelle Alexander,
and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva just to name a few). What
I am more concerned about is what happens after we

accept that these representations are unjustified, unjust, and untrue and based entirely on racial
identification. Do these images themselves constitute racist imagery? Does the fact that these
representations are presented and upheld on a national scale (whether in the minds of individuals,
in the education system, or in popular media) prove that China is racist? I would ask, why wouldnt it? What
makes racism in China any different than that of the US, especially when it looks so similar? White people I have spoken to
have been quick to point out that China does not have the same legacy of chattel slavery as the
US and therefore they cannot be racist, yet as Don Wyatts book shows, China actually did in fact
enslave black people, so that argument lacks all value. We can argue the extent and intensive of
slavery, but it was nonetheless present and in my mind that is all that matters. China as the
nation-state that we understand it to be today has modern racist imagery on a national level and a
history of enslaving black people, let alone some pretty colonial behaviors going on in Africa
today. Yes, as far as I am aware, there have not been any Jim Crow-like laws, mass lynchings, or
black sharecroppingbut there need not be. Laws against black people specifically does not
make sense for China, when they can just have laws against all foreigners and then specially
execute them against black individuals. Besides, Jim Crow-esque laws are manifestations of
racist logics and white supremacist ideologies, not the causes of such. The US context of anti-black racism will
of course look different from any of the same sentiments in China because of the socio-historical context of each country, but that does not
preclude China from being racist in the first place. 2. Black people are ugly/not beautiful. A childhood
friend of mine recently

asked me, essentially, if aesthetic preference was akin to racism. In other words, if Chinese people
think all or most black people are ugly, does that mean they are being racist? Again, this is a conversation
that has been had very many times so I will not get into the particularities of this larger argument. But, I will say that aesthetic
preference has never and will never operate outside of power struggles and racial tensions. What
that means is, it is no coincidence at all that very nearly all of the Asian people I have ever
interviewed or talked to (or even overheard talking) simultaneously think black people are inherently bad
people and are ugly. These things go hand in hand. It does not make sense for one to justify ones prejudice and hatred for a whole
group of people with whom you have actually had very little contact with and think they are aesthetically valuable. The politics of
physical attraction and aesthetic value have been used to control, demonize, and invalidate entire
groups of people for at least hundreds of years and they have proven to be quite powerful forms
of control. In other words, the widespread opinion in Chinese societies that black people are ugly and
invaluable as human beings are indeed related. It is important to note, though, that while socially structural racism
and aesthetic preference operate parallel to each other, they are not completely dependent on
each other, iea Chinese person (or white person for that matter) marrying a black spouse does
not exclude them from being racist or participating in their societys racism. Something interesting occurs
often enough to complicate this a little further: I have seen a few cases of Chinese people telling my black
friends that they are beautiful, and this has happened to me a couple of times as well. I will actually talk more about this in the
next article when I go through common Western responses to Chinese anti-blackness, but I will mention now
that it is my understanding that when Chinese people say so beautiful! () to my black
friends or me, they are actually only referring to our eyes and not in fact us as a whole, but I will
cover that next time. 3. They dont work hard/dont work well. This one has come up the least number of times, but I have seen it
used much more frequently here in Ghana than in China or Taiwan or Hong Kong, which is important to note. That signals to me that there are
different kinds of referencing happening when Chinese people talk to me about blackness in China than in Africa. Chinese people in Africa are
more likely to talk about work, marriage, and intermixing than anyone I talked to anywhere else. That being said, this is a new category of
evidence of black inferiority I have encountered with Chinese people, although it is no stranger in any American discourse on race. In fact, in
the recent US presidential campaign fever, I dont think a day has gone by where I havent seen or heard a white American talk about how black
people and Latinos dont work and are sucking resources from innocent tax-paying whites. I think that the arguments against this kind of
evidence would apply equally whether the person perpetrating this falsehood is white or Chinese and whether its against black people in the
West or black people in Africa, and therefore I defer to people who have been doing work on the myth of the non-working black. I have yet to
find a study or paper or book on the myth of the inferior African work ethic yet there are dozens or more on the myth of the black/Latino/poor
work ethic in the United States, especially given Mitt Romneys campaign essentially ran solely on a platform of white supremacy. Perhaps after I
have learned more about this I will have a more specialized response to the particular context of Chinese perceptions of black work ethic, but
until then it looks to me to be operating on a purely racist basis. 4. Weve always liked white skin its an ancient thing, even for Chinese
girls.Yes, idealized pasty white skin has appeared in Chinese literature for a long time. It is one thing to prefer your women pasty (thats literally
to demonize brown/black skin (especially when its biological) or

use white peoples compliance with ancient aesthetic preferences to uphold their superiority.
Sometimes I wonder about the kind of damage being done when people use innocent historical
notions of goodness/beauty to explain the (I would argue) almost religious love of white
people/whiteness across Asia. I say innocent because thats my perception of the way it is presented to me. To paraphrase the
an aesthetic choice), but it is another thing
majority of my Chinese informants, I have been told No, no, no, we like white peoples physical features because of our history. We have always
liked white skin. Its been like that for hundreds/thousands of years. In other words, love
of whiteness is based in history so
it is okay to demonize non-whiteness today. Historical Asian skin tone preference is somehow supposed to explain why
people hate blackness or why white peoples eye shapes, noses, and hair and eye colors are considered superior to natural Asian ones. Sorry, but
that does not make logical sense and it is just a poor excuse to stop thought and leave white superiority and black inferiority unquestioned. I
would love to see a study done tracing the historical development of the love of white people in China. For some time in China, white people
were demonized too. How did that change? When did that change? What was it like before? How did white demonization start and to what extent
did it occurs? How did demonization of black people develop in relation to the demonization of white people? It is pretty obvious that dislike for
brown skin tones on Asian people most likely came first and when black people started showing up in large numbers it probably carried over, but
right now it looks to me like modern anti-blackness has transformed way beyond the kinds of anti-darker skin tones of the past. I really hope to
see this part of Afro-Chinese Studies develop quickly. 5. We wont accept our children marrying black people/ We dont accept black exchange
students/We prefer white people working for us. For as long as I have lived in Asia I have heard stories of Chinese families refusing family
membership to black people, whether that means in terms of marriage or in terms of host families. I have
had a total of four
different Chinese host families in my life, each time through a program that organizes the arrangements for us. During my
most recent program, the US Department of States Critical Language Scholarship Program in Beijing this past summer, I heard several stories
from my fellow program participants of host families refusing to host black students for the 2-month period and telling their white host children
how happy they were they were not black. My
first host family in Taiwan told me they were disappointed that I

was the American coming to live with them for five months and that I should probably bleach
my skin and straighten my hair to be accepted. There are some writings online about this issue in terms of marriage, my
favorite being lifebehindthewall.wordpress.com. People I interviewed directly about marriage confirmed the same kinds of things that appear on
these blog posts: Chinese people do not seem to be okay with their children marrying black people. The same seems to be true for black people
seeking employment in China. People
have reported online that they have been told they were denied a job
because the company found out they were black. Black people are denied equal access to
marriage, study abroad, and work, among other things, in Chinese societies. This is a type of
structural discrimination that racism requires to be racism. Yes, there are still plenty of Chinese families that do not
support interracial marriages with white people or international marriages with Japanese, Malaysian, Filipino, etc. spouses, but those relationships
are still far likelier to be accepted than black-Chinese relationships, according to everyone I have ever talked to on the subject. If this isnt racism,
I really dont know what is. 6. Black people arent real Americans.I
cant tell you how many times I have had people

laugh in my face when I tell them I am American. One truly horrendous conversation I had with an older
Chinese man ended in me asking him why he thinks I cant possibly be from the US if Im telling
him I am. He told me that Americans just dont look like me. When I asked him why he thinks so, he told me
well, I watch TV! That same week a little girl asked me in my apartments elevator if I was from England or the US and a man with her, who I
am assuming was her grandfather, told me No, she cant be from one of those countries must be I quickly interrupted and said to the girl
Actually, I am from the US, youre very smart and the older man shook his head and said Cant be, cant be. A lot of people have told me
(black, white, and Asian) that Im hard to guess and they cant really tell what I am, so its hard for people to guess American when they
see me. Yet, my
black friends in China, whose identities are never left to guessing but just
automatically assumed dont fair any better. Black people are from Africa. They cannot be
Western. The West, with all of its superior military, technology, and in some ways culture (depending
on who youre talking to) cannot possibly also belong to or incorporate blackness. Of course, that is not to say that
Chinese people I have spoken with think the West is in every way superior, but talking to young people I have seen a lot of talk
about in what ways China needs to be like the West, how the US/Europe do things better, how he
or she is dying to go to the West and live there. When I tried to explain that these images of the
West are coming from blatantly untrue depictions of the West in Hollywood, my informants
understandably did not believe me. They got even more confused when I told them that in a lot
of ways Asian people are treated with the same disdain and sometimes flat out hatred as black
people are. But of course, I am generally not understood to be American so what do I know? For as little as Chinese people
are educated on black people, they sure do have vehement, confident ideas of what blackness is;
even when black people tell them otherwise, in Chinese minds, blackness cant be American.
This then, is not a question of habits, language, culture, historyits a matter of physical
appearance and nothing more. Alright, we have come to the end of my brief exploration of six common Chinese responses to
blackness that I have come across. Up next month will be a look at some of the common Western excuses for why China is not racist in part two
of this article.
Policy Aff Specific Links:
Export Controls:
Lawfare is the facilitator of military violence security cant be
reformed without transitioning away from modern legal
thought.
Morrissey 11 (John Morrissey. Lecturer in Political and Cultural Geography,
National University of Ireland, Galway; has held visiting research fellowships
at University College Cork, City University of New York, Virginia Tech and the
University of Cambridge. Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare
in the War on Terror, Geopolitics, Volume 16, Issue 2, 2011) Kguy
Security, not liberty: the permanent emergency of the security society The US militarys evident disdain
for international law, indifference to the pain of Others and endless justifying of its actions via the
language of emergency have prompted various authors to reflect on Giorgio Agambens work, in
particular, on bare life and the state of exception in accounting for the functioning of US sovereign power
in the contemporary world.111 Claudio Minca, for example, has used Agamben to attempt to lay bare US
military power in the spaces of exception of the global war on terror; for Minca, it is precisely the
absence of a theory of space able to inscribe the spatialisation of exception that allows, today, such an
enormous, unthinkable range of action to sovereign decision.112 This critique speaks especially to the
excessive sovereign violence of our times, all perpetrated in the name of a global war on terror.113
Mincas argument is that geography as a discipline has failed to geo-graph and theorise the spatialization
of the pure sovereign violence of legitimated geopolitical action overseas. He uses the notion of the
camp to outline the spatial manifestation and endgame of a new global biopolitical nomos that has
unprecedented power to except bare life.114 In the biopolitical nomos of camps and prisons in the
Middle East and elsewhere, managing detainees is an important element of the US military project. As
CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid made clear to the Senate Armed Services Committee in
2006, an essential part of our combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan entails the need to detain
enemy combatants and terrorists.115 However, it is a mistake to characterize as exceptional the US
militarys broader biopolitical project in the war on terror. Both Mincas and Agambens emphasis on the
notion of exception is most convincing when elucidating how the US military has dealt with the threat
of enemy combatants, rather than how it has planned for, legally securitized and enacted, its own
aggression against them. It does not account for the proactive juridical warfare of the US military in its
forward deployment throughout the globe, which rigorously secures classified SOFAs with host nations
and protects its armed personnel from transfer to the International Criminal Court. Far from designating a
space of exception, the US does this to establish normative parameters in its exercise of legally
sanctioned military violence and to maximize its operational capacities of securitization. A bigger
question, of course, is what the US military practices of lawfare and juridical securitization say about our
contemporary moment. Are they essentially exceptional in character, prompted by the so-called
exceptional character of global terrorism today? Are they therefore enacted in spaces of exceptions or
are they, in fact, simply contemporary examples of Foucaults spaces of security that are neither
exceptional nor indeed a departure from, or perversion of, liberal democracy? As Mark Neocleous so
aptly puts it, has the liberal project of liberty not always been, in fact, a project of security?116 This
project of security has long invoked a powerful political dispositif of executive powers, typically
registered as emergency powers, but, as Neocleous makes clear, of the permanent kind.117 For
Neocleous, the pursuit of security and more specifically capitalist security marked the very
emergence of liberal democracies, and continues to frame our contemporary world. In the West at least,
that world may be endlessly registered as a liberal democracy defined by the rule of law, but, as
Neocleous reminds us, the assumption that the law, decoupled from politics, acts as the ultimate
safeguard of democracy is simply false a key point affirmed by considering the US militarys extensive
waging of liberal lawfare. As David Kennedy observes, the military lawyer who carries the briefcase of
rules and restrictions has long been replaced by the lawyer who participate[s] in discussions of strategy
and tactics.118 The US militarys liberal lawfare reveals how the rule of law is simply another
securitization tactic in liberalisms pursuit of security; a pursuit that paradoxically eliminates
fundamental rights and freedoms in the name of security.119 This is a liberalism defined by what
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid see as a commitment to waging biopolitical war for the securitization of
life killing to make live.120 And for Mark Neocleous, (neo)liberalisms fetishization of security as
both a discourse and a technique of government has resulted in a world defined by anti-democratic
technologies of power.121 In the case of the US militarys forward deployment on the frontiers of the war
on terror and its juridical tactics to secure biopolitical power thereat this has been made possible by
constant reference to a neoliberal project of security registered in a language of endless emergency to
secure the geopolitical and geoeconomic goals of US foreign policy.122 The US militarys continuous
and indeed growing military footprint in the Middle East and elsewhere can be read as a permanent
emergency,123 the new normal in which geopolitical military interventionism and its concomitant
biopolitical technologies of power are necessitated by the perennial political economic need to securitize
volatility and threat. Conclusion: enabling biopolitical power in the age of securitization Law and force
flow into one another. We make war in the shadow of law, and law in the shadow of force David
Kennedy, Of War and Law 124 Can a focus on lawfare and biopolitics help us to critique our
contemporary moments proliferation of practices of securitization practices that appear to be primarily
concerned with coding, quantifying, governing and anticipating life itself? In the context of US militarys
war on terror, I have argued above that it can. If, as David Kennedy points out, the emergence of a global
economic and commercial order has amplified the role of background legal regulations as the strategic
terrain for transnational activities of all sorts, this also includes, of course, warfare; and for some time,
the US military has recognized the opportunities for creative strategy made possible by proactively
waging lawfare beyond the battlefield.125 As Walter Benjamin observed nearly a century ago, at the very
heart of military violence is a lawmaking character. 126 And it is this lawmaking character that is
integral to the biopolitical technologies of power that secure US geopolitics in our contemporary moment.
US lawfare focuses the attention of the world on this or that excess whilst simultaneously arming the
most heinous human suffering in legal privilege, redefining horrific violence as collateral damage , selfdefense, proportionality, or necessity.127 It involves a mobilization of the law that is precisely
channelled towards evasion, securing 23 classified Status of Forces Agreements and offering at once
the experience of safe ethical distance and careful pragmatic assessment, while parcelling out
responsibility, attributing it, denying it even sometimes embracing it as a tactic of statecraft and
war.128 Since the inception of the war on terror, the US military has waged incessant lawfare to legally
securitize, regulate and empower its operational capacities in its multiples spaces of security across the
globe whether that be at a US base in the Kyrgyz Republic or in combat in Iraq. I have sought to
highlight here these tactics by demonstrating how the execution of US geopolitics relies upon a proactive
legal-biopolitical securitization of US troops at the frontiers of the American leasehold empire. For the
US military, legal-biopolitical apparatuses of security enable its geopolitical and geoeconomic projects of
security on the ground; they plan for and legally condition the milieux of military commanders; and in
so doing they render operational the pivotal spaces of overseas intervention of contemporary US national
security conceived in terms of global governmentality.129 In the US global war on terror, it is lawfare
that facilitates what Foucault calls the biopolitics of security when life itself becomes the object of
security.130 For the US military, this involves the eliminating of threats to life, the creating of
operational capabilities to make live and the anticipating and management of lifes uncertain future.
Some of the most key contributions across the social sciences and humanities in recent years have
divulged how discourses of security, precarity and risk function centrally in the governing dispositifs
of our contemporary world.131 In a society of (in)security, such discourses have a profound power to
invoke danger as requiring extraordinary action.132 In the ongoing war on terror, registers of
emergency play pivotal roles in the justification of military securitization strategies, where risk, it
seems, has become permanently binded to securitization. As Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster
point out, the perspective of risk management seductively effects practices of military securitization to
be seen as necessary, legitimate and indeed therapeutic.133 US tactics of liberal lawfare in the long war
the conditioning of the battlefield, the sanctioning of the privilege of violence, the regulating of the
conduct of troops, the interpreting, negating and utilizing 24 of international law, and the securing of
SOFAs are vital security dispositifs of a broader risk- securitization strategy involving the deployment
of liberal technologies of biopower to manage dangerous irruptions in the future.134 It may well be
fought beyond the battlefield in a war of the pentagon rather than a war of the spear,135 but it is
lawfare that ultimately enables the toxic combination of US geopolitics and biopolitics defining the
current age of securitization.
American hegemony is deadthe only thing that remains is a racist sovereign

violence that makes all their impacts and the destruction of American policy a
matter of time
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough
College in New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, pg. 14
It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says,
first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide (1997: 257).
From its first development, we then get to a situation where, as I noted at the outset of this paper,
racist violence becomes a global and biopolitical regime of terror, a war between two main
classes: the war of the political and financial elites against the class of those who have been
dispossessed to various degrees once again, the violence of the 1% against the 99%. As
Foucault says, this is a question of the technique of power, more than of ideologies (as it was the
case with the traditional type of racism), because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of
the urgency of the struggle, the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw use of the
violence that, as Walter Benjamin (1978) says, informs the law, domination without hegemony.
Especially at the present stage of the world, where information and knowledge make it
unnecessary and thus impossible for the General Intellect or common understanding and reason
to be governed, brutal domination and potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be
the only instruments left to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class. Then, the old
sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of
racism (Foucault 1997: 258). Foucault makes the example of Nazi Germany, where murderous
power and sovereign power [were] unleashed throughout the entire social body (p.259) and the
entire population was exposed to death (p.260). But this is today a common and global
paradigm: The sovereign right to kill (ibid.), from cases of police brutality in the cities to war
atrocities throughout the world, has become the most effective way to deal with a population
that refuses to recognize the false legitimacy of the sovereign, the sovereign right to govern.
What Foucault says of the Nazi State but he acknowledges it applies to the workings of all
States (ibid.)shows the terminal stage of sovereign power: a desperate will to absolute
domination no longer able to count on hegemony: We have an absolutely racist State, an
absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State (ibid.). This certainly shows the
crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly, in a globalized world, it shows the crisis
of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final solution. No one can blame them. Their
unintelligent worldview is bound to that. The hope is that they will not destroy everything
before they are gone. Yet, they will not go by themselves, without the workings of an altering
power, bound to inherit the earth. This is the power of individuation, the dignity of individuation,
whose workings are based on disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the age of
biopolitical terror, have nothing to sell except their own skins, (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the
history of racist violence, of conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder (ibid.).
The plan will encourage offsets agreements which turns the casethe net result is
tech transfer to China
HARTUNG 2013 (William, Director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy,
Risk and Returns: The Economic Illogic of the Obama Administration's Arms Export Reforms, August 21,
http://www.ciponline.org/research/html/risk-and-returns-the-economic-illogic-of-the-obama-administrations-armsexp)
In todays hypercompetitive arms market, the big weapons
contractors frequently outsource component

production as part of an offset package. Offsets are side deals intended to sweeten the pot and
entice a buyer to preference one seller over another. For example, Lockheed Martin will build components of its new F35 combat aircraft in at least eight nations in exchange for their purchase of the plane.45
Since the United States government first started tracking offset agreements in the defense sector in 1993, 61 United States-based firms have
reported 11,353 offset transactions with 50 countries. The total value of offsets provided under these arrangements was more than $56 billion.46
Over the longer-term, equipment
and know-how transferred via offset agreements including machine tools, other
production equipment and software can strengthen competitors by enhancing the purchasing nations ability
to build its own version of all or part of the imported item. As the Commerce Departments Bureau of Industry and Security noted in
its most recent annual report on offsets in the defense trade, offset agreements and associated offset transactions can negate some
of the potential economic and industrial base benefits accrued through defense exports if the offset activity
displaces work that would otherwise have been conducted in the United States.47
As the department further notes, offsets can have significant, negative long-term effects on
United States suppliers:
[A]t times, U.S. prime contractors develop long-term supplier relationships with foreign
subcontractors based on short-term offset requirements. These new relationships can limit
future business opportunities for U.S. subcontractors and suppliers, with negative consequences for the
domestic industrial base. Other kinds of offsets, such as technology transfers, may increase
research and development spending in foreign countries for defense or non-defense industries, thereby
helping to create or enhance current and future competitors to U.S. industry.48
A number of major industrial sectors show a net loss as a result of offsets more jobs exported via offsets than created via export revenues
created by offset-related sales. Industries that are net losers due to offsets include other aircraft parts and auxiliary equipment manufacturing;
military armored vehicle, tank, and tank component manufacturing; aircraft engine and engine parts manufacturing; and search, detection,
and navigation system and instrument manufacturing.49 Military aircraft manufacturing is the only sector with a significant net positive more
jobs created via exports than lost via offsets. And even this is a relatively small number 22,470 jobs.50
The role of offset agreements in outsourcing American jobs has been of particular concern in the
aircraft industry. Rivals of the United States, including China, have used offsets and technology transfers from
United States-based firms to help build their own civilian aerospace production capacity. An analysis by the IAM
notes that employment in the aerospace industry in the United States has decreased by 40 percent
during the past 20 years, in large part due to offshoring of production linked to offset
agreements.51
Offsets and outsourcing turn the casethey cause job loss and Chinese military
advances
OSPC 2013 (Open Society Policy Center, Export Control Reform: Economic Illogic and Overlooked
Consequences, OSPC Issue Brief, July, http://opensocietypolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Arms-ExportControl-Reform-Increases-Outsourcing.pdf)
Critics of the reform effort believe that several implications of loosening
controls on USML items could, in the words of a former

head of the State Departments Office of Defense Trade Controls, constitute a recipe for outsourcing production. Under
this scenario, the ECRI would, in fact, harm domestic industry and result in the export of jobs.
Calculating the economic costs or benefits of looser restrictions on exports of certain items is complicated by the fact that that not all
exports are created equal. If a U.S.-based firm uses foreign components in an exported item, the
Commerce Department treats the entire item as if it was produced in the United States. This may not
matter much in gauging the impact of the export on the revenues and profits of the exporting firm, but it
makes a huge difference in

terms of the potential impact on U.S. jobs. More foreign components mean fewer U.S. jobs.
Changes made through the reform initiative will make it more likely that subcomponents of U.S.
weapons systems will be produced abroad. Although the largest labor union representing workers in this industry have
repeatedly raised the issue with the Commerce Department, the Administration has apparently undertaken no study to determine the impact of
outsourcing of component production on the number of jobs generated by U.S. exports.
In the complex world of international trade, most countries demand economic offsets
arrangements that reduce the economic cost of an imported item when they purchase a product
from the United States. Offsets may be direct, such as placing production of components or final
assembly of the item in the purchasing country; or indirect, such as steering production on an
unrelated item to the purchasing country, making unrelated investments there, or even helping
the purchasing country sell its own products in the world market. Since the U.S. government first
started tracking offset agreements in the defense sector in 1993, 61 U.S. firms have reported 11,353 offset transactions with 50
countries. The total value of offsets provided under these arrangements was over $56 billion.8
Obviously, this phenomenon convolutes the benefits to domestic industry and workers by
moving production of key components overseas.9
Even by a narrow definition of the offset phenomenon that focuses only on defense trade, a number of major industrial sectors
show a net loss more jobs exported via offsets than created via export revenues created by
offset-related sales. Industries that are net losers due to offsets include other aircraft parts and auxiliary equipment manufacturing;
military armored vehicle, tank, and tank component manufacturing; aircraft engine and engine parts manufacturing; and search, detection,
and navigation system and instrument manufacturing.10 Military
aircraft manufacturing is the only sector with a

significant net positive that is, more jobs created via exports than lost via offsets. Even in this case, however, some
of the 22,470 jobs cited might actually be overseas.11
In fact, the role of offset agreements in outsourcing American jobs has been of particular concern in the aircraft industry, where rivals such
as China have used offsets and technology transfers from U.S. firms to help build up their own
civilian aerospace production capacity. Boeing is a case in point: the company has bought over
$1 billion worth of aircraft components from China, and 4,500 current Boeing aircraft include
parts made in China.12
Korea:
They dont solve because the nuclear umbrella would still be in place
Andrew Logie 12, Ph.D. candidate at Helsinki University, MA in Korean Studies from London
University, 2012, The Answers: North Korea, p. 110-111
The USA cannot win a land war with North Korea because that almost certainly means a war with mainland China. Consequently Washington is
unwilling to see North Korea politically collapse if there is a chance it could lead to renewed conflict. With South Korea now rich enough to pay
for its own modern military, US
troops could in fact be entirely withdrawn from the country without greatly
changing the balance of power on the peninsula, not least because South Korea would remain under the American
nuclear umbrella. The withdrawal of US troops has long been held by Pyongyang as a precondition to reconciliation with Seoul and
their continued presence is an oft-stated justification for developing its own nuclear deterrent.
Not withdrawing the navy takes out the AFF

Sanger, 5-28-10 chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times (May 28, In the
Koreas, Five Possible Ways to War,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/weekinreview/30sanger.html)
Ever since an armistice ended the Korean War, the two sides have argued over and from time to
time skirmished over the precise location of the Northern Limit Line, which divides their
territorial waters. That was where the naval patrol ship Cheonan was sunk in March. So first on the
Obama administrations list of concerns is another incident at sea that might turn into a
prolonged firefight. Any heavy engagement could draw in the United States, South Koreas chief
ally, which is responsible for taking command if a major conflict breaks out. What worries some
officials is the chance of an intelligence failure in which the West misreads North Koreas
willingness and ability to escalate. The failure would not be unprecedented. Until a five-nation investigation
concluded that the Cheonan had been torpedoed, South Korea and its allies did not think the Norths mini-submarine fleet was powerful enough
to sink a fully armed South Korean warship.
Tensions low talks

Kim, 11-27-15 - Business Day (Jack, "North and South Korea plan further talks to ease tension"
www.bdlive.co.za/world/asia/2015/11/27/north-and-south-korea-plan-further-talks-to-easetension)
SEOUL North and South Korea agreed to hold talks at the vice-minister level next month, after a meeting on Thursday
aimed at further easing tension following the end to an armed standoff in August. The meeting of
officials at the border truce village of Panmunjom came after the two sides signed an agreement in which Pyongyang expressed regret over
landmine blasts near the border that wounded two South Korean soldiers. Officials agreed to vice-minister-level talks on December 11 at the
industrial park in the North Korean city of Kaesong just a few kilometres on the northern side of the border run jointly by the two Koreas, a joint
press statement said. The
talks are a fresh attempt at dialogue between the rivals, which have all but cut
off ties since 2010, when a South Korean navy ship was destroyed by a torpedo that Seoul said
was fired from a North Korean submarine. Pyongyang denies any role. The North also bombed a South
Korean island later that year, blaming Seoul for provoking it by firing into its territorial waters during a military exercise. " The agenda
will be issues that will improve relations between the South and the North," the statement issued after the
talks said. As part of the August agreement, the two sides held reunions last month of families separated during the 1950-53 Korean war. North
and South Korea are technically still at war because the conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. If dialogue makes progress, the North is
expected to seek the resumption of cross-border tours from the South to its Mount Kumgang resort, a once-lucrative source of cash for the
impoverished state that was suspended in 2008. Seoul in turn is expected to try to get Pyongyang to agree to hold family reunions on a regular
basis, a top humanitarian priority for the South, where there are more than 60,000 mostly elderly people who are looking for relatives in the
North.
No Korea war
Fisher 13 (Max, the Post's foreign affairs blogger. Before joining the Post, he edited
international coverage for TheAtlantic.com, The Washington Post, Why North Korea loves to
threaten World War III (but probably wont follow through)
But is North Korea really an irrational nation on the brink of launching all-out war, a mad dog of East Asia? Is Pyongyang ready to sacrifice it all? Probably not.
The North Korean regime, for all its cruelty, has also shown itself to be shrewd, calculating, and single-mindedly obsessed with its own
self-preservation. The regimes past behavior suggests pretty strongly that these threats are empty. But they
still matter. For years, North Korea has threatened the worst and, despite all of its apparent readiness, never gone
through with it. So why does it keep going through these macabre performances? We cant read Kim Jong Euns mind, but the most plausible explanation
has to do with internal North Korean politics, with trying to set the tone for regional politics, and with forcing other countries (including the United States) to bear the
costs of preventing its outbursts from sparking an unwanted war. Starting World War III or a second Korean War would not serve any of Pyongyangs interests.
Whether or not it deploys its small but legitimately scary nuclear arsenal, North Korea could indeed cause substantial mayhem in the South, whose capital is mere
the North Korean military is antiquated and inferior; it wouldnt last long against a U.S.-led counterattack. No
matter how badly such a war would go for South Korea or the United States, it would almost certainly end with the regimes total
destruction. Still, provocations and threats do serve Pyongyangs interests, even if no one takes those threats very seriously. It helps to rally North
Koreans, particularly the all-important military, behind the leader who has done so much to impoverish them. It also helps Pyongyang to control the
miles from the border. But
regional politics that should otherwise be so hostile to its interests. Howard French, a former New York Times bureau chief for Northeast Asia whom I had the
pleasure of editing at The Atlantic, explained on Kim Jong Ils death that Kim had made up for North Koreas weakness with canny belligerence: The shtick of
, resolved to
bluff big.
apparent madness flowed from his countrys fundamental weakness as he, like a master poker player
bluff and
Kim adopted a
game of brinkmanship with the South, threatening repeatedly to turn Seoul into a sea of flames. And while this may have sharply raised the threat of war, for the
it steadily won concessions: fuel oil deliveries, food aid, nuclear reactor construction, hard cash-earning tourist enclaves and
investment zones. At the risk of insulting Kim Jong Eun, it helps to think of North Koreas provocations as somewhat akin to a child throwing a temper
North,
tantrum. He might do lots of shouting, make some over-the-top declarations (I hate my sister, Im never going back to school again) and even throw a punch or
two. Still, you give the child the attention he craves and maybe even a toy, not because you think the threats are real or because he deserves it, but because you want
the tantrum to stop. The big problem here is not that North Korea will intentionally start World War III or a second Korean War, because it probably wont. So you can
rest easy about that. The big problem is that North Koreas threats and provocations, however empty, significantly raise the risk of an unwanted war.
The United
States, South Korea and yes Pyongyangs all-important ally, China, all have much more to lose in a regional war than does North Korea. It falls to
those countries, then, to keep the Korean peninsula from spiraling out of control. Even if they dont ultimately offer Pyongyang
concessions to calm it down, as they have in the past, theyve still got an interest in preventing future outbursts. Like parents straining to manage a
childs tantrum, its a power dynamic that oddly favors the weak and misbehaving.
China INF:
No impact to high alert and the agreements solve the impact
EASTWEST INSTITUTE 2009 (Reframing Nuclear De-Alert Decreasing the operational readiness of
U.S. and Russian arsenals, http://www.ewi.info/reframing_dealert)
Russian opponents of de-alerting assert that neither
countrys systems are targeted at the other; in fact, highalert

levels have not prevented the two countries from building a strategic partnership. Nuclear
weapons are under strict technical and organizational control, which excludes the possibility of
accidental or unauthorized use. The issue of the possibility of an accidental nuclear war itself is hypothetical. Both states have
developed and implemented constructive organizational and technical measures that practically exclude launches resulting from unauthorized
action of personnel or terrorists. Nuclear
weapons are maintained under very strict system of control that

excludes any accidental or unauthorized use and guarantees that these weapons can only be used provided that there is an
appropriate authorization by the national leadership.10 Furthermore, the two countries have taken bilateral steps to reduce nuclear risk. These
include the 1963 Hot Line, the 1971 agreement on measures to reduce the threat of nuclear war, the agreements on pre-launch notification of
ballistic missile tests and on Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers, as well as the 1998 and 2000 agreements on the establishment of Joint Center for
the Exchange of Data from Early Warning Systems and Notification of Missile Launches (JDEC). The JDEC could not be operationalized due to
a number of objective and subjective difficulties, including secrecy-related issues. Nonetheless, the concept remains potent. Apart from bilateral
exchange of information, ballistic missile and satellite-launch-vehicle (SLV) launches of third parties could be covered by the JDEC.
Failsafes and CBMs solve the impacteven if an accident occurs it wont escalate
ROSENKRANTZ 2005 (Steven, Foreign Affairs Officer, Office of Strategic and Theater Defenses, Bureau
of Arms Control, Weapons of mass destruction: an encyclopedia of worldwide policy, technology, and history, p 1-2)
Since the dawn of the nuclear era, substantial thought and effort have gone into preventing
accidental and inadvertent nuclear war. Nuclear powers have attempted to construct the most
reliable technology and procedures for command and control of nuclear weapons, including
robust, fail-safe early warning systems for verifying attacks. The United States and the Soviet Union also
maintained secure second-strike capabilities to reduce their own incentives to launch a preemptive strike against each other during crisis
situations or out of fear of a surprise attack. The two nuclear superpowers worked bilaterally to foster strategic stability by means of arms control
and confidence-building measures and agreements.
Several confidence-building agreements were negotiated
between the two-superpowers to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war: the 1971 Agreement on Measures to Reduce
the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War, the 1972 Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas, and the 1973 Agreement on
the Prevention of Nuclear War. Following the end of the Cold War, the
United States and the Russian Federation have

continued to offer unilateral initiatives and to negotiate bilateral agreements on dealerting and
detargeting some of their nuclear forces to further reduce the likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear
accident. They have concluded agreements on providing each other with notifications in the
event of ballistic missile launches or other types of military activities that could possibly be
misunderstood or misconstrued by the other party.
The US and Russia wont withdraw from INF

COOPER 2013 (David, The James V. Forrestal Professor & Chair of the Department of National Security
Affairs, US Naval War College, GLOBALIZING REAGANS INF TREATY Easier Done Than Said?
Nonproliferation Review, March)
To be sure, just opening up the existing treaty would not come without potential costs. For some, these would include further locking in existing
US and Russian INF obligations. While INF still enjoys wide support within the US national security community, a few prominent figures on the
right, most notably President George W. Bushs fiery former UN ambassador, John Bolton, argue that, because INF limits US offensive options
and complicates our missile defense countermeasures without constraining todays missile proliferators, the treaty has become woefully obsolete
and needs to be either effectively internationalized, or, more realistically, in light of the dubious prospects for achieving this vis-a`-vis Iran and
other hostile powers, scrapped altogether.42 From this perspective, although Ambassador Bolton does not say so, a Global INF negotiation that
ends in stalemate might not necessarily be a bad thing, since this could provide a plausible pretext for the United States and Russia to jointly pull
the plug on INF. By contrast, from this perspective, opening the treaty up without ensnaring Iran and other hostile actors might represent the
worst of all worlds by further entangling the United States in INF with nothing meaningful to show for it. Even if one accepts this logic, however,
opening up INF would probably amount to little more than accepting a sunk cost. Previous
Russian renunciation threats and

calls from the political right for US abrogation notwithstanding, it seems improbable that INF is going
anywhere, regardless of whether or not it is broadened. As a recent RAND Corporation study notes, the
political and security costs of a U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty would be significant and far-reaching. 43 While
acknowledging that Russia might be somewhat more likely to initiate an INF withdrawal, either unilaterally or cooperatively with Washington,
this same study finds that, on balance, Moscow probably has good reasons not to do so.44 Assuming that these political
calculations are correct*and of course they may not be, particularly for Russia in light of President Putins past penchant for dramatics and
unpredictability*and even stipulating Ambassador Boltons perspective, any nonproliferation gains that might be achieved from Global INF,
however modest, incremental, or distant, would at least offer something to show for having to live in perpetuity with an outdated arms control
burden. Conversely, from the perspective of those who do see enduring value in INF, moving quickly in partnership with Russia to launch a
Global INF initiative might be a prudent insurance policy against any unforeseen future temptation by either Moscow or Washington to walk
away from their obligations.
The US wont withdraw from INF

BOHLEN et al 2012 (Avis Bohlen, retired career foreign service officer, William Burns, retired general,
Steven Pifer, Brookings Institution, John Woodworth, helped negotiate the INF; The Treaty on IntermediateRange
Nuclear Forces: History and Lessons Learned, December,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2012/12/arms%20control%20inf%20treaty
%20pifer/30%20arms%20control%20pifer%20paper.pdf)
In 2011, former Bush administration arms control officials John Bolton and Paula DeSutter argued in the Wall
Street Journal that, given the proliferation of INF missiles in third countries, the United States should withdraw from the treaty
if it could not be expanded to cover at least Iran, China, and North Korea.9 They did not indicate, however, where the United States would be
able to deploy new INF missilesthe
Europe and Asia would
enthusiasm for hosting such missiles on the part of American allies in

be minimal. Their proposal gained little traction.
Russia wont withdraw from INF

BOHLEN et al 2012 (Avis Bohlen, retired career foreign service officer, William Burns, retired general,
Steven Pifer, Brookings Institution, John Woodworth, helped negotiate the INF; The Treaty on IntermediateRange
Nuclear Forces: History and Lessons Learned, December,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2012/12/arms%20control%20inf%20treaty
%20pifer/30%20arms%20control%20pifer%20paper.pdf)
Suggestions continue to come from time to time out of Moscow that Russia ought to reconsider
its adherence to the INF Treaty. Over the past several years, however, these have not been voiced by authoritative
Russian officials.
Would withdrawal from the INF Treaty allow Russia to deploy military capabilities that it needs at present? While the New START Treaty
codifies a rough parity between the United States and Russia in strategic nuclear forces, Russian officials remain concerned about their
conventional force disadvantages vis--vis NATO andalthough Moscow rarely voices these concerns publiclyChina. The Russian military
has launched a conventional arms modernization effort, but it is not expected to be completed until 2020 or later, and it is not clear whether the
ambitious rearmament program will receive the funding that it needs.
Russian analysts thus indicate that for the foreseeable future Russia will rely more heavily on its nuclear forces, and Russia maintains by far the
largest non-strategic nuclear arsenal in the world. Although
Russia is prohibited from having INF missiles, it is

believed to have hundreds of nuclear gravity bombs, air-to-surface missiles, and sea-launched
cruise missiles, among other weapons, above and beyond its strategic nuclear forces.8
Given Russias numerical advantage in non-strategic nuclear weapons compared to the United
States or China, Russia does not appear to have a need for the additional non-strategic nuclear capability that INF
missiles would provide. Russian military analysts may have concluded that the missions of ground-launched INF range systems can be
effectively assumed by other weapons. Moreover, a decision by Moscow to withdraw from the INF Treaty could entail
significant political costs in its relations with states in Asia and Europe. Depending on their ranges and locations, new Russian INF
missiles could target most of Asia and Europe but likely could not reach the United States other than perhaps Alaska. A new deployment of INF
missiles would complicate Russian relations with countries such as China, Japan, Germany, and others, who would not see a justification for
Moscows recreation of the Cold War INF missile threat, especially given other Russian nuclear capabilities.
ASAT
Political issues make debris removal impossible.
Oliver and Pugliese 15 - Stphane Oliver and Antoine Pugliese, supervised by Victor Dos
Santos Paulino (Active Debris Removal: A Business Opportunity? Toulouse Business School,
Available Online at: http://chaire-sirius.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Oliver-Pugliese-2015Active-Debris-Removal-A-Business-Opportunity-Unknown.pdf, Accessed 7-2-2016, RJS)
Political Issues. As space activities are an extremely sensible matter on the international ground, since
they involve military operations in sort of an unregulated space, there is no wonder that for the moment,
space fairing nations never succeeded to reach an agreement on space debris . Several questions are
pending on this matter. First of all, as we already mentioned it, space activities involve dealing with
sensible and sometimes secret technologies. Earth observation satellites and communication satellites are
sometimes used by states for military purposes. Some of them are not even declared as such, and it is
not rare for a launch services company to send in orbit unidentified spacecraft. Thus it is easy to
understand that states are not willing to see the development of technologies allowing a spacecraft to get
close to another one and to manipulate it or worst moving it from its current orbit . As a spacecraft
designed for on-orbit services or for space cleaning could as well be designed for antisatellite operations,
many countries are slowing down the development of such devices, and are reluctant to cooperate with
other nations, fearing that this newly developed technology may one day be turned against them . For
example, the US International Traffic in Arms Regulation, or ITAR, prevent any nation from
manipulating any object with a potential military use without the agreement of the US government if this
object or if one of its component is made from American technologies . In that case, it is easy to
understand that ITAR regulations can reach a large part of the worlds on-orbit satellite fleet. As
such, the ITAR regulations are considered as one of the main political obstacles for an effective orbital
debris removal. Also, even if it seems that every nation wants to get rid of space debris, as they are
disturbing their space activities, no nation yet declared to be willing to pay for what will be a costly ODR
operation. For example, many small nations owning only few spacecraft (or even no spacecraft at all)
are claiming that the big polluters, mainly the US, China and Russia, should pay for such cleaning . But on
the other side, even a country with no satellites is benefiting from services issued by foreign companies,
owning foreign satellites. As space appears as a common good, shouldnt every nation pay? For the
moment the question remains unanswered. In fact, space cleaning operations will be all the more
costly as countries keep being reluctant to a common solution . As expressed by Liou and Johnson
(2006), the lack of cooperation is leading to a cost inefficiency due to the uncertainty and complexity of
the technology. International cooperation in space has rarely resulted in cost-effective or expedient
solutions, especially in areas of uncertain technologies feasibility . Liou and Johnson, 2006.
Space debris control is too expensive.

Oliver and Pugliese 15 - Stphane Oliver and Antoine Pugliese, supervised by Victor Dos
Santos Paulino (Active Debris Removal: A Business Opportunity? Toulouse Business School,
Available Online at: http://chaire-sirius.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Oliver-Pugliese-2015Active-Debris-Removal-A-Business-Opportunity-Unknown.pdf, Accessed 7-2-2016, RJS)
Economic obstacles Space is considered as a common good and is unfortunately overexploited by
humans. It is the consequence of what Garrett Hardin called in 1963 the tragedy of the commons, a state
of over-exploitation due to the impression that the resource is infinite . Space suffers from the tragedy of
the commons, a phenomenon that refers to the over-consumption of shared resources when there is no
clear ownership over it . By this sentence, Megan Ansdell means that the natural tendency of space
actors in power will likely be to do nothing until they absolutely must . Similarly to the case of global
warming, space authorities tend to wait as much as possible before taking any action, waiting for the
situation to become critical. Why that? Well, the development costs of space cleaning technologies are
so high that most authorities will only be ready to spend this money when they are compelled to.
According to NASA's Advanced Space Transportation Program, it costs around $10,000 per
kilogram to launch anything to orbit. In fact, the contribution to implement a viable ODR is evaluated at a
cost of $100-200 million per year according to some business cases . To put that figure into context, it
represents less than 1% of the world annual public space budgets. However, Governments are still
reluctant to spend this money that could preempt severe space collisions and generate billions of dollars
of losses. As we just saw it, numerous obstacles are slowing down the efforts made to conceive an
efficient ODR policy. However, several events prove that progress has been made on the path
during the last decade.
Cooperation with China allows for the Chinese to steal US tech, turns case.
Zane 13 Kris Zane, 3-12-2013 (Obama Lets China Steal Top Secret NASA Technology,
Western Journalism, 3-12-2013, Availalble Online at http://www.westernjournalism.com/obamalets-china-steal-top-secret-nasa-technology/, Accessed: 6-23-2016, RJS)
At 2 a.m, on June 17, 1972, five men dressed in business suits and wearing surgical gloves were
in the process of bugging the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate office complex. Caught
in the act, they were later identified as Nixons Plumbers, part of a nationwide operation to
ensure Nixons reelection that included wiretapping, burglary, private investigators, and mafialike shakedowns. Nixon put a halt to the Watergate investigation, giving marching orders to the
Plumbers to keep quiet and told his cronies in the CIA and Department of Justice to stall the FBI
investigation. Last month, we found out that two NASA facilitiesLangley Research Center in
Hampton, Virginia, and Ames Research Center near San Francisco, California-were gorged with Chinese
national engineers, who had access to top secret defense technology, who then took this information back
to their handlers in communist China. Congressman Frank R. Wolf, through information gathered from
whistleblowers, not only found that secret defense information was stolen, but that the Obama
administration, including DOJ, may have shut down the investigation. According to a whistleblower
speaking to Aviation Week, the Chinese nationals obtained high-level, cutting edge technology,
including: Missile defense technologyHigh-performance rocket engines, fuel and oxidizer tanks from
an ASAT (anti-satellite weapon), guidance and terrain-mapping systems from the Tomahawk cruise
missile and a radar altimeter from the F-35Upon allegations that defense secrets at the Ames facility
were breached, an FBI investigation was launched and completed, the information then being turned over
to Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Fry. Fry began to prepare indictments and convened a secret grand jury.
However, literally minutes before Fry was to begin the proceedings, and without explanation, he was
replaced by Assistant U.S. Attorney Elise Becker, and the investigation suddenly stalled . According to
Congressman Wolf, Department of Justice and White House officials intervened in the investigation to
shut it down. Congressman Wolf and other members of Congress put together a confidential report,
Destruction of NASA from the Inside: A Summary Report of Criminal and Political Activity, delivered to
the Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, which states that NASA has been hemorrhaging top secret
technology not only China, but Saudi Arabia as well. Eric Holder has of course denied that they
quashed the investigation, but Congressman Wolfs probe puts the DOJ right in the middle of what
could be the biggest loss of U.S. technology since the Rosenbergs funneled information about the atomic
bomb to the Soviet Union. Nixon shut down the Watergate investigation to ensure his reelection.
The Obama administration is alleged to have shut down the NASA investigation to ensure that the
funneling of top secret defense technology to communist China continues . Impeachment for high
crimes and misdemeanors would be only the beginning
ICE BREAKERS:
No Arctic conflict by any nation, specifically Russia claims of conflict are
exaggerated cooperation now this card will also smoke them
Fries, 12 Tom, Senior Fellow at the Arctic Institute, MBA from Georgetown University, Perspective
Correction: How We Misinterpret Arctic Conflict, http://www.thearcticinstitute.org/2012/04/perspective-correctionhow-we.html
War and conflict sell papers -- the prospect of war, current wars,
remembrance of wars past. Accordingly, a growing cottage industry devotes itself to writing about the
prospect of conflict among the Arctic nations and between those nations and non-Arctic states, which is mostly code
for China. As a follower of Arctic news, I see this every day, all the time: eight articles last week, five more already
this week from the Moscow Times, Scientific American or what-have-you. Sometimes this future conflict is portrayed
the portrayals of the states involved are

cartoonish, Cold-War-ish...its all good guys and bad guys. Im convinced that this is
as a political battle, sometimes military, but
nonsense , and I feel vindicated when I see the extent to which these countries' militaries collaborate in the
high North. From last week's meeting of all eight Arctic nations' military top brass
(excepting only the US; we were represented by General Charles Jacoby, head of NORAD and USNORTHCOM) to
Russia-Norway collaboration on search & rescue; from US-Canada joint military exercises to
US-Russia shared research in the Barents...no matter where you look, the arc of this
relationship bends towards cooperation. But there's a bigger
misconception that underlies the predictions of future Arctic conflict that we
read every week. This is the (usually) unspoken assumption that the governments of
these states are capable of acting quickly, unilaterally and secretly to pursue
their interests in the Arctic. False. This idea that some state might manage
a political or military smash-and-grab while the rest of us are busy clipping
our fingernails or walking the dog is ridiculous. The overwhelming weight of evidence
suggests that the governments of the Arctic states are, like most massive organizations, bureaucratic messes.
Infighting between federal agencies is rampant all around, as are political shoving matches between federal and
Money is still scarce, and chatter about military

activism isnt backed up by much: Canada is engaged in a sad debate over the downgrading of the
state/provincial/regional governments.
proposed Nanisivik port; the United States icebreaker fleet is barely worth mentioning and shows little sign of new
life in the near-term future; US Air Force assets are being moved 300+ miles south from Fairbanks to Anchorage;
and
Russias talk about a greater Arctic presence has been greatly
inflated for the sake of the recent elections . In a more general sense, we have
viciously polarized governments in the US and, to a lesser extent, Canada, as well as
numerous hotter wars elsewhere that will take the lions share of our blood
and treasure before the Arctic gets a drop of either. The smaller states might be able to
act more nimbly, but Norway and Denmark are successful Scandinavian socialmarket economies with modestly-sized militaries who arent likely to put
military adventurism in the Arctic at the top of their to-do lists. Theyre also
patient decision-makers who are making apparently sincere (if not always successful)
efforts to incorporate their resident indigenous communities into national
politics. This makes fast, unilateral, secret action unlikely. And then
there is Russia. From the outside, it can often seem as though the Russian
government rules by fiat. This reasonably leads to the concern that someone might take it into his head to
assert Russias military might or otherwise extend the countrys sovereignty in the Arctic. But it is fairly clear that
Russias success is currently, and for the near-term future, dependent on its position within
the constellation of global hydrocarbon suppliers. To continue to develop its supply base,
Russia needs the assistance of the oil majors of neighboring states, and indeed
it is showing signs of warming up to foreign engagement with its
Arctic hydrocarbons in significant ways. Its political relationships with its
regular customers are also critical to its future success. Russia isnt likely to
wantonly sour those relationships by acting aggressively against all four of
its wealthy, well-networked littoral brothers in Europe and North America. Its
not only the handcuffs of many colors worn by the Arctic states that will keep
them from getting aggressive, it is also the good precedents that exist
for cooperation here . Russia and Norway recently resolved a forty year-old
dispute over territory in the Barents. There are regular examples of military
cooperation among the four littoral NATO states and between Norway and
Russia. Even the US and Russia are finding opportunities to work
together . Meanwhile, the need to develop search-and-rescue capabilities is
making cross-border cooperation a necessity for all Arctic actors . There are
numerous international research and private-sector ventures, even in areas other
than hydrocarbons. These will only grow in importance with time. In fact, it would
seem that for many of these countries, the Arctic is a welcome relief - a site
where international collaboration is comparatively amicable.
New deployment strategies arent necessary- we can shore up naval power without it
Work 12 (Robert O. Work, United States Under Secretary of the Navy and VP of Strategic
Studies @ Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, "The Coming Naval Century," May,
Proceedings Magazine - Vol. 138/5/1311, US Naval Institute,
www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012-05/coming-naval-century, 2012)
For those in the military concerned about the impact of such cuts, I would simply say four things: Any grand
strategy starts with an assumption that nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means, and its
means equal to its purposes. The
upcoming defense drawdown will be less severe than past postWorld

War II drawdowns. Accommodating cuts will be hard, but manageable. At the end of the drawdown, the
United States will still have the best and most capable armed forces in the world. The President well
appreciates the importance of a world-class military. The United States remains the only nation able to project and sustain large-scale military
operations over extended distances, he said. We maintain superior capabilities to deter and defeat adaptive enemies and all resources are scarce,
requiring a balancing of commitments and resources. As political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote: The to ensure the credibility of security
partnerships that are fundamental to regional and global security. In this way our military continues to underpin our national security and global
leadership, and when we use it appropriately, our security and leadership is reinforced. Most important, as
the nation prioritizes

what is most essential and brings into better balance its commitments and its elements of national
power, we will see the beginning of a Naval Centurya new golden age of American
sea power. The Navy Is More Than Ships Those who judge U.S. naval power solely by the number of
vessels in the Navys battle force are not seeing the bigger picture. Our battle force is just one
componentalbeit an essential oneof a powerful National Fleet that includes the broad range of
capabilities, capacities, and enablers resident in the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. It
encompasses our special-mission, prepositioning, and surge-sealift fleets; the ready reserve force; naval aviation, including the maritime-patrol
and reconnaissance force; Navy and Marine special operations and cyber forces; and the U.S. Merchant Marine. Moreover, it is crewed and
operated by the finest sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, civilian mariners, and government civilians in our history, and supported by a talented
and innovative national industrial base. If this were not enough, the
heart of the National Fleet is a NavyMarine

Corps team that is transforming itself from an organization focused on platforms to a total-force
battle network that interconnects sensors, manned and unmanned platforms with modular
payloads, combat systems, and network-enabled weapons, as well as tech-savvy, combat-tested
people into a cohesive fighting force. This Fleet and its network would make short work
of any past U.S. Fleetand of any potential contemporary naval adversary.
Bureaucratic reluctance to deploy, delayed response

Watts 12 Robert, graduate of the Coast Guard Academy, Captain Watts has served six sea tours
with the Navy and Coast Guard, most recently commanding USCGC Steadfast (WMEC 623). A
qualified Surface Warfare Officer and Cutterman, he holds advanced degrees from the Naval War
College, Old Dominion University, American Military University, and the Naval Postgraduate
School, and he is currently a doctoral candidate at the Royal Military College of Canada (War
Studies). The New Normalcy-Sea Power and Contingency Operations in the Twenty-First
Century http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/87e866a1-24dd-4e91-9ffa-cb0f64f15144/TheNew-Normalcy--Sea-Power-and-Contingency-Operat.aspx
The inherent mobility of sea power means largely what it does in the traditional rolemodern technology allows
global reach in three dimensions and almost instant operational coordination worldwide. But the primary
barrier to mobility in crisis-contingency operations is not technological . If mobility is to be exercised,
ships must actually sail, and it is herein the commitment of resources to a crisis that things
become culturally problematic. Despite the need, the answer to a crisis contingency is not always to employ sea power
immediately. This cultural hesitancy has two aspects. The first is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that it is more a matter of legend
than of practical discussion. The United States has a long-standing tradition of rejecting the use of military forces in the domestic context, a
rejection that dates back to the Revolution. It was codified in law with the passing of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which directs that military
forces (specifically the U.S. Army) cannot engage in domestic law enforcement.18 The legislation is often misinterpreted as meaning that any
domestic use of military forces is illegal; that is not the case, but it is nevertheless widely believed in both civilian and military 56 NAVAL WAR
COLLEGE REVIEW circles.19 Thus before naval forces can be committed to a crisis, a comprehensive legal
review is often demanded, something that takes timetime that is usually not available. Another cultural
barrier arises from service ethos. Bluntly, warships are designed and train to fight. In the modern high-tech
era, naval warfare is a very specific (and expensive) proposition. It demands very sophisticated and specialized
equipment. The radar on an Aegis cruiser, for example, is exceptionally good at tracking and destroying enemy aircraftbut only that. In a
crisis contingency that marginalizes that purpose of a platforms defining systems, the purpose of the platform itself could be called into question.
According to this logic, if a vessel is employed (albeit successfully) for a purpose for which it is not designed, the door is opened for its
increasing use for that purpose and not its proper one. In the grand scheme of things, warships used for other purposes are not training for war; in
the short term this leads to a loss of readiness for combat, while in the longer term it could mean the elimination of platforms altogether in favor
of others more suitable for noncombat missions. Although this seems to be a largely philosophical argument, in a shrinking budget
environment it is not without a certain politically compelling logic. The effects of these factors are not
insignificant. In recent crisis contingencies (the mass migration operations of 1994 and Katrina) the arrival of naval
vessels was delayed while legal and operational impact issues were addressed , in the Katrina case so long as to
become a national embarrassment.20 Bureaucratic reasons, not materiel, were the culprits, ultimately to the
detriment of the response. Hesitancy can be fatal in an operation requiring rapid response , and culture
and bureaucracy can conspire to encourage just that.
Policy Links You Should Read:
Hegemony:
War and the pursuit of hegemony are used by the sovereign to
further biopower leads to reproduction of patriarchy, racism
and neoliberalism
Corva, 09 (Dominic, University of Washington, Biopower and the
Militarization of the Police Function, ACME,
http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/828/685)//BW
Hardt and Negris central claim with respect to this task is that war has become a regime of
biopower, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but
producing and reproducing all aspects of social life (2004, 13). It is well beyond the
scope of this review to examine Foucaults theorization of biopower, 2 but it is important to point out that Hardt and
Negris inclusion of controlling the population in their definition is consistent with an often-overlooked aspect of
the mode of governance in which strategies of sovereign power

are subsumed by biopower. This aspect is the inclusion of sovereign power,
rather than its total eclipse, in strategies associated with liberal
governmentality (see Foucault in Burchell et al, 1991, 102). In this article, I use the term sovereign power
governmentality,
to denote the use of state-sanctioned force (what Foucault calls negative or repressive power) to control domestic
and/or foreign territories. And biopower,
though it is articulated with strategies of

sovereign power, positively produces subjects of governance through
techniques of normalization. Biopolitical strategies of governance secure the
reproduction of hegemonic social orders (capitalist, patriarchal, masculinist,
sexist, racist and so forth). For Foucault, both strategies are articulated and dispersed through the
territorial state, to address the problem of governing a national population. The state, with its attendant sovereign
functions, is an effect of hegemonic orders, while at the same time a necessary nexus for the dispersal of
Sovereign power, in
the last instance, takes life or lets live (Foucault, 1984, 261). Biopower, on the other hand, which
hegemony-friendly, mostly biopolitical but also sovereign, strategies of governance.
functions through the proliferation of acceptable freedoms, fosters life or disallows it to the point of death. It fosters
life through the production of knowledge about the (legitimate) self, especially in relation to a given population. This
is what is meant by normalization, which refers to the construction of what behavior, and therefore who, is normal
in the population. While Foucaults work examines the relationship between the liberal, European nation-state and
global governmentality that produces

the neoliberal, capitalist world subject whose national citizenship is
increasingly secondary to global economic citizenship. If Empires biopower is
truly hegemonic, then the exercise of sovereign power should be articulated with and disciplined by the
its subjects, Hardt and Negris Empire theorizes a (sort of)
biopolitical practices of what Hardt and Negri refer to as the global aristocracy: transnational corporations (TNCs),
the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so forth. Empires imperialism should reproduce
the neoliberal order, in the long run, rather than disrupt or de-legitimate it.
Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy --- the strategy of omnipotence sees threats to

empire everywhere, which necessitates constant violence
McClintock 9 (Anne Chaired Professor of English and Womens and Gender Studies at the
University of WisconsinMadison, M.Phil. from Cambridge University, Ph.D. from Columbia
University, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, in Small Axe,
March 2009, Issue 28, p. 50-74, http://smallaxe.net/repository/file/sx%2028/5SA28%2520McClintock%2520%2850-74%29.pdf) Kguy
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and
dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the
permanent threat of the war on terror. I have come to feel that we cannot
understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US government has
committed itself after 9/11two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people
imprisoned, killed, and torturedunless we grasp a defining feature of our

moment, that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power. Taking
shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War
to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the United States
has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is
only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of
absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral
and nightmarish quality of the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless threat , a
war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and
persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a
strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere a consensual
hallucination, 4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and
hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic selfdelusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel
that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those
established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We
need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial
violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on the middle
super-carceral state.
passage to nowherethat have come to characterize the United States as a

5 Can we, the
uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since
does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry,

as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction
of the exceptional nation to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we
9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire,
theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but
which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in
casting states of emergency into

fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not
something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored.
Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state
collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible,
itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people
a crisis of violence and the

visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state
attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the
spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and
penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of
moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United
States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority,
a tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The
beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute us? We now inhabit
deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled
we must also find a way to

speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the
hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official
history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully understand
the proliferating circuits of imperial violencethe very eclipsing of which gives to our
moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric castwithout understanding the pervasive presence
of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself across the
political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply
by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture
Hofstadters famous identification of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an
inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of
grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat,
a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is

can produce pyrotechnic
held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11),
displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and
peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US
imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency,
submerged mind, or Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am I
interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have psyches
or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as
paranoid if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural
narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence,
and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective
national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing
and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory
flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated
between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense
dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate
memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a
way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical
question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to
instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with,
and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously
humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated
(incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training
camps not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally
conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial
paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the
visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as
they emerge in the torture at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that
torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory
sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians
Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there
are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians The barbarians have declared war. President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote
Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient dj
vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of solution? Every modern empire faces an abiding
crisis of
legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight
is that an imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the
barbarians. It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the
silhouette of the empires borders in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of
the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The
enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part.
And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a
disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution. With the
collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR
evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth
Where were the enemies now to justify the

continuing escalation of the military colossus? And now what shall
become of us without any barbarians? By rights, the thawing of the cold war
should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible
columnist, and infiltration vanished.
external threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy
deficit: Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we
The threats have become so remote. So remote

that they are difficult to ascertain. Colin Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific
exist for. Dick Cheney likewise complained:
threatsNorth Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president,
George W. Bush likewise fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we
know they are out there. It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US
administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for
the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would
require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to
political
casus belli and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach. General
the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a
Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . .
War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually
attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the
attack, Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted,
America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before. Charles
Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era,
he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13
Unipolar power precludes an effective long-term solution to nuclear deterrence and

encourages proliferation --- only a return to previous balance of power can solve
van Munster and Sylvest 13 (Rens Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies, Casper Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark, paper prepared for
the ISA Annual convention, March 2013, p. 5-13,
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites/classicalrealism/vanMunster&Sylvest_Nu
clearRealism_ISA2013.pdf)
The existence of nuclear weapons could thus not be downplayed as an unintended consequence of the
scientific enlightenment (Walker, 2007: 431). To the contrary, the thermonuclear revolution was made possible
by science, technology and rationality. In that sense, nuclear realists would have strongly agreed with Adornos (1966: 320) famous remark
that there is no universal history leading from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. At any rate, a
blind faith in the principles of science and rationality was unwarranted in light of the horrors of
the twentieth century. It could even be outright dangerous, as Herz realized after having witnessed, at close range in Geneva,
the breakdown of the reformed international order with the League of Nations at its center an order he as an ardent liberal had politically supported (Herz, 1939;
Herz, 1942; Herz, 1951). Mumford underwent a similar conversion. Having visited Germany in the early 1930s during a time when the national socialist movement
was growing rapidly and making its political presence felt, he had failed to note both the movements presence and the intensity of its anti-liberal ideals. When
Mumford belatedly realized what was at stake, his atonement took the form of a fight against what he termed pragmatic liberalism and its isolationist implications
for American foreign policy. As he argued, such a liberalism was too noble to surrender, too sick to fight, plagued by a total incapacity to face the worst and thereby
Nuclear realists therefore argued for a more sober and

humble calibration of liberalism and its optimistic belief in progress. What was needed was a
language and understanding of politics in the face of dark realities that no rational theory could
provide a bulwark against.4 Such a language had to be formulated between the optimist belief in universal values of a rational science and progress
on the one hand and a pessimistic retreat from emancipation and liberty on the other. Given the absolute materiality of nuclear
weapons and the political context in which they existed at the height of the Cold War, liberalism
required a healthy dose of realism without illusions (Philp, 2012) that should not begin from an idea
of how people ought to act ideally or rationally, but from an appreciation of the context within
which politicians and policy-makers have to make choices as well a critical examination of their
actual conduct. This realist form of liberalism has strong affinities with Foucaults later injunction that: We must try to proceed with
the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an
risking the ultimate perversion: being too virtuous to live.3
analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the essential kernel of
rationality that can be found in the Enlightenment and would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the contemporary limits of the
necessary, that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects (Foucault, 1986: 42, 43) For nuclear
In their view a state-dominated

configuration of international politics was bound to produce a politically suicidal and morally
unacceptable great power nuclear war (or a great power conventional war that risked escalating into a nuclear war), something that classical
realists, the contemporary limit of the necessary was nothing less that the question of survival of the species.
realists familiar to IR scholars, even if somewhat belatedly, also came to accept (Craig, 2003). This appreciation of the limits of science and means-ends rationality
guides for political action also informed their critique of deterrence and the dangerous illusion amongst government officials that the H -bomb was a usable, if not a
winning, weapon rather than a technique of extermination. The central element in the nuclear realist critique of deterrence was an appreciation of how the politics of
deterrence coalesced with the changing knowledge economy of the emerging military-industrial complex. Although civilians managed to break the military monopoly
on strategy in these years, they did so from positions of intellectual authority established by funds from within this ever-expanding complex; whether in think tanks
like RAND or in the several centers dealing in nuclear strategy that were established at major universities during this period (Kuklick, 2006; Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2000).
To nuclear realists this reconfiguration of knowledge production failed to adequately face the challenge of these new weapons; indeed, it merely signaled how the
scientific method that had spurred (and been spurred by) modern civilization was incapable of confronting the moral and existential dimensions of military force after
the thermonuclear revolution. Clearly, science and technology had brought wonders to the modern world, but when dictated and pursued by power-intoxicated agents
Nuclear realists kept stressing that the focus on short-term

order and stability amounted to moral failure: it produced a false sense of security, a host of
negative side-effects and precluded a sustainable long term solution. The moral critique of deterrence was strongly
rooted in epistemological concerns and nuclear realists maintained that the majority of politicians and strategists relied on an
overtly thin or too rationalist concept of deterrence that in their realist conception of politics was
untenable. While both Herz and Russell conceded in the late 1950s that deterrence had been paradoxically successful, they also argued that it was based on
the prospects for civilization were dim (see also Sylvest, 2013a).
rather optimistic assumptions. When Herz made these points he also offered a knowledgeable and in some respects sympathetic discussion of nuclear strategy. He
security through nuclear weapons meant complete insecurity and that the most
potent weapon was shot through with paradoxes and ambivalences. In making these points, Herz clearly grasped that
credibility was the crucial issue (Herz, 1959: 198, 202, 215). But then a host of problems remained, none of them negligible: lunatics,
application of rationality in a context of uncertainty, risks of misinterpretation, different kinds of
trigger-happiness in officials running so-called fool proof systems and, not least, the endless secondguessing of intentions (Herz, 1959: 183f.; Herz, 1962: 131-133). With respect to the latter Herz sarcastically remarked that [i]t may be doubted that
began by noting that
even the theory of games as applied to international relations can cope with this one (Herz, 1959: 207n.). Against the background of the elevation of deterrence to
unilateral and mutual deterrence. The former mainly based on the concept of massive retaliation
was plagued by confusion and lack of precision (a common refrain among critics of Eisenhower
administrations policies in the 1950s). The notion of mutual deterrence was not straightforward either and Herz argued
that only a strict concept of mutual deterrence, only threatening retaliation against nuclear attacks, could work (Herz, 1959: 189).5 Everything else
would be illogical, since it would presume an adversary (or deteree) to be deterred by something
that would not deter the deterrer. Unfortunately, Western policy was founded on such shaky
foundations. A policy of retaliation that was not precise and determinate, i.e. based on a proclamation of no-first
use, might provoke rather than prevent war and especially coupled with a defense policy
underemphasizing conventional military force it could mean an involuntary rush into the very
conflict we want to avoid (Herz, 1959: 194-5). Russell made many similar points (Russell, 1959: 30-31, 39, 70-1), but he was more outspoken
dogma (Herz, 1959: 184) Herz examined both
was found wanting: it
about the motivation behind his dissection of nuclear strategy and simulation; namely to counter the widespread belief that the H-bomb constituted a winning
weapon and to unmask the long-term instability of the concept of deterrence (or what Dulles called brinkmanship). Russell did this by invoking an analogy to the
the game played by running two cars

against each other, testing the resolve of both drivers before being decided by a crash or the first
turn away from it symbolized the inherent instability of deterrence. Russell was at pains to refute the argument that
game of chicken made popular in a Hollywood movie a few years previously. For Russell,
there was no alternative to continue playing a suicidal game or surrendering to the Soviet adversary (Russell, 1959: 30-1). The chicken analogy was Russells most
insightful contribution to contemporary nuclear strategy and secured for him a supporting role in the development of strategic thought: the following year RAND
theorist Herman Kahn used Russells analogy in his notorious treatise On Thermonuclear War (1960). The virtue of Russells analogy was its perceptiveness in
relation to the crucial issue of credibility.6 In Kahns hands, however, chicken became an argument for blind, automated resolve along the lines of the infamous
Russell engaged in
the kind of simulation that characterized Kahns strategizing, he did so in order to expose the
absurdity and futility of considering the use of military force after the thermonuclear revolution.
doomsday machine that later made it into Western folklore through its appearance in Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove. Although
His purpose was completely contrary to that of Kahn, who thought it important to think the unthinkable and contemplate the possibility of nuclear war. Indeed, when it
came to American policy, Russell pointed out I can find almost nothing that seems to me compatible with rationality in Kahns adoption of deterrence (Russell, 1961:
the effects of this

phenomenon landed Kahn in a paradox not unlike that presented by the weapons he strategized
about: the notion that thermonuclear war could be fought led to a bleak and cheerless outlook, but
it is the best that Mr. Kahn can offer us even by stretching optimism to the very limits of credibility (Russell, 1961: 17). In an environment
populated by fallible, pugnacious and occasionally mad human beings, a concept based on how
decision-makers rationally ought to act was not just unrealistic, but also extremely dangerous.7 The
political rationality underlying the traditional conduct of international politics, whatever its severe
shortcomings in the pre-nuclear era, reached an absolute limit in the mid-twentieth century. The horrifying nature of World War II
both its increasingly total, unstrained character, the German extermination policy towards the
Jews and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that(virtually) brought the war to a close
17). The fact that Kahn thought thermonuclear war in some instances rational and that he underestimated, according to Russell,
obviously contributed to this increasing realization, but it was the advent of thermonuclear weapons that finally undermined time-honored practices of international
Three interrelated institutions are of particular importance: the balance of power, diplomacy
and war. Herz, who had much in common with other classical realists of his time, had argued that the traditional European balance of
power policy was a safeguard against imperial ambitions that, with Britain strategically placed at
the center as the holder of the balance, had achieved near-perfection in the eighteenth century. In
society.
contrast to a more mechanical system where order was achieved at random Herz stressed that [b]alance of power politics is an applied art, not an applied science
Two challenges to this (idealized) construction of the balance of power presented

themselves in the post-war era. First, the power shifts of the international system made it doubtful whether a balance of power (policy) could
function in a more rigid configuration with only two major players and no holder of the balance. After the arrival of the thermonuclear
bomb, furthermore, combating Kremlins false ideology required an altogether different strategy of
(Herz, 1951: 216).8
genuinely appealing to the people in the communist world. Emphasis should not be put on a
fabricated, hollow fantasy of the American dream but on the actual pluralistic system which
allows the greatest variety and play to whatever economic forces and institutions, private or
public, will efficiently further the common good (Mumford, 1954a: 8). Second, the classical balance of power
had, when it worked best, depended on the existence of a system of diplomacy that allowed for
frank exchanges of view and, in case diplomacy failed, war as a continuation of diplomacy by
other means. Again, however, injecting thermonuclear weapons into this already fragile and dangerous
organization of international politics exposed the limits of traditional political rationality and
diplomacy. Drawing on George F. Kennan, Herz (1959: 180) pointed out how the nature of new weapon made it unsuitable
for being used as a threat in diplomatic relations. Russell repeatedly stressed this same point during the 1950s. With the
existence of the thermonuclear bomb, he argued, [d]iplomats ... are deprived of their traditional weapon. They are in
fact reduced to a game of bluff and blackmail. If it is thought that the other side would rather exterminate the human race than yield, it
is rational to give way to the lunacy of opponents. There is thus a premium on madness, and one-sided rationality entails defeat for the
less irrational.9 War, or the threat of war, similarly lost its meaning in the modern Clausewitzian sense.
Although the dictum that war is a continuation of policy has been true hitherto, it is true no longer (Russell, 1954b: 251), since [i]n a war using the
H-bomb, there can be no victor.10 Of the nuclear realists treated here, Russell was the most outspoken in stressing the novelty of situation that
the thermonuclear revolution had brought about. The Bikini tests, his early grasp of the physics and scale of the H-bomb, as well as his attention to those few facts and
the
ends of war can no longer be achieved with the most advanced weapons. As he starkly put it, [w]e can all live or
judgments about the new weapon made available by politicians and military officials at the time, led him to stress the wholly new fact (Russell, 1954d: 51) that
all die, but it is no longer possible to think that only our enemies will die.11 Towards the end of the 1950s, when John Herz published International Politics in the
Unlimited war ... can no longer bestow on any power waging

it in the form of nuclear war that which used to be the fruit of superiority and thus of victory:
the attainment of war aims, whether security or any others (Herz, 1959: 21). This situation was brought
about by guided, intercontinental missiles and the revolutionary force of fusion bombs that
achieved an uncanny absoluteness of effect (Herz, 1957: 488). Consequently, security meant insecurity,
while victory was a mere word. This state of affairs was particularly dangerous, in Herzs analysis, in a
situation where war was increasingly bureaucratized or reified (Herz, 1959: 274) and where the
dynamics of the security dilemma played itself out in a context of ideological conflict and
mutual suspicion. Oppenheimers metaphor of two scorpions in a bottle was highly appropriate (Herz, 1959: 13). Lewis Mumford was in complete
Atomic Age (1959), he entirely agreed with Russells point:
agreement with Herz and Russell about the fundamental point: There will be no victor in World War III, Mumford argued, since a genuine war of extermination
would bring about our own downfall (Mumford, 1954b: 88 [italics in original], 77). In re-publishing and developing ideas published as a reaction to the atomic bomb,
Mumford warned that modern war pursued to its logical end would mean not the defeat of the
enemy but his total extermination: not the resolution of conflict but the liquidation of the
opposition (Mumford, 1954b: 170). Anders concurred and drove home the point with characteristic simplicity: because nuclear weapons
overwhelm their targets, their almightiness is their defect [Ihre Allmacht ist ihr Defekt] (Anders, 1956: 258). The Hbomb flouts the conventional understanding of a means by entailing the destruction of the end.
Or simply: the bomb is too big. In Anders words, the end discovered its own end in the effect of the means,
which signaled nothing less than the degeneration of the conceptual distinction between means and end. Nowhere was this more obvious
than in the context of arms racing, where [t]he production of means has become the end of our
existence [Dasein] (Anders, 1956: 251). For these reasons, nuclear realists were also sceptical about the possibility of fighting a limited nuclear war. After it
was clear that the Soviet Union had obtained a thermonuclear device, the combination of a nuclear standoff and a doctrine of
massive retaliation that despite several attempts at qualification (e.g. Dulles, 1954) was still seen as
risking a major nuclear exchange over a minor conflict led to an attempt to make war fighting
possible and plausible again. It was feared that the credibility of the nuclear threat was
compromised by touting it in the context of minor conflicts or any kind of aggression. Lodged in such
moves was a tacit recognition that the H-bomb (a strategic weapon) transgressed the category of a military weapon that
could be used for political purposes and a conviction that tactical nuclear weapons were a
weapon like any other. As Henry Kissinger phrased it in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), [t]he prerequisite for a policy of limited war is
to reintroduce the political element into our concept of warfare and to discard the notion that policy ends where war begins or that war can have goals distinct from
those of national policy (Kissinger quoted in Freedman, 2003: 97). Although nuclear realists had some sympathy with the argument that the superpower conflict
needed a safety valve,12 they ultimately were unconvinced by the argument for limited nuclear war. The main problem they foresaw here concerned escalation, a
problem which advocates of limited nuclear war has never convincingly cracked (Freedman, 2003: xiv). As Herz put this point in 1959:
None of the
various suggested distinctions as to graduated deterrence, targets, tactical as opposed to strategic atomic weapons, and
so forth, seems to offer a sufficient guarantee against eventual (or even immediate) outbreak of all-out nuclear
war; only avoidance of the first use of any and all atomic and nuclear weapons (in the sense of fission
and fusion weapons) might guarantee this (Herz, 1959: 200). This was an argument that Herz shared with Russell (as well as with more conventional
strategic thinkers opposed to limited nuclear war). Indeed, this discussion of limited nuclear war led straight back to the overriding theme in the nuclear realist analysis
of how military force was reconfigured in the wake of the thermonuclear revolution. By falsely considering the H-bomb a weapon let alone a winning weapon in
military strategists and defenders of deterrence failed to

appreciate the reorganization of basic truths that followed in the wake of technological
progress.
effect by even entertaining the notion that they were usable
Links:
Anthro:
Extinction has and is already happening Their representations of futural
environmental crisis make them complicit in present racialized crisis of culture and
opportunity lost to the global parasite of the European human settler.
Ahuja, 15 [Neel Ahuja, associate professor of postcolonial studies in the Department of
English and Comparative Literature at UNC; Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of
Extinctions; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; 21:23, 2015;
http://ahuja.web.unc.edu/files/2013/08/Ahuja-GLQ.pdf]
To Kill Softly Media representations of climate change struggle to grasp the enormity of killing.
The planetary scale of carbon amplification, its association with expanding bodies and displaced
destruction, coincides with a spectacular trauma of extinction: ecologically violent uses of land, chemicals, and
carbon are accelerating the sixth major extinction event in earths history. This event (if we can stomach the cool rendering of mass death as a
singularity) will commit 1835 percent of extant animal and plant species to extinction by 2050.19 Perhaps
one million species

will disappear, and countless billions of living bodies will be denied the conditions of life or
prematurely killed. Climate-related disasters are accelerating threats to already precarious
lifeways: Inuit nations face melting Arctic ice; Maldivians and other islanders lose ground to
rising seas; vulnerabilities to infectious disease grow with shrinking water supplies; the worlds
agrarian poor face crop diseases, drought, desertification, and food price instability; and all
countries face increased weather disasters. The large number of people who depend on
subsistence agriculture are already living outside the ecological boundary parameters that
enabled the rise of modern human societies.20 In this sense, we are already living the future of
extinction. The planetary presentnot some speculative futureexhibits a staggering scale
of reproductive failure, human and nonhuman. Yet small bodies and intimate
environments often get lost in big atmospheric narratives. Since its seventeenth-century origins in English, the
term atmosphere has signaled the fluid medium of above-ground relations, its contradictory figuration as a space of geology and life, and a
background that forges exchange between social and physical processes. Atmospheres can surround big and small bodies, and can shift as bodies
entangle and disentangle spatially. With industrial pollution, lower atmospheric space abounds with plumes of toxic gases (methane, carbon
dioxide, and carbon monoxide) as well as noncarbon by-products (e.g., nitrous oxide and ozone) that unpredictably concentrate in our bodies as
we encounter a busy street, a power plant, or a factory farm. In addition to rising to heights where they can trap solar heat, these gases fix in soil
and water, returning unpredictable flows of toxicity to the lithosphere where plants grow. These toxicities often concentrated in poor and
minority communitiescontribute to childhood asthma, lung disease, and the spread of various cancers. In an account of living with toxic
sensitivity to airborne heavy metals, Mel Chen describes navigating and transforming unpredictable atmospheres and their conjoined affective
and spatial entanglements. The improvisational strategies for prophylaxissuch as donning a particulate mask to avoid exposure to vehicle
emissions on a busy streetinevitably conjure public surveillance. Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask, writes Chen, I am
perceived as a walking symbol of contagious disease like SARS, and am often met with some form of repulsion.21 Chens account points to
how the materiality of everyday air pollution subtly intertwines with the materiality of race. Race, according to Renisa Mawani, might
itself be understood as an atmospherics rather than a social construction. Drawing on Fanons accounts of
race and atmosphere, Mawani explores race as an affective movement, a force rather than a thing, a current that reconstitutes and reassembles
itself in response to its own internal rhythms and to changing social and political conditions.22 If race is not simply a phenotypic characteristic
but an ecology of affective movement and exchange, the effects of carbon pollution disability, disease, forced migration, and sometimes death
can catalyze the emergence of xenophobic fears about economic and ecological interconnection. Racialized
climate reporting
draws affective power from senses of pervasive and inescapable environmental pollution. Michael
Ziser and Julie Sze detail the persistent geopolitical and racial fears driving US responses to climate change. Contrasting the
sentimental domestication of the (white) polar bear in US media with persistent fears of the
cross-Pacific migration of Chinese air pollution, Ziser and Sze argue that climate discourses conjure
earlier racial panics about yellow peril and obscure primary US responsibility for
contemporary and historical emissions.23 While such reporting contributes to an atmosphere of
fear and crisis, the everyday physicality of climate processes inscribes fear at the site of the skin.
Atmosphere names a space of unpredictable touching, attractions, and subtle violencesa space
at once geophysical and affective, informed by yet exploding representation, a space where the
violences of late-carbon liberalism subtly reform racialized sensoria through shifting scales of
interface. To explore this further I suggest that we think with mosquitoes, mosquitoes both figural and real, mosquitoes
that bite, migrate, and feed on various bodies. These are parasites like those in Narayans vision of gay plague; they are
also strange kin in a warming atmosphere. Mosquitoes excite colonial tropes in environmental
discoursefrom anthropophagic consumption (feeding on humans) to visions of tropical
contagion.24 In the vampiric image of female mosquitoes blood feastsrequired for their sexual
reproductionthere is a counterpoint to the carnivorous virility that Carla Freccero attributes to
liberal humanist visions of the subject. A small body becomes a predator of the human, forcing strange ecologies of attraction
and feeling even as it poses risks of debility and death.25 But the parasite turns out to be feeding on a parasite.
Alongside the mosquito, a universalized, waste-expelling human settler appears as the ultimate
atmospheric parasite in neoliberal climate discourse. Michel Serres puts the point about scale this way: The human
parasite is of another order relative to that of the animal parasite: the latter is one, the former a set; the latter is time, the former, history; the latter
is a garden, the former, a province; to destroy a garden or a world.26 An
organic imperialist, the human colonizes

ecologies, time, and thought itselfan entire lifeworld. In the hands of late-carbon liberalisms
human settler, killing takes a form both massive and casual. This figuration is based on some daunting facts of
extinction. The everyday activities of carbon-dependent industrial living connect ones bodily consumption and waste to the stranger intimacies
of a shared atmosphere, slowly threatening other far-flung bodies, human and nonhuman.27 The
effects of waste may kill softly,

enmeshed in the deep time and circuitous space of slow violence, a largely unintentional
ecocide.28 From this vantage, beyond its invocation of xenophobic rhetorics of shape-shifting,
virality, and contagion, the parasite suggests a problem of knowledge about agency and causality.
For this is a human defined by waste rather than by romantic marks of sentience, feeling, or
intentionality. To gloss Berlant, inhabiting late-carbon liberalism produces myths, icons, and feelings
that may be profoundly confirming despite binding a person or world to situations of
profound threat.29 Rather than settle comfortably into the assumption of species-derived powerof the destructive and universal
human geological agency of the Anthropocenewe might say that to recognize that life is ambiently queer is to divest from spectacular
temporalities of crisis and transcendence that infuse queer theory and environmentalism alike. Queering in this sense emerges by tracing an
affective materiality that interrupts anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums rather than a sovereign stance of negation in relation
to Law, including the law of compulsory reproduction. Thus I interpret queer inhumanism as an account of interspecies entanglement and
reproductive displacement, an inquiry into the unrealized lifeworlds that form the background of the everyday. This
requires thinking
askance the human and thinking death, animality, and vulnerability in an age of many extinctions
extinctions of taxonomized species, to be sure, but also more subtle orchestrations of racial
precarity and quiet obliterations of histories that could have been. In a time of extinctions,
lateral reproduction suggests not some transcendent space of queer negationor worse, an acceptance of Narayans logic of plague
but a problem of rethinking our casual reproduction of forms of ecological violence that kill
quietly, outside the spectacular time of crisis.
Anthropocentrism is first and foremost a form of colonialization and can only

manifest itself through a colonial relationship to the land.
Belcourt, 15 Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta
(Billy-Ray, "Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought,"
Societies 2015, 5(1), 1-11)
In their critique of the ways in which academia (as an infrastructure of whiteness) has settled and appropriated
decolonization, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that internal colonialism requires the biopolitical and
geopolitical management of people, land, flora, and fauna within the domestic borders of the
imperial nation [my emphasis] [5] (pp. 45). However, Tuck and Yang do not position the animal body as the fleshy material(ity) against
and through which settler colonialism is materialized insofar as the oppression of animals and, as I will argue, the (settler-colonial)
politicization of animality progresses the settler state. I therefore contend that we cannot dismantle
speciesism or re-imagine human-animal relations in the North American context without
first or simultaneously dismantling settler colonialism and re-theorizing domesticated
animal bodies as colonial subjects that must be centered in decolonial thought. To re-figure
speciesism and neoliberalized animal subjectivities as vehicles for settler-colonial continuity, I consider the ways in which an animal ethic is
important to decolonial thought by re-framing animality as a politics of space and introducing anthropocentrism to Andrea Smiths theorizations
of the logics of white supremacy. I then reject the colonial politics of animal recognition proposed by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka in
Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights to scrutinize contemporary re-configurations of animality within settler-colonial infrastructures of
being. Here, I suggest that Zoopolis
is representative of a neoliberal trend in CAS wherein the reconstruction of animality is only conceivable through settler-colonial epistemologies. However, to
refrain from subsuming animal ethics within a discourse of anthropocentric struggle, I conclude by considering Indigenous cosmologies to offer a
decolonial ethic that accounts for animal bodies as resurgent bodies. It is thus my contention that animal
domestication,
speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions are only possible because of and
through the historic and ongoing erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of
Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. For that reason, we cannot address animal
oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming settler colonialism and white
supremacy as political mechanisms that require the simultaneous exploitation or destruction of
animal and Indigenous bodies. Indeed, the domestication of animal bodies as colonial and capitalist
subjects always already reifies hegemonic forms of [settler and speciesist] power [6] (p. 84). Here,
animals are always being interpellated by [spatial] recognition to deploy animal bodies as
settler-colonial utilities [7] (p. 453). I propose a politics of space to conceptualize the ways in
which settler moves to knowing and/or constructing animal bodies and/or subjectivities
(re)locates animals within particular geographic and architectural spaces. The insertion of animal
bodies into specific industrialized, colonized, and vacated spaces (such as (factory) farms, urban
apartments, and emptied forests) is therefore the gesture through which animality is made
intelligible and material in the settler imagination. In other words, I argue that colonial animalities are
inseparable from the colonized spaces in which they are subjected and labored.
Failing to center settler colonialism in their resistance to anthropocentrism invests

the alternative in settler futurity
Belcourt, 15 Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta
(Billy-Ray, "Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought,"
Societies 2015, 5(1), 1-11)
Abstract: In this paper, I argue that animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal
interactions in North America are possible because of and through the erasure of Indigenous
bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. That is, we cannot
address animal oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming and subsequently
dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy as political machinations that require the
simultaneous exploitation and/or erasure of animal and Indigenous bodies. I begin by re-framing animality
as a politics of space to suggest that animal bodies are made intelligible in the settler imagination on stolen,
colonized, and re-settled Indigenous lands. Thinking through Andrea Smiths logics of white supremacy, I then re-center
anthropocentrism as a racialized and speciesist site of settler coloniality to re-orient decolonial thought toward animality. To critique the ways in
which Indigenous bodies and epistemologies are at stake in neoliberal re-figurings of animals as settler citizens, I reject the colonial politics of
recognition developed in Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlickas recent monograph, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford
University Press 2011) because it militarizes settler-colonial infrastructures of subjecthood and governmentality. I then propose a decolonized
animal ethic that finds legitimacy in Indigenous cosmologies to argue that decolonization
can only be reified through a

totalizing disruption of those power apparatuses (i.e., settler colonialism, anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and
neoliberal pluralism) that lend the settler state sovereignty, normalcy, and futurity insofar as animality is a settler-colonial
particularity. The decolonization of settler colonial forms needs to be imagined before it is practiced. Lorenzo Veracini [1] (p. 108). 1.
Introduction: Critical Animal Studies and Decolonizing Decolonization It is my contention that Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and
mainstream animal activisms have failed to center an analysis of settler colonialism and
therefore operate within the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state [2] (p. 10). This
theoretical absence is thus a form of colonial violence wherein indigeneity is invisibilized,

wherein the Indigenous body is re-made into a site of modern impossibility to make possible the
re-shaping of animal subjectivities as settler-colonial imaginaries. However, I am not concerned with
decolonizing an academic field imagined through settler modes of knowledge production. Although
some CAS scholars have proposed a framework of total liberation through which all social
justice activism addresses colonial and speciesist oppression, they have framed decolonization as
a responsibility for all who fight for social justice without centering indigeneity or calling for both the
destruction of the settler state and a repatriation of land to Indigenous communities [3] (p. 59). Here, a decolonial theory that is
not accountable to Indigenous politics as a site of colonial rupture erases the referent (the Indigenous
body) through which decolonization was mobilized in the first place. This misrecognition of the Indigenousness of
decolonization not only integrates decolonial thought into a discursive space of sameness (as
merely a social justice project and not one of Indigenous life-makingness), but also colonizes it
by re-centering and therefore re-subjectifying the settler as an acting body that is, as a body
that deploys decolonial politics without unsettling the colonial history through which settlercolonial life-ways are already Indigenous death-ways. For instance, in Defining Critical Animal Studies, Anthony J.
Nocella II et al. argue that CAS must advance a holistic understanding of the commonality of oppressions in favor of decentralizing and
democratizing society at all levels and on a global basis [4] (p. xxvii). This rendering of oppressions
as commensurable,
however, obfuscates the singularity of settler colonialism insofar as its irreducible elements are
the disappearance of indigeneity and the sedimentation of settler life-ways as normative. That is,
decolonization wants something different than [other] forms of justice and is far too often
subsumed into other civil and human-rights based social justice projects [5] (p. 2). Further, Nocella IIs
animal ethic as an ethic that democratizes nonetheless secures settler sovereignty by merely making the settler
state less oppressive (if that is even possible) and is thus antithetical to decolonization.
Centering anthropocentrism upholds racism and makes coalitions imposibble.

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]
Racism = Racial Prejudice + Power The Peoples Institute Given the sheer might of
The Machine, youd think everyone would be talking about how to get power. After
all, it is power that keeps animals oppressed. But is power just a numbers game? When a
million people demonstrated for peace in New York in February 2003 I was struck by
two things: how white the crowd was, and how the next day everyone was gone and the
war in Iraq proceeded. David Billings, a white anti-racist trainer with The Peoples
Institute and historian of the grassroots movement says, Nowadays we know how to
mobilize, but not how to organize. 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. 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 hide the long history of African,
Indigenous, and multiracial rebellion. 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, especially boys who would become tomorrows leaders. Is
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. 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. The Machine also understands that race is about power,
and its generals also read Sun Tzu. Much the way the suffering of animals is
invisibilized, so too is the suffering of peoples of color and Indigenous peoples . Beneath
the radar of mainstream media, these groups more often get the stick instead of the carrot.
David Hilliard, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, recounted in his April
04 interview with Satya, some 40 are still in prison, 28 of us were murdered. They
were killed because they were black and wanted Power to the People, not because they
were vegetarian. In Colombia, almost 4,000 labor organizers have been murdered in the
last 15 years. In one state in India, 4,000 farmers committed suicide between 1999-2004
in desperation over free trade and privatization policies. This is a far cry from most
large AR organizations, which model themselves after corporations and in fact are
characterized by the same institutional racism : no matter how colorful their
brochures, the vast majority of positions of power are held by white people , albeit nice
ones who like animals. According to one activist, outreach to communities of color is
approached like a marketing challenge, not as a desire to share power. A corporation is a
legal person, but without a mind. As such, no one is accountable for de facto segregation
unless someone is stupid enough to use the n word. The Peoples Institute, in its
Undoing Racism workshops, asks social workers and other participants Do you make
money off the poor? One by one, people nod their heads. Is it possible that AR workers
from the CEOs of large nonprofits who may make a third of a million dollars, to
grassroots grunts who make minimum wageare making money off of animals? The
Peoples Institute states: Any organization that is not intentionally anti-racist inevitably
benefits white people.
Apoc:
The Apocalyptic rhetoric of the 1AC ignores that black bodies are constantly living
in apocalypse. To care about the future is only to care about the deaths of white, first
world citizens because every other body is already the object of violence. Their
disembodied futurism makes violence spectacular causing desensitization, which
turns their impacts since structural impacts never register in their extinction first
utilitarian calculations
AbdelRahim 2008 (Layla, Ph.D. from the Universit de Montral, Department of Comparative
Literature, Beyond the Symbolic and towards the Collapse: Intro to John Zerzans conferences
in Montreal, May 2008, http://layla.miltsov.org/introduction-to-z/ || NDW)
For, it is not Zerzan who has invented the Machine with its terminology and the technological solution that made the atomic bomb possible as
THE option, leaving no possibility for life outside of the Atomic way of life under the constant threat of obliteration (and, actual death; let us
not forget Baghdad, Serbia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki). And it is not Zerzan who has welcomed the extermination of millions of people around the
world under the aegis of the defence of the Civilised way of life (slavery, colonialism, the war of terror on terror, etc.). Those who are
worried about the collapse of their system, close their eyes on, and hence participate in, the continuing
extinction of human and, what Zerzan calls, plant and animal communities around the world whose collapse this civilisation has impelled.
Perhaps, the speakers, still fail to perceive the millions of already dead and still dying as people or as complex entities of a complex system that
exists for its own right and not for the sake of being domesticated (appropriated and exploited) by some humans. Instead, in fearing the
onslaught of their
own collapse, these people see the other victims of civilisation as resources, the
necessary collateral damage needed to regulate the smooth flow of food to the fridges, restaurants and cafs of the speakers what
Malthus called the disasters necessary to regulate their (the brown peoples) overpopulation and not our (civilised) voracious appetites.
Being a white male, Zerzan has renounced the privileges of the white male system and his biography is a witness to that fact. While, of course,
there is a difference between someone renouncing having had a choice in the first place and someone not having a chance to renounce because
the System never extended an invitation to the Bacchanalia of Civilisation, it is still an excellent example for those in the position of privilege to
follow. Which, of course, hardly ever the
privileged do, since they greatly fear their own demise even though for
others this collapse has long occured. But then, Zerzan warns us that the symbolic alienates people from the
suffering of others and replaces our ability for empathy and experience with concentration on personal
salvation. In its imposition of a virtual reality, Civilisation estranges us from our own pain and, ultimately, by
killing the Other the civilised kill the Self. The other side of the question, though, is that many of those who do not even
have a chance at privilege, gobble up the whole value system and ensure that by their simple desire to one day get there (there is of course the
ultimate abstraction) run the system to its logical end: the Total Collapse, the Apocalypse that elitist knowledge and desire that will blow up the
rest of the world. Some of the so-called anarchists at the fair seem to fall in this category: they do not associate themselves with the capitalist
elites, they identify themselves as anarchists and yet scream in fear that it is Zerzan and not those who order and finance Knowledge and
technologies who is going to take away their cosy computers, tasty bakeries, black uniforms, contraceptives and the medical establishment that
makes their abortions and sex change operations, and the like. In other words, they are deaf to the fact that it is this Knowledge with its implicit
and inherent logic that has killed off thousands of varieties of animal, plant, and human cultures around the world. When
they scream
that the collapse will kill millions of people, they obviously exclude all the Africans, Asians, Aborigines who
have already been killed and continue to perish around the world. This logic, obviously, excludes these people from the
category itself of people and we find ourselves facing the elitist eugenicist rhetoric, once again.
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
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent)
Scandal, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, 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 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 overaccumulation 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.
China:
The China threat is not rooted in POLICY, but in an ideology of anti-blackness that
began with the Middle Passage
Young book worm in 13 (Tag Archives: Anti-Blackness Bodies, Silence, and Multiracialism:
Challenges of Solidarity Between POC, https://loudmouthedbookworm.wordpress.com/tag/antiblackness/)
There is a shared historical context in that exploitation is exploitation, oppression is oppression, etc is etc, and everything feeds back into and upholds the same multivaried and mulitifaceted structure of disparate, yet intersecting and inextricable, systems of oppression that together make up
the structure White Supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, ie kyriarchy. But its not the same. Its just not. Sexton, drawing on the words of another scholar, puts it best in his lecture. To paraphrase, it is a very different thing to be coming from a slave population than an immigrant population,
the historical and

ongoing manifestations of anti-Blackness in this country from the dehumanizing traumas and
racial-sexual terror of the Middle Passage
no matter how lowly such immigrants are regarded. I dont like getting into Oppression Olympics, mainly because I think playing the game of who had/has it worse is unproductive in most instances. But the fact remains:
,
, to their reiteration, revisitation and reconstruction under chattel slavery, sharecropping, white neighborhood organizations, Jim Crow, redlining, the Drug War, and the
PIC is incomparable to what has been endured by any other marginalized racial group in this country. The exceptionalism of anti-Blackness does not arise from it being a worse form of oppression than others Rather, it is anti-Blackness foundational role in the construction of White
Supremacy that makes it indispensable to that system. Scott Nakagawa put it best, anti-black racism is the fulcrum of white supremacy. That is to say, White Supremacy is particularly reliant on anti-Blackness because of the historical intimacy the two share in their concurrent formation.
The racialization of persons of

Pacific descent, South Asian descent
have their roots in this primary
master and slave The birth of African
slavery was also Europes first foray into colonialism.
Middle Eastern descent and of Muslim faith, East Asian/
Hispanic/Latino origin
, South Pacific descent, and
, intimate racialization of conqueror and conquered,
Later, it was slavery, an institution reliant on captivity, commodification, debasement, and racial-sexual terror to maintain a
greater system of forced labor, genocidal expansion, and economic extraction, that provided the capital and the labor necessary to the preservation and projection of an intercontinental empire conceived of and realized in the name of White Supremacy. An empire that has persisted to this day,
in spite of great ruptures. Blackness has a unique relationship to Whiteness. As Sexton mentions, paraphrasing once more, it is possible to be anti-Black and not anti-X, but it is not possible to be anti-X and not anti-Black. This fact is present in everyones life. For example, I am a person of
color. However, I can still participate in anti-Blackness. More than that, I may do so and benefit from it, whether in housing, employment, education, or a couple other things. Even though Ill never have White Privilege, I can still take a few chips home if I play my cards right. Latasha Harlin,
15, was shot dead in LA by Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, on March 16, 1991. Soon Ja Du, 51, was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and sentenced to five years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine. Well, until
war in the Asia-Pacific region. I am sure it will be fought for glorious reasons.
Americas next
Even so, hypothetically, if I were a good boy and sat
very still for the whole thing, I might be ok. But I dont plan on it. This is where the 0.1% comes in. Non-Black people of color need to be conscious of the capacity to participate in anti-Blackness and how all non-Black bodies are positioned and permitted to benefit from participation in antiBlackness. However, real solidarity cannot be created unilaterally, and the fact remains that Black people in this country have historically benefitted from and participated in anti-Asianness, anti-Arabness, Orientalism, Islamophobia and nativism in a manner similar to how Asian (in the most
The project of empire began with the enslavement of

Africans and the conquest of the Americas, and reached its zenith with the colonization of Asia
From the beginning, Asia was the goal of the imperial project
1898,
US military power has established, defended, and maintained global hegemony through
racialized military intervention in China
these
conflicts are
about American interests, morals, and way of life
encompassing, continental sense of the word) people have benefitted from and participated in anti-Blackness.
. Columbus sailed west seeking India to increase his patrons profits from and control over the spice trade.
The British, French, and Dutch Empires reached the height of their power with the conquest and plundering of Asia. America, too, first globally projected its power with the Spanish-American War, a conflict with fronts in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Since
, Japan, Laos, Samoa, Indonesia, Iran, Micronesia, the Sandwich Islands, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Turkey,
Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Pakistan. Every time, these places were/are deemed strategically important enough for American lives to be sacrificed, but little to no information is ever recorded or given with any regularity on the number of local casualties. That is because
not about locals, they are
Conflicts:
Resolving Conflicts in civil society creates a permanent state of exception against
the black body. Middle Ground is complicit.
Wilderson 10 (Frank;UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms; p6-7}AvP
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 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 mid-196os 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 than 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. The difficulty of writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Black, and White socially engaged feature films as
aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject positions of the "Savage" and the Slave, is that today's intellectual
protocols are not informed by Fanon's insistence that "ontology-once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside-does not permit us
to understand the being of the black man:'6 In sharp contrast to the late 1960s and early 1970s, we now live in a political, academic, and
cinematic milieu which stresses "diversity;' "unity;' "civic participation;' "hybridity;' "access;' and "contribution:' The radical fringe of political
discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between the protester and the police has
narrowed considerably. The effect of this on the
academy is that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of

the three domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around " political unity;'
"social attitudes;' "civic participation;' and "diversity ;') and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities'
postmodern regimes of "diversity;' "hybridity;' and "relative [rather than "master"] narratives"). Since the 1980s, intellectual
protocols aligned with structural positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly
fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations-such as man/woman,
worker/boss. Instead, the
academy's ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and "unique"

experiences of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions. This would be
fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the
upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the
1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the
United States and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs exacerbates-or, more precisely, mystifies and veils-the
ontological death of the Slave and the "Savage" because (as in the 1950s) the cinematic, political, and
intellectual discourse of the current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the
irreconcilable demands of Indigenism and Blackness-academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary
critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how left-leaning scholars help civil society
recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians and
Blacks. The aim of this book is to embark on a paradigmatic analysis of how dispossession is imagined at the intersection of (a) the most
unflinching meditations (metacommentaries) on political economy and libidinal economy, (e.g., Marxism, as in the work of Antonio Negri, and
psychoanalysis, as in the work of Kaja Silverman), (b) the discourse of political common sense, and (c) the narrative and formal strategies of
socially or politically engaged films. In other words, a paradigmatic analysis asks, What are the constituent elements of and the assumptive logic
regarding, dispossession which underwrite theoretical claims about political and libidinal economy; and how are those elements and assumptions
manifest in both political common sense and in political cinema?
Coalitions:
Their coalitional politics are rooted in the logic of productivity, which is structurally
inaccessible to the Black bodythis legitimizes the structure of antiblackness
Wilderson 2003
[2003, Professor of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine, 2003 (Frank, A. B. Dartmouth College (Government/Philosophy); MFA Columbia University
(Fiction Writing); Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley (Rhetoric/Film Studies), The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, Social Justice, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p18-27]
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 capitals primal desire than is
ond, 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 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 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 (Gramscis new hegemony, Lenins 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 texts 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 capitals over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th
and 21st 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 co alition politics come to grips with Americas
structuring rationality what it calls capitalism, or political economy but not with its
structuring irrationality, the anti-production of late capital, and the hyper-discursive 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 antiBlackness.
exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Sec
Civil societys inevitably antagonistic relationship to the Black turns the

affirmatives call for freedomthe only alternative is to inject radical incoherence
into the system
Wilderson 2003 [2003, Professor of African American Studies at University of California,
Irvine, 2003 (Frank, A. B. Dartmouth College (Government/Philosophy); MFA Columbia

University (Fiction Writing); Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley (Rhetoric/Film Studies),
The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, Social Justice, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p18-27]
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 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, 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 revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. 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 societys
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 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."
One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if,
indeed, ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the
desire that underwrites ones politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word
"prison" being linked to the word "abolition+n"? What are this movements 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 socalled radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of
blacknessand 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 foy 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 societywith 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 y 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-inwaiting) 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
Disability Justice:
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 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 of the
Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses. It is highly conceivable that 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, the questions of Humanism were elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the Africanquachattel (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

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 so-called 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,
Humans) seized
conflict and resolution, between the disparate members of the human race, east and west. 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 expect 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 nonChristians. 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 production of that walking destruction
which became known as the Black. Put another way, 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 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 Americas
because 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, liberties of Englishmendepended on African slavery. (Emphasis mine 1423) 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 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. 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 elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and communicable,
political project out of the necessity of freedom as an absolute?
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.
Disease:
The western fight against disease is a form of anti-blackness not only does it allow
the white to invade countries in a form of colonialism but also establishes a white
savior complex- Hudson and Pierre14
{James Hudson and Jemima Pierre are both doctors who specialize in anti-racism writing, 9/24/14, Ebola,
Cholera: The Epidemiology of Anti-Blackness and the White Savior Industrial Complex- Black Lives Dont
Matter, http://www.globalresearch.ca/ebola-cholera-the-epidemiology-of-anti-blackness-and-the-white-saviorindustrial-complex-black-lives-dont-matter/5403954}AvP
The ravages of Ebola

and cholera
and the worlds response to both remind us
that the scourge of anti-Blackness is deadly, and global. The response
suggests that
Black(s) are expendable, unprotected from the most abject and degrading forms of
suffering, immaterial waste
U N brought
cholera to Haiti in 2010. The bacteria was present in fecal matter of Nepalese soldiers
who were stationed in the country as part of MINUSTAH, the U N force that has
militarily occupied the republic since 2004
cholera has killed close to 9,000 and sickened more than 700,000 Haitians,
cholera
reinforce the humiliation and indignity suffered at the hands of
foreigners. So too does the international response
UN has
refused to accept responsibility for the epidemic and its consequences. Their initial actions
of literally shitting on Haiti
by callously dumping toxic matter into water that served as
a source for drinking, bathing, and irrigation for thousands of Haitians, was shrugged off.
They responded to Haitian requests for aid
with a cruel impunity. When Haitians
and international allies tried to sue the UN for its actions in an attempt to get redress, UN
Secretary general
asserted the organizations immunity and Haitis lack of
sovereignty by asserting that the charges against it were, in legal parlance, nonreceivable and hence, inactionable. In essence, the assertion of non-receivable becomes a
curt denial of Haitian humanity. Similar circumstances emerged, in West Africa, were
Ebola has stricken
in West Africa
of
in Haiti
savage,
to the two epidemics
people
. And they raise the question: how do we begin to build a movement claiming Black lives matter when, clearly, they do not? The
the fall of
cholera
nited
ations
the
nited
ations
. When the soldiers shit was pumped from the MINUSTAH camp into the rivers of the Artibonite Valley in central Haiti, the bacteria quickly spread
unchecked. To date,
people,
. For
s degrading symptoms uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea
to the epidemic. Despite reams of scientific evidence proving the source of the bacteria, the
and Haitians
have also
or compensation
their
, Ban-Ki Moon
coldly
have
primarily Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Like in Haiti, the symptoms associated with Ebola mark it as especially degrading, the disease particularly dirty. A virus of no known origin that is spread through contact with bodily
fluids, Ebola shares with cholera certain symptoms, such as vomiting and diarrhea. Though while the victims of cholera die from organ failure and acute dehydration, those of Ebola often die from hemorrhaging. But beyond the symptoms, the response to cholera in Haiti and Ebola in West
in West Africa the indifference to Black suffering, and desire to preserve

White life, has been startlingly blatant many in America found out about the Ebola
outbreak when news that two white missionaries were given an experimental drug and
flown out of Liberia to the U.S.
for further treatment. A third white U.S.
citizen was flown to Nebraska for treatment.
by the time news of the
White flight reached the shores of the Americas, Ebola had already infected more than
1660 Liberians, killing scores.
Black lives are demeaned and deemed disposable. As Africans
,
three white missionaries were given the experimental drug
Africa has been strikingly similar though, perhaps,
the
. Indeed,
the
North
(at a cost of $2 million for each evacuation and treatment)
But warnings of an epidemic had been circulating since late 2013 and
As of September 18th, there have been 5,300 infected with Ebola and 2,630 deaths, with most of the cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Here, again, we see the pattern where African,
, including African doctors and aid workers were quickly dying from the disease
itself under much speculation and flown to safety. By mid-September, when the fourth African
doctor, Dr. Olivet Buck, head of the Lumley Health Center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, died of the disease, it was revealed that the World Health Organization refused to send her to Germany for treatment. At the same time, two Dutch doctors stricken with Ebola were flown home to Europe. It
has also emerged that the first African doctor to die of the virus, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, the chief Sierra Leonean physician treating Ebola, was also denied the chance by Doctors Without Borders to receive the experimental drug, ZMAP, given to the two white missionaries. To add insult to
African
lives dont matter. The western, white, response to the cholera and Ebola epidemics
ultimately teaches us that global white supremacy thrives on Black suffering, denigration,
and death. Because, next to the stories of Black disease
and linked to uncivilized and
untamed Black cultural practices as well as the way white media revels in publishing
pictures of dead Blacks we get the construction of the brave and heroic white saviors
who risk their lives for the Blacks and non-whites: the white savior industrial complex at
its best. Of course no mention of the decidedly non-heroic relationship of the white
injury, the U.S. government first announced that a $22-million, 25-bed Ebola hospital was intended for foreign (read: mainly white) healthcare workers. While outrage forced the U.S. to include African health workers in its plans, it was and has been clear that
as endemic
, there is
western world to countries like Haiti and West Africa

white savior industrial
complex supports brutal policies[where] the banality of evil transmutes into the banality
of sentimentality: imperialism, neocolonialism, military occupation.
the powerful world,
ignore the suffering of
poor, black people
It is about the reality that in a universal context of anti-Blackness, Black lives
dont matter anywhere.
those of
. As Teju Cole demonstrates, the
In a recent interview, Dr. Joia Mukherjee, of Partners in Health,
explained the racism behind the wests Ebola response by saying, I think its easy for the world
who are largely non-African, non-people of color to
. But we have to see this as more than ignoring the Black suffering poor; it is about white supremacys desire for Black death and Black suffering. It is about coming to terms with the fact that there is something systematic and
sinister about Black killing globally.
Economic:
The economic liberalization on which the American nation-state has preserved its
homogeneity is utilized to whitewash foreign cultures in order to increase
representative government, blurring lines of law and disorder.
Comaroff and Comaroff 7 (John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American
Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at at Harvard, and Jean
Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology Law and
Disorder in the Postcolony pgs. 1-5)//kbuck
Notes from the Front Crime vs. . . . Whore the criminals, the gangs or the government? Did the Capital just happen to have the power to punish
men? MonoPolice manipulate majoraties to run with them So whats the police force but a resource to reinforce the plans of the dominant? Im
haunted by questions, spending time behind bars Statistics on TV, that concede were sadistic, deceive me cause murder and thievery thrives on
all sides of the lines that divide class. I take pepper-spray with a pinch assault and battery and Im charged to step n say: yo honour, go bother
the ofce of your bosses where the crime starts. And I ask, while cleaning dirty white collars for a living, why law suites the raw brutes in board
rooms that horde loot? They set the precedent then send the president to assure you, his lady, Justice, is blind. But shes got contacts that say too!
The colonists, the capitalists and wordy bright scholars make a killing. marlon burgess, hip-hop verses, Cape Town, 15 September 2004 Among
all the things that have been said about the spread of democracy since the end of the Cold Warand a great deal has been said about it, in every
conceivable voiceone thing stands out. It is the claim that democratization has been accompanied, almost everywhere, by a sharp rise in crime
and violence (see, e.g., Karstedt, forthcoming; Caldeira 2000: 1): that the latter-day coming of more or less elected, more or less representative
political regimesfounded, more or less, on the
rule of lawhas, ironically, brought with it a rising tide of

lawlessness. Or, put another way, that political liberation in postcolonial, posttotalitarian worlds, and the 1 1
economic liberalization on which it has oated, have both implied, as their dark underside, an ipso facto
deregulation of monopolies over the means of legitimate force, of moral orders, of the protection
of persons and property. And an unraveling of the fabric of law and order. This may not be all that easy
to demonstrate empirically; it depends in large part on how democracy and criminality, past and present, are measured.1 But, as popular
perception and party platforms across the planet focus ever more on escalating crime, and on the problem of dis/order, the co-incidence
certainly seems to be beyond coincidence. It has long been argued that social disorder, expressed in elevated rates of criminality, is in the nature
of transition itself, that it inevitably follows epochal changes in the order of things. Our times, like many before, are commonly described in the
language of historical disjuncture, whether by appeal to retrospection and renaissance (neoliberalism, neomedievalism), to ironic aftereffect (the
postmodern, posthuman, post-Fordist, f-utilitarian),2 or to the portentous dawning of New Eras (of Empire, Exception). Little
wonder,
then, that the ruptures of the ongoing present, real or imagined, are often associated, in collective
consciousness as well as in social theory, with transgression, liminality, and lawlessness. As Hannah
Arendt reminds us, Marx long ago saw a generic connection between transformation and violence, which, he insisted, is the midwife of every
old society pregnant with a new one; even more, of all change in history and politics.3 Foreshadowings here of Fanon (1968) and other
theorists of decolonization. To be sure, modern history has seen some very bloody transitions to populist
rule. And it has born

witness to regimes that, under the alibi of liberal democracy, have sanctied and sustained
criminally brutal modes of domination, some of them highly rationalized, highly technicized,
highly sanitized. Indeed, the relative ease with which autocracies have made the transition to
constitutional democracy points toward the possibility that theyautocracy and liberal democracy, that is
share more mechanisms of governance than has conventionally been recognized, not least their
grounding in a rule of law, an Iron Cage of Legality itself predicated, more or less visibly, on
sovereign violence (cf. Agamben 1998: 10; Foucault 1978). Whether or not there is a necessary relationship between the lethal and the
legal, as Walter Benjamin (1978) and his intellectual progeny would have it,4 their historical afnity seems beyond dispute. The coincidence of
democratization and criminal violence has been most visible in, and most volubly remarked of, postcolonies: that is, nation-states, including those
of the former USSR, once governed by, for, 2 John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff and from an elsewhere; nation-states
in which
representative government and the rule of law, in their conventional Euro-modernist sense, were
previously underdeveloped; nation-states in which the normalization of organized crime and
brutal banditry, themselves the product of a complex play of forces (see below), has been a central motif of the
chapter in their history that began, at n de sicle, with the end of the Cold War and the triumphal spread of neoliberal capitalism. With a new
Age of Empire, the Age of US and Them.5 This age has its mythic fons et origo in 1989, the year that history was supposed to end (Fukuyama
1992) with the political birth of a Brave Neo World.6 The neo here refers to a reanimationor, more precisely, to the fetishizing anewof old
panaceas from the history of liberalism: two in particular. One dates back to the second half of the eighteenth century, to a time when political
authority, social order, citizenship, and economy were also urgently in question (see, e.g., Becker 1994). It is the idea, often associated with Adam
Ferguson (1995), that a measure of control over arbitrary governmental power, especially over the power of autocratic potentates, ought to be
vested in, and exercised by, a citizenry.7 This idea has come to be subsumed, loosely, in the term civil society which, in its neo guise, stands for
many things, among them: (1)society against the state, itself a highly ambiguous aphorism; (2) the market, often glossed as the private
sector, utopically envisaged as a technically efcient mechanism for producing the common good; and (3) the community, a vague abstraction
posited, somewhat mystically, as an appropriate site for, and agent of, collective actionand, more cynically, as the end point of the devolution of
the costs and responsibilities of governance (J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 1999).8 But above all, since the late 1980s, civil
society
has connoted a teleological reversal: a move from increasingly rationalized, increasingly
bureaucratized, increasingly elaborated regimes of rule toward ever more outsourced, dispersed,
deinstitutionalized, constitutionally ordained governancefrom political evolution, classically conceived, to political
devolution. In theory, at least. The other panacea is the ballot box: an appeal to the classic apparatus of mass participatory democracy. In its
postcolonial neo-life, however, this has often proven, in practice, to involve a very thin distillation of the concept: a minimalist, procedural
version that, notwithstanding the claims made for it by some political scientists (see, e.g., Przeworski et al. 2000; and, for a critique, Wedeen 2004
and forthcoming), equates freedom with the occasional exercise of choice among competing, often indistinguishable alternatives. Which, as we
have said elsewhere (J. L. ComaLaw and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction 3 roff and J. Comaroff 1997), renders the franchise to homo
politicus what shopping has long been to homo economicus:a beatied, cosmic fusion of free will, human satisfaction, and ethical righteousness.
This is historically apt: it is a version of democracy that shadows closely the neoliberal apotheosis of the market, the displacement of homo faber
by the consumercitizen, and the reduction of collective action to the pursuit of enlightened interest. It is also the
version of
representative governmenta small idea, Malcolm Bradbury (1992: 276) once wrote in a postmodern ction, which
promises hope, and gives you Fried Chickenthat is currently being thrust upon the world at
large. Often it is imposed as a condition of nancial aid, foreign investment, and moral salvation
by an unadornedly coercive Western consensus led by the United States (see, e.g., Young 1993: 299300)9
and abetted by such instruments of the new global economy as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Stiglitz 2002). Indeed,
this is the translucent veil behind which has closed the iron st of structural adjustment, with its
demands on postcolonies to cleave to market principles and to deregulate in ways that privilege
the private sector over the state. It hardly bears repeating any longer that these demands have had unintended, highly destabilizing
effects on the fragile political and economic arrangementson the ecologies of patronage, redistribution, and survivalthat developed in many
nation-states across the global south with the end of the high age of colonialism. Of which more in due course. As this implies, civil society and
the ballot box, as they have come popularly to be understood at the dawn of the twenty-rst century, are not just panaceas for the contemporary
predicament of postcolonies. More significantly, they have taken on the substantive forms of the Brave Neo World of which they are part. This, in
turn, raises an obvious, and obviously loaded, question: To the degree that there has been an epidemic of criminal violence in these polities in
recent timesto
the degree, also, that they have seen the emergence of criminal phantom-states in
their midst (Derrida 1994: 83) or even the criminalization of the state tout court (Bayart, Ellis,
and Hibou 1999; see below)does it really have anything at all to do with democratization? Or,
pace the commonplace with which we began, does electoral democracy, itself long an object of critique outside the West (see, e.g., Mamdani
1990, 1992; Makinda 1996; Karlstrom 1996),10 veil the causes and determinations of rising lawlessness, just as
the material
realities of the Brave Neo World disappear behind the ballot box? The answers are notas straightforward as
they may seem. Why not? Because rising criminality in postcolonies is not simply a reex, antisocial response to poverty or joblessness, scarcity,
or other effects of structural ad4 John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff justment, important though these things are. Neither is it merely the
working of unchecked power, clothed in the trappings of stateor of bandit quasi states11serving itself by monopolizing the means of
extracting value and doling out death (cf. Bataille 1991; Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 1314). Nor even is it the consequence of normative
slippage occasioned by the radical transitions of the recent past. It is part of a much more troubled dialectic: a
dialectic of law and

dis/order, framed by neoliberal mechanisms of deregulation and new modes of mediating human
transactions at once politico-economic and cultural, moral, and mortal. Under such conditions
and this is our key pointcriminal violence does not so much repudiate the rule of law or the licit
operations of the market as appropriate their formsand recommission their substance. Its
perpetrators create parallel modes of production and proteering, sometimes even of governance
and taxation, thereby establishing simulacra of social order. In so doing, they regure the pas de deux in which
norm and transgression, regulation and exception, redene each other both within and beyond national polities. In the process, the means
and ends of the liberal democratic state are refracted, deected, and dispersed into the murkier
reaches of the private sector, sometimes in ways unimagined by even the most enterprising of
capitalists, sometimes without appearing to be doing very much at all to disturb the established
order of things. Just as, according to Charles Tilly (1985: 17071), many modern governments operate in
essentially the same ways as racketeersespecially in the provision of protectionso, in
many postcolonies, violent crime increasingly counterfeits government, not least in providing
fee-for-service security, and social order (J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff, forthcoming: chap. 1). With market
fundamentalism has come a gradual erasure of received lines between the informal and the
illegal, regulation and irregularity, order and organized lawlessness.
Economic integration perpetuates antiblackness we must reject the urge to

conform to the system. Economic growth theory presumes markets that treat
everyone equally masks and extends the historical legacy of white supremacy
Gibson and Mngxitama 2008 (Andile, Black consciousness thinker and organizer, Nigel C,
Black activist and scholar, Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, Palgrave
Macmillon 2008, http://wfeet.za.net/biko_lives_contesting_the.pdf#page=106) Kguy
Biko advocated the rejection of such a scheme: We believe that we have to reject their economic system, their political system, and values that
govern human relationships . . . We are not really fighting against the government; we
are fighting the entire system.19 Biko had

economic model that integrates blacks into the very structures of colonialism and apartheid
would create an unhealthy and self-defeating competition amongst blacks: It is an integration in
which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to
white values. It is an integration in which the black man will have to prove himself in terms of these values before meriting acceptance and
foreseen that an
ultimate assimilation, and in which the poor will grow poorer and rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black.20 The second
contestation of Bikos memory comes from the state linked political and bureaucratic classes. Their ascendance into the higher echelons of the
postapartheid bureaucracy has in practice also mobilized a version of Black Consciousness which on the face of it privileges blackness. The
discourse of transformation, representivity and reflecting the demographics of society are the
concepts employed in the process. However, the actual practice of power, as in the formal political system and its symbols, still employs
colonial and apartheid forms. As a bureaucracy, this confronts the majority of blacks as a cold, arrogant,
often violent and indifferent system. How could it be different, when democracy did not mean the establishment of new
systems of relations? The bureaucratic class at the higher levels shares a lot with the black business class. Often senior bureaucrats have left the
administration for business after having laid out lucrative business possibilities from state institutions, often through privatization efforts. It must
also be said that in the battle for the heart of the postapartheid bureaucracy, the black aspirant bureaucrat has not shied away from recalling the
painful past of black exclusion as leverage in the battle against white position holders. But once the position is held, the behavior, vis--vis the
black excluded, seldom changes. In Bikos conception of liberation, integration
into the white value system stands
opposed to genuine black liberation. The model of a black project promoted by the black business and political classes is
integration, and in practice the experience of postapartheid has been the realization of the integration model that, as Biko had predicted, . . .
could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture. This integrated picture chimes well with the ethic of
reconciliation without justice that is associated with the TRC and the postapartheid version of nonracialism. The Biko that these two main
postapartheid black classes have appropriated is a Biko who is mute in the face of continued black suffering, exclusion, and humiliation. The
business and political classes have nothing to say to the multitudes who live in the shacks and the Reconstruction and Development Programme
(RDP) houses that have been described as dog kennels; who continue to suffer unacceptable infant mortality rates; whose hospitals are less than
places of abandonment and death; who continue to die from AIDS. In a sense, Bikos thought has been reduced to slogans on T-shirts weaned of
all radical content as a philosophy of black liberation, and images of Biko have come to adorn glossy magazines and fashion houses. As Prishani
Naidoo and Ahmed Veriava put it in this volume, you might find Bikos face staring at you from a T-shirt selling for over R300. But they warn us
not to be confused by corporate Black Consciousness and the importance of Black pride. Biko is big in Rosebank. So big that one cant help
but be reminded of Walter Benjamins warning: not even the dead will be safer if the enemy wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be
victorious.
Economics is infiltrated with racist politics. A rising tide doesnt raise all ships
economic 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, 2002]
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 ca tegories 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 of wage laboring is formed. Capitalist freedom came to exist in contrast to
serfdom and slavery. 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. 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 creation of labor markets would, necessarily, be very different in an environment where direct
producers view themselves as already free. There are countless stories of the difficulties of creating labor markets in African colonies, for
instance. 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. 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 to creating a wage
laboring consciousness, one in which the individual can sell her labor power like so many bushels of tomatoes. 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.
Enviorment:
Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-authoritarianism and mass violence
against those deemed environmental threats also causes political apathy which
turns case
Buell 3 (Frederick Buell, cultural critic on the environmental crisis and a
Professor of English at Queens College and the author of five books; From
Apocalypse To Way of Life, pg. 185-186)
Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of
liabilities. First, it seems to have become a political liability almost as
much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its
predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to
refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called
grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with
crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a total solution to
the problems involved a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the
limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of
the Third Reichs infamous final solution.55 A total crisis of society
environmental crisis at its gravestthreatens to translate despair into
inhumanist authoritarianism ; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional
authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expertled solutions are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing
them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel,
since it makes no difference at all what any

individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the
ironically and/or passively, that
full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply
ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly
the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is
tempted to turn ones back on the environment. This means,
preeminently, turning ones back on natureon traditions of nature feeling, traditions
simple proposition:
of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of
and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is

thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and
live in postnaturea conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end
of the millenium. Explorations of how deeply nature has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable
to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to
nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them. But what
ecological science),
quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of
these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one specific notion of
environmental crisiswith 1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism. Excessive
concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has significantly changed since the
1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if one does
not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place.
The
apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with

running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions
that promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and
with (often, though not always) the need for immediate total solution. Thus
doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave
temptation; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of
nature, temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to
clearly terminal nature.
Fluidity:
Fluidity of switching in an out of the category of the human is something the black
lacks and the analogization of women as being outside the category of human
actively obscures the original violence of slavery
Broeck 2008 [Sabine, Acting President of the Collegium for African American Research at the
University of Bremen, Germany, Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity: Re-reading
Gender Studies Epistemology Through Black Feminist Critique,]
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
enslaved Africanorigin female beings never qualified as women (because of 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
beings were not subjected to particular politics and practices - most importantly - rape, and the theft of motherhood. However, as Spillers has argued, and as Hartman's texts illuminate,
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
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
white 18th century women to full human subjectivity, as opposed to thingness.
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. (White) Gender Studies may decide to
reflect self-critically on its own embeddedness in the Enlightenment proposal of human freedom which strategically split a certain group of humans, namely enslaved African-origin people, from the constitutive freedom to possess
themselves and as such, from any access to subjectivity, which entailed, as Hortense Spillers above all has argued, a splitting of African-origin women from gender. If, thus, the knowledge of the slave trade and slavery will become the
site of a re-reading of Enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity, a revised theoretical, and material approach to an epistemology of emancipation like Gender Studies will be possible. Gender Studies, too, lives "in the time of
It is the economic, cultural and epistemic regime of human

commodification, that transgressive nexus of violence, desire and property which first formed the horizon of the Euro-American
modernity that US and European intellectuals, including Gender Studies, have known and claimed. The Enlightenment's
proposal of human subjectivity and rights which was in fact inscribed into the world the slave trade and slavery
had made (Blackburn), created a vertical structure of access claims to self-representation and social
participation from which African-origin people, as hereditary commodities, were a priori abjected. It is on the
basis of that abjection, that the category of woman, of gender as a framework to negotiate the
social, cultural and economic position of white European women was created. To accept that the very constitution of gender
slavery," in the "future created by it" (Hartman 2007, 133).
as a term in European early modernity was tied to a social, cultural and political system which constitutively pre-figured "wasted lives," and an extreme precariousness of what constitutes human existence, throws contemporary
notions of gendered subjectivity into stark relief. Hartman's work, therefore, may be read as just as axiomatic as Bauman's, Butler's or Agamben's in measuring postmodern global challenges to critical theory. Elaine Scary's, Susan
Sontag's interventions on pain and voyeurism, and Spillers' or Wood's considerations, more specifically, on the sexualized campaigns of Anglo-American abolition, have compounded the challenge for an epistemology of slavery as a
To play an active role in the project of

decolonizing (post)modern critical theory, gender studies need to acknowledge and reckon with
black de-colonial feminist interventions beyond add-on approaches. Those interventions will
enable an epistemic turn away from the solipsistic quasi universal presentism of much of
contemporary theory, and make it answerable to its own indebtedness to the history of early
modern Europe, and the New World. Hartman's and Spiller's texts, as well as Morrison's writing become something like deconstructive guides: we are being asked to look, and listen
modern episteme not to recycle abolitionist titillation - the risk to become part of a second order abolitionist discourse must, however, be run.
with black women's perspectives - but at the same time the texts fold back on themselves, and thus on our reading; they disrupt a smooth appropriation of suffering, they derail us from a swift hate for the Thistlewoods (Mother, 61).
Those texts under scrutiny here do enact a kind of self-conscious parasitism, forcing readers into complicity - but they refuse to do it innocently, disrupting a renewed take on slavery by way of abolitionist benevolence. They teach
I, too, live in
readers that the boundaries of the archive cannot be trespassed at will, and without consequence; and they also teach us to respect what Hartman calls, with Fred Moten, "black noise" (2008, 12). "
the time of slavery" - is a statement not yet widely enough echoed; gender theory needs to
expose itself to the demands of modern history. At a time of rampant takeover by globalized forces of neo-liberalism, for (white) gender studies theory the challenge is
to achieve agony instead of complicity with the corporate projects and, particularly in Europe, with the recent onset of a rampant eulogizing of Europe as the mythical ground of universal freedom. This urgency of the modern past as
postmodern present may be shored up against all too flippant deployments of Agamben's, Bauman's or Butler's respective terms of "precarious lives" - terms which need to be reloaded with their entire modern history. (White)
critical gender theory, as much as it has been a modern critical agent in the negotiation of patriarchal power, has also partaken in the violence of
discursive formations that produced the disposable lives of "black flesh". Black women writers like
Hartman, Spillers or Morrison argue for creating or maintaining - in the face of much postmodern indifference or abandon - a particular "relationship to loss". Their
work, as formulated most clearly by Hartman, calls for a "redress project" which challenges white reading communities - in
the present case, a reading public trained in gender studies, that is - to go beyond the confines of gender. To re-arrive in the time of slavery calls for a political orientation in support of
"fugitive justice," in Best and Hartman's words, to interrogate rigorously the kinds of political claims that can be mobilized on behalf of the slave (the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable) in the political present. [...] [W]e
are concerned neither with 'what happened then' nor with 'what is owed because of what happened then,' but rather with the contemporary predicament of freedom, with the melancholy recognition of foreseeable futures still tethered
to the past. [...] [W]hat is the story about the slave we ought to tell out of the present we ourselves inhabit -- a present in which torture isn't really torture, a present in which persons have been stripped of rights heretofore deemed
inalienable? (Best and Hartman, 3, 4) Hartman (and her co-author, Stephen Best) have outlined a series of questions for the Redress Project, the most important in my context being the following: What is the violence particular to
slavery? [...] What is the essential feature of slavery: (1) property in human beings, (2) physical compulsion and corporal correction of the laborer, (3) involuntary servitude, (4) restrictions on mobility or opportunity or personal
liberty, (5) restrictions of liberty of contract, (6) the expropriation of material fruits of the slave's labor, (7) absence of collective self-governance or non-citizenship, (8) dishonor and social death, (9) racism? We understand the
particular character of slavery's violence to be ongoing and constitutive of the unfinished project of freedom. What is the slave -- property, commodity, or disposable life? What is the time of slavery? Is it the time of the present, as
Hortense Spillers suggests, a death sentence reenacted and transmitted across generations? (Best and Hartman, 5) 18 For the still largely white gender studies academic community in Europe to adopt itself to the redress project means
a re-location into the time of slavery, into a genealogical continuum which reaches from the early modern period into postmodernity. This kind of "bracketing" gender might result in an expansion of urgently needed sites of crossracial alliance, for gender studies to find a position from which to share not only postcolonial melancholia but also transcultural conviviality, as Paul Gilroy has recently phrased it. This conviviality requires white critical communities
to read black women writers/critics work not as ethnography, but as lessons in decolonization itself. Working through Fred Moten's In The Break, Hartman postulates: By throwing into crisis "what happened when" and by exploiting
the "transparency of sources" as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe "the resistance of the object," if only by
first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity, trying to narrate "the time of slavery as our present," to "imagine a future in which the afterlife of slavery has ended," and finally, to move beyond
"the ongoing state of emergency on which black life remains in peril. (2008, 11, 12) Euro-American modern societies created the paradox of dehumanized but at the same time racialized and hyper-sexualized group of about 12 million
people at the locomotive disposal of white ownership. As black writers have insisted for generations, and Hartman's work confirms yet again, this transatlantic moment of early modernity amply qualifies as the first instance of "the
Beyond an innocence of 'gender' as a category rooted in a narrative of universal freedom, the

political point that Gender Studies needs to adjust itself to is to trace its own story as much to a
story of the realization of subjectivity as to a story of abjection, and foundational
commodification of black human beings.
lager."
The Affirmatives progressive gains only maintain the fluidity of whiteness that is
silent on the on the ontological violence of Red genocide Cosmopolitan politics are
only possible through the clearing of the frontier that provides libidinal and
institutional rebar for civil society that maintains the coherence of White supremacy
that is maintained by ongoing genocide of Indigenous bodies.
Wilderson 10 (Frank Unspeakable Ethics, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 141-5)
WellovertwentythousandWesternsandfrontierfilmshavebeenshotandreleasedsincethedawnofcinema.Eventhoughtheymayonlyappearinasmall
percentageofthefilmsandforaparsimoniousnumberofminutes,NativeAmericansarecentraltothelibidinaleconomyoftheentiregenre.TheWesternscinematic
Theclearing,then,isimaginedbythe
Westernasasafespacewhosesafetyisunderconstant,ifsometimesunspokenthreatfrom
Savageswhoinhabitthefrontierorwho,typicallyatthebeginningofafilm,havejumpedthereservationforsomeinexplicable
reason.Clearing,intheSettler/Savagerelation,hastwogrammaticalstructures,oneasanounand
theotherasaverb.ButtheWesternavowsonlyclearingslaborasanoun.Westernscalluponustobowour
imaginarycaststheSavageasaclearandprobabledangerlurkingjustbeyondtheSettlersclearing.
headsreverently,togivethisnounapropernameandrefertoitfondly,thewayChristiansgavethechildapropernameandcalledittheLittleBabyJesus.
Similarly,theWesterninterpellatesuswithsuchreverencetotheclearing,whosepropername
mightbetheLittleBabyCivilSociety,agenuflectionbestowedupontheclearingby,forexample,StagecoachandotherfilmsbyJohn
Ford.Butpriortotheclearingsfragileinfancy,thatis,beforeitscinematiclegacyasanewbornplacename,itlaborednot
acrossthelandasanounbutuponthebodyoftheSavageasaverb.TheWestern,however,
onlyspeakstoanimaginaryoftheclearingasanoun,whiledisavowingtheclearings
ontologicalsignificanceasaverb:civilsocietysessentialstatusasaneffectforgenocide.Whatwould
happentothelibidinaleconomyofcivilsocietyif,overthecourseofonehundredyears,ithadbeensubjectedtotwentythousandcinematicmirrors,filmsaboutitself
Giventhe
centralityoftheWhitechild,theinfant,totheWesternscinematicsolicitationoffaithinthe
ethicsofLittleBabyCivilSociety,howshatteredmightthatfaithbecomeifwerethefilmsto
revealthatthenewbornbabesuckledIndianbloodinsteadofWhitebreastmilk?Thesinewsof
civilinstitutionalitycouldnotsustainthemselveslibidinallyundersuchconditions.Andcivilsocietywould
loseitsmidtolatetwentiethcenturyelasticity.Therewouldbe,forexample,nosocialspacefortheWhitecultural
progressivewhorevelsinNativeAmericanlore,studiesIndianplacenames,orotherwise
inwhichitwascastnotasaninfantcartographyofbuddingdemocraticdilemmas,butasamurderousprojection,ajuggernautforextermination?
derivespleasureandanenhancedsenseofpurposefromhis/herrespectforIndianculturejustas
therewouldbenosocialspacefortheWhitepersonwhoromanticizesthehistoryofthepioneeringWestwhileneglectingthegenocidethatclearsthespaceforthis
AnyonewhowasWhiteanddidnotspeak,sociallyandlibidinally,
inwhatwouldbeahyperarticulateandthoroughlyselfconsciousantiIndianfascismwould
findhim/herselfunabletobrokerrelationswithothermembersofcivilsociety,fortheruseof
social,sexual,andpoliticalhybriditywhichWhitenessmanagestoconvinceitselfof,would
becomeuntenableatbest,treasonousatworse.Onecouldnot,forexample,beinfavorofNativeAmericansweatlodgeceremonies,
history.(Thesetwopersonasarenotsofarapart.)
fishingorgamingrightsandbe,simultaneously,enfranchisedwithincivilsociety.Suchpostcolonialand/ordemocraticquestionswouldbecomestructurally
impossible:onewouldeitherbeamongthelivingoramongthedeadbutnot,asisassumedtoday,both.Cinemacomesintoexistenceduringthe1890s,atprecisely
LittleBabyCivilSocietywasbeingweanedfromitsselfimageasamurderous
projectionandestablishingitselfasasitewheretheleadershipofideas(hegemony)replaces
directrelationsofforce;aplacewherearobustpolitical,sexual,andsocialhybriditycounteracts
crudeManicheismnegotiationsofviolence.Earlycinemaisonthecuspofthatthatattempt.Amomentwhentheweof
Whitesubjectivityismovingfromwearemurdererstowardwearecitizens.Whatis
importantforourinvestigationisthecentralityofSavageontologyandtheinstitutionalityofcinematotherhetoric,ratherthanthe
thatmomentwhen
actualhistory,ofthistransition(where,asIhaveindicatedtransitionismerelyaeuphemismfordisavowal)..
Time/Futurism:
The futurist PTX of the 1AC represents a colonial understanding of time, that
ignores that the future is an accumulation of past and current forms of anti-black
violence
Dillon (Stephen, Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 2013 ("It's here, it's that time:"
Race, queer futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist
theory, 2013, vol. 23, No. 1, 38-51, C.A.)
Baucom and Spillerss theorizations of time as accumulation and capture have profound implications for how we understand the future.
Traditionally, the future is a space and time we do not know, a place of possibility and hope.
The emptiness of the future is imagined as a space of seamless progress: a myth of Marxist teleology; a capitalist
dream; a fantasy of nationalism and colonialism. When we imagine the future as the
outcome of the passage of time, the past falls away and the present disappears so that the
future becomes relief from the devastating weight of everything that has come before. For
example, Jos Esteban Muoz argues that the way out of the crushing weight of today is to
hold on to the future because now is not enough. According to Muoz, the future is the
domain of queerness, a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality that
allows us to think then and there when here and now is not enough (2009, 1). For Muoz, the
call for no future is only available to those who have a future to deny. He worries that abandoning the
future to a heteronormative white world will only lead to the deaths of more queer people of color. Yet, if time does not pass but
accumulates, then the future is not the triumph of a tendency inscribed in the present . It is
not the dissolution of the past or the undoing of the present. If time does not pass but
accumulates, then the future is not liberated from the constraints of yesterday, but, rather,
is the place where the wreckage of then and now lives on. When we think of time against the temporal regimes
of the state, heteronormativity, the nation, and capital, time drags, reverses, compresses, and accumulates. Engaging queerness as a
force that distorts and undermines normative logics of sequence is to know that the
conditions of possibility for the atrocities of the past have not faded, but, rather, have
intensified (Freeman 2010, 27). It is to deploy what Jasbir Puar calls an antecedent temporality where one can see, feel,
and engage the ghosts that are not yet here, but will be tomorrow and the next day and the
next (Puar 2007, xx). Muoz writes that the past tells us something about the present: It tells us that something is missing, or something is not
yet here (2009, 86). Baucom and Spillers extend this assertion by arguing that past forms of racial terror are a lesson
about the present, but also a vision of what is to come. If time does not pass but
accumulates, then the past is where the future is anticipated, recollected, and demonstrated
(Baucom 2005, 213). If there is no progress, but instead repetition, modification, intensification,
reversals, and suspensions, then we know what the future will be. The future will be what
was before.
Their investment in futurity ignores that time accumulates and functions as a

historical stillnessthis functions as a temporal prison for black liberation
Dillon 13 [Stephen, Prof. Queer Studies @ Hampshire College, Its here, its that time: Race,
queer futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames, Women & Performance: A
Journal of Feminist Theory vol. 23 no. 1,pp. 42-4]
Hortense Spillers provides a powerful theorization of time as accumulation in her classic essay, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American
Grammar Book: Even though the captive flesh/body has been liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter,
dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors
of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject is
murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. (Spillers 1987, 68)
According to Spillers, the
anti-blackness inaugurated under chattel slavery is a death sentence enacted

across generations, one that changes name and shape across time and space even as its continuity
endures. Yet, for Spillers, time not only accumulates, it also captures. Her conception of temporality means that
time is a form of captivity: one that makes her a marked woman (65). She is marked by a history of violence,
trauma, and terror that alters normative conceptions of temporality. In other words, antiblackness and racial terror are epistemological and bodily forces, but they are also temporal
intensities that structure subjectivity and life chances. Baucom and Spillerss theorizations of time as
accumulation and capture have profound implications for how we understand the future.
Traditionally, the future is a space and time we do not know, a place of possibility and hope. The emptiness of the future is
imagined as a space of seamless progress: a myth of Marxist teleology; a capitalist dream; a
fantasy of nationalism and colonialism. When we imagine the future as the outcome of the passage of
time, the past falls away and the present disappears so that the future becomes relief from the devastating weight of everything that has
come before. For example, Jos Esteban Muoz argues that the way out of the crushing weight of today is to hold on to the future because now is
not enough. According to Muoz, the future is the domain of queerness, a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality that allows
us to think then and there when here and now is not enough (2009, 1). For Muoz, the call for no future is only available to those who have a
future to deny. He worries that abandoning the future to a heteronormative white world will only lead to the deaths of more queer people of color.
Yet, if time does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not the triumph of a tendency inscribed in the present. It is not the dissolution of
the past or the undoing of the present. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not liberated
from the constraints of yesterday, but, rather, is the place where the wreckage of then and now
lives on. When we think of time against the temporal regimes of the state, heternormativity, the
nation, and capital, time drags, reverses, compresses, and accumulates. Engaging queerness as a
force that distorts and undermines normative logics of sequence is to know that the conditions of
possibility for the atrocities of the past have not faded, but, rather, have intensified (Freeman 2010, 27).
It is to deploy what Jasbir Puar calls an antecedent temporality where one can see, feel, and engage the
ghosts that are not yet here, but will be tomorrow and the next day and the next (Puar 2007, xx). Muoz
writes that the past tells us something about the present: It tells us that something is missing, or something is not yet here (2009, 86). Baucom
and Spillers extend this assertion by arguing that past
forms of racial terror are a lesson about the present, but also
a vision of what is to come. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the past is where the
future is anticipated, recollected, and demonstrated (Baucom 2005, 213). If there is no progress, but
instead repetition, modification, intensification, reversals, and suspensions, then we know what
the future will be. The future will be what was before. The actions of the Womens Army work against a notion
of history as progress, and in its place, engage the repetitions, accumulations, and intensifications
of time as it circulates, suspends, and speeds up. For them, the progress of the revolution means cutbacks in
daycare centers, ending of free abortions, forced sterilization of minority women, discrimination against single women
and lesbians in housing, and firing of single women in favor of men with families.9 The revolution is a new formation
that reproduces and expands past forms of white supremacist and heteropatriarchial regulation
and subjection. Isabel from Radio Regazza describes the revolutionary state as such: Angry unemployed people are
rioting in the streets and the city is on fire with their rage. Now what do you think the
government plans to do about this situation besides beating them over the head with billy clubs?
Do they plan to supply them with jobs, with training programs, or with decent housing? Nah, uh uh. You know what theyre going to do? The
same bloody tactic they pulled before the revolution, remember, and Im here to warn you, its going to happen again. Theyre
already
starting a shuffle board, an act on a grand scale where all the poor and the unemployed will be
shoved economically into the ghetto.10 [my emphasis] Isabels declaration that its going to happen again
deploys an anticipatory logic that theorizes the past and present as a preemption of future
possibilities (Clough and Willse 2011, 2). The future and the present compress and collide because the temporality of state violence is a
time of repetition, intensification, and accumulation. Franz Fanons concept of historicity is instructive here. For Fanon, the past is
ontologically sutured to race so that when I discovered my blacknessI was battered down by tom-toms,
cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: Sho good eatin (Fanon
1967, 112). For Fanon, white supremacy functions as a type of temporal prison where black
liberation is delayed and destroyed by the capacity of past traumas, rooted in colonization and
slavery, to affect, shape, and possess the present. Fanon looks to the past of European colonization and sees a mirror of
the future, an endless past/present of colonial domination (Scott 2010, 76). In other words, white supremacy is not just a
spatial technology that inhabits infrastructure and institutionality; it is also a temporal
regime that refuses to abide by the progress of the law, language, or the passage of time. As
Kara Keeling writes: The past constricts the present so that the present is simply the reappearance of the past (2007, 26). And as Isabel makes
clear, state
violence limits the possibilities of the present and future by binding both in a closed
circuit of reverberation and magnification. When time accumulates, it possesses, detains, and immobilizes: this is time as a form of
capture. In short, Isabel knows what is coming because it has already happened in the past that is the future that has already arrived. There
is not relief from knowing the past is gone because the past is a warning of what is coming. Its going to happen again.
Their hopeful pragmatism argument and the idea that we have to do something
is a temporal investment in someday, in the future, but which can never be
redeemed, only imagined. In reality, black gratuitous violence is exacerbated
Warren 15 [Calvin L., Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope; Surce: CR: The New
Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Derrida and French Hegelianism (Spring 2015), XMT, pp.
215-248 Published by: Michigan State University Press Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215 . Accessed: 30/03/2015
The solution relies on what we might call the trick of time to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the
temporality of hope is a time not-yet-realized, a future tense unmoored from present-tense
justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its solutions from
critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that these solutions stand up against the
lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to
history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the past or present. Put differently, we can never ascertain
the efficacy of the proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always
retreating to a not-yet and could-be temporality. This trick of time offers a promise of
possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can
never be redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the
psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility,
never to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony through time by claiming the
future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing) any other conception of time that
challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant
(re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really exist within the
politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future tense. The trick of time and political solution converge
on the site of action. In critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction.
But we cant just do nothing! We have to do something. The field of permissible action is
delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/ inaction silences critical engagement with
political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit
certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action takes place in the politicalthe political not
only claims futurity but also action as its property. To do something means that this doing must
translate into recognizable political activity; something is a stand-in for the word politics
one must do politics to address any problem. A refusal to do politics is equivalent to doing nothingthis
nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a zero-state as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it).
Black nihilism rejects this trick of time and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To refuse to
do politics and to reject the fantastical object of politics is the only hope for blackness in an
antiblack world.
Generic:
All metaphysical outlets of thought the 1AC assumes including the very concept of
existence itself, are rooted in anti blackness and literal destruction of black people.
Warren 15 [Calvin L., Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope ; Surce: CR: The New
Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Derrida and French Hegelianism (Spr ing 2015), XMT, pp.
215-248 Published by: Michigan State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor
.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215 . Accessed: 30/03/2015
For the black nihilist, anti-blackness is metaphysics. It is the system of thought and organization
of existence that structures the relationship between object/subject, human/animal,
rational/irrational, and free/en- slavedessentially, the categories that constitute the field of
Ontology. Thus, the social rationalization, loss of individuality, economic expansionism, and
technocratic domination that both Vattimo and Heidegger analyze actually depend on antiblackness.5 Metaphysics, then, is unthinkable without anti- blackness. Neither Heidegger nor
Vattimo explores this aspect of Beings oblivionit is the literal destruction of black bodies that
provide the psychic, economic, and philosophical resources for modernity to objectify, forget,
and ultimately obliterate Being (nonmetaphysical Being). We might then consider black captivity
in the modern world as the perfection of metaphysics, its shameful triumph, because through
the violent technology of slavery Being itself was so thoroughly devastated. Personality became
property, as Hortense Spillers would describe it, and with this transubstantiation, Being was
objectified, infused with exchange value, and rendered malleable within a sociopolitical order. In
short, Being lost its integrity with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; at that moment in history, it
finally became possible for an aggressive metaphysics to exercise obscene powerthe ability to
turn a human into a thing. The captive is fractured on both the Ontological and ontic levels.
This violent transubstantiation leaves little room for the hopeful escape from metaphysics that
Heidegger envisions. Can the black-as-object lay claim to DaSein? And if so, how exactly does
hermeneutic nihilism restore Being to that which is an object? If we perform a philosophy of
history, as Vattimo would advise, we understand that metaphysicians, and even those we now
consider post- metaphysicians, constructed the rational subject against the nonreasoning black,
who, according to Hegel, Kant, Hume, and even Nietzsche was situated outside of history, moral
law, and consciousness (Bernasconi 2003; Judy 1993; and Mills 1998). It is not enough, then, to
suggest that metaphysics engenders forms of violence as a necessity, as a byproduct; thinking
itself is structured by anti-blackness from the very start. Any postmetaphysical project that does
not take this into account will inevitably reproduce the very structures of thought that it would
dismantle.
Gender:
The process of racialization in America both subtends and fundamentally structures
the question of gender, absent racial analysis gender as a category is impossible to
effectively theorize and resist
Martinot 2010 [Steve, Instructor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco
State University, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization, p. 40-41]
In the mid-seventeenth century, bond-laborers in general, whether English or African, were held as chattel. That meant they were
the matrilineal servitude

statute implies is that the elite intended to reduce Africans to perpetual servitude. Its
focus on African women served to incorporate their sexuality and maternal
capacities into their chattel status as a form of production, producing laborers who
would also be considered commodities. African women were thus to be transformed
into a special domain of sexuality, while their sexuality was reduced to a mode of
wealth production at the same time. Under such conditions, any sexual violation of
an African woman was then implicitly recharacterized (decriminalized) as wealth
production. Ultimately, this ability to use African and African American motherhood for the purposes of wealth enhancement
was institutionalized in the form of breeding farms (Stampp 1956, 245). The overall effect of the statute was not,
however, restricted to African women. Sexuality was devalued in English women in the
process of relocating it in the bodies of African women. That is, by validating the
violation of African women as the cultural site of sexuality itself, in the name of and
in the interest of plantation wealth, sexual being was in the same gesture withheld
from English women. English women became instead the desexualized site of
validated motherhood as the concomitant of the commodification of African
motherhood as capital. Motherhood was functionalized for English women in the
process of appropriating motherhood as production in the African
The 1ACs focus on white bourgeois conceptions of gender still leaves intact the
larger codes of Western Man and therefore makes patriarchal violence inevitable.
Weheliye (Alexander G., professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University) 2014 (Habeas Viscus: Racializing
considered property and could be traded or sold during the term of their servitude. What
Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Duke University Press, pg.22-24 C.A.)
Take, for instance, Judith Butler's passing reference to Wynter's oeuvre: Fanon's project has been extended by contemporary scholars, including
the literary critic Sylvia Wynter, to pertain to women of color and to call into question the racist frameworks within which the category of the
human has been articulated. While Fanon might not have been a champion of feminism as we have come to understand itthough one could
contest this, seeing how easy it has become to brush aside in a single sentence Fanon's work on the basis of his androcentrism, although this does
not occur nearly as frequently in the case of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Michel Foucaultit is not quite clear how his theorization of
interior colonies would not pertain to women of color, unless Butler were writing under the presumption that black people such as Fanon and
Wynter could produce thought only for and about their particular identities as black men and women. Viewing
Wynter's colossal
project, with which Butler does not engage in any sustained way, both of critiquing the
current western instantiation of the human as coterminous with the white liberal subject
and of crafting a new humanism should not be reduced to observing the historicity of this
concept with the aim of showing how women of color and other groups are excluded from
its purview. Or to put it in Butlerian terms: Wynter is interested in human trouble rather
than "merely" woman-of-color trouble, even while she deploys the liminal perspective of
women of color to imagine humanity otherwise. In response to Butler and western
feminism more generally, Wynter has stated on several occasions that her object of
knowledge is not gender but genregenres of the human: "Our struggle as Black women
has to do with the destruction of the genre; with the displacement of the genre of the
human of 'Man.' "For Wynter, destroying only western bourgeois conceptions of gender leaves
intact the genre of the human to which it is attached, and thus cannot serve as a harbinger
of true emancipation, which requires abolishing Man once and for all. It seems as if we have yet to
countermand the "unrecognized contradiction" which, as Gayatri Spivak so fittingly diagnosed in 1988, "valorizes the concrete experience of the
oppressed, while being so uncritical about (how) the historical role of the intellectual is maintained by a verbal slippage."13 Rather than
contending with Wynter's thinking as an intellectual project in the same manner as she does with Althusser, Hegel, or Irigaray, Butler privileges
her concrete experience as a woman of color." In
addition to rejecting gender as a category independent of

other axes of subjugation, Wynter states that in her writings " 'race' is really a code- word for
'genre.' Our issue is not the issue of 'race.' Our issue is the issue of the genre of 'Man.' It is
this issue of the 'genre' of 'Man' that causes all the -isms... Now when I speak at a
feminist gathering and I come up the '-isms with 'genre' and say 'gender' is a function of
'genre,' they don't want to hear that. "19 Thus, Wynter does not privilege race over gender as much as she insists that the
master's tools (a universal notion of gender) cannot dismantle the master's house (Man), in Audre Lorde's formulation. Rather, Wynter's
is a feminism typified by a critique of race and coloniality that focuses on the liberation of
humans from all "-isms" versus only one specific form of subjection such as sexism, and it does
not contradict the majority of women-of-color feminisms, which have not taken gender as an isolatable or even primarycategory of analysis
but have instead highlighted the complex relationality between different forms of oppression. Mainstream feminism in contrast sees itself "as an
autonomized particularity, rather than as a particularity constitutive of a new non-middle class mode of universality. For Wynter ,
a
feminism that does not aspire to create a different code for what it means to be human
merely sketches a different map of Man's territorializing assemblages; however, in order to
abolish these assemblages feminism's insurrection must sabotage "its own prescribed role
in the empirical articulation of its representations in effect by coming out of the closet,
moving out of our assigned categories. "Hortense Spillers makes a similar point when she maintains, "we are less
interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as
female social subject." In this context, "gendered femaleness" denotes gender as a "purely natural" and sovereign modality of
difference while the revolt of a "female social subject" articulates gender as an integral
component in the abolition of the human as Man. As phrased by one of the defining texts in the recent history of
black feminism: "If BIack women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the
destruction of all the systems of oppression. " Moving away from discourses of inclusion and recognition, the Combahee River Collective dwells
on the specific positions of black women within western modernity to launch global critiques, expansive theories, poetic tactics, and relational
political projects that spurn the ethnographic encampment of Man's racializing assemblages." Neither Wynter nor Spillers asks us to choose
between race and gender but, instead, their thinking demands vigilance about how different forms of domination create both the conditions of
possibility and the "semiosis of procedure" necessary to hierarchically distinguish full humans from not-quite-humans and nonhumans.'6
Spillers's and Wynter's ideas have been essential to formulating my arguments, because they
represent systems of thought

both individually and taken togetherthat tackle notions of the human as it interfaces with
gender, coloniality, slavery, racialization, and political violence without mapping these
questions onto a mutually exclusive struggle between either the free- flowing terra nullius
of the universally applicable or the terra cognitus of the ethnographically detained. Wynter's
large-scale intellectual project, which she has been pursuing in one form or another for the last thirty years, disentangles Man from the human in
order to use the space of subjects placed beyond the grasp of this domain as a vital point from which to invent hitherto unavailable genres of the
human.27 According to this scheme in western modernity the religious conception of the self gave way to two modes of secularized being: first,
the Cartesian "Rational Man, " or homo politicus, and then beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, "Man as a selected being and natural as
the universal human, 'man as man. "'" The move from 2 organism . . . supernatural conception of world and the self's place within this cosmos,
however, does not signal the supersession of a primitive axiomatic with an enlightened and rarefied type of the human. Rather, one genre of the
human (Judeo-Christian, religious) yields to another, just as provincial, version of the human, and, although both claim universality, neither genre
fully represents the multiplicity of human life forms. In the context of the secular human, black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the
colonized, the insane, the poor, the disabled, and so on serve as limit cases by which Man can demarcate himself as the universal human. Thus,
race, rather than representing accessory, comes to define the very essence of the modern human as "the code through which one not simply knows
what human being is, but experiences being. " Accordingly, race makes its mark in the dominion of the ideological and physiological, or rather
race scripts the elision of the former with the latter in the flesh.
Global Violence:
White supremacy is a global system of oppression that normalizes genocidal
modalities of violence and domination
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]
white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization

that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized human
difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility
For the theoretical purposes of this essay,
(including physical extermination and curtailment of peoples collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a
white supremacy is simultaneously premised on and

universalized conceptions of the white (european and euroamerican) human vis-
historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination,
consistently innovating
-vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white)
sub- or non-human. to
consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation (rather than a freakish
facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this material logic of
violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose
American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering. While the US
prison industrial complex constitutes a statecraft of perpetual domestic crisis that emerges from
this social logic of white supremacy, the US prison regime is becoming profoundly undomesticated in a
twofold sense: the technologies of carceral racial domination have distended into localities beyond the
US proper (they are extra-domestic), while the focused and mundane (though no less severe) bodily
violence of the prisons operative functions have constituted a microwarfare apparatus, accessing
and penetrating captive bodies with an unprecedented depth and complexity (the regime is in this
sense defined by an unhinged, undomesticated violence). In this context, the (racial) formations of
punishment and death inscribed on the various surfaces of the US prison regimefrom the nearby to the far awayare in fact
generally unremarkable. It cannot be overemphasized that this carceral formation produces a normal and
trite violence, a naturalized facet of American social intercourse across scales and geographies, forming the underside of a civil society that
is historically unimaginable outside its modalities of formal exclusion and civil/ social neutralization. Yet , it is precisely as this
prison regime rearranges, remobilizes, and redeploys its normalized structure of white
supremacist bodily violence into geographies beyond the American everyday that it momentarily
surfaces as a spectacle of public consumption and even a critical public discourse, in such moments as
the photographic revelation of the uS militarys torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. While the national scope of the US prison
industrial complex constitutes a profound social and political crisis of epochal scale, it also composes an institutional
symbiosis that has yielded an authentic conjunctural articulation of state violence that is both
organic to the domestic US carceral and capable of rearticulation, appropriation, and
mobilization across global geographies. Thus, to understand the prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and
or extremist deviation from it)
politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel through which the state generates particular practices of legitimated violence and
Prison regime is a conceptual and theoretical (not a discretely institutional) phrase

that refers to a modality through which the state organizes, rationalizes, and deploys specific
technologies of violence, domination, and subjectiontechnologies that are otherwise reserved for deployment in sites
bodily immobilization.
of declared war or martial law: in this usage, prison regime differentiates both the scale and object of analysis from the more typical macroscale institutional categories of the prison, the prison system, and, for that matter, the prison industrial complex. the conceptual scope of
this term similarly exceeds the analytical scope of prison management, prison policy, and the prison (or prisoners) experience, categories that
most often take textual form through discrete case studies, institutional reform initiatives, prison ethnographies, and empirical criminological
notion of a prison regime invokes a meso (middle, or mediating) dimension of

processes, structures, and vernaculars that compose the states modalities of self-articulation and
self-conceptualization, institutional crafting, and rule across the macro and micro scales. It is
within this meso range of fluctuating articulations of power that the prison is inscribed as both a
surveys. Rather, the
localization and constitutive logic of the states production of juridical, spatial, and militarized
dominion. A genealogy of the prison regime foregrounds the essential instabilitythe unnaturalness
of its object of discussion, suggesting a process of historical analysis and theorization that methodologically extends beyond 1.) the
particular and mystified institutionality of the discrete and narrowly bounded entity we know as the Prison; and 2.) the juridical and institutional
formalities of the states supposed ownership of and orderly proctorship over the Prison as it is conventionally conceived.
Global Warming:
Global Warming is not caused by humans writ largeit 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, invisibilizing
millions of non-whites already killed.
Wynter 2007 (Sylvia, Professor Emeritus in Spanish and Romance Languages at Stanford Univeristy, 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 mis-attribution 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-1989-collapse-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 ever-increasing
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; man-made 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 reversible
at 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.
Hegemony:
American hegemony is deadthe only thing that remains is a racist sovereign
violence that makes all their impacts and the destruction of American policy a
matter of time
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough
College in New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, pg. 14
It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says,
first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide (1997: 257).
From its first development, we then get to a situation where, as I noted at the outset of this paper,
racist violence becomes a global and biopolitical regime of terror, a war between two main
classes: the war of the political and financial elites against the class of those who have been
dispossessed to various degrees once again, the violence of the 1% against the 99%. As
Foucault says, this is a question of the technique of power, more than of ideologies (as it was the
case with the traditional type of racism), because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of
the urgency of the struggle, the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw use of the
violence that, as Walter Benjamin (1978) says, informs the law, domination without hegemony.
Especially at the present stage of the world, where information and knowledge make it
unnecessary and thus impossible for the General Intellect or common understanding and reason
to be governed, brutal domination and potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be
the only instruments left to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class. Then, the old
sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of
racism (Foucault 1997: 258). Foucault makes the example of Nazi Germany, where murderous
power and sovereign power [were] unleashed throughout the entire social body (p.259) and the
entire population was exposed to death (p.260). But this is today a common and global
paradigm: The sovereign right to kill (ibid.), from cases of police brutality in the cities to war
atrocities throughout the world, has become the most effective way to deal with a population
that refuses to recognize the false legitimacy of the sovereign, the sovereign right to govern.
What Foucault says of the Nazi State but he acknowledges it applies to the workings of all
States (ibid.)shows the terminal stage of sovereign power: a desperate will to absolute
domination no longer able to count on hegemony: We have an absolutely racist State, an
absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State (ibid.). This certainly shows the
crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly, in a globalized world, it shows the crisis
of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final solution. No one can blame them. Their
unintelligent worldview is bound to that. The hope is that they will not destroy everything
before they are gone. Yet, they will not go by themselves, without the workings of an altering
power, bound to inherit the earth. This is the power of individuation, the dignity of individuation,
whose workings are based on disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the age of
biopolitical terror, have nothing to sell except their own skins, (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the
history of racist violence, of conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder (ibid.).
US hegemony is just the racial violence of America gone global aff claims to
benevolence are symptoms of white privilege
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-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 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 statecrafted, 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
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
discourse and transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to totalize society.
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
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
simply import, imitate, or reenact these institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the opposite: the
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.
professional) scholarly praxis. Here I am arguing that
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
Affirmatives focus on the exteriorized violence of American imperialism obscures

and disavows the banal domestic violence of Coloniality critically unpacking the very concept
of war is necessary to understanding war as intrinsic to US Hegemony
Rodriguez (Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside) 2009 (The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
state violence and fo
White Locality, and Abolition, Critical Sociology, Vol. 36 (1), pg. 151-173, C.A.)
War, such a common term in the global lexicon, is arguably among the least rigorously
theorized and most willfully misunderstood concepts of our historical present. The social
intercourse of the USA simultaneously presumes a relatively coherent consensus
comprehension of war, while reflexively (and often obsessively) dislocating its localities of
violence to sites alien from and devoutly foreign to the proximate sites of the US homeland.
Wherein the comprehension of the militarizations of the War on Terror if not constantly
displaced onto the elsewhere (non-local) spectacles of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Fallujah, and
Bagram? What to make of the rhetorically saturated, localized wars on gangs, drugs,
poverty, and illegal immigration of the last few decades if the organic statecraft therein does
not merely entail the multiple political articulations of intensified policing and state intervention,
but focally encompasses mobilizations of the legitimated excesses of the racist state in an
orchestrated violence that is no less fatal than that of actual civil war? My concern in this essay
is with contextualizing and resituating the profound state and state-ordained violences of
those proliferating warfare technologies that have been rendered mundane, acceptable, and
banal within the nuances of the American domestic social formation in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries. More precisely, I wish to bring analytical and theoretical attention to the
organized human fatalities and orchestrated subjections of racially pathologized social
subjects that are essential to white supremacist nationbuilding, even and especially within
the historical conjuncture of the multiculturalist racist states emergence as the hegemonic
institutional phenotype of the USA. Thus, what might a radical sociology, antiracist praxis, and
social theory contribute to a critical reframing of the white supremacist state as something that
has neither obsolesced nor decomposed, as if simply a relic of an earlier, vulgar moment in US
racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994),1 but has reinvigorated and recomposed its animus
of dominance through a symbiosis of multiculturalist incorporations/empowerments and
political enhancement of a statecraft that is durably and foundationally racist? Here, I follow
scholar activist and political geographer Ruthie Gilmores clarifying definition of racism as the
state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerabilities to premature death (Gilmore 2002: 261). In spite of, or perhaps because of, the
recent proliferation of antiwar liberal and progressive discourses challenging the
militarized US global regime of the Bush Administrations War on Terror, the circumstances,
scenes, and locations of warfare have been insidiously periodized and re-sited not
incidentally by the antiwar left itself to the nominal historical and geographic exteriors
of the USA. There is a political-discursive circuit bridging the extra-national and global
military mobilizations of the US state, including its knowledge-producing and violenceenhancing techniques, and the loyal opposition and dissension of the establishment US left
to a state-induced global war that it alleges is being conducted under false, flawed, or
immoral pretensions. The energy conducted by this political-discursive circuit (as with all
functioning circuits) reproduces each of the nominally opposed elements of its bridge while,
uniquely, generating bodies of social thought (embodied by scholars, pundits, activists, state
figures, and public media forms) and political performances (rallies, antiwar
agendas/manifestos, and rituals of public debate) that instruct a particular common sense of
what war is. This common sense obscures and consistently disavows the material
continuities between state-formed technologies of warmaking across historical moments
and geographies, while re-forming the US Homeland as a place of relative peace or at
least as a place that is not at war wherein state-produced and state-proctored
institutionalizations of massive racist violence are unrecognizable as such, and articulations
of the current emergencies of domestic warfare e.g. by prison and penal abolitionists (Critical
Resistance Publications Collective 2000), radical women of color antiviolence activists
(INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence 2006), and imprisoned radicals and revolutionaries
(Hames-Garcia 2004; Rodrguez 2006) are held with suspicion as the allegations of those
(simply) unwilling to concede the fundamental tenability and universal reformability of the US
social and state forms. I am thus addressing a modality of war that is most often contained and
disappeared into the categorically unremarkable: that which is so taken-for-granted, assumed so
organic to the production of the social landscape, that it is quite literally not worthy of extended
remark, much less sustained critical comment or analysis. As such, this historical present is a
warfare mosaic that refuses simplifying categorization precisely because its composition absorbs
the identification of its observers, and (following Althussers formulation) hails social subjects
with individualizing narratives of national vindication. The discursive techniques of this war
subsume regularly available, locally recognizable artifacts of martial law (e.g. announced
and valorized police roundups of gangs and illegal aliens), a racist police state (euphemized
as racial profiling), and deeply political or proto-political civil insurrection (e.g. rioting, cop
assassination, and property destruction) under the rubrics of law, policing, justice, and (most
importantly) peace or peacekeeping. In the context of this political-cultural national
production, ordinary people are not merely witnesses to state-waged atrocity in their midst,
but are (sometimes overlappingly) its participants, enablers, victims, and strategists.
r that matter, state power itself through a specific institutional site.
Hope:
The politics of hope forces people, when they have hope, to only spend it in the
sphere of the Political. The ability to have hope in the government
[ignores/excludes/precludes/prevents] other avenues for change, sanctioning the
systems that are inherently based on the slaughter of black bodies. Nihilistically
rejecting hope is key to overturn the reliance on hope in the government.
Following Kant and other postmetaphysical philosophers, the critical field questions (and in some circles completely denounces) a
certain spiritual predisposition to the worldthat unknowable noumenon that limits Reason but provides
the condition of possibility for its organization of the world of perception, phenomenon. The problem with the critical questioning of
the spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then, insidiously, translates them into the
scientific or the knowable, as a way to both capitalize on the mystic power of the spiritual and to preserve the spiritual
under the guise of enlightened understanding. We find this deceptive translation and capitalization of spiritual
substance within the sphere of the Politicalthat use subject organization of social existence through political
institutions, mandates, logics, and grammarsas a way to govern and discipline beings. If we think of hope as a
spiritual concepta concept that always escapes confinement within scientific discoursethen we can suggest that hope constitutes a
spiritual currency that we are given as an inheritance to invest in various aspects of existence. The issue, however, is that
there is often a compulsory investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. This is the forced
destination of hopeit must end up in the Political and cannot exist outside of it (or any existence of hope
outside the political subverts, compromises, and destroys hope itself. Like placing a fish out of water. It is as if hope only has intelligibility and
efficacy within and through the Political). Put differently, the
politics of hope posits that one must have a politics to

have hope; politics is the natural habitat of hope itself. To reject hope in a nihilistic way, then, is really to
reject the politics of hope, or certain circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing,
practicing, and conceiving of hope.
Indigenous Peoples:
Red colonialism is only possible through the blackening of indigenous bodies
Sweet 3[11/07/03, James H. Sweet, Florida International University, Collective Degradation:
Slavery and the Construction of Race, Spanish and Portuguese Influences on Racial Slavery in
British North America, 1492-1619]
The understanding of Negroes as an enslaveable race, regardless of color, continued in the
Americas. In the early slave communities of Brazil, Negro transcended Africa to include any
slave, whether Native American or African. For instance, slave inventories from Bahia in the 1570s
and 1580s divided slave holdings into negros da terra [Indians] and negros de guin.12 Similarly,
in Rio de Janeiro in the 1620s, a Negro from Angola and another from Brazil were denounced to the
Inquisition for performing acts of sodomy on one another.13 The term negro da terra disappeared
in most parts of Brazil by the middle of the seventeenth century, as Africans became the
dominant slave labor force, but one can clearly see by these examples that the Portuguese
utilized the term Negro to imply slave status, regardless of skin color. In this way, Indian slaves
were literally blackened to conform to their social status. Having said this, it is important to remember that
while Negro had some flexibility in its application to people of enslaveable status, all peoples
from sub-Saharan Africa were considered Negroes and therefore enslaveable. Their color,
accentuated by the term Negro, simply became a signifier for their presumed status as
slaves.
Intersectionality:
Intersections of gender that remains silent on race is an active stance that reifies
DR. CRENSHAW Prof of Speech Comm @ Univ. Ala. 1997
Carrie-PhD. USC; former director of debate @ Univ. of Ala.; WESTERN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
This analysis of Helms opening argument illustrates how the ideology of white privilege
operates through rhetorical silence. Helms statement was an argument over the meaning of the
UDCits members, its actions, and its insignia. It was an ideological struggle to maintain
silence about the members whiteness and its implications through a strategic use of gender. Two
key issues arise here. First, rhetorical silence about whiteness sustains an ideology of white
privilege. Second, intersecting gendered discourses work to preserve this silence. Helms silence
about whiteness naturalized the taken-for-granted assumptions contained in his framework for
understanding who is harmed by this decision. The colossal unseen dimensions [of] the silences
and denials surrounding whiteness are key political tools for protecting white privilege and
maintaining the myth of meritocracy (McIntosh 35). This silence is rhetorical and has important
ideological implications. Scott observes that silence and speaking have symbolic impact and as
such are both rhetorical. When considering the dialectic of speaking and silence, he thinks of
silence as the absence of speech. Silence is active, not passive; it may be interpreted.
Furthermore, silence and speech may be both simultaneous and sequential. The absence of
speech about whiteness signifies that it exists in our discursive silences. It may often be
intentional; it can be interpreted, and it can occur simultaneously with the spoken word.
Whiteness silence is ideological because it signifies that to be white is the natural condition, the
assumed norm. Scott notes that silences symbolize the nature of thingstheir substance or
natural condition. Silences symbolize hierarchical structures as surely as does speech (15).
Indeed, the very structure of privilege generates silences, and ironically, the most powerful
rhetoric for maintaining an existing scheme of privilege will be silent (10). Thus, silent
rhetorical constructions of whiteness like Helms protect material white privilege because they
mask its existence.
Meaning:
the affirmatives attempt/insistence to ascribe meaning to the structures of the world
inherently is a discourse of hope and futurity which depends on and propagates the
terror of anti-black violence.
Warren 15 [Calvin L., Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope ; Surce: CR: The New
Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Derrida and French Hegelianism (Spr ing 2015), XMT, pp.
215-248 Published by: Michigan State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor
.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.15.1.0215 . Accessed: 30/03/2015
Meaning itself is an aspect of anti-blackness, such that meaning is lost for the black; blacks live
in a world of absurdity, and this existential absurdity is meaning for the world. Meaninglessness
is really all there is (or we could say that real meaning for the world is utter meaninglessness).
In an interview with Mark Sinker, Greg Tate provided a reconceptualization of meaning when he
stated, the bar between the signifier and the signified could be understood as standing for the
Middle passage that separated signification from sign (Sinker 1991). The very structure of
meaning in the modern worldsignifier, signified, signification, and signdepends on antiblack violence for its constitution. Not only does the trauma of the Middle passage rupture the
signifying process, but it also instantiates a meaningless sign as the foundation of language,
meaning, and social existence itself. Following the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
(1986), we could suggest that the meaninglessness of anti-black violence is the crypt-signifier
that organizes the modern world and its institutions. Any meaning that is articulated possesses
a kernel of absurdity that blacks embody as fleshy signs. The meaninglessness that Cornel
West bemoans is nothing more than the kernel of nonsense that an anti-black world attempts to
conceal with its discourses of hope and futurity. What the black nihilist does is bring this
meaninglessness to the fore and disclose it in all of its terroristic historicity.
Nuclear War:
Representations of future nuclear war rest on racist fears of irrational non-whites
the 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]
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
In this study,
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 these representations, emerging when Europes empires were
relinquishing direct control of their colonies, share the uncertainty that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent decolonizing preocess. 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, 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
white superiority; instead,
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
US foreign policy had to negotiate the

American governments response to domestic systems of racial discrimination, and vice versa.
think such moments have occurred. Civil rights and Cold War historians have long understood that
Recently decolonized nations whose populations had been excluded 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
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
this book 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 sense of master
the master narrative of white supremacism

that proved so useful to European colonialism and the settlement of North America. How do
narratives is worth retaining. My usage here designates the explanation itself, specifically
texts come to be inscribed by master narratives? What justification do I have in reading the master narrative o white supremacism
and related narratives of settlement through the literary, cultural and filmic texts analysed here?
Queerness:
Without a previous analysis of blackness, queer theory fundamentally misses the
foundation of what normativity and deviance is based off of this overlooking of
blackness will inevitably fail
Jackson 11 (Waking Nightmares. Zakkyiah Iman Jackson on David Marriot. Zakkyiah has a
Ph.D. @ University of California Berkeley. Peaches, April 2011)
Marriotts scholarship reminds us that queer theory may unwittingly diminish its criticality if it
fails to acknowledge the role antiblack racism plays in shaping the discursive practices of gender
and sexuality. The violence that produces blackness necessitates that from the existential vantage point of black lived experience, gender
and sexuality lose their coherence as normative categories.8 Moreover, as queer theory attempts to map a territory that
encompasses an increasingly generalized nonnormativity, it may unwittingly overlook the
function of blackness in modernity, since the black body has been rendered the absolute index
of otherness.9 While particular nonblack sexual and gendered practices may be queered, blackness serves as an essential
template of gendered and sexual deviance that is limited to the negation not of a particular
practice but of a state of being. In other words, there are no practices that an individual black
person can take up that will settle once and for all the doubt that accompanies the assertion of a
black humanity. Marriotts texts encourage us to interrogate the subject of feminist and queer theory rather than presume that a subject is
always and already there.
Blackness fundamentally structures the sexuality divide in the world involving

homophobia, queerness etc and is a prior question
Jackson 11 (Waking Nightmares. Zakkyiah Iman Jackson on David Marriot. Zakkyiah has a
Ph.D. @ University of California Berkeley. Peaches, April 2011)
Marriott reminds us that nonbeing is the existential burden facing black people under the conditions of
(post)modernity and also the specter that haunts queer subjectivity. This is fitting considering that the birth of
homosexuality is inextricable from the rise of scientific authority and its racism. Fantasies of blackness, particularly black female sexuality, are
the gendered and racial specters that haunt queernessthat from which homonormative subjects must distance themselves in order to be properly
recognized as humans, as citizens, as subjects. Despite
prior interdictions on same-sex sexuality, it is only as

recently as the late nineteenth century that sexual acts and desires became constitutive of
identity: the homosexual becomes a type.12 In Siobhan Somervilles Scientific Racism and the Invention of the
Homosexual Body, she queries, is it merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as
either homosexual or heterosexual emerged at the same time that the United States was
aggressively policing the imaginary boundary between black and white bodies?13 Somerville goes
on to suggest the mutually constitutive effects of the bifurcated categories of race and sexuality, their structural interdependence and mutual
production. Structures
and methodologies that drove dominant scientific ideologies of race were

subsequently taken up in the scientific pursuit of an emerging discourse of sexuality. Difference
was thought to be a visualizable fact inscribed on the body; according to this logic, interiority
could be read on the surface of the bodys anatomical markers. Racial difference seemed to hinge
on and be most represented by the supposed differences of sexual appetites and anatomies,
particularly those of the African female. Sexologists drew on fantasies of black female embodiment as their model of sexual deviancy and gender
nonconformity. Racial
comparative-anatomy methods were used to determine sexual definition, with a

presumed similitude between deviant white bodies and the black body. The word homosexual
itself seemed to conjure some anxieties about miscegenation, as the barbarously hybrid word
was a mix of Latin and Greek, even referring to shades of gender and sexual half-breeds.14
Reading Marriott in the context of feminist and queer theory offers new insight into the gendered and sexualized nature of blacknesss ontological
negation, particularly the nonheteronormativity of races reproduction. The
negation of blackness is the foundation of

ethics and politics, even of modern sociality itself; this negation overdetermines black practices
as criminal, queer, nationally polluting, and pathological.15\
Their approach to queerness presumes a performativity of the body that the slave
has no access to
Wilderson III 10 [Frank B., Apparently just an unqualified film critic. Friends with Siskel and
Ebert? Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 313-316]
Above I suggested that Seshadri-Crooks, by way of Butler, contradicts my assessments. This is imprecise: in point of fact, she is simply mute in
the face of my assessments. Again, the
drama of value that Butler imagines is one in which gender stands in

as a reified form that masks the hybridity of bodies. The body then, or rather disparate bodies, is a basic
"always already" for Butler, Seshadri-Crooks, and most feminism (this includes the feminism of film theory). Granted, though it
appears in her assessment as the smallest scale of cartographic coherence, it nonetheless appears asand herein lies the rub!a capacity for
spatiality and temporality possessed universally by all. But surely Judith Butler, a White American, if not Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, an East
Indian, must recall that Africans
went into the hold of ships as bodies and emerged from the holds of
those ships as "flesh." "I. . . make a distinction . . . 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 iconography."42 For the body's
reification of gender to constitute an essential grammar of suffering there must first be a body
there. Feminism, Marxism, and film studies must provide and account for a corpus delicti, the corpse of a murder victim. One would think
that true rigor demands some, however short, nod to that historical process through which Black flesh
was recomposed as a body before one can write about a universal template called "the body"
which can perform and contest gender in dramas of value. In other words, what "event" (what coherence of
time) reinstated Black corporeal integrity (reinstated cartographic coherence) so that philosophers and film
theorists (and Marxists, filmmakers, and White feminists) could imagine Blackness as
possessing the capacity to be staged in dramas where bodily stylization is repeated where
value reifies as gender? This burden of proof is on the Master, not the Slave. Lacan, Silverman, Negri, Hardt, Butler, Heath, Marc
Forster and company must make that case to Fanon, Spillers, Patterson, Hartman, Marriott, Judy, and Mbembe. I . . . suggest that
"gendering"
takes place within the confines of the domestic, an essential metaphor that then
spreads its tentacles for male and female subjects over a wide ground of human and social
purposes [that ground being civil society]. Domesticity appears to gain its power by way of a
common origin of cultural fictions that are grounded in the specificity of proper names, more exactly, a
patronymic, which, in turn, situates those subjects that it covers in a particular place. Contrarily, the cargo of a
ship might not be regarded as elements of the domestic, even though the vessel that carries the
cargo is sometimes romantically personified as "she." The human cargo of a slave vesselin the
effacement and remission of African family and proper namescontravenes notions of the
domestic. . . . Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into
account as quantities.43 Until one can demonstrate how the corporeal integrity of the Black has
indeed been repaired, "a political genealogy of gender ontologies" which "blow[s] apart the sexgender-desire nexus .. . [and thus] permits resignification of identity as contingency" is a political
project the Slave can only laugh at, or weep at. But whether laughing or weeping (for the Slave's counterhegemonic responses
are of no essential value and have no structural impact), the Slave is always sidelined by such "resignification of
[Human] identity." Resignification of an identity which never signified an identity void of semiotic play
is nothing to look forward to. Here, an unforgivable obscenity is performed twice over: first,
through the typical White feminist gesture that assumes all women (and men) have bodies, ergo all
bodies contest gender's drama of value; and, second, by way of the more recent, but no less common, assertions
that the analysis of "relations" between White and Black has a handy analog in the analysis of
gendered relations. Indeed, for such intellectual protocols to transpose themselves from obscenities to protocols truly meaningful to the
Slave (in other words, for their explanatory power to be essential and not merely important), the operative verbs, attached to what Butler calls
"the . . . forces that police," would have to be not mask and redact but murder. "Identity" may very well be "the investiture of name, and the
marking of reference"44and here is where the postcolonial subject and the White subject of empire can duke it out (if, in the process, they
would leave us alone!)but Blackness
marks, references, names, and identifies a corpse. And a corpse is not
relational because death is beyond representation, and relation always occurs within representation.
What is the "it" beyond representation that Whiteness murders? In other words, what "evidence" do we have that
the violence that positions the Slave, is structurally different from the violence inflicted on the worker, the woman, the spectator, and the
postcolonial? Again, as I demonstrated in part 1, the murdered "it" is capacity par excellence, spatial and temporal capacity. Marxism, film theory,
and the political common sense of socially engaged White cinema think Human capacity as Butler and Seshadri-Crooks do, as universal
phenomena. But Blacks experience Human capacity as a homicidal phenomenon. Fanon, Judy, Mbembe,
Hartman, Marriott, Patterson, and Spillers have each, in his or her own way, shown us that the Black lost the coherence of space and time in the
hold of the Middle Passage. The philosophy of Judith Butler, the film theory of Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane, and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks,
the Marxism of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the social optimism or pessimism of popular film reviews, and the auteurial intention of the
director Marc Forster all leave the Slave unthought. They take as given that the Black has access to dramas of value. But each
disparate
entity in any drama of value must possess not only spatiality (for even a patch of grass exists in space), but the
power to labor on space, the cartographic capacity to make placeif only at the scale of the
body. Each disparate entity in any drama of value must possess not only temporality (for even a patch of grass begins-exists-and-is-no-more)
but the power to labor over time: the historiographic capacity to narrate "events"if only the "event" of sexuality. The terrain of the body and the
event of sexuality were murdered when the African became a "genealogical isolate."45 Thus, the
explanatory power of the

theorists, filmmaker, and film reviewers cited above, at its very best, is capable of thinking
Blackness as identity or as identification, conceding, however, as the more rigorous among them do,
that "black and white do not say much about identity, though they do establish group and
personal identifications of the subjects involved."46 But even this concession gets us nowhere. At
best, it is a red herring investing our attention in a semiotic impossibility : that of the Slave as signifier.
At worst, it puts the cart before the horse, which is to say that no Marxist theory of social change and proletarian recomposition, and no
feminist theory of bodily resignification, has been able (or cared) to demonstrate how,
when, and where Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Yet, they remain, if only by omission,
steadfast in their conviction that slavery was abolished. At moments, however, the sensory
excess of cinema lets ordinary White film say what extraordinary White folks will not.
The politics of endless difference makes queerness a free-floating signifier that

assistants in invisibilizing whiteness
Smith 10 [Andrea, Professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California
Riverside, Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1-2]
At the same time, however, Native studies also points to the limits of a "post-identity" politic or "subjectless" critique. Sarita Echavez See, Hiram Perez, and others who do queer of color critique in particular have argued that within the field of
queer studies, this claim to be "postidentity" often retrenches white, middle-class identity while
disavowing it.15 For instance, in Fear of a Queer Planet, Warner concedes that queer culture has been dominated by
those with capital: typically, middle-class white men. But then he argues that "the default model for all minority
movements is racial or ethnic. Thus the language of multiculturalism almost always presupposes an ethnic organization
of identity, rooted in family, language, and cultural tradition. Despite its language of
postmodernism, multiculturalism tends to rely on very modern notions of authenticity, of culture
as shared meaning and the source of identity. Queer culture will not fit this bill . . . because queer
politics does not obey the member/nonmember logics of race and gender."16 He marks queer
culture as free-floating, unlike race, which is marked by belonging and not-belonging. To borrow
from Silva's Toward a Global Idea, the queer (white) subject is the universal self-determining subject, the
"transparent I," but the racialized subject is the "affectable other." But if queerness is dominated
by whiteness, as Warner concedes, then it also follows a logic of belonging and not-belonging. It
also relies on a shared culture one based on white supremacy. As Perez notes: "Queer theory,
when it privileges difference over sameness absolutely, colludes with institutionalized racism in
vanishing, hence retrenching, white privilege. It serves as the magician's assistant to
whiteness's disappearing act."17 To extend Perez's analysis, what seem to disappear within queer
theory's subjectless critique are settler colonialism and the ongoing genocide of Native peoples.
The analysis that comes from queer theory (even queer of color critique), then, rests on the presumption of the U.S.
settler colonial state. Thus this essay puts Native studies into conversation with queer theory to look at both the possibilities and limits
of a postidentity analytic.
Revolution:
Affirming the excluded or radically outside as revolutionary potential reifies the
status quo by reinstituting outmoded and romanticized notions of authority.
Brandt 2005 [Joan, teaches French at Claremont McKenna College, Julia Kristeva and the
Revolutionary Politics of Tel Quel, in Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of
Kristevas Polis, eds., Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (State University of New York
Press, Albany NY: 2005), pp. 47-50]
It needs to be noted, however, that Kristevas very presentation of the conception of primary idealization presupposes the wider problematic of
negative nihilism. Psychoanalysis
arises as a discourse once the mechanisms of idealization in a society

have run into difficulty: the lack of a secular variant of the loving father makes contemporary
discourse incapable of assuming primary identificationthe substratum for our idealizing
constructions (1987, 374). In secular modernity the variants of the loving father, which are seemings
(illusions) rather than objects, are unable to take themselves seriously. The failing is one
dimension of the failure of modern institutions and discourses to come up with symbolizations of
the semiotic at the everyday level. The fate of the tendential severance of the semiotic and
symbolic is played out in individual experience alone, and this restriction is responsible for the
modern isolation and new maladies of the soul (see Kristeva, 1995). Psychoanalysis is a resource for the individual who
bears the burden of this failure. Religions are a possible recourse, but in contemporary conditions they represent only a dispersion of individuals
into various temporal and spatial moments bequeathed by the history of religions, which are no longer historical, that is to say, which no longer
provide us with experience. Art steps into the gap. The
major significance of art is its introduction of exteriority

with respect to psychic despair. The artwork, in specific instances, gives form to drives and
affects so that these emerge from the psychic prison of individual suffering and gain meaning for,
and in support of, a social group. Although arts capacities to reconnect the semiotic and symbolic can be specified in exactly the
same way as before, what gave us the traversability of the symbolic in 1974its fragility owing to its being liminary and not originary takes
on a second meaning. The
fragility of the symbolic now also has the sense that there is something weak
or missing in respect of the symbolic function. That is to say, whereas the symbolic can be
grasped conceptually as the function of authority underlying all specific social authority, value or
law (the Law before the law in Lacan), in actuality it is unable to give them any substance or
flexibility. The following passage from The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (1996) shows the
influence of the exploration of negative nihilism in the 1980s, notably the view unfolded in the
trilogy that psychoanalysis is witness to a collapse of (confidence in) modern institutions and
discourses. One of the reasons for our incapacity to implement revolt symbolically perhaps
resides in the fact that authority, value and law have become empty, flimsy forms. . . . As suggested by
the title of the work . . . Revolution in Poetic Language, revolt was already the central subject. The power vacuum and lack of values were not yet
issues when I wrote that book in the 1970s; the change no doubt appeared in a more obvious, more drastic, more threatening way after the recent
collapse of communism. On a political level, however, the evolution in question has probably been under way since the end of the French
Revolution and the development of democracy that followed. But I leave this question open for now to return to the profound logic of the
passageways and impasses of the revolt internal to our cultural memory. (1996, 25) Authority,
value, and law are flimsy,

empty social forms. This is not to say that they are without any power. It is to say that they do
not have any substance for individuals. Kristeva presses the point that what becomes the
symbolic function in Lacan has more to do with religion in Freud than with modern political
discourses. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt clearly states what has always been the case given Kristevas Freudian point of view.
Social revolt is a dialectical conception, dependent upon the intimate connection between law
and the violence that assaults it. For violence is laws condition of possibility and always lies
subjacent to it. That is to say, Kristeva accepts the Freudian paradigm of the primal hordes
patricide, in respect of which the original ambivalence toward the tyrannical father (affection and
hatred) become guilt and repentance, bringing about the form of law or function of authority that
is upheld by the murderous sons as the condition of socialization. Investigations of the sacred at the foundation of
the social (sacrifice, taboo) explore this process. Moreover, Freud
emphasizes the complicity between the foundation

of the social and that underlying violence, a complicity which implies the resurgence of the
subjacent violencewith its attendant jouissanceagainst law. However, and this is the crucial
point, the dialectic of prohibition and transgression is only possible if law and authority are
substantial and meaningfully experiencedeven substantially experienced as unbearable, one
might say.4 Kristeva announces in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt that this may be so, now, in some contexts, but generally it is not so
(1996, 29). Her attention to sexual difference in the formation of subjectivity in Western cultures is tightly linked to this problem.
Sexuality:
Focus on sexual power mystifies the plantation
Sexton 8 (Jared Sexton, Director of African American Studies at UC Irvine, 2008,
Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, pages 111-114)
FYI: Randall Kennedy is one of the first black scholars in this generation to pen a sustained
argument advocating what he terms a cosmopolitan ethos that welcomes the prospect of
genuine, loving interracial intimacy (page 107-108)
In response to the last question, we examine several comments from Kennedys opening chapter, In the Age of Slavery. As noted, Kennedy
is at pains to counter the claims of a certain black feminist history regarding the extremity of power
exercised by the slaveholder and the absolute submission required of the slave (Hartman, quoted in Kennedy 2003,
532fn11). He is, in other words, attempting to demonstrate, or at least to speculate upon, the limits of the slave
systems power of domination. Beyond this limitwhose locus proves frustratingly obscure
the agency of the slave herself was, we are told, able to affect significantly the conditions of
captivity to alternate ends. Kennedy, in other words, proffers a narrative in which evidence of agency
(evidence, that is, confirming an assumption of agency), however circumscribed or practically
ineffective, is taken as a sign of resistance. More properly, this is a narrative of resistant affection, an
insistence that the dehumanizing social order of racial slavery was unable to achieve its ultimate
goalthe absolute submission of the slavebecause it could not overcome the irresistible
force of affection between men and women, regardless of color. When all is said and done, a human is
still a human, as it were, and the family romance of normative heterosexuality persists even within
hierarchies that preclude for the captive all of the recognizable (social, political, economic, cultural, legal)
trappings of human being in the modern sense. Here is Kennedy: The slave system failed,
however, to perfect the domination that [ Judge Thomas] Ruffin envisioned. It failed to bind the slaves so tightly as to deprive
them of all room to maneuver. It failed to wring from them all prohibited yearnings. Slavery was, to be sure, a horribly oppressive
system that severely restricted the ambit within which its victims could make decisions. But slavery did not extinguish altogether the possibility
of choice. (43) We
might ask, what is the minimum ambit of decision making? What sort of
system, if not slavery, would bind one so tightly as to deprive one of all room to
maneuver? Need a system of domination be perfect in order for it to be legally binding or
socially effective or politically determinant? Need the captive body be deprived of all room
to maneuver for the situation to be considered one of extremity? Need the yearnings of
slaves be wrung entirely from them for their prohibition to be considered a constitutive
element of life? At what point does the quantitative measure of the slaves bondage become
difference of a qualitative sort? What precisely is the choice available under slavery, and
is it one worthy of belaboring, one whose sphere of influence is to be considered
newsworthy? To put a finer point on it, why is the categorical discrepancy refused between the free and the enslaved,
or more specifically, between the slave and the slaveholder? Is such refusal not tantamount to denying the very
existence of slavery as a system that produced slaves rather than free people whose freedom
was simply severely restricted or whose power was simply severely limited or who
simply faced difficult situations? Kennedy continues: Bondage severely limited the powerincluding the sexual powerof
slaves. But it did not wholly erase their capacity to attract and shape affectionate, erotic attachments of all sorts, including interracial ones. In a
hard-to-quantify but substantial number of cases, feelings of affection and attachment between white male masters and their black female slaves
somehow survived slaverys deadening influence. The great difficulty, in any particular instance, lies in determining whether sex between a male
master and a female slave was an expression of sexual autonomy or an act of unwanted sex. The truth is that most often we cannot know for sure,
since there exists little direct testimony from those involved, especially the enslaved women. (44) The
inability to quantify the

know for sure anything about them does not prevent the author from considering them
nonetheless substantial, and the paucity of direct testimony,6 especially [from] the enslaved women,
does not stop the author from extrapolating wildly about said feelings of affection and attachment between them and
number of cases or, indeed, to
their white male masters. In fact, it is the void in its placethe great historic silence that
enables both the reiteration of
longstanding alibis for white male sexual violencewhat Hartman (1997) discusses skillfully as the ruses of
seductionand the projection of this newfangled, though no less menacing, story about a
maverick interracial intimacy that, almost undetectably, undermines the injunctions of white
supremacy, serving not only as a sign of agency for enslaved women but a moment of their
resistance as well. Their sexual power is expressed as the capacity to attractand
somehow to manipulatethe erotic attachments of white male slaveholders. There is here an
unsubtle shift in terms: agency is not in itself subversive; indeed, the entire slave system derives, in large part, from
the agency of the enslaved (its capture, manipulation, redeployment, etc.) (Chandler 2000). Agency may be resistant or
complicit or both, and it may or may not have practical effects in the world; all of this can only
be determined contextually. Much more troubling than Kennedys imprecision here, however, is his entirely
uncritical suggestion about the sexual power of slaves. Is not one of the principal conceits of
power to suggest that though the dominant may monopolize power political, economic, and social, the
dominated nonetheless enjoy a wily aptitude for getting their way by other means,
namely, the ars erotica of seduction? Is not one of the most pernicious elements of the proslavery
discourse that the attractiveness of enslaved black women presents a threat of corruption to
civilized white manhood and/or an internal guarantee against the excesses of state-sanctioned
violence reserved for white slaveholders? The same quality that served as temptation was also,
or alternately, taken to be that which would forestall the descent of slaveholding into unrestrained brutality, an essential
rationalization for the upholding of white (male) impunity toward blacks, whether enslaved
or nominally free (Hartman 1997).7 Finally, was not the suggestion that enslaved black men might
have the power to seduce white women (whether free or, in earlier periods, indentured) one of the prime alibis
for the construction of regulatory or prohibitory statutes around interracial marriage and
sexual relations from the seventeenth century onward (Bardaglio 1999)? In each case, the focus on
the sexual power of slaves was undoubtedly a displacement of the organized violence
consistently required of captivity and, further, a dissimulation of the institutionalized
sexual power of slaveholders in particular (whose authority not only foreclosed the possibility of prosecution and
militated against the extralegal reprisals but also contributed immeasurably to their capacity to attract and shape affectionate, erotic attachments
of all kinds. The
asymmetry here approaches the incommensurablehow, after all, would a

slave go on to court a master? How would such an exercise in self-objectification,
supplementing structural availability with an affirmation of willingness, rightly be called
power?). This is no less the case simply because for Kennedy the sexual power of slaves is
something to honor or celebrate rather than to fear.
Their move towards sexual liberation is not possible without maintaining the
fungibility of the slave
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]
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.
it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the

Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses . It is highly conceivable that
Therefore,
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
African-qua-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) 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 so-called
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. 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.
Self-Congratulatory Politics:
Their politics of diversity continue self-congratulatory politics- We get an external
whiteness impact from this
Yancy12 {George; Prof at Duquesne University; How Can You Teach Me if You Dont Know
Me? Embedded Racism and White Opacity; Philosophy of Education Archive;
http://ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/pes/article/view/3600/1221}AvP
So, I decided to talk about diversity in a way that would create risk, something that Odysseus failed to do. In other words, diversity, within the
context of white North America, requires something more radical than Odysseus was willing to do. Hence, I think that it is important that I deploy
one central pedagogical value that I hold dear, one that will shape the spirit of this talk: parrhesia (or fearless speech). Fearless or courageous
speech involves genuine risk and vulnerability. Fearless
or courageous speech, however, also involves fearless or

courageous listening, which is a form of listening that does not leave us intact, unmoved,
and dogmatic. One must be willing to listen to what is often most difficult and painful to hear about oneself and our society. So, I decided
to talk about what I see as part of the problem for genuine diversity to take place: namely, the problem of whiteness. My talk then is not
designed to leave us feeling good about ourselves; it is not designed to make us feel that
my presence here the fact that you see before you a Black philosopher talking about diversity is a sign of your progress, and your
liberal political sensibilities, your openness to dialogue. After all, if whiteness is the problem, then it is important that
we avoid reinforcing the centrality of that problem. So, my contention is that instances of diversity
where whiteness remains the center of privilege, invisibility, and power are not genuine
instances of diversity at all. If diversity-talk is to be more robust, and if diversity at the level of lived experience is to be more
fruitful and vivacious, then it is necessary that we engage in the process of un-concealing whiteness, revealing its subtle dynamism and structure.
After all, without this pre-conditional critical work of naming whiteness, of critically engaging whiteness, diversity might simply function to
serve the hidden values of whites as a group; diversity might function as a way of feeding white moral narcissism; and, diversity might function
as a way of making whites comfortable, giving them a false sense of post-racial and post-racist arrival. What we really want to do, then, is to
make whiteness unsafe as a normative category. Therefore, it is important to put whiteness at risk. Otherwise, whiteness
can
maintain its stability precisely through the rhetoric of self-congratulatory processes as it
constructs its own safe vision of diversity. What is necessary is a discussion about diversity that raises the stakes, like
walking from Jerusalem to Jericho, where something is lost, where we disorient ourselves, were we dwell near others in a transformative
way, where we do not simply walk by and notice that which is different from us, but where we dwell near differences, where we tarry with
differences. So, before we can talk about happy stories of diversity, we must, as Sara Ahmed would say, hear unhappy stories about racism,1
specifically the way in which the Black body constitutes not a site of difference as the human other, but difference as the problematic other, the
other who is only allowed a voice so long as that voice does not disrupt whiteness as usual. The title of this essay How Can You Teach Me if
You Dont Know Me? suggests the idea that to know me as an embodied Black person it is necessary that I am actually heard, that is, that I
am not occluded by white voices from speaking from my own embodied experiences. Indeed, it is also important that my voice is not simply
rearticulated through a prism of white discourse that can and often does obfuscate the voices of people of color. Another way of thinking about
the critique of whiteness as implied within the title of this essay is to ask: How can you critically engage the theme of diversity if you dont know
yourself? This question gives the problem back to whites, signifying their own cognitive and emotive distortion vis--vis themselves. Indeed, the
heart of this question posed to whites involves a powerful act of transposition: How does it feel to be a white problem? Rethinking the term
nigger through the process of reversal, James Baldwin asks, But if I am not the nigger and if it is true that your invention reveals you, then
who is the nigger? Baldwin goes on to say, I give you your problem back. Youre the nigger, baby, it isnt me. As long as whites see
themselves as normative, and I am different qua nigger, diversity
will function as a cover, a political maneuver,

a mere empty gesture. Baldwins point forces us to ask: Will the real nigger please stand up?
Soft Power:
Soft Power is a tool to maintain hegemony.
Sakellaropoulos and Soitris, 08 (Spyros, Asst Prof of Social Policy Panteion University, and
Panagiotis, Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean 2008 Science & Society
proquest) D2
American neoconservative thinkers have the virtue of not retorting to cosmopolitan rhetoric, when
talking about U. S. foreign policy. They insist that there is no alternative to American leadership.
Many states have benefited from the world order created by U. S. power, and if the United States failed, the rest of the world would be in a much
worse situation (Kagan, 1998). Especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, many
scholars argued for the necessity of a

benevolent hegemony, which will have as its first objective the preservation and enhancement of
U. S. predominance by strengthening its security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests
and standing up for its principles around the world (Kristol and Kagan, 1996). Proponents of the
"Benevolent Hegemon" Thesis discredit European criticisms of American policy; Europeans, it is said, are
free to live in peace because there are Americans who safeguard diis peace (Kagan, 2002). For this benevolent hegemony to be
consolidated, U. S. supremacy is necessary, together with the order it secures. The U. S. strategy
appears in this view as an aggressive effort to safeguard capitalist social relations on a global
scale; to make sure that all the institutional arrangements necessary for the internationalization of
capital are in place all over the world, and that there are no obstacles to capital accumulation. While
U. S. strategy supports American firms and investments overseas, it also promotes a global collective capitalist interest.
It defends U. S. hegemony in the imperialist chain as the most powerful capitalist state and the
only state capable of safeguarding the long-term interest of all the major capitalist states, and in
this way to make sure that there will be no contestation of U. S. predominance. It is on the basis of
this effort to represent the global collective capitalist interest, and not sheer arrogance, that the national security strategy is very clear: the
United States will not hesitate to attack anyone (even a present ally) who opposes its dominant
position. The United States thus seeks to prevent the emergence of challengers, at either the
global or regional levels, by promoting international law, market economy and liberal democracy
(Posen and Ross, 1996-97, 34). From now on the USA must act as the sole superpower by
promoting its military dominance, including unilateral military action and pre-emptive use of
force (Hoffmann, 2003).
Soft power hides uses of heg

Darby 2k (Tom Darby, Tom Darby is Professor of Political Science, 2000 Bulletin of Science
Technology & Society, Vol. 20, No. 40, Who Has the Right to Rule the Planet?, azp) D2
Our technology at the end of this century is manifested by the disembodiment of power in the
form of the appearance of the invisible. This is why the power of technology during the time of
globalization often is referred to as soft power, soft because it is both malleable and boundless.
The power of such technology either appears benign or, because of its stealth, appears not to exist at all. Its use is always justified by that
abstraction called values. This
power is as soft and as illusive as the electronic image, itself. Mass

communication is both decentralized and dispersed power. It is also mass illusion and delusion in
that the more decentralized and dispersed it becomes, the less natural and historical reality exists. Given the world
picture, more and more people are coming to take the virtual as an improvement over the givens of nature and history, or they are simply
taking the virtual itself as the given, and therefore not questioning the picture they see. And so, we
flip on the TV. There is

CNN. But maybe not. Perhaps a talk show in Icelandic, Slovak, or Urdu. But for now, most are in
English. Tomorrow, perhaps in Chinese. Crudely put, news or talk about the news is history as
journalism, as Heidegger termed it (Heidegger, 1959). This is the world picturethe world as a
picturethe world pictured as a whole in which the past and future are zapped into an
electronic image of the present. The specific language matters less and less, for the format (the frame) increasingly is the same;
the content is conditioned by the context and the context by the perspective. Truth is relative, so they say, but this is not the point. Although
truth is relative to the perspective from which the world is being viewed, limiting thereby, both what one sees and how one interprets it, greater
numbers of people are seeing versions of the same picture. Thus, more and more people
are becoming less and less tied to

the little corners of their necessarily limiting standpoints, and are coming closer to what
Heidegger (1984) calls a standpoint without standpoint. This point is so obvious that it is likely to be missed (and
this is the point), because it is about that that defines us most but that we question least. It is about our Archimedean Point,
our technology, in general, and electronic technology, in particular.
Trying to help shift a country towards democracy is just a smokescreen for large
corporations and neoliberal exploitation
Neocosmos, 11 (Professor and Director of Global Movements Research at Monash University,
in Johannesburg. He is also a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of
the Western Cape, Michael, Mass mobilisation, democratic transition and transitional violence
in Africa, 2011-03-31, Issue 523, http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72163) D2
When political conditionalities proved insufficient, it was (and still is) always possible to
enforce such democracy, human rights and incorporation into the global order through the
deployment of military might, more or less justified by notions of humanitarian intervention. This
may simply have lengthened the process of transition but was never meant to alter its final outcome. In fact the transition is apparently a
never-ending one as the ideal of the West is rarely attained. The present then is turned into an ongoing transition to an
always-receding future, all along guaranteeing careers in the business of good governance. Moreover, the theoretical foundation of human rights
discourse (HRD), on which this whole reasoning was constructed, is that people are seen only as victims, in particular as victims of oppressive
regimes, and not as collective subjects of their own liberation. As such the
law along with its trustees (governments, transnational

and national NGOs, multinational agencies) are understood to be their saviours.[6] The neocolonial
relationship here should be apparent, not because HRD is in itself inherently colonial, but because it is a form of state politics
which is applied to neocolonial conditions with all the zeal of a democratizing mission.[7] It is these conditions which require elucidation and
analysis. The construction of indices as measures of democracy and the training by Western NGOs of experts from Africa in the use of these,
much in the same way as indices had been constructed in the past in order to measure development, evidently shows how politics has been
reduced to a technical process, for only a technique can be quantitatively measured.[8] Democratisation which ultimately has its roots in
the struggles of people from all walks of life for greater control over their daily lives hence in the self-constitution of a demos is now
placed into the hands of experts such as human rights

lawyers, social entrepreneurs, governance professionals and gender mainstreamers who together staff an industry whose
tentacles hold up the liberal global hydra of the new imperial democratising mission on the continent.
Rather than a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, what occurred on the
African continent during the 1990s can be more profitably understood as a process of systematic depoliticisation, a process of political exclusion. If we agree with the philosopher Jacques Rancire that politics begins exactly
transformed into a technical process removed from popular control and
when those who cannot do something show that in fact they can[9], then it is not difficult to visualise de-politicisation as a process whereby
those same people are being convinced that they really are quite incapable, that they did not do anything significant, new or different after all,
despite what they may or may not have thought, as it would have all happened anyway and that in any case their work is now over. Everyone
should return to their allotted place in the social structure and vacate the field of politics, leaving it to those who know how to follow
unquestioningly the rules of the game (of the state): The trustees of the excluded. In fact if historicist categories are preferred, this process could
be described as a never-ending transition from the inventive politics of popular agency to the oppressive technicism of state and imperial power.
Time:
Time cant function on a normative plane because of the functions of white
supremacist violence that renders black existence impossible
Dillion13{Stephen; University of Minnesota; Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the
Neoliberal-Carceral State; University of Minnesota Conservancy; accessed 8/23/15 @
8:23PM}AvP
In this chapter, I continue to consider time in relation to how radical and revolutionary activists theorized the formation of the neoliberal-carceral
state in the 1970s United States. In chapter one, I argued that the neoliberal-carceral state is possessed by the racialized, gendered, and financial
logics of chattel-slavery. More specifically, I focused on neoliberalism to argue that
the market is a system of

dispersed biopolitical control symbiotically enmeshed with the prison and animated by the
antiblackness of chattel-slavery. This chapter builds on the concerns of the first by asking, if time does not pass, but
accumulates, then what did the future of the prison and neoliberalism look like from the 1970s when both formations were
rising to a new level of dominance? In particular, I explore what I call the temporality of violence. As I document,
racialized and gendered forms of violence undo homogenous conceptions of time. Possession is one
temporality of violence where the past takes hold of the present. Yet, possession also has
profound implications for the future. When one centers racialized and gendered forms of violence in a theory of
history, time does not flow evenly, progressing into a better or unknown future. Instead, violence can
slow time, reverse it, loop it, make it stop or rush by in a moment of terror; it can also make
it disappear forever. This chapter explores different conceptions of the relationship between time, race, gender, and violence. It
examines two contrasting visions of how neoliberalism and the prison were connected to time and the future: I analyze the rhetoric of late 1960s
law and order politicians and the epistemologies of 1970s underground revolutionaries.162 Specifically, I examine how a discourse
about time and the future was used by proponents of law and order to suture the freedom of the
market to the incapacitation of the prison. In addition, I explore how underground revolutionary activists named this process through a nonnormative engagement with temporality. While the last chapter considered how the past is theorized in the writings of imprisoned (and at one
time underground) revolutionary black women, this chapter analyzes the writings of 1970s imprisoned radicals and underground revolutionaries,
most of whom identified as women, in order to examine how they theorized the prison and the market in relation to time and the future. It
contrasts these revolutionary visions to the dreams of people like Nixon who understood the prison and the market as foundational to the security
and order of the nation and its future. Indeed, for Nixon and others, the very possibility of a future depended on the immobilization of those
rendered surplus or resistant to new economic regimes structured around privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation, and financialization. In
other words, embedded in the emergent discourses of the neoliberal-carceral state was a vision of the futureone where the freedom of
individuality and the market required the mass immobilization of the prison. By contrasting statist and underground forms of knowledge about
the prison and market, I argue that underground activists produced a theory of time and history that understood law and order as a way for the
prison and market to colonize the future.
Tech:
Their use of technology is rooted in a white power matrix makes colonial genocide
inevitable and necessary
Dinerstein 6 (Joel Dinerstein, Associate Professor James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization Director, New Orleans
Center for the Gulf South Director, American Studies Program the author of an award-winning cultural study of jazz and industrialization,
Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture (2003), as well as several articles theorizing the concept of cool in
postwar jazz, film noir, and literature. He is the co-curator and co-author of American Cool, an American Studies and photography exhibit
opening at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in February 2014. He has served as a consultant for popular music and jazz for Putomayo
Records, HBO's Boardwalk Empire, the NEH, and several university presses. He received the Student Body Award for Excellence in
Undergraduate Teaching in 2005 and teaches courses at the intersection of modernism, popular culture, African-American Studies, and
contemporary literature. He is a jazz DJ on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans and writes often on the city's second-line culture. He is currently
finishing up a cultural history, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago, 2015). "Technology and Its Discontents: On the
Verge of the Posthuman". American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 3, September 2006, Pgs. 569-595 (Article). PWoods)
Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American
superiority within modernity, and its underlying mythos always traffics in what James W. Carey
once called secular religiosity.3 Lewis Mumford called the American belief system mechanoidolatry as early as 1934; a few years later he deemed it our mechano-centric religion. David
F. Noble calls this ideology the religion of technology in a work of the same name that traces
its European roots to a doctrine that combines millenarianism, rationalism, and Christian
redemption in the writings of monks, explorers, inventors, and NASA scientists. If we take into
account the functions of religion and not its rituals, it is not a deity who insures the American
future but new technologies: smart bombs in the Gulf War, Viagra and Prozac in the pharmacy,
satellite TV at home. It is not social justice or equitable economic distribution that will reduce
hunger, greed, and poverty, but fables of abundance and the rhetoric of technological utopianism.
The United States is in thrall to techno-fundamentalism, in Siva Vaidhyanathans apt phrase; to
Thomas P. Hughes, a god named technology has possessed Americans. Or, as public policy
scholar Edward Wenk Jr. sums it up, we are . . . inclined to equate technology with civilization
[itself].4 Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology. Yet scholars of
whiteness rarely engage technology as a site of dominant white cultural practices (except in
popular culture), and scholars of technology often sidestep the subtext of whiteness within this
mythos. The underlying ideology and cultural practices of technology were central to American
studies scholarship in its second and third generations, but the field has marginalized this critical
framework; it is as if these works of (mostly) white men are now irrelevant to the fields central
concerns of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity on the one hand, and power, empire,
and nation on the other. In this essay I will integrate some older works into the fields current
concerns to situate the current posthuman discourse within an unmarked white tradition of
technological utopianism that also functions as a form of social evasion. By the conclusion, I
hope to have shown that the posthuman is an escape from the panhuman. This is an important
moment to grapple with the relationship of technology and whiteness since many scientists,
inventors, and cognitive philosophers currently hail the arrival of the posthuman. This
emergent term represents the imminent transformation of the human body through GNR
technologiesG for genetic engineering or biotechnology, N for nanotechnology, and R for
robotics. The posthuman, as N. Katherine Hayles defined it in How We Became Posthuman
(2000), implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and
multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological
organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed. To be reductive, the
posthuman envisions the near future as one in which humans are cyborgsin which the human
organism is, for all practical purposes, a networked being composed of multiple human-machine
interfaces. Underlying cultural beliefs in technological determinism matched with the inalienable
right of consumer desire will soon produce what even cautious critics call a social
transformation at the level of the individual body, as consumers purchase genetic enhancements
(to take one example). In other words, steroids, cloning, gene mapping, and surgical implants are
just the tip of an iceberg that, when it melts, will rebaptize human beings as cyborgs.5 William J.
Mitchell calls this new self-concept Me++a pun on the computer language C++and claims
this future is already present. When Mitchell claims to routinely exist in the condition . . . [of]
man-computer symbiosis, or that he now interact[s] with sensate, intelligent, interconnected
devices scattered throughout my environment, who can argue with him? An eminent design
theorist and urban planner at MIT, Mitchell breezily describes a near future of high-tech
wearables with implanted computers (e.g., clothes, eyeglasses, shoes) that extend our sense of
self over an increasingly permeable body surface. If each person is jacked in to dozens of
computers within a few millimeters of the human shell, will that transform human nature (as
many GNR enthusiasts claim)? As Mitchell declares, increasingly I just dont think of this as
computer interaction, but as something like an expansive self. Me++ is a consumer gold rush:
the evolution of the fragile human body into a silicon-based cyborg with superhuman capacities.
Heres a complementaryand unexceptionalclaim from Rodney A. Brooks, the chair of the
Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT: We are about to become our machines . . . [we] will morph
into machines. Brooks admits this process may bring short-term metaphysical confusion, but he
assures readers in Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us that GNR technologies will
bring long-term progress.6 What do claims for man-computer symbiosis have to do with
whiteness and religion? Brooks and Mitchell are technological determinists for whom the blithe
morphing of the human organism into cyborgs recapitulates the Western tendency to universalize
its own perspective. Their works consider the coming of GNR technologies as inevitable,
progressive, and beneficial, and their rhetoric assumes universal, equitable distribution of such
changes. Moreover, their disregard of social realities perpetuates an unspoken racialized (white)
narrative of exclusion that treats technology as an autonomous aspect of cultural production
illuminating the road to a utopian future that will not require social or political change.7
Technological progress has long structured Euro-American identity, and it functions as a prop for
a muted form of social Darwinismeither might makes right, or survival of the fittest. Here
is the techno-cultural matrix: progress, religion, whiteness, modernity, masculinity, the future.
This matrix reproduces an assumed superiority over societies perceived as static, primitive,
passive, Communist, terrorist, or fundamentalist (depending on the era). The historian of
technology Carroll Pursell points out that the most significant engine and marker of modernity
is technology ([which is] almost always seen as masculine in our society), and that only the
West invokes modernity as a signal characteristic of its self-definition.8 In Machines as the
Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Michael Adas
traced the rhetoric of technology as it became the primary measure of intelligence, rationality,
and the good society, supplanting Christianity for nineteenth-century colonial powers. Weapons,
mass production, and communication networks became the fetishes of colonial dominance and
racial superiority, which were disseminated (for example) in numerous British best sellers
through binary opposites of dominance/passivity: machine versus human or animal power;
science versus superstition and myth; synthetic versus organic; progressive versus stagnant.9
Such oppositions still inform contemporary theories of Western superiority (e.g., the clash of
civilizations, the end of history). Casting preindustrial (or premodern) peoples as risk-averse
and enslaved to obsolescent ideologiesthat is, as not progressingsentences them to secondclass status with regard to the future. Sturken and Thomas ask two crucial questions about the
role of technology in the American cultural imagination: Why are emergent and new
technologies the screens onto which our culture projects such a broad array of social concerns
and desires?, and consequently, Why is technology the object of such unrealistic
expectations? I extrapolate the following two answers from the fields critical framework, by
way of Leo Marx, Kasson, Nye, Carey, and Noble (among many others). New technologies help
maintain two crucial Euro-American myths: (1) the myth of progress and (2) the myth of white,
Western superiority.10 In a given society, a myth functions as a play of past paradigm and future
possibility, according to Laurence Coupes study, an act of remembering and re-creating the
sacred narratives of the past. Progress secularized the idea of Christian redemption by inventing
(and instantiating) a near-sacred temporal zonethe futureto contain its man-made utopian
dreams. A myth cannot be declared in rational terms; it resist[s] completion in order to keep up
its dialectic . . . of memory and desire, of ideology and utopia. For a myth to have cultural
force, it must be unarticulated; it works as a disclosure rather than . . . a dogma, an opening
into unspoken systems of belief.11 Technological progress is the telos of American culture, the
herald of the future, the mythic proof in the nations self-righteous pudding. Nowhere . . . can
we find a master narrative so deeply entrenched in popular imagination and popular language as
the mythic idea of progress, notes the historian of technology John Staudenmeier, particularly
technological progress. Yet at the intellectual level, historians Carl Becker and J. B. Bury
deconstructed the myth nearly a century ago. Becker even identified progress as a covalent
religion at the 1935 Stanford lectures: the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a
symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a philosophy of human destiny. For both Bury and
Becker, the myth of social progress emerged from the Enlightenment idea of the perfectibility of
man through the application of reason. That man-made future would be a more just, more
peaceful, and less hierarchical republican society based on the consent of the governed. Instead,
over two centuries, technology has piggybacked onto social progress by creating the rush of
change without social improvement.12 We have confused rapidity of change with advance,
John Dewey wrote in a 1916 essay titled Progress, and four years later noted that these four
facts[]. . . natural science, experimentation, control, and progress[]have been inextricably
bound up together. For Dewey, the attitude . . . toward change itself had changed during the
Enlightenment due to scientific advance. What had once been the Christian idea of the
millennium of good and bliss had been reworked into a man-made ideal spoken of under the
names of indefinite perfectibility, progress, and evolution. The result was that the Golden Age
for the first time in history was placed in the future instead of at the beginning. Once the future
replaced heaven as the zone of perfectibilityas powered by technologyprogress began to
function as a religious myth that substituted a sacralized temporal zone (the future) for a sacred
spatial one (Heaven).13 The sacraments of this belief system are new technological products.
The presumption of a continuous flow of new technologies has been inscribed in the cultural
imagination and has become a teleological signifier of social progress that helps to structure the
nations self-congratulatory can-do optimism in a better future. As historian Michael L. Smith
summed it up, the artifacts of technological innovation[from] electric lights, automobiles,
airplanes, [to] personal computershave come to signify progress . . . [and] Americans have
been asked to visualize the future as a succession of unimaginable new machines and
products.14 More than a century ago, Edward Bellamy, himself a lay pastor preaching a vision
of technologically driven utopia in Looking Backward, caught the paradox: This craze for more
and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes, coupled with apparent
complete indifference as to whether mankind derived any ultimate benefit from them or not can
only be understood . . . [as] one of those strange epidemics of insane excitement which have been
known to affect whole populations at certain periods. Rational explanation it has none. Yet the
hunger for greater and wider invention has not ebbed; its not the tulip craze. It is instead the
sign of a cultural dis-ease, of an ongoing gold rush of the American mind. At sites such as the
EPCOT center, Americans pay for the privilege of being indoctrinated into a progressive
history of technology and faith in a sanitized, inexorably beneficial, technological future.15
For the GNR enthusiasts (as I will call them), the agency of progress has shiftedfrom society
(social planning, good government, virtuous leadership) to the individual (quality-of-life,
obtainable through constant consumption). In a sense, the Enlightenment utopia of the mindas
the rational host of selfcontrol, self-mastery, and perfectibilityhas shifted to the body. As selfactualization now seems possible through technological advance, the body has become the locus
of consumer desire and the (literal) base for layers of technological prosthetics. As Vivian
Sobchack notes, the desire for transformation through technology has . . . detached itself from
visions of rationality and [social] progress and attached itself (with some anxiety) to more
subjective states of technological being.16 In other words, social relations will not improve
through moral elevation or a more equitable distribution of resources, but through self-mastery
available over the counter. Social progress was vested in a faith in political institutions,
centralized planning, and democratic participation. As late as the 1970s, the utopian ideals of
technological transformation tended more toward the national (transportation networks, nuclear
energy, NASA) and even the domestic (consumer appliances, television) than the personal. The
desire for technological transformation of subjective statesvia the bodycan be traced to
the simultaneous emergence of miniaturized electronics (e.g., the Walkman, video games, cell
phones), psychotropic drugs, and the Internet. The 800-pound gorilla in the discursive room is
the need for a new definition of the humanwithout which the term posthuman is
meaningless. In various ways, this is at the heart of Sherry Turkles and Donna Haraways work,
of cognitive scientists and philosophers from Daniel Dennett to Francisco Varela, and in the
utopian claims of futurists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil.17 A few years ago, veteran
Washington Post editor Joel Garreau wondered why the past generations technological changes
transformed work and home, but left social and political life unchanged. Where is the social
impact of this change? Where is the Reformation? Who are the new Marxists? he wondered.
Turns out theyre GNR enthusiasts, and theyre predicting the [imminent] transcendence of
human nature. At first blinded by cultural lag, Garreau has produced a balanced presentation of
posthuman utopian claims in Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds,
Our Bodiesand What It Means to Be Human. Of course, many non-Western peoples are (by
and large) locked out of the discussion since the symbiosis of human and technology
excludes them (almost by definition). So if, as Sturken and Thomas claim, new technologies are
always a Rorschach test for the collective concerns of a particular age, what does the
enthusiasm for the posthuman say about postmodern consumer society?18 Such a scenario
seems tailor-made for the field, since American studies produced the critical framework
necessary to confront this question directly: Are our new, improved cyborg bodies waiting for us
just around the bend, or is this just another cycle of technological utopianism promoted through
Leo Marxs rhetoric of the technological sublime?19 That is the guiding question of this
article. Building on this long introduction, I will first sketch the roots of technological worship in
the European past, and then map the posthuman discourse onto the resultant myths of progress
and the Adamic. In the conclusion, I will address the two most important questions: What are the
consequences of the myth of technological progress as it informs white, Western superiority?
What possibilities open up if the myth can be delegitimated at the level of national identity? This
is an exploratory essay into a more conscious future. If technology is equivalent to dominion
over Nature, then the religion of technology (according to Noble) emerged from a few early
medieval monks who resurrected the symbolic ideal of the original Adam. They believed the preFallen Adam, immortal and created in the divine likeness, was recoverable through individual
piety and work in the mechanic arts, such that men could be co-workers with God in making
over the planet to prepare for the second coming. The reach of this concept is long (as I will
show), but an American strain took shape in nineteenth-century New England. In his classic
work The American Adam (1955), R. W. B. Lewis showed how American writers secularized the
Puritan ideal of a new Jerusalem by sending male loners out to the frontier, where each could
work for a restoration of Adamic perfection, knowledge, and dominion, [and] a return to Eden.
For Oliver Wendell Holmes, only science could bring the new man, and such restoration
would owe much to technological transformation. Lewis illuminates a pattern in the texts of
Cooper, Whitman, and Thoreau, wherein male bodies mark territory in new (and potentially
redemptive) landscapes: The hero of the new adventure [was] an individual emancipated from
history . . . self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid
of his own unique and inherent resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation,
that the new hero . . . was more easily identified with Adam before the Fall.20 The concept of the
Adamic is invested in recuperating an Edenic purity earned through virtuous work: it informs the
Euro-American myth of Columbuss discovery, Euro-American dreams of space, and the
posthuman. A quick sketch is in order. The first intellectual figure to valorize the mechanic arts
(i.e., technology) as a means to access the divine was an influential ninth-century Irish monk,
John Scotus Erigena. Calling the mechanic arts divinely inspired, Erigena elevated practical
activity to works of grace and helped masculinize carpentry and crafts. His writings provided an
ideological foundation to the medieval industrial revolution of the twelfth-century homosocial
monastic world. As Mumford showed in Technics and Civilization, the creation of watermills,
windmills, the spring wheel, and the mechanical clock, along with innovative mechanisms for
metal forging and ore crushing, created early systems of mass production that valorized order,
rationality, and system; the creation of steady mechanical power created new methods of milling,
tanning, and blacksmithing. What Noble calls the monastic mechanization of the crafts found
its sublime dynamic agent in waterpower and its sublime artistic form in the cathedrals that
formed a sacred geography in Europe for five centuries.21 The next conceptual element in the
Adamic was provided by a twelfth-century Italian monk, Joachim of Fiore, who called for an
avant-garde of spiritual men to act as agents of the second coming and recover mankinds
original perfection. His influential ideas were later taken up by Francis Bacon, whose widely
read utopian work, The New Atlantis, published in 1627, imagined a society in which humankind
became purified through rational order as applied to social organization; in other words, he
imagined a monastic society on a national level. The engineering school is the center of learning
in Bacons work, and he called it The College of the Six Days Work; the spiritual men were in
charge of a second, rational, man-made creation (Six Days) meant to improve and redeem the
first. The influence of The New Atlantis on the history of science, technology, exploration, and
globalization cannot be overestimated: it served as a literary blueprint for the Royal Society of
London and anticipated the modern industrial laboratory.22 In an American context, Columbus
arrives as one of those spiritualized menthe embodiment of cutting-edge maritime
technology. Columbuss closest friends were monks and Franciscan friars, and he spent a great
deal of time in monasteries. Columbuss hunger for finding a passage to the Indies was always
couched in the language (and vision) of Gods purpose and the practice of the sailors art [that]
predisposes one . . . to know the secrets of the world. Columbus called his voyages to the New
World an enterprise to Jerusalem, and wrote that God made me the messenger of the new
heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me
the spot where to find it. After his second voyage, Columbus walked the streets of Cadiz and
Seville in sackcloth; he was dressed on his deathbed in a Franciscan habit and buried in a
Carthusian monastery. As many scholars have noted, after Columbus, paradise became . . . a
place, and I will not here rehearse the vision of the New World as a site to redeem an exhausted
Europe through domestication, improvement, and progress, from the parable of The Tempest to
Europes second discovery of America through technologyFordism, Taylorism, aviation,
speed, and skyscrapersas rendered in Hughess American Genesis.23 The rise of a scientific
perspective and the waning of religion during the Enlightenment created fertile ground for
transforming the sacred image of the human organism into a mechanical one. For Mumford, the
worship of machines by white elites was a fait accompli by the late seventeenth centurythe
world [had] a new Messiah: the machineand this faith was manifested in the compulsive
urge toward mechanical development without regard for . . . the development in human
relations. My touchstone would be Julian Offray de la Mettries Man, a Machine (1748). To de
la Mettrie, human beings were a collection of springs which wind each other up, the human
body a large watch powered by wheels, and the soul itself nothing but an enlightened
machine. At first reviled, the idea of the human machine became a commonplace in the
nineteenth century. This fusion of the religious and the mechanical helped usher in an
astonishingly fertile period of domestic invention between 1830 and 1860. Leo Marx found in
the technological discourse of the period a palpable sense that inventors [believe they] are
uncovering the ultimate structural principles of the universe.24 More important, in the midnineteenth century technology and the Adamic come together at the level of national myth. In his
brilliant synthetic work, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New
Beginnings, David E. Nye found that nearly all Euro-American foundational narratives of
nineteenth-century frontier settlement understood their right to the land, not as the New
Jerusalem of the Puritans, but as the technological transformation of an untouched space.
Whether by the axe, the mill, the canal, the steamboat, the railroad, the dam, or the steel plow,
the technology caused a chain of events, allowing the settlers to participate in what they called
a second creation. The white settlers legitimated their presence from New England to
California by putting forth the technology as the agent that conquered the wilderness, thus
eviscerating Native American (i.e., first creation) claims to the land, and giving the United
States nothing less than a national myth of origin. Heres the boilerplate: A group enters an
undeveloped region, and using one or more new technologies . . . transforms a part of the
region. The region becomes prosperous, attracts new settlers, and the original landscape
disappears and is replaced by a second creation largely shaped by the new technology. The
narratives are often written or told in the passive voice and emphasize the technology as the
agent of a developmental process. It is a minor-key version of manifest destiny, one town at a
timean exemplary tale of progressoften told less for the purpose of establishing national
borders than to justify the assimilation of nature for industrial society. To use Heideggers
well-known terms, Americans began to enframe naturenatural resourcesas a set of raw
materials, as standing-reserve for human consumption.25 All founding myths partake in
religious concepts: they posit a story of origin, explain a peoples right to a given geography, and
grant a transcendent reason for that existence (in this case, progress and improvement). Nyes
analysis reveals how the concept of the Adamic evolved here from an individual, male ideal to a
group (and then national) identity as a result of frontier experiences. Instead of a transhistorical
symbolic ideal of a materialist, autonomous male (Adam), a group of bodies laid claim to a new
land through their participation in its (technological) improvement. In other words, EuroAmerican bodies affirmed their right to new geographical space without recourse to conquest
narratives; instead, this technological creation story became the formula for justifying the
improv[ement] of any Eden whose inhabitants were few or ignorant or lacked a railroad. One
of Nyes myriad examples is an 1859 lecture by Abraham Lincoln on inventions in which he
proclaimed that old fogie, father Adam . . . [was] a very perfect physical man, but he lacked
sophisticated communication networks (the telegraph, the railroad), did not enjoy food brought
from the other side of the world, and was thus no equal of Young America. The New Adam
was Young America.26 The fusion of progress, technology, and religion into a white mythology
is then continually reinscribed. The massive social transformations brought on by telegraph,
railroad, and electricity created a sense that technology was white magic (to use Franco
Morettis term), and the awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity . . . [became] directed
toward technology. History as a record of . . . progress became doctrine during the
Enlightenment, but with rapid industrialization . . . the notion of progress became palpable;
improvements were visible to anyone. As new machines continually altered the workplace, as
communication and transportation networks collapsed time and space, modernity became a
social fact: ones life did not resemble ones parents or grandparents lives. As Marx summed up
the transformative moment, To look at a steamboat [or a locomotive] . . . is to see the sublime
progress of the race.27 The markers of the difference were machines, technological products,
and the effects of technological networks. Carey and Quirk revealed the role of the future in
this ideological mix, and showed how Americans colonize this temporal zone with the utopian
repercussions of new technological networks. Their examples were the telegraph, railroad,
telephone, electricity, automobiles, and finally, computers; for each, advocates predicted a new
day and a radical discontinuity from history. This quasi-sacred nature of technology has
marked it, for Americans, as a force outside history and politics. Technology thus becomes the
prime mover of an ongoing millenarian impulse, and futurists (public relations workers,
scientists, writers, and businessmen) cast themselves . . . [as] secular theologians composing
theodicies for . . . [their] technological progeny. For example, utopian claims for computers in
the 1970s were seen less as marketing reports than as dispatches from the futures frontlines by
self-abnegating servants plugged in to the truth and the future as determined by the inexorable
advance of science and technology. Grafting the rhetoric of technological revolutions onto the
millennial impulse creates the necessary conditions for the mythic system of progress; over and
over again in contemporary futurology, the emergent technological network reboots the
national faith. In modern futurism, Carey wrote as if anticipating posthuman rhetoric, it is the
machines that possess teleological insight.28
Terrorism:
Their terrorism advantage is based on the exportation of a violent anxiety and fear
of raced bodies
Ghraib to Stockton to bagong 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 uS-commandeered 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 selfcontained 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
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
still in dispute (those of army specialist Joseph Darby) most
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
Alt:
Solvency:
No form of metaphysical or structural re-positioning can liberate blackness, because
the concept of emancipation is problematic in a world where anti blackness is a
necessity and a constant. Nothing can restore the black from the void of existence, in
a world predicated on their absence. The very foundation of production relies on the
notion of non being. Thus nothing can happen, the dream of progress is a false
dream, no matter how many Political Victories becoming human is an oxymoron.
Wilderson 08 (Frank B Wilderson III. Biko and the Problematic of Presence Page 287,
Frank is a professor of African America Studies and Drama @ UC Irvine. July 2008)
The importance of this for our meditation on Bikos Black Consciousness can be stated simply: empowerment
predicated on Black
Consciousness can only impact/liberate the Black at the level of preconscious interests and at the level of
unconscious identifications; but not at the level of structural positionality. Psychic disalienation is
therefore a problematic conception of emancipation in a world where anti-Blackness is a structural
necessity and a paradigmatic constant. Black Consciousness cannot restore the Black to a world
predicated on his/her absence. No matter what Blacks do (fight in the realm of preconscious interest or heal disalienation in
the realm of unconscious desire), Blackness cannot attain relationality. Whereas Humans are positioned on the
plane of being and, thus, are present, alive, through struggles of/for/through/over recognition, Blacks can
neither attain nor contest the plane of recognition. That is to say Black Human remains an oxymoron
regardless of political victories in the social order or the psychic health of the mind ; not because of the
intransigence of White racism, or the hobble of the talking cure in the face of hallucinatory whitening, but because were there to be a place and
time for Blacks, cartography and temporality would be impossible. My black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes; but my Black
being has no resistance in the eyes of the White man. 48 The first clause is a central tenet in the assumptive logic of Steve
Bikos Black Consciousness. It speaks to the register of preconscious interests and, perhaps, unconscious identifications. But t he second
clause points to a partition between how the Black imagines him/herself ( the interests of Black Consciousness and
attempts to disalienate the psyche) and how the Black is positioned (as a dead entity in a paradigm of living entities).
My Black consciousness may well be immanent in my eyes, but my eyes are not Human eyes, they are
Black, unworldly, eyes. Thus, my gaze, a blackened gaze, cannot reposition me, cannot restore me to a
paradigm whose coherencethat is the integrity of Humanity at every scale: the national, the civic, the
domestic, the corporealis predicated on the production and reproduction of my nonbeing. I am not a
weak cousin, or a stepchild within the paradigm; rather I have no claims to relationality writ large.49 And my cry
to the contrary, my Black consciousness or Negritude, does not restore me to relationality; it makes me crazy, or religious, or provisionally
empowered. It is an unworldly claim upon the worlda leap of faith. Through it I may find a place in heaven (or in hell) but I remain unplaced
here on earth.
Carry out political apostasy through black nihilism. Refuse to participate in and
thus uphold the Politics of anti-blackness.
The black nihilist recognizes that relying on the Political and its grammar offers nothing more
than a ruse of transformation and an exploited hope. Instead of atheism, the black nihilist would
embrace political apostasy: it is the act of abandoning or renouncing a situation of unethicality
and immorality in this sense, the Political itself. The apostate is a figure that selfexcommunicates him-/herself from a body that is contrary to its fundamental belief system. As
political apostate, the black nihilist renounces the idol of anti-blackness but refuses to participate
in the ruse of replacing one idol with another. The Political and Godthe just and true God in
Carters analysis are incommensurate and inimical. This is not to suggest that we can exclude
God, but that any recourse to the Political results in an immorality not in alignment with Godly
principles (a performative contradiction). The project to align God with the Political (political
theology) will inevitably fail. If anti-blackness is contrary to our beliefs, self-excommunication,
in other words black nihilism, is the only position that seems consistent. We can think of
political apostasy, then, as an active nihilism when an alternative political arrangement is
impossible. When faced with the impossibility of realizing the not-yet-social order, political
apostasy becomes an empowered hermeneutical practice; it interprets the anti-black Political
symbolic as inherently wicked and rejects it both as critique and spiritual practice.
2NC Alt Solves

Black Nihilism is an illegible grammar to political discourse- this is an epistemology
that rejects the bio political imperative of knowledge.
The problem that we encounter is that black nihilism is reduced to an anti-black epistemology
the illegible grammar that speaks through the black body , psyche, and spirit
is forcibly, and erroneously, translated in to an epistemology that is inimical to its meaning.
Black nihilism cannot be reduced to an anti-black foundation of knowledge (or metaphysics), and when
this translation, this compulsory alignment of knowledge, fails to explain or understand the black nihilist,
black nihilism is considered pathological and must be disciplined, contained, and, ultimately,
destroyed. If all knowledge must submit to a bio-political imperative, then the
socially dead object is always already situated at an impasse in relation to this imperative:
either one lives in bad faiththe optimistic and politically hopeful belief that anti-black
structures can be transformed to provide vitality to blackness, despite all evidence to the contrary or
one lives as the pathogen (i.e., socially pathological) and risks increased vulnerability to violent
state apparatuses. In other words, the pathological behavior that West and Brogdon bemoan as selfdestructive, pessimistic, and apathetic from black youth is a gross misreading. Perhaps this
pathology is a way of speaking otherwise when other forms of discourse are
inaccessible; the nihilist might have to assume an anti-grammatical enunciation to express the
inexpressible. West and Brogdon subject this anti grammar to an anti-black epistemology,
which mandates that all action must align with its bio-political imperative .
When this forced translation fails, the nihilist is labeled pathological , troubled,
faithless, suicidal, fatalistic, and reckless. Hermeneutical nihilism challenges this
domination and allows incommensurate grammars to exist. The strategy of forced alignment
translation as dominationis a tool of the Political designed to preserve its
metaphysical organization. Bio-politics will always fail the politically dead
object because bio-politics depends on the politically dead black object to
constitute itself. If political integration is the dream of the optimists, it will result in nothing more
than what Achille Mbembe (2003) calls the necropolitical (40).In this context, we can define necropolitics as the distribution of fraudulent hope that leaves the subject endangered.
Perm:
Frontline:
1. The perm inscribes meaning into the political and to the world. It promotes a
futurity that is not accessible to the black subject. Proves that the perm is just
as bad as the aff and there is mutual exclusivity
Warren 15 (Calvin Warren. Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living.
https://www.academia.edu/21900566/Black_Interiority_Freedom_and_the_Impossibility_of_
Living) Kguy
Meaning itself is an aspect of anti-blackness, such that meaning is lost for the black; blacks live in a
world of absurdity, and this existential absurdity is meaning for the world. Meaninglessness is really all
there is (or we could say that real meaning for the world is utter meaninglessness) . In an interview
with Mark Sinker, Greg Tate provided are conceptualization of meaning when he stated, the bar
between the signifier and the signified could be understood as standing for the Middle passage that
separated signification from sign (Sinker 1991). The very structure of meaning in the modern world
signifier, signified, signification, and signdepends on anti-black violence for its constitution. Not only
does the trauma of the Middle passage rupture the signifying process, but it also instantiates a
meaningless sign as the foundation of language, meaning, and social existence itself . Following the
work of Nicolas Abrahamand Maria Torok(1986),we could suggest that the meaninglessness of antiblack violence is the crypt-signifier that organizes the modern world and its institutions. Any
meaning that is articulated possesses a kernel of absurdity that blacks embody as fleshy signs. The
meaninglessness that Cornel West bemoans is nothing more than the kernel of nonsense that an antiblack world attempts to conceal with its discourses of hope and futurity. What the black nihilist does is
bring this meaninglessness to the fore and disclose it in all of its terroristic historicity.
2. Perm is severance- they are able to remove themselves from their starting
point within civil society- this detaches them from their ptx and thats a
voting issue because it steals neg ground.
3. Invasion DA: White Supremacy desires to control spaces such as debate to
promote its own goal. The Perm is an instance of that.
4. Ruined Survival Strategy DA: This is an example of the state getting into
Black life. Our performance of the 1nc was an imagination of a world without
the state. They are actively suppressing blackness by messing up survival
strategies which actively recreates violence and erasure.
5. Rejection of political hope is our only hope
Warren 15 (Calvin Warren. Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living.
https://www.academia.edu/21900566/Black_Interiority_Freedom_and_the_Impossibility_of_
Living) Kguy
Following Kant and other postmetaphysical philosophers, the critical field questions (and in
some circles completely denounces) a certain spiritual predisposition to the worldthat
unknowable noumenon that limits Reason but provides the condition of possibility for its
organization of the world of perception, phenomenon. The problem with the critical questioning
of the spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then, insidiously, translates
them into the scientific or the knowable, as a way to both capitalize on the mystic power of the
spiritual and to preserve the spiritual under the guise of enlightened understanding. We find
this deceptive translation and capitalization of spiritual substance within the sphere of the
Politicalthat use subject organization of social existence through political institutions,
mandates, logics, and grammarsas a way to govern and discipline beings. If we think of hope
as a spiritual concepta concept that always escapes confinement within scientific discourse
then we can suggest that hope constitutes a spiritual currency that we are given as an
inheritance to invest in various aspects of existence. The issue, however, is that there is often a
compulsory investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. This is the forced destination
of hopeit must end up in the Political and cannot exist outside of it (or any existence of hope
outside the political subverts, compromises, and destroys hope itself. Like placing a fish out of
water. It is as if hope only has intelligibility and efficacy within and through the Political). Put
differently, the politics of hope posits that one must have a politics to have hope; politics is the
natural habitat of hope itself. To reject hope in a nihilistic way, then, is really to reject the
politics of hope, or certain circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing
Do the Alt or Aff

1. That severs the 1ACs epistemology voting issue for fairness makes the aff
a moving target
2. Groundthey can win disads to the alt like short-term impactsforces
defense of their methodology they should have 8 mins of offense k2 fairness
and education
Non Mutually Exclusive

1. That severs the 1ACs epistemology we should be able to garner offense
from the way they represent the debate space k2 Groundthey can win
disads to the alt like short-term impactsforces defense of their methodology
they should have 8 mins of offense k2 fairness and education - Worst-case
you reject the perm and default to the alt.
Alt then Aff

1. That severs the 1ACs epistemology, actor and plan immeadicay voting issue
for fairness makes the aff a moving target
and education
Aff then Alt

1. Cant solve that continues this sort of legal enframing we critique if were
winning a risk of our impacts theres no reason to vote on this perm.
2. That severs the 1ACs epistemology voting issue for fairness makes the aff
a moving target
and education
All Other Instances

1. Our link proves we cant we critique the affs orientation with the political
which means we have to refocus our attention AGAINST the law this could
be our only chance to do so, callister says its try or die against the squo.
2. The permutation either is severance or doesnt solve- severance of
representations is bad because it screws negative offense- you have to punish
their bad view of the world its a voting issue
3. The links prove that the aff draws lines of legality refuse that oscillation
between inside and outside
Edkins and Pin-Fat 05. Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol
Aberystwyth University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at
Manchester Universit, Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005 34: pg. 14
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoeand bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in
Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique
of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked
life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the
elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a
mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite.
Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between
forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be
contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this
challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign
power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign powers assumption of the right to
draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within
this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not only to
contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort
sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or
fighting over where the lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed,
it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that
lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such strategies
contest the violence of sovereign powers drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such
violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail
to refuse sovereign powers line-drawing ethos, an ethos which, as Agamben points out,
renders us all now homines sacri or bare life. Taking Agambens conclusion on board, we now
turn to look at how the assumption of bare life can produce forms of challenge. Agamben puts it
in terms of a transformation: This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be
transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly
exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe-.... If we give the name form-of-life to
this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains
inseparable from it we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain
defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and
jurisprudence.60
4. Commodity DA The perm is just in an round link they only call upon the
alternative it in times when it provides them with something they want, which
is in this case the ballot.
5. Every link we win is a disad to the perm and a Net-Benefit to the alternative
Ill do the link work here.
A2:
A2: Exisential impacts o/w

Institutional structures of domination create everyday holocaustsyou should
reject singular focused impacts in favor of working against the ongoing extinctions
of people of color [international conflict impacts]
Omolade 89, [1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years
and an organizer in both the womens and civil rights/black power movements, We Speak for
the Planet in Rocking the ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics, pp. 172-176]
Recent efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear
testing, stockpiling, and weaponry, while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to
countries and factions around the world, vividly demonstrate how "peace" can become an
abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly blind to the
constant wars and threats of war being waged against people of color and the planet by those
who march for "peace" and by those they march against. These pacifists, like Gorbachev and
Reagan, frequently want people of color to fear what they fear and define peace as they
define it. They are unmindful that our lands and peoples have already been and are being
destroyed as part of the "final solution" of the "color line." It is difficult to persuade the
remnants of Native American tribes, the starving of African deserts, and the victims of the
Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the major danger to human life on the
planet and that only a nuclear "winter" embodies fear and futurelessness for humanity .
The peace movement suffers greatly from its lack of a historical and holistic perspective,
practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of people of color; the movement's
goals and messages have therefore been easily coopted and expropriated by world leaders
who share the same culture of racial dominance and arrogance. The peace movement's racist blinders have
divorced peace from freedom, from feminism, from education reform, from legal rights, from human rights, from international alliances
and friendships, from national liberation, from the particular (for example, black female, Native American male) and the general (human
being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-black power movement in the United States have always demanded peace with
justice, with liberation, and with social and economic reconstruction and cultural freedom at home and abroad.
The integration of our

past and our present holocausts and our struggle to define our own lives and have our basic needs
met are at the core of the inseparable struggles for world peace and social betterment. The
Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always been its whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite
movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who
are oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that
when people of color have organized and struggled-most especially, because of their particular history, Black people-have moved in a more
humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination, enlightened science, and movements
toward peace have developed from a culture and history mobilized against women of color. The political advancements of white men have
grown directly from the devastation and holocaust of people of color and our lands. This technological and material progress has been in
direct proportion to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the daytoday survival, political struggles, and rising up of women of color,
especially black women in the United States, reveal both complex resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often conflicted responses to
The Holocausts Women of color are survivors of and remain casualties of

holocausts, and we are direct victims of war-that is, of open armed conflict between countries
or between factions within the same country. But women of color were not soldiers, nor did we
trade animal pelts or slaves to the white man for guns, nor did we sell or lease our lands to the
white man for wealth. Most men and women of color resisted and fought back, were
slaughtered, enslaved, and force marched into plantation labor camps to serve the white masters of war and to build
the military and war.
their empires and war machines. People of color were and are victims of holocausts-that is, of great and widespread destruction, usually by fire.
The world as we knew and created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The experience of Jews and other
Europeans under the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of torture, and the
demonical apparatus of war aimed at the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain death at Auschwitz and said,
"You will be a remembrance-You tell the story. You survive." She lived. He died. Many have criticized the Jews for forcing non-Jews to
remember the 6 million Jews who died under the Nazis and for etching the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds.
Yet as
women of color, we, too, are "remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the
world. We must remember the names of concentration camps such as Jesus, Justice,
Brotherhood, and Integrity, ships that carried millions of African men, women, and
children chained and brutalized across the ocean to the "New World." We must remember the
Arawaks, the Taino, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware,
and the other Native American names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for tribes of people
who are no more. We must remember the holocausts visited against the Hawaiians, the aboriginal
peoples of Australia, the Pacific Island peoples, and the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We must remember the
slaughter of men and women at Sharpeville, the children of Soweto, and the men of Attica. We must never, ever, forget the children disfigured,
the men maimed, and the women broken in our holocausts-we must remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the stories and teach
them to our children and our children's children so the world can never forget our suffering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the
Jewish holocaust under the Nazis is over,
our holocausts continue. We are the madres locos (crazy mothers)

in the Argentinian square silently demanding news of our missing kin from the fascists who
rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see our mothers and fathers shot in front of our
eyes. We are the Palestinian and Lebanese women and children overrun by Israeli,
Lebanese, and U.S. soldiers. We are the women and children of the bantustans and refugee
camps and the prisoners of Robbin Island. We are the starving in the Sahel, the poor in Brazil,
the sterilized in Puerto Rico. We are the brothers and sisters of Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our
hearts, not daring to speak of it with our lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have developed the
Nazi techniques of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of persecution.
Forced removals of women, children, and the elderly-the "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid bantustans without resources for
survival have replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites achieve two objectives:
The work camps destroy black family and community life, a presumed source of resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose
purpose is to serve the South African state's drive toward wealth and hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any
democratic rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful assembly, to free speech, and to political representation.
The regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such
as Stephen Biko; penal colonies such as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely arrested without cause, detained without
limits, and confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation. Legally and economically, South African
apartheid is structural and institutionalized racial war. The Organization of African Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in
Tanzania was called to review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The meeting considered South Africa's
racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans on the continent and a stark reminder of the absence
of equality and peace, representing the worst form of institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Mahatma Gandhi who have used nonviolent resistance charged that those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as their oppressors.
Yet all successful revolutionary movements have used organized violence. This is especially true of national liberation movements that have
obtained state power and reorganized the institutions of their nations for the benefit of the people. If men and women in South Africa do not use
organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be that pacifism and nonviolence cannot become a way
of life for the oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the
developing communities and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who have and use nonviolent
weapons will refrain from using them long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political battles. To survive, peoples in developing countries
must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South
Africa; sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting of black teenagers by a white
man, such as happened in New York City.
Peace is not merely an absence of 'conflict that enables white

middleclass comfort, nor is it simply resistance to nuclear war and war machinery. The
litany of "you will be blown up, too" directed by a white man to a black woman obscures
the permanency and institutionalization of war, the violence and holocaust that people of
color face daily. Unfortunately, the holocaust does not only refer to the mass murder of Jews,
Christians, and atheists during the Nazi regime; it also refers to the permanent
institutionalization of war that is part of every fascist and racist regime. The holocaust
lives. It is a threat to world peace as pervasive and thorough as nuclear war
A2: Not Ontological (Hudson)

1. History DA: Their evidence doesnt incorporate slavery and the creation of
the structuring logic of civil society. Slavery creates the condition for the
negation of blackness. Structures are built on this form of exclusion. Refusing
signifiers doesnt solve anything on a structural level.
2. Western Logics DA: Their evidence assumes that they can structurally unknot black death, This falls under western logics of freedom which isnt
accessible to the Black body. The perpetual drive for this perfects slavery.
3. Their construction of black identity is flawed. Blackness has to be ontological
because of the functions of slavery in creating black identity.
Wilderson 10
(Frank, Red, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms pg 35-36)
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
, 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 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. 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
without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What I am suggesting is that first
could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolicthough 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 elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and
communicable, political project out of the necessity of freedom as an absolute? 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.
4. Claiming it is a social construct doesnt change the fact that it has material
effects. Even If we lose this. The ALT is still better
Wise 8 {Tim J; anti-racist activist; White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged
Son}AvP
Although white Americans often think we've had few first-hand experiences with race, because most of us are so isolated from people of color in
our day-to-day lives, the reality is that this isolation is our experience with race. We are all experiencing race, because from the beginning of our
lives we have been living in a racialized society, where the color of our skin means something socially even while it remains largely a matter of
biological and genetic irrelevance. Race
may be a scientific fiction-and given the almost complete genetic overlap between persons of
the various so-called races, it appears to be just that-but it is a social fact that none of us can escape no matter
how much or how little we may speak of it. Just as there were no actual witches in Salem in 1692,
and yet anti-witch persecution was frighteningly real, so too race can be a falsehood even as
racism continues to destroy lives, to maim, to kill, and, on the flipside, to advantage those
who are rarely its targets. A few words about terminology: When I speak of "whites" or "white folks," I am referring to those
persons, typically of European descent, who are able, by virtue of skin color or perhaps national origin and culture, to be perceived as "white," as
members of the dominant group. I do not consider the white race to be a real thing, in biological terms, as modern science pretty well establishes
that there are no truly distinct races, genetically speaking, within the human species. But the white race
certainly has meaning in

social terms, and it is in that social sense that I use the concept here. As it turns out, this last point is more important than you might think.
Almost immediately upon publication, this book's first edition came under fire from various white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who launched a
fairly concerted effort to discredit it, and me as its' author. They sought to do this by jamming the review boards at Amazon.com with harsh
critiques, none of which discussed the content-in all likelihood none of them had actually read the book-but which amounted, instead, to ad
hominem attacks against me as a Jew. As several explained, being Jewish disqualifies me from being white, or writing about my experiences as a
white person, since Jews are, to them, a distinct race of evildoers that seeks to eradicate Aryan stock from the face of the earth. On the one hand
(and ignoring for a second the Hitler-friendly histrionics) of course, it is absurd to think that uniquely "Jewish genes" render Jews separate from
"real" whites, despite our recent European ancestry. And it's even more ridiculous to think that such genes from one-fourth of one's family, as with
mine, on my paternal grandfather's line, can cancel out the three-quarters Anglo-Celtic contribution made by the rest of my ancestors. But in
truth, the argument is completely irrelevant, given how I am using the concept of whiteness here. Even if there were something biologically
distinct about Jews, this would hardly alter the fact that most Jews, especially in the United States, are sufficiently light skinned and assimilated
so as to be fully functional as whites in the eyes of authority. This wasn't always the case but it is inarguably such now. American Jews are, by and
large, able to reap the benefits of whiteness and white racial privilege, vis-a-vis people of color, in spite of our Jewishness, whether
viewed in racial or cultural terms. My "claiming to be white," as one detractor put it, was not an attempt on my part to join the cool kids. I wasn't
is more about how you're likely to be viewed and treated in a white supremacist
society than it is about what you are, in any meaningful sense. This is why even some very light-skinned
folks of color have been able to access white privilege over the years by passing as white or being
trying to fool anyone. Whiteness
misperceived as white, much to their benefit. Whiteness is, however much cliched the saying may be, largely a social construct. This is a book
about that construct and how it plays out in the larger culture. It is not a scientific treatise, and because it is not, it is quite impervious to whatever
science may or may not have to say about race, now or in the future.
5. Hudson concludes negativeliberalism cant recognize

the black experience
Hudson 2013 (Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg , South
Africa, has been on the editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The South African Journal of Sociology and Theoria:
A Journal of Political and Social Theory and Transformation, and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in
Theory and Criticism, The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013, p.
Taylor and Francis; DOA: 7/22/15 || NDW)
Liberal democracy doesnt recognize black experience; it says, this isnt the
experience of colonialism the struggle is over: weve got a liberal constitutional democracy this kind of
expression (of colonialism) that is if liberal democracy even acknowledges its very existence), isnt really
colonialism. Its an ersatz colonialism, neutered by the very form of its expression i.e., via freedom of expression
in a liberal democracy. Therefore it should just be allowed to pass ignored. If you take such objects out of the
colonial frame deprive them of their historic meaning then what are they? Individual dignity eroded? Perhaps.
if you put them in their colonial name as you just have to), then it isnt a matter
of individual dignity of any individual or of the individual, but it is a matter now of
colonialism itself, i.e. the specifically black subject as object in the gaze
of the white (self-possessed) master. This is what liberalism, no matter how
democratic, cannot appreciate: it cannot grasp what is at stake in these stagings of the colonial
unconscious, because its very premises an individualist social ontology wont
allow it to. Remember, for the black, the effect of perceiving these objects is to
be ontologically reduced, emptied out, amputated (Fanon 1968). For the white, the effect is the
But
opposite: to feel confirmed, at home, in what is, after all, the white gaze on the black man. Destitution/plenitude,
the elementary doublet of colonial experience and the colonial relation itself. Even if we assume whites and blacks
to be both unconsciously in thrall to the signifier white, the effect is quite different in the two cases; for the black,
the effect of non-existence is still impossible for him, not to feel. What such objects show is precisely that
colonials is still with us; it isnt just structural inertia combined with ANC corruption and mismanagement that
Colonial identifications
are still with us, and working silently to maintain the status quo. An object such as
explains the ongoing racial distribution of life chances and assets in South Africa.
The Spear is both revelatory of this and, at the same time, reinforces these identities. It stands out, however,
because its as close to not being silent, to being not silent as the distinction between unconscious and conscious
will allow. Its as close to being transparent to consciousness as it is possible to be, without being transparent to
consciousness. Perhaps this explains something of the excess passion is has produced in the public space.
Conclusion Colonialism of a very special type To the extent that post 1994, at last, structurally colonial white and
black identities are prohibited but not destroyed, the
state is involved in a politics of
the
unconsciousness. 274 P. Hudson Downloaded by [] at 10:53 22 July 2015 The colonial unconscious is
part of the Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) historically, the conceptual model of the ANC and the SACP, today
the tri-partite alliance. This fantasy is itself still a fundamental component of South African society which resists, in
different ways, the NDR. As weve seen, its identificatory effects antagonise and subvert the NDR (and this is not
whites and
blacks are interpellated by the white master signifier; blacks too (to the extent
only from without, but also within the NDR itself). So this is a fight that includes blacks, because
they havent separated themselves from their self-identification in the terms of the white imaginary) recognise
themselves in such presentations, because colonial logic entails that they see themselves through white eyes.
Perhaps they dont know it, but what they see (in this object) pulls them in and (re)colonises them, ratcheting up
their existing white identifications. The white colonial unconscious is a site of political struggle because where a
liberal democratic perspective implies tolerance and even silence, a national democratic state because it is
fundamentally challenged by this unconscious signifier (whiteness) has to do something. But what? Fight it on
liberal democratic individualist grounds? Or as hate speech? But it has already lost its specificity once named as
hate speech rather than colonial speech. This said, neither should the National Democratic state seek to
become an apparatus by which the nervous systems of its inhabitants are regulated (Groys 2011, 17), thereby
saturating all modalities of subjectivisation. The hypothesis of total power (Badiou 2001, 83) and telos of absolute
closure must be resisted. The National Democratic Revolution is unlikely to be able to avoid being eclipsed by liberal
democracy, thus bringing to a close a determinate sequence in the history of the South African state unless it
succeeds in charting a course against both the effect of amnesia of liberal individualisation (vis--vis colonialism),
and the fantasy of national democratic plenitude.
A2: Fatalism (Ba)

Their ev is flawed
1. Terming us as Fatalist reinforces discursive measures that progress the
metaphysical strategy of punishment
University, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, CR: The New Centennial Review,
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015] kguy
Black nihilism acknowledges that metaphysics is a destructive matrix, but it resists the temptation to
believe that there is an alternative or a beyond the violence that sustains the world . For many, this
could be read as fatalism or passive nihilism. The terms passive and fatalism applied to black
nihilism are saturated with negativity to discredit its legitimacy; this discursive maneuver becomes
another metaphysical strategy of disciplining and punishing errant thought . Despite these invectives
and political hopes will to power, black nihilism uses hermeneutics to return the political dream to its
proper placein the place of the void (Fanon). Black nihilism demands a traversal, but not the traversal
that reintegrates the subject (and Being) back into society by shattering fundamental fantasies of
metaphysics, but a traversal that disables and invalidates every imaginative and symbolic function. Its
hermeneutics blackens the world, as Lewis Gordon suggests in Theory in Black: Teleological
Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture (2010)
2. No impactfalsifiability is impossible for the aff as well,

so it links back
Ill answer each warrant in this evidence:
3. African Diasporayes, black expression can exist, but
that doesnt disprove the thesis that social life is not
possible within civil society
4. Jazz and cross-cultural dialoguethese things exist, but
theyve also been co-opted by White society and paraded
as an American innovation rather than Black cultureit
also doesnt answer natal alienation because our
argument is about the inability for blacks to say Im from
____that sense of discomfort and vertigo, of notbelonging within the world, is what makes the Black body
socially dead within civil society
A2: Nihilism
1. Nihilism and hope arent mutually exclusive. Hope constitutes a reason to
invest in ones existence. That is different from the politics of hope which is
a hope that normative politics will emancipate the black body. They are
blurring the lines between them. This only recreates hegemonic domination
(Also a good response to reformism)
Warren15 {Calvin L.; George Washington University; Black Nihilism and the Politics of
Hope; CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol 15 Number 1, Michigan State University Press;
Spring; accessed 8/18/15 @ 8:40PM}
To speak of the Politics of Hope is to denaturalize or demystify a certain usage of hope . Here I
want to make a distinction between hope (the spiritual concept) and the politics of hope (political hope). The
relationship between the spiritual concept of hope and its use as a political instrument is the focus of the black nihilist critique.2 Following Kant
and other postmetaphysical philosophers, the critical field questions (and in some circles completely denounces) a certain spiritual predisposition
to the worldthat unknowable noumenon that limits Reason but provides the condition of possibility for its organization of the world of
perception, phenomenon. The problem with the critical questioning of the spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then,
insidiously, translates them into the scientific or the knowable, as a way to both capitalize on the mystic power of the spiritual and to preserve
the spiritual under the guise of enlightened understanding. We find this deceptive translation and capitalization of spiritual substance within the
sphere of the Politicalthat organization of social existence through political institutions, mandates, logics, and grammarsas a way to govern
and discipline beings. If we think of hope as a spiritual concepta concept that always escapes confinement within scientific discoursethen we
can suggest that hope
constitutes a spiritual currency that we are given as an inheritance to

invest in various aspects of existence. The issue, however, is that there is often a compulsory
investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. This is the forced destination of hope
it must end up in the Political and cannot exist outside of it (or any existence of hope outside the political
subverts, compromises, and destroys hope itself. Like placing a fish out of water. It is as if hope only has intelligibility and efficacy within and
through the Political). Put differently, the politics
of hope posits that one must have a politics to have hope;

reject hope in a nihilistic way, then, is really to reject the
politics of hope, or certain circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing, practicing,
and conceiving of hope. In the essay A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote in the 2004 Election, Grant
politics is the natural habitat of hope itself. To
Farred (2006) exposes a kernel of irrationality at the center of African American political participation. Traditionally, political participation is
motivated by self-interested expectancy; this political calculus assumes that political participation, particularly voting, is an investment with an
assurance of a return or political dividend. The
structure of the Politicalthe circular movement between

self-interest, action, and reward is sustained through what Farred calls the electoral unconscious. It
historicizes the subject in relation to the political in that it determines the horizon of what
is possible it maps, through its delimitation or its (relative) lack of limits, what the constituency and its members imagine they can, or,
would like to expect from the political (217). In this way, the electoral unconscious, as the realm of political fantasy, mirrors the Lacanian notion
of fantasy; it maps the coordinates of the political subject and teaches it how exactly to desire the Political. For Farred, there is a peculiar logic
(another scene) operating as the motivation for African American participation in the Political. Unlike the traditional political calculus, where
action and reward determine civic engagement, African American participation does not follow this rational calculusbecause if it did, there
would actually be no rational reason for African Americans to vote, given the historicity of
voting as an ineffective practice in gaining tangible objects for achieving redress,
equality, and political subjectivity. African Americans, according to Farred, have an irrational
fidelity to a practice that, historically, has yielded no concrete transformations of antiblackness.
This group is governed not by the electoral unconscious but by the historical conscious, which is the intense [and incessant] understanding
of how the franchise has been achieved, of its precarious preciseness as well as their (growing) contemporary liminality, their status as
marginalized political subjects (217). African Americans are a faithful voting block not because of votings political efficaciousness but as a way
to contend with a painful (and shame-full) history of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Political participation becomes an act of historical
commemoration and obligation; one votes because someone bled and died for the opportunity to participate, and duty and indebtedness
motivate this partial political subject. Within this piece, we get a sense that black fidelity to the Political is tantamount to the Lacanian notion of
driveone perpetuates a system designed to annihilateparticipation, then, follows another logic. The act of voting, according to Farred, is
legitimate in and of itself; it is a means as an end (or a means without an end, if we follow Agambens logic [2000]). The means, the praxis of
voting, is all there is without an end in sight. African
American political participation is an interminable

cycle of reproduction, a continuous practice of reproducing the means of reproduction
itself. This irrational fidelity to a means without an end gives rise to the politics of
despairrepresentation for its own sake and the apotheosis of singular figuresand a politics without hope: African
American fidelity, however, takes its distance from Pauline hope like faith, hope is predicated upon a complex
admixture of expectations and difference. In this respect, the African American vote is not, as in the
colloquial sense, hopeful: it has not expectations of a shining city appearing upon an ever distant, ever retreating, hill in the unnamed-able
future. Fidelity represents the anti-Pauline politics in that its truth, its only truth, resides in praxis. (223) This brilliant analysis compels us to
rethink political rationality and the value in meansas a structuring agent by itself. What I would like to think through, however, is the
distinction between hope and despair and expectations and object. Whereas Farred understands political participation as an act without a
political object, or recognizable outcomewithout an end, if
we think of end and object as synonymsI would

Politics of Hope reconfigures despair and expectation so that black political
action pursues an impossible object. We can describe this contradictory object as the lure of metaphysical political activity:
suggest that the
every act brings one closer to a not-yet-social order. What one achieves, then, and expects is closer. The political object that black
participation encircles endlessly, like the Lacanian drive and its object, is the idea of linear proximitywe can call this progress, betterment,
or more perfect. This
idea of achieving the impossible allows one to disregard the historicity of

anti-blackness and its continued legacy and conceive of political engagement as bringing
one incrementally closer to that which does not existones impossible object. In this way, the Politics of
hope recasts despair as possibility, struggle as triumph, and lack as propinquity. This impossible object is not tethered to real
history, so it is unassailable and irrefutable because it is the object of political fantasy. The politics of hope, then, constitutes
what Lauren Berlant would call cruel optimism for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about redress,
equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach. The objective of the Political is to
keep blacks in a relation to this political objectin an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it strengthens the very
anti-black system that would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the object certainly has an irrational aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is
not mere means without expectation; instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the
pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued widening of the gap between historical reality and fantastical
ideal. Black nihilism
is a demythifying practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating

strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fantastical object. Once we denude political hope of
its axiological and ethical veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only
alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2) shielding this alter native from rigorous
historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an unknown future, 3) delimiting the field of
action to include only activity recognized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing
critiques or different philosophical perspectives. The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty
under the auspices of happiness and life. It terrifies with the dread of no alternative.
Life itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes untenable
without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternativea discursive and political organization beyond
extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary alternative/no-alternative
ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the ontoexistential horizon .
The terror of the no alternativethe ultimate space of decay, suffering, and deathdepends on two additional binaries: problem/ solution
and action/inaction. According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these
solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of the problem; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegels
aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the problem with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach
of hopes solution every problem is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that
the solution is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a solution is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the
problem itself.e
A) Not at all
Marriott, 2007 (David, Professor of History @ UC Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual Culture
and Black Modernity Pg 237-240)
In Fanon it may be that the imperative of decolonization becomes an ethical lawhence his
ambiguous references to Kanta law justifying risk and ruin rather than sacrifice and resignation. Hence, the move from
colonialism to decolonization represents a move, not from the ethical into history, but involves a
radical leap into a way of life based on indeterminate negation, a negation without end but
always at work in the depths of history. On the other hand, Fanon also states, "My black skin is not the wrapping of
specific values. It is a long time since the starry sky that took away Kant's breath revealed the last of its secrets to us. And the moral law is not
certain of itself" (Fanon; Black Skin, 227). This statement follows another explicit reference to Kant: "One duty alone: That of not renouncing my
freedom through my choices" (229). The text referred to here is Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, which concludes as follows: "Two things fill
the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and
the moral law within me."19 It is important to note that Fanon is not denying Kant's confidence in the sublime presentation of moral ideas, which,
in the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues discloses the whole power (Macht) of the mind. Rather he is stating that Kant's enthusiasm for the
infinitude of the starry heavens-the infinitude of which allows us to recognize, in turn, the infinite destiny of our own moral nature-cannot happen
in the Antilles. It cannot happen there precisely because of the racial distribution of guilt and its paralysis at the level of the imaginary. Fanon's
critique of Kant echoes that of Nietzsche's. For Nietzsche, the sacrificial exercise of morality in Kantian ethics results in impotence when the will
to obey the law against natural desire and out of no interested motive-not even fear-overwhelms the individual and produces the resort to
ressentiment, the culture of reaction. Nietzsche is not condemning the disciplining of natural desire, on the contrary, he commends it, but what he
the law
is interested, which is not to deny it is sovereign or universal, but to imply that the meaning of
sovereignty depends on a principle of calculability, which, in his view, is to suspend the law itself
and the opposition of disinterested reverence and natural desire. For the genealogist the moral law in the
objects to is its moralized accountability, when it is justified as disinterested submission to categorical law For Nietzsche (and Fanon),
universality of its form constitutes the misrecognized form, not of law, but of will to power. Its crueltyfrom Kants perspective its indifference
to heteronomous interestsis the displaced symptom of its affective truth. For Fanon, it
is this cruelty and this impotence

which is deeply racialized both in terms of its psychology and historical sociology. In considering the
uncertainty of moral law, of racism and of time, Fanon holds fast to a notion of the colonial subject as always
divided and never fully present to itself. The aporias between blackness and history, for example,
illustrated this in the form of blacks as reactive or nihilistic Black Skin, White Masks explores this aporia in terms
of a question: namely, what is it about colonial authority that allows it to generate forms of nihilistic passivity rather than Kants inner freedom of
moral law? What is it about the autonomous imposition of duty that turns the black subject into a reactive affect, thematized here as a submission
to racialized time and history? Colonial power reveals the limits of Kants categorical law here understood as the autonomous imposition of duty.
The moral law is uncertain of itself in the Antilles because colonial racism makes that law, in terms of duty, an impossible demand which is
aporetic: be like me and do not be like me, be white but not quite. As such, colonialism transforms the moral law into a will to power based on
racial exclusion. In order to grasp why Fanon thinks this is the case, I have explored the relation between the loss that racial forgetting represents
negativity that exposes, almost inevitably, the extent to which

the will to power in the colonial nation-state is one defined by its perpetual readiness to
wage war against the colonized at the level of both ideological fantasy and psyche. For Fanon,
colonialism operates a pure power politics completely divested of ethical and universalistic
considerations. A war in which blackness is understood as a source of historical failure in
need of cathartic cure and/or annihilation. A war in which the death of blacks, as utter abjection, is a nothingness
and the negative sublimity of moral law in the Antilles. A
without history and so indistinguishable from the unhistorical nothingness of a people without time. In conclusion, given that Fanon's last workThe Wretched of the Earth-was an attempt to work out the idea of an ethical state in the context of decolonization, many commentators have
tended to lose sight of how the political question of social justice and revolutionary struggle was, for Fanon, invariably tangled up with questions
of responsibility and risk. 20 In other words, the difficult task Fanon set himself was how to resolve the problem of power and justice in cultures
distinguished by Manichaeism. What could the idea of an ethical state mean in nations divided according to whether blacks are the remnants of an
unhistorical, unethical substance, .neither life nor being, but the unhappy existence of spectral life? Notions which were not only inscribed in
economic and social relations but, more often than not, in judicial procedures and constitutional and parliamentary practices of executive
governance. Fanon's
idea of revolution should therefore not be restricted to the political but must also
be seen as an attempt to describe how national desires come to be bound by somatic fantasies.
Fanon's error, according to many, may have been in conceiving imperialism too psychologically, but his ideal of the decolonized
cultural nation and political state cannot be understood without taking into account his ideas on
the heteronomy of political demands and unconscious desires. If Fanon's political vision of the
world was essentially Nietzschean-divided between sovereign life and slavish abjection his call for national liberation and
unity in the developing nations went hand in hand with a call to look at death in the face, to
make death as such possible for blacks otherwise condemned to the nothingness of death ,
death as the representation of lawless violence. In Fanon's oeuvre the politics of black experience
calls for the endurance of such negation and hence its movement, but only in the knowledge
that the death within us cannot be determined, and this is the price we pay for life lived at the
limits of both political virtue and political violence
A2: Cede the Political

A) The Political ceded the moment black lives were in question. Even if
members in civil society work towards black emancipation in a normative
fashion. Black Death is still inscribed within society which prevents black
access to the political-Sexton15
{Jared; UC- Irvine; Unbearable Blackness; Cultural Critique, No 90 U Minnesota press; Spring;
accessed 8/18/15 @ 6:50PM}AvP
You think also, in this moment, about the unspeakable, perhaps unimaginable ways that black lives have been devalued, and you have
trouble determining when to start the storyor history or mythology or fableor how far aWeld to
draw your sphere of concern. Who, after all, are your people? And, again, did or do those lives have value in the Wrst place? Did or do they not,
rather, antagonize value? Can black lives as such be counted and counted on, in or as a form or principle? Are they accountable or are they
supernumerary? Add to that the fact that you cannot but wonder about the sort of action that might respond to that devaluing, or originary
nonvalue, and to speculate, indeed, about forms of value created or derived otherwise; the value of a color, all color, or the notes of another score.
The usual repertoire wont do. And what
of your allies, coalescing around the matter or mattering of

black lives lost or taken, today all clamoring that they are so much with you as to be you too? Which side you are on is
easier to assert than to ascertain. Your beautiful statement of a universal particular is turned on its head as the
agglutination of the worlds largest particular universal, voiced in radical newspeak. Get out and
testify, you think, make it plain. The police are marching with you now as well, expressing sympathy and
solidarity with the people, your people, and they are denying their terrible and terrifying social function in
the selfsame moment of execution. You are losing track of where policing ends and
protesting begins. Get out and clarify, you think, speak on it. Take action. You want to imagine a practice in
the default of the political, in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the selfpossessed individual, and perhaps even without a person, in the usual meaning of the
term (Hartman, 66). You raise the ultrapolitical possibility of a spooky action at a distancethink otherworldly, act nonlocally.2 A
comrade declares: Black people in the United States and worldwide are the only people . . . for whom it is not productive to speak in terms of
police brutality. Not because police brutality as such is not a pervasive problem and a mortal threat, but rather because the reigning political
philosophy has been built on fundamental concepts and categories inadequate for the analysis. The world, or at least that political world in
which legible claims and nameable losses are characteristic, is not ready to think about policing in the way that it affects black people. We are
policed all the time and everywhere (Wilderson). You wonder what to do in a world like this. How many dimensions does it entail? What shape
does resistance or rebellion acquire when the force of repression is virtually without limit, when terror resides within the limits of the socially
tolerable, when the innocuous and the insurgent meet an equal force of punishment (Hartman, 63, emphasis added)? Innocuous or insurgent, it
makes no difference.
You are never innocent, so you waste no breath pleading with a redeeming
adjective (Kelley, 108). It makes you want to throw up both your hands and holler, Dont
Shoot! You do not doubt that they will, and you halfway wish they would, again, here and now. Dont shoot! or Go on and shoot!
Whats the difference?3 You wish them out of existence, their whole world. You come to this, heres
the marrow of it, not moving, not standing, its too much to hold up, what I really want to say is, I dont want no fucking country, here or
there and all the way back, I dont like it, none of it. (Brand 1997, 48) But this is not a positive program. This is a politics without claim or name.
You
do everything with the acknowledgment that conditions will most likely remain the same.
No bullshit. The slogans are for the press, and that imaginary audience you say you must
address, but in your heart you know they arent true, performative contradictions all. You
mask that knowledge because you think you need allies to protect against isolation, because you
think solidarity is always and only engendered by coalitions, because you think you need friends beyond
those whose raised hands like yours make no earthly difference, except to elongate the target, because
you think you have some already. You need to be reassured that you have not fallen prey to resignation
or fatalism or irresponsibility, that you have not given up on struggle as a way of life, as living.
No, you cannot but recognize, if no one else will, the enormity of the breach instituted by
slavery (Hartman, 51). That breach establishes the fundamentals of a negrophobic society , an
You wont even concede that its negative dialectics. It is much worse than that, or much better, depending on the vantage, and the wish.
antiblack world, and you feel it set violently against you, not as an idea, but in your very body, your actual being (Fanon, 142). The breach is an
established fact for you, from the cradle to the grave, and you have nowhere from whence to go once more unto it. You are in the breach and of it.
We all are, you say, but few listen. You are never innocent and you realize the children must know it too. You wonder what is the minimum age
for the loss of innocence or its absence. The children know that innocence is not black. They never had it to lose. And they will have occasion
to learn as much, over and over again. You live
out a valueless form of life whose value exists as potential in

and of another world, a higher-dimensional space. You cannot protect yourself and you will not be
saved. You will learn that lesson to the young ones and pass it on to them as a mission or a curse. You cannot protect them with your love or
advice and no one has yet devised an art of war sufWcient to the task. The hatred of the world is upon you. It is also within
you. It is the substance of your waking dreams, the single most constant fact of [your] existence.4 None of which diminishes your desire to
Wght. You understand now that black lives matter, not in or to the present order of knowledge that determines human being, but only ever against
it, outside the limits of the law. Black Lives Matter is a radical will and testament. You sense in this a displacement of the human held up
between your eventful protests against a nonhuman status and your everyday celebrations of an inhuman excess otherwise known as black
power.5
B) Trauma DA: they force people to re-live personal traumas by serving a

state that enslaved and killed its ancestors
C) USFG simulation leads to disconnection-Reid-Brinkley8
{Dr. Shanara; University of Pittsburgh Department of Communications, THE HARSH
REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY
DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL
PERFORMANCE AND STYLE; accessed 8/19/15 @ 9:13PM}AvP
So, within public discourse, how race is coded rhetorically in public deliberation is of critical importance. Mitchell observes that the stance of
the policymaker in debate comes with a sense of detachment associated with the spectator
posture.115 In other words, its participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to
distance themselves from the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around
terms like torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can
only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan
remarks: the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the
debaters were. The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When
we blithely call for United

States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that
establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated
everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications (emphasis in original).116 118 The objective stance
of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies upon acceptable forms of evidence, engaging in logical
discussion, producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters note, such a stance is integrally linked to the normative,
discursive
practices of policy-oriented debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege.
historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying networks of oppression. In other words, the
Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than seeing themselves as government or state actors,
Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in debate, violating the more objective stance of the policymaker and require their opponents
to do the same.
D) 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 slave-owning 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 smallscale 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.
A2: Coalitions/Black white binary bad

A) Coalition based politics desire to understand black flesh. Blackness cant be
articulated or protected through a non bwb lens. This is thinly veiled
antiblackness-R.L13
{informal theorist working on the problematic of racialised identities, gender and communisation
theory; Metamute.org; WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH
;June 5; http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-socialdeath;accessed 8/18/15 @ 6:15PM}AvP
This gratuitous violence, on the one hand, subjugates black existence to an irrational
accumulation of bodies, and subsequently produces a condensed delimitation of blackness
in space. Whether it was the owning and trading of slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black
existence is excluded and stockpiled as so many objects within a spatial boundary. In this condition, life is reduced to a statistical
quantity, black existence is made exchangeable with any other. Therefore, on the other hand, black existence is also a fungible
object, infinitely malleable in its content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim subjecthood.11 These
structural features come to their fullest expression in the contemporary scenario of police shootings. The endless stream of young black men shot
by police borders on excess, demonstrating the pure interchangeability of such names as equivalents, meaning that such seemingly particular
empirical cases are in actuality a general condition. Blackness is as devalued as it is susceptible to all aspects of material and social containment,
control and debility. Yet, in these instances, even morally indignant liberals are complicit with anti-blackness by focusing on police shootings as a
contingent rather than structural feature of black existence. Often such moral indignation emphasises the atrocious nature of such events and
spectacularises the use of excessive force so as to fundamentally produce a completely inert body. Attention
is then focalised on
the excess of black suffering, reducing the victim to a tabula rasa upon which all manners
of empathetic projection obscures the basis of a morbid white enjoyment that garners
pleasure through the depiction of excoriated black flesh.12 In short, the violence of antiblackness produces black existence; there is no prior positive blackness that could be
potentially appropriated. Black existence is simultaneously produced and negated by racial domination, both as presupposition and
consequence. Affirmation of blackness proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming
the violence that structures black subjectivity itself. And these conditions that procure black existence consistently
repeat the sombre refrain of anti-blackness: there is no black identity, there is no black subject, there is no black life as such. As a consequence,
black existence is fundamentally marked by social death, materially living as a sentient object but
without a stable or guaranteed social subjectivity. And as such, the status of blackness forms the basis upon which
white life can subjectivise itself, socially and materially through the negation of the black body. White life recognises itself as a positive
counterpart to the non-subjecthood of blacks. However, Afro-pessimists claim that this relation between black
death and white life

is not merely asymmetrical. The distinction between the two is qualitatively different, and
potential for reconciliation between whites and blacks is impossible. This particular distinction instead
procures an antagonism in relation to the social totality. The inordinate amount of violence perpetuated against blacks
naturalised and thus ontological means that such a situation is untranslatable to any
representable terms of experience or identity. Such a structural feature of blackness
mired in violence cannot be related to contingent experiences of social, political or
economic violence, such as the struggles of workers or immigrants. Black existence forms the bottom line, the
condition of possibility, of general social and material integration. It is not necessarily ones whiteness
that matters inasmuch as one is not black enabling entrance and participation in civil society. Barred from the immanent capacities of living, antiblackness is the necessary ground for the definition and propagation of life in general.13 In this way, Afro-pessimism also enacts a political
intervention onto the terrain of identity politics and multiracial coalitions. Perhaps more generally, Afro-pessimism can be seen as a critique of the
Left and all forms of activism that participate in representational politics. In the US, the past decades have seen the proliferation of identity-based
politics predicated on a politics of recognition. It is this position that was made possible by the legacies of the black struggles of the 1950s to
1970s, epitomised in black liberation and the civil rights movement. However, contemporary anti-racist formations obfuscate and implicitly
disavow such a legacy, while simultaneously utilising their impact to promote reform and integration. The basis of such perspectives is a wider
acceptance and visibility of marginalised identities within the stronghold of civil society. Calls
for unity by multiracial

coalitions mask complicity with the structures of anti-blackness. They proffer an analysis
that seeks to go beyond the framework of black and white racial dynamics. Yet in this
gesture to go beyond black and white, the specificity of anti-blackness is obscured. In such
instances, these analyses aim to discover common ground through the particularity of nonblack racial identities or other oppressed categories. But this common ground is predicated
on an underlying humanness, from which black existence is fundamentally barred . Such a
perspective presents an atomised individual traversed by a variety of oppressions, yet these oppressions are representable
and conditional to a historic instance of violence (as opposed to the ontological
unconditionality of violence perpetuated against blacks), and could potentially be
recognised and addressed. For it is on the basis of (human) recognition and selfrepresentation from which minoritarian identities can wage their struggle . Black existence is barred
from such a possibility due to the fact that such recognition is based upon not being black. As long as one can distance onself
enough from blackness, then one has the possibility of integrating into civil society
generally:
B) Anti-Radical coalitions try to incorporate blackness into civil society. This is

impossible. Doesnt solve and perfects slavery- Wilderson3
{Frank; UC-Irvine; The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal; page 19-20; Social Justice
Vol.30 No.2 (2003); http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/archive/92_30_2/92_04Wilderson.pdf;
accessed 8/17/15 @ 1:04PM}AvP
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 societys many junior partners: Black
citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social
movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of
hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately
accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil societys junior
partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the
insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-inwaiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright
handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are
underwritten by a supplemental antiBlackness. In her autobiography, Assata Shakurs comments vacillate between
being interesting and insightful to painfully programmatic and responsible. The expository method of conveyance
accounts for this air of responsibility. However, toward the end of the book, she accounts for coalition work
by way of extended narrative as opposed to exposition . We accompany her on one of Zayd Shakurs many Panther
projects with outside groups, work dealing with white support groups who were involved in raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail
(Shakur, 1987: 224). With no more than three words, her recollection becomes matter of fact and unfiltered. She writes, I hated it. At the time, i
felt that anything below 110th street was another country. All my activities were centered in Harlem and i almost never left it. Doing defense
committee work was definitely not up my alley.... i hated standing around while all these white people asked me to explain myself, my existence.
i became a master of the one-liner (Shakur, 1987: 224). Her hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully realized, of all the zonal
violations to come when a white woman asks her if Zayd is her panther...you know, is he your black cat? and then runs her fingers through
Assatas hair to cop a kinky feel. Her
narrative anticipates these violations-to-come at the level of the

street, as well as at the level of the body. Here is the moment in her life as a prison-slave-inwaiting, which is to say, a moment as an ordinary Black person, when she finds herself among friends abolitionists, at least partners in
purpose, and yet she feels it necessary to adopt the same muscular constriction, the same coiled anticipation, the same combative one-liners that
she will need to adopt just one year later to steel herself against the encroachment of prison guards. The verisimilitude between Assatas
wellknown police encounters, and her experiences in civil societys most nurturing nook, the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about
political desire, Black positionality, and hegemony as a modality of struggle.
C) Coalitional politics leads to false equivalencies and furthers antiblackness

Sexton10
{Jared; Associate prof of AA studies at UCI; 2010; People-of-Color-Blindness; Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery,; Pg 48-49}AvP
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
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
sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of
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
. 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
targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them
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
D)
Going beyond Black White Binary doesnt address nuances of White

supremacy. Only reifies racism.
Smith 06- Phd from UC Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness) 2006 [Andrea smithactivist/educator who was born in San Francisco and grew up in Southern California. She
received her PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz.Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of whaite supremacy- Color of Violence-Incite! The
anthology- p. 69-70]
Our organizing can also reflect anti-Black racism. Recently, with the outgrowth of multiculturalism
there have been calls to go beyond the black/white binary and include other communities
of color in our analysis, as presented in the third scenario. There are a number of flaws with this
analysis. First, it replaces an analysis of white supremacy with a politics of multicultural
representation; if we just included more people, then our practices will be less racist. Not true. This model
does not address the nuanced structure of white supremacy, such as through these distinct
logics of slavery, genocide, and Orientalism. Second, it obscures the centrality of the slavery
logic in the system of white supremacy, which is based on a black/white binary. The
black/white binary is not the only binary which characterizes white supremacy, but it is still a central one
that we cannot go beyond in our racial justice organizing efforts. If we do not look at how
the logic of slaveability inflects our society and our thinking, it will be evident in our work as well.
For example, other communities of color often appropriate the cultural work and organizing strategies of
African American civil rights or Black Power movements without corresponding assumptions that we should
also be in solidarity with Black communities. We assume that this work is the common property of all
oppressed groups, and we can appropriate it without being accountable.
A2: Infiltration (Williams)

A) We dont divorce ourselves from the institutions our analysis of civil society is
an example of infiltration with in non-discursive institutional spaces
B) Libidinal Economy DA: Becoming acquainted with the methods of the
oppressor is the acceptance of the masters successes this commodifies the
black body and merely makes it a tool for the masters whim. This is another
example of chattel slavery
C) The Courts will always be tyrannical and they dont have an actual warrant
for why Militant solutions actually fail
D) They need to win that Pessimism is a bad way of framing blackness to win
this argument
E) The power to decide is the power to control. White consensual politics can
continue to rethink itself, this is wholly inadequate for blacks. The power
itself is the problem and every instance that codifies this power legitimizes
killing blacks. The affirmative says that power has shifted to the power to
make life but this is untrue for the black body Tuskegee, Michael Brown, and
Eric Garner prove that Juridical Power is alive and well.
King'04
(Patricia A. King Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics, and Public Policy B.A.,
Wheaton College; J.D., Harvard Areas of Expertise: Family Law Professor King's expertise is in the
study of law, medicine, ethics and public policy. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department
of Health... REFLECTIONS ON RACE AND BIOETHICS IN THE UNITED STATES )
It is unlikely, however, that African Americans would have viewed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
simply as a civil rights issue. For those cognizant of African American history and contemporaneous civil
rights struggles, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study joined a long parade of horribles in American
history that defined the struggle in which civil rights battles were fought. Like slavery ,
lynching, and the night riding terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study belonged in the category of
events that illustrated the cruel and irrational extent to which American culture entitled
whites to burden black lives. For the black[s] community, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study symbolized the
pervasive scientific racism inherent in American life, particularly in American medicine. Tuskegee was a reminder
of the role that science and medicine have played in defining and employing racial differences
between blacks and whites in ways that privilege whites and mark blacks as an inferior people. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, equal opportunity and equal access to health care remain elusive goals for racial minorities. Despite
common recognition that the Tuskegee Study is Americas metaphor for racism in medical research,6 there has been inadequate attention paid
to race, either in the sense of negative and differential treatment or in terms of pervasive scientific racism, in the construction of bioethics in the
United States. American
bioethics, from its inception, has resisted taking account of social context. In American bioethics,
issues, have historically
enjoyed lesser status. Even today, the failure to obtain consent from 4 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954). 5 Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L.
individualism, self-determination, and autonomy are paramount. Other values, and other ethical
No. 88-352, 78 Stat. 240 (codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. 2000d-2000d-1 (2000)). See also Roger Wilkins, White Out, in CRITICAL
WHITE STUDIES: LOOKING BEHIND THE MIRROR 658, 659-60 (Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic eds., 1997) (explaining that
segregation is not the sole source of racism, and that integration does not cure all of racisms ills). 6 TUSKEGEES TRUTHS: RETHINKING
THE TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY 3 (Susan M. Reverby ed., 2000).
A2: Race is a Fiction

Even If race is a fiction. It has material impacts
Wise 8 {Tim J; anti-racist activist; White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged
Son}AvP
Although white Americans often think we've had few first-hand experiences with race, because most of us are so isolated from people of color in
our day-to-day lives, the reality is that this isolation is our experience with race. We are all experiencing race, because from the beginning of our
lives we have been living in a racialized society, where the color of our skin means something socially even while it remains largely a matter of
biological and genetic irrelevance. Race
may be a scientific fiction-and given the almost complete genetic overlap between persons of
it is a social fact that none of us can escape no matter
how much or how little we may speak of it. Just as there were no actual witches in Salem in 1692,
and yet anti-witch persecution was frighteningly real, so too race can be a falsehood even as
racism continues to destroy lives, to maim, to kill, and, on the flipside, to advantage those
who are rarely its targets. A few words about terminology: When I speak of "whites" or "white folks," I am referring to those
the various so-called races, it appears to be just that-but
persons, typically of European descent, who are able, by virtue of skin color or perhaps national origin and culture, to be perceived as "white," as
members of the dominant group. I do not consider the white race to be a real thing, in biological terms, as modern science pretty well establishes
that there are no truly distinct races, genetically speaking, within the human species. But the white race
certainly has meaning in
social terms, and it is in that social sense that I use the concept here. As it turns out, this last point is more important than you might think.
Almost immediately upon publication, this book's first edition came under fire from various white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who launched a
fairly concerted effort to discredit it, and me as its' author. They sought to do this by jamming the review boards at Amazon.com with harsh
critiques, none of which discussed the content-in all likelihood none of them had actually read the book-but which amounted, instead, to ad
hominem attacks against me as a Jew. As several explained, being Jewish disqualifies me from being white, or writing about my experiences as a
white person, since Jews are, to them, a distinct race of evildoers that seeks to eradicate Aryan stock from the face of the earth. On the one hand
(and ignoring for a second the Hitler-friendly histrionics) of course, it is absurd to think that uniquely "Jewish genes" render Jews separate from
"real" whites, despite our recent European ancestry. And it's even more ridiculous to think that such genes from one-fourth of one's family, as with
mine, on my paternal grandfather's line, can cancel out the three-quarters Anglo-Celtic contribution made by the rest of my ancestors. But in
truth, the argument is completely irrelevant, given how I am using the concept of whiteness here. Even if there were something biologically
distinct about Jews, this would hardly alter the fact that most Jews, especially in the United States, are sufficiently light skinned and assimilated
so as to be fully functional as whites in the eyes of authority. This wasn't always the case but it is inarguably such now. American Jews are, by and
large, able to reap the benefits of whiteness and white racial privilege, vis-a-vis people of color, in spite of our Jewishness, whether
viewed in racial or cultural terms. My "claiming to be white," as one detractor put it, was not an attempt on my part to join the cool kids. I wasn't
is more about how you're likely to be viewed and treated in a white supremacist
society than it is about what you are, in any meaningful sense. This is why even some very light-skinned
folks of color have been able to access white privilege over the years by passing as white or being
trying to fool anyone. Whiteness
misperceived as white, much to their benefit. Whiteness is, however much cliched the saying may be, largely a social construct. This is a book
about that construct and how it plays out in the larger culture. It is not a scientific treatise, and because it is not, it is quite impervious to whatever
science may or may not have to say about race, now or in the future.
A2: Winant
A) No Link: We dont K whiteness we K antiblackness
B) Whiteness and Blackness arent Identities they are structural position so
these responses dont even apply
C) This ev is racist. They allow Blacks to be subject to gratuitous violence
because they dont want whites to lose their hierarchies
A2: Whiteness not RC (Niemonen)

We agree. Whiteness isnt a structure. It is the product of the creation of civil
society. Combating whiteness wouldnt solve. We focus on Anti-Blackness, We solve
offense.
A2: Racism Created by Policy So Solved by Policy

Racism isnt a manifestation of policies- Racism is a structural negation of blackness
that leads to the creation of policies. Getting rid of racist policies doesnt solve
unless we destroy white democracy and Civil Society
Curry13 {Tommy J; Texas A&M; In the Fiat of Dreams; Academia; accessed 8/21/15}AvP
Despite the rhetorical strategies adopted by both Black and white political theorists which urge
Blacks and whites alike to demand Americans to continue their allegiance to the foundational deracialized ethos of the post-Civil Rights era, the reality of the American racismits sheer recurring
violence against Black peopledemands more than symbolic rhetorical allusion. To seriously grasp the
reality of racist oppression and the sempiternal machinations of anti-Blackness throughout American
society be it in its institutions like the prison industrial complex, its policies like Affirmative action, or its
manipulation of Black social degradation and economic disadvantage to support pathological theses about
disasters like Katrina or cultural deviance as in the death of Trayvon Martin, Darius Simmons, or Jordan
Davis, the study of the matter itselfracismmust be a study of a conceptual disengagement with the
myth of racial equality and the automatic progressivism of the American liberal project. This
disengagement is not simply the refusal to accept the idealism of civil rights myth held beyond the realm
of fact, but the disengagement with the illusions of democracy and equality that continue to ignore the
role that violence has played and continues to play in the subjugation, incarceration, and vilification of
Black life. As Dr. A.J. William Myers reveals in his work groundbreaking work entitled
Destructive Impulses, Until at such time white America (and Black America) is openly willing to
confront a historical legacy of its own violence (perpetrated against an American people of
color), any venture into and/ or expository on race relations becomes an exercise in futilityAs
a result, therefore, white violence, confined to the subliminal recesses of the American psyche,
continues to prevent the transition necessary for the country to move beyond the idea of race.iIn
America, Blackness and the racism that continues to condemn those historical racialized peoples is
violenceit is the forceful and coercion enclosing of human beings to an inferior social, political, and
economic status of which their own humanity exceeds. This dehumanizing relegation of the raced citizen
is not a gradual or incremental debasement, but rather the historically immediate condition of inferiority
that presents progress to be attainable by the cyclical degrees of physical violence against the racialized
population. For these racially oppressed peoples, violence is the permanent fixture of existence in
America, since it is the vitiation of their humanity that rationalizes the varying techniques of their cultural
erasure, birthing the emergent symbolic associations of degradation that replace their invisibility, and
empowering the intentional enforcements of their societal exclusions. In fact, it is precisely this
triumvirate that gauges what we take to be the negation of the necessity of revolutionary
change--since the raced is taken to be present, as a result of a critical redefining of humanity,
integrated into society.
A2: Monolith/Homogenizing Bad (Ahmed, Sullivan)

No Link: Look at blackness in a spectrum rather than as an identity. We dont see
white as the marker of cultural identity we see it as a marker of political identity
Olson 4, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University (Joel, The Abolition of
White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004)
A bipolar analysis also challenges the assertion that there are different degrees of whiteness, in
which some people are more white than others. Several scholars have recently argued that
bipolarity does not pay enough attention to the differences, tensions, and instabilities within
racial categories as well as between them. John Hartigan Jr., for example, argues that too many
analyses of race in the United States unfairly homogenize whites experiences. He acknowledges
that whiteness does have a homogenizing tendency, but there are still varied forms of racial
significance in the disparate circumstances of whites in North America. Most of this
heterogeneity among whites, he holds, is due to class differences. Similarly, Howard Winant
argues that white privilege is meted out differently among whites (e.g., less for Jews, Arabs,
gays, and lesbians) and that a monolithic understanding of whiteness leaves no room for the role
of ideology and conviction in structuring white advantage. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray
argue that class divisions among whites have disintegrated much of whatever white unity existed
under slavery and segregation. Contemporary scholarship, they insist, must treat whiteness as a
complex, messy, and ambivalent social force that takes into account how some poor
whites are both inside and outside whiteness, still white yet somehow less white than others.82
The problem with the degrees of whiteness argument is that it misunderstands the nature of
white identity. Whiteness is not a guarantee of equality among whites but, as I argue in the next
chapter, a form of racial standing. Culturally, economically, or anthropologically speaking, there
is much differentiation among whites. But as a form of status, whiteness is an absolute: you have
it or you dont. White standing does not mean that all whites are treated the same, only that in
certain instances their myriad differences are subordinated in the interest of white solidarity.83
The result, as a European aristocrat visiting the United States in 1809 noted, is that even a poor
white may claim equality to a rich white with the challenge, Do you believe that you are any
whiter than I am?84 It is important to acknowledge the myriad differences among whites, but it
makes little sense to discuss degrees of whiteness, for as Richard Wright once exhorted, Whose
hands ran the business enterprise? White hands. Whose hands meted out the law? White hands.
Whose hands regulated the money? White hands. Whose hands erected the churches? White
hands. Thus, when the white world is viewed from inside the colored world, that world is a
block-world with little or no divisions.85 Wrights point is that as a block-world whiteness is
a force against social complexity and diversity rather than a reflection of it. It does not make all
whites absolute equals, but that was never the intent of white citizenship.86 It just ensures that no
white ever need find himself or herself at the absolute bottom of the social and political barrel,
because that position is already taken.
A2: Singh
Risk of failure shouldnt deter our assault on civil society
Newton 72 (Huey P. Newton, Co-Founder of The Black Panther Party and its Minster of Defense and all around badass, got
his PhD at UC: Santa Cruz, Revolutionary Suicide pp.4-6)jml
To understand revolutionary suicide it is first necessary to have an idea of reactionary suicide:

the reaction of a man <person> who takes his <their> own life in response to social conditions that
overwhelm him and condemn him <them> to helplessness. The young Black men in his study had
been deprived of human dignity, crushed by oppressive forces, and denied their right to live as
proud and free human beings. A section in Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment provides a good
analogy. One of the characters, Marmeladov, a very poor man, argues that poverty is a not a vice. In poverty, he
says, a man can attain the innate nobility of soul that is not possible in beggary; for while society may drive the poor man
out with a stick, the beggar will be swept out with a broom. Why? Because the beggar is totally
demeaned, his dignity lost. Finally bereft of self-respect, immobilized by fear and despair, he
sinks into self-murder. This is reactionary suicide. 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 <one> a man rises up against a power as great as the United States, <one> 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 quiet desperation. Yet all of 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*, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the wretched earth. This
belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the
forces that will 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 all- Black and white alike- ill 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. *The power structure, based on
the economic infrastructure, propped up and reinforced by the media and all the secondary educational and cultural intuitions
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.
Considering how we must live, it is not hard to accept the concept of revolutionary suicide. In this
we are different from white radicals. They are not faced with genocide. The greater, more immediate problem is the survival of the entire world.
If the world does not change, all its people will be threatened by the greed, exploitation, and violence of the power structure in the American
empire. The handwriting is on the wall. The
United States is jeopardizing its own existence and the existence

of all humanity. If Americans knew the disaster that lay ahead, they would transform this society
tomorrow for their own preservation.
A2: Omi/Reform
Reform is just reactionary conservatism their unwillingness
to accept that systemic antagonisms cannot be fixed means
their project is permeated with whiteness
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of
sociology, Queer Necropolitics, http://www.deanspade.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of 'preservation through
transformation' to describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in
this dynamic (Harris 2007: 1539-1582; Siegel1997: 1111-1148). In the face
of significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law reform tends to
provide just enough transfonnation to stabilize and preserve status
quo conditions. In the case of widespread black rebellion against white
supremacy in the US, civil rights laws and colourblind constitutionalism have
operated as formal reforms that masked a perpetration of the status quo of
violence against and exploitation of black people. Explicit exclusionary
policies and practices became officially forbidden, yet the
disuibution of life chances remained the same or worsened with the
growing racialized concentration of wealth in the US, the dismantling
of social welfare, and the explosion of criminalization that has developed in
the same period as the new logic of race neutrality has declared fairness and
justice achieved. Lesbian and gay rights politics' reproduction of the
Inythology of anti-discrimination law and the non-stop invocation of'equal
rights' frameworks by lesbian and gay rights politics marks an .investment in
the legal structures of anti-blackness that have emerged in the wake of
Brown. The emergence of the demand for LGBT inclusive hate crime laws
and the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and james Byrd, Jr. Hate
Crimes Prevention Act as a highly lauded federal legislative 'win' for lesbian
and gay rights offers a particularly blatant site of the anti-blackness central
to lesbian and gay rights -literally an investment in the expansion of
criminalization as a core claim and desire of this purported 'frecdom'. 9 In
the context of the foundational nature of slavery in US political formation, it
is perhaps not surprising to see a political formation of white 'gay and
lesbian Americans' articulate a demand fOr fi-eedom that is contingent on
the literal caging of black people. The fantasy that formal legal equality is all
that is needed to eliminate homophobia and transphobia is harmful not only
because it participates in the anti-black US progress narrative that civil rights
law reforms resolved anti-blackness in the US (thus any remaining suffering
or disparity is solely an issue of 'personal responsibility'), 1IJ but also
because it constructs an agenda that is harmful to black queer and trans
people and other queer and trans people experiencing violent systems
mobilized by anti-blackness. Formal marriage rights will not help poor
people, people vvhose kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfire
system regardless of whether or not they can get married, people who do
not have immigration status or health benefits to share with a spouse if they
had one, people who have no property to pass on to their partners, or people
who have no need to be shielded from estate tax. In fact, the current wave of
same-sex marriage advocacy emerges at the same rime as another promarriage trend, the push by the right wing to reverse feminist wins that had
made marriage easier to get out of and the Bushera development of
marriage promotion programmes (continued by Obama) targeted at women
on welfare (Adams and Coltrane 2007: 17-34; Alternatives to l\!larriage
Project 2007; Coltrane and Adams 2003: 363-372; Feld, Rosier and Manning
2002: 173-183; Pear and Kirkpatrick 2007; Rector and Pardue 2004). The
explicitly anti-black focus of the attacks on welfare and the mobilization of
racialized-genclered images to do this go hand in hand with the pro-marriage
gay rights frame that similarly invests in notions of 'personal responsibility',
and racializecl--gendered family formation norm enforcement. The
articulation of a desire for legal inclusion in the explicitly anti-black, antipoor governance regime of marriage, and the centralization of marriage
rights as the most resourced equality claim of gay and lesbian rights politics,
affirms its alliance with anti-blackness. It is easy to imagine other queer
political interventions that would take a different approach to concerns about
parental rights, child custody and other family law problems. Such
approaches centre the experiences of queers facing the worst violence of
family law, those whose problems -will not be resolved by samesex marriage
- parents in prison, parents facing deportation, parents with disabilities,
youth in foster care and juvenile punishment systems, parents whose
children have been removed because of 'neglect' clue to their poverty. The
choice of seeking marriage rights, like the choice to pursue hate crime laws
rather than decriminalization, the choice to pursue the Uniting American
Families Act 11 rather than opposing immigration enforcement and the war
on terror, the choice to pursue military service rather than demilitarization, is
a choice to pursue a place fOr white gay and lesbian people in constitutively
anti-black legal structures.
A2: Marriott/Dogmatism
No link:
1. Marriott assumes that no social life is possibleour
argument isnt that social life is impossible, just that it
cannot be accessed within civil societythe alt is a
prerequisite
Theres no impact to dogmatism anywaysif we win the
ontology debate, then it means were just right
A2: Ehlers
No linkour kritik doesnt say that blacks have no agency, but
rather, than civil society doesnt afford or assign them agency
blacks can find life within social death, but that life is always
one that is targeted within civil society due to structuring
forces of antiblackness
A2: Tuck and Yang/Colonialism

There is an ontological difference between slavery and
colonialism we must prefigure slavery in order to understand
the ways in which antiblackness has dispossessed the Savage
the concept of the law is irredeemable once properly
understood for black agency is only ever conceivably legal
when it is criminal the struggle for indigenous liberation is
always appropriative of black struggle in a violent
analogization that erases black agency
Sexton 10
(Jared, Associate Professor at UC Irvine in African American Studies People of Color Blindness;
published in 1998; p. 14-7)
in the debate about the colonial policy of assimilation and its discontents, a
debate in which Mannoni and Fanon intervene respectively, it is slavery and the particular freedom struggle
it engenders that mark the critical difference. Slavery: that which reduces colonial
peoples to a molten state uniquely enabling the metropolitan power to pour them
into a new mould, a process in which the personality of the native is first
destroyed through uprooting, enslavement, and the collapse of the social
structure (Mannoni 1990: 27). For Mannoni, assimilation is only practicable where an individual has been
That is to say,
isolated from his group, wrenched from his environment and transplanted elsewhere (Mannoni 1990: 27,
emphasis added). Fanons historical materialist redaction of Mannonis psychology of the colonial relation is to
refuse the latters projection of the affective disorders produced by colonization into a pre-colonial cultural eternity.
Not so much, perhaps, because such projection would have the Malagasy desire her own colonizer (like the Inca
who Mannoni suggests desires her own conquistador in an earlier historical period), but because the contradictions
of colonization might provide an even more problematic recommendation for the introduction of slavery (Mannoni
To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the

dispossession of land and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to
1990: 27).
suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved. More
you may lose your motherland, but you will

not lose your mother (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the social death
under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the natal alienation and
genealogical isolation characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery
and Social Death: I prefer the term natal alienation because it goes directly to the heart of what is
simply, we might say of the colonized:
critical in the slaves forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also
has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was

this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of blood, and from
any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by
the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate
human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all
slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 78) True even if elevated by the income and formal education of
the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader
of the Free World. 4 The alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future
generations and rendering thereby the notion of descendants of slaves as a strict oxymoron. It is also a
the
deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and Fanon each note in their turn, is total, more
fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized, whose status
obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a
collection or dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the
horizontal prohibition, canceling ties to the slaves contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool,
absolute submission mandated by [slave] law discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartmans 1997 Scenes of
Subjection:
the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely
formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000).

Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs
whatsoever of reasoning intent and rationality are recognized solely in
the context of criminal liability. That is, the slaves will [is] acknowledged only as it
[is] prohibited or punished (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning,
a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of
culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori.
The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not

unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white
bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as
revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually
existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The
latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American
revolutions (with their themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions
(with their themes of secular messianic transformation) or, later still, the broad anti-colonial
movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with
their themes of indigenous reclamation and renaissance). 5 One of the
defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture
remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black suffering
as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the
singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loc Wacquant
calls its functional surrogates or what Hartman terms its afterlife. Put differently, the occult presence of racial
slavery continues to haunt our political imagination: nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which
never arrives and does not stop arriving (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartmans notion of slaverys afterlife and Wacquants
theorization of slaverys functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror
of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis of language of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing
that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual legacy of slavery, precisely
The relations of
slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal abolition, mutating into the burdened
because it requires the untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation.
individuality of freedom.The functions of the chattel system are largely maintained,Wacquant might say, despite
the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison.
Slavery lives on, it survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international
movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment (Davis 2003). But what if slavery does not die, as
it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the
psychic life of power? What if the source of slaverys longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but the
obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar? On this
account, for those that bear the mark of slavery the trace of blackness to speak is to sound off without
foundation, to appear as a ghost on the threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity
to absent the presence,ornegatethewilltopresence,ofeveryclaimtohumanbeing,evenperhapsthefugi- tive movement
of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the very fruitful notion of fugitive
justice that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on Redress. Co-editors Saidiya
How does one compensate for

centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of
restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what
was broken? (Hartman and Best 2005: 2) That is to say, they are thinking about the question of slavery in
Hartman and Stephen Best are posing the right question:
terms of the incomplete nature of abolition, the contemporary predicament of freedom (2005: 5, emphasis
added). Yet, the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life lived in loss spanning the split difference
between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law and justice, hope and resignation relies nonetheless on an
outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life. Returning to our
the outside is a concept embedded in the

problmatique of colonization and its imaginary topography , indeed,
the fact that it can imagine topographically at all. But, even if the freedom
dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images of place (and to do
schematization of Fanon, we can say that
what both the fact

of blackness and the lived experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant
registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. 6 The language of race
developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is
our context and that context is the world, then this is the principal insight revealed by the
contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive slave. Malcolm
X, by another route, was not far from this formulation in his famous The Ballot or the Bullet address,
here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted);
delivered 3 April 1964 at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Speaking to the risks of political
If you go to jail, so what? If you

black, you were born in jail. If you black, you were born in jail, in the North as
well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the
Canadian border, youre south. For blacks in the USA, the political borders of the
nation-state mark the walls of a social incarceration, a political ontology of
race uninterrupted by ontic differences of region or legal standing.
Of course, Malcolm X did not restrict his commentary to the USA, even if recent
developments in national electoral politics were the focus of this particular address. His evolving analysis
accommodated a much larger geographical scale, what he elsewhere designated white
world supremacy. But if there is any weight to his insistence that the Mason-Dixon Line, demarcating the
territories of a still unresolved civil war, or even the prison wall, constituting liberal democracys internal hard
edge, are incidental to black life this from a former prisoner of over six years should we not
confrontation with the structures of racial domination, he exhorts:
extend this reasoning to the ultimate penalty, the absolute master, and stop talking about death as the limit of
black life? Not a loss (of life and limb, liberty and property), but a never having had. Not only the figurative nothing
to lose but your chains of the proletariat, but the literal inability to lose (because unable to own, to accumulate, to
have and to hold, to self-possess) at all. Cant have (even when we got), cant be (even when we are): a strange
freedom in the heart of slavery. The political ontology of race is a phrase borrowed from work of political theorist
Frank B. Wilderson, III, where it has been elaborated from his 2003 Social Identities article, Gramscis Black Marx,
to his 2008 American Book Award-winning memoir, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, and his
forthcoming Red,White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Drawing heavily upon Gordon and
Fanon, alongside the early Patterson, the ongoing research of Wacquant on the four peculiar institutions that have
operated to define, confine, and control African Americans in the history of the United States (Wacquant 2002: 41),
and an array of noted literary critics and historians (e.g. David Eltis, Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald A.T.
Judy, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers); Wilderson supplants the paradigm of comparative ethnic and racial studies
in two principle ways. First, by moving conceptually from the empirical to the structural, especially insofar as the
question of differential racialization or the complications of racial hierarchy makes recourse to a comparative
sociology, measuring relative rates of infant mortality, poverty, illiteracy, high school graduation, hate crimes,
imprisonment, electoral participation, and so on. Second, by reframing racism (pace Fanon) as a social relationship
that is grounded in anti-blackness rather than white supremacy. What Wilderson demonstrates at length is that the
racialization of the globe (Diktter 2008) or the formation of the world racial system (Winant 2002) does not
adhere strictly to Du Boiss thesis on the color line the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in
Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea in which Negro slavery is referred to as but one phase of
a general problem. Rather, slavery establishes the vestibule of the category of the Human. To be sure, Humans do
modernity is, to a large degree,

marked by societies structured in dominance: 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. 7 On this score, we should note that the absolute
not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact,
submission mandated by law was not simply that of slave to his or her owner, but the submission of the enslaved
before all whites (Hartman 1997: 83). The latter group is perhaps better termed all non-blacks (or the unequally
arrayed category of non-blackness), because it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that
matters most, rather than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom. The structural position of the Indian
slaveholder or, for that matter, the smattering of free black slaveholders in the USA or the slaveholding mulatto
elite in the Caribbean is a case in point (Blackburn 1997; Koger 2006; Miles and Holland 2006). Freedom from the
rule of slave law requires only that one be considered non-black, whether that non-black racial designation be
white or Indian or, in the rare case, Oriental this despite the fact that each of these groups have at one point
or another labored in conditions similar to or contiguous with enslaved African-derived groups. In other words, it is
not labor relations, but property relations that are constitutive of slavery.
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 selfreferentially 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
The 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
legitimacy of U.S. government strategies as forms of legality reflect these dimensions.
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
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.
perceived "threat" is sufficient. Indeed,
Makes alt necessary anything else is just whites mediating

the conflicts of civil society
Rodrguez 9 Chair of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside
(Dylan, The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,
Critical Sociology 36(1))
To revise the classical Marxist formulation, the sustenance of white bodily integrity
is the structural logic that produces state, economic, cultural, and social
formations, and is the usually unspoken discursive logic through which the
Homeland obtains its narrative and material gravity.2 The political crises
and social contradictions that emerge from these arrangements including
those articulated as antiwar, antiracist, pro-civil and human rights,
and pro-diversity are inevitably and necessarily framed as conflicts to be
decisively mediated by white civic subjects whose terrain of struggle
is rendered coherent by the mandate of white bodily integrity.
Suppression or resolution of crisis and con- tradication, in this case, can only be intelligible when
articulated or (at least) sanctioned by a decisively white community of (national) interest, and it is
white locality becomes a flexible, rigorously innovative formation of

white supremacist dominance: the lived locality of Homeland/National
Security is the propertied fantasy of embodied white subjects from scales across
here that
the narcissistic individual to the audaciously collective or national, the fantasy of Homeland belongs to
discursive structures of white supremacy find coherence

in the trappings of multiculturalism (consider the formulaic and rigorously enforced
them at a time when the
diversity of the White House police forces, and the US military, for example).
A2: Util
Racism disproportionately affects people of color maximizing
happiness only applies to white life
Peter 7
Peter is a staff writer for On Philosophy, an online ethics forum, Utilitarianism Is Unjust,
https://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/09/08/utilitarianism-is-unjust/, NN
A system is unjust when it treats people differently without a good reason for
this different treatment. Obviously what counts as a good reason will be
debatable, but to get started let us consider only reasons that all parties can
understand as good reasons. Racism then is unjust because there is no good
reason behind the unequal treatment given to the different races. Of course
the racist does have a justification for their bias, they will claim that the
other races are inferior. But this is not a reason that both parties will
understand, while people of the same race as the racist may agree with him,
few members of the races being oppressed will consider themselves
naturally inferior. And the racist lacks objectively sound evidence that could
in principle convince everyone of that judgment. On the other hand the fact
that people receive different treatment according to their wealth in a
capitalist system is not necessarily unfair. The justification for this unfair
treatment is that the wealthy can spend more money, and hence catering to
their needs receives more generous compensation. Thus pricing a good out
of someones ability to purchase it isnt unjust, because there is an objective
fact of the matter that they simply cant give as much to you for it as others
may be able to. Of course this doesnt mean that there may not be a good
reason to moderate capitalism as well, the poor may argue that principle X
implies that they should receive some special treatment. But this is not a
rejection of the reasons behind the unequal treatment resulting from a
difference in wealth, and hence such unequal treatment is not unjust.
According to this principle utilitarianism is unjust because it treats
people differently based on their capacity for happiness; although
utilitarians can appeal to their principles to justify this different treatment, so
can racists, and like the racist the utilitarian arguments are not based on
objective facts. But before we get into the details allow me to give examples
of some groups of people who would be treated unfairly in a purely utilitarian
system. The first are those who have no capacity for happiness or
unhappiness. There are rare people born without this ability, and we can
easily imagine possible species (such as the Vulcans from Star Trek) or
conscious computers (such as Data, also from Star Trek) who lack it as well.
Utilitarianism cares only about maximizing happiness or pleasure, and so
these people effectively wouldnt count; their treatment would be invisible to
the system. Since we cant make the Vulcans unhappy we would be free to
exploit them, turn them into slaves, or whatever else would make us happy.
And since we cant make them happy there is no reason for the system to
give them any of the rights or privileges that make us happy. Since they
arent made unhappy by this treatment the total amount of happiness may
be increased, and hence utilitarianism as a system would endorse it. Also
treated unfairly are people who are in a permanent state of unhappiness. It

isnt inconceivable that someone might have a condition that prevents them
from being happy, and, although many such people might choose to end
their lives, there would probably be some who would still choose life. A
utilitarian system would take that choice away from them, and to execute
them immediately, since they will always be unhappy (negative happiness)
eliminating them would increase the total amount of happiness. If such
actions could be considered just it would only be if we could somehow
convince these people that abusing them on the basis of their capacity for
happiness is reasonable, which means convincing them of the validity of
utilitarianism. This may be impossible, and not just because utilitarianism
advocates acting against their interests. Consider an alien species who is
rational, and has emotions, but whose emotions dont correspond to human
emotions. While we are naturally motivated to try to be as happy as possible
these aliens are naturally motivated to bring the strength of their Zeb and
Geb emotions into balance. Could we convince these aliens that maximizing
happiness is reason for them to be treated differently? I am sure that we
could make them understand that we are motivated by happiness, and that
we wish to maximize it. But they wont see that as a good reason to let
themselves be abused, just as we dont see anothers desire to steal as good
reason to let them steal. No, we will reply that we have interests of our own
that stealing from us hurts, and there is no good reason to favor the desire to
steal over the desire to be stolen from, and every reason to do the opposite.
Similarly, the aliens will reply to us that maximizing total happiness is also
against their interests, and that they cant see a reason to systematically
favor happiness over a balance of Zeb and Geb. Moreover the aliens will
wonder how happiness, a quirk of our physiological construction, can be
invoked as an objective reason to treat people differently. Certainly our own
happiness may be taken into account when we act, but it is irrational to act
on the basis of other peoples happiness because we have no direct access
to it. If someone comes up to us an tells us that they are extremely unhappy,
but that a donation of $10 can make then happy again does this supposed
suffering give us a reasons to give them money? Of course they could be
lying, but they could be telling the truth as well, and since happiness is
basically internal we arent in much of a position to tell the difference. And
because happiness is internal there is nothing stopping us from distorting our
judgments of it to justify all kinds of biases. For example, the racist can
argue that other races have a diminished capacity for happiness,
and that this justifies mistreating them to serve our own needs, and
no one can disprove him. Thus it is reasonable to insist that actions be
justified by an appeal to objectively measurable consequences that all
parties can have a reason to endorse when it comes to creating a system for
everyone to live under. And maximizing happiness isnt among these.
Utility concerns and democratic happiness theory reify power

of structures because whites are the only ones thought of as
capable to have happiness
Powell 93, Thomas Powell is a prominent American author who writes books on
philosophy and empire, The Persistence of Racism in America,

https://books.google.com/books?
id=9IBDlUpIB2sC&pg=PA118&lpg=PA118&dq=utilitarianism+and+racism&source=bl&ots=TUgXs8HJl&sig=_IONzkbuR53K8zyYpv96LvkFOys&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8PWGVevEN8jkAHQxoCICg&ved=0CF4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=utilitarianism%20and%20racism&f=false,
NN
In the nineteenth century, as both democracy and racism took shape,

utilitarian thinking dominated the English-speaking world. The utility
principle became the basis for democratic racism. Its goal became
the greatest good of the greatest number of people like me, with
habits, manners, attitudes and characteristics like mine. Romanticism
accentuated differences, categorical and individual, and glorified the selfreliance and self-assertion that capitalism had already institutionalized. The
universalist version of utilitarian thought never really captured America's
allegiance, even at the peak of Utilitarianism as presented by John Stuart
Mill. The idea of the greatest good of the greatest number seemed to require
a concession that everyone's good was equivalent to everyone else's , which
Americans found difficult to make, to say the least. But an ingenious
adaptation of the principle was already available, combining egoistic and
universal utilitarianism in capitalist fashion by assuming that to serve oneself
is to serve the general welfare. After all, I can't be sure what will add to the
aggregate happiness or good of the society in a general way, but I can be
sure that if I increase my own happiness and those whose happiness
contributes to mine, there ismore happiness among the greatest number
that includes me. What had social utility was what worked for the happiness
of most people; and most people were white. Cautioned most notably by
James Madison in The Federalist, especially number ten, by Alexis de
Tocqueville in Democracy in America, and by John C. Calhoun in his
Disquisition and Discourse, American leaders generally took measures to
prevent "tyranny of the majority." Our best political thinkers always realized
that democracy in America meant broadly implementing the will of the
majority, while at the same time protecting the rights of those who were not
part of the majority. In the matter of race dispositions, however, tyranny of
the majority flourished, strengthened by capitalism, utilitarianism, simplistic
notions of democracy, and romanticism, all burgeoning in the nineteenth
century, even as scientific racism gained momentum. The divergent and
conflicting interests of whites have always determined how blacks were
treated, and what rationalizations were needed to justify that treatment.
After the Civil War, as constitutional and economic conflicts were agonizingly
settled, reconciliation and reunification proceeded on the basis of tacit
acceptance of racism.3 been before the development of full-blown scientific
racism late in the century, the North generally and substantially shared
Southern ideas of race. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, embraced

popular racist views, despite his insistence on thinking for oneself. In fact,
Emerson's special eloquence in making popular dispositions sound lofty or
profound was devastating. The chief formulator of Transcendentalism, New
England's moralistic idealism, was Theodore Parker. He wrote that AngloSaxons were the best of the Teutonic race, the best of the best, endowed
with an "instinct for progress." Albeit under tremendous political pressure,
Abraham Lincoln made explicitly racist statements in 1858, referring to a
permanent "physical difference between the white and black races which I
believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social
and political (Apra.," In 1861 he was prepared to sacrifice blacks' freedom
permanently if that would bring about regional reconciliation. Lincoln's views
a a, dispositions represented quite well those of most Americans in the
North. He disliked slavery and found it an embarrassment and a disgrace,
particularly since emancipation in the British Empire in 1833. However, his
feelings of revulsion toward slavery did not lead him to egalitarian
acceptance of its victims. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, racism
derived respectability from legal and Populist-democratic points of view, as
well as from scientific arguments and theories of social science. It continued
to derive 'righteous" feelings from the spirit of Redemption -- redeeming the
South from the claimed outrages of Reconstruction and outside interference.
Outside the South, racism gathered force from the dispositions associated
with immigration restriction, especially "Anglo-Saxonism." By the end of the
century, when white supremacists were instituting the most rigid segregation
by law, scientific racism was so pervasive that vitriolic racist views found a
receptive national audience, through even the most enlightened and liberal
periodicals., As Thomas P. Bailey observed, the "Southern Way" was close to
being the "American Way." Racism was democratic in the simplest
sense: it had overwhelming popular acceptance and support.
Preventing blacks from voting ensured that no white faction or party could
use them against its white opposition. Their disfranchisement was
progressive, proceeding in the name of liberalism, good government, and
reform. White solidarity, sometimes exaggerated, nonetheless underlay
much of Southern Progressivism in particular. Later, as blacks moved north
Racism was democratic in the simplest sense: it had overwhelming popular
acceptance and support. Preventing blacks from voting ensured that no
white faction or party could use them against its white opposition. Their
disfranchisement was progressive, proceeding in the name of liberalism,
good government, and reform. White solidarity, sometimes exaggerated,
nonetheless underlay much of Southern Progressivism in particular. Later, as
blacks moved north in large numbers, the "problem" spread, and racist views
intensified in the North (as witness events following World War One). But
what underlies such views? To use Kovel's distinction, modern and
particularly non-Southern racism is much more "aversive" than "dominative."
In 1835, Tocqueville noted that ". .. the prejudice of race appears to be
stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still
exists; and nowhere is it an intolerant as in those states where servitude has

never been known ...." Tocqueville was noting mainly the racism of aversion,
avoidance of people who were looked down upon: the binary mind-set at
work, emphasizing differences of we-they, us-them, and the analogous goodbad. It drew support from belief in superiority of abilities, "demonstrated"
through equality of opportunity; from massive indoctrination in the ideology
of capitalism; from traditions of individual responsibility, back to
Arminianism, from an understanding of equality among equals in "virtue and
talents"; from egoistic utilitarianism, from romanticism, and from democracy.
In short, racism drew support from America's most cherished values and
attitudes.
A2: Alexander
The Slave is inherently antagonistic to civil society. There was
no period to which white America did not determine the black
person as a slave for life. From the outset, the only value the
Slave posited within the libidinal economy was fear.
Chambers 68
(Chambers, Bradford. "Colonial Slave Statues: 1630-1740." Chronicles of Black Protest. New York: New
American Library, 1968. 32-35. Print.)
White indentured servants comprised as much as two-thirds of the original labor force of the English
colonies in the New World. By a system of indenture, a man made a contract with a shipping company
for free passage, and in exchange he agreed to let the captain sell his services for a period of years to
the highest bidder. Hundreds of thousands of white men from England, Ireland, and Scotland, (religious
dissenters, paupers, and prisoners, for the most part) came to the New World in this manner. They
were called bondsmen redemptioners and indentured servants. After their time of service was
given up two to seven years the law required that bondsmen be given a new suit of clothes, a small
parcel of land, and modest means to start their lives as freemen. A misconception of
American black history a misconception supported by a growing number of

popular accounts is that a more or less idyllic period existed abetween
the time of the landing of the Jamestown blacks in 1619 and the enactment,
some forty years later, of the first colonial statutes defining the black man as
a slave for life. During this interim period, we are told, the black man was
treated on nearly a legal par with the white bondsman. An important
corollary to this interpretation of history is that color distinctions, as a
condition of slavery, became a fact of early American life after a series of
colonial statues decreed it so in the 1660s. According to this interpretation,
the doctrine of the black man as an inferior being developed as a result of
legal disenfranchisement. The inference is that the American forebears
practiced racial equality and that a period of indeterminacy existed, following
which had the colonists been allowed to pursue their better instincts
black men might have been assimilated into the mainstream of
American life. The historical justification for this interpretation has
tremendous bearing on our times. Suppose it were true that American denial
of the black mans humanity originated in statutes and laws designed to
promote the interests of the colonial planters and other privileged classes ; in
that event there would be massive logic for the aims of the protest
movement of the first half of the 20th century, which directed its
efforts toward breaking down legal barriers to racial equality. Since then,
there has been a drastic revision in the goals of the black protest
movement, and the conclusion becomes more and more accepted that
there is something inherent in the makeup of white America that
denies the black man his humanity, no matter how extensive the legal
changes. Whatever that inherent something is, it became manifest at an
exceptionally early period in American history. The records of the early acts
of the colonial assemblies and, in the case of Virginia, of the House of
Burgesses are not easy to follow, and they raise almost as many questions
as they answer. Yet they do tell an astonishing story. The first recorded
statute that refers to the black man is a Virginia resolution of 1630, adopted
eleven years after the landing of the Jamestown slaves in 1619. The time
lapse hardly need surprise us, because the number of slaves in the colony
was limited to a few cargoes, sold or traded at irregular intervals by Dutch
ships. At the time there were not more than two hundred black men in the
whole colony, out of a population of roughly 7500. It wasnt until the colony
was in a position to sell all the tobacco and slaves were coming in with
increasing numbers that House of Burgesses responded with legislative
enactments affecting the legal status of black men. What should concern us
is the fact that the Virginia colonists saw fit to adopt a discriminatory
resolution against the black men when there were still so few of them in the
colony. And we must presume that the resolution in question, and the acts
adopted subsequently, were an expression of the attitudes and believes of
the freemen of Virginia, since this was after all a democracy the first
experiment in democracy, as a matter of fact, in all of North America.
Consider the implications of the first three or four statutes that appear below
as they express the attitudes of the Virginia Freemen. In the resolution, a
white man is accused of dishonoring himself and defiling his body because
he had intercourse with a black woman. Then, a statute prohibits black men
no one else from carrying guns. Next, in the statute of 1646, the
wording of the text lists the black man in the same category as an object, not
as a human being. These very early statutes reveal a decidedly
discriminatory attitude already prevalent long before the acts of the 1660s
gave it legal sanction. They hardly suggest a period of legal indeterminancy
out of which black men might have emerged the equal of other men. The
Rhode Island reference of 1652 is the common practice of the time, and
the implication is clear that black men had been relegated to
lifetime slavery from the outset. The later statutes, beginning about
1660, reveal an almost hysterical fear of slave uprisings. These astonishing
statutes are evidence that black men, even at the start of the slave trade,
refused to submit meekly to the white mans domination, and that they did
in fact rebel against their condition. Here and again an important distinction
is to be made between slavery in South America and slavery in the English
colonies. The Spanish had to contend with numerous slave insurrections, and
they were often ruthless in the punishments they meted out; yet, fully
conscious of their own morally untenable position, they seemed to accept
the consequences and to face up to the rebellions as they occurred. The
North American colonists were from the beginning seized by a
collective fear of the black man; a fear so pervasive that they alone of
the New World settlers sanctioned the most extreme repressive measures,
hoping perhaps to avoid thereby the consequences of their own terrifying
guilt. It is important to know that the colonists possessed three categories of
slaves. The first consisted of Indians taken as prisoners of war. The English colonists,
like their Spanish and Portuguese predecessors, had to accept what was by then almost a tenet of international law:
that the Indians were free men. They were exploitable, but they were not to be treated as outright slaves, except
Indians taken in combat, or Indians convicted of some kind of crime. Moors and Turks belonged to a second
category of colonial slaves. It will be noted in some of the statutes that an English treaty exempted some Turks from
bondage, but the statute establishes that the early colonists did enslave a number of the infidels. Colonial
enslavement of the Moors, Turks, and some Jews (Jews were outlawed in England at this time) was sanctioned by
unwritten law, on the ground that they were non-Christians.
Blacks were part of the second
category, since they were non-Christian, but they formed a third

category of their own, because in addition to being heathens,
they were considered to be savages, set apart from human society,
destined by Noahs curse to perpetual servitude.
Aff Answers
Policy Focus Good:

Policy focus key to combat racism---anti-blackness was created by policy and can
only be destroyed by policy
Jamelle Bouie 13, staff writer at The American Prospect, Making and Dismantling
Racism, http://prospect.org/...mantling-racism
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates
has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus on
white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two
conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices
the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice
as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second,
that it's possible to dismantle thisprejudice using public policy. Here is
Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few
Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgans work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country
changing as a result. If
we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed .
And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to
creation.
Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his
blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I dont believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage
or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more
end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the
slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNCs utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making,
but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define
racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyaltybasically just prejudicethen Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create
racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That there's
nothing natural
about the black/white divide that has defined American history . White Europeans had contact with
black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism.
It took particular choices made by particular people in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginiatomake black
skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving African
indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility, colonial
landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of America. The
position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavement blacks are lowly, therefore we must
keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't
built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem
with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block
black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums . Onlookers then use the reality
of slums
to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words,
create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behavior
owning a home, getting marriedand then blame them for the adverse consequences . Indeed, in arguing for gay
marriage and responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New
Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more
sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way
gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But
this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that
come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal
marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis
added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that
society can create stigmas by using law to force
particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the
fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire
encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution."
If the prohibition
against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting itas we've seen over the last decade
has helped destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way .
Root Cause:
Anti-blackness isnt a monolithic root cause---they shut off
productive debate over solutions means the alt fails
Shelby 7 Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies
and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical
Foundations of Black Solidarity
Others might challenge the distinction between ideological and
structural causes of black disadvantage, on the grounds that we are
rarely, if ever, able to so neatly separate these factors, an epistemic
situation that is only made worse by the fact that these causes interact in
complex ways with behavioral factors. These distinctions, while perhaps
straightforward in the abstract, are difficult to employ in practice. For
example, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the members of a
poor black community to determine with any accuracy whether
their impoverished condition is due primarily to institutional
racism, the impact of past racial injustice, the increasing technological
basis of the economy, shrinking state budgets, the vicissitudes of
world trade, the ascendancy of conservative ideology, poorly funded
schools, lack of personal initiative, a violent drug trade that deters
business investment, some combination of these factors, or some
other explanation altogether. Moreover, it is notoriously difficult to
determine when the formulation of putatively race-neutral policies has
been motivated by racism or when such policies are unfairly applied by
racially biased public officials. There are very real empirical difficulties
in determining the specific causal significance of the factors that
create and perpetuate black disadvantage; nonetheless, it is clear
that these factors exist and that justice will demand different
practical remedies according to each factor's relative impact on
blacks' life chances. We must acknowledge that our social world is
complicated and not immediately transparent to common sense, and
thus that systematic empirical inquiry, historical studies, and
rigorous social analysis are required to reveal its systemic
structure and sociocultural dynamics. There is, moreover, no mechanical
or infallible procedure for determining which analyses are the soundest
ones. In addition, given the inevitable bias that attends social inquiry,
legislators and those they represent cannot simply defer to social-scientific
experts. We must instead rely on open public debateamong
politicians, scholars, policy makers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens
with the aim of garnering rationally motivated and informed
consensus. And even if our practical decision procedures rest on critical
deliberative discourse and thus live up to our highest democratic ideals,
some trial and error through actual practice is unavoidable. These
difficulties and complications notwithstanding, a general recognition of the
distinctions among the ideological and structural causes of black
disadvantage could help blacks refocus their political energies and selfhelp strategies. Attention to these distinctions might help expose
the superficiality of theories that seek to reduce all the social
obstacles that blacks face to contemporary forms of racism or white
supremacy. A more penetrating, subtle, and empirically grounded
analysis is needed to comprehend the causes of racial inequality
and black disadvantage. Indeed, these distinctions highlight the
necessity to probe deeper to find the causes of contemporary forms of
racism, as some racial conflict may be a symptom of broader
problems or recent social developments (such as immigration
policy or reduced federal funding for higher education).
Whiteness:
Our advancement of democracy combats anti-blackness its
not all-pervasive
Winant 97
Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for New
racial Studies at UC Santa Barbara, September-October 1997, Behind Blue
Eyes: Contemporary White Racial Politics, online:
http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/winant/whitness.html
So, monolithic white supremacy is over, yet in a more concealed way,
white power and privilege live on. The overt politics of racial
subordination has been destroyed, yet it is still very possible to "play
the racial card" in the political arena. Racially-defined minorities are
no longer subject to legal segregation, but they have not been
relieved of the burdens of discrimination, even by laws supposedly
intended to do so. Whites are no longer the official "ruling race," yet they
still enjoy my of the privileges descended from the time when they were.
In this situation the old recipes for racial equality, which involved creation
of a "color-blind" society, have been transformed into formulas for the
maintenance of racial inequality. The old programs for eliminating white
racial privilege are now suspected of creating nonwhite racial privilege.
The welfare state, once seen as the instrument for overcoming
poverty and social injustice, is now accused of fomenting these
very ills. Therefore, not only blacks (and other racially-identified
minorities), but also whites, now experience a division in their
racial identities. On the one hand, whites inherit the legacy of
white supremacy, from which they continue to benefit. But on the
other hand, they are subject to the moral and political challenges
posed to that inheritance by the partial but real successes of the
black movement (and affiliated movements). These movements
advanced a countertradition to white supremacy, one which
envisioned a radicalized, inclusive, participatory democracy, a
substantively egalitarian economy, and a nonracial state. They
deeply affected whites as well as blacks, exposing and denouncing
often unconscious beliefs in white supremacy, and demanding
new and more respectful forms of behavior in relation to
nonwhites. Just as the movements partially reformed white
supremacist institutions, so they partially transformed white
racial consciousness. Obviously, they did not destroy the deep
structures of white privilege, but they did make counterclaims on
behalf of the racially excluded and subordinated. As a result,
white identities have been displaced and refigured: they are now
contradictory, as well as confused and anxiety ridden, to an
unprecedented extent. It is this situation which can be described as white
racial dualism.[1]
Their argument elevates whiteness to an all-pervasive force

that explains nearly all global oppression means alt fails
Andersen 3
Margaret L. Andersen, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Vice
Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Delaware, 2003,
Whitewashing Race: A Critical Perspective on Whiteness, in White Out: The
Continuing Significance of Racism, ed Doane & Bonilla-Silva, p. 28
Conceptually, one of the major problems in the whiteness literature
is the reification of whiteness as a concept, as an experience, and as
an identity. This practice not only leads to conceptual obfuscation
but also impedes the possibility for empirical analysis. In this
literature, "whiteness" comes to mean just about everything
associated with racial domination. As such, whiteness becomes a
slippery and elusive concept. Whiteness is presented as any or all of
the following: identity, self-understanding, social practices, group beliefs,
ideology, and a system of domination. As one critic writes, "If historical
actors are said to have behaved the way they did mainly because
they were white, then there's little room left for more nuanced
analysis of their motives and meanings" (Stowe 1996:77). And
Alastair Bonnett points out that whiteness "emerges from this critique
as an omnipresent and all-powerful historical force. Whiteness is
seen to be responsible for the failure of socialism to develop in
America, for racism, for the impoverishment of humanity. With the
'blame' comes a new kind of centering: Whiteness, and White people,
are turned into the key agents of historical change, the shapers of
contemporary America" (1996b:153). Despite noting that there is
differentiation among whites and warning against using whiteness as
a monolithic category, most of the literature still proceeds to do
so, revealing a reductionist tendency. Even claiming to show its
multiple forms, most writers essentialize and reify whiteness as
something that directs most of Western history (Gallagher 2000).
Hence while trying to "deconstruct whiteness and see the
ubiquitousness of whiteness, the literature at the same time
reasserts and reinstates it (Stowe 1996:77). For example, Michael Eric
Dyson suggests that whiteness is identity, ideology, and
institution (Dyson, quoted in Chennault 1998:300). But if it is all these
things, it becomes an analytically useless concept. Christine Clark
and James O'Donnell write: "to reference it reifies it, to refrain from
referencing it obscures the persistent, pervasive, and seemingly
permanent reality of racism" (1999:2). Empirical investigation requires
being able to identify and measure a concept or at the very least
to have a clear definitionbut since whiteness has come to mean
just about everything, it ends up meaning hardly anything.
Apostasy bad:
We dont need apostasy, we need a blueprint for political
change
McWhorter 8
PhD in Linguistics @ Stanford University, Associate Professor of Linguistics @
UC-Berkeley, lecturer @ Columbia University, M.A. in American Studies @
NYU, Fellow @ the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Contributing
Editor @ the Manhattan Institutes City Journal, author of several books on
Hip Hop in American Culture [John, All About the Beat, June 2008, Pg. 130133]
A question that must be asked is also just what a black revolution would
even be about today. Certainly black America has serious problems. However, a
revolution does not consist solely of howling grievances. For a revolutionary effort to be
worth anyone's time, the demands have to be ones that those being revolted
against have some way of fulfilling. In one episode of the animated version of Aaron McGruder's
The Boondocks, there is an articulate depiction of the idea that black people need to Rise Up as a group and Make Demands. Huey,
whose bitter frown is as ingrained in his design as a vapid smile is on Mickey Mouse, imagines that Martin Luther King comes back to
life and inspires a revolution in black America, graphically indicated as hordes of blacks swarming the gates at the White House. "It's
fun to dream," Huey concludes, the idea being that black people know what to rise up against, but that they would run up against
the heartless moral cesspool that is AmeriKKKa, where, say, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." But the question is:
what would the people at the gates, if attended to, demand? Fifty years ago, the
demands were obvious: dismantle Jim Crow. And since then, a lot more has
been given: affirmative action, the transformation of welfare from a stingy program for widows to an open- ended dole for
any unmarried woman with children (done largely as riot insurance in the late 1960s, called for by leftist activists including black
yes, black America still has problems. Yes, there is still

racism. But what is it that the White House should do now, in 2008, that is
staring everyone in the face but hasn't happened because white people just
"don't care" and the black community has failed to "demand" it? What?
ones) ... I could go on. So
Precisely? I am not implying that what needs to happen is black people getting acquainted with those "bootstraps" we hear so much
the problems are not the kind that could be solved by simply
buckshotting whitey with the usual cries of "racism." Would the people at the gates be calling
about. But
for inner city schools to get as much money as schools in leafy white suburbs? If they did, they would see the same thing that has
happened when exactly that was done in places like New Jersey and Kansas City: nothing changes. Obviously something needs to be
How many of the

shouters would know about poor black kids kicking academic butt in KIPP
schools? Or in other charter schools filled with kids there because ofoh dear
vouchers, in Ohio and Florida? Let's face itmost of the people at that fence would
draw a blank on what KIPP schools even were, much less the good that
vouchers are doing. Some revolution. Would the people at the gates be
calling for police forces to stop beating up on young black men and sometimes killing them? Well, that's a legitimate concern. But the revolution on
that is already happening, in every American city making concerted efforts to
foster dialogue between the police and the street. We're not there yet, but
things are better. Anyone who says that the shooting death of Sean Bell in
2006 in New York was evidence that nothing had changed since the death of
Amadou Diallo in 1998 knows little of what the relationship between the
police and black people was like in New York and so many other places before
the nineties. In 1960, the death of Amadou Diallo would have made the local papers only, for one day,
done about the schools. But what, of the sort that should be shouted through the White House fence?
wouldn't have been considered important news
and, even in those papers, on some back page. It

.
Going through newspapers of that era, one constantly comes across stories about things that happened to "Negroes," on page A31,
We are blissfully past that America.
that today would be front-page breaking news.

And back to the
main point: what could the White House do to prevent things like the Diallo and Bell incidents? What simple, wave-the-wand policy
point would make it so that never again would a young black man be killed by the police in dicey circumstances where everybody
The relationship between police forces and black

people is not as simple as something that could be changed by
storming through a gate, which is obvious from how persistent that problem has been despite profound
lost his head for a minute or so?
changes on so many other fronts.
Violence and genocide is the inevitable result of alt

Horowitz 89
David, author and civil rights activist, founder of the New Left in the 1960s
and editor of its largest magazine, Rampart, and Peter Colier, journalist,
"Destructive Generation", pp 265-270
The manufacture of innocence out of guilt: it is the eternal work of the
Left. The true genius of radicalism is constant self-recreation and
reappearance in new guises. Never mind that the sloughcd-off skins it
leaves behind are fossilized remains of the death and destruction caused
by its past commitments. For Leftists, there are only tomorrows. They
never talk about the evil they have done, except superficially, to imply (as
Hayden does) that it has increased their moral sensitivity. But they are
always anxious to discuss the Utopia to come. The future perfect is the
only tense in their political grammar. Thus they are willing to criticize
every revolution but the one currently unfoldingthe one in which there is
still a choice. Their opponents' misdeeds must never be forgotten, but
their own can never really be recalled. While Central America is alleged by
Leftists to be "another Vietnam," Nicaragua is never another Cuba. How
does the Left maintain its belief against the crushing weight of its failures
in the past? By recycling its innocence, which allows it to be born again in
its Utopian faith. The utopianism of the Left is a secular religion (as the
vogue of "liberation theology" attests), its promise an earthly kingdom of
heaven. However sordid Leftist practice may be, defending Leftist ideals is,
for the true believer, tantamount to defending the ideals of humanity
itself. To protect the faith is the highest calling of the radical creed. The
more the evidence weighs against the belief, the more noble the act of
believing becomes. In this sense, Ter-tullian is the true father of the radical
church. "Credo quia impossi-bile": "I believe because it is impossible." In
the Stalin era, an English Quaker, returning from a visit to Bolshevik
Russia, reported to his flock: The Communist view of human nature seems
to me far more inspired by Faith, Hope and Charity than our own The
simple unostentatious life of Russia's rulers represents a notable advance
in real civilizationreal because based on a more enlightened
interpretation of human nature, both of its needs and capacities; an
interpretation which incidentally is also a more Christian one. Almost forty
years later, in the mid-Sixties, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin declared
that "Communism is a page torn out of the Bible" and that "the social
justice that's been achieved in ... North Vietnam [is] an achievement no

Christian society on that scale has ever achieved ." Today, softheaded
Witness for Peaceniks come home from Managua saying much the same
thing. It is understandable that they should have found a heaven on earth
there, for the Sandinistas have consecrated the marriage of the religious
and the revolutionary by combining the offices of comandante and priest.
"For me, the four Gospels are all equally Communist" declared the Marxist
padre Ernesto Cardenal. So committed is he to the infallibility of his
spiritual and temporal leader that after returning from a trip to Havana to
kiss Castro's ring, Cardenal reported that Cuba's homosexuals "were
actually happier in the concentration camps [that Castro had built for
themj, a place like that where they were all together must have been
almost like paradise for them." It is often observed that a symmetry exists
between the extreme ends of the political spectrum, that the fanatics of
the Right are mirror images of the zealots on the Left. But once we leave
the extremes, there is this tangible difference: the Right seeks to conserve
(and the Left to undermine) workaday democracy; the Left seeks to defend
(and the Right to defeat) the destructive fantasy of a heaven on earth.
This is why American Leftists in their "innocence" embrace political evil in
a way that American conservatives in their realism do not. A Bill Buckley
might defend a Pinochet in Chile on pragmatic grounds as "our
sonofabitch," but he would never call him "the Abraham Lincoln of his
people," as Jesse Jackson has praised Communist dictators like Fidel Castro
and Daniel Ortega. Nor would the Right defend Chile as a brave new
society pioneering the path to humanity's future, the way the Left has
defended Soviet Russia, the People's Republic of China, Communist Cuba,
Nicaragua, and all the other socialist despotisms. It is this religious
confusion and moral corruption that defines the utopianism of the Left. It
insists on imposing the idea of salvation on a temporal reality that is by its
nature flawed; in so doing, it exploits mankind's faith, as well as its hope
and charity. If self-righteousness is the moral oxygen of the radical creed,
self-deception is the marrow of its immune system. Credo quia impossibile: because what he believes is impossible, the radical believes because
it is necessary to believe. Malcolm Muggeridge observed the prototypes of
the radical faithful on a tour of Russia in the 1930s: Their delight in all
they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to this delight,
constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age. There were
earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the
massive headquarters of the OGPU with tears of gratitude in their eyes,
earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented
when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to
them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God
museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest
pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square and
bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who
stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: "If only
we had something like this in England!" The almost unbelievable credulity

of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even Soviet
officials used to handling foreign visitors. After Stalin's death, when the
Soviet rulers were forced to admit a considerable part of the terrible truth,
many of their progressive supporters also had confessions to make: In fact,
they had not really been so credulous as they appeared. Their seeming
innocence, as Nobel novelist Halldor Laxness explained, actually had an
element of guile: "We feared that the final victory of Socialism would be
hampered and hindered if the truth about Stalin's paradise were revealed
to the public" It is easy for today's Leftists to dismiss such revelations,
saying that "that was then and this is now"that Stalin is long dead, his
memory having been exhumed and then desecrated by Gorbachev as well
as Khrushchev. But as new Marxist paradises have sprouted in China,
Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, new generations of
revolutionary tourists have made their visits and come away reporting that
they had seen a future that really worked. Back home they have spread
the new gospel, their voices filled with what Milan Kundera has called the
"totalitarian poetry" of the socialist cause: the lyrical promises that lead
directly to the gulagwaiting room of the socialist paradise. But while
Utopian fantasies provide socialism with a shield against external criticism,
within its own borders a brutal pragmatism rules the state. The millions
who have been "liberated" by revolutionaries know the dirty little secret of
their liberation: that they are more oppressed by the revolution itself
than they ever had been by the regime it replaced. It is the need to
bridge the chasm between the socialist dream and the socialist reality that
produces the totalitarian state. The essence of that state and its
difference from the democracies with which it will always be at war was
foreseen with crystal clarity by Machiavelli. Because people are
susceptible, he wrote, "it is easy to persuade them, |but | difficult to fix
them in that persuasion. Thus it is necessary to take such measures that,
when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by
force." In the year zero of the revolution, Lenin showed himself to be
Machiavelli's disciple: "If the workers and peasants do not wish to accept
socialism, our reply will be: Why waste words when we can apply force?...
If we do not apply terror and immediate executions, we will get nowhere. It
is better that a hundred innocent are killed than that one guilty person
escapes." It is this bleak landscape that the totalitarian poetry is meant to
beautify.
Coalitions Good:
Uniting different coalitions is necessary to overcome white supremacy---the alt
recreates white divide and conquer
bell hooks 3, social critic extraordinaire, Beyond Black Only: Bonding Beyond Race,
http://prince.org/msg/105/50299?pr
African Americans have been at the forefront of the struggle to end racism and white supremacy in the United States
since individual free black immigrants and the larger body of enslaved blacks first landed here. Even though much of that struggle has been directly
concerned with the plight of black people, all gains received from civil rights work have had tremendous
positive impact on the social status of all non-white groups in this country. Bonding between enslaved Africans, free Africans, and Native Americans is well
documented. Freedom fighters from all groups (and certainly there were many traitors in all three groups who were co-opted by rewards given by the white power structure) understood the importance of solidarity-of struggling against
The enemy was not white people. It was white supremacy. Organic freedom fighters, both Native and
African Americans, had no difficulty building coalitions with those white folks who
wanted to work for the freedom of everyone. Those early models of
coalition building in the interest of dismantling white supremacy are often
forgotten. Much has happened to obscure that history. The construction of reservations (many of which were and are located in areas where there are not large populations of black people) isolated communities of
Native Americans from black liberation struggle. And as time passed both groups began to view one another through Eurocentric
stereotypes, internalizing white racist assumptions about the other . Those early coalitions were not
maintained. Indeed the bonds between African Americans struggling to resist racist domination, and all other people of color in this society who suffer from the same system, continue to be fragile, even as we
all remain untied by ties, however frayed and weakened, forged in shared anti-racist struggle. Collectively, within the United States people of color strengthen
our capacity to resist white supremacy when we build coalitions. Since white supremacy emerged
the common enemy, white supremacy.
here within the context of colonization, the conquering and conquest of Native Americans, early on it was obvious that Native and African Americans could best preserve their cultures by resisting from a standpoint of political
The concrete practice of solidarity between the two groups has been eroded by the divide-andconquer tactics of racist white power and by the complicity of both groups. Native American artist and activist of the Cherokee people Jimmie Durham, in his collection of essays A Certain
solidarity.
Lack of Coherence, talks about the 1960s as a time when folks tried to regenerate that spirit of coalition: In the 1960s and 70s American Indian, African American and Puerto Rican activists said, as loudly as they could, This
country is founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. This statement, hardly arguable, was not much taken up by white activists. As time passed, it was rarely taken up by anyone. Instead the fear that
ones specific group might receive more attention has led to greater nationalism, the showing of concern for ones racial or ethnic plight without linking that concern to the plight of other non-white groups and their struggles for
Bonds of solidarity between people of color are continuously ruptured by our complicity with white
racism. Similarly, white immigrants to the United States, both past and present, establish their right to citizenship within white supremacist society by asserting it in daily life through acts of discrimination and assault that
liberation.
register their contempt for and disregard of black people and darker-skinned immigrants mimic this racist behavior in their interactions with black folks. In her editorial On the Backs of Blacks published in a recent special issue of
TIME magazine Toni Morrison discusses the way white supremacy is reinscribed again and again as immigrants seek assimilation: All immigrants fight for jobs and space, and who is there to fight but those who have both? As in
the fishing ground struggle between Texas and Vietnamese shrimpers, they displace what and whom they canIn race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real
aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African AmericanSo addictive is this ploy that the fact of blackness has been abandoned for the theory of blackness. It doesnt matter
anymore what shade the newcomers skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door. Often people of color, both those who are citizens and those who are recent immigrants, hold black
people responsible for the hostility they encounter from whites. It is as though they see blacks as acting in a manner that makes things harder for everybody else. This type of scapegoating is the mark of the colonized sensibility which
always blames those victimized rather than targeting structures of domination. Just as many white Americans deny both the prevalence of racism in the United States and the role they play in perpetuating and maintaining white
supremacy, non-white, non-black groups, Native, Asian, Hispanic Americans, all deny their investment in anti-black sentiment even as they consistently seek to distance themselves from blackness so that they will not be seen as
jockeying for white approval and reward obscures the

way allegiance to the existing social structure undermines the social welfare of all people of color .
White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color bond
across differences of culture, ethnicity, and race. It is always strengthened when we
act as though there is no continuity and overlap in the patterns of exploitation and oppression that affect
all of our lives. To ensure that political bonding to challenge and change white supremacy will not be cultivated among diverse groups of people of color, white ruling groups pit us against one another in a no-win
residing at the bottom of this societys totem pole, in the category reserved for the most despised group. Such
game of who will get the prize for model minority today. They compare and contrast, affix labels like model minority, define boundaries, and we fall into line. Those rewards coupled with internalized racist assumptions lead nonblack people of color to deny the way racism victimizes them as they actively work to disassociate themselves from black people. This will to disassociate is a gesture of racism. Even though progressive people of color consistently
we have yet to build a contemporary mass movement to challenge white supremacy that
would draw us together. Without an organized collective struggle that consistently reminds us of our
common concerns, people of color forget. Sadly forgetting common concerns sets the stage for competing concerns. Working within the system of white supremacy, non-black people
critique these standpoints,
of color often feel as though they must compete with black folks to receive white attention. Some are even angry at what they wrongly perceive as a greater concern on the part of white of the dominant culture for the pain of black
people. Rather than seeing the attention black people receive as linked to the gravity of our situation and the intensity of our resistance, they want to make it a sign of white generosity and concern. Such thinking is absurd. If white
folks were genuinely concerned about black pain, they would challenge racism, not turn the spotlight on our collective pain in ways that further suggest that we are inferior. Andrew Hacker makes it clear in Two Nations that the vast
majority of white Americans believe that members of the black race represent an inferior strain of the human species. He adds: In this view Africans-and Americans who trace their origins to that continent-are seen as languishing at
a lower evolutionary level than members of other races. Non-black people of color often do not approach white attention to black issues by critically interrogating how those issues are presented and whose interests the
representations ultimately serve. Rather than engaging in a competition that sees blacks as winning more goodies from the white system than other groups, non-black people of color who identify with black resistance struggle
recognize the danger of such thinking and repudiate it. They are politically astute enough to challenge a rhetoric of resistance that is based on competition rather than a capacity on the part of non-black groups to identify with whatever
progress blacks make as being a positive sign for everyone. Until non-black people of color define their citizenship via commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice rather than investing in the dehumanization and oppression of
black people, they will always act as mediators, keeping black people in check for the ruling white majority. Until racist anti-black sentiments are let go by other people of color, especially immigrants, and complain that these groups
As more people of
color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white
supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer . The most recent effort to undermine progressive bonding between people of color is the
are receiving too much attention, they undermine freedom struggle. When this happens people of color war all acting in complicity with existing exploitative and oppressive structures.
institutionalization of multiculturalism. Positively, multiculturalism is presented as a corrective to a Eurocentric vision of model citizenship wherein white middle-class ideals are presented as the norm. Yet this positive intervention
is undermined by visions of multiculturalism that suggest everyone should live with and identify with their own self contained group. If white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is unchanged then multiculturalism within that context
can only become a breeding ground for narrow nationalism, fundamentalism, identity politics, and cultural, racial, and ethnic separatism. Each separate group will then feel that it must protect its own interests by keeping outsiders at
For even though

demographics in the United States would suggest that in the future the nation will be more populated by people
bay, for the group will always appear vulnerable, its power and identity sustained by exclusivity. When people of color think this way, white supremacy remains intact.
of color, and whites will no longer be the majority group, numerical presence will in no way alter
white supremacy if there is no collective organizing, no efforts to build
coalitions that cross boundaries. Already, the white Christian Right is targeting large populations of people of color to ensure that the fundamentalist values they want
this nation to uphold and represent will determine the attitudes and values of these groups. The role Eurocentric Christianity has played in teaching non-white folks Western metaphysical dualism, the ideology that under girds binary
notion of superior/inferior, good/bad, white/black, cannot be ignored. While progressive organizations are having difficulty reaching wider audiences, the white-dominated Christian Right organizes outreach programs that
acknowledge diversity and have considerable influence. Just as the white-dominated Christian church in the U.S. once relied on biblical references to justify racist domination and discrimination, it now deploys a rhetoric of
multiculturalism to invite non-white people to believe that racism can be overcome through a shared fundamentalist encounter. Every contemporary fundamentalist white male-dominated religious cult in the U.S. has a diverse
congregation. People of color have flocked to these organizations because they have felt them to be places where racism does not exist, where they are not judged on the basis of skin color. While the white-dominated mass media
focus critical attention on black religious fundamentalist groups like the Nation of Islam, and in particular Louis Farrakhan, little critique is made of white Christian fundamentalist outreach to black people and other people of color.
Black Islamic fundamentalism shares with the white Christian Right support for coercive hierarchy, fascism, and a belief that some groups are inferior and others superior, along with a host of other similarities. Irrespective of the
standpoint, religious fundamentalism brainwashes individuals not to think critically or see radical politicization as a means of transforming their lives. When people of color immerse themselves in religious fundamentalism, no
meaningful challenge and critique of white supremacy can surface. Participation in a radical multiculturalism in any form is discouraged by religious fundamentalism. Progressive multiculturalism that encourages and promotes
coalition building between people of color threatens to disrupt white supremacist organization of us all
into competing camps. However, this vision of multiculturalism is continually undermined by greed, one group wanting rewards for itself even at the expense of other groups. It is this perversion of
solidarity the authors of Night Vision address when they assert: While there are different nationalities, races and genders in the U.S., the supposedly different cultures in multiculturalism dont like to admit what they have in common,
the glue of it all-parasitism. Right now, theres both anger among the oppressed and a milling around, edging up to the next step but uncertain what it is fully about, what is means. The key is the common need to break with
A based identity politics of solidarity that embraces both a broad based identity politics
which acknowledges specific cultural and ethnic legacies, histories , etc. as it
simultaneously promotes a recognition of overlapping cultural traditions and values as
well as an inclusive understanding of what is gained when people of color unite to
resist white supremacy is the only way to ensure that multicultural
democracy will become a reality.
parasitism.
Permutation Solvency:
Institutions are inevitable and engaging them is key studying, understanding, and
reforming institutions is the only way to prevent unchecked abuses of power and
atrocities
Marti and Fernandez 13 (2013, Ignasi, Associate Professor Strategy and Organization,
EMLYON Business School, OCE Research Centre, France, and Pablo, Professor, IESE Business
School, University of Navarra, The Institutional Work of Oppression and Resistance: Learning
from the Holocaust, Organization Studies August 2013 vol. 34 no. 8 1195-1223)
Oppressive institutional work In
our examination of the Holocaust, we focused initially on the purposeful

work) by the Nazis and others to gradually
regulate the lives of their targeted populations and separate them, first symbolically, then physically
everyday practices that involved a concerted effort (i.e. institutional
through spatial segregation and ultimately concentration camps and death. The different types of oppressive work we referred to ranging
from categorization, seclusion and creation of social distance to the unleashing of absolute violence share one fundamental aspect: They all
contribute to transforming the universal structures of human relatedness to the world: space and time, social relations, and ultimately the relation
to the self. They do it, however, in different degrees. Considering such processes and transformations will expand our understanding of agency
and institutions. One
might observe different forms of oppression as characterized by the degree to

which they allow actors different spaces of autonomy and leave room and potential for agency. Some types
of oppressive work restrict people only by culture and norms; whereas others produce conditions that are significantly more stringent, such as
those imposed on the Jews shortly after the Nuremberg laws were passed to severely limit their access to the job market or the running of
business; use of public transportation; attendance in school; or participation in religious ceremonies. The creation of taxonomy of categories into
which every individual can be pigeonholed appears to be a crucial type of institutional work. Such actions were undertaken by the Nazis in
classifying their target population(s) as Homo sacer or subhuman (Agamben, 1998). Moreover, such escalation of oppression is eased by the
creation of social distance between the oppressors (as well as those who benefit from oppression) and the oppressed by means of authorization,
routinization or different types of rhetorical devices notably what we called camouflage language. Once the categories are created, the
oppression continues with spatial separation, dispossession of property and sometimes even ones names, and increasingly violent responses to
any noncompliance. Here we are fully entering the terrain of what Goffman called total institutions (Goffman, 1961). In them, one can see
different degrees of self-violation and, concomitantly, of spaces of autonomy. The oppressive work applied in ghettos was different from that used
in death camps, each featuring distinct types of institutional work. The most extreme setting the death camp allowed for almost no resistance
as the oppressors exercised near-total control, destroying any vestiges of independent social life (and, in many cases, life itself). How relevant are
those forms of oppression to present-day organizational phenomena, and how do they contribute to our understanding of institutional work? We
argue that different forms of oppressive work can be observed today, although certainly none with the horrifying purposes of and the results
attained by the Nazis. These occurrences range from well-known oppressive institutional orders to the most regular organizations under the
modern, capitalist institutional order. These and others not discussed here offer what we believe is an important opportunity for students of
institutional work. Even though less harrowing than the Holocaust, total
institutions of today may still be sadly

characterized by humans being belittled and dehumanized; sometimes spatially circumscribed; heavily
guarded; often stripped of markers of individual identity; clearly categorized as the other; and often terrorized and treated with
violence. Such instances include genocides (Pina e Cunha et al., 2010; Stokes & Gabriel, 2010); the treatment of
prisoners of war in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (Greenberg & Dratel, 2005); institutions such as asylums and mental hospitals (Grob, 1983) or
work camps; and cases of forced labour, human trafficking or forced marriage (Bales, 1999). For example, human trafficking has grown
over the years as an industry to become according to the United Nations the fastest-growing form of organized crime (United Nations, 2001)
one which is considered a high-profit, low-risk trade for the organizers. Children and women are trafficked for forced prostitution, domestic
servitude, unsafe agricultural or sweatshop labour, or sold as brides. Cases such as that of Nigerias Niger Delta (Akpan, 2010) are well reported.
More broadly speaking, forced labour can be found in many countries today, and the International Labour Organization estimates at least 12.3
million people in forced labour worldwide (other estimates show that figure to be as high as thirty million; see Bales, 2004; Crane, 2013). A
rather well-known example concerns workers in the charcoal camps of Brazil (Bales, 1999).12 One can observe in these cases the creation of
geographical and social distance, which ease the treatment of enslaved human beings and contributes to their alienation. Sadly, examples
like these abound. While differing in forms and degrees of oppressive work, they nonetheless share
a common theme: the

effort and intent to shatter the human capacity to resist. We believe the study of various types of oppressive
work brings an important perspective to discussions about the paradox of embedded agency (Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002) by focusing not on
how institutional change is possible, but on how through which types of institutional work it can be made impossible. Milder forms of
oppressive work can be found today in humiliating practices that pervade developed and less developed countries alike. Some examples are those
regulations imposed on immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who seek work permits, access to social welfare services or asylum.
Through increasingly stringent regulations, tedious processes that are often experienced as arbitrary, and fearful controls, people are invited to
accept and embody imposed, sometimes meaningless, categories. Such categories notably affect peoples perception of their rights and civic
participation, impact their job-seeking patterns and efforts, and make them suspects in the eyes of others.13 An insightful study of Central
American immigrants in the United States finds that this can lead [the immigrants] to accept their self-depreciation as normal (Menjvar &
Abrego, 2012, p. 1413), echoing similar findings from Europe (Escandell & Ceobanu, 2009; McLaren, 2003). Other examples of humiliating
practices which are gaining prevalence in todays society include airport security checks and other work legitimated by 9/11 and the war on terror
(Molotch, 2012), and the use of different surveillance tools and measures intended to prevent theft by employees.14 Routinization and
authorization play an extremely important role in these practices, which all contribute in varying degrees to damaging peoples pride and dignity
by imposing a sense of inferiority and subordination (Lindner, 2010). A final and rather puzzling element in most of these practices is that they
are often legally sanctioned. Thus, a
promising research agenda is to examine oppression through

formal structures of power that are publicly respected rather than focus exclusively on the
wilful exercise of violence with the intention to inflict suffering. Which carriers of power and what types of
institutional work negatively impact the quotidian practices of human beings and reduce their capacity to act? Finally, a vast body of research by
anthropologists, sociologists of work, and critical management scholars has shown how milder, often hidden forms of oppressive work find their
way into many contemporary versions of capitalist workplace organization. These types of oppression feel natural, yet they are no less important.
In such settings, work discipline is not necessarily enforced by abuse, violence or arbitrary constraints and categorization, but is expressed in
other ways. One example would be rigid and exacting guidelines for physical appearance, such as Walt Disney Worlds instruction that
fingernails should not extend more than one-fourth inch beyond fingertips (Leidner, 1993, p. 9). Leidner, drawing on the work of Hochschild
(1983) also reports how in some cases organizations seek to extend control through emotional labour too, hoping to direct how [the employees]
view themselves and how they feel (Leidner, 1993, p. 64). Alternately, workers are asked to be open to change on short notice, take risks
continually, and become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures (Delbridge, 1998; Harris-White, 2003). Reflecting on this
trend, Sennett (1998) argues that pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control, rather than created the conditions which
set us free. Although mild compared to the extreme of genocide described in this paper, and sometimes even hidden, such forms of oppressive
work still affect the capacity of human beings to act, think and feel. It seems reasonable to consider them as well in expanding our understanding
of agency and institutions. Resisting: Anti-oppressive institutional work The prevailing perspective on resistance continues to claim that
individuals willingly subject themselves to systems of domination (Willmott, 1993). This structural vision is strengthened by the idea that groups
and individuals usually fail in their attempts to resist oppression (Allen, 2008; Burawoy, 1979; Gaventa, 1992). However, as we have seen,
resistance did occur even in the midst of the most horrifying efforts to fully shatter it. An important insight derived from the analysis of
oppressive work and resistance in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe is the fact that the parameters of resistance are set, in an important manner,
by the institutions of oppression. To the extent that oppressive forms of work are effective, they may fully preclude any forms of resistance. The
Nazi project of human destruction reached its peak with the creation of the Muselmnner, whose capacity to (re)act and to resist had been
completely obliterated. As several authors have argued, they became the living dead and ceased to be fully human. Hence, they were no longer
capable of doing any type of work (Levi, 2009; Sofsky, 1997). Acts of resistance that do occur under circumstances of most severe oppression are
often either individual and mundane (e.g. walking erect and washing ones face) or collectively but utterly desperate (e.g. revolts by the
Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor), which may be partially understood in terms of how the level of oppression structures
the available options. Thus, depending on the circumstances people confront, their resistance may oscillate from organized but hidden collective
acts (e.g. illegal press, theatre performances and the school system in the Warsaw ghetto) to violent overt confrontations (e.g. revolt in the last
days of the Warsaw ghetto) to silent, anonymous acts (e.g. of sabotage and foot dragging) to essentially individual, small-scale efforts such as
writing. We attribute this to the existence of some sort of correlation between the two forms of work explored in this article: oppressive and antioppressive. Future studies might focus on such oscillation and look at how different types of institutional oppressive work are confronted by
different forms of resistance. Future research might also probe the intent of those efforts and how that may impact the specific types of antioppressive work done. Is the resistance aiming to fully disrupt the oppressive machinery or to nibble away part of its effects? Is the resisters goal
survival, or simply reminding oneself and others that he or she remains a human being? Addressing questions like this might bring a new
perspective to discussions and today criticisms about the heroic character of most accounts of institutional entrepreneurship. Are (arguably
non-heroic and mundane) acts such as writing, walking erect or washing ones face acts of resistance and instances of anti-oppressive work? We
have argued that they are, provided they are effortful acts performed with the intention of resisting the takeover of ones autonomy and very
humanity. Furthermore, the spectrum of acts of resistance provides students of institutional theory and agency a strong reminder of the need to
seriously consider how the nature of the institutional order(s) shape the options (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011) and ultimately the lives of people
inhabiting them (Creed, DeJordy & Lok, 2010; Hallet & Ventresca, 2006). As stated above, our argument is that different forms of anti-oppressive
work seen in the Holocaust are present and observable in the most ordinary organizations under the modern, capitalist institutional order (see
Bauman, 1989; Clegg et al., 2006). If the objective of the work of oppression is to drive some goals, claims and aspirations to the realm of the
impossible and limit peoples capacity to think, feel and act independently, our understanding of the reasons and methods behind everyday forms
of institutional work can be advanced by studying acts of resistance (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Such work can include both active and passive
elements, which has been demonstrated by scholars from diverse traditions studying the contemporary workplace organization (Crowley, 2012;
Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Vallas, 2012). Overt forms of collective resistance, which require organized coordination and planning, have received
much attention by institutionalists over the last decade particularly those employing the colourful imagery of social movements (Schneiberg &
Lounsbury, 2008; Tilly & Tilly, 1998). Other examples of active strategies include various forms of machine sabotage, foot dragging, theft, and
criticizing supervisors in their absence (Hodson, 2001; Scott, 1990). Finally, people do play dumb, feign ignorance, withhold enthusiasm,
dissimulate and avoid work. These are well-known examples of passive strategies of resistance. While many of these instances stop well short of
outright defiance, what is left to scholars interested in institutional work is to examine how the intent to do anti-oppressive work is inscribed in
the acts, and what difference such acts does make to the acting individuals. On the mediations of power Institutional theory suggests that
institutions, through different mechanisms and carriers, shape patterns of thought, action and organization
(Battilana & DAunno, 2009; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zilber, 2002). We argue that the study of oppression and resistance
offers new, rather neglected, possible angles to study how actors go about creating, maintaining
and transforming institutions. We elaborate on two of them. The first one is the study of physical violence. Recent empirical
studies of institutional reproduction and change have concentrated on the tactical, strategic, manipulative and persuasive aspects of power to the
virtual exclusion of its coercive, bodily and forceful dimensions (Clegg et al., 2006; Lawrence, 2008). However, the study of oppression reminds
us that the use of different rhetorical weapons and social skills (Fligstein, 2001) is not necessarily the end of the story. In order to obtain
compliance, human beings are granted education, indoctrinated, given access to media and sometimes even taught sociology (Moore, 1978), but
in some cases compliance is attained through fear and even terror, by means of physical coercion and abuse, restricted mobility, rape or forcing
people to kill their kin. Less horrendous examples of situations where compliance was attained by force can be seen in todays United States or
Europe. For instance, Central American immigrants interviewed by Menjvar and Abrego (2012) explained how their fear of moving around in
the cities in search of employment or social services had fundamentally changed their lives. Likewise, some workers labour long hours under
hazardous conditions for low pay, subjected to employer abuse with little or no means of self-protection (perhaps out of fear of losing their jobs).
In these situations, physical safety and economic survival may depend on silence, which can appear as conformity and compliance (Sennett,
1998; Vallas, 2012). The focus on oppressive work illustrates how violence can be facilitated by the use of camouflage language, routinization,
categorization, and the use of fully legitimate and formal structures of power namely, the law. All of these mechanisms create social distance
between the oppressors and the victims. Yet, in the end, as Barley points out: words break no bones (Barley, 2008, p. 507). Where
the
exercise of power is concerned, we should look not only at who has it and why, but also at
how such power is exercised. More specifically, we should ask how different forms of physical violence (or the threat of such) are
mobilized to perform institutional work. While terms such as oppression and violence are frequently regarded as obsolete, they are not. Such
phenomena, even if considered to be rare and analytically extreme, are common in the world. Since they are likely to play an important role in a
large number of processes of institutional creation, maintenance and disruption, they are relevant and timely for our research community. The
second new angle that we hope to bring to the study of institutional work is the focus on the grey zone (Levi, 1989/2009). One of the more
puzzling elements about the Holocaust is the fact that some of the Jews e.g. Jewish authorities, Sonderkommandos contributed both actively
and passively to the extermination of their own people. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Germans, Poles, French and Lithuanians contributed
to the system of domination, not only through their roles as administrators but also by indifference. We believe important new insights can be
gleaned by examining who inhabits the grey zone and why, in different situations (with varying degrees) of oppression. This is particularly true
with regard to institutional maintenance, which has attracted only modest empirical interest (Dacin, Munir & Tracey, 2010; Zietsma & Lawrence,
2010). Thus, a promising research agenda is to examine how those populations targeted for oppression (e.g. the Jews, agricultural labourers,
women) and those who do not necessarily have an obvious motive to oppress others (e.g. Lithuanians during the Holocaust; co-ethnic
supervisors), contribute willingly or not to the reproduction of the system of domination, and through which types of institutional work.
Furthermore, can anti-oppressive work actually contribute to oppression by reproducing/reinforcing those institutional arrangements that enable
it? Studies of resistance in the workplace illustrate the irony of how some of the most defiant workers (Vallas, 2012, p. 25) those particularly
rigid in their opposition to managerial policies succeed only in reaffirming managements position (Courpasson, Dany & Clegg, 2011; Fleming
& Spicer, 2007; Vallas, 2012; Willis, 1977). The contradictory nature of the grey zone and who inhabits it thus represents a promising direction
for research in institutional theory one that demands less clear-cut distinctions between challengers and incumbents in accounts of institutional
reproduction and change. Things that matter? A final element that may come more forcefully into our conversations through the study of
oppression and resistance is the relevance of morality. In existing accounts of institutional entrepreneurship and work, the status of morality is
awkward and ambiguous if it appears at all. In that respect, they are similar to most sociological narratives which, according to Bauman (1989) do
without reference to morality. In Making Social Science Matter, Bent Flyvbjerg argues that among the three things necessary to re-enchant and
empower social science there is the need to take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we
must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 167). Recent calls by management scholars
point out that we institutionalists in particular (Clegg, 2006; Munir, 2011) have failed to focus on problems that matter and to address
contemporary issues of broader societal relevance, such as the current global financial crisis (Lounsbury & Hirsch 2010; Munir, 2011); forced
labour, including for children (Bales, 1999; Crane, 2013); growing job precariousness (often masked as flexibility); or repression in Syria and
censorship in China. Moreover, beyond that lack of attention to todays social issues, the question of values and power is rarely discussed in
studies of institutional work. As recently expressed by Creed and colleagues, In the management literature, institutional change and agency are
most often discussed without reference to their underlying moral or political vision (Creed et al., 2010, p. 1380). Are we suggesting that articles
should include a moral (or moralizing?) discussion? Certainly not. The point we want to make is that today there is a marked need for debate and
reorientation of values (Bauman, 2008; MacIntyre, 2006) and organization theorists might want to have a say. Indeed, some scholars have taken
on the task. For instance, Khan, Munir and Willmott (2007) examined the elimination of the long-standing institutional practice of child labour
from the worlds largest soccer ball manufacturing cluster in Pakistan; and Creed and colleagues looked at how marginalized GLBT ministers had
to be the change they wanted to see in their churches(DeJordy & Lok, 2010, p. 1355). Nevertheless, should we settle for limiting discussions on
values and morality to just those studies dealing with issues that appear to be morally problematic? Put differently, are there really relevant
settings and contexts for which we can do without reference to morality? Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 167) suggests that doing that would mean the
perpetuation of science as usual. Instead, he argues for the emergence of what he calls a phronetic social science, whose objective is
contributing to societys capacity for value-rational deliberation and action. We think it is worth contributing to such emergence and we see
potential for doing that. For instance, revisiting recent work by Suddaby, Cooper and Greenwood on the role of large accounting firms in the
emergence of a transnational regulatory field in professional services, the reader learns how the new emerging dominant logic reduces the
concern for citizens rights and the public interest, emphasizing instead commercialism and the protection and promotion of capital markets
(Suddaby et al., 2007, p. 356). These insights join a large number of other studies that show the growing marketization of our society (Bourdieu,
1998; Davis, 2009). Is this a matter on which we, organization scholars, want to say something beyond the fact that it occurs? Likewise, in a
recent article Mair and colleagues (2012) study how an intermediary organization in southern Asia builds inclusive markets as a means to
generate economic and social development for the least advantaged societal groups. However, while they explicitly attend to the institutions at
play and their consequences in form of market and community marginalization, their article seems to assume that market inclusion is all good,
and leaves it unproblematized. We see in here food for further reflections and research. Finally, those interested in how actors are able to do
institutional work (Battilana & DAunno, 2009; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) should ask this key question: Are
there or might there be types

structures, practices, beliefs and technologies that would prevent those who inhabit them from
becoming agents? Or if this seems to suggest too extreme a state of affairs although historically manifested in the figure of the
Muselmann are there or might there be types of institutional work that seriously threaten the
possibility of agency for others? That certainly appears to be the case in todays world. Addressing
of social
questions like that might shed new light on the subject of embedded agency by bringing to our attention
what the pre-conditions of agency are, thus helping to explain how institutional
change is possible if actors are fully conditioned by the institutions that they wish to change
(Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002). As we elaborated above, in different forms and to varying degrees oppressive
work transforms the capacity of human beings to act, think and feel. If
people feel their capacity to shape their lives

has been taken from them (Nussbaum, 2000); or that they have been pushed into herds like animals (Marcuse, 1991) or treated
with no dignity (Hodson, 2001), is there still any point in discussing how they may transform or create
institutions? We believe it does. But we should be well aware that without some minimum control and dignity,
institutional work and for that matter, any sort of work and even life becomes unbearable (Frankl, 1984/1959; Marcuse, 1991). People need to
feel and be treated as worthy human beings in order to envision and execute acts of agency. Thus, we need to focus on how the denial of human
dignity and worth occurs if we want to have a more complete understanding of agency and institutions. It also seems
necessary to
study what actions people may take to regain their dignity (Sennett, 2003; Scott, 1990) and take pride in their
accomplishments, no matter how modest they may appear to others. Finally, we need to reflect on how such studies can
offer a solid ground for helping us to construct new institutional orders (or change existing
ones), with a renewed commitment for a more humane and respectful set of practices, beliefs and technologies for those inhabiting them. In
short, we need to study what institutional orders should be pursuing for each and every
human being, so that they are empowered and granted conditions and spaces for moral
agency.
Ahistorical:
They assume that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a
broader web of historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativism
Charoenying (citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) 8
(Timothy, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach,
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach)
The year 1492
marked a major
turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year
Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalusa Moorish
province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlierand more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the
European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance
of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial
identity. According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental
Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion
throughout the known world. The discovery of godless natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and
Seplveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift , Maldonado-Torres argues,
would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religousand ultimately racial
differences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias
against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian
peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular conceptions about the indigenous
natives of the Americas. These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of,
colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the
enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans .
Agency Turn:
Agency is inevitable asserting that systems are terminally screwed diminishes the
value of resistance to oppression even in the face of slavery, resistance was possible
Robinson 2k4 (Reginald Leamon, prof law @ Howard U, researcher on the relation between
race and academic thought Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, and White Structural
Oppression: An Analysis of Critical Race Practive/Praxis American University Law Review 53,
no.6 (August 2004): 1361-1419)
During slavery, when whites ruled blacks by law, vigilance, and violence, blacks fought and
died, all in the name of their natural, normal claim to freedom. In addition to fighting and dying, they
ran away so often that southern planters called it a disease.4 Using guile and wit, slaves escaped, hiding
within earshot of their masters. Having escaped, Harriet Jacobs lived for seven years in an attic space
over her masters head.5 Working slowly, slaves frustrated the masters desired yield. Using sabotage,
slaves destroyed tools, making their exploitation inefficient . Feigning sickness, they resisted. Denmark
Vesey, future revolt leader, pretended to suffer from epilepsy.6 When not running, slaves used sheer intelligence, patience,
and planning. In 1848, Ellen Craft, a white mulatto, dressed like a man , hid her visage behind bandages of a false injury,
and refused to talk.7 By her side, ever attentive and properly cowered, the faithful slave was her husband.
Believing in their right to be free, Craft and her husband walked and rode their way to freedom.8 Choosing to
fight and die, slaves showed us their power to act purposefully. The power to act is human
agency, and these actions can support or transform society. Through social and cultural influences, society can constrain
or empower ordinary people9 to act by giving them relatively equal access to the rules, resources, and language. By supporting or
transforming a society, we express a latent, inexorable power that rejects the thought that white structural
oppression negates ordinary peoples subjectivity, thus making them subtextual victims .10 Within a broad
structuralist framework, white structural oppression refers to practices like racism that constitute an
objective, external power that robs people of their natural right to be free human beings . Subtextual
victims refer to ordinary people like blacks who believe that America will always treat them badly ,
preventing them from attaining social and economic success. For these ordinary people, experiences like subtextual
victimization and practices like white structural oppression belie human agency (e.g., right action).11
Although ordinary people like blacks exercised human agency within the crucible of slavery, Critical Race Theory ( CRT) builds its
methodology on the idea that law, race, and power oppress ordinary people, denying them the right to live
free and to act purposefully.12 Race Crits have developed deconstructive approaches to unearth how law and race form powerful,
objective relations of whites over blacks, men over women, natives over foreigners. Relying on this methodology and these approaches, Race
Crits, especially in early writings, analyzed unconscious white racism.13 Given CRTs early development, these writings were perforce
theoretical. Recently, some Race Crits have sought practical, serviceable tools to assist lawyers and activists.14 Practical
writings cope better with struggles against white racism . Practical writings talk to
community activists.15 They enable political lawyers to examine and transform legal conflicts into
practical solutions or legal remedies. These writings encourage left scholars to leave the ivory tower, so
that they can work with the ordinary people for whom Race Crits purport to write and on whom their
scholarly existence depends.16 Under this view, Race Crits can redress white structural oppression and
engage in antisubordination struggles, so that ordinary people can use their human agency.
Their alt is entirely useless for real people

Robinson 2k4 (Reginald Leamon, prof law @ Howard U, researcher on the relation between
race and academic thought Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, and White Structural
Oppression: An Analysis of Critical Race Practive/Praxis American University Law Review 53,
no.6 (August 2004): 1361-1419)
Within these antisubordination practices, structural forces dominate, prevailing over ordinary people. 183
By Williams and Yamamoto applying the mindset doctrine uncritically, they suggest that ordinary
people cannot engage in this assessment and reassessment.184 As the founders had conceived, they
use the mindset doctrine to rebuke elite whites use of white structural oppression. Yet even if they do not
think alike, ordinary people have a common culture of shared understandings within their various
communities. In the mid to late 1800s in California, Asians had human agency. In the early 1900s, elite
whites attempted to subvert this agency through laws like the Alien Land Act. After the California
legislature enacted this clearly racist law, Asians found creative ways to hold real property.
Although living in hostile climates, Asians forged ahead to the dismay of many whites.185 During
slavery, blacks used money to buy their freedom. They worked within the slavery system, reinforcing it
indirectly, so that they could be free. The irony notwithstanding, blacks had human agency. An
antisubordination practice that negates the subject and her agency cannot
help ordinary people. Williams and Yamamoto keep ordinary people in the blame game,
encouraging them to become self-reflective only so that they can identify the structural forces that affect
their lives. Unintentionally, ordinary people become not personally responsible but more efficient at
proclaiming their innocence and their victim status, and in so doing, they only marginally inspect their
mindsets (or core beliefs). By proclaiming their innocence, ordinary people never
know that they, too, co-create racism. In relying on the mindset doctrine, Race Crits
like Williams and Yamamoto have little interest in core beliefs, except if they belong to white
elites and a system called white structural oppression. Further, while it is clear that Race Crits like
Richard Delgado have influenced a new generation of left scholars, none of them has unpacked the
disturbing implications for ordinary people. Even under a so-called radical theory like CRT, ordinary
people can vitiate personal responsibility, proclaim their innocence, and blame the structural forces that
lie solely in white elite hands. In effect, CRT keeps ordinary people like blacks in a victims
conscience. I apply this point with equal vigor in the following section.
Political Ontology Turn:

We K the whole notion of "political ontology" as it relates to race. It discourages
black unity its net worse.
James 10 (Michael James, Bucknell University Faculty, Contemporary Political Theory;
Cultural and Ethnic Pluralism; Law and Legal Theory Ph.D., Duke University "The Political
Ontology of Race" APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper available via:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1643755)
The role of agency in the political ontology of race reveals another problem: the fragility of
racial solidarity. Because black political solidarity is a choice, some blacks will likely
defect from the collective fight to resist race-based inequality (Shelby 2005, 155). Whereas biological
ontology and social ontology emphasize the unchosen aspect of race, something that cannot be unilaterally rejected, political ontology
foregrounds choice, thus clarifying how black solidarity is vulnerable not only to external attack from anti-black racism, but also to
internal defection by thin blacks who reject black political solidarity. This fragility becomes more daunting when we consider which thin
blacks are most able and have the greatest incentive to reject black political solidarity . Both
those who can physically pass for white and those whose class status facilitates their assimilation into white society can avoid the negative
experiences associated with black racial identity highlighted by interactive-kind social constructivism. But while the defection of passers can
dilute the political strength of the black community and reinforce the social structure that values physical whiteness, the
defection of
the better off and the better educated is more debilitating, since it deprives the black
political community of some (but not all) of its best potential leaders (Shelby 2005, 79-80, 85).15 Thus
the political ontology of race, better than its biological or social counterparts, elucidates the fragility of black
political solidarity.
The political ontology of race also highlights conflicts of interests and perspectives that can
permeate the thin black community. If lighter skinned and higher class blacks are less likely to bear the scars of race, their
experiences and perspectives will differ substantially from that of darker, poorer blacks. And in the case of wealthier, better educated blacks, their
short-term, purely economic interests will surely conflict with those of poorer blacks as well. Finally, if higher status blacks tend to dominate
leadership positions within the black political community, their divergent perspectives and interests can at the least undermine their ability to
represent ordinary blacks well, and at worst lead them to betray their interests. Trust
between black political elites and

ordinary blacks thus becomes a central problem for the political ontology of race. But as I will
argue in the next section, the problem of trust is better addressed by the political ontology of race than by the social or biological ontologies.
*State Not Always Racist---Wall:

Too sweeping to say working-through-State never counters racism heres 7
concrete examples:
Seligman 11 Brad Seligman Lead Counsel, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc The nationwide
class action gender discrimination case against Wal-Mart Stores and founder of the Impact Fund,
which provides financial and technicalassistance and representation for complex public interest
litigation Clearinghouse REVIEW Journal of Poverty Law and Policy JanuaryFebruary
2011 http://www.impactfund.org/downloads/Resources/UsingLawForChange-Seligman.pdf
Litigation as a tool for social change has a long and proud tradition in the U nited States. In the nineteenth century
cases were brought to challenge discriminatory laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and to advance
labor rights and the rights of women and people of color. In the twentieth century the epic battle to
dismantle Jim Crow laws and the separate but equal doctrine culminated in the famous Brown v.
Board of Education decision. In the 1960s federal rules were developed to make class action litigation
more feasible, and courts approved massive institutional-change cases against industries and
governmental units.1 In the 1970s environmental litigation, aided by the passage of federal laws such as the National
Environmental Policy Act, became common. Starting in the 1980s, however, social justice litigation has become more challenging to
pursue due to more conservative judges, tougher class certification and substantive law decisions, more demanding attorney-fee and costrecovery requirements, the decline in federal enforcement of civil rights and environmental laws, and cutbacks and restrictions on legal services
funding.2 Still, such litigation remains a potent weapon for change. In recent years the environmental justice
and disability rights movements have shown that the path remains open for innovative litigation. Today we nevertheless must
be more
strategic and thoughtful about how we use litigation. Here I describe a holistic model of social justice
litigation that includes adroit use of the media, coalitions, and working partnerships with community and
grassroots organizations and other forms of advocacy. I explore the range of procedural devices in the social justice
litigators tool box. And I remind readers to take pride in and enjoy their work.
And, meaningful reformism now disproves sweeping claim.

Farber 98
Daniel A., Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, and Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law,
University of Minnesota. J.D., summa cum laude, University of Illinois School of Law, 1975,
KRINOCK LECTURE SERIES: IS AMERICAN LAW INHERENTLY RACIST?, 15 T.M.
Cooley L. Rev. 361, lexis
PROFESSOR FARBER: As I was getting ready to leave for the airport, my wife gave me a final piece of advice about this debate. She said,
"Don't be too reasonable." Nevertheless, I would like to begin by stressing some common ground that I think may get lost because the debate
format naturally encourages us to take adversarial positions. In reality, Professor Delgado and I share a great deal in our views of law and
American society. Both of us see the issue of racial inequality as being central and requiring the most serious possible attention. Both of us reject
the conservative dogma of color blindness, and both of us, as I think will be shown tonight, believe that one imperative need is for dialogue and
discussion of this topic if we are to make any progress. So we do have something in common. But we also have a fundamental disagreement, I
think, a disagreement that is illustrated by the fact that we
are on the opposite sides of this debate about the
inherent racism of American law. As Professor Delgado said in his introductory remarks, critical race theory'sview is
essentially that racism is embedded in the DNA of American law. And that in effect, racism is not merely a widespread blemish on American law,
but is instead, a radical infection that goes right to the heart of the legal system. I disagree with that for reasons that I will hopefully make clear.
[*375] I think that this thesis rests on a one-sided view of the legal system. I think that it is based on a misunderstanding of some of the
fundamental principles of the system. I think in the end, despite what I know are Professor Delgado's good intentions, that the
inherent
racism position (and critical race theory, in general) risks being more destructive than constructive in terms
of advancing our national conversation on race. I noticed that Professor Delgado postponed the issue of inherent
racism, or the inherency of racism, until his next ten minutes. I may also put off, to some extent, my discussion of that point as well, though I will
refer to it briefly. Let me begin with the vision of the American legal system that Professor Delgado presented in his first twenty minutes. I do not
intend to deny the reality of the dark side of American law in American legal history, and that dark side has indeed been very bad at times.
Nevertheless, I think one
and that we
might equally point to some more positive aspects of American legal society,
get only a skewed and incomplete picture if we focus only on one side of the
picture: if we ignore the Thirteenth, n15 Fourteenth, n16 and Fifteenth n17 Amendments; if we ignore
Brown v. Board of Education n18 and the work of the Warren Court; if we ignore the Civil Rights Acts
of 1964, n19 1965, n20 and 1990; n21 and if we ignore or minimize the commitment to affirmative action that many American
institutions, especially educational institutions, have had for the past two decades. I do not think you have to be a triumphalist to
think that these are important developments-you only have to be a realist. Similarly, as serious as the problem of racial inequality remains in our
society, it
is also unrealistic to ignore the considerable amount of progress that has been made.
Consider the emergence of the black middle class in the last generation or generation and a half, and
the [*376] integration of important American institutions such as big-city police forces, which are important in the
day-to-day lives of many minority people. The military has sometimes been described as the most successfully integrated institution in American
society. We all know, as well, that the
number of minority lawyers has risen substantially. In state and

federal legislatures, there was no such thing as a black caucus in Congress thirty or forty years ago,
because there would not have been enough black people present to call a caucus. And do not forget the considerable
evidence of sharp changes in white attitudes over that period in a more favorable and
tolerant direction.
*Pessimism towards progressivism inverts the error and makes racism worse. This
card rules:
Jones 99
Richard Wyn Jones is at Cardiff University, where he is currently a Professor of Politics.
Professor Wyn Jones is the former Director of the Institute of Welsh Politics and professor in
critical security studies at Aberystwyth University. Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory
1999. ISBN 1-55587-335-9 (hc. :alk. paper) ON-LINE ED.: Columbia International Affairs
Online, Transcribed, proofread, and marked-up in HTML, September 1999.
An even more troubling feature of Adorno and Horkheimers analysis is the downplaying of individual responsibility that is implicit in their
argument. If Auschwitz is the inevitable outcome of enlightenment, and if instrumental rationality is too powerful to resist, then can we expect an
individual Nazi to act in a different fashion? In the hermetic society the individual is a mere cipher, and if this is the case, can any individual
really be blamed for his or her behavior? These questions highlight an ethical lacuna at the heart of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Despite the obvious intentions of the authors, their
analysis generates a logic that renders them unable to differentiate

meaningfully between different actions in the political realm . If nothing complicitous with this world can have any truth,
then surely everything that exists in the real world must be judged equally untrue or false. But if this is so, how are we to evaluate
efforts at securing change in contemporary society? Let us consider the ending of apartheid in South Africa.
Although the citizens of that country cannot be adjudged to be free after the overthrow of the apartheid
system, surely they are freer. Although the establishment of liberal democracy there offers no panacea, it
is a better system than the totalitarian one that it has replaced . But although Adorno and Horkheimer as individuals would
almost certainly have rejoiced in the downfall of the apartheid system, as theoreticians they seem to be unable to provide us
with any grounds for favoring one particular set of social institutions over another . Here we have a
bizarre inversion of the relativism to which contemporary poststructuralist approaches are prone. By arguing that there
are no grounds to choose between different accounts of reality, poststructuralists are inevitably forced to accept that all accounts of a given reality
are true. They can make no judgment on these claims that is not arbitrary (Norris 1992; Hunter and Wyn Jones 1995). Similarly, by arguing
that everything in the world is equally false, Adorno and Horkheimer can make no judgment as to why we might
prefer some forms of behavior and some set of practices over others. Here the impasse into which the analysis of Dialectic of
Enlightenment leads its authors stands in bold relief. The determinism and reductionism of their argument is ultimately
paralyzing. It was, of course, Antonio Gramsci who popularized the injunction that all those intent on changing society should attempt to face
the world with a combination of pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This position has much to commend it given the
propensity of radicals to view society with rosetinted glasses. However, the limitations of this position are nowhere better illustrated than in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the pessimism is so thoroughgoing that it becomes absolutely debilitating.
Any attempt to challenge the status quo already stands condemned as

futile. The logical outcome of this attitude is resignation and passivity. Adorno attempted to make a virtue of the
detached attitude that he and Horkheimer adopted toward the political struggles of their own age by claiming: If one is concerned to achieve
what might be possible with human beings, it is extremely difficult to remain friendly towards real people. However, considering that it is only
real people who can bring about a better society, Adornos complex form of misanthropy ultimately leads only to quiescence (Wiggershaus
1994: 268). Thus, despite the clear similarities in the influences and interests of the founding fathers of critical theory and Gramsci, the
resignatory passivity of the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment led them to a position on political practice far more akin to that
of Oswald Spengler or Arthur Schopenhauer than to that adopted by the Sardinian Marxist Gramsci, even as he languished in a fascist prison. In
view of the traditional Marxist emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, it is hardly surprising that Adorno and Horkheimers rejection of any
attempt to orient their work toward political activity led to bitter criticism from other radical intellectuals. Perhaps the most famous such
condemnation was that of Lukcs, who acidly commented that the members of the Frankfurt School had taken up residence in the Grand Hotel
Abyss. The inhabitants of this institution enjoyed all the comforts of the bourgeois lifestyle while fatalistically surveying the wreckage of life
beyond its doors. Whereas Lukcss own apologias for Stalinism point to the dangers of subordinating theoretical activity to the exigencies of
daytoday practical politics, Adorno and Horkheimer sunder theory and political practice completely, impoverishing the theoretical activity
itself. Their stance leads to an aridity and scholasticism ill suited to any social theory that aspires to realworld relevance. Furthermore, the
critical theorists position on political practice is based on an underestimation of the

potential for progressive change that exists even in the most administered societies. It is instructive to contrast the
attitude of Adorno and Horkheimer with that of Raymond Williams, who delivers the following broadside against high culture Marxists such as
the members of the Frankfurt School: When the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture, and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask
them... where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see. (R. Williams 1989: 8) As I will
discuss in Chapter 6, the evidence suggests that Williams is closer to the truth. People acting both individually and collectively,
through social movements and state institutions, can actually influence the world around them in a
progressive direction. Adorno and Horkheimers pessimism is unwarranted.
State Not Always Racist---Ext:

Reforms are possible and desirable---tangible change outweighs the risk of cooption
and is still a better strategy than the alt
Michael Omi 13, and Howard Winant, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias,
Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium Rethinking Racial Formation Theory
Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the white
racial frame evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They
dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely a distraction from more
ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias 2012,
p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change,
but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial
democracy is an oxymoron a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete
democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree . If they mean that people of colour have no
democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree . The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many
respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive
economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past
In
decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites employment,
health, education persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown
people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial
dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.
Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we overlook the serious reversals
of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation
we wrote about racial reaction in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in
substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing was able to rearticulate race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights
movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the
US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period , in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or
Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic
forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led
by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as
key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like
Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional . While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we
do not believe that his interest convergence hypothesis effectively explains all these developments . How does
whole story.
neglect.
Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the South for a generation count as convergence? The US racial regime has been transformed in
hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil
rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process ; here the US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its hegemony. But
Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls passive revolutions cannot be merely symbolic if
they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process . Once again, we
are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if partial
victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life . And yes, we think that
further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate
level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the
anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social . In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded
not only the inclusion of racially defined others and the democratization of structurally racist societies,
but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience
and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself . They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black
significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues,
movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war
By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success
movements among others.

. Far
from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same rearticulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of colourblindness and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their
Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with the various
backlash phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of
colourblindness, reveal the transformative character of the politicization of the social. While it is not
possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the
mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them.
mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and antidemocratic social movements that are evident in US politics today.
Liberal reformism is the only way to avoid reductive theories that collapse into
totalitarianism---making the system live up to its empty promises of equality is
better than discarding equality
Jefferey Pyle 99, Boston College Law School, J.D., magna cum laude, Race, Equality and the
Rule of Law: Critical Race Theory's Attack on the Promises of Liberalism, 40 B.C.L. Rev. 787
Liberal principles are therefore "indeterminate" to the extent that they are not mechanically determinative of
every controversy.224 Indeed, as Samuel Huntington has pointed out, Americans hold potentially conflicting ideals (such as individualism and democracy, liberty and equality)
simultaneously, without trying to resolve the conflicts between them once and for 1111.2" Rather, they have set up processes and institutions
to resolve conflicts pragmatically, case-by-case, issue-byissue, problem-by-problem .
226 Liberals, unlike radical legal theorists, assume that there are no universal solvents , that values are
not easily ranked"' and that reasoning by analogy is usually more helpful (and more persuasive) than deductions from the abstract
theories of philosopher-kings. 228 Liberal politics, like the common-law courts on which it relies, requires perpetual reexamination of both the major and minor premises of most legal syllogisms. It allows for both continuity and change,
stability and flexibility, tradition and innovation. 52 The liberal system's celebrated capacity for social change
rests in the ability of aggrieved citizens to confront power-holders, such as legislators, judges or voters, with their failures to live
up to the promises of the "American Creed."23" In doing so, the aggrieved can argue with sonic force that they are seeking justice, not revolution, when in fact
they may be seeking both."' The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example, was not a radical measure, yet it started a revolution in
Southern politics.232 It purported to secure a right already enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment,233 and thus fulfill fundamental notions of equality that most Americans could
not easily deny.231 The Act would probably not have passed, however, if it had been presented as a benefit to one group to the detriment of another in a zero-sum power game. Second, liberal
politics is about morality as well as interests. It is about holding public officials morally and politically responsible for meeting unfulfilled promises.235 By casting victims of discrimination as
legitimate claimants to the promise of equality in the American Creed, liberal politics gives victims the higher moral ground, without fully separating them from the people whose oppressive
behavior they seek to change.2"" The Reverend Martin Luther King exemplified this promissory politics best on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, when he said: In a sense we've come
to our nation's capital to cash a check: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory
note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note. ... America has given Negro people a had check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient
funds." We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of
King brilliantly articulated the promises and realities that animated the civil rights revolution in America. 238 He reminded
Americans of their founding principles, assumed the fundamental equality of the bargainers, and placed the power structure on the delensive.239 King did not paint whites as
irredeemably racist; he simply insisted that they live up to their obligations .") To Derrick Bell, in contrast, the
coffers of justice in America have always been empty. To him, the promises of liberalism are just "bogus freedom checks" which "the Man" will never honor.24
freedom, and the security of justice. 2"7 Through this metaphor,
' Bell, like other race-crits, attacks American liberalism from a European political orientation, which conceives of politics as a zero-sum struggle between entrenched classes or groups.242 In this
all politics is power politics, and law serves merely as an instrument or oppression by the group that happens to be in power.2'3 No common principles
race-crits, like other class theorists, do not attempt to prove that African Americans are
permanently disadvantaged; they simply assert it. Nor do they acknowledge that black Americans have
made considerable (although Far from satisfactory) progress since de jure segregation was ended."' Critical
race theory, like Marxism before it, clings to group "domination" as the single cause of disadvantage.2' 7 It takes one unifying idearacial
dominationand tries to fit all facts and law into it.248 Liberalism, on the other hand, distrusts
grand unifying theories, preferring to emphasize process over ends. 24' As a result, liberalism
frustrates anyone, Left or Right, who would have governments embrace their ideologies.25 Because of the value liberals place on
liberty, they tend to he wary of the sort of power concentrations that could mandate changes quickly."' They prefer a more incremental approach to
political change that depends on the consent of the governed, even when the governed are often ignorant, misguided and even bigoted. 252 Liberalism is never utopian, by anyone's
definition, but always procedural, because it presupposes a society of people who profoundly disagree with each other and whose
interests, goals, stakes and stands, cannot easily, if ever, be fully reconciled.'" Because of these differences, liberals know
there is no such thing as a "benevolent despot," and that utopias almost invariably turn out to be dystopias. 254 Race-crits, on the
other hand, are profoundly utopian and sometimes totalitarian.25' In their view, the law should ferret out and eliminate white racism at any costa''' Richard Delgado,
view,
exist which might persuade whites to he more inclusive. 241 The
for example, complains that "[n]othing in the law requires any [white] to lend a helping hand, to try to help blacks find jobs, befriend them, speak to them, make eye contact with them, help them
The race-crits, in their

preoccupation with power, forget that the power to persuade remains the principal
way of achieving lasting change in a democratic political culture.258 A beneficial
but controversial measure is much more likely to survive changes of the party in power if it can be said to
carry out the will of "the people," from whom all power in the United States is said to derive. 25" For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
controversial as it was,'" has remained a bulwark of civil rights protection for thirty-six years because of its democratic and
fix a flat when they arc stranded on the highway, help them feel like 11111 persons. ... How can a system like that change anything?"257
constitutional
legitimacy. 2"1 On the other hand, if Malcolm X or the Black Panthers had attempted to set up a separate black state
their efforts would have been crushed immediately.
on American soil in the tradition of John Brown,
Our even if arg. If they win the States uniformly racist in current form, still vote
Aff. Ignores reconstructive liberalism, and what the State *could yet become*.
Contextualizes to plan and perm
Ward 99
Cynthia V. Ward Professor of Law, College of William and Mary. WILLIAM AND MARY
LAW REVIEW
Vol. 40:719 http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1554andcontext=wmlr
However bruised by the continuous attacks of its radical critics, "liberal legalism" has so far
survived the critical onslaught. But like all battles between powerful opponents the fight has
produced casualties on both sides. Liberal theorists have responded to radical attacks by reexamining certain facile assumptions about the priority of individual autonomy, the nature of
rationality, and the possibility of state neutrality, and replacing them with a rich and provocative
literature that affirmatively defends liberal values and celebrates liberal legal institutions as the bestperhaps the only-way of respecting and encouraging human "difference " while also maximizing
freedom and equality.
On the other side, the work of radical critics of liberalism has begun to reflect the idea that liberal
values-appropriately modified-are worth examining in a reconstructive light. Without losing sight of
the injustices that have been inflicted on vulnerable groups under the liberal American
Constitution, at least some radical theorists seem willing to concede that something precious,
perhaps even irreplaceable, would be lost were liberal rights and institutions , with their vision of
respect for individual dignity and their desire to maximize individual freedom, to be rejected
wholesale along with the scourges of racism and sexism that have always shadowed them .
It is tempting to oversimplify. One should take seriously the declared motivations and
concerns of one's opponents, and be careful not to discover casually that they have been on one's side all
along, although somehow without realizing it. Let me therefore emphasize that I think there are
important and irreconcilable differences, at many levels, between liberal visions of the person, of
politics, and of the law, and the visions articulated by liberalism's communitarian, critical race, feminist,
and postmodern critics. What I find most fascinating in recent legal theory, though, is the
increasingly apparent intuition that amid such basic differences there is also a growing area of
common ground. Ironically, it may be that the reconstruction of liberal legalism, in some recognizable
form, will become the single most dramatic result of radical legal theory.
The masters tools can be used to dismantle the masters house

James 9 Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte (Robin M, Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar: On the Politics
and Aesthetics of Contemporary Feminist Deployments of the Master's Tools, April 14, DOI:
10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01033.x)
In these two instances of successful reappropriation of the master's tools autonomy/universality and the guitarthe
particular, real-world advantages offered by this technique might even require its adoption in instances
where nothing else can do what it does. Indeed, to require that we categorically abandon the master's
tools seems itself to be an overly abstract ideal that overlooks the often contradictory, historically
overdetermined real-world contexts in which all ideas are made meaningful and in which actions unfold .
In this world, the stage is already set in certain ways, and sometimes the best or only way to maneuver through its various
obstacles requires the repurposing of what we find in/on this stage. If, as Coates's discussion demonstrates, power
functions not only at the level of ideology, but also at the level of desire, then feminists cannot avoid engaging dominant structures of feeling and
affective conventions (such as those at work in tonal harmony and/or rock music), because these cannot be persuaded or altered by facts or
arguments (that is, ideological critique or demystification). Reading Butler and Peaches from the perspective of non-ideal theory demonstrates
that a reappropriation of the master's tools is successful not only when it is more effective or affective than anything else,
but also when
its use of these tools problematizes or voids the master/slave or insider/outsider hierarchy
itself. Under these conditions, the master's tools (for example, autonomy,universality, and playing the guitar) can indeed bring
down the master's house.
Working from within the system can produce change. Solves their race args
James 9 Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte (Robin M, Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar: On the Politics
and Aesthetics of Contemporary Feminist Deployments of the Master's Tools, April 14, DOI:
10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01033.x)
Norma Coates expresses here an ethical and aesthetic quandary we might term a feminist guilty pleasure: liking something one knows one just
shouldn't like, since one considers its politics problematic, if not disgusting. Why would an avowed feminist like this clearly misogynistic work?
How can one have an aesthetic taste for something that is politically disgusting? This is not a new question by any means, but it is still a contested
one. Indeed, Audre Lorde has famously argued that the the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, just as Laura Mulvey has
equally famously called for the necessity for feminists to abandon mainstream cinematic pleasure as coercive (Mulvey 1975; Lorde 1983). I
contend, however, that we should not be too quick to dismiss either the master's tools or some of the pleasures we
might experience from them. Indeed, when
appropriately hacked, the master's tools in certain situations and under

certain criteria might even be very effective tools for feminist, anti-racist work. Examining two casesone
political, one aestheticfrom the perspective of non-ideal theory, I will demonstrate concrete instances in which multiply-underprivileged
individuals have utilized, for liberatory ends, the concepts, rhetoric, and methodologies characteristic of what bell hooks terms the white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy.1 Judith Butler's recent appeals for autonomy and universality, and indie-electro artist Peaches's use of
conventionally racist and sexist art forms are all instances in which the master's tools have been productively
reappropriated for progressive ends. I argue that non-ideal theory also helps clarify two conditions that help to distinguish a
successful resignification from a hegemonic rearticulation: first, reappropriation is successful when, as Butler argues, the very
process of an outsider's appropriation of insider privilege collapses the insider/outsider or
master/marginalized distinction, so the procedure is itself transformative ; second, success is achieved in
instances where nothing else does quite what the master's tools do, when nothing is as accessible,
effective, affectiveor, as in the case of Coates and the Stones, as sexyas mainstream/conventional discourse.
State Not Always Racist---Hopelessness Turn:

Claiming "States always racist" is a turn. Over-privileges hopelessness makes
actual remedies impossible
Farber 98
Daniel A., Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, and Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law,
University of Minnesota. J.D., summa cum laude, University of Illinois School of Law, 1975,
KRINOCK LECTURE SERIES: IS AMERICAN LAW INHERENTLY RACIST?, 15 T.M.
Cooley L. Rev. 361, lexis
And finally, what I fear the most is the response that seemed to be implied by one of the audience questions earlier. If
it is true that
American society is inherently racist, doesn't that mean that it is essentially hopeless? Now
this conclusion does not logically follow from that premise, any more than it logically follows that if certain character traits have a genetic basis
then it is hopeless to do anything about them. But nevertheless, we all recognize that when we are talking about individuals and biology, these
genetic theories tend to discourage the idea of reform, and tend to reinforce, as a matter of social reality, the view that any bad behavior that we
see is just inherent. I think we can expect to see the same kind of thing when we are dealing with the sociological equivalent involving the claim
that there is this inherent genetic flaw in American society. You can see this most clearly in Derrick Bell's writings, which are redolent of despair
and which, in that respect, curiously resemble Robert Bork's writings, who is similarly convinced that the genetic flaws of American society will
prevent it from ever achieving his vision of justice. It is true that we
cannot afford to forget our history. It is true that much

of that history is unfortunate, if not worse. But it is also true that if we remain totally obsessed with the
flaws of the past, fixated on their inevitability, we are unlikely to be able to move past them
and move forward. And in particular, it seems to me that if we approach today's problems primarily as an
issue in finger-pointing, in blaming somebody or another, or in finding the culprit, then we are not likely to be
able to unite our society in a quest toward attacking those serious problems.
AFF Framework:
This debate should center around institutionsthe role of the ballot is for the team
that best provides a strategy for changing the institutions that constitute violence as
opposed to changing the knowledge production the neg falsely believes constitutes
those institutions
Themba-Nixon 2000 (Makani, Executive Director of the Praxis Project, Former California
Staffer, Colorlines, Oakland: July 31, 2000, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Pg. 12)
In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules
of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about
changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we
really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without
contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for
people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to
city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand
For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's
message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was
about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors.
Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find
it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new
regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being
pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got
involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start
the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage
ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks
to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over
600 local policies have been

passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems
and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been
enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that
guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are
just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made
inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local
policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interestswhich are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true:
cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots
organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of

local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater
reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in
the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the
fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the
importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health
care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has
some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal
standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there
are
real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment.
Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important
social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the
mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Getting It in Writing Much of
the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive
manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real
consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a
decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a
certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy,
the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers . Still, if it's
worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on
rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in
their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making
policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to
develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps
most important, we
will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring
us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so.
Reform Good:
The affirmative is a project of infiltrationuniversalist prescriptions that isolate
ourselves from the institutions that exercise power militates against revolutionary
movementsbecoming acquainted with the methods of American racist Kangaroo
justice is specifically key to develop tactics and strategies for bringing about the end
of the world
Williams 69 [Summer 1969, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as president of the Monroe,
North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton cited Williamss Negroes with
Guns as a major inspiration, peaches,The Deprived: Rebellion in the Streets, The Crusader, Volume 10, Number 02,
http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.Crusader.Vol.10.2.Summer.1969.pdf]
INFILTRATE THE MANS INSTITUTIONS: Black youth should not commit the catastrophic
error of seeing things simply in black and white. That is, of seeing things as all good or all bad.
It is erroneous to think that one can isolate oneself completely from the institutions of a
social and political system that exercises power over the environment in which he resides.
Self-imposed and premature isolation, initiated by the oppressed against the organs of a
tyrannical establishment, militates against revolutionary movements dedicated to radical
change. It is a grave error for militant and just-minded youth to reject struggle-serving
opportunities to join the mans government services, police forces, armed forces, peace corps and
vital organs of the power structure. Militants should become acquainted with the methods of
the oppressor. Meaningful change can be more thoroughly effectuated by militant pressure
from within as well as without. We can obtain invaluable know-how from the oppressor. Struggle
is not all violence. Effective struggle requires tactics, plans, analysis and a highly sophisticated application of mental aptness. The forces of oppression and tyranny have perfected a
highly articulate system of infiltration for undermining and frustrating the efforts of the
oppressed in trying to upset the unjust status quo. To a great extent, the power structure keeps itself informed as to
the revolutionary activity of freedom fighters. With the threat of extermination looming
menacingly before Black Americans, it is pressingly imperative that our people enter the
vital organs of the establishment. FIGHT KANGAROOISM: Inasmuch as the kangaroo court system
constitutes a powerful defense arm of tyranny, extensive and vigorous educational work must be
done among our people so that when they serve on jury duty they will not become tools of a legal
system dedicated to railroading our people to concentration camps disguised as prisons. The
kangaroo court system is being widely used to rid racist America of black militants, nonconformists and effective ghetto leadership. These so-called courts are not protecting the
human and civil rights of our people; they are not dis- pensing even-handed justice, but are
long-standing instruments of terror and intimidation. Black Americans must be inspired to
display the same determination in safeguarding the human and civil rights of our
oppressed people as white racists are to legally lynch us. No matter how much rigmarole is dished out about black capitalism and
minority enterprise, the hard cold fact remains that it is as difficult for a Black American militant to
receive justice in America's tyrannical courts as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Black people
must be brought to see their duty as jurors as an opportunity to right legal wrongs not to
perpetrate shameful obeisance to tyranny and racism. Youth should mount a campaign
relative to this social evil that will by far exceed the campaign of voter registration.
Totalizing Bad:
Totalizing claims of blackness fails because it discounts transnational forms of
racism and ignores the real resistances that have and continue to take place in the
marginal and diasporic spaces of society.
Ba, 2011 (saer Maty Ba, u of st Andrews, the us decentered: from black social death to cultural
transformation, cultural studies review 17:2, sept 2011)
A few pages into Red, White and Black, I feared that it would just be a matter of time before
Wildersons blackassocialdeath idea and multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees
with run (him) into (theoretical) trouble. This happens in chapter two, The Narcissistic Slave,
where he critiques black film theorists and books. For example, Wilderson declares that
Gladstone Yearwoods Black Film as Signifying Practice (2000) betrays a kind of conceptual
anxiety with respect to the historical object of study ... it clings, anxiously, to the filmastext
aslegitimate object of Black cinema. (62) He then quotes from Yearwoods book to highlight
just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwoods attempt to construct a canon can be.
(63) And yet Wildersons highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the Diaspora or
African Diaspora, a key component in Yearwoods thesis that, crucially, neither navelgazes
(that is, at the US or black America) nor pretends to properly engage with black film.
Furthermore, Wilderson separates the different waves of black film theory and approaches them,
only, in terms of how a most recent one might challenge its precedent. Again, his approach is
problematic because it does not mention or emphasise the interconnectivity of/in black film
theory. As a case in point, Wilderson does not link Tommy Lotts mobilisation of Third Cinema
for black film theory to Yearwoods idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course,
Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally questioned since
Lotts 1990s theory of black film was formulated. Yet another consequence of ignoring the
African Diaspora is that it exposes Wildersons corpus of films as unable to carry the weight of
the transnational argument he attempts to advance. Here, beyond the UScentricity or social and
political specificity of [his] filmography, (95) I am talking about Wildersons choice of films.
For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to
acknowledge a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black body, the Black
home, and the Black community (111) while films like Alan and Albert Hughess Menace II
Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally, problematise Street
Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP) policing. The above examples expose the fact
of Wildersons dubious and questionable conclusions on black film. Red, White and Black is
particularly undermined by Wildersons propensity for exaggeration and blinkeredness. In
chapter nine, Savage Negrophobia, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too
aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black style ... Blackness 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 ... Anyone can say nigger because anyone can be a nigger. (235)7 Similarly, in
chapter ten, A Crisis in the Commons, Wilderson addresses the issue of Black time. Black is
irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed through
the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right
because they are the ship hold of the Middle Passage: the most coherent temporality ever
deemed as Black time but also the moment of no time at all on the map of no place at all.
(279) Not only does Pinhos more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous (see below),
I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians and sociologists works on slave
ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazzstudies
books on crosscultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another
side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing
jazz as belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking, (225) there seems to be
no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution
or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti Blackness.9 Last but not least,
Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood films badly
planned sequel: How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking?
The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.
Refuse the characterization of blackness as ontological death by asserting life in

the face of structures of domination, blackness exceeds its own objectification their
framework is totalizing and historically incorrect.
Brar 12 (2012, Dhanveer Singh, PhD candidate, commnications,Blackness, radicalism,
sound: Black Consciousness and Black Popular Music in the U.S.A (1955-1971), A thesis
submitted for the degree of PhD in Media and Communications 2012, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/7806/1/MED_thesis_Brar_2012.pdf)
Paying attention to phonic materiality allowed the enquiry into the blackness of the Black Consciousness movement and Black popular music
between 1955 and 1971 to remain open. It allowed for an attentiveness to the ways in which blackness and radicalism were always
under contestation, and always being produced, even if that meant radically breaking up black production.
There seemed to be an internalised resistance at work within the phonic materiality of the movement and the music which
never let them settle. The refusal to settle acted as a persistent questioning of the phonic materiality produced as the blackness and radicalism of
the movement and the music. It is for this reason that; James Brown and Amiri Baraka's respective black communal programs were defined but
also taken apart by a rhythmic psycho-sexuality; Sam Cooke and Martin Luther King's attempts to generalise the intense
spirituality of black freedom began to sound like atemporality and death; and neither Motown or the League could
engender the discipline they felt a revolutionary project or mass black music required because that discipline was about gendered labour. This
thesis has not been about identifying the apparent failures of the Black Consciousness movement or Black popular music. Instead it has been an
attempt to amplify the sound of the blackness that instigated those events, sustained them, but which could not be called to a halt. It is by
privileging the phonic materiality of the archive that I have been able to attend to both the formation of and the strain against the blackness of
black radicalism and black music. Phonic substance was necessary to the modalities of the music and the radicalism but it was never simply the
basis for opposition to racial oppression. The phonic substance which was blackness was constantly used to work out radically different ways
blackness could be. The phonic substance structures the relationship between black music and black radicalism as blackness, but it is also a
blackness which strains against them. This is the paraontological relation; blackness in constant escape, pressurising
its own ontological ground, its own phenomenological features, its own basis as an epistemology. Each time
the music and the radicalism do this, they do it as a black sonic operation. Returning to the wider field of Black studies, in this thesis I assembled
an archive of sound recordings, television footage, documentaries, interviews, personal testimonies, criticism, cultural analysis and a range of
other materials to constitute the historical juncture of Black Consciousness and Black popular music in the U.S. The phonic materiality marked
across all of these materials is a realisation of the ways in which blackness is testament to the fact objects can and do
resist. The black object resists by rendering itself audible and black radicalism is a tradition in which objects have made
themselves heard. It is a tradition of objects which have recorded their strain against their designation as objects. In this instance
blackness does not operate as a total outside, it is not non-ontological, it is not without analog and is not
social death. No matter how much intellectual, psychic and material
energy is invested in rendering these claims true. Instead blackness is the immanent
critique which lives in the life of the object, which may not be recognised as life, even when it strains to
do so, but cannot be denied as life. Neither can it be denied the strain against its own
affirmation of life. It is a life, and a strain against it , which lives in the phonic substance the black object produces. The life of
the black object lives in the sound it makes and that sound stands as a common project of blackness, which may be dismissed as inchoate noise,
as excessive feeling, as lacking in revolutionary discipline, but this dismissal occurs because when the object resists, it rubs up against the divide
between noise and music, excessive and proper feeling, discipline and unruliness. The blackness of black radicalism, like the
blackness of black music, lives in that break, and constantly
breaks, away. The debate within Black studies over what
blackness is and what blackness does is still being contested. With new work on the way from Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler and Jared Sexton,
this only offers possibilities for continued speculation. To repeat, the discussion over what blackness means within Black studies is not a minor
dispute within a relative sub-discipline of Cultural studies and Critical theory. It is, as Chandler has pointed out, necessary to thought, because
blackness is a necessary problem for what is deemed to be thought. But Chandler is very careful to remind us that this means blackness is
also, paraontologically, a possibility for thought. In light of this coming work, I believe it is necessary to continue thinking about how
this debate is informed by the phonic substance which is blackness, and which blackness escapes from, even whilst that phonic substance escapes
from it. In short, it remains vital for me to continue to be a student of Black studies.
Abandonment Turn:
Abandoning politics cedes it to the elites causes war, slavery, and authoritarianism.
Boggs 2k (Carol, PF Political Science @ University of Southern California, The End of Politics,
pg. 250-251)
But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political
mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous,
the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus,
institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact,
insulated from the minimalist critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly
acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary
citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo. Such one-sided minimalism gives
carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible. The
flight from abstract principles rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status
quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen
as too deeply embedded in the social and institutionalmatrix of the time to be the target
of oppositional political action. If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of
everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh

realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the
dictates of conventional wisdom. Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive
conditions would, in Oakeshotts view, turn into a political nightmare. A belief that
totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue
that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or
totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises. Oakeshotts
minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics
hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state

and military institutions will magically disappear from peoples lives. Far from
it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for
their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and
privilege. Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far
removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the
American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and
unity in the face of social disintegration. Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards
antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian
and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate
system. In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the
embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And
either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshotts Burkean muddlingthrough theories.
Colonialism turn:
Anti-blackness is not an ontological antagonism-conflict is inevitable in politics,
but does not have to be demarcated around whiteness and blackness-the alt's
ontological fatalism recreates colonial violence
Hudson, 2013 (Peter, "The state and the colonial unconscious", Social Dynamics: A journal of
African studies, 39.2, Taylor and Francis)
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself .
There always has to exist an outside,

which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility
of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place
which isnt excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity
may be universal (may be considered ontological), its content (what fills it) as well as the
mode of this filling and its reproduction are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier
of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is
itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the same, exclusion
and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and never terminally
settled. Put differently, the curvature of intersubjective space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the
othering of otherness are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism
might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the
meaning of these signifiers is never necessary because they are signifiers. To be sure,
colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks who
are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than the
ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man
doesnt exist, the black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic
itself, including its most intimate structuring relations division is constitutive of the social, not
the colonial division. Whiteness may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but
respect for the ontological difference (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological
status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the separation of whiteness
from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the void of black being functions as the ultimate substance, the
transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its
constitutive axis, its ontological differential. A crucial
feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not

screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the
imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the lived experience (vcu) of the colonised
subject. The colonised is traversing the fantasy (Zizek 2006a, 4060) all the time; the void of the verb to be is the very content of his
interpellation. The
colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and the
imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 Fixed into non-fixity, he is eternally
suspended between element and moment5 he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the production of meaning and is thus the point of
entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism. Be this as it may, whiteness
and blackness are (sustained by)

determinate and contingent practices of signification; the structuring relation of colonialism
thus itself comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can always be undone.
Anti-colonial i.e., anti-white modes of struggle are not (just) psy- chic6 but involve the
reactivation (or de-sedimentation)7 of colonial objectivity itself. No matter how sedimented (or
global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see
Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771 n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible
the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time because it is the presence of one
object in another undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a
differential relation is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of each
other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself,
reducing it to a condition of its possibility.8 All symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess over itself, something it cant totalise or make
sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant object that has no place of its own, isnt
recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it its part of no part or object small a.10 Correlative to this object a is the
subject stricto sensu i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier without an identity that pins it down.11 That
is the subject of
antagonism in confrontation with the real of the social, as distinct from subject position based
on a determinate identity.
Dogmatism Turn:
Afropessimisms dogmatism reifies the failures of defining static identities
Blackness is reduced to incapacity and the black is thus forced to embody such
abjectionthe result is a recreation of the violence of universality by actively
refusing to define blackness as contingent
Marriott 12 [David Mariott, Black Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20
(1): 37-66]
However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (The Structure of
Antagonisms), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the
being of the Black, Wilderson
is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also
refigures the whole of being: the essence of being for the White and non-Black position is non-niggerness, consequently, [b]eing
can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness (p. 37). It is not hard when
reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be
peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there
is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of such
a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism: for the claim that Blackness is
incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form means merely that the black has to embody this
abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logicand the denial of any kind of ontological integrity to the
Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a
logic of non-recuperabilitymoves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as
such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in calling death, the symbolic
remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present: White (Human) capacity, in advance
of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses
involving violence, antagonisms and parasitism, Wilderson
describes White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural

studies as incapable of understanding the suffering of the Blackthe Slave (they cannot do so because
they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afropessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as
a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one

centrally concerned with exposing the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans (p.
68). Reading seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacans notion of the originary (imaginary)
alienation of the subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between empty and full speech, and so apparently cannot
grasp the trauma of absolute Otherness that is the Blacks relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the structural, or absolute,
violence of Black life (pp. 74; 75). 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 (p. 76). The violence of such abjectionor incapacityis therefore that it cannot be
communicated or avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology
reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacans notion of full speech to the search for
communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according
to Wildersons own logic, his

description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacans notion of the real but, in his
insistence on the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the
heart of universality. The Black is beyond the limit of contingencybut it is worth saying immediately
that this beyond is indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence whose traces can only be thought
violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for Wildersons political
thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and
primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury
implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here:
irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).
Their argument isnt afropessimism, but absolutist despairtheir facile

antihumanism doesnt chart us a path towards the end of the world, but instead
limits us to total resignation
Marriott 12 [David Mariott, Black Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20
(1): 37-66]
In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very
unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon: [Fanons]
audacious commitment to an alternative

conception of humanity reconstituted outside race [...] is something that does not endear
Fanons work to todays practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so
characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly
with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears.
Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable
obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the strategic award of
an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings
confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon
has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of incorrigibility around national
liberation struggles or minority cultures. (pp. 1578, my emphasis) Whatever one might think of the cogency of these
remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside outside of race, a humanism
that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier), the
question of whether US culture can

ever escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson IIIs powerful Red, White, and Black:
Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanons antiphilosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as
yet, part of human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its
separation from the state of nature from which it has come) forms
a major part of Wildersons conception of antiblackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture. It is against the conception that
racism could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on
the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly
social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the US. In brief, slavery remains so
originary, in the sense of what he calls its accumulation and fungibility (terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no
analogy to other forms of antagonism Wildersons examples are the Holocaust and Native American genocide there
is simply no process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss (as wound, or trauma): as such,
slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of
historical process, if black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed
from the start (p. 22). The
problem with Wildersons argument, however, is that it remains of a piece with

the manichean imperatives that beset it, and which by definition are structurally uppermost,
which means that he can only confirm those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a
dialectical path beyond them, insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no outside to black social death
and alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own
enslavement by race. This is not so much afro-pessimism a term coined by Wildersonas thought
wedded to its own despair.
Black Culture Turn:

Their claims about the absolute destruction of African culture are factually
incorrect, contemporary African-American culture can be traced back to Central
African Bantu survivals that were retained during slavery.
Holloway 1990 [Joseph E., Professor of Pan-African Studies at CSU Northridge, The Origins of African-American Culture,
Africanisms in American Culture ed. by Joseph E. Holloway p. 17]
Many other enslaved Africans were employed as field slaves. This occupation, in fact, was engaged in by the majority of Africans, suggesting that
it was among the field slaves that much of African-American culture and language evolved.
These field slaves were mainly Central Africans who, unlike the Senegambians, brought a homogenous
culture identifiable as Bantu. The cultural homogeneity of the Bantu is indicated by a common language. Once the Bantu
reached America they were able to retain much of their cultural identity. Enforced isolation of
these Africans by plantation owners allowed them to retain their religion, philosophy, culture,
folklore, folkways, folk beliefs, folk tales, storytelling, naming practices, home economics, arts,
kinship, and music. These Africanisms were shared and adopted by the various African ethnic
groups of the field slave community, and they gradually developed into African-American
cooking (soul food), music (jazz, blues, spirituals, gospels), language, religion, philosophy, customs, and arts.
Their assertion of the anthropological off-the-mapness of black subjectivity mirrors

white racist anthropologists and linguists who defended the idea that slavery
represented an absolute break with African culture.
Asante 1990 [Molefi Kete, Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Temple University, African Elements
in African-American English, Africanisms in American Culture ed. by Joseph E. Holloway p. 19-20]
A considerable intellectual meanness had to be combated by the initial cadre of

communicationists who examined the continuity of black language behaviors from Africa to
America. The racist assumption that black pidgin reflected innate inability of Africans to learn
English was current at one time. In fact, as Herskovits pointed out, the linguists who studied pidgin often had no knowledge of
African languages and therefore could not make informed interpretations. Lorenzo Turner augmented this position by exposing inaccuracies in
linguists who were quick to give assurance that there were no African survivals among
black Americans. Only with the work of Mervyn Alleyne and other sociolinguists did we begin to get a clearer picture of the African
the work of
contribution to English. Alleyne particularly demonstrated continuity in the West Indies. Earlier, Ambros Gonzales, like many white American
linguists, misunderstood the Gullah language and arrived at the wrong conclusion. In 1922 he cited a list of words that were purported to be of
African origin. Most of the words are either English words misspelled or African words interpreted as English words that blacks could not
pronounce. Gonzales was thoroughly confused about what he was studying, as Turner pointed out: Many other words in Gonzales glossary
which, because of his lack of acquaintance with the vocabulary of certain African languages, he interprets as English, are in reality African words.
Among other Gullah words which he or other American writers have interpreted as English, but which are African, are the Mende suwangc, to be
proud (explained by Gonzales as a corruption of the English swagger): the Wolof lir, small (taken by Gonzales to be an abbreviated form of the
English little, in spite of the fact that the Gullah also uses little when he wishes to): the Wolof benj, tooth (explained by the Americans as a
corruption of bone): The Twi fa, to take (explained by Americans as a corruption of the English for). The point made by Turner is that white
American linguists refused to consider the possibility that blacks used African words in their
vocabularies. In fact, the evidence demonstrates that whites unfamiliar with either African languages or Gullah
made expansive generalizations that tended to support their preconceived motions about black
speech habits. Writing in the American Mercury in 1924, George Krapp said that it is reasonably safe to
say that not a single detail of Negro pronunciation or Negro syntax can be proved to have other
than English origins. Other writers who voiced nearly the same judgment regarding the
presence of African survivals in black American speech supported the notion of an absolute
break with African culture. It was inconceivable to them that either phonological, morphological,
or semantic interference could have existed where Africans retained their language behavior in
connection with English.
The survival of African religion also disproves the idea that black culture has no
ontological reach since it was a key element of slave uprisings and revolts.
Mulira 1990 [Jessie Gaston, Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at CSU Sacramento, peaches, The Case of Voodoo in
New Orleans, Africanisms in American Culture ed. by Joseph E. Holloway p. 37]
It is more difficult to measure and evaluate the persistence of African culture elsewhere, especially in the United States, outside the core areas of
New Orleans and the Sea Islands. In many pocket areas in the southern states and in
cities and towns through the United

States, remnants of African culture abound: in language patterns and vocabulary, in literature, in
techniques of storytelling, in folktales such as Breb Rabbit and Tar Baby, in music and dance forms, singing, and
rhythm, in foods, and in ways of eating certain foods. The extended-family concept and respect for elders in many rural areas
were African transplants. Africanisms are of course most prevalent among black southerners because the South was the heart of the slavery
system in the United States. These people took their traditions outside the South once they migrated. The
most dominant and intact

African survival in the black diaspora has proved to be the religion voodoo. The survival of
African religious and magical systems is directly linked to their importance in everyday life. In
addition, their ability to accommodate and be associated with various facets of other established religions strengthened their chances of survival.
Ancient deities in the African pantheon were often given Catholic saints names. The most tenacious African religious retentions in the United
States are found where Catholicism has been particularly strong, including New Orleans. By appealing to traditional deities and mystical forces,
the slaves were able to keep alive their link with Africa. During the early stages of slavery the link was reinforced by voodoo priests and root
doctors who continued to be represented among the newly arrived slaves. The priests in particular led the crusade for the survival of their
religious practices by identifying African deities with Catholic saints in Haiti and Brazil. And African concepts of good and evil found
counterparts in the Christians belief in heaven and hell and Christ and Satan. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the root doctors have
been more visible in practicing their craft than the priests. From its beginning, voodoo encompassed certain elements such as divination,
manipulation, and herbalism that gave it the appearance of a magical rather than a religious system. In the early days of slavery, magic was often
the strongest element because of the suppression of voodoo as a religion by the authorities and slave owners. These antivoodooists managed to
limit the number of voodoo meetings among slaves, but they found it impossible to stop the making of voodoo and hoodoo objects in the slaves
cabins. (Hoodoo is the negative component of voodoo.) Magic
helped the slaves to cope with their daily situations,

main value
to win the affection of the ones they desired, to cause harm to their enemies, and to feel protected from harm themselves. Its
was and continues to be psychological. Magic is intimately related to voodoo, as it is to most religions, but is not its essence.
Voodoo contains some elements of magic, and magic receives much of its strength from the voodoo deities and rituals. African religious
and magical systems also survived because of the organizational role they played in slave revolts
throughout the New World but particularly in Haiti and Brazil. Revolutionary protest appears to have been
engraved in voodoo upon its arrival in the Americas. Revolts in the early period of slavery were
largely the work of African priests and medicine men. In conducting insurrectional meetings
disguised as religious ceremonies, voodoo leaders often promised the gods support for any
rebellion the slaves decided to engage in. The assurance of supernatural support to both leaders and
followers and the priests promise that the ancestors were aiding the struggle for freedom gave the slaves
the necessary inspiration, courage, and determination. Various charms, gris-gris, potions, and small parcels containing
bits of paper, bones, or potions hung around the necks of the fighting men provided protection and good luck by warding off bullets. The
slave insurrection in New York in 1712 was led by a conjurer who convinced the fighters they were invulnerable.
A leader in the 1822 insurrection in North Carolina, Gullah Jack, also was a conjurer and root
doctor; his charms, chiefly of animal claws, were designed to make the insurrectionists invulnerable. Voodoo priests also helped suicide victims
by telling them what to do to ensure their return after death to their homeland in Africa.
Culture is an indispensable resource for collective struggle against anti-black

oppression that posits blackness as absent of culture and identity. Identifying a
usable past is the raw material for the creative self-making and in turn selfdetermination of Afro-Diasporic peoples that exists as a transnational architecture
for effective combat against global white supremacy. Identification with African
culture is the best means of scaffolding rhetorical devices and points of affinity and
solidarity that translate into actual social mobilization and change.
Singh 2004 [Simboonath, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, peaches, Resistance, Essentialism,
and Empowerment in Black Nationalist Discourse in the African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari
Movements, Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3]
The resurgence of black consciousness and pride in the Caribbean a la the Rastafari and Black Power movements illustrates the power of activism
to inspire individual and collective ethnic pride and consciousness. The
construction and reconstruction of history and

culture to redefine the meaning of ethnicity is an important aspect of ethnic movements. All three
movements initiated a cultural reconstruction process by substituting dominant oppressive
symbols (colonialism, domination, exploitation, subjugation, and European cultural imperialism and hegemony) for more positive
and liberating African symbols. This cultural inversion marked an important departure from the
acculturation approach, in that both the Rastafari and the Black Power advocates attempted to reverse the dominant structure that has
characterized the Caribbean region--one based on colonial dominance and control, resistance to slavery, indenture ship, and plantation society--to
an emphasis on the positive and resilient character of the oppressed, i.e. the descendants of former slaves, namely, Afro-Caribbean peoples. The
centrality of black diasporic culture in all of the movements points to the relevance of historical struggles in shaping and reshaping identities.
Black diasporic culture, then, is concerned with struggles to be different. An awareness of shared histories of enslavement, racist subordination,
cultural survival, resistance and political rebellion is the core of the black Diaspora (Clifford, 1994). The term Diaspora encompasses not only
notions of transnationality and movement, but political struggles aimed at defining self and community in historical contexts of displacement.
Diasporic cultures with their emphasis on displacement and a desire to return to an original homeland, be it real or symbolic, can be placed in the
context of the Rastafari, Black Power, and Back to Africa movements. By
recasting the cultural material of the past in

innovative ways, ethnic movements reforge their own culture and history and, as a result,
reinvent themselves (Nagel, 1994). In constructing an ethnic identity, a look backward in time, or what Dag Blanck (1989) calls a
"usable past," acts as an essential ingredient in the identity creation process. Anthony Cohen (1985, p. 99)
writes, "in constructing culture the past is a resource used by groups in the collective quest for meaning
and community." Rick Fantasia (1988) describes a "culture of solidarity" that arises out of activism. "'Culture of solidarity" is defined as
the emergence of a collective consciousness and shared meanings that result from participating in collective action. From this perspective, it can
be argued that ethnic
movements are the embodiments of cultures of solidarity because they challenge

negative hegemonic images and institutions by: (i) redefining the meaning of ethnicity in
appealing ways; and (ii) using cultural symbols to effectively dramatize grievances and demands
(Nagel, 1994, p. 166). Ethnic groups engage in the construction of culture by using particular aspects of
their culture and history in order to create common meanings, build solidarity and ultimately
launch social movements. Joane Nagel's (1994, p. 164) shopping cart metaphor to describe the dynamic character of ethnic culture is
instructive here: "we construct culture by picking and choosing items from the shelves of the past and present." Culture and history,
therefore, are essential aspects of ethnicity, and in the context of social movements they have
been specifically employed as mobilization strategies to redefine and reconstruct identity and
culture. The Rastafari, Back to Africa, and Black Power movements used culture and history to
define a common purpose, create common meanings, build ethnic solidarity, and lay claims to
self-determination. The manipulation of ethnic symbols, culture and history in these movements supports the idea that culture, ethnic
identity and customs are not "fixed." Indeed, the black cultural nationalists and Black Arts proponents, in conceding that blacks were assimilated
enough to engage in acts of self-hatred, such as modifying their looks to conform to white standards, were implicitly acknowledging that black
culture in the Diaspora was essentially hybrid (Robinson, 2001). In other words, the idea that identity and culture are fixed and natural
phenomena is a romantic and essentialist conception. Hybridity, then, becomes a remedy for essentialist subjectivity (Hall, 1994). Cultural
renewal and transformations are, therefore, important aspects of ethnic movements. Activists
use cultural icons, imagery, symbols and

claims as part of the mobilization process (Nagel, 1994, p.165). David Snow et al. (1986) contend that social
movement activists utilize culture such as specific types of rhetorical devices, and cultural themes and cultural discourses as a
way of recruiting members, gaining political currency and achieving movement goals. Similarly
(Gamson, 1988) illustrates the relationship between culture and ethnic mobilization by showing how cultural symbols and themes are used to
serve movement ends. Protest, therefore, becomes a crucible of culture. These movements created a New World nationalist consciousness in
which notions of "Africa," "black ethnicity," "black pride," and "black nationalism," instilled a strong sense of deep cultural resonance among
diasporic Africans. By subscribing to the idealization of Africa perspective in which Africa represents a symbol of identity and home, the
Rastafari, Garvey, and Black Power movements represent a symbolic confrontation of the status quo in their respective societies (Chevannes,
1998). This was expressed in the symbols they employed: religion, dress, hair, drugs and music. Both movements represented symbolic attempts
at restructuring reality--an ideal concept of reality in which social change and social action were manifested in more symbolic rather than
concrete forms.

Black Nihilism - Wake 2016

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Black Nihilism/Swag Swag

Would you kill the world to save ya self?

Black humanity became somewhat of an imaginary number in

Black suffering, here, is

. The political theologian and black optimist, then, propose a

Black nihilistic hermeneutics resists the point but is

The act of renouncing will not

Reliance on legality as a metric of progress fuels a violent temporal narrative that

Warren 15 [Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington

Black nihilism is a demythifying practice, in the

movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history

Peace is not merely an absence of 'conflict that

K Aff specific Links:

The solution relies on what we might call the trick of

This trick of time

politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant

recently asked Don Wyatt, a scholar on very early Afro-Asian

was shocked to be considered black by other people for

This creates a violent assortment of black imagery- the unjustified representation of

I am more concerned about is what happens after we

friend of mine recently

to demonize brown/black skin (especially when its biological) or

of whiteness is based in history so

had a total of four

first host family in Taiwan told me they were disappointed that I

cant tell you how many times I have had people

Policy Aff Specific Links:

American hegemony is deadthe only thing that remains is a racist sovereign

contractors frequently outsource component

controls on USML items could, in the words of a former

makes a huge difference in

aircraft manufacturing is the only sector with a

Not withdrawing the navy takes out the AFF

Tensions low talks

countrys systems are targeted at the other; in fact, highalert

weapons are maintained under very strict system of control that

Several confidence-building agreements were negotiated

United States and the Russian Federation have

The US and Russia wont withdraw from INF

Russian renunciation threats and

The US wont withdraw from INF

enthusiasm for hosting such missiles on the part of American allies in

Russia wont withdraw from INF

Russia is prohibited from having INF missiles, it is

Space debris control is too expensive.

crimes and misdemeanors would be only the beginning

the portrayals of the states involved are

Money is still scarce, and chatter about military

Russias talk about a greater Arctic presence has been greatly

upcoming defense drawdown will be less severe than past postWorld

the nation prioritizes

heart of the National Fleet is a NavyMarine

Bureaucratic reluctance to deploy, delayed response

Policy Links You Should Read:

the mode of governance in which strategies of sovereign power

though it is articulated with strategies of

global governmentality that produces

Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy --- the strategy of omnipotence sees threats to

imprisoned, killed, and torturedunless we grasp a defining feature of our

passage to nowherethat have come to characterize the United States as a

does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry,

casting states of emergency into

a crisis of violence and the