Afro-Pessimism Neg lab DD

Notes
(notes would be inserted here)

===NEG===

***1NCs***

1NC: Afro-Pessimism (remembrance)

The 1ACs use of the state as an ethical actor re-enforces the antagonism of
blackness in white civil society - this whitewashes anti-black violence and reenforces the racist power-structures that render the USFG coherent
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society an
American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African
American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 6-8, AF)
The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black
subject, lies in the Black subjects potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital
formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker
demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the
proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its
ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black
subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with the
possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the
generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-accumulation crisis , the Black (incarcerated)
body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure marxist conflict: the
categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by way of the Black
subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it mean to be free? that
grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up against a grammar of
suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering beyond signification
itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous terror of White supremacy is as
much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared pleasures as it is upon a
logicthe logic of capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking about this terror, Cornel West
uses the term black invisibility and namelessness to designate, at the level of ontology, what we are calling
a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting assault on black humanity
produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that of black invisibility and
namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the first difficult challenge and
demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black
culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and existential
bruises of black people while fending off insanity and selfannihilation . This is why the "ur-text" of
black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a
wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition . (8081) Thus, the Black subject position in America is an antagonism , a demand that can not be
satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics ; whereas the Gramscian
subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful War of
Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy
of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself. From the
positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the question hides the process by which the
discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed and answered the question,
What does it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized around the categories of exploitation
(unfair labor relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the only category of oppression which concerns
Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again,

this
is inadequate, because it would call White supremacy "racism" and articulate it as a derivative
phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating White supremacy as a matrix
constituent to the base, if not the base itself. What I am saying is that the insatiability of the
slave demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the
modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)the Black body can not give its consent because

generalized trust, the precondition for the solicitation of consent, equals racialized whiteness
(Lindon Barrett). Furthermore, as Orland Patterson points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death ,
which is to say that a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange: a
slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct
relations of force, which is to say that a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation
of a symbolic rationality. White supremacys despotic irrationality is as foundational to American
institutionality as capitalisms symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it dictates the limits
of the operation of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb vital
to its sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the necessary condition for the
flourishing of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what
Richard Wright meant when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor ." (72) And it is well known that a
metaphor comes into being through a violence which kills, rather than merely exploits, the
object, that the concept might live. West's interventions help us see how marxism can only come to grips
with America's structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot
come to grips with America's structuring irrationality : the libidinal economy of White
supremacy, and its hyper-discursive violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society,
may live. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of
White life. This is important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements
today) which is so dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles over hegemony are
seldom, if ever, asignifyingat some point they require coherence, they require categories for the
recordwhich means they contain the seeds of anti-Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of a hypothetical
scenario. In the early part of the 20th century, civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will, around emerging industries such as meat
packing. In his notes on Americanism and Fordism (280-314), Gramsci explores the scientific management of Taylorism, the
prohibition on alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of
civil society in places like turn of the century Chicago:

The objectification of blackness means that we are ontologically murdered over

and over again with no contingency, Black flesh becomes the enslaved profit for
white society
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, professor at the University of Vanderbilt, 1987, The John Hopkins
University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,
http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/6/14, KM)
Among the myriad uses to which the enslaved community was put, Goodell identifies its value
for medical research: Assortments of diseased, damaged, and disabled Negroes, deemed
incurable and otherwise worthless are bought up, it seems by medical institutions, to be
experimented and operated upon, for purposes of medical education and the interest of
medical science [86-87; Goodells emphasis ]. From the Charleston Mercury for October 12, 1838, Goodell notes this
advertisement: To planters and others. Wanted, fifty Negroes, any person, having sick Negroes, considered
incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected with
scrofula, or kings evil, confirmed hypochrondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder
and its appendages, diarrhea, dystentery, etc. The highest cash price will be paid, on application as above. At No. 110
Church Street, Charleston. [87; Goodells emphasis] This

profitable atomizing of the captive body provides

another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of
relatedness between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures
adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community
becomes a living laboratory. The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social
realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative
emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the captive flesh/body has been
liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling
episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and
mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human

subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous

archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. Faulkners young Chick Mallison in The Mansion calls it by other
names the ancient subterrene atavistic fear [227]. And I would call it the Great Long National Shame. But
people do not talk like that anymore it is embarrassing, just as the retrieval of mutilated
female bodies will likely be backward for some people. Neither the shameface of the
embarrassed, nor the not-looking-back of the self-assured is of much interest to us, and will not
help at all if rigor is our dream. We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but
words will most certainly kill us.
The alternative is to wallow in the permutation of present and past to return and
depart from the violence created by slavery this opens up new avenues to
challenge the normalized violence in modernity
Hartman 02, (Columbia University African American literature and history professor, 02(Saidiya
V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4,
pp.757-777, CLF)
The point here is not to condemn tourism, but to rigorously examine the politics of memory and
question whether working through is even an appropriate model for our relationship with
history. In Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra opts for working through as kind of middle road
between redemptive totalization and the impossibility of representation and suggests that a
degree of recovery is possible in the context of a responsible working through of the past . He
asserts that in coming to terms with trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable
aspects of the past that might be used in rebuilding a new life . 23 While LaCapras arguments are persuasive,
I wonder to what degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to build a new life?
To what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the present or, as Marx warned, can we
only draw our poetry from the future and not the past? 24 Here I am not advancing the impossibility of
representation or declaring the end of history, but wondering aloud whether the image of enslaved ancestors
can transform the present. I ask this question in order to discover again the political and ethical relevance of the past. If
the goal is something more than assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of
memory, the pressing question is,Why need we remember? Does the emphasis on remembering
and working through the past expose our insatiable desires for curatives, healing, and anything
else that proffers the restoration of some prelapsarian intactness ? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing
history? Can remembering potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the
routine of violence constitutive of black life in the United States ? Or is it that remembering has become the
only conceivable or viable form of political agency? Usually the injunction to remember insists that memory can
prevent atrocity, redeem the dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both
individuals and collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slaverys crime, and ably standing in the others shoes . I am not
proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence of a public history of slavery rather than the
saturation of representation that engenders these compulsive performances, but instead pointing to the danger of facile invocations
of captivity, sound bites about themillions lost, and simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement. These

encounters with slavery are conditioned by the repression and erasure of the violent history of
deportation and social death in the national imagination , and the plantation pastorals and epics of ethnicity
that stand in their stead. In this respect, the journey back is as much motivated by the desire to return
to the site of origin and the scene of the fall, as with the invisible landscape of slavery, the
unmarked ports of entry in the United States, and the national imperative to forget slavery,
render it as romance, or relegate it to some prehistory that has little to do with the present. The
restored plantations of the South reek with the false grandeur of the good old days, and the cabins dont appear horrible enough. Too
easily, onemight conclude,Well, things werent all that bad. The starkness of the dungeons seems to permit a certain dignity; their
cavernous emptiness resonates with the unspeakable. These blank spaces hint at the enormity of loss, the millions disappeared, and
what Amiri Baraka describes as the X-ed space, the empty space where we live, the space that is left of our history now a mystery.

1NC: Burn it down

The power to name is the power to maim skin color is the sight of the most
foundational antagonism, the affs attempt to remove history from modernity is
not only impossible but also excessively violent
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Professor at the university of Vanderbilt The John Hopkins
University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,
http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/6/14, KM)
The captivating party does not only "earn" the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains,
consequently, the right to name and "name" it: Equiano, for instance, identifies at least three different names that he is given
in numerous passages between his Benin homeland and the Virginia colony, the latter and England -"Michael," "Jacob," "Gustavus
Vassa" [35; 36]. The nicknames by which African-American women have been called , or regarded or
imagined on the New World scene- the opening lines of this essay provide examples - demonstrate

the powers of
distortion that the dominant community seizes as its unlawful prerogative. Moynihan's "Negro Family," then,
borrows its narrative energies from the grid of associations, from the semantic and iconic folds buried deep in the collective past,
that come to surround and signify the captive person . Though there is no absolute point of

chronological initiation, we might repeat certain familiar impression points that lend shape to the business of dehumanized
naming. Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is
disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the mighty debris of the itemized account, between the
lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise that overrun the sense of clarity we believed we had gained concerning this
collective humiliation. Elizabeth Donnan's enormous, four-volume documentation becomes a case in point. Turning directly to this
source, we discover what we had not expected to find - that this aspect of the search is rendered problematic and that observations of
a field of manners and its related sociometric are an outgrowth of the industry of the "exterior other" [Todorov 3], called
"anthropology" later on. The European males who laded and captained these galleys and who policed and
corralled these human beings, in hundreds of vessels from Liverpool to Elmina, to Jamaica; from the Cayenne Islands, to the ports
at Charleston and Salem, and for diacritics / summer 1987 69 three centuries of human life, were not curious about

this "cargo" that bled, packed like so many live sardines among the immovable
objects. Such inveterate obscene blindness might be denied, point blank, as a possibility for
anyone, except that we Know it happened. Donnan's first volume covers three centuries of European "discovery" and
"conquest," beginning 50 yearsbefore piousCristobal, Christum Ferens, the bearer of Christ, laid claim to what he thought was the "
Indies." From Comes Eannes de Azurara's "Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441-1448" Donn an 1:18-41], we
learn that the Portuguese probably gain the dubious distinction of having introduced black Africans to the European market of
servitude We are also reminded that "Geography" is not a divine gift. Quite to the contrary , its boundaries were shifted

during the European "Age of Conquest" in giddy desperation, according to the dictates of conquering armies,
the edicts of prelates, the peculiar myopia of the medieval Christian mind . Looking for the " Nile River," for
example, according to the fifteenth-century Portuguese notion, is someone's joke. For all that the preColumbian "explorers" Knew
about the sciences of navigation and geography, we are surprised that more parties of them did not end up

"discovering" Europe. Perhaps, from a certain angle, that is precisely all that they found - an alternative
reading of ego. The Portuguese, having little idea where the Nile ran, at least understood right away that there were men and
women darker-skinned than themselves, but they were not specifically knowledgeable, or ingenious, about the various families and
groupings represented by them. De Azurara records encounters with "Moors," "Mooresses," "Mulattoes," and people "black as
Ethiops" [1:28], but it seems that the " Land of Guinea," or of "Black Men," or of " The Negroes" [1:35] was located anywhere
southeast of Cape Verde, the Canaries, and the River Senegal, looking at an eighteenth-century European version of the subsaharan
Continent along the West African coast [1:frontispiece]. Three genetic distinctions are available to the Portuguese eye, all along

the riffs of melanin in the skin: in a field of captives, some of the observed are "white enough,
fair to look upon, and weII-proportioned." Others are less "white like mulattoes," and still others
"black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who
saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere" [1:28]. By implication, this "third man," standing for the
most aberrant phenotype to the observing eye, embodies the linguistic com-munity most
unknown to the European. Arabic translators among the Europeans could at least "talk" to the "Moors" and instruct them
to ransom themselves, or else. . Typically, there is in this grammar of description the perspectiveof "declension" not of simultaneity,
and its point of initiation is solipsistic - it begins with a narrative self, in an ap-parent unity of feeling, and unlike Equiano, who also
saw "ugly" when he looked out, this collection self uncovers the means by which to subjugate the "

foreign code of conscience," whose most easily remarkable and irremediable difference is
perceived in skin color. By the time of De Azurara's mid-fifteenth century narrative and a century and a half
before Shakespeare's "old black ram" of an Othello "tops" that "white ewe" of a Desdemona, the magic of skin

color is already installed as a decisive factor in human dealings . In De Azurara's narrative, we

observe males looking at other males, as " female" is sub-sumed here under the general category
of estrangement. Few places in these excerpts carve out a distinct female space, though there are moments of portrayal that
perceive female captives in the implications of socio-cultural function. When the field of captives (referred to above) is
divided among the spoilers, no heed is paid to relations, as fathers are separated from sons,
husbands from wives, brothers from sisters and brothers, mothers from children- male and
female. It seems dear that the political program of EuropeanChristianity promotes this hierarchical
view amongma/es, although it remains puzzling to us exactly how this version of Christianity transforms the "pagan" also into the
"ugly." It appears that human beings came up with degrees of " fair" and then the "hideous, " in its
overtones of bestiality, as the opposite of " fair," all by themselves, without stage direction, even though there is the
curious and blazing exception of Nietzsche's Socrates, who was Athens's ugliest and wisest and best citizen. The intimate
choreography that the Portuguese narrator sets going between the " faithless" and the " ugly" transforms a partnership of dancers
into a single figure. Once the " faithless," indiscriminate of the three stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they
become an altered human factor: The altered human factor Fenders an alterity of European ego, an invention, or "discovery" as
decisive in the full range of its social implications as the birth of a newborn. According to the semantic alignments of the excerpted
passage, personhood, for this European observer, locates an immediately outward and superficial determination, gauged by quite
arbitrarily opposed and specular categories: that these "pagans" did not have "bread" and "wine" did not mean that they were feast
less,as Equiano observes about the Benin diet, c. 1745, in the province of Essaka: just as fufu serves the Ghanaian diet today as a
starch-and-bread-substitute, palm wine (an item by the same name in the eighteenth-century palate of the Benin community) need
not be Heitz Cellars Martha's Vineyard and vice-versa in order for a guest, say, to imagine that she has enjoyed. That African housing
arrangements of the fifteenth century did not resemble those familiar to De Azurara's narrator need not have meant that the
African communities he encountered were without dwellings. Again, Equiano's narrative suggests that by the middle of the
eighteenth century, at least, African living patterns were not only quite distinct in their socio metrical implications, but that also
their architectonics accurately reflected the climate and availability of resources in the local circumstance: " These houses never
exceed one story in height; they are always built of wood, or stakes driven into the ground, crossed with wattles, and neatly plastered
within and without" [9]. Hierarchical impulse in both De Azurara's and Equiano's narratives translates all perceived difference as a
fundamental degradation or transcendence, but at least in Equiano's case, cultural practices are not observed in

any intimate connection with skin color. For all intents and purposes, the politics of melanin, not isolated in
its strange powers from the imperatives of a mercantile and competitive economics of European nation-states, w ill make of
"transcendence" and "degradation" the basis of a historic violence that will rewrite
the histories of modern Europe and black Africa. These mutually exclusive
nominative elements come to rest on the same governing semantics- the
ahistorical, or symptoms of the "sacred." By August 1518, the Spanish King, Francisco de Los Covos, under
the aegis of a powerful negation, could order "4000 negro slaves both male and female, provided they be Christians" to be taken
to the Caribbean, " the islands and the mainland of the ocean sea already discovered or to be discovered" Donn an 1:42]. Though

the notorious "Middle Passage" appears to the investigator as a vast background without boundaries in
time and space, we see it related in Donnan's accounts to the opening up of the entire Western hemisphere
for the specific purposes of enslavement and colonization. De Azurara's narrative belongs, then, to a
discourse of appropriation whose strategies will prove fatal to communities along the coastline of West
Africa, stretching according to Olaudah Equiano, "3400 miles, from Senegal to Angola, and [will include} a variety of Kingdoms"
[Equiano 5].

Anti-Black terror sustains Human community and fragments the Black psyche
only the incomprehensible end of the world solves Wilderson 11 (Frank, PhD, Associate Professor, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine,
The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,
InTensions, Vol 5, 2011)
Ritual murders which purge White aggressivity subtend Bukharis impeded mourning and my dissembling
scholarship, despite the fact that the filial cleansing and affilial stability proffered by the Black
imagos intrusion as a phobic object does not cut both ways. The Black psyche emerges within a
context of force, or structural violence, which is not analogous to the emergence of White or
non-Black psyches. The upshot of this emergence is that the Black psyche is in a perpetual war with itself
because it is usurped by a White gaze that hates the Black imago and wants to destroy it. The
Black self is a divided self or, better, it is a juxtaposition of hatred projected toward a Black
imago and love for a White ideal: hence the state of war (Marriott, Fanons War). This state of being at war
forecloses upon the possession of elements constitutive of psychic integration: bearing witness

(to suffering), atonement, naming and recognition, representation. As such, one cannot
represent oneself, even to oneself as a bona fide political subject, as a subject of redress. Black
political ontology is foreclosed in the unconscious just as it is foreclosed in the court. [I]t may not be
too fanciful to suggest, Marriott writes, that the black ego, far from being too immature or weak to
integrate, is an absence haunted by its and others negativity. In this respect the memory of loss
is its only possible communication (425). It is important to note that loss is an effect of temporality; it
implies a syntagmatic chain that absence cannot apprehend. Marriotts psychoanalytic inquiries work through
the word loss in order to demonstrate the paucity of its explanatory power. Again, loss indicates a prior plenitude,
absence does not. [29] Marriott explains how we all work together, how we all bond over the Black imago as
phobic object, that we might form a psychic community even though we cannot form political
community. He does so by recalling that exemplary moment in Black Skin, White Masks, when Fanon sees himself through the
eyes of a White boy who cries in terror, Look a Negro! Symbolically, Fanon knows that any black man could have triggered the
childs fantasy of being devoured that attaches itself to a fear of blackness, for this fear signifies the racial epidermal schema of
Western culturethe unconscious fear of being literally consumed by the black other. Neither the boy nor Fanon seems able to avoid
this schema, moreover, for culture determines and maintains the imago associated with blackness; cultural fantasy allows Fanon
and the boy to form a bond through racial antagonism (Bonding over Phobia 420). [30] This phobia is comprised of

affective responses, sensory reactions or presubjective constellations of intensities, as well as

representational responses, such as the threatening imago of a fecal body which portends
contamination. And this affective/representational performance is underwritten by
paradigmatic violence; which is to say the fantasy secures what Marriott calls its objective
value because it lives within violence too pervasive to describe. xvi The picture of the black psyche that
emerges from this intrusion is one that is always late, never on time, violently presented and fractured by these moments of
specular intrusion (Bonding over Phobia 420). The overwhelming psychic alienation that emerges from

the

literal fear and trembling of the White boy when Fanon appears, accompanied by the foul
language that despoilsis traumatic for the Black psyche. One comes to learn that when one
appears, one brings with one the threat of cannibalism. What a thing, writes Fanon, to have eaten ones
father! (Black Skin, White Masks)And the Black psyche retains the memory of that eternal White fear of being eaten [and]
turned into shit by an organic communion with the black body [This] is one of the most depressing and melancholic fantasies
ensuing from the psychodynamics of intrusion (Bonding over Phobia 421). [31] Again, though this is a bond between Blacks and
Whites, it is produced by a violent intrusion that does not cut both ways. Whereas the phobic bond is an injunction against Black
psychic integration and Black filial and affilial relations, it is the life blood of White psychic integration and filial (which is to say
domestic) and affilial (or institutional) relations. [32] To add to this horror, when we scale up from the cartography of the mind to
the terrain of armed struggle and the political trials, we may be faced with a situation in which the eradication of the generative
mechanism of Black suffering is something that is not in anyones interest. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black
suffering explored in this article, is not in the interest of the court, as Justice Taney demonstrates as his ruling mobilizes the fantasy
of immigration to situate the Native American within political community and to insure the Africans standing as a genealogical
isolate. Taneys majority decision suggests that juridical and political standing, like subjectivity itself, are not constituted by positive
attributes but by their capacity to sidestep niggerization. Nor is the eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering in
the interests of the White political prisoners such a David Gilbert and Judith Clark, Kuwasi Balagoons codefendantstheir
ideological opposition to the court, capitalism, and imperialism notwithstanding, because such ideological oppositions mark
conflicts within the world rather than an antagonism to the world. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of

Black suffering would mean the end of the world and they would find themselves peering into an
abyss (or incomprehensible transition) between epistemes; between, that is, the body of ideas
that determine that knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time. In other words, they
would find themselves suspended between worlds. This trajectory is too iconoclastic for working class, postcolonial, and/or radical feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be liberated in the
world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is why even their
most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead. Finally, if we push Marriotts
findings to the wall, it becomes clear that eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering is also not in the interests of
Black revolutionaries. For how can we disimbricate Black juridical and political desire from the Black psyches desire to destroy the
Black imago, a desire which constitutes the psyche? In short, bonding with Whites and non-Blacks over phobic reactions to the Black
imago provides the Black psyche with the only semblance of psychic integration it is likely to have: the need to destroy a Black imago
and love a White ideal. In these circumstances, having a white unconscious may be the only way to connect withor even contain
the overwhelming and irreparable sense of loss. The intruding fantasy offers the medium to connect with the lost internal object,
the ego, but there is also no outside to this real fantasy and the effects of intrusion are irreparable (Bonding over Phobia 426).
This raises the question, who is the speaking subject of Black insurgent testimony? Who bears witness when the Black insurgent
takes the stand? Black political horizons are singularly constrained, because the process through which the Black unconscious
emerges and through which Black people form psychic community with Humans is the very process which bars Black people from
political community.

The alternative is to burn it down why stop at the aff civil society is inseparable
from its foundation
Farley 4 (Anthony Paul, Associate Profess @ Albany Law School, Perfecting Slavery,
http://www.luc.edu/law/activities/publications/lljdocs/vol36_no1/farley.pdf, Accessed:
11/9/11, )
What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of
necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the
war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to

The
slaves burned everything because everything was against them. Everything was against the
slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were
positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything. 49 Leave nothing white
burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.48

behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more
water, the fire next time.51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned

everything in Haiti.52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of
the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the
Nineteenth century.53 At the dawn of the Twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The colorline belts the world.54
Du Bois said that the problem of the Twentieth century was the problem of the colorline.55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the
Twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power

that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become
and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains
to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. win
the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not
called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the
slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood is
not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not
called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree and thus the living can never

be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death
is not a beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country
of the slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand
narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery .
The progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite
direction of the past-present- future timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the

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

***2NC ***

V.1 Overview
a. Remember to explain the thesis of the argument it is very important to stress that the entire
state and civil society are rendered coherent by anti-blackness this is an important uniqueness
question for debate on the permutation as well as the state good/reformism arguments
b. impact calculus should
-indict the idea of utilitarian calculation IE whiteness renders white bodies as subject
meaning that they are worthy of being calculated in policies while the black body is rendered
non-human this not only is a link but is also a reason why the impact calculus of the aff is
rooted in a racist paradigm of colonial calculation etc.
-doesnt have to have a nuclear war explosion global warming econ collapse impact this
is an argument about the way society functions racial injustice is a prior question to other
alarmist issues created by the USA agenda to ignore gratuitous violence
c. link framing should be aff specific but also focus on just the advocacy/use of the state as
something that is capable of being redeemed
And, The objection that we cannot theorize because action must be taken now
trades off with a paradigmatic analysis of the past that is a pre-requsite for any
solvency for the kritik
Hartman 02, Professor of African American Literature and History Columbia University ,
02(Saidiya V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101,
Number 4, pp.757-777, CLF)
What is at stake here is more than exposing the artifice of historical barricades or the
tenuousness of temporal markers like the past and the present . By seizing hold of the past, one
illuminates the broken promises and violated contracts of the present. The disjuncture between what
David Scott has described as that event and this memory, beyond comprising an essential dimension
of belatedness, raises a host of questions about the use and relevance of the past, the political
and ethical valence of collective memory, and the relation between historical responsibility and
the contemporary crisis, whether understood in terms of amasochistic attachment to the past, the intransigence of racism,
or the intractable and enduring legacy of slavery.8 In other words, Africa as an atavistic land as well as the
character and consequences of an identification with Africa are mediated by way of the
experience of enslavement, and perhaps, even more important, by way of a backward glance at
U.S. history as well. That is, the identification with Africa is always already after the break. Added to this is the question
of whether Africa serves merely as a mirror that refracts the image of the United States , thereby
enabling the returnee to explore issues of home and identity with a measure of contemplative distance. Certainly, this is not
surprising when we take into account the way I which slavery and Africa function as the
generative and constitutive points of reference in continuist narratives of African-American history and cultural
survival.9 For this reason, it is important to disaggregate Africa and slavery in order to apprehend the
ways in which they come together. The journey to Elmina Castle, Ouidah, or Goree Island is first and foremost a way of
commemorating slavery at its purported site of origin, although one could just as easily travel to Portugal or visit the Vatican. The
paradox here is that the title to home and kin emerges only in the aftermath of the dislocation and death of the Middle Passage and
the social death of enslavement; in short, it is a response to the breach of separation. Kinship is precious by virtue of its dissolution,
and wounded kinship defines the diaspora.10 The pristine and idealized vision of home and kin is even more esteemed as a
consequence of its defilement. It is, in this way, not unlike virginity, which Faulkner observed must depend upon its loss, its
absence to have existed at all.

V.2 Overview

Blackness = enslavement
The perceived axiom of black = slave destabilizes the black community
permanently
Sexton 10 (Jared, Assoc Prof of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, People of Color
Blindness p. 33-34)
Not all free persons are white (nor are they equal or equally free), but slaves are paradigmatically black.
And because blackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political
and legal culture, it permanently destabilizes the position of any nominally free black
population. Stuart Hall might call this the articulation of elements of a discourse, the production of a non-necessary
correspondence between the signifiers of racial blackness and slavery.27 But it is the historical materialization of
the logic of a transnational political and legal culture such that the contingency of its articulation
is generally lost to the infrastructure of the Atlantic world that provides Frank Wilderson a basis
for the concept of a political ontology of race.28 The United States provides the point of focus here, but the
dynamics under examination are not restricted to its bounds. Political ontology is not a
metaphysical notion, because it is the Social Text 103 Summer 2010 37 explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available
to historic challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political status either,
even an oppressed political status, because it functions as if it were a metaphysical property
across the longue dure of the premodern, modern, and now postmodern eras . That is to say, the
application of the law of racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its
operation across the better part of a millennium .29 In Wildersons terms, the libidinal economy of antiblackness is
pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its political economy. In fact, the application of slave law among
the free (that is, the disposition that with respect to the African shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning
human bodies into sentient flesh) has outlived in the postemancipation world a certain form of its prior
operation the property relations specific to the institution of chattel and the plantationbased agrarian economy in which it was
sustained. Hartman describes this in her 2007 memoir, Lose Your Mother, as the afterlife of slavery: a measure of man and
a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone . . . a racial calculus and a political
arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.30 On that note, it is not inappropriate to say that the
continuing application of slave law facilitated the reconfiguration of its operation with the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, rather than its abolition (in the
conventional reading) or even its circumscription as punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted (on the progressive reading of contemporary critics of the prisonindustrial complex). It is the paramount value of Loc Wacquants historical sociology, especially
in Wildersons hands, that it provides a schema for tracking such reconfigurations of antiblackness from slavery to mass imprisonment without losing track of its structural
dimensions, its political ontology.31

U/X of Civil Society

Civil society is founded on the antagonism of whiteness and blackness the
coherence of the state rests on racialized gratuitous violence
Wilderson 10 [Frank B., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, Red, White & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 29-31 ]
The three structuring positions of the United States (Whites, Indians, Blacks) are elaborated by a rubric of three
demands: the (White) demand for expansion, the (Indian) demand for return of the land, and
the (Black) demand for "flesh" reparation (Spillers). The relation between these positions
demarcates antagonisms and not conflicts because , as I have argued, they are the
embodiments of opposing and irreconcilable principles or forces that hold out no hope for
dialectical synthesis, and because they are relations that form the foundation on which all
subsequent conflicts in the Western Hemisphere are possible. In other words, the originary, or
ontological, violence that elaborates the Settler/Master, the "Savage," and the Slave
positions is foundational to the violence of class warfare, ethnic conflicts, immigrant battles,
and the women's liberation struggles of Settler/Masters. These antagonismswhether
acknowledged through the conscious and empirical machinations of political
economy or painstakingly disavowed through what Jared Sexton terms the "imaginative
labor" of libidinal economyrender all other disputes as conflicts , or what Haunani-Kay
Trask calls "intra-settler discussions."40 As I stated above, in the 1960s and 1970s, as White
radicalism's discourse and political common sense found authorization in the
ethical dilemmas of embodied incapacity (the ontological status of Blacks as
accumulated and fungible objects), White cinema's proclivity to embrace
dispossession through the vectors of capacity (the ontological status of the Human as an exploited
and alienated subject) became profoundly disturbed. While many socially and politically engaged film scripts
and cinematic strategies did not surrender completely to incapacity (i.e., to the authority of the Slave's grammar of suffering),
many failed to assert the legitimacy of White ethical dilemmas (the supremacy of exploitation and alienation as a grammar of
suffering) with which cinema had been historically preoccupied.41 The period during which

COINTELPRO crushed the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army also
witnessed the flowering of Blackness's political power not so much as institutional capacity
but as a Zeitgeist, a demand that authorized White radicalism . But by 1980 White
radicalism had comfortably re-embraced capacity without the threat of disturbanceit
returned to the discontents of civil society with the same formal tenacity as it had from 153242 to
1967, only now that formal tenacity was emboldened by a wider range of alibis than simply free
speech or the antiwar movement; it had, for example, the women's, gay, antinuclear,
environmental, and immigrants' rights movements as lines of flight from the absolute ethics
of Redness and Blackness. It was able to reform (reorganize) an unethical world and still sleep at
night. Today, such intrasettler discussions are the foundation of the "radical" agenda. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, the irreconcilable demands embodied in the "Savage" and the Slave are
being smashed by the two stone-crushers of sheer force and liberal Humanist discourses such
as "access to institutionality," "meritocracy," "multiculturalism," and "diversity" discourses that
proliferate exponentially across the political, academic, and cinematic landscapes. Given the violent state repression of Red,
White, and Black political movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and the forces of multiculturalism and neoliberalism in the 1980s
and 1990s, my project asks whether it is or ever was possible for the feature film, as institution and as text, to articulate a
political ethics that acknowledges the structure of U.S. antagonisms. Unlike radically unsettled settler societies, such as Israel
and pre-1994 South Africa, the structure of antagonisms is too submerged in the United States to

become a full-fledged discourse readily bandied about in civil societythe way a grammar is
submerged in speech. Film studies and socially engaged popular films constitute important terrains which, like other

institutions in the United States, work to disavow the structure of antagonisms; but they also provide interesting sites for what is
known in psychoanalysis as repetition compulsion and the return of the repressed.

***Links***

Civil Society
The belief stemming from anti-blackness of the present existence of a society
where racism must not exist due to the demise of slavery, perpetuates the
inequalities that stems from the very system that we partake in, a system built
upon anti-blackness
Sexton, 2011 (Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine The Curtain of the Sky: An
introduction, p.14-16, KS)
That is to say, 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 isolated from his group, wrenched from his
environment and transplanted else- where (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 1990: 27). 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 suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at
least not enslaved. More simply, we might say of the colonized: 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 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.4The

alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and
future generations and rendering thereby the notion of descen- dants of slaves as a strict
oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition, canceling ties to the slaves contemporaries as well.
Reduced to a tool, 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 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 trans- formation) 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).5One 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 because it requires the untenable demarcation of an
historic end in Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal abolition, mutating into the burdened
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 neverlived, 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, or negate
the will to presence, of every claim to human being, even perhaps the fugi- 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. Coeditors Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best are posing the right question: 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 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 schematization of Fanon, we can say that 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 here does not imply that onecan in
either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); 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. 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.

Anti-blackness has built a society where blackness is synonymous with slaveness,

implicity enslaving blacks within everyday society, this oppression ontologically
murders blacks in a way that outweighs other forms of oppression
Sexton, 2011
(Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine The Curtain of the Sky: An introduction, p.14-16, KS)

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 compli- cations
of racial hierarchy makes recourse to a comparative sociology, measuring relative rates of
infant mortality, poverty, illiteracy, high school graduation, hate crimes, impris- onment,
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 not live under con- ditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, 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 com- modification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that structure
of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and
exchanged.7On this score, we should note that the absolute 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 propertyrelations that are constitutive of slavery. To
repeat: not all free persons are white (nor are they equal or equally free), but slaves are
paradigmatically black. Because blackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a
transnational political and legal culture, it permanently destabilizes the position of any
nominally free black population. Stuart Hall might call this the articulation of elements of a discourse, the production of
a non-necessary correspondence between the signifiers of blackness and slavery (Hall 1996). But it is the historical materialization
of the logic of a transnational political and legal culture such that the contingency of its articulation is generally lost to the
infrastructure of the Atlantic world that provides Wilderson a basis for the concept of a political ontology of race that locates the
color line vis-a-vis slavery: black/non-black rather than white/non-white. The USA provides the point of focus here,

but the dynamics under examination are not restricted to its bounds. Political ontology is not a
metaphysical notion, because it is the explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to
historic challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political
status either, even an oppressed or subjugated political status, because it functions as if it were a
metaphysical property across the longue dure of the pre-modern, modern and now postmodern
eras. That is to say, borrowing a distinction from Jrgen Habermas, the application of the law of racial slavery is
pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its operation across the better part of a
millennium (Habermas 1985).8 In Wildersons terms, the libidinal economy of anti-blackness is pervasive, regardless of
variance or permutation in its political economy.9 In fact, the application of slave law among the free (i.e. the disposition that with
respect to the African shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh) has out- lived
in the post-emancipation world a certain form of its prior operation the property relations specific to the institution of chattel and
the plantation-based agrarian economy in which it was sustained. As noted, Hartman describes this in her memoir as the afterlife of
slavery: a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone a racial calculus and a political arithmetic
that were entrenched centuries ago (Hartman 2007: 6). On that score, it is not inappropriate to say that the

continuing application of slave law facilitated thereconfiguration of its operation with the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, rather than its abolition (on the
conventional reading) or even its circumscription as punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted (on the progressive reading of contemporary critics of the
prison- industrial complex). It is one of the great values of Wacquants work, especially in
Wildersons hands, that it provides an historical schema for tracking such reconfigurations from
slavery to mass incarceration without losing track of the structural dimension.10 The challenge

for all subsequent scholarship in the overlapping fields of the sociology of race and ethnic and
racial studies is to orient itself within this theoretical horizon if it is to attain what is most
essential.

Color Blindness
White people attempt to hide whiteness see themselves as non-raced
Dyer 97 (Richard, , Professor of Film Studies at Kings College, Matter of Whiteness, P. 2, ESB)
There is no more powerful position than that of being just human. The claim to power is the
claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people cant do that - they can only
speak for their race.2 But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race.
The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with
all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by
undercutting the authority with which they/ we speak and act in and on the world.The sense of
whites as non-raced is most evident in the absence of reference to whiteness in the habitual
speech and writing of white people in the West. We (whites) will speak of, say, the blackness or Chineseness of
friends, neighbours, colleagues, customers or clients, and it may be in the most genuinely friendly and accepting manner, but we
dont mention the whiteness of the white people we know. An old-style white comedian will often start a joke: Theres this bloke
walking down the street and he meets this black geezer, never thinking to race the bloke as well as the geezer. Synopses in listings of
films on TV, where wordage is tight, none the less squander words with things like: Comedy in which a cop and his black sidekick
investigate a robbery, Skinhead Johnny and his Asian lover Omar set up a laundrette, Feature film from a promising Native
American director and so on. Since all white people in the West do this all the time, it would be invidious to quote actual examples,
and so I shall confine myself to one from my own writing. In an article on lesbian and gay stereotypes (Dyer 1993b), I discuss the fact
that there can be variations on a type such as the queen or dyke. In the illustrations which accompany this point, I compare a
fashion queen from the film Irtne with a black queen from Car Wash - the former, white image is not raced, whereas all the
variation of the latter is reduced to his race. Moreover, this is the only non-white image referred to in the article, which does not
however point out that all the other images discussed are white. In this, as in the other white examples in this paragraph, the fashion
queen is, racially speaking, taken as being just human. This assumption that white people are just people,

which is not far off saying that whites are people whereas other colours are something else, is
endemic to white culture. Some of the sharpest criticism of it has been aimed at those who
would think themselves the least racist or white supremacist, bell hooks, for instance, has noted
how amazed and angry white liberals become when attention is drawn to their whiteness, when
they are seen by non-white people as white.
The invisibility of whiteness leads to a false sense of individual achievement: we
need to see whiteness as privilege
Dyer 97 (Richard, Professor of Film Studies at Kings College, Matter of Whiteness, P. 9, ESB)
It is this privilege and dominance that is at stake in analysing white racial imagery. McIntosh
starts from the recognition that white people dont see their white privilege, which acts like an
invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks,
passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank cheques (ibid.: 1-2). The invisibility of these
assets is part and parcel of the sense that whiteness is nothing in particular, that white culture and identity
have, as it were, no content. This is one of the feelings most commonly expressed by the white women interviewed by Ruth
Frankenberg in her study of white identity'. She notes that many of the women said that they did not have a culture (Frankenberg
1993: 192): culture, distinctive identity', one might say colour, tended to be felt as add-ons to an identity that is not itself distinctive
or coloured, that lacks flavour (ibid.: 197). As one woman (Cathy Thomas) vividly and wittily put it, To be a Heinz 57 American, a
white, class-confused American, land of the Kleenex type American, is so formless in and of itself (ibid.: 191), Having no

content, we cant see that we have anything that accounts for our position of privilege and
power. This is itself crucial to the security with which wc occupy that position . As Peggy' McIntosh
argues, a white person is taught to believe that all that she or he does, good and ill, all that we
achieve, is to be accounted for in terms of our individuality. It is intolerable to realise that we
may get a job or a nice house, or a helpful response at school or in hospitals, because of our skin
colour, not because of the unique, achieving individual we must believe ourselves to be . But this
then is why it is important to come to see whiteness. For those in power in the West, as long as
whiteness is felt to be the human condition, then it alone both defines normality and fully
inhabits it. As I suggested in my opening paragraphs, the equation of being white with being human secures a position of power.
White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all
people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of
other peoples; white people create the dominant images of the world and dont

quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set
standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to
fail. Most of this is not done deliberately and maliciously; there are enormous variations of power amongst white people, to do
with class, gender and other factors; goodwill is not unheard of in white peoples engagement with others.
White power none the less reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences and
goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal. White people
need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness
needs to be made strange. There is a political need to do this, but there are also problematic
political feelings attendant on it, which need to be briefly signalled in order to be guarded
against. The first of these is the green light problem. Writing about whiteness gives white people the go-ahead to write and talk
about what in any case we have always talked about: ourselves. In, at any rate, intellectual and educational life in the West in recent
years there have been challenges to the dominance of white concerns and a concomitant move towards inclusion of non-white
cultures and issues. Putting whiteness on the agenda now might permit a sigh of relief that we white people dont after all any longer
have to take on all this non-white stuff.

Color Line
The colorline originates from and is justified by the spectacle created by whites
blacks are born into a system in which whites prevent them from crossing the
colorlinethe whites demand spectacles to create black inferiority.
Farley 99 (Anthony Paul, Boston College Law School professor, 7/1/99, Black Men on Race,
Gender, and Sexuality, New York University Press, 7/6/14, AX)
Let the black body choose to attack itself through crime and watch as infinite resources are made
available to educate its self-hatred. A prosectutor and a defense lawyer, a judge and a court recorder, a psychiatrist and
a probation officer, a U.S. marshall and a city detective, a jury of near-peers and a galley of friends and strangers, and oak-lined
courtroom in a beautiful courthouse, and, finally, a room of ones own in prison will all be made available, for free,

to the black body that heeds its maters voice and turns against itself through crime. This
process educates the black body that it is criminalthe criminal justice system produces
recidivism and nothing else. Thus, the system produces the very spectacleblack criminality
upon which it relies to justify its existence. These twinsSambo (the Minstrel) and Bigger Thomas (the
Criminal)are both fictions made flesh only by the process of spectacularization. The spectacle is both the origin and
the justification of the colorline. Things could not be otherwise, for it is only by means of the
spectacle that whites become and remain white. And it is only by means of the spectacle that
blacks become and remain black. Each of these colors is a script that we are forced to perform.
The race-pleasure experienced by whites is a sadistic pleasure in that it can be produced only by
the pain experienced by those whom the system marks as black. Under classic segregation, signs such as
Whites Only accomplished the marking. Under modern neosegregation, the segregated are made to mark
themselves. I am speaking today of millions of bodies made to perform the work of spectacle production by a nation addicted to
whiteness. How does the ordeal work? Urban areas are first stript-mined of opportunities of any kind of left, quite literally,
toxic with lead paint, carbon dioxide, rat and roach fecal matter, and a host of other organic and inorganic
pathogens. These urban areas, defoliated as if to reveal some secret Ho Chi Minh trail, are then marked as
bantustans for black. I call these areas, collectively, the Neocolony or Golgotha. Black bodies are then banished, like
lepers, to the Neocolony. Not every black body resides in the Neocolony; however, those that exist in other sites
are, like plague victims in the Middle Ages, quarantined. Let a black body move through a whiteidentified space and watch the enforces of the quarantine , police and private citizens alike, move into
action and use their prophylactic suspicious to prevent the black plague from crossing the
colorline. Thus the stage is set for peculiar passion play required of blacks by whites, the performance of spectacle. The
colorline is the boundary of a site of production: the Neocolony is not simply a wasteland. The Neocolony, which simultaneously
exists in the nonspaces of banishment and quarantine is a factory. The black body is made to produce the spectacle

of its own degradation. The bodies within the Neocolony are turned, each against the other, by
the very desperation of the situation. In a mass surrender to their torturers they often become that which
their masters require them to be: inferior. Black criminality and black incompetence are
not accidents; rather they are demands. We should think of them as production orders, or stage directions, from
white America to the Neocolony.

Democracy
The Black Subject's Absence from all State or Capital Formations Functions as the
Basis of the American Democracy but Kills and Exploits Itself. Moreover, it Calls
Into Question Productivity
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society an
American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African
American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 6-8, AF)
The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black
subject, lies in the Black subjects potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital
formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker
demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the
proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its
ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black
subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with the
possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the
generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-accumulation crisis , the Black (incarcerated)
body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure marxist conflict: the
categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by way of the Black
subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it mean to be free? that
grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up against a grammar of
suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering beyond signification
itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous terror of White supremacy is as
much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared pleasures as it is upon a
logicthe logic of capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking about this terror, Cornel West
uses the term black invisibility and namelessness to designate, at the level of ontology, what we are calling
a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting assault on black humanity
produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that of black invisibility and
namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the first difficult challenge and
demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black
culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and existential
bruises of black people while fending off insanity and selfannihilation . This is why the "ur-text" of
black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a
wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition . (8081) Thus, the Black subject position in America is an antagonism , a demand that can not be
satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics ; whereas the Gramscian
subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful War of
Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy
of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself. From the
positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the question hides the process by which the
discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed and answered the question,
What does it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized around the categories of exploitation
(unfair labor relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the only category of oppression which concerns
Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again,

this
is inadequate, because it would call White supremacy "racism" and articulate it as a derivative
phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating White supremacy as a matrix
constituent to the base, if not the base itself. What I am saying is that the insatiability of the
slave demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the
modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)the Black body can not give its consent because
generalized trust, the precondition for the solicitation of consent, equals racialized whiteness
(Lindon Barrett). Furthermore, as Orland Patterson points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death ,

which is to say that a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange: a
slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct
relations of force, which is to say that a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation
of a symbolic rationality. White supremacys despotic irrationality is as foundational to American
institutionality as capitalisms symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it dictates the limits
of the operation of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb vital
to its sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the necessary condition for the
flourishing of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what
Richard Wright meant when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor ." (72) And it is well known that a
metaphor comes into being through a violence which kills, rather than merely exploits, the
object, that the concept might live. West's interventions help us see how marxism can only come to grips
with America's structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot
come to grips with America's structuring irrationality : the libidinal economy of White
supremacy, and its hyper-discursive violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society,
may live. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of
White life. This is important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements
today) which is so dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles over hegemony are
seldom, if ever, asignifyingat some point they require coherence, they require categories for the
recordwhich means they contain the seeds of anti-Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of a hypothetical
scenario. In the early part of the 20th century, civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will, around emerging industries such as meat
packing. In his notes on Americanism and Fordism (280-314), Gramsci explores the scientific management of Taylorism, the
prohibition on alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of
civil society in places like turn of the century Chicago:

Education
The Modern Educational System Reentrenches the White-Over-Black System and
Continues to Shield the Persistence of Institutionalized Racism
Farley 5, Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at Boston
College Before Teaching at Albany Perfecting Slavery Page 230-231
Slavery, our slavery, begins and ends with white-over-black. It sometimes seems that we have moved away from the
tyranny, from the terror, from slaverys death to some New England town meeting that includes, or will quite soon include, the souls
of all those hitherto enslaved black folk. 27 It sometimes seems to some of us that we are on the verge of

some great gettin up mornin in which the dead will awaken , the many thousands gone will return, and all
will be right as rain, right as rain and without the thunder. We are said to have moved from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation. Free at last! Free at last! Free at last! Or so our masters tell us. But the fire bell is still ringing in the
night, somewhere behind the wall of sleep, and all is not as it seems in the Promised Land of the
Civil Rights Movement dream. Before the morning is night and memory and forgetting will not let us simply declare things to be
alright. Slavery is white-over-black. Segregation is white-over-black. Neosegregation is white-over-black. The movement, then,

from slavery to segregation to neosegregation, from the so-called past to the so-called present, from then to now,
is movement from white-over-black to whiteover-black to white-over-black, and that is not movement. That
is the motionlessness of death. The so-called Civil Rights Movement has taken us from white-over-black to white-overblack to white-overblack. White-over-black, whatever its juridical designation, is slavery. Slavery is death. The end, death, requires a
beginning. White-overblack begins where it ends. White-over-black begins with death. Education is where we begin. We begin

after we are called. We are called and that is when and how we all begin. There is a calling. We are called upon to be. We
can only be by becoming. What we become depends upon the calling that we choose to follow.
We become the calling that we make our own. Jonathan Kozol writes of education in the neosegregated, postBrown v. Board of Education era as death at an early age. 29 White-over-black is death at an early age. Slaves are not called.
Slavery is death. Education is where this death begins. 28

Embodiment
By trying to put yourself in the body of a black person you are putting yourself in
control of the body which leads to the exploitation and forcible whiteness of the
slave.
Hartman, 3. (professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and
history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, Saidiya and
Frank B, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought, pg 185-186)
Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection, S. VH. - there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture
and on minstrelsy in particular. And there was a certain sense in which the ability to occupy blackness

was considered transgressive or as a way of refashioning whiteness, and there were all these rad ical
claims that were being made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no, this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." It doesn't mat
ter whether you do good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's why think
ing about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material rela tions of slavery was so key for me. F.W -Yes, that's clarifying. A

body that you can do what you want with. In your discussion of the body as the property of enjoyment, what I
really like is when you talk about Rankin. Here's a guy like the prototypical twentieth-century white
progressive anti-slavery and uses his powers of observation to write for its abo lition, even to his
slave-owning brother. He's in the South, he's looking at a slave coffle, and he imagines that these slaves being
beaten could be himself and his family. Through this process it makes sense to him, it becomes
meaningful. His body and his fam ily members' white bodies become proxies for real enslaved
black bodies and, as you point out, the actual object of identification, the slave, disappears.
S.V.H. - I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical ques tions/problems/crises for the West:
the status of difference and the status of the other. It's as though in order to come to any recogni
tion of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly
displaced and effaced: "Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of
that position." That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday the need for the innocent
black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You
have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to .. . F.W. - [laughter] A nigga on the warpath! S. V.H. - Exactly! For me it
was those moments that were the most - the moments of the sympathetic ally, who in some ways telling

is actually no more able to see the slave than the person who is exploiting him or her as their
property. That is the work Rankin does and I think it suggests just how ubiquitous that kind of
vio lence, in fact, is.

Exploration
The desire to explore the unknown is intimately tied to the desire to execute
violence against the unknown the 1acs act of exploration carries with it a history
soaked in the blood of the middle passage
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor @ Vanderbilt University
The John Hopkins University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar
Book, http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/8/14, KM)
Turning directly to this source, we discover what we had not expected to find that this aspect of the
search is rendered problematic and that observations of a field of manners and its related
sociometries are an outgrowth of the industry of the exterior other [Todorv 3], called
anthropology later on. The European males who laded and captained these galleys and who
policed and corralled these human beings, in hundreds of vessels from Liverpool to Elmina, to Jamaica;
from the Cayenne Islands, to the ports at Charleston and Salem, and for three centuries of human life, were not
curious about this cargo that bled, packed like so many live sardines among the immovable
objects. Such inveterate obscene blindness might be denied , point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except
that we know it happened. Donnas first volume covers three centuries of European discovery and conquest, beginning
50 years before pious Cristobal, Christum Ferens, the bearer of Christ, laid claim to what he thought was the indies. From Gomes
Eannes de Azuraras Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441-1448 [Donnan 1:18-41], we learn that the Portuguese
probably gain the dubious distinction of having introduced black Africans to the European market of servitude. We are also

reminded that Geography is not a divine gift. Quite to the contrary, its boundaries were shifted during the
European Age of Conquest in giddy desperation, according to the dictates of conquering armies, the edicts of prelates,
the peculiar myopia of the medieval Christian mind. Looking for the Nile River, for example, according to the fifteenthcentury Portuguese notion, is someones joke. For all that the pre-Columbian explorers knew about the sciences of
navigation and geography, we are surprised that more parties of them did not end up discovering Europe. Perhaps , from a
certain angle, that is precisely all that they found an alternative reading of ego. The
Portuguese, having little idea where the Nile ran, at least understood right away that there were men
and women darker-skinned than themselves, but they were not specifically knowledgeable, or ingenious, about the
various families and groupings represented by them. De Azurara records encounters with Moors, Mooresses, Mulattoes, and
people black as Ethiops [1:28], but it seems that the Land of Guinea, or of Black Men, or of The Negros [1:35] was located
anywhere southeast of Cape Verde, the Canaries, and the River Senegal, looking at an eighteenth-century European version of the
subsarharan Continent along the West African coast [1:frontispiece]. Three genetic distinctions are available to the Portuguese eye,
all along the riffs of melanin in the skin: in a field of captives, some of the observed are white enough, fair to look upon, and wellproportioned. Others are less white like mulattoes, and still others black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as
almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere [1:28]. By implication, this third man, standing for
the most aberrant phenotype to the observing eye, embodies the linguistic community most unknown to the European. Arabic
translators among the Europeans could at least talk to the Moors and instruct them to ransom themselves, or else Typically,
there is in this grammar of description the perspective of declension, not of simultaneity, and its

point of initiation is solipsistic it begins with a narrative self, in an apparent unity of feeling, and unlike
Equiano, who also saw ugly when he looked out, this collective self uncovers the means by which to
subjugate the foreign code of conscience, whose most easily remarkable and irremediable
difference is perceived in skin color. By the time of De Azuraras mid-fifteenth century narrative and a century and a
half before Shakespeares old black ram of an Othello tups that white ewe of a Desdemona, the magic of skin color is already
installed as a decisive factor in human dealings. In De Azuraras narrative, we observe males looking at other males, as female is
subsumed here under the general category of estrangement. Few places in these excerpts carve out a distinct female space, though
there are moments of portrayal that perceive female captives in the implications of socio-cultural function. When the field of
captives (referred to above) is divided among the spoilers, no heed is paid to relations, as fathers are separated from sons, husbands
from wives, brothers from sisters and brothers, mothers from children male and female. It seems clear that the political program
of European Christianity promotes this hierarchical view among males, although it remains puzzling to us exactly how this version of
Christianity transforms the pagan also into the ugly. It appears that human beings came up with degrees of fair and then the
hideous, in its overtones of bestiality, as the opposite of fair, all by themselves, without stage direction, even though there is the
curious and blazing exception of Nietzsches Socrates, who was Athens ugliest and wisest and best citizen. The intimate
choreography that the Portuguese narrator sets going between the faithless and the ugly transforms a partnership of dancers into
a single figure. Once the faithless, indiscriminate of the three stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they
become an altered human factor: And so their lot was now quite contrary to what it had been, since before they had lived in
perdition of soul and body; of their souls, in that they were yet pagans, without the clearness and the light of the Holy Faith; and of
their bodies, in that they lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings for they had no knowledge of bread and wine,
and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgment of houses; and worse than all, through the great ignorance that was in
them, in that they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth. [1:30]

Globalization
Globalization ushers in a new form of Apartheid that makes war and antiblackness
inevitable
Sexton, 8 [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies @
UC Irvine, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, page
239-244]
The immanence of global capital in no way prevents the drawing of internal lines of exclusion . As
Giovanni Arrighi (1995) states, Entire communities, countries, even continents , as in the case of sub-Saharan
Africa, have been declared redundant, superfluous to the changing economy of capitalist
accumulation on a world scale. In the wake of the cold war, the unplugging of these redundant
communities and locales from the world supply system has triggered innumerable, mostly
violent feuds . . . over the appropriation of resources that were made absolutely scarce by the
unplugging (330). Managing such feudsfueling them and containing them in order to profit from themhas
become a principal strategic concern of the new global hegemony and the indispensable
underside of its political economic globalization (Bhattacharyya 2005). It is carried forward by means
of a brutal geopolitics, at the heart of which lie black populations: north, south, east, and west. Achille
Mbembe (1999) notes, for instance, that the African experience shows that in the age of globalization
bringing the world climate under control involves of necessity the forcible breaking-down of
existing territorial frameworks . . . and the simultaneous erection of shifting areas and areas in
which populations judged to be superfluous can be corralled and their mobility limited . For those
consigned to decomposition on the outskirts of the great technological changes going on today, deterritorialization goes
hand-in-hand with the setting up of a constraint economy, designed quite simply to get rid of
their unwanted populations and exploit their resources in the raw state . In these circumstances, after
the breakdown of the three worlds heuristic, war seen as a general economic system no longer necessarily
pits those who have the weapons against each other. Preferably, it sets those who have weapons
against those who have none (Mbembe 1999). Weapons include not only structural adjustment policies (SAP) and
increased militarization, recently known in the United States as the prison-welfare-industrial complex (Davis 2003; Wacquant
2005) but also, returning to our earlier point, the new forms of apartheid intended for the spatial containment

of AIDS (Dean 2000).3 Immobilization and exclusion: counterparts to the accelerated mobility and
intercourse of people, goods, and information that typically register in descriptions of the new
global context (Bauman 2000). From this vantage, it is imperative to recall that the Grab for Africa . . . was the
high-water mark of European imperialism, and the frenzy for possessions was certainly underlain by the sense of the
closing of the world. It was, in other words, the great time of the tracing of lines in the chancelleries of Europe (Parker 1998, 2425n4). We reencounter this rehabilitated geopolitical inscription todaystill Eurocentricbut underlain now by the sense of the
closing of the world of a qualitatively different order. The effects of the consummate geography of capital on subjectivity are titanic.
The catastrophic consequences described by Gilroy have now become generalized as the conditions of

possibility for human being. Capitalist power actualizes itself in a basically uninhabitable space
of fear. That much is universal. The particulars of the uninhabitable landscape of fear in which a given body nevertheless dwells
vary according to the socially valorized distinctions applied to it by selective mechanisms of power im-planted throughout the social
field (Massumi 1993, 24). For Brian Mas- sumi, the paradigmatic subject of this universal fear is white,

bourgeois, metropolitan, and female; the paradigmatic source is public, unmediated,

anonymous, and sexualized. An urbanized North American woman dwells in the space of
potential rape and battering. Her movements and emotions are controlled (filtered, channeled) by the
immanence of sexual violence to every coordinate of her socio-geographical space-time . This image
is deliberately evoked as a cliche. It is Massumis point to demonstrate its iconic status, its readymade legibility, its status as an
omnipresent screen of projection, circulating as ubiquitous collective fantasy in print media, television, and film culture. However,

there is a twist to the trope of the imperiled white woman vulnerable to sexual violence.
Capitalist power determines being a woman as the future-past of male violence . . . . [Yet] the flow
of stupidity in contemporary society [perception and intellection restricted to a recognition reflex] consists in the
translation of the she to the we' of everywoman to everyone : a loss of the specificity of the landscape of fear
(24; emphasis added). Massumi writes at some length about the fear-blur produced in this situation, especially by the
machinations of mass media. It is vague by nature, he claims. It is low-level fear. A kind of background

radiation saturating existence. . . . It may be expressed as panic or hysteria or phobia or

anxiety. But, he continues, these are to low-level fear what HIV is to AIDS: signs of subjectivity in
capitalist crisis. The self, like AIDS, is a syndrome (24-25): a complex of effects coming from no single, isolat- able place,
without a linear history, and exhibiting no invariant character-istics (11). The introduction of the concept of the syndrome
marks out a requisite shift in analytical frameworks to the extent that syndromes , unlike symptoms,
mark the limit of causal analysis. They cannot be exhaustively understoodonly pragmatically
altered by experimental interventions operating in several spheres of activity at once (31). To take
up this challenge is to pursue a syndromatic analysis.4 Bearing in mind the difficulties for analysis engendered by the syndrome of
capitalist subjectivity, the generalization of the white womans fear of potential rape and battering,

we can still suppose that this ambient, low-level fear is overdetermined by what Fanon calls the
racial distribution of guilt in the antiblack world (1967, 103). Here the Negro is the master, he remarks
sardonically. He is the specialist of this matter: whoever says rape says Negro (166). That AIDS, in its symbolic soldering to the
black body, is widely considered to be the privileged locus of biofear production (Massumi 1993, vii) only
compounds this atmospheric dread. If, as Baxandall (1995) suggests, the fear of AIDS has made sexual contact increasingly
stigmatized (243), then this fear is amplified by the legacies of negrophobia in which, as noted previously, the Negro

symbolizes the biological danger (Fanon 1967, 165). The contemporary fear of AIDS reinvigorates a
longstanding premise of antimiscegenation: the fear that sexual contact with black bodies will turn
over into violence, that such contact in and of itself constitutes violence, a site of brutality or
morbid contamination or both. To speak of the fear of AIDS is , of course, to understate the case,
just as it is an understatement to speak simply of negrophobia . The loathing relative to AIDS is far more
radical than the affective condition of fear suggests. We are facing, rather, what Dean (2000) describes as wholesale
repudiation by a society that refuses to admit a signifier for AIDS (99). By persistently representing itself as
having a general population that remains largely immune to incidence of AIDS, the United States [and global civil society]
pushes AIDSand the social groups seen as representing AIDSto the outside of its psychic and social
economies, treating them exactly like shit. (99) The fate of AIDS and the fate of the black are fundamentally
intertwined: rendered in the symbolic order as abject, fecal objects . Symbolizing the danger faced by the body in
the throes of globalization, the confusion of boundaries marking inside from out, and a crisis in the
scale of cognitive mapping (Jameson 1998b); shuttled between disciplined mobility and the lethal economy of constraint;
AIDS, like blackness, should be understood as a condition of the body, an index of the bodys
vulnerability (Dean 2000, 98). The constitutive outside of societys political and libidinal economies
is, of course, located differently across the globe. In the deindustrialized urban areas of the North, particularly in the
United States, it is operated most prominently by the practices of policing and crystallized in the
overt use of the racial profile. It is put into effect much more powerfully by the virtual expulsion of sub-Saharan Africa
from the global political economy, a structural exile beneath what we might call the arc of the global South. This continental
prohibition, a demarcation internal to the underdeveloped regions, may require reconfiguration
of the global imaginaryand the nomenclature of theory, culture, and politicsaway from the present NorthSouth axis, useful as it may be in some respects, toward an uneven East-West partnership as the
definitive vector in the movement of globalization. In the United States, a fractal reflection of the
global racial formation (Winant 2001) is observable. Pierre Bourdieu notes, for instance, The Charitable
State, founded on the moralizing conception of poverty, tends to bifurcate into a Social State
which assures minimal guarantees of security for the middle classes, and an increasingly
repressive state counteracting the effects of violence which results from the increasingly
precarious condition of the large mass of the population, notably the black (quoted in Bauman 2000, 103). I will only
mention the litany of social indicators for this increasingly precarious condition: unparalleled rates of residential and
educational segregation (Massey and Denton 1998), unemployment (Wilson 1996), premature death by preventable
disease and toxic environments (Bullard 1994; Semmes 1996), homicide (Hutchinson 2002), imprisonment
and surveillance (Mauer 1999), and so forth. Within the politics of multiracialism, the isolation and
criminalization of blackness is transmuted into a concern for the unwillingness of the black
population to participate in the browning of America (Root 1995).5 Conservative critics cite the clannishness
of black community, its atavistic investment in notions of black pride and the reproduction of the one-drop rule, that is, the
internalization of racist rules of identification that make blacks , at worst, more separatist inspired
than . . . the long-standing white power structure (Byrd 1996). Liberal critics, in turn, bemoan the tenacity of

attitudinal barriers to intimate relations between blacks and nonblacks, but only to advance their forced assimilation in the name of
national unity (Lind 1998). This mainstream apprehension finds its alter ego in the unwavering theater

of panic staged in explicit white supremacist discourse. If, as Ferber (1998) says, it is an understate-ment to
claim that white supremacy is obsessed with interracial sexuality, then that compulsion to repeat finds its firmest moorings in the
idea of the sex/violence of blacks. It is here that we find ourselves undergoing a globalization without Africa,

a multiracialism without blacks, a world community in which the color line becomes etched
more deeply even as it is, in some quarters, dissolved.
Globalization and multiracialism shift the color line so that Blackness is no longer
biological
Sexton 8, [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies,
Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, page 231-234]
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Fredric Jameson (1998b) announced that the state of things the word globalization attempts to designate will be
with us for a long time to come; and . . . its theorization . . . will constitute the horizon of all theory in the years ahead (xvi). It would thus seem that

any intellectual project accompanying the historical movement of black liberation whose intervention
sustains the current position of enunciationmust take as central the series of questions posed by the term . We
might posit the reverse as well: anyone thinking seriously about globalization , particularly those hoping to organize political
resistance to it, cannot afford to elide the question of black liberation without missing something
essential to its unfolding. It is my suspicion that this vital consideration, made only more pointed by the ambivalent
rendering of race mixture, forces an uncanny encounter with the black bodyits capacities, its energies,
its appearance as well as its structured installation in the nexus of sexuality and violence . In each
case noted previously (the white supremacist movement, the global sex industries, the discourse of multiracialism), it is the image of the
black body that throws the apparatus of representation into unmitigated crisis. The history of
racism is a narrative in which the congruency of micro- and macrocosm has been disrupted at
the point of their analogical intersection: the human body (Gilroy 1997, 192). This prescient point, offered by Paul
Gilroy in his essay Scales and Eyes, bears significantly on the present effort. The body presents a problem, a point of
disruption, for the historical narrative of racism. It has failed to lend itself, once and for all, to a
stable designation. As Gilroy asks, Has anyone ever been able to say exactly how many races there are, let alone how skin shade should
correspond to them (195)? Of course, the answer is no, but we have seen that the indeterminacy of race in the order of active differentiation (192)
has not proved insurmountable, even if it is inescapable . Quite the contrary, this perennial difficulty has
given rise to a frenetic succession of methods designed for specifying human difference that
characterize the protean nature of modernitys most pernicious signature (192). In the current moment, we
confront a novel question: What does that trope race mean in the age of molecular biology (192)? For Gilroy, we now inhabit a space
beyond comparative anatomy where the body and its obvious, functional components no
longer delimit the scale upon which assessments of the unity and variation of the species are to
be made (194). Our collective estrangement from anatomical scale has rendered the eye
inadequate, if it ever was, to the tasks of evaluation and description demanded by racial segregation .
Thus, the ascendancy of what he terms nanopolitics departs from the scalar assumptions asso-ciated with
anatomical difference [and] accelerates [a] vertiginous, inward movement towards the
explanatory power of ever-smaller scopic regimes (193). Indeed, this one-way movement, downwards and inwards,
locks the racializing project into a perpetual search for the zero degree of difference. However, if racial
difference cannot be readily correlated with genetic variation (194), the most basic level of differentiation known to date, at what level can it be
asserted, maintained, legitimated? Or is it destined simply to remain anxious and uncertain, forever suspicious? Gilroy is less than sanguine about
these developments. Although skepticism about the status of visible differences is welcomed for the trouble it causes to the paradigm of comparative
anatomy, there

is no indication that the calibration of human sameness and human diversity

will diminish in political importance. The frustration of this procedure at one scale does not prevent its seeking refuge by

burrowing deeper into the flesh, the viscera, the blood, the DNA. Gilroy asks, Can a different sense of scale and scaling form a counterweight to the
appeal of absolute particularity celebrated under the sign of race? Can it answer the seductions of self and kind projected onto the surface of the
body? Scarcely: the

repudiation of surface-level sameness by the proliferation of invisible

differences remains an object of aggravated fascination insofar as such differences are
understood to produce catastrophic consequences where people are not what they seem to be
(192). We are familiar with the vast literature regarding the thematic of racial passing in and
beyond the United States, which often sensationally features the scandal of seeming to be white
when one is, in truth, something else (Ginsberg 1996; Sanchez and Schlossberg 2001). Today, the fear of invisible

blackness commingles with the global traffic in hypervisible blackness , the premier consumer product. Across
the globe, one can play at blackness, selectively appropriating everything but the burden, to borrow
Greg Tates (2003) apt phrase. Yet, Gilroys remarks on the crisis of visible difference invoke another catastrophic consequence not unrelated to an
unsuspected or invisible blackness. Visible

differences, he notes, not only prove unreliable in determinations of race,

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

consequence associated with the age of molecular biology: AIDS. He concludes his essay as follows: With the body figured an epiphenomenon of coded
information, this

aesthetics [of racial difference] is now residual. The skin may no longer be
privileged as the threshold of identity. There are good reasons to suppose that the line between
inside and outside now falls elsewhere. (196) This other threshold of identity, this newly privileged elsewhere
that now houses the persistent dividing line, is located within the body, tracking an invisible
presence that demotes and denotes the significance of the bodily surface. It is , in effect, a
displacement of the skin as the preeminent sign of race . Here we note a convergence with the project of multiracialism
discussed at the outset: for different reasons, both developments portend the obstruction or unraveling of
racialization in the field of vision one betting on the increasing difficulty of making clear discriminations on the surface, the other
devaluing the surface altogether. However, nothing in Gilroys account alludes to the wholesale replacement of the surface by the interior, wherein the
latter simply supplants the former. More likely, we

have an augmentation of racial difference, an alloy of the inner

and outer, by way of the discourses of biotechnology and genetic science . Similarly, the blurring of
the color line prophesied by multiracialism provides the occasion, within the imagination of
white supremacy and antiblackness, for a redoubled effort to police it. In this respect, the
surface becomes a more intense object of observation precisely because it has become more
unreliable as a sign of race.

Hegemony (cultural)
Hegemonic Cultures begin to think that they are superior this leads to wars
based on culture under the guises of virtue and nation this is exactly what
occurred in Europe
Snead 81 (James, James Arthur Snead was a professor, fiction writer, and film critic whose
academic work analyzed literary modernism"On Repetition in Black Culture"; Black American
Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 4; published in 1981; p. 147-148)
In certain cases, culture, in projecting an image for others, claims a radical difference from others, often
further defined qualitatively as superiority. Already, in this insistence on uniqueness and "higher" development, we
sense a linear, anthropomorphic drive. For centuries (and especially within the last three), Europe has found itself in
hot contest internally over this very issue. Culture has been territorialized and, with it, groups of its diverse adherents. Cultural
wars have become territorial wars have become cultural wars again, and indeed into this
maelstrom have been sucked concepts of "race," "virtue," and "nation," never to re-emerge .6 Not
so much the content of these cross-cultural feuds startles as the vehemence and aggression with which groups of people wrangle over
where one coverage ends and another begins. The incipient desire to define "race" and "culture" in the same

breath as "identity" and "nationality" finally coincides with great upheavals of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in Europe among them, the overturning of the feudal monarchies of Central Europe and
the discovery and subjugation of black and brown masses across the seas. Herein the word culture gains two fateful
senses: "that with which one whole group aggressively defines its superiority vis-?-vis another"
and, a finer one, "that held at a level above the group or mass, for the benefit of the culture as a
whole, by the conscious few (i.e., the distinction between haute and basse culture)."7 At the same time as
Europeans were defining themselves over against other European nations , and some of them even
against members of their own nations, they were also busy defining "European culture" as separate from
"African culture," the ultimate otherness, the final mass. Only having now reached this stage can we make any
sense whatever of the notion of "black culture" and what it might oppose.8 " Black culture" is a concept first created
by Europeans and defined in opposition to "European culture." Hegel, for example, saw "black
culture" as the lowest stage of that laudable self-reflection and development shown by European
culture whose natural outcome must be the state or nationhood . In his by no means atypical nineteenthcentury view, Hegel said that black culture simply did not exist in the same sense as European culture did. Black culture (as one
of several non-Western cultures) had no self-expression (i.e., no writing); there was no black Volksgeist, as in Europe, and
not even particular tribes or groupings of Africans seemed in the least concerned to define
themselves on the basis of any particular Volksgeist. Hegel (like most of Europe) was confused
by the African: Where did blacks fit into "the course of world history"? 9: In this main portion of Africa
there can really be no history. There is a succession of accidents and surprises. There is no goal, no state there that
one can follow, no subjectivity, but only a series of subjects, who destroy each other . There has as yet been little
comment upon how strange a form of self-consciousness this represents.

Hegemony brings increases forceful submission to the government, especially in

the context of blackness hegemonic celebration of the oppressed also results in
the loss of the ideal of consent
Hartman, 3. (professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and
history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, Saidiya and
Frank B, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought, pg 185-186)
S.VH. - But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can
take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an

opportunity for cel ebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few
centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about our selves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's
actually the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history undertaken by
many leftists in the 1 970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted

in celebratory narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as if there was
a space you could carve out of the ter rorizing state apparatus in order to exist outside its
clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in partic ular, one of my hidden polemics in
the book was an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up
in the context of looking at the status of the slave. F W - That's very interesting, because it's something I've been
thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that Gramsci breaks down
hegemony into three categories: influence, leadership, and consent.5 Maybe we could bring the
discussion back to your text then, using the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white
anti-slavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's really interesting is that in your
chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only explain how the positional ity of
black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness dis articulates the
notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[B]eing forced to submit to the will
of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (S, 110). In other words, the female
slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fun gible object, which is to say that she is ontologically
different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured labor er, be a subordinated subject. You go
on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case, sex] is required to establish
consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option.... Consent is unseemly in a
context in which the very notion of sub jectivity is predicated upon the negation of will" (S, 111).

Humanism
The affs universal account of persons is the taciturn violence of social stability, the
slave kick starts modernity and the condition of possibility for action.
Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine, Red, White &
Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 43-45]
Due to the presence of prior existing relations in a world of contemporaries, no fear of the fear of the world is at stake when White theorists meditate
ontologically (whether through a cultural object such as film or on a set of intellectual protocols) and findas do their Black colleaguescapacity
everywhere. It would be more accurate to say not that they find capacity everywhere, since they do not look everywhere, but that they find it where they

there is nothing homeostatic about the White

(or other Humans). If the Black is death personified, the White is the personification of
diversity, or life itself. As Richard Dyer reminds us, The invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in
white discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity. When I said above that this book wasnt merely seeking to fill a gap in the
analysis of racial imagery, I reproduced the idea that there is no discussion of white people. In fact for most of the time white people
speak about nothing but white people, its just that we couch it in terms of people in general
Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm [Whites] seem not to be represented to
themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualized and abled .
Thus the threat of discovering oneself in ones own scholarly or artistic endeavors as comparison is not a fate that awaits White academics. White
academics disavowal of Black death as modernitys condition of possibility (their inability to imagine their
productive subjectivity as an effect of the Negro) stems not from the unbearable terror of that (non)self-discovery
always already awaiting the Black, but from the fact that, save brief and infrequent conjunctures
of large-scale Black violence (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave revolts and twentieth-century urban unrest), the socius
provides no catalyst for White avowal . In short, thoughtessential, ontological thoughtis all but impossible in White cultural
and political theorybut it is not (as we will see in Monsters Ball in part 4) impossible in the unconscious of the White film itself. This state of
affairs, the unbearable hydraulics of Black disavowal and the sweetness and light of White disavowal, is best encapsulated in
the shorthand expression social stability, for it guarantees the civility of civil society . Put anecdotally,
are, among their contemporaries, and assume its ubiquity. Unlike the Negro,

but nonetheless to the point, when pulled individually by the button, both inmate and guard might be in favor of criminal rehabilitation, both might
even believe that the warden is a swell guy, and in their enthusiasm they might even take for granted that by criminal they are speaking of the
inmates and not the guards, or for that matter the warden. However, while the shared experiences in the political economy of the prisona common
policy agenda, that is, rehabilitationor the shared identifications in the libidinal economy of the prisonthe unconscious captation of both inmate and
guard by the image of the wardenmay certainly be important to any meditation on either prison economy, they are certainly not essential to such
reflection. This means that they cannot break in on the mutually exclusive constituent elements that make the positions of inmate and guard
irreconcilable, at least, not with such a force as to rupture the positional exclusivity and bring about an end to the (prison) world. This holds true
regardless of the fact that the mobility of symbolic material, that is, the idea of criminal rehabilitation and the agreement on who constitutes a

The
libidinal economy of modernity and its attendant cartography (the Western Hemisphere, the United States, or civil
society as a construct) achieves its structure of unconscious exchange by way of a thanatology in which
Blackness overdetermines the embodiment of impossibility, incoherence, and incapacity .
Furthermore, political economy achieves its symbolic (political or economic) capacity and structure
of preconscious exchange by way of a similar thanatology . Judy goes so far as to say that at the crux of
modernitys crisis is the dilemma how to represent the Negro as being demonstrably human
within the terms of the law. Here, of course, he does not mean law in a juridical sense but rather law as a portal of intelligibility
through which one can be said to have the capacity to access Reason and thus be recognized and incorporated as a bona fide subject. Through
Judys analysis of the Negro (the slave) as modernitys necessity (the Other that Humanity is not :
Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger), that which kick-starts and sustains the production of the
Western Hemisphere, we can begin to make the transition from the parasitic necessity of
Whiteness in libidinal economy to its parasitic necessity in political economy. Whiteness is
parasitic because it monumentalizes its subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct
proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity. By capacity I have meant something more comprehensive
than the event and its causal elements and something more indeterminate than agency. We should think of it as a kind of facility or
matrix through which possibility itselfwhether tragic or triumphantcan be elaborated : the ebb
criminal, and the mobility of imaginary captation, that is, the image of the warden, are both without limit in their capacity for transgression.

and flow between, on the one hand, empty speech, racist actions, repressive laws, and institutional coherence and on the other hand, full speech,
armed insurrection, and the institutional ennui. This is what I mean by capacity. It is a far cry from Spillerss state of being for the captor and Judys
muted African body, a far cry from pure abject- or objectness: without thought, without agency, with no capacity to move. In short,

White

(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black

incapacity: Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best .

Legalism
The Modern System of Anti-Blackness is Perfected through Legal ActionThe
Cycle of Domination is Completed When The Slaves Bows Down to the System

Farley 5, Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at Boston
College Before Teaching at Albany Perfecting Slavery Page 221-222
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black

is slavery
and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the
colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black
it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is
segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually . The
story of progress up from slavery is a lie , the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told
juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave
perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the
moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its
unfreedom by willing itself unfree. 3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before
its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the
field of law hoping for an answer.
The law contains the pleasure of whiteness, and through it we see ourselves as
masters and slaves. Oppressors fall into the pattern of enjoying the white-overblack dynamic. We need to remember that it will be easy to fall back into the past.
Farley 02, Prof @ Albany Law School, 2002 (Anthony P., 2002, The Poetics of Colorlined
Space, p. 99)
Race is a form of bodily pleasure, akin to sexuality. Look, A Nigger! is a sensation that both the
tormentors and the tormented feel within their bodies. Frantz Fanon writes: Look at the
Nigger! My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning
in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro
is ugly. The legal expressions of the colorline are, similarly, sensations that people have both in
and about their bodies. The master and his slave may both come to see and feel themselves
through the law that defines, commands, and is the expression of their situation. Jean-Paul
Sartre wrote: Oppression based on slavery was not at first recognized by the law, but it soon
becomes institutional. Thus a son of a slaveholder, born amidst a regime based on oppression,
not only considers the fact of possessing slaves as natural but also as legitimate since this fact is
one part of the institutions of his homeland. And the more he is raised to respect the authority of
the State and recognize his duties toward it, the more the right of possessing slaves appears
sacred to him and the more it will remain beyond discussion. There is an underlying tie between
the way of accepting and assuming different legal prescriptions (matrimonial, civic, military
duties, etc.) and the way of accepting the right to possess slaves. It is the ensemble that is
respected and recognized. Whether race finds its expression as slavery, segregation, or neosegregation, the legal song remains the same. The pleasure of whiteness is spread throughout
the entire ensemble. The law is an organ of perceptiona great ephemeral skinand through it we come to feel
ourselves as masters and slaves, segregators and segregated, neo-segregators and neo-segregated, white and black,
subject and object, and S/M. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or
fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a
whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is I desire you, and releases, nourishes,
ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my
words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.
The relationship of white-over-black endures because people have learned to take pleasure in it. We

ignore the sensual aspects of colorlined space at our peril. We would do well to recall the warning and
the prophecy of the Great American Novel: So we beat on; boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
into the past.

Forgetting History
The attempt to rid slavery from the past is impossible
Sexton 10 (Jared, Assoc Prof. of African American @ UC Irvine, People of Color Blindness;
p. 48-49)
This is why every attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to make substantial gains
insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical
infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option and the only

effective defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack
civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of the midcentury
social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black
freedom entails the necessarily total revamping of the society.77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of

the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total Social Text 103 Summer 2010 49 revamping of
the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I knew
that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I
would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by
slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was captivity without the possibility of flight,
inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going
beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution .78

Multiculturalism
The politics of multiracialism subverts discourse surrounding race studies and
paints the Black Body as the dominant oppressor
Sexton 8 [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies,
Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, page 50-55]
To that end, I am interested in the field of representations, coextensive with politics (Burgin 1996, 22)
within which multiracialism fashions its theoretical objectrace mixtureafter the post-Loving
inauguration of decriminalized interracial sexuality and the dawn of an ostensible biracial baby
boom (Root 1992a). We should understand this politics of representation in at least two ways: first, representation as speaking for, as in
politics, and second, representation as re-presentation, as in art or philosophy. Gayatri Spivak (1988) has demonstrated that these two
senses of representationwithin state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subjectpredication, on the otherare related but irreducibly discontinuous . . . [marking] differences
between the same words (275). Within the ambit of multiracialism, this critical discontinuity is lost to
conflation, covered over as the processes of representation are effaced in favor of a supposedly
self-evident product. The multiracial movement (as a project of political representation) and the Weld of
multiracial studies (as a project of scholarly and literary re-presentation) recapitulate similar procedures with
respect to an anticipated multiracial populaceas, respectively, a subject of representation and
an object of knowledge. That is to say, each instance organizes itself around the interpretation of the
multiracial as a sign, or trace, of interracial sexuality insofar as the latter is thought to be a
positive threat to the racial status quo. The liberal critique engendered by these twin phenomena aims at the amendment of
individualized sexual morality and the reform of privatized racial etiquette. A dichotomous alignment is thus drawn: on the one hand, racism with antimiscegenation; on the other, antiracism with the affirmation of an unsullied interracial sexuality, epitomized by the romantic ideal of love across the
color line (Peiss and Horowitz 1996). Cast in these terms, political

struggle, including struggle about sexual politics, is personalized

and reduced to opinion. Welcome as may be the attenuation of the legal regime of
antimiscegenation in the United States, to assume that global white supremacy (Mills 1998) or what
Gordon (1997) more fittingly calls the antiblack world is undermined by the proliferation of now
permissible race mixture and the correlated growth in multiracial self-identification requires , at
the very least, gross historical amnesia and acute political naivete. Radicalizing the politics of
multiracialism, if it be possible, entails going beyond the celebration of multiracial people as the best
of both worlds . . . the solution to centuries of racial discord (Spencer 2004, 106) or the living extension
of a tedious antiessentialism (Dalmage 2004, 6). Even the latter point is too generous, since multiracialism, in point of fact,
wards against antiessentialism and represents instead a reification of biological notions of race
(Goldberg 1997). It is our task to demonstrate how this reification of raceinsofar as the concept of mixture relies logically and rhetorically
upon a purity conceptis linked as well to a naturalization of sexuality, including questions of interracial
desire. But what most pointedly solicit the critique developed here are the specific consequences
that multiracialism presents for the half-life of antiblack racism . If multiracialism reinforces the
idea of biological race in general, it does so by negatively purifying which is to say quarantining
racial blackness in particular as the centerpiece of a vaster re-racialization of U.S. society in the
post-civil rights era (Martinot 2002). After resurrecting the tenets of a long-debunked scientific racism, multiracialism then
renders black resistance to its dubious goals as an intransigent, unthinking force of political
repression. The historic demand for an affirmative revaluation of blackness in the face of its manifest negation becomes, on this count, the
paramount source of objectionable un-American activities like the policing of identity and the restriction of sexual freedom.10 Blacks are thus
depicted in the multiracial imagination as a conglomerate anachronism, perpetuating
disreputable traits of antebellum slave society and presenting a foremost obstacle to the
progress of liberal society today: white supremacy in blackface, antiblackness turned upside
down. The assertion of a pernicious black racism relies for its rhetorical purchase upon an
impossible merging of racial blackness with the power of the racial state .11 All arguments about
the supposedly overbearing presence and persuasion of blacks in the United States from the popular
culture industries to the mass media to the court of public opinion hinge upon this social fantasy. In other words, it is not
simply asserted in this milieu that blacksmuch like their white or nonblack counterpartscan exhibit morally

reprehensible attitudes or even discriminatory behavior in the private sphere toward those
deemed racially other. It is also claimed that blacks have, as an outcome of the modern civil rights movement, commandeered the
repressive and regulatory agencies of the federal government (hence the renewed hue and cry of states rights!) and, through such means, have
transformed the whole of the economy and society to their collective advantage. That

is to say, blacks have inverted racial

hierarchy or reversed racism, to cite the common phraseto the categorical disadvantage of,
primarily, whites, but also Asian Americans and Latinos. Multiracial people, so runs the story, are caught in the midst
of this great transformation: Multiracial people experience a squeeze of oppression as people of color and
by people of color. People of color who have internalized the vehicle of oppression in turn apply
rigid rules of belonging or establishing legitimate membership. The internalization of
either/or systems of thinking operates even between communities of color , such as Asian American and
African American. (Root 1992 b, 5) Although it would seem from this passage that communities of color, much like the unnamed white community that
is historically instantiated through the vehicle of oppression, are all

equally culpable of oppressing multiracial people

with rigid rules of belonging or . . . legitimate membership, it is clearly black communities that
present the gravest perceived danger on this score.12 In fact, the latter, darker term of this
oppressive squeeze not only defines the multiracial experience as different from a
monoracial13 black experience but alsoin direct contrast to Roots guiding metaphor explains why
multiracial people are, rather, located beneath monoracial blacks (not in the land of in between [Root 1992b, 7])
in the hierarchical interpretation of differences, the most oppressed, the final other in a complex of power
moves (Sandoval quoted in Root 1992b, 5). We might flesh out Roots central claim in this way: multiracial people experience a
squeeze of oppression as people of color [historically oppressed by white supremacy] and [as
multiracial people, in particular, who are also oppressed] by [monoracial] people of color [which is to
say, black people who have commandeered (internalized and applied) the vehicle of
oppression].14 Hence, the populating of this discursive landscape with worrying, hallucinatory images of black depravity: corrupt black public
officialshucksters, blowhards, imposters, liars, and petty lords; undeserving black beneficia-riesaffirmative action babies, coddled criminals, and

This swarm of figures in

black has as its upshot an imaginary world of black oppression , or what I would call oppressive black power, of
global proportionsnot the oppression of blacks by others (primarily, whites, but also Asian Americans and Latinos) but the oppression
of others by blacks. If the range of this alleged epochal shift in the racial distribution of power remains hazy in the common sense, it
finds consistency in dogmatic pronouncements about the dominance of a black-white binary
paradigm over all discussions of race and racism, justice and equality, rights and privileges,
politics and public policy in the United States. Whatever else may preoccupy partisans of multiracialism, all can agree,
without benefit of even the most rudimentary definition, that the issue at hand is not just about black and white. This
perfunctory popular appeal, despite its professed commitments to decenter whiteness and build progressive coalition with blacks,
serves only to dislodge sustained discussions of the conditions of black existence and the
political possibilities of radically transforming the structures of antiblackness. Again, not because black
welfare queens; and, perhaps most paradoxically, vicious black police, a racial border patrol (Douglas 2003).

politics has proven to be detrimental to any multiracial constituency whatsoever recall that, when granted a coveted congressional audience, the
multiracial movement refrained from substantive arguments regarding either a history of discrimination or a violation of the civil rights of multiracial
people per sebut rather because it

is simply asserted that black politics must be detrimental to any

multiracial constituency whatsoever. The politics of multiracialism is, then, properly understood only as
a purely formal negation of blackness. Substantive arguments grounded in structural analyses are jettisoned by reference to an

archive of anecdotes in which fielding hostilityor even questionsfrom blacks is elevated to the status of political oppression, regardless of the actual
relations of power involved.15 Contrary to the received wisdom of its liberal-progressive opponents, multiracialism is not founded by the desire to
exacerbate divisions within black communities along lines of color and class. It is driven neither by attempts to introduce a wedge issue that might
facilitate a statistical reduction of the national black population nor by attempts to interrupt civil rights compliance monitoring. These are likely
byproducts of its political intervention, and they are often noted as objectives among the right wing of the multiracial movement, but I suggest that they
do not represent the motive forces of the wider social phenomenon. Rather, multiracialism

augments the neoconservative

discourse of reverse racism that has taken root since the late 1960s by promoting , in novel ways, the
image of blacks as an authoritarian political bloc that illegitimately determines the direction of
federal policymaking and the substance of the national culture. Far from a strategic offensive deploying classic
divide-and-conquer tactics, it is more appropriately understood as a rationalizing discourse for an ongoing
American Apartheid (Massey and Denton 1998) or an inchoate preemptive strike for a nascent resegregation (Frankenberg and Lee
2002; Logan 2002),16 which is to say the continued and increasing isolation of blacks without state and civil society. Seen in this light,

multiracialism arbitrates neoconservative race politics as an accompaniment to an advancing

neoliberalism that is itself oscillating between official (liberal) multicultur- alism and the (conservative)
posture of colorblindness, twin aspects of what David Theo Goldberg (2002) calls the fagade of racial dispersal (5). Racist states

have undertaken to deflect resistance by indirection. Contemporary states have sought thus to dissipate the normative
power of critique in two related ways. On one hand, they have rerouted rightful anger at the homogenizing
exclusions of racist states into circuitous ambiguities and ambivalences of mere racially
characterized, if not outrightly colorblind, conditions; and on the other hand, they have pursued superficial
appropriation through uncritical celebration of the multicultural. (5-6; emphasis added) This explains, to some
extent, why the political dissension, organizational weakness, and theoretical confusion of the
multiracial movement or the dearth of intellectual rigor in multiracial studies do not in any way
diminish the historical significance of multiracialism. Its appeal to the circuitous ambiguities and ambivalences of mere
racially characterized . . . conditions is predominantly affective, which is to say it is prelogical or paralogical (Fanon 1967, 154-59), and its
official rhetoric does not so much articulate the interests or illuminate the position of any
particular nonblack group (i.e., the New Immigrants, the white middle and working classes, or even multiracial people themselves) as
much as it rehearses the phobic annulment of the rightful anger of blacks and the normative
power of [black] critique. It is, in other words, a political theater for the acting out of a repetition
compulsion, the staging of ritual loathing, an ardent refusal to be addressed by, and therefore
implicated in, the historical force of black rage, the insatiable demand for black reparation, or
the inconsolable melancholy of black suffering . As the color line of the twentieth century is swiftly transformed into the new
black/nonblack divide (Yancey 2003) of the twenty-first, it is this collective antipathy toward the lived experience of
the black that tenders the possibility of any nominally post-racial rapprochement . Whether characterized
as an expanded and refashioned whiteness (Warren and Twine 1997) or a selective multiracialism (Lind 1998), this portentous shift, so vital to the
browning of America, discloses the uneven and uneasy camaraderie obtaining in the culture of antiblackness.

State
The supposition of the state as ethical actor is foundational to blackness as slave
the 1ac renders civil society coherent
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor at UC Irvine in African American Studies People of
Color Blindness; published in 1998; p. 40-41)
Agamben is incorrect to date the onset of this crisis and the advent of the paradigm of the camp with the new laws on citizenship
and on the denationalization of citizens in Europe of the interwar years, that is, the rise of martial law in the first half of the
twentieth century.48 The general failure of the inscription of nativity in the order of the nation-state

and the states management of the biological life of the nation is predated and prepared by the
strict prohibition of nativity under the regime of racial slavery and the states management of
the biological life of the enslaved throughout the Atlantic world , most pointedly through the sexual
regulation of race in the British North American colonies and the United States.49 And the racial circumscription of
political life (bios) under slavery predates and prepares the rise of the modern democratic state,
providing Social Text 103 Summer 2010 41 the central counterpoint and condition of possibility for the
symbolic and material articulation of its form and function.50 If in Agambens analysis the
inscription of nativity in Euro-America is disquieted in the twentieth century by postcolonial
immigration, the native-born black population in the United States known in the historic instance as the
descendants of slaves suffers the status of being neither the native nor the foreigner, neither the
colonizer nor the colonized.51 The nativity of the slave is not inscribed elsewhere in some other (even subordinated)
jurisdiction, but rather nowhere at all. The nativity of the slave is foreclosed, undermining from within the potential for citizenship,
but also opening the possibility of a truly nonoriginal origin, a political existence that signifies the presence of an absence that
discloses the absence inherent in all presence and every present.52 Agamben overestimates the extent to which the question of
nativity is displaced by the figure of the refugee. It is perhaps better to say that it is disturbed by the presence

of strangers in a strange land. More simply, we might say to the refugee that you may lose your
motherland, but you will not lose your mother.53 The latter condition, the social death in
which one is denied kinship 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 study: I
prefer the term natal alienation because it goes directly to the heart of what is 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 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.54 True, even if one attains the income and educational levels 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. The alienation and isolation of the slave is not just vertical , canceling out ties to past and
future generations (the descendants of slaves now understood as a strict oxymoron). It is also horizontal, canceling
out ties to the slaves contemporaries as well. The deracination of the slave , reduced to a tool, is total,
more fundamental than the displacement of the refugee, whose status obtains in a network of
persecuted human relations in exile rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things.
Crucially, deracination is strictly correlative to the absolute submission mandated by law discussed by Hartman above, the most
perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty. 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.55 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. Again, this is true not only for the slaves resistance to submission to this or that

slaveholder but to the whole of the free population, what I called earlier the unequally arrayed category of
nonblackness.

The state fabricates the memory of slavery

Hartman 02, , (Saidiya V., Columbia University African American literature and history
professor Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number
4, pp.757-777, CLF)
By looking at a range of practicesthe bartering of letters of welcome and return, the states role in the fabrication
of a common memory of slavery, tourist performances and the peregrinations of middle-class African-American tourists
I set out to explore the time of slavery, that is, the relation between the past and the present, the horizon
of loss, the extant legacy of slavery, the antinomies of redemption (a salvational principle that will help us
overcome the injury of slavery and the long history of defeat ) and irreparability. In considering the
time of slavery, I intend to trouble the redemptive narratives crafted by the state in its orchestration of mourning, the promises
of filiation proffered by petty traders, and the fantasies of origin enacted at these slave sites. As well, the time of slavery
negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist;
we are coeval with the dead.
Slaverys enduring legacy has yet to be address by the state Mourning and
discussion of history in the context of slavery is key to bring light to the issue and
solve
Hartman 02, (Saidiya V., Columbia University African American literature and history professor,
Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4, pp.757777, CLF)
Notwithstanding the limits of slave route tourism, at these sites the chronicle of dispossession and domination, which is often
contained, localized, and dismissed in the United States by the rubric black history, receives official recognition, at least by
UNESCO and the African states participating in the Slave Route Project, as one of the greatest human tragedies. The opportunities
for witnessing and remembrance encouraged here center the marginalized presence of the transatlantic slave trade. At best, these
sites of memory provide a public space to mourn, a space in which black grief isnt made the stuff of national entertainment and
prurient interest, it is important to consider the possibility of mourning as a counternarrative to the exclusions of U.S. national
history and a personal seizure and appropriation of the narrative resources made available by tourism. Since neither the

millions of lives lost in the transatlantic trade nor the enduring legacy of slavery have yet to be
acknowledged in the U.S. national context, where the aggrieved voice is dismissed as so much
bitching and moaning.19 The dismissal or refutation of slaverys enduring legacy, not
surprisingly, employs the language of progress, and, by doing so, establishes the remoteness and
irrelevance of the past. As a consequence of this posture, claims for redress based on this history
and its enduring legacy are disqualified and belittled as ridiculous or unintelligible , with some
conservative critics going so far as to denigrate these claims as racists acts themselves. Mourning, as a public expression
of ones grief, insists that the past is not yet over; this compulsion to grieve also indicates that
liberal remedy has yet to be a solution to racist domination and inequality. The seizing hold of the past is
a way of lamenting current circumstance and countering the regular disqualification of claims for redress as complaint, envy, and a
barrier to social advancement, so giving voice to the grief of the diaspora is especially important in light

of the extreme discretion of the scholarly community regarding the slave trade and the glib
dismissal or condescending embrace that can only understand these lamentations, or any effort to
reckon with the breach and rupture induced by the slave trade as yet another example of Negro mimicry or the holocaust in
blackface.20 In that it enables the aggrieved to recount the history that engendered the degradation of slavery and the injurious
constitution of blackness, mourning can be considered a practice of countermemory that attends to that which has been negated and
repressed. Yet, the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between
responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and Incorporation. Can

we mourn for those lost without assuming

and usurping the place of the dead, and yet recognize that the injuries of racism tether us to this
past? Does mourning necessarily entail the obliteration of the other through identification ? Can
we mourn the dead without becoming them? The ceremonies of slave route tourism and the
fantasy of return suggest the oppositeto remember the dead is to assume their place . Yet mourning
need not entail stepping into the ancestors shoes or negating the difference between us and them with the bludgeon of
identification. In other words, can we fashion an emancipatory vision not premised on recovery or disentangle mourning from
overcoming the past? While the grief of the diaspora and the longings for return threaten to replace

the experience of those captured and enslaved with our own simulated captivity, deny the
finality of deportation with our belated presence, and obscure the difference between that event
and its enduring legacy, nonetheless there is still a need to mourn, a need augmented by the

ubiquity of racist assault, the disallowance of this space of mourning within the United States,
and the unwillingness to declare slavery a crime against humanity.
The state is the cause of the historicist cycles that subjugates civilizations under
others the impact is the perceived subjugation of black culture under European
culture
Snead 81 (James, James Arthur Snead was a professor, fiction writer, and film critic whose
academic work analyzed literary modernism"On Repetition in Black Culture"; Black American
Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 4; published in 1981; p. 148-149)
The word state (Staat) is not to be defined as a strict political entity, but any coherent group whose
culture progresses from the level of immediacy to self-awareness. How then do European culture and black
culture differ in their treatment of the inevitability of repetition, either in annual cycles, or in artistic forms? The truly selfconscious culture resists all non-progressive views; it develops . Hegel admits the category of change, and
even the fact of cyclical repetition in nature, but prefers not to look at it, or if at all, then not from a negative "oriental," but from a
positive "occidental" standpoint. In such a view, Hegel states: "Whatever development [Bildung] takes place

becomes material upon which the Spirit elevates itself to a new level of development , proclaiming its
powers in all the directions 148 of its plenitude."'3 Hence emerges the yet prevailing "third option" mentioned
above as a response to repetition: the notion of progress within cycle, "differentiation" within
repetition. So the first category in which European culture separates itself from "Oriental" and "African"
cultures is in its treatment of physical and natural cycles. This separation into "occidental" and "oriental" must
seem amusing to anyone familiar with, among other Western texts, Book XV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the "pessimistic"
and 'oriental" viewpoint appears in the lips of an "occidental" predecessor of Hegel's, Pythagoras: Nothing is constant in the whole
world. Everything is in a state of flux, and comes into being as a transient appearance.... don't you see the year passing through a
succession of four seasons? ... In the same way our own bodies are always ceaselessly changing . . . . Time, the devourer, and the
jealous years that pass, destroy all things, and, nibbling them away, consume them gradually in a lingering death.... Nor does
anything retain its appearance permanently. Ever-inventive nature continually produces one shape from another. . . . Though this
thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sum of things remains unchanged .. . . 14 The truth is that cyclical

views of history are not "oriental," but were widespread in Europe well before the inception of
historicism, which began not with Hegel, but long prior to the nineteenth century (and here one might
mention as Hegel's percursors Bacon or Descartes in the Enlightenment, the progressive consummatio in the eschatology of Joachim
of Floris, the Thomistic orientation towards teleology, or even go back to the "final" triumph of the Heavenly City of St. Augustine of
Hippo). The debate in Western culture over the question of the shape of history, for most of its course, has been pretty evenly waged,
with the advantage perhaps initially even somewhat on the side of the cyclical view. Only with the coming of scientific

progressivism (as predicted and formulated by Bacon in The Advancement of Learning in 1605) was the linear model
able to attain pre-eminence, and then not for some two hundred years . '5 The now suppressed (but
still to be found) regarding of cycles in European culture has always resembled the beliefs that
underlie the religious conceptions of black culture, observing periodic regeneration of biological and agricultural
systems.'6

The government is trying to control blackness by appearing to set it free.

Hartman, 3. (, professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and
history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC IrvineSaidiya and Frank
B, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought
FW. - That structures institutions. And your work on empathy shows that; it helps us to understand how
important blackness is to the libidinal economy of white institutionality. Now, I think I'm fair in
generally characterizing the reparations debate and those who've renewed it - Randall Robinson and company that they got a tiger
by the tail, and then didn't want the tiger to do its thing.29 The reparations people present the issue to blacks as

though slavery is an essentially historical phenomenon that ended, but the effects of which put
blacks at what they call, you know, "an unfair disadvantage" to those in other positions who are
also chas ing the American dream. Through such a move the reparations folks literally waste a
political weapon, they dull the knife, they keep the tiger in the cage, because here is a weapon
which could spew forth in untold directions: I'm thinking here of Nat Turner's greatest night. Instead, that
weapon is a denuded or, maybe a policed method of conveyance. They're trying to simultaneously mobilize and
manage black rage. If reparations were thought of not as some - by saying thing to be

achieved, but as a weapon that could precipitate a cri sis in American institutionality, then it
could be worked out a lot differently from the way it's presented. One could present a repa
rations agenda in the way in which you present your book, dealing with the despotism of black
positionality as it moves from genera tion to generation, from historical moment to historical
moment - with despotism beirig the almost ahistorical constant. Unleash the tiger and let it do
its thing.

***Framework***

Framework Solvency Ev.

Music as Method
Music is a metaphor of the repetition of these cycles rhythm is often sacrificed to
avoid repetition of some fact, the same way some cultures may be considered an
already-extinct stage in Hegels philosophy
Snead 81 (James, James Arthur Snead was a professor, fiction writer, and film critic whose
academic work analyzed literary modernism"On Repetition in Black Culture"; Black American
Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 4; published in 1981; p. 152)
In almost conscious opposition to Hegel's idea of "progressive" culture, European music and
literature, perhaps realizing the limitations of innovation, have recently learned to "foreground"
their already present repetitions, "cuts," and cyclical insights. As European music uses rhythm mainly as an
aid in the construction of a sense of progression to a harmonic cadence, repetition has been suppressed in favor of the fulfillment of
the goal of harmonic resolution.39 Despite the clear presence of consistent beat or rhythm in the common

Classical forms of the ostinato or the figured bass or any other continuo instrument, rhythm was
scarcely a goal in itself and repetition seldom pleasurable or beautiful by itself. Although the key role of
"recapitulation" in the ABA or AABBAA sonata form (often within a movement itself, as in the so frequently ignored "second
repeats" in Beethoven's major works) is undisputed in theory, in live performance, these repetitions often are left

out

to avoid the undesirability of having "to be told the same thing twice." Repeating the exposition, as
important as it no doubt is for the "classical style," is subsumed within and fulfilled by the general category called "development." By
the time the music does return to the home tonic, in the final recapitulation, the sense is clearly one of repetition with a difference.
The momentum has elevated the initial material to a new level rather than merely re-presenting it unchanged.40 Even though

the works of Wagner and his followers represent a break from this traditional formal model of
development derived from the sonata form, the Wagnerian leitmotif, for instance, is anything but a
celebration of repetition in music. In the Ring, Wagner's consummate vehicle for the leitmotivic style of composition,
the recurrent musical phrases are in fact a Hegelian progression or extended accumulation and
accretion to an ultimate goal or expression that begins somewhere during the early part of the
Gotterdammerung, or even starting late in Siegfried; the leitmotifs are invested in installments throughout Das
Rheingold and Die Walku/re and are then repaid with interest by the end of the Gatterdammerung.

Remembrance
Standing in the shoes of ancestors provides a vessel of remembrancereminding
those peoples of todays oppressionsthe broken promises of the civil rights
movement, unrealized aspirations and devalued lives
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, (Saidiya V.,
Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4, pp.757777, CLF)
Clearly, the primal scene that explains the origin of the subject is the event of captivity and enslavement, thus the sites returned to
are the dungeons, barracoons, and slave houses of the west coast of Africa. The journey through the dungeons is a kind of time travel
that transports the tourist to the past. Not only do these fantasies have complicated and mixed origins, but their enactment is no less
vexed; for the identification of origins, the drama of return and the staging of recovery are shot through with an awareness of both
the impossibility and the necessity of redressing the irreparable. At the portal that symbolized the finality of departure and the
impossibility of reversion, the tensions that reside in mourning the dead are most intensely experienced. Mourning is both an
expression of loss that tethers us to the dead and severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming the place of the dead. The
excesses of empathy lead us to mistake our return with the captives. To the degree that the bereaved attempt to

understand this space of death by placing themselves in the position of the captive , loss is
Attenuated rather than addressed, and the phantom presence of the departed and the dead
eclipsed by our simulated captivity. You are back! We are encouraged to see ourselves as the
vessels for the captives return; we stand in the ancestors shoes.We imaginatively witness the
crimes of the past and cry for those victimizedthe enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered .
And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ourselves, too. As we remember those ancestors held
in the dungeons, we cant but think of our own dishonored and devalued lives and the unrealized
aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movement.
The intransigence of our seemingly eternal second-class status propels us to make recourse to
stories of origin, unshakable explanatory narratives, and sites of injurythe land where our blood has been spilt as if
some essential ingredient of ourselves can be recovered at the castles and forts that dot the
western coast of Africa, as if the location of the wound was itself the cure, or as if the weight of
dead generations could alone ensure our progress.
Remembrance frames the crimes in such a way as to give a vantage point to
contemporary progress, as limited as that is, and turns history into a museum.
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, 02 (Saidiya
V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4,
pp.757-777, CLF)
Given the irreparable nature of this event, which Jamaica Kincaid describes as a wrong that can be assuaged only by the impossible,
that is, by undoing the past, is acting out the past the best approximation of working through

available to us? By suffering the past are we better able to grasp hold of an elusive freedomand
make it substantial? Is pain the guarantee of compensation? Beyond contemplating injury or apportioning
blame, how can this encounter with the past fuel emancipatory efforts ? Is it enough that these acts
of commemoration rescue the unnamed and unaccounted for from obscurity and oblivion,
counter the disavowals constitutive of the U.S. national community, and unveil the complicitous discretion
of the scholarship of the trade? Bluntly put, is there a necessary relation between remembrance and
Redress? Can the creation of a collective memory of past crimes insure the end of injustice ?22
Can monumentalizing the past suffice in preventing atrocity ? Or does it only succeed in framing
these crimes against humanity from the vantage point of contemporary progress and reason,
turning history into one great museum in which we revel in antiquarian excess ? Can we get the merest
hint of that event by spending half an hour in the dungeons? I am not trying to make light of these engagements with the past, but
only to shake our confidence in commemoration and the accompanying conceits about world peace and universal history entailed in
the designation of thesemonuments asWorld Heritage sites and, as well, consider whether the imagined and simulated captivity
doesnt in fact operate to contrary purposes if it doesntminimize the very terror it sets out to represent through these mundane
reenactments.

Remembrance grants us a backwards lensestoo see into the past to help us create
new life and a new future
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, 02(Saidiya
V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4,
pp.757-777, CLF)
The point here is not to condemn tourism, but to rigorously examine the politics of memory and
question whether working through is even an appropriate model for our relationship with
history. In Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra opts for working through as kind of middle road
between redemptive totalization and the impossibility of representation and suggests that a
degree of recovery is possible in the context of a responsible working through of the past . He
asserts that in coming to terms with trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable
aspects of the past that might be used in rebuilding a new life . 23 While LaCapras arguments are persuasive,
I wonder to what degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to build a new life?
To what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the present or, as Marx warned, can we
only draw our poetry from the future and not the past? 24 Here I am not advancing the impossibility of
representation or declaring the end of history, but wondering aloud whether the image of enslaved ancestors
can transform the present. I ask this question in order to discover again the political and ethical relevance of the past. If
the goal is something more than assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of
memory, the pressing question is,Why need we remember? Does the emphasis on remembering
and working through the past expose our insatiable desires for curatives, healing, and anything
else that proffers the restoration of some prelapsarian intactness ? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing
history? Can remembering potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the
routine of violence constitutive of black life in the United States ? Or is it that remembering has become the
only conceivable or viable form of political agency? Usually the injunction to remember insists that memory can
prevent atrocity, redeem the dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both
individuals and collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slaverys crime, and ably standing in the others shoes . I am not
proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence of a public history of slavery rather than the
saturation of representation that engenders these compulsive performances, but instead pointing to the danger of facile invocations
of captivity, sound bites about themillions lost, and simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement. These

encounters with slavery are conditioned by the repression and erasure of the violent history of
deportation and social death in the national imagination , and the plantation pastorals and epics of ethnicity
that stand in their stead. In this respect, the journey back is as much motivated by the desire to return
to the site of origin and the scene of the fall, as with the invisible landscape of slavery, the
unmarked ports of entry in the United States, and the national imperative to forget slavery,
render it as romance, or relegate it to some prehistory that has little to do with the present. The
restored plantations of the South reek with the false grandeur of the good old days, and the cabins dont appear horrible enough. Too
easily, onemight conclude,Well, things werent all that bad. The starkness of the dungeons seems to permit a certain dignity; their
cavernous emptiness resonates with the unspeakable. These blank spaces hint at the enormity of loss, the millions disappeared, and
what Amiri Baraka describes as the X-ed space, the empty space where we live, the space that is left of our history now a mystery.

Education Turn
Education Lies at the Route of Liberation for Those Being Persecuted By the
SystemOnly Through Knowledge of Injustice Can the Slave Other Throw the
System

Farley 5,[ Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at Boston
College Before Teaching at Albany Perfecting Slavery Page 248-249]
We are called and our childhood begins. We begin as children. We begin to make choices and those choices are what we become.
Our calling must be preceded by our education in that calling. We are educated or trained and that

training regimen, our specific education, 103 may become our calling, depending upon what we choose to make of
ourselves and our situations. Freedom, then, is the only calling. The slave has no choices . The will of the slave
is not its own. The slave is owned and so cannot own its choices. The slave, being property, cannot own. Property cannot own
property. We are called out of objecthood. Education is a calling into freedom, a calling out of objecthood.
The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The

slave is an object. The slave, however, may come to

understand itself as an object and that makes it the most peculiar object in the world or out of it. The slave is the most
peculiar object in that it senses its own abjection, it understands the abjection it senses as its own abjection, and, furthermore, it
senses that abjection as the only thing that it may rightly be said to own. The slave owns only its abjection. Can

freedom be made from such a call? Anything is possible. And abjection is a calling. Abjection calls the
slave into objecthood. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it follows the call to objecthood. The call to
objecthood, abjection, implies, for the cunning slave, another direction. 104 The slave has no maps for these other territories.
Slavery is death. For the master, education in the slave is a horror . 105 For the master, the educated

slave is uncanny. 106 Education brings the slave, who is death, back from death, back from the undiscovered
country, back to life. This is uncanny for the master because the master has knowing non-knowledge that to return from
death, the slave must end slavery. 107 The master experiences this knowing non-knowledge as uncanny. We fear death

and the slave is the body of the death that we fear: The fear of the dead, who return to take away with them the living, has found an
explanation from the point of view of individual and social psychology in the unconscious death wishes which the survivor harbored
against the dead person while he lived, because of which he now fears that persons vengeance. 108 The master should be

afraid. The slaves that return from the undiscovered country do indeed plan to take away with
them the living 109 and so the fear of death, and of the return of the dead, has a foundation. White-over-black
deathis the foundation. Education undermines the foundation of white-over-black and so education
of the slave is the foundation of the fear of the dead. Education is the way that the slave begins its return from the
undiscovered country. Revolution is the way that the returned slaves complete their return and, through that completion, manage to
take away with them the living. 110

Impacts

Foundation of all violence

Objective anti-Black violence is the structural base for all conflicts Wilderson 11 (Frank, Associate Professor, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, The
Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,
InTensions, Vol 5, http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php#footxvii,
)
[2] With only small arms and crude explosives at their disposal, with little of nothing in the way of logistical support,iii with no
liberated zone to claim or reclaim, and with no more than a vague knowledge that there were a few hundred other insurgents
scattered throughout the U.S. operating in largely uncoordinated and decentralized units,iv the BLA launched 66 operationsv
against the largest police state in the world. Vertigo must have seized them each time they clashed with agents of a nuclear-weapons
regime with three million troops in uniform, a regime that could put 150,000 new police on the streets in any given year, and whose
ordinary White citizens frequently deputize themselves in the name of law and order. Subjective vertigo, no doubt: a

dizzying sense that one is moving or spinning in an otherwise stationary world , a vertigo brought on by
a clash of grossly asymmetrical forces. There are suitable analogies, for this kind of vertigo must have also seized Native Americans
who launched the AIMs occupation of Wounded Knee, and FALN insurgents who battled the FBI. [3] Subjective vertigo is

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

Black peoples subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative

contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by
subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is radically different
from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by
violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed
struggle in this comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians,
post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the states disciplinary violence
with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is
because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from
intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps,
such as the American Indian Movements demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.s
desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacin Nacionals (FALN)
demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a
territory. But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual
frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and
frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns. [5] The structural, or
paradigmatic, violence that subsumes Black insurgents cognitive maps and conceptual
frameworks, subsumes my scholarly efforts as well. As a Black scholar, I am tasked with making sense of this
violence without being overwhelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, the writing must somehow be indexical of
that which exceeds narration, while being ever mindful of the incomprehension the writing
would foster, the failure, that is, of interpretation were the indices to actually escape the
narrative. The stakes of this dilemma are almost as high for the Black scholar facing his/her reader as they are for the Black
insurgent facing the police and the courts. For the scholarly act of embracing members of the Black Liberation Army as beings
worthy of empathic critique is terrifying. Ones writing proceeds with fits and starts which have little to do with the problems of
building the thesis or finding the methodology to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and anger of my readerideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own interventions and strategies for assembling my argument. Vertigo seizes me
with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and swirl around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there
seems to be no other way to speak. I am speaking through the voice and gaze of a mob of, lets just say it, White Americans; and my
efforts to marshal a mob of Black people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army smack of compensatory gestures. It is not that the
BLA doesnt come to my aid, that they dont push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies can make the case that we are worthy of
our suffering and justified in our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be locked away forever. How can we
be worthy of our suffering without being worthy of ourselves? I press on, even though the vertigo that seizes me is so overwhelming
that its precise naturesubjective, stemming from within me, or objective, catalyzed by my context, the raging throngcannot be
determined. I have no reference points apart from the mob that gives no quarter. If I write freedom fighter, from within my ear
they scream terrorist! If I say prisoner of war, they chant cop killer! Their denunciations are sustained only by assertion, but

they ring truer than my painstaking exegesis. No firewall protects me from them; no liberated psychic zone offers me sanctuary. I
want to stop and turn myself in.

Capitalist Exploitation
Blackness is the Basis of Capital
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society an
American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African
American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 6, AF)
Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent . This phenomenon is central to neither Gramsci
nor Marx. The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is two-fold: First, the
socio-political order of the New World (Spillers 1987: 67) was kick-started by approaching a
particular body (a Black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a White body
with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slaverythe accumulation of Black bodies
regardless of their utility as laborers (Hartman; Johnson) through an idiom of despotic power (Patterson)
is closer to capital's primal desire than is waged oppressionthe exploitation of unraced
bodies (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci) that labor through an idiom of rational/symbolic (the wage) power: A relation of terror as opposed
to a relation of hegemony.

The use of cycles as a result of cultures leads to an economic collapse under the
guise of capitalist growth
Snead 81 (James, James Arthur Snead was a professor, fiction writer, and film critic whose
academic work analyzed literary modernism "On Repetition in Black Culture"; Black American
Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 4; published in 1981; p. 149)
Black culture highlights the observance of such repetition, often in homage to an original generative instance or act. Cosmogony, the
origins and stability of things, hence prevails because it recurs, not because the world continues to develop from the archetypal
moment. Periodic ceremonies are ways that black culture comes to terms with its perception of

repetition, precisely by highlighting that perception. Dance often accompanies those ritualistic occasions when a
seasonal return is celebrated and the "rounds" of the dance (as of the "Ring Shout" or "Circle Dance") recapitulate the "roundings" of
natural time: Christmas, New Year's, funerals, harvest-time.'7 Weddings especially are a re-enactment of the

initial act of coupling that created mankind and are therefore particularly well-suited as
recognitions of recurrence. Conscious cultural observance of natural repetition no longer characterizes European culture.
The German wedding festival, for example, the Hochzeit, is today fully divested of its original ties to the repeating New Year's festival
Hochgezit, and the sense of an individual marriage as a small-scale image of a larger renewal and repetition is now gone. 8
Outside of the seasonal markings of farmers' almanacs , the sort of precise celebration of time's passage and
return that we see in Spenser's Shepheards Calender or in the cyclical mystery plays has been out of general favor in
recent times (or simply consigned to the realm of the demonic as in the Mephistophelean "I've already buried heaps of them!/And
aways new blood, fresh blood, circulates again/So it goes on . . ."19). Yet the year does still go around: How does European

culture deal with perceived cycles? Recurrent national and sacred holidays are still marked, but with every sense of a
progression having taken place between them. The "New Year's Resolution" and its frequent unfulfillment
precisely recall the attempt and failure to impose a character of progression and improvement
onto an often non-progressing temporal movement . Successive public Christmas celebrations and ornamental
displays vie to show increase in size, splendor, or brightness from previous ones (although, significantly, the realm of sacred ritual,
while immediately co-existing with the commercial culture, still works to bar any inexact repetition of religious liturgy, such as in the
Nativity service). Other contemporary cycles, such as the four-year intervals of the Olympic Games and Presidential Elections,
fervently need to justify their obvious recurrence by some standard of material improvement or progress: a new or larger Olympic
site or new Olympic records, a new or better political party or personality. In European culture, financial and production cycles have
largely supplanted the conscious sort of natural return in black culture. The financial year is the perfect example of

this Hegelian subsumption of development within stasis. For repetition must be exact in all
financial accounting, given that, globally, capital ultimately circulates within closed tautological
systems (i.e., decrease in an asset is either an increase in another asset or a decrease in a liability, both within a corporate firm
and in its relations with other firms). The "annual report" of a business concern, appearing cyclically in
yearly or interim rhythm (always on the same "balance-sheet date"), contains ever the same kinds of
symbols about the concern's health or decrepitude. It is only the properties of difference between year2 and yeari
(as quantified by numerical changes in the symbols-say, in the cash flow matrix) which suggest the means by which the essentially
exact repetitions are to be evaluated and translated into a vocabulary of growth and development. Capital, hence, will not

only necessarily circulate but must consequently also accumulate or diminish , depending on the state of

the firm. Economics

and business, in their term "cyclicality," admit the existence and even the
necessity of repetition of decline, but continually overlay this rupture in the illusion of
continuous growth with a rhetoric of "incremental" or "staged" development, which asserts that
the repetition of decline in a cycle may occur, but occurs only within an overall upward or spiral
tendency.2
Capitalism causes slavery to transition into other forms of forced servitude there
is the societal belief that since the slaves were freed they are in debt to the
government and should pay for their freedom by doing the same work and acting
the same as they would if they were still slaves.
Hartman, 3. (professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and
history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, Saidiya and
Frank B, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought, pg 185-186)
S.V.H. - Right. And this is where the larger narrative of capitalism comes into play . Because, basically, in
most places in the world, you have a transition from slavery to other modes of involuntary
servitude. In my work, I critique the received narrative about the transition from slavery to
freedom in the American context, but we could also look at that same kind of transformation in relation to the antislavery rhetoric that comes to legitimize the colonial pro ject in Africa. By the nineteenth century, slavery was the dominant mode
of production in West Africa. Eventually, the European nations decided "This is an awful institution and we need to stop it," so we
get King Leopold masking his atrocities in the Congo in the discourse of anti-slavery, or British colonial figures in Ghana
effectively saying, "Well, we saved you from the slave raider so you should be grateful."19 In both cases, it's the same notion:
"We've given you your freedom, so now you're in our debt ." F.W - And that brings us to Reconstruction in
your book where you're talking about post-jubilee: The

good conduct encouraged by such counsels eased

the transition from slavery to freedom by imploring the freed to continue in old forms of
subservience, which primarily entailed remaining on the plantation as faith ful, hardworking,
and obedient laborers, but also included manners, styles of comportment in work rela tions,
objects of consumption, leisure, and domestic relations. In their emphasis on proper conduct,
these schoolbooks resuscitated the social roles of slavery, not unlike the regulation of behavior
in labor contracts or the criminalization of impudence in the Black Codes. The pedagogical
injunctions to obedience and servility cast the freed in a world starkly similar to the one in
which they had suffered under slavery. On the one hand, these texts heralded the natural rights
of all men; and on the other, they advised blacks to refrain from enjoying this newly conferred
equality. Despite procla mations about the whip's demise, emergent forms of involuntary
servitude, the coercive control of black labor, the repressive instrumentality of the law, and the
social intercourse of everyday life revealed the entan glements of slavery and freedom. (S, 151)
So. There's this whole army of white people - missionaries, educators, and the like - who go down South to help rehabilitate the
Negro after slavery. And in reading that, a wave of cynicism swept over me, because all of a sudden I thought of Freedom Summer,
and the white students in SNCC, which is a blasphemous thought to have. S.V.H. - It's too immediate, but yes. I mean, it's
incredible: these people have been working suddenly there's this question of whether or not they

can actually be productive. And here as everywhere else in the world, you need violence to make a
working class. So what you see are the various means utilized to do that: forms of state violence,
extra-state vio lence, and the values propagated by moralizing and religious dis courses. And
what's interesting is that the black elites become the purveyors of those very values. Kevin Gaines
has shown in Uplifting the Race how in many ways the agenda of the black elite is reac tionary and they
are, in effect, the handmaidens of the state.
This position of ownership fosters an economy of control that ensures slavery and
social ineptitude
Farley 8(Anthony , Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Paul Farley, B.A., University of
Virginia, J.D., Harvard Law School, 2008, The Colorline as Capitalist Accumulation, p. 953963, Accessed: 7/5/14) //AMM

An owner purchases fixed capital and variable capital and sets in motion the alchemy the result
of which is the production of commodities. The owner, "the capitalist," is said to have "produced"
these commodities. The owner has produced these commodities not for their use value but rather for their exchange
value, a peculiar value that can be realized only if there is a market for their exchange or sale. If all goes
as planned by the owner, then the required fixed and variable capital will be available on the market and the commodities produced
will be sold on the market and the value received for the commodities produced will be in excess of the value expended in their
production. Failure is possible for the individual capitalist because there are competitors in the

market. Failure, repeated often enough, results in the precipitation of the failed, and therefore former, capitalist
down to the black planet of the dispossessed. Individual capitalists fail and fall and then cease to be capitalists. Inaividual capitalist
failures and successes are the expected result of market freedom and competition. The individual capitalist is merely

an avatar of capitalism, not capitalism itself. Capitalism itself is kept aloft by the capitalists as a
class, and not by any particular capitalist or set of capitalists. Only the failure of the owners as a class can bring about the classless
society. Failure of the owners as a class would mean that the dispossession occasioned by the markthe original accumulationhas
been undone. Failure or success of the individual capitahst is the way that capital is said to move from less to more productive (of
capital) enterprises. An invisible handIs it the hand of God?is said to make certain that capital moves in ways that make the
market the best of all possible worlds. The market must become the entire world or capitalism falls apart.

If there is an escape from the market, that is to say, if there is a remainder of the commons, then those with
only their skins to alienate will remove themselves from the market to the commons. If escape is
possible, then the offer made by the capitalists to the dispossessed will be refused and the
dispossession that is the soulless soul of the system of capital will be undone. The offer made by the capitalist is the
offer of employment or death. The commons were divided into properties of the owners in the initial dispossession. The
dispossessed own only the skins they are in and all else belongs to the inheritors of the initial dispossession. The owners make
an offer, "Work for us." Or, rather, "Work for me." In "exchange" for a certain amount of labor in
accordance with certain directions and at certain level of intensity and under certain conditions , the owner promises to
give the laborer a certain sum of money. The sum given to the laborer must represent a value that is
smaller than that realized by the owner as a result of the laborer's labor in order for the system
of capital to work. Individual owners may fail, but capitalism remains unless the owners fail as a class. The owners, as a class,
succeed so long as they collectively manage to obtain free labor (surplus value), and this they cannot obtain from free laborers. What
is surplus value? Surplus value is the free work that the dispossessed perform for their masters. The

dispossessed work for free because they are not free. The dispossessed are not free to do anything
other than work for free or die. Slavery-or-death is not a choice, each is the other but the dispossessed
repress that fact. In non- revolutionary situations, that is, in law-governed situations, this repression is such that the
dispossessed experience their dispossession as freedom and their social death as life . In
psychoanalytic terms, the dispossessed repress and then screen their repressed experience of
dispossession with a feeling of freedom. The dispossessed experience themselves as free to choose to accept the offers
of this-that-or-the-other representative of the owners of the means of production. They seem free to choose but they
are not free to choose because they are not free to refuse. Capital's legion of representatives produce, by their
numbers, an illusion of choice, and this illusory choice seems like freedom to those who know of nothing to which it might be
compared. One seems free to work for owner-X or owner-Y or owner-Z. The contract between the owners and their

slaves is always the same. The slaves must work for free for their masters . Wages, hours and conditions
may vary between X or Y or Z but the fact of surplus value's extraction is not and cannot be forgotten by any individual capitalist who
cares to remain a capitalist for long. The master's mastery is only the master's ability to dispossess his slaves of the hours and days of
their lives. The slave works for the master and some part of the value of the slave's labor beyond that needed to pay for the materials
of production and labor is retained by the master. Without that retention of surplus value, the master

eventually falls out of the capitalist class. Without the extraction of unpaid labor, there are no
owners. None of the dispossessed would agree to such an exchange without first believing
escape to be impossible. Escape seems a physical impossibility if the market is the entire world .
Escape seems a logical impossibility if there is no alternative. Escape seems unethical and antisocial if this is the best
of all possible worlds. Thus, the entirely of the law and the prophets for the owners is reducible to one sentence; "Resistance is
futile." Slaves educated by the masters* gospel look for happiness in slavery. Where there is oppression, there is
resistance. The resistance of the slave is of the futile sort, as will be demonstrated.

Blackness forces everything about that person even their enjoyment to belong
to white people.
Hartman 03. (Saidiya and Frank B, professor at Columbia University specializing in African
American literature and history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC
Irvine published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought , pg 188)
F.W. - And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete
appropriation, what you call "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and nefarious uses of
slave property" and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use
of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was
shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved
blacks proper ty, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibil ity of
becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and
whiteness. But what's most intrigu ing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how not
only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the proper ty of white enjoyment, but so is and this is really key - the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to
white people.13

Gratuitous violence
The objectification of blackness means that we are ontologically murdered over
and over again. Black flesh becomes the enslaved profitthe whites make us
disposable and distanced from humanity.
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987,Professor at Vanderbilt University The John Hopkins University
Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,
http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/6/14, KM)
Among the myriad uses to which the enslaved community was put, Goodell identifies its value
for medical research: Assortments of diseased, damaged, and disabled Negroes, deemed
incurable and otherwise worthless are bought up, it seems by medical institutions, to be
experimented and operated upon, for purposes of medical education and the interest of
medical science [86-87; Goodells emphasis ]. From the Charleston Mercury for October 12, 1838, Goodell notes this
advertisement: To planters and others. Wanted, fifty Negroes, any person, having sick Negroes, considered
incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected with
scrofula, or kings evil, confirmed hypochrondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder
and its appendages, diarrhea, dystentery, etc. The highest cash price will be paid, on application as above. At No. 110
Church Street, Charleston. [87; Goodells emphasis] This

profitable atomizing of the captive body provides

another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of
relatedness between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures
adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community
becomes a living laboratory. The captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social
realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative
emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless. Even though the captive flesh/body has been
liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling
episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and
mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human

subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous
archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. Faulkners young Chick Mallison in The Mansion calls it by other
names the ancient subterrene atavistic fear [227]. And I would call it the Great Long National Shame. But
people do not talk like that anymore it is embarrassing, just as the retrieval of mutilated
female bodies will likely be backward for some people. Neither the shameface of the
embarrassed, nor the not-looking-back of the self-assured is of much interest to us, and will not
help at all if rigor is our dream. We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but
words will most certainly kill us.
The state of motherhood is reproduced through ideological and legal acts of
naming that dehumanize black women and transform their bodies into flesh and
offspring into slaves.
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Professor at Vanderbilt University The John Hopkins University
Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,
http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/6/14, KM)
Ethnicity perceived as mythical time enables a writer to perform a variety of conceptual moves all at once. Under
[ethnicitys] its hegemony, the human body becomes a defenseless target for rape and veneration ,
and the body, in its material and abstract phase, a resource for metaphor. For example, Moynihans tangle for
pathology provides the descriptive strategy for the works fourth chapter, which suggests that underachievement
in black males of the lower classes is primarily the fault of black females , who achieve out of all
proportion, both to their numbers in the community and to the paradigmatic example before the notion: Ours is a society
which presumes male leadership in private and public affairsA sub-culture, such as that of the
Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage [75]. Between
charts and diagrams, we are asked to consider the impact of qualitative measure on the black males performance on standardized
examinations, pact of qualitative measure on the black males performance on standardized examinations, matriculation in schools
of higher and professional training, etc. Even though Moynihan sounds a critique on his own argument here, he quickly withdraws
from its possibilities, suggesting that black males should reign because that is the way the majority culture carries things out: It is

clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating under one principle, while the great majority of the populationis
operating on another [75]. Those persons living according to the perceived matriarchal pattern are, therefore, caught in a state of
social pathology. Even though Daughters have their own agenda with reference to this order of Fathers (imagining for the
moment that Moynihans fiction and others like it does not represent an adequate one and that there is, once we dis-cover him, a
Father here), my contention that these social and cultural subjects make doubles, unstable in their respective identities,
in effect transports

us to a common historical ground, the socio-political order of the New World.

That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous
peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World,
diasporic plight marked a theft of the body a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance)
severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender
difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all
gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and
particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes
join. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: 1) the

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

only to lacerate the skin, but to tear out small

portions of the flesh at almost every stake [221]. The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue,
take on the objective description of laboratory prose eyes beaten out, arms backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle,
punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet. These

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

contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away. It is this flesh and blood
entity, in the vestibule (or pre-view) of a colonized North America, that is essentially ejected from The Female Body in Western
Culture [see Suleiman, ed.], but it makes good theory, or commemorative herstory to want to forget, or to have failed to realize,
that the African female subject, under these historic conditions, is not only the target of rape in

one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind but also the topic of specifically externalized
acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other
males. A female body strung from a tree limb, or bleeding from the breast on any given day of field work because the overseer,
standing the length of a whip, has popped her flesh open, adds a lexical and living dimension to the narratives of women in culture
and society [Davis 9]. This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh of female flesh ungendered offers a praxis and a
theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.

Since blacks are view as non-persons, it creates a view that any crime against a
black person is allowed because they are seen as never having any opposition to
the crimes committed against them.
Hartman, 3. (professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and
history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC Irvine, Saidiya and
Frank B, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought, pg 185-186)
FW. -And in those terms we might think about how Rodney King was accused of inviting his own beating;
you know, he shook his ass in an aggressive manner at a white woman . So maybe you could sketch out
the way in which the black woman functions sim ilarly in slavery, as somehow outside the statutory,
or inside it: she cannot be raped because she's a non-person yet she is presumed to invite the
rapist. S. VH. - Yes. No crime can occur because the slave statutes rec ognize no such crime. Often
when I'm looking through the crimi nal record of the nineteenth century, I'm seeing the text of
black agency. The people who are resisting their masters and overseers appear in the records
as they're prosecuted for their crime, creating this displacement of culpability that enables
white innocence. In the case of State of Missouri v. Celia (1855), Celia is raped repeat edly by
her owner from the moment she's purchased. She begs him to stop; he doesn't, so she kills him.
Her crime is the crime on record: she is the culpable agent.18 So in this formulation of law and its
punishment, blackness is on the side of culpability, which makes the crimes of property
transparent and affirms the rights to property in captives. And you're right, that displacement functions
more generally. Who is the responsible and culpable agent? For the most part, it's always the slave,
the native, the black.
Blackness constitutes an ontological marking that sets the basis for mastery and
exploitation
Farley, 8 (Anthony Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Paul Farley, B.A., University of
Virginia, J.D., Harvard Law School, 2008, The Colorline as Capitalist Accumulation, p. 953963, Accessed: 7/5/14) //AMM
We are all flesh and all flesh is common until it is marked . The marking of flesh is accomplished by
violence. Some are to have and others are to have not. Those who want to possess must mark the others for
dispossession. The haves must come together as one , as Leviathan, because no one can rule another
alone. The one must sleep sometime, and the sleep of the master is the emancipation of the slave. Leviathan, the state, with its
many eyes and rules, murders sleep. Law begins as the masters come together as one, as Leviathan. The masters come
together as one through the mark. Before the mark of dispossession, all we have is the skin that holds
us. Before the mark, the skin we are in holds all of us in common and all is common . The mark must
therefore be made or found ready-made on the skin. The mark, written or found already-written on the skin,
separates those who are to have from those who are to have not . The mark splits the first commons. The first
commons is the skin that we are all in. Before the mark, we are. After the mark, we are white-over-black .
Ownership of things is first and last and always ownership of people . The would-be owners must
mark those whom they would own for dispossession. The mark, white- over-black, is made on the flesh. The mark is
made with violence. The mark is a fatal wound. White-over-black is slavery and slavery is death, death only,
and that continually. The monopolization of things needed to livefields, factories, forests and so onis
instituted by the violence of the mark. The mark shows who is to own and who is to be owned. The
mark is the first and last and enduring moment in the history of ownership because ownership of things
is first and last and always ownership of people. The flesh is marked and the would-be owners direct the violence of dispossession
against those marked for violent dispossession (Middle Passage, Manifest Destiny, Infinite Justice and so on). What was

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

collective will of the owners or die. This

surrender or abdication of will is impossible for the living, for

living is nothing other than the choices by presented with a choice that is not a life choice:
Surrender to the will of the owner and die or surrender to the elements and die. The
dispossessed, marked as not-owning the fields, factories, forests or any of the other things needed to keep the furies and fates,
like hunger and exposure, at bay, are destroyed. The destruction, however, is not all at once, it is endless.
And the endlessness of this destruction requires that they, the dispossessed, are first made mad.

Libidinal economy
Anti-Black terror sustains Human community and fragments the Black psyche
only the incomprehensible end of the world solves Wilderson 11 (Frank, PhD, Associate Professor, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine,
The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,
InTensions, Vol 5, Acc: 02/03/12, )
Ritual murders which purge White aggressivity subtend Bukharis impeded mourning and my dissembling
scholarship, despite the fact that the filial cleansing and affilial stability proffered by the Black
imagos intrusion as a phobic object does not cut both ways. The Black psyche emerges within a
context of force, or structural violence, which is not analogous to the emergence of White or
non-Black psyches. The upshot of this emergence is that the Black psyche is in a perpetual war with itself
because it is usurped by a White gaze that hates the Black imago and wants to destroy it. The
Black self is a divided self or, better, it is a juxtaposition of hatred projected toward a Black
imago and love for a White ideal: hence the state of war (Marriott, Fanons War). This state of being at war
forecloses upon the possession of elements constitutive of psychic integration: bearing witness
(to suffering), atonement, naming and recognition, representation. As such, one cannot
represent oneself, even to oneself as a bona fide political subject, as a subject of redress. Black
political ontology is foreclosed in the unconscious just as it is foreclosed in the court. [I]t may not be
too fanciful to suggest, Marriott writes, that the black ego, far from being too immature or weak to
integrate, is an absence haunted by its and others negativity. In this respect the memory of loss
is its only possible communication (425). It is important to note that loss is an effect of temporality; it
implies a syntagmatic chain that absence cannot apprehend. Marriotts psychoanalytic inquiries work through
the word loss in order to demonstrate the paucity of its explanatory power. Again, loss indicates a prior plenitude,
absence does not. [29] Marriott explains how we all work together, how we all bond over the Black imago as
phobic object, that we might form a psychic community even though we cannot form political
community. He does so by recalling that exemplary moment in Black Skin, White Masks, when Fanon sees himself through the
eyes of a White boy who cries in terror, Look a Negro! Symbolically, Fanon knows that any black man could have triggered the
childs fantasy of being devoured that attaches itself to a fear of blackness, for this fear signifies the racial epidermal schema of
Western culturethe unconscious fear of being literally consumed by the black other. Neither the boy nor Fanon seems able to avoid
this schema, moreover, for culture determines and maintains the imago associated with blackness; cultural fantasy allows Fanon
and the boy to form a bond through racial antagonism (Bonding over Phobia 420). [30] This phobia is comprised of

affective responses, sensory reactions or presubjective constellations of intensities, as well as

representational responses, such as the threatening imago of a fecal body which portends
contamination. And this affective/representational performance is underwritten by
paradigmatic violence; which is to say the fantasy secures what Marriott calls its objective
value because it lives within violence too pervasive to describe. xvi The picture of the black psyche that
emerges from this intrusion is one that is always late, never on time, violently presented and fractured by these moments of
specular intrusion (Bonding over Phobia 420). The overwhelming psychic alienation that emerges from

the

literal fear and trembling of the White boy when Fanon appears, accompanied by the foul
language that despoilsis traumatic for the Black psyche. One comes to learn that when one
appears, one brings with one the threat of cannibalism. What a thing, writes Fanon, to have eaten ones
father! (Black Skin, White Masks)And the Black psyche retains the memory of that eternal White fear of being eaten [and]
turned into shit by an organic communion with the black body [This] is one of the most depressing and melancholic fantasies
ensuing from the psychodynamics of intrusion (Bonding over Phobia 421). [31] Again, though this is a bond between Blacks and
Whites, it is produced by a violent intrusion that does not cut both ways. Whereas the phobic bond is an injunction against Black
psychic integration and Black filial and affilial relations, it is the life blood of White psychic integration and filial (which is to say
domestic) and affilial (or institutional) relations. [32] To add to this horror, when we scale up from the cartography of the mind to
the terrain of armed struggle and the political trials, we may be faced with a situation in which the eradication of the generative
mechanism of Black suffering is something that is not in anyones interest. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black
suffering explored in this article, is not in the interest of the court, as Justice Taney demonstrates as his ruling mobilizes the fantasy
of immigration to situate the Native American within political community and to insure the Africans standing as a genealogical
isolate. Taneys majority decision suggests that juridical and political standing, like subjectivity itself, are not constituted by positive
attributes but by their capacity to sidestep niggerization. Nor is the eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering in
the interests of the White political prisoners such a David Gilbert and Judith Clark, Kuwasi Balagoons codefendantstheir
ideological opposition to the court, capitalism, and imperialism notwithstanding, because such ideological oppositions mark

conflicts within the world rather than an antagonism to the world. Eradication

of the generative mechanisms of

Black suffering would mean the end of the world and they would find themselves peering into an
abyss (or incomprehensible transition) between epistemes; between, that is, the body of ideas
that determine that knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time. In other words, they
would find themselves suspended between worlds. This trajectory is too iconoclastic for working class, postcolonial, and/or radical feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be liberated in the
world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is why even their
most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead. Finally, if we push Marriotts
findings to the wall, it becomes clear that eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering is also not in the interests of
Black revolutionaries. For how can we disimbricate Black juridical and political desire from the Black psyches desire to destroy the
Black imago, a desire which constitutes the psyche? In short, bonding with Whites and non-Blacks over phobic reactions to the Black
imago provides the Black psyche with the only semblance of psychic integration it is likely to have: the need to destroy a Black imago
and love a White ideal. In these circumstances, having a white unconscious may be the only way to connect withor even contain
the overwhelming and irreparable sense of loss. The intruding fantasy offers the medium to connect with the lost internal object,
the ego, but there is also no outside to this real fantasy and the effects of intrusion are irreparable (Bonding over Phobia 426).
This raises the question, who is the speaking subject of Black insurgent testimony? Who bears witness when the Black insurgent
takes the stand? Black political horizons are singularly constrained, because the process through which the Black unconscious
emerges and through which Black people form psychic community with Humans is the very process which bars Black people from
political community.

Racism
The history of blacks and whites are inherently intertwined. The Other and the
Oppressor are equally intertwined, the link created by movements of the Other to
be equal to the Oppressor. We need to look at the colorlined space in the sense of
the body to find a way to break free.
Farley 2002, Prof @ Albany Law School, (Anthony P., 2002, The Poetics of Colorlined Space,
p.98)
We have not Overcome. We have been Overcome. We have been Overcome by our own belief in the green
light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but thats no mattertomorrow we will run faster.
Gatsby believed in the American Dream, the orgastic future represented by his belief. Gatsby had to be excluded
for the green light to keep shining. The marchets believed in the orgastic future and the green light. The word
orgastic captures perfectly the erotic tangle of dreams and desires that causes masters and
their slaves, owning classes and their working classes, and whites and their blacks to cleave to one another. This union of
oppressor and oppressed begets the non-revolutionary situation. Power is seductive. Put
another way: Seduction is a strategy of power.The green light is a way of organizing, of understanding, the space
between East Egg and West Egg. It is the space of longing and the space of refusal. It is the space that begets the elite and,
necessarily, those

Others whose exclusion renders elitism possible. It is a way of seducing us into

the space of white-over-black. That space, the colorline, is a space of longing and refusal. In it the
excluded long for inclusion, the included enjoy their exclusivity, and each party pretends that it
does not find in the other the necessary condition of its own possibility. Put another way, each is the others
bastard child. Domination and submissioneach finds itself, its history and its genealogy, in the
other. There are no whites without blacks, men without women, straights without lesbians and gays, rich without
poor, or high caste without low. There is no hierarchy without pretense. We pretend that the space
marked by the line is not filled with poetic significance. Strangely, even as we pretend, we become adept at
navigating the emotional, the sensual, terrain of colorlined space. We become masters of submission
white and black. We pretend because it is easier to dream of the green light and the orgastic future than to face the cruel
inevitability of the current situation. Again, Fitzgerald is instructive: There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the
tired. The

green light, the orgastic future, is the form of pleasure that links the pursued with their
pursuers and the busy with the tired. Both parties to the pseudo-conflict are linked by an erotic of
mastery and slavery. Race is a form of pleasure. For whites, it is a sadistic pleasure in decorating
black bodies with disdain. For blacksin todays non-revolutionary situationit has become a
masochistic pleasure in being so decorated. Oppressors require an Other in order to imagine
themselves as elite. The system acquires its stability from the desires it cultivates in its
perpetually excluded Others. The green light over the bay, like the Civil Rights Movement
longing for equal rights and inclusion (diversity) within this oppressive order of things, is a
form of longing that links oppressed to oppressor at levels too deep for the mind to touch. This
chapter is a postmodern reply to Critical Race Theory and critical legal studies. Both movements
have traced, with breathtaking creativity, the myriad ways in which segregation has adapted
itself to its post-civil-rights institutional environment. Both movements have relied on maps of
the political economy of colorlined space to reach their powerful conclusions. I am following a
new map, a map of the senses. The sensual contours of colorlined space must be heeded if we
are to understand how the colorline operates and, more important, break free of its confines . CRT
presents racism as permanent, but it does not explain why. CLS presents law as politics that finds itself expressed as law is inevitably
the politics of the colorline. CRT and CLS have

failed to map an important aspect of colorlined space because

they have both privileged the mind over the body. This article may be used as a map of
colorlined space from the perspective of the body. It is a map of colorlined spacethe pleasurescapethat reveals the S/M nature of the current order of things.

Slavery
Slavery can never be forgivenracial subjection, incarceration, impoverishment
and second class citizen ship are all echoes of the legacy of slavery
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, (Saidiya V.,
Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4, pp.757777, CLF)
What becomes apparent, despite the proclaimed unanimity of the ancestors and their
descendants in the commonplace pronouncement You are back is the ambivalence of the
identification with Africa forged in these encounters. After all, the origin identified is the site of rupture and,
ironically, the forts and castles built by Europeans come to approximate home. Loss predominates at this imagined site of origin,
since the genesis of the diaspora is located in this commercial deportation. This unhomely home hints that this state

of exile and estrangement might well be inescapable.14 Nor is an African identity easily reclaimed, since one is as
likely to be called obroni, which means foreigner or white, as sister and these salutations actually achieve a strange equality as
designations of exchange relations, markers of foreignness, and inducements to buy. While remembering the anguish

of the ancestors is a central aspect of the pilgrimage to these monuments of the transatlantic
trade, recursion is also informed by the imperatives and longings of the present .That is,
dispossession is itself an inheritance that tethers us to that event. Racial subjection,
incarceration, impoverishment and second-class citizenship: this is the legacy of slavery that still
haunts us.15 The duration of injury and the seemingly intractable character of our defeat account for the living presence of
slavery, and as well for the redress proffered by tourism.

Black people are doing the work of society only to die the state can do nothing to
solve for these harms because racial inequality is continuous throughout the
government and society as a whole.
Hartman, 3. (Saidiya and Frank B, , professor at Columbia University specializing in African
American literature and history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC
Irvine published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought pg 197-198)
F.W - And living in this order, black people are still doing the work in those innocent scenes. They're
doing the work of dying; black women are doing the work of recognizing white women in their
quests as in Mildred Pierce;28 and black men are performing the work of recognizing the sexual
virility of white men. That's real ly important work that we're called upon to do and still live
under the specter of despotism. So maybe we're still - and this is very tragic B. Wells club was. We're trying to
make ourselves over so that they don't kill us. S. VH. - And I think the underlying question is, "Where do we go
from here?" F. W - Is that leading us to reparations? S.VH. - Yes. I've been thinking about the notion of focusing one's
appeal to the very state that has inflicted the injury. The reparations movement puts itself in
this contradictory or impossible position, because reparations are not going to solve the
systemic ongoing production of racial inequality, in material or any other terms . And like
inequality, racial domination and racial abjection are pro duced across generations. In that sense,
reparations seem like a very limited reform: a liberal scheme based upon certain notions of
commensurability that reinscribe the power of the law and of the state to make right a certain
situation, when, clearly, it cannot. I think too that such thinking reveals an idealist trap; it's as if once
Americans know how the wealth of the country was acquired, they'll decide that black people
are owed something. My God! Why would you assume that? Like housing segregation is an accident! I
think that logic of "if they only knew otherwise" is about the disavowal of political will. Why is the welfare state dis mantled, even
though it's actually going to affect more white women and children than black people? Because it has to do with that political will
and an antipathy to blackness that structures .. .

State of Exception
The state of exception is premised on blackness as object this legitimizes
colonialized violence that is in-seperable from the institutions founded on the
juridical structure of slavery
Sexton 10 (Jared, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities. Associate Professor,
African American Studies School of Humanities People of Color Blindness; published in 1998; p.
32-33-BRW)
In Means without End, the theoretical prcis of his Homo Sacer tetralogy,1 Giorgio Agamben suggests that under
present conditions we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental
concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its
rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and
only figure of the refugee.2 The proposal derives from a paramount concern to counteract the increasing

institutionalization of the state of exception throughout the political-juridical order of the modern nation-states,
and it is premised on an understanding of the refugee as a limit-concept, a figure that at once brings a radical crisis
to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed.3 This urgent
renewal of categories is made possible by the conceptual crisis of the nation-state represented by the refugee insofar as she
disarticulates the trinity of state-nation-territory and the very principle of the inscription of nativity upon which it is based.4 The
refugee is the contemporary political subject par excellence because she exposes to view the originary fiction of sovereignty and
thereby renders it available to thought.What is this fiction? It is not only the presumed identity between the human

(zoe ) and the citizen (bios) the conceptual fissure that makes possible the modern production of
bare life and that between nativity and nationality the conceptual distinction that makes possible
the reciprocal naturalization of propagation and property in the name of race . It is
also the conflation of the ruler (or ruling class) with sovereignty itself, the tautological claim that the law (logos) is
ontologically prior to the establishment of its jurisdictional field , a space defined by relations of purely
formal obedience. The state of exception would seem to betray the mystical foundation of authority because the sovereign power
operates in suspension of positive law, enforcing the law paradoxically insofar as it is inapplicable at the time and place of its
enforcement. However, the dynamic stability of that foundation the space of obedience is demonstrated by the terrible fact that
the state of exception has been materialized repeatedly within a whole array of political formations across the preceding century and
in the particular form of the camp. With the birth of the camp, the exception becomes the rule, consolidating a field of obedience in
extremis in place of rule by law, a paradigm of governance by the administration of the absence of order.5 However, if for
Agamben the camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet, its novelty does not escape a certain conceptual belatedness with
respect to those repressed topographies of cruelty that Achille Mbembe has identified in the formulation of necropolitics.6 On
my reading, the formulation of necropolitics is enabled by attending to the political and economic

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

already institutionalized, perhaps more fundamentally, in and as the political-juridical structure

of slavery.9 More specifically, it is the legal and political status of the captive female that is
paradigmatic for the (re)production of enslavement, in which the normativity of sexual violence
[i.e., the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially tolerable and necessary violence]

establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and sexual subjection .10
This is why for Hartman resistance is figured through the black females sexual self-defense, as exemplified by the 1855 circuit court
case State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, in which the defendant was sentenced to death by hanging on the charge of murder for
responding with deadly force to the sexual assault and attempted rape by a white male slaveholder. Having engaged Hartman,
Mbembe must write the following under the terms of a certain disavowal: The most original feature of this terror formation [the
colony] is its concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. . . . the colony represents the site

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

from violence, the vicious refiguration of rape as mutual and shared desire, the wanton exploitation of the captive body tacitly
sanctioned as a legitimate use of property, the disavowal of injury, and the absolute possession of the body and its issue. In short,

black and female difference is registered by virtue of the extremity of power operating on captive
bodies and licensed within the scope of the humane and the tolerable. 12 Mbembes formulation can
suggest the originality of colonial sovereignty only insofar as it bypasses Hartmans evidence and argument.13 In fact, it does so by
artfully recuperating the very sources that Hartman brings in for critique. In note 30 of Necropolitics, Mbembe cites affirmatively
Hartmans Scenes of Subjection (alongside Manuel Moreno Fraginals 1964 Marxist history of Cuban slavery, The Sugar Mill, and
Susan Buck-Morsss 2000 Critical Inquiry article, Hegel and Haiti) in support of his claim that the very structure of the plantation
system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.14 In notes 34 and 36 of the
same article, however, Mbembe cites affirmatively two sources in contradiction of Hartmans position: the well-known passage from
the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave in which the narrator describes the terrible spectacle of the
torture of his Aunt Hester by the overseer, Mr. Plumber; and the work of folklorist Roger Abrahams on the form and function of
corn shucking as slave performance in the antebellum United States.

Societys structure prevents whites from assisting blacks the idea of giving up
white skin privilege does not allow whites to become objects like blacks are when
the relationship between the two races will always be one of domination and
submission.
Hartman 03. (Saidiya and Frank B, , professor at Columbia University specializing in African
American literature and history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC
Irvine, published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought pg 189-190)
F.W - You've just thrown something into crisis, which is very much on the table today: the notion of allies. What you've said (and
I'm so happy that someone has come along to say it!) is that the ally is not a stable category. There's a structural

prohibition (rather than merely a willful refusal) against whites being the allies of blacks, due to this - to
borrow from Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth again - "species" division between what it means to be a subject and what it
means to be an object: a structural antago nism. But everything in the academy on race works off of

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

***Alts***

Analysis of the Past

An analysis of the past is a pre-requisite to creating the future before we ask the
question of what to do, we must realize what society did to bring itself to the
question
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, 02(Saidiya
V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4,
pp.757-777, CLF)
What is at stake here ismore than exposing the artifice of historical barricades or the
tenuousness of temporal markers like the past and the present . By seizing hold of the past, one
illuminates the broken promises and violated contracts of the present. The disjuncture between what
David Scott has described as that event and this memory, beyond comprising an essential dimension
of belatedness, raises a host of questions about the use and relevance of the past, the political
and ethical valence of collective memory, and the relation between historical responsibility and
the contemporary crisis, whether understood in terms of amasochistic attachment to the past, the intransigence of racism,
or the intractable and enduring legacy of slavery.8 In other words, Africa as an atavistic land as well as the
character and consequences of an identification with Africa are mediated by way of the
experience of enslavement, and perhaps, even more important, by way of a backward glance at
U.S. history as well. That is, the identification with Africa is always already after the break. Added to this is the question
of whether Africa serves merely as a mirror that refracts the image of the United States , thereby
enabling the returnee to explore issues of home and identity with a measure of contemplative distance. Certainly, this is not
surprising when we take into account the way I which slavery and Africa function as the
generative and constitutive points of reference in continuist narratives of African-American history and cultural
survival.9 For this reason, it is important to disaggregate Africa and slavery in order to apprehend the
ways in which they come together. The journey to Elmina Castle, Ouidah, or Goree Island is first and foremost a way of
commemorating slavery at its purported site of origin, although one could just as easily travel to Portugal or visit the Vatican. The
paradox here is that the title to home and kin emerges only in the aftermath of the dislocation and death of the Middle Passage and
the social death of enslavement; in short, it is a response to the breach of separation. Kinship is precious by virtue of its dissolution,
and wounded kinship defines the diaspora.10 The pristine and idealized vision of home and kin is even more esteemed as a
consequence of its defilement. It is, in this way, not unlike virginity, which Faulkner observed must depend upon its loss, its
absence to have existed at all.

The way we talk about and represent the past affects the way we perceive the
present
Hartman 02 Columbia University African American literature and history professor(Saidiya V.,
Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4, pp.757777, CLF)
The dissolution of the self or estrangement from ancestral land necessarily precedes the achievement of a full, restored, and
authentic identity held out by return. That is, enslavement fundamentally mediates this diasporic

identification with Africa and accentuates what Kobena Mercer has described as the essential constituent
of diasporic identitythe rupture between me and my origins. Yet if this rupture engenders diasporic
identity, then the search for roots can only exacerbate ones sense of being Estranged, intensify the
exilic consciousness, and confirm the impossibility of reversion. 11 The want of an authentic identity and
long-awaited reunion with Africa exacerbates the crisis of homelessness. The complex and ambivalent forms of
identification and disidentification with Africa and the United States facilitated in these
excursions hint at an anxiety about home, that is, a fear that being a stranger in a strange land might be an inveterate
condition on native soil and ancestral land. In the end, these peregrinations might be less about the search or reclamation of The
Time of Slavery 765 home, than expressions of the contrarieties of home. Let me make clear that my intention here is not

to reinscribe a racialist account of diaspora, position Africa as primordial land , suggest that
diasporic identity is best explained along the singular axis of reclamation , or fall prey to what Gerald
Early describes as the confused wonder of black Americans in the face of things African, but rather to interrogate the dominant
framing of this encounter with the past and elucidate its vexed character.12 As David Scott suggests, the kinds of questions

that need to be asked about the place of Africa in the cultural and political discourse of the
diaspora need not make any claims regarding the ultimate ontological status of Africa and

slavery in the present of the cultures of the NewWorld . Thus the important task here is not asserting the
genuineness or falsity of these assertions, establishing the verifiable presence of Africa in the diaspora, or refuting this
connection by insisting that no essential relation exists, either because Africa is an empty
signifier or race is a spurious ground for identity . Instead Scott encourages us to consider the ways in which
Africa and slavery are employed . . . in the narrative construction of relations among pasts, presents, and futures [and] the rhetorical
or ideological work that they are made to perform. The bridge between Africa and the Americas is articulated

negatively in terms of separation, the unremembered dead, and the second-class status of African Americans in the
United States. Or, as Toni Morrison remarks, it is bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one ever assumed
responsibility for. The place Africa holds in the political and historical imagination is complicated since origin is figured as loss and
the tale of ones becoming is a death foretold.More important, fabulating narratives of continuity is entangled with a critique of the
present, since these encounters reframe the history of the trade from the vantage point of the North American diaspora and critically
reflect on the meaning of U.S. national identity. That is, the ideological construction of the past is guided by the

current political interests of the diaspora; in fact, the unavoidable disfigurements of the present
articulate the meaning of a diasporic and U.S. national identity. The past called Africa in these
narratives is very much a history of the present. The past interrupts the present not by virtue of
cultural affinity or the status of Africa as authentic cultural origin of the diaspora but because of the
extant legacy of this captivity and displacement.13

Anti-State
The alt is that we must tactically translate the anti-state sentiments of the black
community and use them to reunite said community
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine People of Color Blindness; published in
1998; p. 46-47)
Though it is not difficult to itemize the atrocities Dorothy suffers, both directly and indirectly, and to theorize their relations and
sources, I suggest that her position and Luanns as well is not comprehensible by way of the analogical gestures of
anticolonialism that animate the freedom dreams of the prison letters between Dorothy and her imprisoned lover, Ben (Ben Collins),
that close the film. Reading from this angle (a reading that should not necessarily be avoided) may yield a compelling narrative of
oppression, but what the film indexes, even when the diegesis cannot sustain it, is an ontological condition of

gratuitous violence exterior to the interlarded rationales of the colonial enterprise (including its
systems of patriarchy and class warfare). It is the exteriority of this violence subtending the various systems
of oppression that signals the sine qua non of racial slavery. As such, the superimposed images
of Dorothy, the titular bush mama, and that distant bush mama of the Movimento Popular
de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA), whose prominently displayed agitprop portrait raises the specter of national liberation
within the internal colonies of the United States, are held together by dint of an occlusion: The vulnerability
of the postcolonial is open, but not absolute [as is the slaves]: materially speaking s/he carves
out zones of respite by pushing the Settler, whether back to the European zone or into the sea .
This also means that the postcolonials psychic vulnerability is not absolute one can dream of land lost and land restored. In this
respect, Haile Gerimas Dorothy is not exactly the Bush Mama in the MPLA poster.67 That is to say, what qualifies the

condition of the slave is a suffering that not only wrecks the coordinates of any humanism but
also, for the same reason, precludes the generation of a proper political demand directed at a
definable object or Social Text 103 Summer 2010 47 objective. What is produced instead is an abstract
political insistence a politics of the (death) drive.68 One can perhaps forgive Gerima for not enlarging upon
this complication while subscribing to more likely frames of political intelligibility. Indeed, this gesture of strained political
identification replicates the conceptual trouble endemic to his contemporaries in their formulation of Black Power and eventually
Black Liberation, insofar as they were envisioned and articulated as a politics of third-world solidarity.69 As Wilderson persuasively
claims, as an instance of the shift in the politics of cinematic thought and the cinematic unrest which it catalyzed, Bush Mama

is made possible not so much by the good judgment and artistic genius of Gerima and his
counterparts in the movement of black independent filmmakers (though these are undeniable factors) as by
the activity of radical black political formations and the urban rebellion of significant segments of black communities across the
country: Black folks on the move.70 The problem is not so much the principled or strategic interest in

a
global solidarity but rather the tactical translation of such sentiments into arrangements of
alliance and the guiding assumptions on which the alliance is based. Wacquant would call this solidarity in
the form of an emotive amalgamation rather than of a reasoned comparison.71 How, then, to think about the position of the
unthought in a world for which (the afterlife of) slavery continues to provide the grounding metaphor of social misery?

Burn it Down
The alternative is to revolt against the whitesonly revolution can destroy the
spectacle.
Farley, 99 (Anthony Paul, Boston College Law School professor, 7/1/99, Black Men on Race,
Gender, and Sexuality, New York University Press, 7/6/14, AX)
Resistance is futile. It is futile so long as it takes place in a context that renders it intelligible to the
system. That which makes sense, that which is not a Zen slap in the face, is already defeated by the terrible anticipatory logic of
hierarchy. Hierarchy begets the very struggles that are raised up against it. Are you oppressed
because you are low caste? Gather together your brethren in caste and demand caste rights.
Demand equal rights. Negotiate for a new era of understanding. Fine, and when you have changed the hearts
and minds of your masters, look up at the banner of caste under which you have fought. Are you still a creature of caste?
Frankensteins monster, enslaved to the apostrophe long after the death of the physician who stitched him together. Who

made
you this creature of caste? The system against which one fights is within and without.
Revolution must involve a destruction of ones self and ones context. Revolution is total.
Revolution is a break with reality: When you started in January, did you ever think this movement would become so
great and would capture all of Mexico? What would you have thought if I had said to you on December 31, Tomorrow morning
were going to launch an attack on eight municipalities. Were going to start a war with the objective of overthrowing the Mexican
government and installing a transition government that ___. The outcome of a revolution cannot be predicted or charted because
revolution requires the destruction of the very basis of predictions and charts: revolution requires the destruction of the very basis of
predictions and charts: revolution requires the destruction of the spectacle. And it is only within the spectacle
that the weary drama of the status quo becomes real. Any

strike against a spectacle, armed or otherwise, is a strike

against reality as it is experienced by our masters.
We cannot work within the confines of civil society this binary is too engrained,
only an escape can give us any hope
Farley, 8(Anthony Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Paul Farley, B.A., University of
Virginia, J.D., Harvard Law School, 2008, The Colorline as Capitalist Accumulation, p. 953963, Accessed: 7/5/14) //AMM
The colorline marks the space of white-over-black. It has seemed to us that there is no physical escape,
no land of Canaan, because the colorline belts the world and because the market has become the
world and because the market is always and only a slave market and because that means that
this entire flat earth is an auction block. Indeed, in the case of white-over-black, the map has indeed become the
territory. But the map is wrinkled in time, and that is what we have failed to understand. In fact, the map is endlessly
wrinkled in time. The map is a portrait of the original accumulation. Every movement across its territories is a
movement toward the original accumulation. The original accumulation is the primal scene of
white-over-black. There is no time outside of the original accumulation . We live within the horizon of the
original accumulation and that is why our time is always already their time. When the slave prays for legal relief, it
authorizes its master to rule over its future. The slave gives the portrait it has painted of tomorrow's equality to its
master today. The slave is consciously aware of its desire for equality as it paints . The future appears to us, if
it appears at all, as through a glass, darkly. What the slave has painted is the past, the past into which it flees, the past that contains
slavery, slavery only, and that continually. The slave gives the portrait to its master. The master is colorblind and sees in the slave's
artistic production white-over-black, white- over-black only, and that continually. That is why the master's interpretation of the rule
for equality is white- over-black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave paints with knowing non-knowledge of what
it is doing and every ruling, every legislative, administrative, judicial victory brings the slave back to the past that it has in fact
painted all the while dreaming that it was in fact painting the future. The gift is accepted only during moments of

crisis. There are many crises. The owners, desperate in their need for surplus value, capture and
consume the entirety of space. The owners include each other in their accumulations. Groups of owners, groups of
groups, combine and throw the dispossessed at each other as they wage their endless wars of
accumulation. The dispossessed have no country, but they are trained to feel as if they do and thus trained they
often willingly go to fight each other in order to increase their master's mastery. Few recall the Wobblies' peace plan. Our bullets are
reserved for our own generals, and so there are always wars and rumors of war . Owners must accumulate surplus

value or they perish as owners. The owners, then, are always desperate and happy to leave the
human condition behind in their quest for die eternity of capitalist accumulation . Crises are the fruit

Limits can be exceeded in

many ways and the desperate owners always find new ways of breaking their own system. One type
of this desperate push beyond the limits of reproduction. Beyond the limit, things fall apart.

of crisis occurs when the owners go beyond that which they have trained their slaves to think of as 'fair' in terms of wages, hours and
conditions. Another type occurs when the owners go beyond that which they have trained their slaves to think of as 'fair' in terms of
housing, education and welfare. Sometimes, as with the flooding of New Orleans, the totality of oppression is unveiled. Masters,
having successfully confined their slaves' ambition for bread and roses within the horizon of the juridical sometimes, in capitalist
desperation, get out ahead of their slaves. In such moments the system of white-over-black experiences a crisis because the slaves
see the owners for what the owners are and they also see themselves and what it is they have been doing to themselves. The slave is
then welcomed into the master's house for negotiations. Negotiation requires the slave to pretend that it has something in common
with its master. Slaves and masters have nothing in common and there is therefore nothing to negotiate. Negotiation is always
already at its beginning the almost-escaped slave's surrender to its almost-former master. There are many mansions in the master's
house, each filled with the beauty of yesteryear's dreams of legal emancipation. These legal dreams of equality are the endless
prayers offered up by the slaves during the endless crises of capital. These surrenders are the secret of capital time. The slaves have
knowing non-knowledge of their own breaking point, the point at which their refusal becomes a Great Refusal and their strike
becomes a General Strike and the time becomes a new time, their time, our time, the Commune. The slave knows what will keep it
unconscious of its situation and its inalienable freedom. The slave knows and yet does not know. Law is its way of not knowing. The
Commune is goodbye to all that. We live inside the accumulations. We are lived by the accumulations. We are lived

by the accumulations until and unless we seize the time . The General Strike of the slave power defeated the
Union and the Confederacy. The slaves streamed away from their plantations and seized the time . Time
and tide wait for no one. The stream became a flood and the entire Confederacy might have drowned but for the capture of
all that wide water within the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
Reconstruction swiftly became Redemption, the Confederacy joined the Union, and the self-emancipated proletariat became, once
again, slaves, this time for wages, to the whites.

Mourning
Mourning reveals that the memory of slavery persists and makes the lost objects of
African culture to light
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, 02(Saidiya
V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4,
pp.757-777, CLF)
Tears reveal that the time of slavery persists in this interminable awaiting that is, awaiting freedom and
longing for a way of undoing the past. The abrasive and incommensurate temporalities of the
no longer and the not yet can be glimpsed in these tears . Mourning makes visible the lost
object, variously defined as the homeland, authentic identity, and/or the possibility of
belonging. It also addresses itself to the dismissal of grief as whining and the repression of slavery
from nationalmemory. Certainly, the use of the word loss strains at the complexity of the event and its aftermath and risks
imposing a too-neat narrative of continuity between that event and this condition. Yet the work of mourning, if it is not
dedicated to establishing such connections, at the very least, succeeds in making them. At theDoor
of No Return, the litany of captives taken to the United States, Haiti, Brazil, Surinam, Jamaica, and so forth, maps the lines of
affiliation between various parts of the Americas. In recounting the saga of captivity and enslavement a

particular axis of identification emergesthe chronicle of slavery yields to the everyday terror of
racism, the civil rights movements, and praises issue forth to a pantheon of African Americans including W. E. B. Du
Bois, the Nicholas Brothers, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and Angela Davis. In this regard, the history of the slave
trade and the narrative of the diaspora recounted at these sites privilege the social location and
historical experience of blacks in the United States. Captivity, deportment, slavery, Jim Crow,
and a long-awaited integration and equalitythis narrative is reinforced by the development strategies of African
states, the incentives of the Ministry of Tourism, the directives of USAID, and the acuity of petty traders. Ironically, as a result of
these combined efforts, slavery once again becomes a distinctly American story, with brief mention of African traitors, butwith
little reference to the impact of slavery onAfrica or the regions now known as Ghana and Senegal.

Self Destruction
The suicide bomber is a metaphor for the slave, whose body is made into a weapon
by two irreconcilable logics of survival and of martyrdom
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine People of Color Blindness; published in 1998;
p. 38-39)
The final object of contemplation in Mbembes rewriting of Agambens rewriting of Foucaults biopolitics is the fin
de sicle figure of resistance to the colonial occupation of Palestine: the (presumptively male)
suicide bomber. The slave, able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very
body that was supposedly possessed by another, is thus contrasted subtly with the colonized native, whose
body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense a
cultural politics in lieu of an armed struggle in which to large extent, resistance and self-destruction are synonymous.35

Resistance to slavery in this account is self-preservative and forged by way of a demonstration of

the capabilities of the human bond, whereas resistance to colonial occupation is self-destructive
and consists in a demonstration of the failure of the human bond, the limits of its protean
capabilities. One could object, in an empiricist vein, that the slave too resists in ways that are quite nearly as self-destructive as
an improvised explosive device and that the colonial subject too resists through the creation and performance of music and the
stylization of the body, but that would be to miss the symptomatic value of Mbembes theorization. Mbembe describes

suicide bombing as being organized by two apparently irreconcilable logics, the logic of
martyrdom and the logic of* survival, and it is the express purpose of the rubric of necropolitics to meditate upon this
unlikely logical convergence.36 However, there is a discrepancy at the heart of the enterprise. Rightly so, the theorization of
necropolitics as a friendly critique of Agambens notion of bare life involves an excursus on
certain repressed topographies of cruelty, including, first of all, slavery, in which the lines
between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom become
blurred.37 Yet, as noted, the logic of resistance-as-suicide-as-sacrifice-as-martyrdom is for Mbembe
epitomized by the presumptively male suicide bomber at war with colonial occupation , the most
accomplished form of necropower in the contemporary world, rather than Hartmans resistant female slave, Celia, engaged in closequarters combat with the sexual economy of slave society, Social Text 103 Summer 2010 3 9 the emblematic and paradoxical
figure of the state of exception.38 Why the unannounced transposition? Because the restricted notion of

homo sacer alongside the related notions of bare life and the state of exception is being used in confusion to
account for the effects of the biopolitics of race too generally. The homo sacer, divested of
political status and reduced to bare life, is distinguished not by her vulnerability to a specific
form or degree of state-sanctioned violence but by her social proscription from the honor of
sacrifice.39 The homo sacer is banned from the witness-bearing function of martyrdom (from the
ancient Greek martys, witness). Her suffering is therefore imperceptible or illegible as a rule. It is against the law to
recognize her sovereignty or self-possession. This sort of conceptual conflation is pronounced in recent discussions
of racial inequality within the United States as well, where postcolonial immigration has become the political watchword. Two
figures are held up as exemplary: the immigrant worker from Mexico or Central America profiled and harassed by the Bureau of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and terrorized by a militarized U.S. Border Patrol (and various vigilante efforts) as her
unskilled and semiskilled labor is exploited for the productive and service sectors of the national economy; and the immigrant
worker from the Middle East or South Asia profiled and harassed by the Special Registration Program of the National Security
Entry-Exit Registry System (now US-VISIT) and terrorized by a militarized Transportation Security Administration (and various
vigilante efforts) as her unskilled and semiskilled labor is exploited for the productive and service sectors of the national economy.

The various state agencies of this systematic discrimination are consolidated within the
Department of Homeland Security, and that institution serves as the grand target of much
immigrant rights activism.40 Indeed, Agamben himself is not far from this position, given that the ethical elevation of the
figure of the refugee is motivated by his analysis of the dynamics of xenophobia in contemporary Europe (given too that the
Eurocentric political exile of the refugee remains a species of immigration that persists in the hope of justice under capitalism).41

***Neg Answers***

AT: Perm do both

Perm answers
Any political strategy that does not center blackness is doomed to increase the
alliance with an antiblack civil society and increasing state power.
Sexton 2010 [Jared, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of
Film and Media Studies and one third of The Trifecta of Tough, People-of-Color-Blindness:
Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, Social Text, Vol. 28, No. 2]
The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably undermine
multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the
center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the

machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence within its framework
which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an
afterthought is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation. Black existence does not
represent the total reality of the racial formation it is not the beginning and the end of the story but 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 struggles political, aesthetic,
intellectual, and so on that have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a
proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness.76 This is why

every attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to
make substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical
targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them.
Without blacks on board, the only viable political option and the only effective defense against
the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil society and further
capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and
Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails the
necessarily total revamping of the society.77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in
this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world:

Black Subject key to Antagonistic Identity

Wilderson, 03 (Frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society an
American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African
American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 1, AF)
Any serious consideration of the question of antagonistic identity formationa formation, the
mass mobilization of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and assumptive logic
which undergird the United States of Americamust come to grips with the limitations of marxist
discourse in the face of the Black subject. This is because the United States is constructed at the
intersection of both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix. And the privileged subject of marxist
discourse is a subaltern who is approached by variable capitala wage. In other words, marxism assumes
a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy. In this scenario, racism is read off the base,
as it were, as being derivative of political economy . This is not an adequate subalternity from which to
think the elaboration of antagonistic identity formation; not if we are truly committed to
elaborating a theory of crisiscrisis at the crux of America's institutional and discursive strategies .

The perm doesnt solve, because any presence of the aff wont allow the alts action
to take effect this is important to solve social death of the black community
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine People of Color Blindness; published in 1998;
p. 43-44)
In this light, we might augment the post-9/11 critique of the racial state regarding the Bush
administrations initiation of the ongoing war on terror, the passage of the PATRIOT Acts, the formation of the
Department of Homeland Security, the anti-terrorist roundups of 2001, the torture of enemy combatants at U.S. military

prisons, and so on.58 This

redacted commentary might productively shift the prevailing

conceptualization of American empire and especially the use of imprisonment and police
profiling as tropes of the racialized political oppression it engenders , both nationally and internationally.
We are in a position now to see how the deployment of this rhetorical device (for example, Flying While
Brown is like Driving While Black; the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride builds on the history of the noble US civil rights
movement; the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib is reminiscent of the lynching of blacks)59 is made possible by a

misrecognition of the lived experience of the black . This point is developed by Wilderson with
reference to the distinction between political conflict (involving a demand that can be satisfied by the end of
exploitation or the restoration of sovereignty) and political antagonism (involving a demand that cannot be satisfied
through a transfer of ownership or organization of land and labor) or, in related fashion, between contingent forms of
suffering (state violence incurred by breaching the modality of hegemony) and structural forms of suffering (state
violence experienced as gratuitous, a direct relation of force).60 The former designation in each case encompasses
a wide range of exploitation and exclusion, including colonization, occupation, and even extermination, while the
latter indicates the singularity of racial slavery and its afterlife, the lasting paradox of a sentient
and sapient being sealed into crushing objecthood.61
The normative character of terror insures its invisibility the permutations
attempt to make whiteness fluid is the link
Hartman 02, Columbia University African American literature and history professor, 02(Saidiya
V., Fall 2002, The time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 4,
pp.757-777, CLF)
History that hurts. The dungeon provides no redemption. Reckoning with our responsibility to the dead cannot
save them. The victor has already won. It is not possible to undo the past. So, to what end do we conjure up
the ghost? Of what use is an itinerary of terror? Does it provide little more than evidence of what we
cannot change, or quell the uncertainty and doubt regardingmillions lost and unknown? The debate still rages as to
howmany were transported to the Americas, killed in the raids and wars that supplied the trade, perished on the
long journey to the coast, committed suicide, died of dehydration during the Middle Passage, or were beaten or worked to death
million, million, million, or more?21 Isnt it enough to know that for each captive who survived the

ordeal of captivity and seasoning, at least one did not? At best, the backdrop of this defeat makes
visible the diffuse violence and the everyday routines of domination, which continue to
characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness. The normative character of terror
insures its invisibility; it defies detection behind rational categories like crime, poverty, and
pathology. In other words, the necessity to underscore the centrality of the event, defined here in terms of

captivity, deportation, and social death, is a symptom of the difficulty of representing terror as usual. The oscillation between then
and now distills the past four hundred years into one definitive moment. And, at the same time, the still-unfolding narrative of
captivity and dispossession exceeds the discrete parameters of the event. In itemizing the long list of violations, are

we any closer to freedom, or do such litanies only confirm what is feared history is an injury
that has yet to cease happening?

AT: Reformism
The affirmatives reformist project will never succeed it will be twisted in ways
that benefit the state and feed back into the system
Sexton, 8[Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies
Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, page 45-47]
However, the dispute was never as straightforward as both the multiracial contingent and a largely sympathetic mass media
reported it to be. That is to say, the five-year federal review of official racial classification did not symbolize an enlightened turning point in
the short and beleaguered history of postwar civil rights legislation but rather was enabled by and contributed to a rightward
shift in the discourse of racial equality that had been underway throughout the preceding two
decades. This political faux pas relied on a fundamental misunderstanding ofor a refusal to
understand the nature of civil rights compliance monitoring , the purpose and function of federal racial
classification (as redacted per the 1964 Civil Rights Act), and the various methods available for the collection and tabulation of data on race (and
ethnicity). To that end, it is telling that the multiracial movement refrained from putting forth any substantive arguments regarding either a history of
discrimination or a violation of the civil rights of multiracial people per se. Instead, the

demand to alter the existing

classification scheme was grounded in a nebulous right to recognition, a pseudolegal claim
buttressed by the specious contention that the physical, mental, and emotional health of the
multiracial community, and the self-esteem of multiracial children most especially, hinged on
this form of official acknowledgment.3 Rainier Spencer (1999), in a definitive treatment of the census debates of the 1990s, makes
clear the distortion of historical mission sought by the multiracial lobby.4 Although various segments of the national population have sought social
validation by way of the decennial survey, there

is no such thing as a right to representation under its auspices,

and the census clearly has never responded in any direct way to the self-perceptions of the
demographic units it constructs. In other words, the census is an unfaithful mirror. Its historical
origins lie in the dual interests of the state to apportion congressional representation and to levy
taxes, and its recent transformation, an institutional legacy of the modern civil rights movement,
has added to these tasks assistance in the enforcement of civil rights legislation dating back to
the federal interventions of the Reconstruction era (Skerry 2000). The current racial classification scheme was developed
in the decade following the apex of the civil rights era (from the mid- 1960s to the mid-1970s) in accordance with the latter objectivestatistically

The
multiracial intervention was thus fatally flawed on at least two counts. First, it failed not only to
meet the criteria of relevance to civil rights enforcement but also even to present arguments to
that end. Second, it demanded a change to the standards of federal racial classification when its
overriding concern to create some statistical indices of race mixture was easily addressed by
minor augmentation of the questions asked on the census schedule . Whatever data is gathered by the census
must be filtered through the existing federal classification scheme in order for compliance to be measured. However, once this mandatory
reporting is completed, the data can be retabulated in myriad ways, including approaches that
would directly address the concerns of the multiracial movement to generate a revised racial
profile of the national population. Given, then, that the error of the multiracial challenge to federal racial classification was glaring
tracking progress toward racial equality or the lack thereofand any changes to its configuration must be based in such criteria.

upon the most cursory review, the question remains as to why this coalition of advocacy groups would persist in a fundamentally misguided campaign
over the better part of a decade. The

answer is found partly in the learning curve of its different players,

none of whom could be considered politically savvy, much less expert, on the often arcane
policies of the federal bureaucracy. Another portion is accounted for by the sheer zeal of the campaigns more vociferous
personalities. The fervor that drove a small group of mostly white and middleclass professionals from
a loosely affiliated band of support groups and fledgling student organizations into a highly
visible media presence and, at least momentarily, an influential voice in the halls of Congress was
characterized by considerable blindness to the broader implications of not only the various
policy proposals under consideration but also the public commentary surrounding the
controversy (Njeri 1997). This blindness was a major catalyst to the hostilities that arose immediately
between multiracial groups and traditional civil rights organizations , such as the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, seeking to defend the existing system of civil rights
compliance monitoring. It provided, as well, the basis of a schism between the liberal and
conservative tendencies within the multiracial movement that eventually fractured the strategic
alliance that had garnered attention in the first place. As those with greater sympathies for the wide-ranging goals of the civil rights

establishment like the Association for Multiethnic Americans (AMEA) and the Hapa Issues Forum (HIF)5 gained clarity about the potential
obstruction involved in the desired modification of federal racial classification, they rescinded their support for the original
joint proposal of the multiracial lobbythe formation of a separate multiracial category in
place of or in addition to the other designation and revised their position toward the
multiple-check option that eventually prevailed, leaving the extant classification scheme intact .
By attempting to talk about the slave it causes the death of the slave forces desire
for inclusion in society which leads to the exploitation and eventual obliteration.
Hartman, , 3. (Saidiya and Frank B, professor at Columbia University specializing in African
American literature and history, and Wilderson III, professor of African American Studies @ UC
Irvine published Spring/Summer 2003, The Position of the Unthought page 184)
Saidiya V Hartman - Well! That's a lot, and a number of things come to mind. I think for me the book is about the problem of
crafting a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that
narrative enable?" That's where the whole issue of empathic identification is central for me. Because it
just seems that every attempt to employ the slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her
obliteration, regardless of whether it was a leftist narrative of political agency someone else's
shoes and then becoming a political agent whether it was about being able to unveil the slave's
humanity by actually finding oneself in that position. In many ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural
historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to
explain the position of the enslaved. On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on

the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position
into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political
vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our
claims are more radical. This goes to the sec ond part of the book - that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is
always towards an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project is in
crisis, black people are called upon to affirm it. So certainly it's about more than the desire for
inclusion with in the limited set of possibilities that the national project provides. What then does
this language - the given language of freedom - enable? And once you realize its limits and begin to see its inex orable investment
in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that language of freedom no longer becomes that which

res cues the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that
condition, rather than its transformation.

AT: No alt solvency

Black Subject Creates a Void of Revolution
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society an
American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African
American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 1, AF)
First, the Black American subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of
Gramscian discourse. In other words, s/he implies a scandal. Secondly, the Black subject reveals marxism's
inability to think White supremacy as the base and, in so doing, calls into question marxism's claim to
elaborate a comprehensive, or in the words of Antonio Gramsci, decisive antagonism. Stated another way:
Gramscian marxism is able to imagine the subject which transforms her/himself into a mass of
antagonistic identity formations, formations which can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation,
and/or hegemony, but it is asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward
unwaged slavery, despotism, and/or terror. Finally, we begin to see how marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety:
a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis -- a society which does away not with the category of worker,
but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital : in other words, the mark
of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help keep in place, insure the coherence of, Reformation and
Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This is a crowding-out scenario for other post

revolutionary possibilities, i.e. idleness.

AT: State good/reformism

the struggle of the black community against the state essentially separates and
demonizes the black community the affs attempt to reform institutions that
predicate their rule on slavery is impossible
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate professor at UC Irvine People of Color Blindness; published in
1998; p. 43-44)
By way of illustration, let us consider briefly Haile Gerimas powerful 1976 film, Bush Mama , one of the
signal contributions to the black independent film movement of the early postcivil rights era.62 The most striking aspect
of Bush Mama is not, as might be expected, the motif of disorientation : its ceaseless, frenetic action and
escalating turmoil. Surely, the crowded and unforgiving urban ghetto is the referent and context of Gerimas work and, in a sense,
serves to constitute the projection of a besieged black interiority, the production of a lived space without reprieve and a juridical
existence without recourse.63 One gets the sense that to be black in an antiblack world, a world captured
brilliantly by Charles Burnetts tense and jagged cinematography, is

to be inundated and under assault at every

turn, pushed into an endlessly kinetic movement; which is to say subjected to an open and absolute vulnerability not so much
controlled by the transnational channels of disciplined mobility as pressed by the forces of a merciless routing.64 Nor is it the
explicit and nearly overwhelming thematic of conversion : from quotidian urgency and the pressurized hustle of
everyday ghetto life to political insurgency and the principled rupture of historic change. There is a seductive, perhaps anodyne
political reading of the film as a threat of riot or, more generously, a call to arms or, at least, an intuition of political
opposition, even if it has not yet attained the language or the power to articulate platform and
program. Yet it cannot escape our attention that this deservedly well-known production takes shape in the twilight of the black
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s; in the wake of an unparalleled, though not unprecedented, domestic state repression;
amid the dimming cinders of the hundreds of scenes of urban uprising unfolding across the United States in the preceding decade;
in the denouement of the great anticolonial revolts throughout Africa and the third world that would supply profound inspiration as
points of identification and solidarity. Bush Mama is produced in the aftermath of rebellion, its

containment and incorporation by adjustments of public policy and military strategy, the return
or mutation of a mood that exercises even the conceptual limits of melancholia. The most
stunning aspect of the film is, then, its recurrent torpor and heaviness, its palpably depressive
atmosphere, its leitmotif of exhaustion. One thinks, for instance, of the many scenes of indefinite waiting, of vacant gazes drifting
about unspecified points in the distance, of stolid faces peering through the steel bars of the prison-house cage, of being simply stuck
here or there, of killing (and being killed by) time, of meandering reminiscence and pronouncement and exhortation, of hopelessly
needing to be two or three places at once. The patent anxiety generated by this layering of impasses does not culminate in the films
accelerating surface tempo or its taxing stretch across narrative tenterhooks. The more profound effect is, on the

contrary, to slow the pace of this confrontation to a veritable standstill and to produce an
affective condition beyond or beneath the tremors of panic. However, this is not to say that the film exhibits
fatalism, defeatism, or despair. Exhaustion in no way precludes the labor of critical reflection , the hope of
organized political action, or, for that matter, the enjoyment of a vibrant and sustaining cultural life. Nor does it disable
engagement with what might be a complex and quite expected range of emotional stances as
warranted by the situation: fear, outrage, doubt, sadness, evasion, desperation, even guarded buoyancy. Indeed, there are
traces of all such energies in Bush Mama (so too for Gerimas 1993 Sankofa), even where they are laced with the pathos of suffering
that circulates along the blocked and barren carceral pathways of the ghetto. Exhaustion is operative at another

cinematic level, produced through an amplification of the structuring breach in the conjunction
of state and civil society, the point at which the black comes into radical acquaintance with
herself: living scandal to the dead logic of capital, condition of possibility and impossibility for the operations of
the commodity form, internal foreign object to the institutions of liberal democracy and mockery to its
conceptions of citizen and subject, the conceits of its rule of law, the full repertoire of its criteria for human being.
Ultimately, Bush Mama is a film about a fight that unfurls without the political vanity of struggle or
the moral nobility of resilience, without the existential comforts of spirit and soul, without the historic promise of
transformation, reconstruction, or even a form of alternate sociality a fight without guarantees. As such, Bush Mama may
have an audience or, like Celia, a jury, but it has no community.65

AT: Hegal/humans
Hegels methodology is flawed he views black culture as a culture without
direction
Snead 81 (James, James Arthur Snead was a professor, fiction writer, and film critic whose
academic work analyzed literary modernism"On Repetition in Black Culture"; Black American
Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 4; published in 1981; p. 148)
Hegel's definition of black culture is simply negative: Ever-developing European culture is the prototype for the fulfillment of culture
in the future; black culture is the antitype, ever on the threshold. Black culture, caught in

"historylessness"( Geschichtslosigkeit),i s nonetheless shielded from attack or assimilation precisely

by its aboriginal intangibility (though particular blacks themselves may not be so protected). According to Hegel,
the African, radical in his effect upon the European, is a "strange form of selfconsciousness": unfixed in
orientation towards transcendent goals and terrifyingly close to the cycles and rhythms of
nature. The African, first, overturns all European categories of logic. Secondly, he has no idea of
history or progress, but instead allows "accidents and surprises" to take hold of his fate. He is also not aware of being at a
lower stage of development and perhaps even has no idea of what development is. Finally, he is "immediate" and
intimately tied to nature with all its cyclical, non-progressive data. Having no self-consciousness, he is
"immediate" i.e., always there in any given moment. Here we can see that, being there, the African is also always already there, or
perhaps always there before, whereas the European is headed there or, better, not yet there. Hegel was almost entirely correct in his
reading of black culture, but what he could not have guessed was that in his very criticism of it he had almost perfectly described the
"there" to which European culture was "headed." Like all models that insist on discrete otherness, Hegel's definition

implicitly constituted elements of black culture that have only in this century become manifest .
Only after Freud, Nietzsche, comparative and structural anthropology, and the study of
comparative religion could the frantic but ultimately futile coverings of repetition by European
culture be seen as dispensible, albeit in limited instances of "uncovering." Moreover, the very aspects of black
culture which had seemed to define its non-existence for the phenomologist Hegel may now be
valued as positive terms, given a revised metaphysics of rupture and opening ."

AT: Gender Arguments

Blackness ungenders those who were victims of the middle passage calculability
was expanded to both genders in favor of rendering blackness object
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor @ Vanderbilt University
The John Hopkins University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar
Book, http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/8/14, KM)
The conditions of Middle Passage are among the most incredible narratives available to the
student, as it remains not easily imaginable. Late in the chronicles of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Britains Parliament entertained
discussions concerning possible regulations for slave vessels. A Captain Perry visited the Liverpool port, and among the ships that
he inspected was The Brookes, probably the most well-known image of the slave galley with its representative personae etched into
the drawing like so many cartoon figures. Elizabeth Donnans second volume carries the Brookes Plan, along with an elaborate
delineation of its dimensions from the investigative reporting of Perry himself: Let it now be supposed further, that every man
slave is to be allowed six feet by one foot four inches for room, every woman five feet ten by one foot four, every boy five feet by one
foot two, and every girl four feet six by one foot [2:592, n]. The owner of The Brookes, James Jones, had recommended that
five females be reckoned as four males, and three boys or girls as equal to two grown persons [2:592]. These scaled

inequalities complement the commanding terms of the dehumanizing,

ungendering, and defacing project of African persons that De Azuraras narrator might have
recognized. It has been pointed out to me that these measurements do reveal the application of the gender
rule to the material conditions of passage, but I would suggest that gendering takes place within
the confines of the domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and female subject over
a wider ground of human and social purposes. Domesticity appears to gain its power by way of a common
origin of cultural fictions that are grounded in the specificity of proper name s, more exactly, a
patronymic, which, in turn, situates those persons 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 it
is sometimes romantically (ironically?) personified as she. The human cargo of a slave vessel in the
fundamental effacement and remission of African family and proper names offers a counter-narrative to nations of
the domestic. Those African persons in Middle Passage were literally suspended in the
oceanic, if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated
identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet American
either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the
Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did
not know where s/he was, we could say that they were the culturally unmade, thrown in the midst of a
figurative darkness that exposed their destinies to an unknown course . Often enough for the captains of
these galleys, navigational science of the day was not sufficient to guarantee the intended
destination. We might say that the slave ship, its crew, and its human-as-cargo stand for a wild
and unclaimed richness of possibility that is not interrupted, not counted/accounted, or differentiated, until its
movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure. Under these conditions, one is neither
female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into account as quantities . The female in
Middle Passage, as the apparently smaller physical mass, occupies less room
in a directly translatable money economy. But she is, nevertheless, quantifiable by
the same rules of accounting as her male counterpart. It is not only difficult for the student to find
female in Middle Passage, but also, as Herbert S. Klein observes, African women did not enter the Atlantic slave trade in
anything like the numbers of African men. At all ages, men outnumbered women on the slave ships bound for America from Africa
[Klein 29]. Though this observation does not change the reality of African womens captivity and servitude in New World
communities, it does provide a perspective from which to contemplate the internal African slave trade, which, according to
Africanists, remained a predominantly female market. Klein nevertheless affirms that those females forced into

the trade were segregated from men for policing purposes [African Women 35]. He claims that both
were allotted the same space between decksand both were fed the same food [35]. It is certainly
known from evidence presented in Donnans third volume (New England and the Middle Colonies) that insurrection was both
frequent and feared in passage, and we have not yet found a great deal of evidence to support a thesis that female captives
participated in insurrectionary activity [see White 63-64]. Because it was the rule, however not the exception that the African
female, in both indigenous African cultures and in what becomes her home, performed tasks of hard physical labor so much so

that the quintessential slave is not a male, but a female we wonder at the seeming docility of the subject, granting her a
feminization that enslavement kept at bay. Indeed, across the spate of discourse that I examined for this writing, the acts of
enslavement and responses to it comprise a more or less agonistic engagement of confrontation hostilities among males. The visual
and historical evidence betrays the dominant discourse on the matter as incomplete, but counter-evidence is inadequate as well: the
sexual violation of captive females and their own express rage against their oppressors did not constitute events that captains and
their crews rushed to record in letters to their sponsoring companies, or sons on board in letters home to their New England mamas.

Race is a prior question to genderethnicity ungenders people by trapping them

into a timeless mode of thought in which individuals are objectified by ethnic
background irrespective of gender.
Spillers, 87 (Hortense, 1987, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor @ Vanderbilt University
The John Hopkins University Press, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar
Book, http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/texts/spillers.pdf, 7/8/14, KM)
In other words, in the historic outline of dominance, the respective subject-positions of female and
male adhere to no symbolic integrity. At a time when current critical discourses appear to compel
us more and more decidedly toward gender undecidability, it would appear reactionary , if not
dumb, to insist on the integrity of female/male gender. But undressing these conflations of
meaning, as they appear under the rule of dominance, would restore, as figurative possibility,
not only Power to the Female (for Maternity), but also Power to the Male (for Paternity). We
would gain, in short, the potential for gender differentiation as it might express itself along a range
of stress points, including human biology in its intersection with the project of culture. Though
among the most readily available whipping boys of fairly recent public discourse concerning African-Americans and national
policy, The Moynihan Report is by no means unprecedented in its conclusions; it belongs, rather, to a class of

symbolic paradigms that 1) inscribe ethnicity as a scene of negation and 2) confirm the human
body as a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements. In that
regard, the Report pursues a behavioral rule of public documentary. Under the Moynihan rule, ethnicity itself identifies a
total objectification of human and cultural motives the white family, by implication, and the
Negro family, by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary meanings. Apparently
spontaneous, these actants are wholly generated, with neither past nor future, as tribal
currents moving out of time. Moynihans Families are pure present and always tense.
Ethnicity in this case freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of
the Eternal. We could say, then, that in its powerful stillness, ethnicity, from the point of view of the Report,
embodies nothing more than a mode of memorial time, as Roland Barthes outlines the dynamics of myth [see
myth Today 109-59; esp. 122-23]. As a signifier that has no movement in the field of signification, the use of ethnicity for the
living becomes purely appreciative, although one would be unwise not to concede its dangerous and fatal

effects.