File written by Nate Nys

Email me with any questions: nnys16@blakeschool.org

Negative

1NC Afro-Pessimism K
The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itself the
system of violent antagonisms means solving for contingent violence only
reifies white supremacy and the liberal biopolitical state
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms, NN
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the

structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the

their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps
their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and
modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and
time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to
the violence that underwrites the modern worlds capacity to think,
act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his
land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be
crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but
to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was
not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding
a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a
grammar of

triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers
charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a being for the captor (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which
surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that,
once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the
commodity and to the Human, yet she

had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world
and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itselfwas
unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her
of her claim. Instead, it calls her crazy. And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity? Hes crazy
if he thinks hes getting any money out of us? Surely, that doesnt make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that
he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that
responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are
the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically,
intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the
Savage. Repair

the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple
words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be
dismantled. An ethical modernity would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we
could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to
the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants
rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go
to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so
unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature
films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a
filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive

of
progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that
what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million
Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen
words not only render their speaker crazy but become themselves impossible to
imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to
speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship

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

accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic

zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground.
Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and
cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of success, but they could not dismiss
revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing caseby way of a
paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as
radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that
the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.1 One could (and many did)
acknowledge Americas strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment,
but rather remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces. The political discourse of Blacks,
and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to
this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the

power of Blackness and Redness

to pose the questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all
retreated as did White radicals and progressives who retired from
struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have
been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the
academy where the crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the
young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political
landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that
became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is
it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the
Slave estates destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this
dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the
academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is
doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes in the sense that in even

the most taciturn

historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this
foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms
of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and
Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness

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

grammar of antagonism

breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our
grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the
grammar of political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich
underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and
1

which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is

also
unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume
crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film
or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question.
To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual,
relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from
which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation
of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.

Blackness is always already hyper visible the affirmative misses the point
some bodies will never have the access to anonymity because of the black
aesthetic the affirmative allows for whiteness to remain invisible and
renders blackness as an attractor to violence
Yancy 13, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily on
issues of social justice, Walking While Black in the White Gaze
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-while-black-in-the-white-gaze/?_r=0, NN

My point here is to say that the white gaze is global and historically mobile. And its origins, while
from Europe, are deeply seated in the making of America. Black bodies in America continue to
be reduced to their surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that often force
those black bodies to move through social spaces in ways that put white people at ease. We fear
that our black bodies incite an accusation. We move in ways that help us to survive the
procrustean gazes of white people. We dread that those who see us might feel the irrational fear to
stand their ground rather than finding common ground, a reference that was made by Bernice
King as she spoke about the legacy of her father at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The white
gaze is also hegemonic, historically grounded in material relations of white power: it was deemed
disrespectful for a black person to violate the white gaze by looking directly into the eyes of
someone white. The white gaze is also ethically solipsistic: within it only whites have the
capacity of making valid moral judgments. Even with the unprecedented White House briefing,
our national discourse regarding Trayvon Martin and questions of race have failed to produce a
critical and historically conscious discourse that sheds light on what it means to be black in an
anti-black America. If historical precedent says anything, this failure will only continue.
Trayvon Martin, like so many black boys and men, was under
surveillance (etymologically, to keep watch). Little did he know that on Feb. 26, 2012, that
he would enter a space of social control and bodily policing, a kind of Benthamian panoptic
nightmare that would truncate his being as suspicious; a space where he was, paradoxically, both
invisible and yet hypervisible. I am invisible, understand, simply because
people [in this case white people] refuse to see me. Trayvon was
invisible to Zimmerman, he was not seen as the black child that he
was, trying to make it back home with Skittles and an iced tea. He
was not seen as having done nothing wrong, as one who dreams and
hopes. As black, Trayvon was already known and rendered invisible.
His childhood and humanity were already criminalized as part of a white racist narrative about
black male bodies. Trayvon needed no introduction: Look, the black; the
criminal!

Blackness operates on an ontological register it is impossible to make

blackness acceptable within civil society
Yancy 08, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily on
issues of social justice, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race
https://books.google.com/books?id=VQAfAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=%22On+the+elevator,
+my+Black+body+is+ontologically+mapped,
+its+coordinates+lead+to+that+which+is+always+immediately
%22&source=bl&ots=11lq3QEyJG&sig=m116eKlVHrBtPWmV9AOYb9v0fZU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC
AQ6AEwAGoVChMI7u-OluGUxgIVhz2MCh0F3gf2#v=onepage&q=%22On%20the%20elevator%2C
%20my%20Black%20body%20is%20ontologically%20mapped%2C%20its%20coordinates%20lead%20to
%20that%20which%20is%20always%20immediately%22&f=false, NN

On the elevator, my Black body is ontologically mapped, its cordinates lead to that which is
always immediately visible: the Black surface. The point here is that the Black body in
relation to the white gam appears in the form of a sheer exteriority,
implying that the Black body "shows up," makes itself known M
terms of its Black surface. There is only the visible, the concrete, the seen, all there, all
at once: a single Black thing, =individuated, threatening, ominous, Black. The white woman
thinks she takes no part in this construction: she acts the name of the serious... She apparently
fails to see how he identity is shot through in terms of how she construe. me. This failure is to be
expected given how white privilege renders invisible, indeed, militates against the recognition of
various whitely ways of being-in-the-world. Sullivan notes that the 'habits of white privilege do
not merely go noticed. They actively thwart the process of conscious reflation on them, which
allows them to seem non-existent even as they continue to function..l.

Narrow reforms like the Aff are insufficient to solve racism. The plan just reassures white, middle class America. Thatll divide and hamper grassroots
movements that challenge Laws supporting the surveillance state
Kumar & Kundnani 15
Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the
author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012). Arun Kundnani is research fellow at the
International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. He is a writer and activist, and a professor at NYU. Race, surveillance,
and empire International Socialist Review - Issue #96 Spring - http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-andempire

we are once again in a period of revelation, concern, and debate on national security surveillance.
Yet if real change is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will need
to be fully confrontedor opposition to surveillance will once again be easily defeated by
racial security narratives. The significance of the Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of the NSAs mass surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider
can have. The result has been a generalized level of alarm as people have become aware of how intrusive
surveillance is in our society, but that alarm remains constrained within a public debate that is highly abstract,
legalistic, and centered on the privacy rights of the white middle class. On the one
hand, most civil liberties advocates are focused on the technical details of potential legal
reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard privacy. Such initiatives are likely to
bring little change because they fail to confront the racist and imperialist
core of the surveillance system. On the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government surveillance can be fixed simply by using
Today,

better encryption tools. While encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a government agency would need to monitor an individual, they do nothing to unravel the larger surveillance apparatus.
Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns about loss of sales to foreign customers concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon Valley, what should be a debate about basic

political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits.6 Another and perhaps deeper problem is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit the current situationsuch as George Orwells
discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the type of government surveillance we face today.70 Reference to Orwells 1984 has been
widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the book were said to have soared following Snowdens revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother is, on one level, supported
by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groupsMuslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalistsstate surveillance certainly looks Orwellian. But this level of scrutiny is not faced by the general public.
The picture of surveillance today is therefore quite different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwells 1984, which assumes an undifferentiated mass population subject to government control.
What we have instead today in the United States is total surveillance, not on everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by their race, religion, or political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as

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

a demographics unit planned by the Los Angeles Police Department, which would have
profiled communities on the basis of race and religion, was shut down after a campaign that
united various groups defined by race and class. The lesson here is that, while the national security state aims
to create fear and to divide people, activists can organize and build alliances across race lines to overcome
Similarly,

that fear. To the extent that the national security state has targeted Occupy, the antiwar movement, environmental rights activists, radical journalists and campaigners, and whistleblowers, these groups have gravitated

understanding the centrality of race and empire to national security surveillance

means finding a basis for unity across different groups who experience similar kinds of policing :
Muslim, Latino/a, Asian, Black, and white dissidents and radicals. It is on such a basis that we
can see the beginnings of an effective multiracial opposition to the
surveillance state and empire.
towards opposition to the national security state. But

Racial equality under the law is not only impossible but the attempts to recreate and shift the puzzle pieces of civil society mean slavery is reinvented in
different ways
Woan 11, Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of
Binghamton University, The value of resistance in a permanently white, civil society,
http://gradworks.umi.com/14/96/1496586.html NN
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, in then influential Black Power, describe reformist
strategies as "playing ball" with the white man. They argue that reform plays the white man's
game in order to gain rights, i.e. appeal to a white supremacist government that is the precise
agent responsible for the original harms they are seeking to alleviate.9 While this may very well
result in the granting of new rights previously denied, it maintains a hierarchical system between
whites and nonwhites, since the latter will have to continue to appeal to the former to ask for
rights they never should have been denied in the first place. This places the former in a position
of power to accept or deny such requests. Thus, in Carmichael and Hamilton's view, attempting to
resist white supremacy by working within white supremacist institutions maintains a dangerous
system of power relations that lock in place the hierarchy between whites and nonwhites. / It is
unfortunate enough that members of minority groups face public and private racial
discrimination. It is worse, however, to place the burden of combating this discrimination on
them. What Carmichael and Hamilton aptly point out is that the hierarchy between races

mentioned above is what is responsible for this undue burden. There is not only the constant
physical struggle of protesting, writing letters, and being dragged through litigation that can often
get expensive, but there is the psychological struggle as well. Why am I not worthy of equal
protection under the law? Why is it that others do not even notice the disparate impact of the law?
Or, even worse, why is it that those who do notice, seem to not care? / What inevitably comes
with these types of reformist strategies is an emotional struggle, namely, an inferiority complex
that makes the victimized individual stop and wonder who put the white man in charge of my
body? Appeals to the federal government to repeal discriminatory acts
that deny minorities rights becomes analogous to asking whites to
eliminate such policies and to allow others access to the same rights
they enjoy every day. The racial state becomes in charge of what nonwhites can and
cannot do, and when nonwhites continue to go to whites asking them to pass certain policies,
nonwhites further legitimate this system of power relations. It is difficult to see how true equality
can be achieved wider such a system. / B. Missing the Root Cause: The Racial State / Omi and
Winant further support this claim and explain that it is not merely individual
policies passed by the United States federal government that are
racist, but that racial oppression is a structure of the government
itself.10 They describe this structure as the "racial state" to show that the state does not merely
support racism, but rather, it supports the concept of race itself. As will be discussed later in this
paper, Omi and Winant explain how the state is the agent that has defined race, and that this
definition has evolved over time, to maintain the concept of race and support racism. / Given the
existence of the racial state, Omi and Winant critique reformist strategies as falling short of
achieving normative goals of eliminating racism since the reforms merely get re-equilibriated. A
look at the history of racial victories in the United States further supports this critique. Racial
victories for one minority were often made possible only with the entrapment of another racial
minority. For example, while many celebrate the racial victory of the 1954 Brown v. Board
decision, many fail to see this happened the same year as Operation Wetback, which shifted the
racial discrimination to a different population, removing close to one million illegal immigrants,
mostly Mexicans, from the United States.11 Moreover, soon after the ratification of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granting citizenship and suffrage to Blacks. Congress
chose to deny citizenship to Chinese immigrants.12 In 1941, shortly after the establishment of the
Committee on Fair Employment Practices permitted Blacks into defense industries, Japanese
Americans were taken from their homes and sent off to internment camps. Pei-te Lien argues that
all of these "coincidences" support critiques of reformist strategies
that merely target individual policies, since without challenging the
racial state as a whole, even the elimination of these individual
policies will fail to eliminate racism, as they will simply replicate
themselves or shift elsewhere and target racial minorities in
different ways.14 / C. Separatist Movements / This helps to explain why political activists
began adopting other more revolutionary strategies. Contrary to Martin Luther King Jr. and many
of his followers during the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement emerged and
began advocating for more separatist strategies that rejected making reformist appeals to the
United States federal government. In his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X argued: /
When you take your case to Washington D.C., you're taking it to the criminal who's responsible:
it's like miming from the wolf to the fox. They're all in cahoots together. They all work political
chicanery and make you look like a chump before the eyes of the world. Here you are walking
around in America, getting ready to be drafted and sent abroad, like a tin soldier, and when you

get over there, people ask you what you are fighting for, and you have to stick your tongue in
your cheek. No, take Uncle Sam to court, take him before the world. / Critics of reformist
strategies, such as Malcolm X, understood the United States as being inherently
racial and thus incapable of reform. They use the "coincidences" listed above as
evidence to support this claim. They view the United States federal government as a racial state
that will merely continue to define race in new and more modernized ways, ensuring the
permanence of racism with the passage of new policies supporting these definitions. This is why
they believe reformists are wrong to attack individual policies, rather than the racial state itself. /
For example, the legal enforcement of a racially discriminatory housing covenant may have been
justified due to a racist belief that members of the minority race restricted from acquiring title
within that neighborhood is inferior to the Caucasian race. More specifically, one might support
said covenant because one believes the inferiority of that minority race and the potential they
might become your neighbor will result in a decrease in the fair market value of your property.
After vigorous ongoing protests from civil rights activists, that particular law enforcing those
covenants might get repealed. However, the reason for the repeal of that law might arise not from
an ethical epiphany, but rather an economic rationale in which the homeowner is shown his
property value will remain unaffected, or perhaps even increase. Thus, that particular act may get
repealed, but the policymakers responsible for its original draft will still be in power, and will
maintain the same beliefs that motivated that piece of legislation in the first place. Because there
has been no ethical realization of the injustice in their conduct, the chances remain high that they
will construct new, apparently different but equally discriminatory policies that will force
activists to join forces once again and continue the same fight. / This is why it is not the
individual policies, but the government itself that is the "preeminent site of racial conflict."17
Omi and Winant's proposal of the "racial state" views the government as "inherently racial,"
meaning it does not simply intervene in racial conflicts, but it is the locus of racial conflict.18 In
addition to structuring conceptions of race, the government in the United States is in and of itself
racially structured.19 State policies govern racial politics, heavily influencing the public on how
race should be viewed. The ways in which it does so changes over time, often taking on a more
invisible nature. For example, Omi and Winant describe the racial state as treating race in
different ways throughout different periods of time, first as a biologically based essence, and then
as an ideology, etc. These policies are followed by racial remedies offered by government
institutions, in response to political pressures and in accordance to these different treatments of
race, varying in degree depending on the magnitude of the threats those pressures pose to the
order of society. Notable achievements during the Civil Rights Movement have served as a
double-edged sword. While the reformist strategies utilized during that period helped make
certain advances possible, it also drove other more overt expressions of racism underground.
These more invisible instantiations of racial injustice are far more difficult to identify than its
previously more explicit forms. Praising these victories risks giving off the illusion that the fight
is over and that racism is a description of the past. / For example, the ratification of the Fifteenth
Amendment gave off the illusion that all citizens thereafter had equal access to the right to vote.
Those who supported its ratification now felt entitled to the moral credentials necessary to
legitimize their ability to express racially prejudiced attitudes.21 For example, voter turnout today
remains relatively low for Asian-Americans, and many blame this on cultural differences between
Asians and Americans.22 Asian-Americans are labeled as apathetic in the political community
and they themselves have been attributed the blame for relatively low representation of AsianAmericans in the government today.23 This however, ignores the way in which other more
invisible practices serve to obstruct Asian-Americans from being able to exercise their right to
vote. / Research by the United States Election Assistance Commission by the Eagleton Institute of

Politics at Rutgers University, for example, indicates that restrictive voter identification
requirements have effectively served to disenfranchise Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs) from
voting.24 In the 2004 election, researchers found APIs in states where voters were required to
present proper identification at the polls were 8.5% less likely to vote.25 This study confirmed
that voter ID requirements prevented a large number of APIs from voting.26 / Voter suppression
tactics also play a large role in the disenfranchisement of APIs. According to a Voter Intimidation
and Vote Suppression briefing paper by Demos, a national public policy center, an estimated 50
Asian Americans were selectively challenged at the polls in Alabama during August of 2004, as
being ineligible to vote due to insufficient English-speaking skills.27 Many states have allowed
this selective challenging of voters to take place at the polls, resulting in a feeling of fear,
intimidation, and embarrassment among APIs, driving them away from the polls. / The danger in
treasuring monumental victories such as the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment becomes
apparent when people interpret this ratification as an indication that voting discrimination is no
longer a problem, and that if the voter turnout of Asian-Americans is consistently low, it must be
because they are politically apathetic or disinterested in American ideals. Because they originally
supported the ratification of the amendment, whites can now feel as if they have the moral
credentials to make conclusions such as the cultural differences rationale. The same can be seen
after courts ordered the desegregation of public schools and after affirmative action programs
became more widespread. People began assuming African-Americans now had an equal
opportunity for education and that if they did not succeed, it must be a reflection of their
intelligence or work-ethic, failing to see the ways the problem has not been solved, but rather
disguised itself in other costumes, such as tracking programs in schools or teachers who view
their presence as merely "affirmative action babies" and expect them to fail. / One might ask,
then, why can we not change the racial state one policy at a time? Perhaps one could first work to
gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat discriminatory identification requirements and
political scare tactics. It would not seem entirely implausible to assume that the success of
individual piecemeal reforms within the government could eventually result in a transformation
of the institution itself. However, simply eliminating discriminatory policies is insufficient for an
overhaul of a racial institution. / Understanding the motivating reasons for the elimination of
individual racist policies is a critical factor in determining the success of a movement. While one
justification for passing the Fifteenth Amendment might consist of arguments in favor of equality
and exposing racial injustice, another justification might involve maintaining order and
minimizing disruption, which is important to the federal government and its ability to run
smoothly. Thus, the government often seeks out ways to normalize society through eliminating
disruptions to preserve order. When those being denied certain rights grow significantly
discontent, they rebel and become disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society. This can
take the form of civil disobedience, such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to
the government, etc., or more revolutionary measures, such as damaging government offices or
violently harassing officials to acknowledge the injustices and change policy. / All of these
measures, however peaceful or violent, disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters
are filling up the streets or blocking frequently-used road paths, and most certainly cannot run
smoothly if town halls are being lit on fire. Thus, in order to return to the desired homeostasis,
those in power may often compromise and offer to rectify the situation at hand by granting rights
to individuals through changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the
disruption (the protests, demonstrations, etc.). The lack of effort made towards protecting these
rights bolsters Bell's argument that these reforms serve more of a symbolic value rather than
functional. If still operating under the racial state, these piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the
original racial injustices in the long term, as they will only succeed in establishing a new unstable

equilibrium, only to be followed with the replication of new racial problems.28 These new
problems will once again create resentment, generate protest, and the cycle will begin to replicate
itself, ensuring the permanence of racism. Omi and Winant term this cycle of continuous
disruption and restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This trajectory supports
the treatment of racism as inevitable since even if the racial state mitigates racial disruption over
a particular policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new definition of race will
emerge triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics

The only option for the slave is to reclaim its own death through selfdestruction the black must become the suicide bomber of civil society and
use itself as a weapon to break down white structures it is the most powerful
form of necropower to remain incoherent to the liberal interpretations of the
sovereign
Sexton 10, Jared Sexton, professor at UC Irvine, People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of
Slavery NN

The final object of contemplation in Mbembes rewriting of Agam- bens rewriting of Foucaults
biopolitics is the fin de siecle figure of resis- tance 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 resis- tance to colonial occupation is self-destructive and
consists in a demonstra- tion 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 perfor- mance 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, sacri- fice and redemption,
martyrdom and freedom become blurred.37 Yet, as noted, the logic of resistanceas-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, 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 selfpossession.

2NC - Links

Surveillance links
Liberal reformism in the context of surveillance reifies state power only
complete revolution has the power to be successful
Khalek 13, Rania Khalek is a staff writer for Truth Out, Activists of Color Lead Charge Against
Surveillance, NSA, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19695-activists-of-color-at-forefront-of-anti-nsamovement, NN

"We been exposed to this type of surveillance since we got here," declared Kymone Freeman,
director of the National Black LUV Fest as he emceed the historic rally against NSA surveillance
in Washington, DC. He continued, "Drones is a form of surveillance. Racial profiling is a
form of surveillance. Stop-and-frisk is a form of surveillance. We all
black today!" This was the mood that characterized the atmosphere of the Stop Watching Us
rally on October 26, 2013, organized by broad coalition of more than 100 public advocacy groups
from across the political spectrum, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic
Frontier Foundations and Color of Change, and attended by thousands. The purpose of the rally,
which began as a march from Union Station to the reflecting pool outside Capitol Hill, was to
deliver a petition to Congress demanding an end to NSA mass spying . A White-Centric
Movement? Not Even Close Throughout the day, Freeman's voice could be heard
praising whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning or reminding the crowd of the
racial significance of surveillance history. As a result, the intersection of
surveillance and race remained at the forefront of the day's event,
which the crowd happily welcomed with applause. Yet somehow this was lost on most journalists
in attendance. Despite the crowd's diversity and repeated acknowledgements of America's sordid
history of aggressive spying on communities of color, the few outlets to cover the rally portrayed
it and the movement against NSA surveillance as one dominated almost exclusively by privileged
white people. USA Today managed to interview white men only and failed to quote a single
speaker of color. Neither the Huffington Post nor The Guardian fared any better. To be fair, bigname speakers, such as Jesselyn Radack, director of the Government Accountability Project, and
Thomas Drake, former NSA senior executive turned whistleblower, were featured prominently in
news reports most likely because they are well-known. But that still doesn't explain why almost
all the attendees interviewed were white when the crowd was far from homogenous. Not a single
media outlet bothered to mention the moving and powerful performance of Malachi
"Malpractice" Byrd, a member of the DC Youth Poetry Slam Team whose piece began, "I pledge
civil disobedience to the flag of the hypocritical tyrants that expect us to assimilate and to the
republic, which somehow stands, as one nation, under many gods, of individuals stripped of their
liberties and in need of justice for all." But it was Slate political reporter Dave Weigel who
seemed to have attended a different rally altogether. "Among the attendees: More than a few Tea
Partiers and young, small-l libertarians, possibly equaling those who could be put on the left,"
Weigel reported. While there's certainly nothing wrong with recognizing the presence of rightleaning civil libertarians who value privacy, this portrayal is inaccurate and ignores the voices of
those who suffer the most from the NSA dragnet. Surveillance State Was Built on Targeting
Communities of Color Two days prior to the Stop Watching Us rally, Busboys & Poets, a
progressive DC restaurant, hosted "Enemies of the State? Government Surveillance of
Communities of Color," a panel discussion organized by Free Press, the Center for Media Justice
and Voices for Internet Freedom. The room was packed mostly with activists of color concerned
about the implications of NSA surveillance on already-marginalized and increasingly surveilled
communities. The panel took place at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, on October 24,

2013. Steven Renderos, national organizer for the Center for Media Justice, who helped put
together the panel, told Truthout that examining the legacy of surveillance in communities of
color could help lead to solutions. "It's critical to understand the history so we can learn how to
dismantle it," Renderos said. "Those of us from marginalized communities grew up in
environments very much shaped by surveillance, which has been utilized to ramp up the criminal
justice system and increase deportations," Renderos said. "It's having real consequences in our
communities where children are growing up without parents in the home and families are being
torn apart through raids and deportations, a lot of which is facilitated through the use of
surveillance." Panelist Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director for the South Asian-led social
justice organization Desis Rising Up and Moving, argued that mass surveillance is the predictable
outgrowth of programs that have targeted marginalized communities for decades. "Just by the
very nature of [the United States] being a settler-colonialist and capitalist nation, race and social
control are central to its project," Ahmed said. "Anytime we see any levels of policing - whether
it's day-to-day policing in the streets, surveillance by the police or internet surveillance - social
control, particularly of those that resist the existing system, becomes an inherent part of that
system." But, he warned, "These policies are not going to be limited to one particular community.
They're going to continue to expand further and further" because "the surveillance has a purpose,
which is to exert the power of the state and control the potential for dissent." Seema Sadanandan,
program director for ACLU DC, acknowledged the collective resentment felt by people of color
who are understandably frustrated that privacy violations are only now eliciting mass public
outrage when communities of color have been under aggressive surveillance for decades. "The
Snowden revelations represent a terrifying moment for white, middle-class and upper-middleclass people in this country, who on some level believe that the Bill of Rights and Constitution
were protecting their everyday lives," Sadanandan said. "For people of color from communities
with a history of discrimination and economic oppression that prevents one from realizing any of
those rights on a day-to-day basis, it wasn't a huge surprise." But Sadanandan argued that NSA
surveillance still "has particular concerns for communities of color
because of their unique relationship to the criminal justice or social
control system, a billion-dollar industry with regard to, for example, border patrol or data
mining as it's applied to racially profile." Sadanandan warned that NSA surveillance more than
likely would strengthen that system of control. Former political prisoner and Black Panther Party
leader Dhoruba Bin-Wahad declared that "the United States has moved into a full garrison police
state," which "has been exported and institutionalized all over the globe." His antidote? "We have
to put together an international movement to check the development evolution of the modern
national security state," which requires linking globalized labor exploitation to the prison industry
to the war on terror to institutionalized white supremacy rooted in the "European-settler state."
Bin-Wahad was skeptical about the ability of "legal" remedies to reform the system. "You cannot
make the police state better. You cannot reform white supremacy. We need to abolish the system
as it now stands," Bin-Wahad said. Disappointed With Obama Bin-Wahad's most scathing
indictment was of African-Americans in positions of power. He referred to Barack Obama and the
Congressional Black Caucus as "black enemies of black people" for sanctioning drone strikes and
NSA spying" and called Obama "the worst thing to happen to black people since
Reconstruction." At the rally, Steve, who traveled from Philadelphia and declined to give a last
name, said that growing up as a black man in South Africa instilled in him a desire to speak out
against rights abuses. "I feel sensitive when I see here in America people having their rights
infringed upon," he told Truthout. "The US government must act consistently with what it
preaches around the world. They can't preach to the world about human rights if they're not
providing them to the people over here." Anthony Wilson, who traveled by bus from Philadelphia

with the software company ThoughtWorks, told Truthout at the rally that despite being an
enthusiastic Obama voter, he is disappointed in the president. "I believed that when Obama was
elected things would be more open, but to my surprise it went in the other direction." Wilson also
expressed frustration with his own community, saying, "A lot of black people give Obama a
pass." "When I voted for him, I thought I was voting for a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X.
But he is not progressive enough. He has no intention of changing anything. And if he hasn't done
it by now, then he never will." Renderos expressed similar sentiments. "A lot of communities of
color are deferring to the president with very blanketed support for his policies." Renderos said
organizing and educating can help combat this. "When the framing around surveillance is posited
around the first and fourth amendment, that's unfortunately a reality that doesn't necessarily
resonate with communities of color. The fourth amendment has been eroded through programs
like stop-and-frisk and Secure Communities," he said. "We need to build a consensus around the
increase in deportations and the jail population by communities of color and how this is
intrinsically connected with the increase of a surveillance state here in the US." Learning From
History Ignoring activists of color does more than just rob marginalized communities of having
a voice in the NSA surveillance conversation. It also overlooks potential strategies for fighting it.
Renderos put it best: "We need to learn from history about how movements like the Black Panther
Party, American Indian Movement and the Brown Berets responded to living under a surveillance
state."

Anonymity allows whiteness to remain unchallenged while people of color are

continuously exploitegd
Rodriguez 15, Princess Harmony Rodriguez, 3/27/15, Princess is an afro-latin trans woman,
survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence, creator, otaku, and anti-violence activist. Her
writing has been published on The Feminist Wire, Feministing, Black Girl Dangerous, Know
Your IX, and FeministaJones.com. Who Are the Real Victims?: SAE Racist Chant, Yik Yak, and
the Weapon of Anonymity
Recently, a video depicting members of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) singing a racial
slur-laden song making reference to lynching shocked and appalled the nation. The outcry
resulted in a near-instantaneous dissolution of the chapter and expulsion of its ringleaders.
However, the attitudes expressed by SAE arent exactly isolated. In fact, the outcry spawned the
#NotJustSAE hashtag in which students of color shared our experiences with racism on our
college campuses. An ongoing source of controversy, Twitter and Facebook university
confessions pages and anonymous posting apps are making waves for the exact same reasons.
In particular, the app Yik Yak has been highlighted as a source of trouble because of the chaos it
enables. While some posts are innocent, such as those asking about parties or asking who got the
hookup to a good weed man, there are too many that are dedicated to violent and white
supremacist acts. On campuses across America, the app is either creating or worsening gender,
racial, and class divisions. Schools, including schools already under a microscope for their
(mis)handling of sexual violence, are allowing individual students who come forward about
sexual violence to get targeted by those who were reported. A dear friend of mine, who had
already survived violence, was targeted on her colleges Yik Yak. They threatened her with
violence for daring to speak what happened to her. I saw the screenshots and so did the
administration. Similarly, schools already the target of criticism for their racial divisions are rife
with yaks that are filled with violent threats and racial epithets. For example, a school in North

Philadelphia thats already the target of criticism for gentrifying the area and for having a
disturbingly high number of overt racists has racist yaks posted almost every day. Words that
ordinarily have no negative connotation to them, such as local, are racialized and turned into an
acceptable form of the N-word. When posts get reported to college administrators, its almost a
given that the administration will wash its hands of the responsibility to handle it. Civil rights
laws such as Title VI and Title IX (among others) and the Department of Educations
subsequent Dear Colleague Letters say that universities have a responsibility to handle violence
and harassment from students on campus, even if the violence occurs online. By ignoring and
failing to acknowledge incidents of harassment and violence, theyre breaking the law. Even if
theyre unable to track down who is responsible for particular threats, they can at least make an
attempt to acknowledge the problem. This highlights the problem of anonymity. When people use
anonymity, it can either be used for innocuous or outright negative purposes. In Yik Yaks case, as
has been noted across the country, its used mostly for negative purposes. In its short history, Yik
Yak has been used to make bomb threats, target specific students who were already survivors of
sexual violence, target entire races of people, and threaten said people with violence. In each of
those examples, with the exception of only a few, not only did those posts remain, they got
upvoted. And they didnt get just one or two upvotes, they got dozens of upvotes. Most yaks dont
even get 5 upvotes. But they got dozens. Juxtapose that with statements made by one of its
creators. Brooks Buffington claimed the app was made for the disenfranchised. With violent
yaks not being removed and a constant stream of racist yaks, who really is disenfranchised to
them? Who really is marginalized to them? Who are the real victims? The answer is simple. The
victims are the white bros who use that app, in their own minds. Then, what purpose does
anonymity especially in terms of this particular app serve? Anonymity serves as a weapon for
the patriarchy. Why? Because theyre not held accountable for their words. When someone posts
an anti-black, racist, and/or misogynistic yak, the people who view it including the people in
charge of moderating those posts support it. They upvote it. Even if people report the post, its
probably not gonna go down. In other words, it serves as a weapon for the patriarchy because the
audience of that post, from top to bottom, supports that viewpoint. And thats more than just
within the app, since this app was targeted at college students, so the audience then includes
administration because its inevitable that theyll get involved. Usually, involved only means
that they acknowledge that its happening and then nothing happens from there. Despite their
responsibility to protect their students from violence, particularly violence based on race, gender,
etc., they refuse to act. They protect and enable the status quo: violence towards gender/sexual
minorities, people with disabilities, and oppressed racial groups. With the exclusion of incidents
that go viral, such as the SAE chant, this status quo is never challenged by administration, There
is an unspoken agreement between the powers that be and the students that violence against
oppressed people is okay. In an ideal world, anonymity would protect the oppressed and serve as
a means for us to subvert the negative things forced on us. However, that is not the world we live
in and while there are those who have used anonymity for that purpose, its more common to run
into racists and misogynists using anonymity as a shield to keep themselves from being
accountable for their words and actions. In this world, anonymity and the existing power structure
make it so that oppressors dont have to be accountable for their actions or words unless they
become too much of a burden for the patriarchy to protect. For us to further the conversation
started by #NotJustSAE, we have to acknowledge the challenges that
anonymity creates for oppressed people. Some college students started
campaigns to take back Yik Yak from students who use it to harm others. While anonymity
serves as a weapon for the oppressors, it can be made to serve us as a means to fight back and
change the environment on the internet, on campus, and in society overall.

Race always comes first the privilege to be anonymous is something only

afforded to whiteness
Yancy 14, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily on
issues of social justice, White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White
Problem? http://www.amazon.com/White-Self-Criticality-beyond-Anti-racismPhilosophy/dp/0739189492, NN

This feeling of anonymity has also arisen in similar situations in which my whiteness renders my
antiracist aspirations utterly invisible. I feel my particular identity being effaced by whiteness
itself I want to be able to censure whiteness simply by looking a certain way, through the use of
facial expressions and body language, but I can't. I feel trapped, rendered invisible behind a
screen that makes all white people look identical.. Since I can't change the fact that I am white, I
can't get out from behind the screen. Subtle gestures toward resistance or cross-racial solidarity,
such as looking angry or hated, rarely make any difference: they are easily ignored or misinterpreted by other screened-in whites, and they are usually indistinguishable to those on the other
side. If I yell loud enough or jump high enough, the people out there may be able to hear me or
see me, and a large enough disturbance stands a chance of being noticed by those on my side, too.
But as soon as I cease to make this tremendous effort, I retain instantly and by default to the
anonymity guaranteed by the hegemonic screen of whiteness. My protest against
feeling "anonymous" may signal that I have realized the
impossibility, in this racialized society, of being judged on my
individual merits and not according to my race. Before noticing that whiteness
is a problem, and a problem fore, I was able to enjoy the presumption (mine and other white
people's, thatmis) of my own goodness and the assurance that my individual acts, good or bad,
would never reflect on my race, but only on me personally.. This exposes my mistaken white
belief that U.S. society had already become, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King tr. dreamed,
a meritocracy where we are "not ... judged by the color of lout] skin but by the content of [ourl
character. I now retain that white people generally feel this way only about white people, and
that people of color are justified in assuming white people, including me, to be racist (actively
participating in whiteness) unless we demonstrate otherwise.lv This realization is sobering,
especially the latter. It feels unfair, though, of course, it is not, to have to prove myself, not to be
considered "innocent until proven guilty." Is this in any way analogous to what individual people
of color experi-ence when white people make assumptions about them based on their actual or
perceived race? Does my sense of "anonymity" in a white crowd signal that what I am up against
is nothing less than racial stereotyping? By asking this question, I do not intend to blame people
of color for stereotyping white people or to cry 'reverse discrimination." Insofar as white people
can be "stereotyped' as part of the oppressor group, it is our own fault for having been and
continuing to be oppressors; it is our own racism, coming home to roost. Neither do I intend to
imply that all stereotyping has equally detrimen-tal effects. hi my experience, the white
stereotype of a white person as good works to the psychic advantage of white people who are
clueless about whiteness. It is extremely pleasant to be able to expect to be received warm-ly, or
at least chilly, by virtually everyone I encomter in my dolly life. I am chafmg against this
stereotype because working to diminish the power of whiteness and gaining the good opinion of
mtiracists, especially people of color, has become important to me. But unless I am carving out a
path different from the masses of white people who don't do a whole lot to counteract whiteness,
it is perfectly logical for everyone, whites and people of color alike, to assume that I am part of
those masses. If I'm not taking such steps, I am just like them.

Surveillance reform has no chance of remedying racial inequality

Taylor 14, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Assistant Professor of African studies at Princeton University,
The system isn't broken, it's racist by design, http://socialistworker.org/2014/12/09/system-isnt-brokenits-racist, NN

NONE OF the reforms that Obama and Holder at the federal level or New York City Mayor Bill
de Blasio are suggesting will do anything to address these systemic issues. Instead, Obama's
commission on policing in the 21st century is likely to produce many
of the same "reforms" that created the problems in the first place.
The commission is to be led by former Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson and
Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey. These two particular people at the helm of a
commission aimed at curbing errant police conduct in Black communities is akin to putting the
fox in charge of investigating a rash of attacks on chickens. It's literally absurd. All one needs to
know about Robinson is that she worked in the Department of Justice for seven years during the
Clinton administration, when the U.S. became known as the "incarceration nation." Under
Clinton, the federal and state prison populations rose faster than under any other administration in
American history--the rate at which Black people were incarcerated tripled.

The affirmatives reaction to NSA surveillance is a product of white privilege.

The abuses theyre outraged with arent exceptions to the rule; they are the
rule.
Wise 13 Timothy J. Wise, anti-racist activist and writer, holds a B.A. in Political Science
from Tulane University, 2013 (Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege, Tim
Wises blog, June 19th, Available Online at http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsaspying-and-the-irony-of-racial-privilege/, Accessed 02-17-2015)
The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow struck against
democracy, and that now our liberties are in jeopardy is the kind of thing one can only believe if
one has had the luxury of thinking they were living in such a place , and were in possession of
such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury enjoyed by painfully few folks
of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they have
long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination , in housing, the
justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have circumscribed the
boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for the
latter, freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic privation
in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most
other nations with which we like to compare ourselves.
In short, when people proclaim a desire to take back our democracy from the national security
apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a
premise that is entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back,
and that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasnt and it
hasnt been.

Blackness is a phonotypical and aesthetic phenomena black bodies are

already coded in the temporality of modernity there is no invisibility to a
body marked by gratuitous violence

***CHECK ON THIS CARD BEFORE READING IT USES N

WORD***
Yancy 12, George Yancy is a Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical
philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. Look, A White!:
Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, NN

In terms of the clicking sounds, my body, through the gazes of white people, manifests a
particular modality of volatility (etymologically volare, "to fly"). The etymological meaning of
volatility captures the sense in which the black body, within the context of white lies and fears,
can experience instability, flux, where its meaning appears to fail to remain tethered, as it were,
by the power of black self-definitional agency alone. When walking by whites in
cars, I might be said to exist ontologically quadrupled. While it is not
possible for me to exist in four different places at once, I am after
some-thing that arises at the phenomenological or lived level of
experience. For example, it can be said that I am "here," taking up space outside on the sidewalk or crossing the street before the appearance of any car. However, I am also "ahead of
myself:" I don't mean this in the way that Heideggerians speak of human beings as always ahead
of themselves qua possibility, or in the way that Sartreans speak of human reality as being for
itself and as always future oriented, as always more. Rather, "being ahead of myself' suggests the
sense in which I am always already fixed, complete, given. From the perspective of white looks,
my beingthe dynamic possibility and openness of being other than I amcan never transcend
the fixity of my presumed racial essence. After all, a "nigger" will always be a "nigger." In other
words, before I walk by a car filled with whites, and before they catch a glimpse of me and lock
their doors, I exist in the form of a static racial tem-plate. My being is "known" by whites before
my arrival. I reside in a fixed place, always already waiting for me. In short, then, I exist ahead of
myself. In Charles Johnson's brilliant phrase, and from which the title of this chapter is derived, I
encounter myself "much like a mugger at a boardwalk's end."" My destiny has already
been determined; the meaning of my life is forever foreclosed by my
blackness. As Frantz Fanon writes, "And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it
is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me."" Whiteness has
created a world in which necessity is the foundation of being blackin-the-world. As black, I am possessed by an essence that always
precedes me. I am always "known" in advance. Please welcome the "person"
who needs no introduction: the black. Once next to the car (or once whites "see" my black body
approaching), though physically separated from it, I find myself "over there" floating like a
phantasm in their imaginarymuch like a thought bubble. Yet I am also "alongside" myself as I
catch a glimpse of me through their gazeI have become a predator, their predator. It is as if I
carry myself in the form of an extraneous appendage, a superfluous meaning. Brent Staples offers
a fasci-nating phenomenological description of what it means when the black body, his black
body, experiences a sense of ontological disjointedness and multi-plicity vis-a-vis white looks:
I'd been a fool. I'd been walking the street grinning good evening to people who were frightened
to death of me. I did violence to them by just being. How had I missed this? I kept walking at
night, but from then on I paid attention. I became an expert in the language of fear. Couples

locked arms or reached for each other's hands when they saw me. Some crossed to the other side
of the street. People who were carrying on conversations went mute and stared straight ahead, as
though avoiding my eyes would save them. . . . I tried to be innocuous, but didn't
know how. The more I thought about how moved, the less my body belonged to me. I became
a false character riding along side it.. Staples's point is that he felt removed from his body,
disembodied. Under the white gaze, his body undergoes a process of
volatility, a form of ontologi-cal destabilization. In my case, then, to exist
ontologically quadrupled is to experience myself as "here-ahead-over-there-alongside." In this
way, I have become, under the white gaze, "immaterial" and "vaporous." I am spatially "here."
Yet I am "over there," ahead of myself, fixed as a dangerous preda-tor even before I am "seen" by
white gazes. Then again, once "seen," I am also "there," residing in the minds of whites as a fixed
stereotype. Further still, I am "there," alongside myselfa fourth place. As Robert GoodingWilliams says, the clicking "performances which [produce] this sense of be-ing enslaved to an
image ... leave one feeling literally and utterly dislocated in physical space."" The metaphor of
finding oneself much like a mugger at a boardwalk's end is a profound way of depicting the black
body's meaning as always already ahead of itself. Think about it. One is typically unaware of the
pres-ence of a mugger. The mugger is secretly hiding, waiting to attack. The mugger, if
successful, robs you of something precious, valuable. You feel vio-lated. To be black, in
the context of antiblack racism, is to have one's mean-ing
determinedalready in place. As Johnson argues, "All that I am, can be to them
[whites], is as nakedly presented as the genitals of a plant since they cannot see my other profiles.
Epidermalization [or reduction to the black epi-dermis] spreads throughout the body like an odor,
like an echoing sound.". So, then, the meaning of my blackness is no mystery.
There is no deeper meaning waiting to express itself. All is surface;
there is no depth; I am known already. In this way, too, the meaning
of my being awaits me. Indeed, just when I thought that I was an individual, someone
with inner complexity and layers of psychological sophistication and subtlety, I am laid
bare, the "secret" of my being is out: "I am your worst nightmare." In fact, when
in the presence of many whites, I discover that I am a universal, one who is plagued by an inner
racial teleology that is indelibly fixed. And like a mugger at a boardwalk's end, I am robbed of
ontological upsurge. I feel as if the capacity to transform the meaning of
my life, to define the terms of my existence, has been stolen from
me.

Reform links

Reform is just reactionary conservatism their unwillingness to accept that

systemic antagonisms cannot be fixed means their project is permeated with
whiteness
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of sociology, Queer
Necropolitics, http://www.deanspade.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of 'preservation through transformation' to
describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in this dynamic (Harris 2007: 1539-1582;
Siegel1997: 1111-1148). In the face of significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law
reform tends to provide just enough transfonnation to stabilize and
preserve status quo conditions. In the case of widespread black rebellion against
white supremacy in the US, civil rights law and colourblind constitutionalism have operated as
formal reforms that masked a pe11wtuation of the status quo of violence against and
exploitation of black people. Explicit exclusionary policies and practices
became officially forbidden, yet the disuibution of life chances
remained the same or worsened with the growing racialized
concentration of wealth in the US, the dismantling of social welfare, and the
explosion of criminalization that has developed in the same period as the new logic of race
neutrality has declared fairness and justice achieved. Lesbian and gay rights politics' reproduction
of the Inythology of anti-discrimination law and the non-stop invocation of'equal rights'
frameworks by lesbian and gay rights politics marks an .investment in the legal structures of antiblackness that have emerged in the wake of Brown. The emergence of the demand for LGBT
inclusive hate crime laws and the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and james Byrd, Jr.
Hate Crimes Prevention Act as a highly lauded federal legislative 'win' for lesbian and gay
rights offers a particularly blatant site of the anti-blackness central to lesbian and gay rights
-literally an investment in the expansion ofcriminalization as a core claim and desire of this
purported 'frecdom'. 9 In the context of the foundational nature of slavery in US political
formation, it is perhaps not surprising to see a political formation of white 'gay and lesbian
Americans' articulate a demand fOr fi-eedom that is contingent on the literal caging of black
people. The fantasy that fOrmal legal equality is all that is needed to eliminate homophobia and
transphobia is harmfUl not only because it participates in the antiblack US progress narrative
that civil rights law reforms resolved anti-blackness in the US (thus any remaining suffering or
disparity is solely an issue of 'personal responsibility'), 1IJ but also because it constructs an
agenda that is harmful to black queer and trans people and other queer and trans people
experiencing violent systems mobilized by anti-blackness. Formal marriage rights will not help
poor people, people vvhose kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfire system
regardless of whether or not they can get married, people who do not have immigration status or
health benefits to share with a spouse if they had one, people who have no property to pass on to
their partners, or people who have no need to be shielded from estate tax. In fact, the current
wave of same-sex marriage advocacy emerges at the same rime as another pro-marriage trend,
the push by the right wing to reverse feminist wins that had made marriage easier to get out of
and the Bushera development of marriage promotion programmes (continued by Obama)
targeted at women on welfare (Adams and Coltrane 2007: 17-34; Alternatives to l\!larriage
Project 2007; Coltrane and Adams 2003: 363-372; Feld, Rosier and Manning 2002: 173-183;

Pear and Kirkpatrick 2007; Rector and Pardue 2004). The explicitly anti-black focus of the
attacks on welfare and the mobilization of racialized-genclered images to do this go hand in hand
with the pro-marriage gay rights frame that similarly invests in notions of 'personal
responsibility', and racializecl--gendered family formation norm enforcement. The articulation of
a desire for legal inclusion in the explicitly anti-black, anti-poor governance regime of marriage,
and the centralization of marriage rights as the most resourced equality claim of gay and lesbian
rights politics, affirms its alliance with anti-blackness. It is easy to imagine other queer political
interventions that would take a different approach to concerns about parental rights, child custody
and other family law problems. Such approaches centre the experiences of queers facing the
worst violence of family law, those whose problems -will not be resolved by samesex marriage parents in prison, parents facing deportation, parents with disabilities, youth in foster care and
juvenile punishment systems, parents whose children have been removed because of 'neglect'
clue to their poverty. The choice of seeking marriage rights, like the choice to pursue hate crime
laws rather than decriminalization, the choice to pursue the Uniting American Families Act 11
rather than opposing immigration enforcement and the war on terror, the choice to pursue
military service rather than demilitarization, is a choice to pursue a place fOr white gay and
lesbian people in constitutively anti-black legal structures.

Plurarlist reform is a smokescreen for whiteness to remain unchallenged

legal equality is breadcrumbs for the state to legitimize itself as the savior of
black people
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms, NN

The difficulty of a writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Back, and White socially engaged
feature films as aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject
positions of the Savage and the Slave is that todays intellectual protocols are not informed by
Fanons insistence that ontologyonce it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside
does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic] (Black Skin, White Masks
110). In sharp contrast to the late 60s and early 70s, we now live in a political, academic, and
cinematic milieu which stresses diversity, unity, civic participation, hybridity, access,
and contribution. The radical fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a
passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between the protester and the
police has narrowed considerably. The effect of this upon the academy is that intellectual
protocols tend to privilege two of the three domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests
(as evidenced in the work of social science around political unity, social attitudes, civic
participation, and diversity,) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities
postmodern regimes of diversity, hybridity, and relative [rather than master] narratives).
Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with structural positionality (except in the work of
die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable anymore
to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations
such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academys ensembles of questions are fixated
on specific and unique experience of the myriad identities that make up those structural
positions. This would fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it
does not. Again, the upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite
effect of cinematic and political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit
the grammar of suffering which underwrites the US and its foundational antagonisms. This state
of affairs exacerbatesor, more precisely, mystifies and veilsthe ontological death of the Slave

and the Savage because (as in the 1950s) cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of the
current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of
Indigenism and Blacknessacademic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a
revolutionary critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how Left-leaning
scholars help civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of
emergency for Indians and Blacks.

The ontological status of black bodies cant be fixed with a law just like you
cant pass a law to end capitalism the affirmatives method of reform not
only fails but also means blacks are in a constant state of emergency
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms, NN

As stated above, in the 1960s and 70s, as White radicalisms 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 cinemas proclivity to embrace
dispossession through the vectors of capacity (the ontological status of the Human as an exploited
and alienated subject) became profoundly disturbed. In some films this proclivity was so deeply
disturbed that while many socially and politically engaged film script and cinematic strategies did
not surrender completely to incapacity (that is, to the authority of the Slaves grammar of
suffering), they also 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.xiii The period of COINTELPROS crushing of
the Black Panthers and then the Black Liberation Army also witnessed the flowering of
Blacknesss 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 1532xiv to 1967, only now that formal tenacity was
emboldened by a wider range of alibis than simply Free Speech or the anti-War Movement; it
had, for example, the womens, gay, anti-nuke, 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
intra-settler discussions are now the foundation of the radical
agenda.

The state will always be bad for blackness black bodies are in a perpetual
state of warfare against systems of oppression
Rodriguez 2010, Dylan Rodriguez is a Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, The
Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,
http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151, NN
Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil
liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next
onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics
of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant
production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of normalized and mundane

black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the
American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms
of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of
our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the USA) really does
not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of
US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social
logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. The non-profit and
NGO left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned)
attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist
praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of
these wars. In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by
what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the violent 'abandonments' of the state, which forfeits and
implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while
transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities which
Gilmore (2007b: 445) says are guided by a 'frightening willingness to
engage in human sacrifice'. Yet, at the same time that the state has been
openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle
against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment
left remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable
to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization,
radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and
everyday terms of the very domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and
repeatedly declared as the premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes
both the common narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question
remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this statecraft as the state of
emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally encompasses (war!). Perhaps it is because
critical intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating the skill
and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have generally
undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates)
sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf 'dissent' and counter-state, antiracist, and
antiviolence organizing. Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramscis thoughts on the formation of
contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The State does have and request consent, but
it also 'educates' this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however,
are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. (Gramsci 1995: 259).

Econ link
Economic growth privileges the white upper class market structures and
empirical economic exploitation mean black people are disenfranchised from
the very start
Hoescht 2008, Heidi Hoescht is a PhD in Literature from UCSD, Refusable Pasts: Speculative Democracy, Spectator
Citizens, and the Dislocation of Freedom in the United States, Proquest Dissertations, NN
This dissertation examines the

intimate connections between emancipatory democracy and speculative

economics. It studies cultural texts that reflect and express national ideals of U.S. democracy that emereged in
three periods of heightened captialist speculation the Jacksonian period of the 1830s, the 1930s Popular Front period, and the rise
of liberal multiculturalism between 1980 to the present. The project engages two kinds of cultural texts. The project derives
its proximate objects of the study--folklore, literature, literary criticism, stage performances, community festivals and public parks
from a range of critical and cultural texts produced by Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Catlin,
Frederick Law Olmsted, and the neighborhood of Powderhorn Park. Yet, the disseration also explores a second text that connects these
seemingly disparate objects and authors. The social text that binds the chapters of this dissertaion is a broader text of U.S.
culture and social practice that is conditioned and inflated by the logic of speculation. This second text reveals culture as a central link
in the economic project of U.S. nationalism. Culture in this text, is a key technology by which U.S. inequality is reproduced,
reiterated, and translated across contexts. I argue that the

cultural logic of specualiton disables possibilities for

participatory democracy and racial, gendered, and class justice and equality. This logic aligns the
emancipatory aspirations of aggreived groups to the market and property interests of elites. I show that culture
has been instrumental for expanding social inequality through the promises of U.S. nationalism. The speculative logic of
U.S. democracy relies on the category of "not yet freedom" to hide economic and racial
inequalities. It preserves the idea of democracy only by deferring actual justice to a perpetually
pushed back future. The pursuit of democracy in the United States has been haunted by histories of refusal and deferral.
When aggrieved groups ask for emancipation, elites often respond with promises of freedom
without doing the hard work of creating justice. Refusable Pasts explores how the national culture of the
United States portrays the deferral of freedom to some unspecified "not yet" time in the future as
evidence of real democratic inclusion in the present. Promises of future freedom evidence the
power and pervasiveness of popular aspirations for democracy. Yet because national culture offers
aggrieved groups democratic promises rather than democratic practices, it also demonstrates the power of
elites to suppress popular democracy and preserve their own privileges. Speculative logic and market subjectivity permeate U.S.
national culture. Speculative

practices originate in economic relations, but their logic structures

national culture as well. Speculative logics promising future growth have connected the
expressive cultures of U.S nationalism to the economic life of the nation's elites. Just as investors
anticipate that economic returns in the future will reward their work in the present, citizens are encouraged to defer their
desires for empowerment, autonomy, dignity and community to some perpetually promised but
never quite realized time of "not yet" freedom in the future . Hope functions as a fundamental
mechanism for deferring freedom to the future and refusing radical change in the present. Under
these conditions, culture serves as a cover story promoting economic expansion and empire,
slavery and racial subordination, plunder and perpetual warfare . The national culture of the nation works to
instantiate, legitimate, and perpetuate economic inequality and social stratification. It is also one forum that elites use to manage the
emancipatory aspirations of popular struggles. Culture counts because stories centered on the logic of speculation promise symbolic
reconciliations as the salve to the wounds caused by the perpetuation of inequalities in society. The

speculative logics that

inform national culture portray inexcusable injustices in the present as mere preludes to a
promised prosperity and freedom in the future. Thus, the democratic promises inscribed inside
national culture actually function as powerful mechanisms for the perpetuation of decidedly
undemocratic practices and policies.

The capitalist system was created through the exploitation of the black body
any progress results in anti-black violence
Gabriel and Todorova 2, Satyananda J., Evgenia O., Racism and Capitalist Accumulation: An Overdetermined
Nexus, Journal of Critical Sociology, 2002

The pervasiveness of racial consciousness cannot help but shape the economic relationships in
contemporary capitalist social formations. The interaction of racialized agents shapes the
parameters of a wide range of economic processes such as market exchange transactions,
employment contracts, pricing, capital budgeting decisions, and so on. The fact that one can
observe patterns of differential economic success and failure based on racial ca tegories is
evidence of the impact of racism upon agents. Economic theories, both Marxian and neoclassical, have attempted to
explain rational behavior of agents in the context of the market for labor-power. The Marxian approach has been to make sense of this
market in the context of capitalist exploitation, for which the market in labor-power is a precondition. Capitalism presupposes the
existence of free wage laborers. In the Marxian tradition, direct producers become "free" to sell their labor-power as a result of
determinate social and natural processes. It is in this process of gaining capitalist freedom that the rationality of wage laboring is
formed. Capitalist freedom came to exist in contrast to serfdom and slavery. In

this sense, it was born of a complex

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

various forms of racialized consciousness

that were prevalent in most capitalist social formations, having already produced forms of
dissociation and alienation in the consciousness of direct producers and others, may have been
critical to the rapidity with which labor markets were established and expanded

Property links
Concepts of property and privacy are only applicable to white life blackness
is never situated as a subject but rather object this means that none of the
surveillance reform the aff solves for is applicable to black bodies
Smith 14, Andrea Lee Smith is an intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist. Smith's work
focuses on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native
American women. A co-founder of INCITE!, The Colonialism That is Settled and the
Colonialism That Never Happened, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/thecolonialism-that-is-settled-and-the-colonialism-that-never-happened/, NN
I begin my analysis with the infamous Dred Scott (1857) decision. In this decision, Justice
Daniel explains in his concurring opinion, that Black peoples have
the ontological status of property that derives from their origins in
Africa, the property of Europe. Consequently, this ontological status does
not change simply because ones owner relinquishes his property
rights. Black peoples remain property whether or not an individual
owns them Because Africa is deemed the property of Europe, Africa
must then appear as always, already colonized. Native studies is often
articulated as concerned being primarily with colonization (and, subsequently, decolonization)
while Black studies is articulated as concerned primarily with race (and, subsequently, antiracism). However, this distinction is itself a product of anti-Blacknesss. The colonization of
Africa must disappear so that Africa can appear as ontologically colonized. According to Justice
Daniel, since only nations can be colonized, nations in African can
never have existed. It is only through the disavowal of colonization that Black peoples
can be ontologically relegated to the status of property. Within the Dred Scott decision, Native
peoples by contrast, are situated as potential citizens. Native peoples are described as free
people, albeit uncivilized. While because of their child-like primitive state, they are not worthy
of citizenship at the moment, they may eventually become citizens if they were to renounce their
relationship to their Native nation and demonstrate the maturity required to become a citizen.
Native peoples can claim a certain kind of nation; however, it is nation that must disappear. Thus,
Native peoples apparent proximity to whiteness should not be understood as a pathway to
freedom but as a pathway to genocide. Indigenous nations are supposed to disappear into
whiteness (or, to borrow from Maile Arvin, to be possessed by whiteness) in order to effectuate
their genocide. As Robert Nichols notes in his essay in Theorizing Native Studies, settler
colonialism sets the very terms of its contestation. And the terms of contestation set by settler
colonialism is anti-racism. That is, the way we are supposed to contest settler democracy is to
contest the gap between what settler democracy promises and what it performs. But as Nichols
notes, contesting the racial gap of setter democracy is the most effective way of actually ensuring
its universality. Thus, borrowing from this analysis, settler colonialism does not merely operate
by racializing Native peoples, positioning them as racial minorities rather than as colonized
nations, but also through domesticating Black struggle within the framework of anti-racist rather
than anti-colonial struggle. Anti-Blackness is effectuated through the disappearance of
colonialism in order to render Black peoples as the internal property of the United States, such
that anti-Black struggle must be contained within a domesticated anti-racist framework that
cannot challenge the settler state itself. Why, for example, is Martin Luther King always
described as a civil rights leader rather than an anti-colonial organizer, despite his clear anti-

colonial organizing against the war in Vietnam? Through anti-Blackness, not only
are Black peoples rendered the property of the settler state, but
Black struggle itself remains its property solely containable within
the confines of the settler state. Thus, the colonialism that never happened antiBlackness helps reinforce the colonialism that is settled the genocide of Indigenous peoples.
For the so-called Indian problem to disappear, the United States must itself appear hermetically
sealed from both internal and external threats that would threaten its legitimacy and continued
existence. Indigenous peoples must be made to disappear as internal threats, made to exist in a
constant state of vanishing, in no position to unsettle the settler state. Meanwhile the external
threat posed by a global Black anti-colonial struggle is made to disappear by rendering Africa as
the property of the United States and, subsequently, no longer external to it. Anti-Blackness, then,
is not only constitutive of the settler nation of the United States, but integral to the normalization
of its continuance. The colonialism that is settled and the colonialism that never happened are
further effectuated through colonial constructs of labor. In Johnson v. MIntosh (1823), the
Supreme Court held that, while Indigenous people had a right to occupancy, they could not hold
title to land on the basis of the doctrine of discovery. The European nation that discovered the
land had the right to legal title. Native peoples were disqualified from being discoverers
because they did not properly work: The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce
savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To
leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness. As they did not
work, Native peoples had the ontological status of things to be discovered the status of nature.
Similarly, in Lowe v. United States (1902), the court held that the Kickapoo, who had relocated to
Mexico during the Civil War, did not have the legal ability to remain there without the permission
of the United States in part because of their status as non-workers. Because Native peoples are
legally incompetent (i.e. non-workers) they cannot create property in/on land and, subsequently,
they cannot acquire a domicile.

Privacy and property lead to the idea of owning ourselves this mentality of
autonomy leads to possession of our property and that system has racial
implications that we dont think of
Ladson-Billings and Tate 95, Both Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate are professors at the
University of Wisconsin, Toward a Critical Race Theoryof Education,

Bell examined the events leading up to the Constitutions

development and concluded that there exists a tension between
property rights and human rights.3 4 This tension was greatly
exacerbated by the presence of African peoples as slaves in
America. The purpose of the government was to protect the main object of society
property. The slave status of most African Americans (as well as women and children) resulted
in their being objectified as property. And, a government constructed to protect
the rights of property owners lacked the incentive to secure human
rights for the African American.3 5 According to Bell the concept of
individual rights, unconnected to property rights, was totally
foreign to these men of property; and thus, despite two decades of
civil rights gains, most Blacks remain disadvantaged and deprived
because of their race.3 6 The grand narrative of U.S. history is replete with tensions
and struggles over propertyin its various forms. From the removal of Indians (and later
Japanese Americans) from the land, to military conquest of the Mexic a n s ,37 to the

construction of Africans as property,3 8 the ability to define, possess, and own

property has been a central feature of power in America. We do not
suggest that other nations have not fought over and defined themselves by property and
landownership.3 9 However, the contradiction of a reified symbolic individual juxtaposed tdo
the reality of real estate means that emphasis on the centrality of property can be disguised.
Thus, we talk about the importance of the individual, individual rights, and civil rights while
social benefits accrue largely to property owners.40 Property relates to education in explicit and
implicit ways. Recurring discussions about property tax relief indicate that more affluent
communities (which have higher property values, hence higher tax assessments) resent paying
for a public school system whose clientele is largely nonwhite and poor.4 1 In the simplest of
equations, those with better propCritical Race Theory 53 erty are entitled to better schools.
Kozol illustrates the disparities: Average expenditures per pupil in the city of New York in 1987
were some $5,500. In the highest spending suburbs of New York (Great Neck or Manhasset, for
example, on Long Island) funding levels rose above $11,000, with the highest districts in the
state at $15,000.4 2 But the property differences manifest themselves in other ways. For
example, curriculum represents a form of intellectual property.4 3 T h e quality and quantity of
the curriculum varies with the property values of the school. The use of a critical race story4 4
appropriately represents this notion: The teenage son of one of the authors of this article was
preparing to attend high school. A friend had a youngster of similar age who also was preparing
to enter high school. The boys excitedly poured over course offerings in their respective schools
catalogues. One boy was planning on attending school in an upper-middle-class white
community. The other would be attending school in an urban, largely African-American district.
The difference between the course offerings as specified in the catalogues was striking. The boy
attending the white, middle-class school had his choice of many foreign languagesSpanish,
French, German, Latin, Greek, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese. His mathematics offerings
included algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, general math, and business math.
The science department at this school offered biology, chemistry, physics, geology, science in
society, biochemistry, and general science. The other boys curriculum choices were not nearly
as broad. His foreign language choices were Spanish and French. His mathematics choices were
general math, business math, and algebra (there were no geometry or trig classes offered). His
science choices were general science, life science, biology, and physical science. The
differences in electives were even more pronounced, with the affluent school offering courses
such as Film as Literature, Asian Studies, computer programming, and journalism. Very few
elective courses were offered at the African-American school, which had no band, orchestra, or
school newspaper. The availability of rich (or enriched) intellectual property delimits what is
now called opportunity to learn4 5the presumption that along with providing educational
standards4 6 that detail what students should know and be able to do, they must have the
material resources that support their learning. Thus, intellectual property must be
undergirded by real property, that is, science labs, computers and other state-ofthe-art technologies, appropriately certified and prepared teachers. Of course, 54 Teachers
College Record Kozol demonstrated that schools that serve poor students of color are unlikely
to have access to these resources and, consequently, students will have little or no opportunity to
learn despite the attempt to mandate educational standards.4 7

Democracy link
Democratic deliberation and promotion ignore that not everyone has an equal
vote blacks are never welcome at the deliberative circle which leads to
exclusionary violence
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) NN
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 . (80-81) 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, asignifying at some point they require
coherence, they require categories for the record which means they contain the seeds of antiBlackness. 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:

Democracy is a synonym for imperialism and colonialism whites always

control the conversations
Curry 11, Tommy Curry is an associate professor at Southern Illinois University, In the Fiat of
Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the AntiEthical.,
http://www.academia.edu/3384301/_Draft_In_the_Fiat_of_Dreams_The_Delusional_Allure_of_Hope_the_
Reality_of_Anti-Black_Violence_and_the_Demands_of_the_Anti-Ethical, NN
For many philosophers and social political theorists, the eventuation of an egalitarian humanist society

is the teleological impetus, the inevitable consequence, of embracing liberalism and integrationist
theories of democracy. While these proclamations have been by Black thinkers for centuries as
the promulgations of Americas democratic potential, the Black victims of Americas fetish for
racism, those who are forced to endure the failure of white theory to arrest the racist tyranny ,
have their deaths, their murders, their deprivation interpreted as caricatures, the brutality of which
is taken to be academic capital driving philosophical engagements with and theorizations about
race within the confines Americas geograp hy. In this illusory world, Black citizens are
aspirations thought experiments rooted in the desire to motivate political theories through the excoriation
of Blackness. The Black thinker becomes a voyeur gazing upon this thought raced, but not unhumaned by
Blackness the citizen, historically white, empirically violent, but recognized as human instead of

animal. Hope is the then made the concrete political delusion; the idea that is taken to explain all

Black social and political existence since slavery as progress, despite contradiction or regress . In
thinking about Blackness, the Black scholar removes Black existence from the horrors of America
preferring to think Blackness as unrealized. This is a conceptual failing of Black scholarship, a failing that
Frank Wilderson describes as people consciously or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the
terror of their evidence in order to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things. . It is in this
act the cessation of inquiry whereby the epistemic is collapsed into the political/ontological that the
dereliction of Black thought, its predilection towards becoming a racial normative, is apparent. Much like
the dilemmas found in dealing with Black death and confronting the genocidal tendencies haunting the
lives of Black men articulated by Wynter in chapter one, there is a need to sanitize, make tolerable,
academify Black existence so that it does not become nihilistic and fatalist, but a thought

experiment that offers the white listener, reader, or colleague entrance into the possibility of being
an anti-racist compassionate white reformis

Time link
The echo of slavery transcends linear history, where the slave is murdered out
of the middle passage over and over into both the past and the present. The
slave ship moves through time and space, creating a rupture, which guides
bullets, police surveillance, the prison industrial complex, and the libidinal
economy the affs conception of linear time and progress is a Eurocentric
interpretation of temporality which reifies anti-black violence
Dillon 13, Stephen Dillon is a doctor of philosophy from the university of Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise
of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, Pgs. 24-30, May 2013, Regina Kunzel, Co-adviser, Roderick Ferguson, Co-adviser,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf, NN
Although the connections between slavery and the prison are important to this project, I am also interested in more expansive
understandings of the afterlife of slavery. In particular, I am concerned with theories that can help make the connection between the
market under chattel-slavery and the market under neoliberalism. In other words, the afterlife of slavery structures much more than
the prison or even more than Wacquants carceral continuum. For instance, Christina Sharpe argues that our very subjectivity is
indebted to, and born out of, the discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery. For Sharpe, engaging and analyzing a post-slavery
subjectivity means examining subjectivities constituted by trans-Atlantic slavery and connecting them to present (and past)
mundane horrors that arent acknowledged to be horrors.55 This is one of the main projects of black feminism, as exemplified by
Boggs engagement with the seemingly innocuous institutions of insurance, state bureaucracy, and the university.56 This project is
also central to Hortense Spillerss classic essay, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar book, where she

connects slavery to the life of the symbolic world. She writes: Even though the captive flesh/body
has been liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the
ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors
of captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor
historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject is
murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing
itself in endless disguise.57 Like Jackson and Shakur, Spillers argues that slavery ruptures the progress
of time. The ways meaning and value are institutionalized have been determined by the violence and
terror of slavery. Slavery is a death sentence enacted across generations, one that
changes name and shape as time progresses. Freedom presupposes and builds
on slavery so that post-slavery subjectivities are shaped by forms of power that resemble and
sometimes mimic power under slavery (force, terror, sexual violence, compulsion, torture) while they are also confined by the
post-emancipation technologies of consent, reason, will, and choice.58 Frank Wilderson summarizes this more expansive
understanding of the afterlife of slavery: The

imaginary of the state and civil society is

parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave no world.59 According to
Wilderson, slavery connotes an ontological (not experiential) status for blackness, one that is shaped not by
exploitation and alienation, but by accumulation and fungibility (the condition of being owned and traded.).60 In this way,
slavery does not lay dormant in the past, but became attached to the political ontology of blackness .61 What is most
crucial for my project on the relationship between the afterlife of slavery and neoliberalism is that as freedom navigated the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was not innocent and it did not come alone. Something from
the past held on to freedom as it maneuvered time and space. Freedom
was possessed by its opposite, a ghost wished away by liberal thought that did not so easily disappear. In the 1970s, when the market
produced the freedom of capital mobility, individuality, and choice, and the prison manufactured the freedom of safety and security,
the spirit of slavery dictated the movements and meanings of that freedom. Indeed, the

spirit of slavery lives on in more

shade of tree-lined suburban streets, in
definitions and measures of value, in the prosperity and health of
some, and in the hail of the police as one walks down the street. It
guides bullets and bombs, makes visible what we see, and vanishes
what is right in front of us. It is laced in the cement and steel of the
ways than one can imagine: in the

prison, solidified in dreams of liberation, and embedded in psychic

life. Although it is sometimes recognizable, it also lives on in what we do not know and cannot remember in the lives erased,
expunged, ended or that were simply never recorded to begin with. Whether it comes as spectacle or something one cannot see or
feel, it is always there. The spirit of slavery does more then meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and
animated contemporary formations of power. Possession names the ways that the operations of corporate, state, individual, and
institutional bodies are sometimes beyond the self-possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control, something that may
feel like nothing even as it compels movement, motivates ideology, and drives the organization of life and death. In this way, slavery

The past
Morrison writes, All of it is

is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the roomrather, its spirit animates the architecture of the house as a whole.

does not merely haunt the present; it composes the present . As Toni
now, it is always now.62

Humanism link
Their focus on equality and a common strand of humanity ignores that blacks dont meet under
the category of human turns case

Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms, NN

I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the
disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first,
as White Supremacist event, from which one then embarks upon a demonstration of intent, or
racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed . If the position of the Black
is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other
words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by marxism and/or
psychoanalysis, then his/her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on
the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from
the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black peoples
staunchest allies, and in some of the most radical films. Herenot in restrictive policy,
unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarshipis where the Settler/Masters
sinews are most resilient

Feminism link

Traditional conceptions of feminism and general equality ignore the

specificity of blackness their liberty for all is not inclusive of the black
positionality which dooms their movement to failure
Robtheidealist 14, Robtheidealist is the creater of the website OrchestratedPulse, a social justice
blog and forum where he writes about personal experience along with reviews of popular equality works,
Feminism Aint For Black Folks: Why My Mama Had It Right All Along,
http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/03/feminism-black/, NN

My mom came of age in the late 60s as a Black woman committed to social change. She had the
afro, she read all the radical books, and she hit the streets when the time called for it. She is and
always has been down for the cause. My mother taught me that struggles for justice had to be
lived, and not just discussed or intellectualized. True to form, she dedicated her life to creating
programs and services that protected and uplifted Black families, particularly Black women and
children. But, dont call her a feminist. I was a teenager and fresh off of my first
year in college. I came home praising feminism and claiming that we
should all incorporate it into our worldviews. My mother balked at
that suggestion, and explained that the ideology was not useful for
truly understanding how systemic oppression functioned,
particularly as it related to Black people. At the time, I thought she was just out
of touch; yet, as I got older, I began to realize just how right she was to be critical of conventional
articulations of feminism. What Beyonc Can Tell Us About Conventional Feminism
Feminism is a complex web of ideologies and histories, but lets turn to a real authority on the
issue, Beyonc, for some clarity on how to define conventional feminism. On her most recent
album, Beyonc used a quote from a TED talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The
statement ends with the following definition, Feminist: the person who believes in the social,
political and economic equality of the sexes. In another interview Adichie suggests that
feminism has an even broader definition, saying, it is about being a woman who likes and stands
up for other women. Although there are multiple definitions of feminism, Adichie is a bit of a
popular figure among feminists, particularly Black feminists, and so her words are significant.
In many discussions, conventional feminism is not so much an analysis of patriarchy as it is an
emphasis on equality of the sexes and a sense of camaraderie between women. This broad and
vague definition allows it to operate as a big tent ideology that absorbs any and every idea and
person dealing with women and gender. Even when women like my mother object to its norms
and say I am not a feminist, they are still viewed as feminist because their work relates to
women in some way. What makes this dynamic so troubling for me is that I genuinely want to
understand patriarchy and its impact on our society. But what happens if I dont see myself in
feminist articulations of patriarchy? Should I fight for inclusion in a set of ideas that were not
designed with me in mind? As I struggle to find ways of theorizing my own multidimensional
existence as a Black person in the United States, like my mother, I find myself drifting
further and further away from conventional feminism even Black
feminism. Dont get me wrong, I believe that theres a system called gender. It subjugates
people by first forcing them into gender identities, and then creating a hierarchy of those
identities. Weve seen this process in the form of colonialism, which forced European gender
concepts onto the colonized people, thus stripping them of their pre-colonial systems of
differentiation. (See Oyeonke Oyewumis work) More broadly, the entire system of gender is
founded and maintained by violence and brutality, which is of course disproportionately

experienced by those at the margins. We typically understand the margins to be made up of

women, queer folks, and trans people; yet, Black men have a special relationship to the gender
hierarchy as well. Letting White Women Off the Hook Contrary to the Declaration of
Independence words, not all men are created equal. As a Black male, I too am one of
the hunted. Though I have a degree of male power under the patriarchal superstructure, and
can use that power to do violence against women (most likely Black/Brown women), I do not
have the same systemic power and cultural authority of a White male. Its not as simple
as men always being privileged and women always being oppressed.
If we want to talk about patriarchy in the United States, then we
have to talk about the role that White women played/play in
preserving the White patriarchal system at the expense of non-White
women AND men. Under slavery, Black men were raped by White men AND White
women (see Thomas Fosters work). During the period of mob lynching, White women were
instrumental in getting Black men killedoften with the mens genitals being mutilated (see Ida
B. Wells work). There were numerous White women that used women-only Ku Klux Klan
groups as key sites of feminist work and used the Klan to push the womens agenda, which
demonstrates that theres nothing inherently liberating in the nebulous notion of equality of the
sexes (see Kathleen Blees work). Those are just a few examples of common and systemic
occurrences that muddy the waters a bit, but these realities are almost never
discussed in most feminist spaces even Black feminist circles. So yes,
as a Black man in the United States, I of course benefit from the male supremacy superstructure.
However, historically speaking, that structure wasnt created for the benefit of Black men, and I
dont fully possess the power of masculinitywhich was created by and for White males. In
fact, Gail Dines argues the elevation and mythification of white masculinity relies on the
debasement of black men as sexual savages, Uncle Toms, and half-wits such as Stepin Fetchit.
Im being subjugated by the very dynamic that grants me cursory benefits. Black Male
Privilege? Yet, when I look at most of our conversations on feminism, the reality of Black male
subjugation is largely ignored. In fact, recent years have seen a rise in the idea of Black male
privilege, particularly among Black feminists. In one popular black male privilege checklist, the
writer declares, I will make significantly more money as a professional athlete than members of
the opposite sex will. Is this discrepancy a result of something that Black men have historically
or collectively done or is it just a function of the broader patriarchal superstructure? Remember,
these are the same leagues that wouldnt let Black men play, and even after integration these same
leagues continued to relegate Black men to less prestigious (and less well-paid) positions. Black
men didnt found these leagues, and they are almost completely locked out of ownership (with a
handful of exceptions). White men founded and control these leagues, and moreover, White men
are their target audience and ideal consumer. So while Black men benefit from the sexual
inequality in sports, they didnt create it and they dont control the leagues that practice it.
Receiving a benefit is not the same as possessing the power.
Additionally, theres a difference between situational power and systemic power; privilege is
systemic, not situational. The Black Male Privilege Checklist fails to understand this reality. For
example, light skinned Brown folks get advantages over darker people, but thats not light skin
privilege or white privilege thats White supremacy. The same can be said of Black mens
relationship to patriarchy. You can talk about Black men benefiting from patriarchy, and even
how we perpetuate it, but you cant say that we control it. Where Do I Go From Here?
Patriarchy exists, and it does provide benefits to those who are gendered as male, but there is
much more to the story. Im looking for a critical conceptualization of patriarchy. Where did

patriarchy come from? What are its components? Is it universal? If patriarchy is a social
construct, how and when was it imposed? Is gender, which is the building block of patriarchy, a
White supremacist construct? If patriarchy is, in part, defined by sexualized violence, what is its
connection to Stop & Frisk and the broader prison system two sites of pervasive sexual
assault impacting all genders, but disproportionately plaguing Black and Brown men? How do
experiences under patriarchy impact the ways that non-White men interact with non-White
women and other non-White genders? Is the chauvinism and sexual violence that Black and
Brown women (and other genders) experience at the hands of Black and Brown men a sign of
privilege, or a case of transference? Laverne Cox begins to explore some of these more murky
aspects of gender oppression and their connection to White supremacy as she gives a talk about
anti-trans harassment and violence. Rather than simply moralizing the issue, and saying that her
Black and Brown tormentors are merely morally wretched, she connects their behavior to the
broader systems of powersystems that those Black and Brown people dont actually control.
Theres so much more that I want to explore, but Im not finding room for those questions in most
conventional feminist spaces. When I look to conventional Black feminism, I still cant find
room. Ive found the work of Greg Thomas and Oyeronke Oyewumi on Africa, colonialism, and
gender to be particularly insightful but I wouldnt say that it is feminist. Tommy Curry has
been an indispensable resource as well. Also, Lucy Delaps The Woman Question and the
Origins of Feminism, which is a nuanced and history-rich version of feminism, has been an
invaluable resource for helping me to identify the history and pre-history of European feminism.
Feminism is an ideology, and it can be a useful one for framing
some conversations, but its not the end all be all and its not the only way
to describe patriarchys impact on our world. So, Im going to trust my mothers insight and look
for ways of theorizing the world that go beyond conventional feminism; in fact, these worldviews
may not be feminist at all. I know that this is not a popular perspective, and that it may rub some
people the wrong way. However, I remain thoroughly convinced that the further we drift away
from Lean In, debates about whether women can have it all, Black male privilege, and
other conventional articulations of feminism and towards a robust critique of patriarchy and its
special relationship to White supremacy (colonialism, imperialism, and racism) the better off
well be.

White feminism doesnt discomfort subject positions rather it reifies white

supremacy and structures of power white bodies only care about their own
equality and ignore the uniqueness of black suffering
Obadina 14, Shaki Obadina is a politics student at Hull University along with also being a prominent
social justice writer on the concepts of black feminism and inequality on her website BlackFeministKilljoy,
WHY I AM NOT PRAISING EMMA WATSONS SPEECH,
http://blackfeministkilljoy.tumblr.com/post/98266792208/why-i-am-not-praising-emma-watsons-speech,
NN

I am going to be fairly honest Emma Watson has never really interested me. I am not a Harry
Potter fan and I havent seen much of her work as an actress. But I know deep down that the main
reason why I have never really cared for Emma Watson is because she represents everything that
I am not. I am not a white heterosexual middle class woman whose clean cut is adored by the
public and the media and is what society wants me to be. Instead I am a poor black woman from
Peckham who is solely just seen ghetto, ratchet and a thot. I am highly aware of 4chan
threatening to leak nude photos of her because of her speech which I honestly believe is cruel and
extremely misogynistic. However, I will not ignore the fact that the reason

why feminists especially white feminists and the media are not
criticising the problematic nature of her speech is because of her
high power status as a white heterosexual cis middle class. Lack of
intersectionality Emma Watson states when she researched the word feminism and she
noticed it has become unpopular. According to Emma Watson she is among the ranks of women
whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive.
In this case Emma Watson is extremely wrong. The idea of feminism being
associated with hating men is soley rooted in lesbophobia. How many times have you heard you
are a feminist oh shit you must be a lesbian and you totes hate men lmao from a random
dickhead when you tell them you are feminist? Emma Watson speech continues to
erase women who are more marginalised by her by simply not
acknowledging that is black women who are constantly trapped in
the one dimensional racist trope of being as a strong angry black
woman. We have already seen how detrimental this trope is with the New York Times article
about Shonda Rhimes. It is the strong angry black woman trope that silences us and dismisses our
cries when we are sick and tired of everything that is a result of our double oppression. What
about the Men? Feminism What About the Men feminism is a current trend within
white/mainstream feminism. This type of feminism advocates that women should make spaces
for men in feminism and should essentially pander to men. I strongly disagree with What About
the Men feminism not only is this idea extremely patriarchal and kyrichal but as a black woman
I do not see why I have to make the space for men especially for white cis heterosexual men
when their spaces are virtually everywhere in all aspects in society. Black women have been
constantly marginalized and not accepted in the feminist movement from the very beginning.
Instead of white feminists trying to remove the overt racism in the feminist movement, creating
spaces for black women and stop using intersectionality as a buzzword they would rather focus
on praising male feminists and creating space for men. Emma Watson has been guilty of
dismissing Beyonces feminism because it pays too much attention to men even though that is
not the case and it is actually HER feminism that is male centric. This all just shows how
feminism continues to fonder anti-blackness and further alienate
black women. Malcom X was asked by a journalist when he founded the Organization of
Afro-American Unity if white people were allowed to join. Malcom X simply replied that white
people were not allowed to join the organisation because as black people we had to sort out
detrimental impacts that white supremacy has made on black people. The same rhetoric goes for
feminism. Men should use their privileged position to make society accessible for women it
shouldnt be the other way around. So much Westernisation Let us all remember that this
speech and the HeForShe campaign is for the United Nations. The UN (like IMF and WTO)
promote the strong fundamental idea that the West is civilised and any country that is not Western
is deemed as uncivilised, savage and barbaric. These racist and imperialistic stereotypes of the
Global South is inherently linked with the idea that people of colour in the Global South need to
be saved and most importantly saved by white Westerns. The white saviour complex
allows white Westerners to get away with not taking responsibility
for the fact colonialism is the main reason why the Global South is
suffering. Emma Watsons speech and campaign does not acknowledge the fact it is
capitalism and neo liberal policies that has constantly harmed women of colour in the Global
South rather than benefited them. For instance in the past the use of modernization theories in
development polices actually created gender inequality and contributed to the oppression women
in the Global South face today. Emma Watson does not even pay any respect to

African feminists and African women who have continued to fight for
their own liberation which is deeply rooted in black womanhood
livelehood. At the end of the day it was African Women in the Congo who had to fight against
modernisation theories destroying their agricultural livle. Why didnt she use her privilege and
platform as a celebrity to reaffirm African women and African feminists who have fought for
their liberation rather than Hilary Clinton? I am so done with this type of feminism getting
praised all the time. I am not here to educate/pander to men or let white feminists dismiss me and
other black womens feminism simply for the fact we are black. The more this continues to go on
the more I think I should follow down the path of womanism because at least my struggle to exist
in a white supremacist, kyriarchal and capitalist society with be fully understood and I will be
accepted with open arms.

Islamophobia link

The affirmative is the perfect example of #AllLivesMatter their focus on

contingent violence of Muslim oppression puts anti-blackness as an
afterthought their erasure of this ontological condition is inexcusable the
combination of struggles through the perm is genocide
Qalander 15, Mast Qalander is a Pakistani Muslim who advocates anti-racist, anti-colonial feminism.
She has published multiple books and essays/articles on the matters of social justice. WHY IM NOT
DOWN WITH #MUSLIMLIVESMATTER, https://muslimreverie.wordpress.com/tag/anti-black-racismin-the-muslim-community/ NN

I dont have a twitter account, but Im well aware of how hashtags can be used as tools to express
solidarity, speak out, and mobilize against injustice. Almost immediately after the Chapel Hill
murders, I noticed a lot of Muslims on Facebook using the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter. It was
heartbreaking to hear the news and I understood the grief Muslims were expressing online.
However, I cringed when I saw the hashtag because I recalled all of the critiques of
#AllLivesMatter, which was used online and in activist rallies/spaces as a response to
#BlackLivesMatter. Though #MuslimLivesMatter is not exactly the same as #AllLivesMatter, it
still co-opts the movement against police brutality and racism that
systematically targets, terrorizes, and devalues black people. It
became more unsettling when I watched South Asian, Arab, white, and other non-black Muslims
posting up both #MuslimLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. While there are many people who
mean well when they post these hashtags, I still see a disturbing amount of people getting very
defensive (and even make racist remarks) when they are informed about how these hashtags coopt and appropriate #BlackLivesMatter (and this is yet another example of how we cannot make
it about peoples intentions). When they persist in posting these hashtags, it seems like they are
doing it out of defiance against #BlackLivesMatter, as if the latter is ethnocentric and
supposedly doesnt value the lives of non-black people. The persistence and refusal
to listen also reflects the anti-blackness that exists in our
communities. I know this is an issue that needs to be addressed sensitively. We know the
lives of brown Muslims are not valued in this society and I know there are lot of Muslims who
are shaken up or feel triggered after the brutal murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and
Razan Abu-Salha. Hashtags may seem trivial to some, but they become more than hashtags when
we see them used to organize protests and movements. #BlackLivesMatter was created by three
self-identified Black queer women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. As Garza
writes: Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention
in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally
targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks contributions
to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly
oppression [] When we deploy All Lives Matter as to correct an
intervention specifically created to address anti-blackness,, we lose
the ways in which the state apparatus has built a program of
genocide and repression mostly on the backs of Black people
beginning with the theft of millions of people for free laborand then adapted it to control,
murder, and profit off of other communities of color and immigrant communities. We perpetuate
a level of White supremacist domination by reproducing a tired trope that we are all the same,
rather than acknowledging that non-Black oppressed people in this country are both impacted by
racism and domination, and simultaneously, BENEFIT from anti-black racism. When you

drop Black from the equation of whose lives matter, and then fail
to acknowledge it came from somewhere, you further a legacy of
erasing Black lives and Black contributions from our movement
legacy. And consider whether or not when dropping the Black you are, intentionally or
unintentionally, erasing Black folks from the conversation or homogenizing very different
experiences. The legacy and prevalence of anti-Black racism and hetero-patriarchy is a lynch pin
holding together this unsustainable economy. And thats not an accidental analogy. There are
excellent critiques that I will quote and share below about #MuslimLivesMatter (because I
believe they do a better job at explaining the problems of this hashtag), but Ill just share a few
thoughts here. Yes, the lives of Muslims are not valued in white supremacist capitalist
heteropatriarchy. We know how the media and Hollywood has demonized Muslims and Islam for
a very long time. We know that Islamophobia isnt something that only started after 9/11, but
existed well before that. We know how the massacres against Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and
Pakistanis show us how brown people are not seen as human beings, especially if they are
Muslim. At the same time, we also cannot deny that when we talk about
Islamophobia, it is often centered on the experiences of Arab and
South Asian men. African/black Muslim men and women are
frequently left out of the narrative, marginalized in mosques,
otherized, and vilified by Arab, South Asian, white, and other nonblack Muslims. Anti-black racism is global. We cannot be preaching Prophet
Muhammad (peace be upon him) or the Qurans teachings about diversity and how no one is
superior to another person on the basis of race if we are not practicing it in the community. Yeah,
well hear Arab, South Asian, and white imams quote Malcolm X whenever it is convenient or
boast about Muhammad Ali, but then theyll marginalize black Muslims or make racist remarks
about the black people (Muslim and non-Muslim) in their neighborhood. There is also a
colorblind narrative that accompanies the sermons about Malcolm X. I remember a white imam
in one of my local mosques giving a speech about how Malcolm used to be a racist black
supremacist until he went for Hajj and started to accept all Muslims (he liked to emphasize on
how Malcolm started to accept white people). The conclusion the imam drew from this was that
Islam advocates colorblindness or that race doesnt exist in Islam. This narrative not only
ignores Malcolms post-Hajj speeches against white supremacy, imperialism, and the western
power structure, but also erases his blackness (side note: Ill be writing a post one of these days
on how religious and community leaders, especially those in the west, use Islam to silence antiracism). Well hear non-black Muslims speak highly of Hazrat Bilal (peace be upon him), the
Abyssinian companion of the Prophet, and how he was chosen specifically by the Prophet to be
Islams first muezzin. Well hear them talk about how beautiful his voice must have been and how
he was one of the most trusted companions of the Prophet. Well also hear talk about how Islam
doesnt tolerate racism and point to Hazrat Bilal as proof. Yet, when it comes to the way we treat
black people or talk about black people, whether Muslim or not, there is no denying that antiblack racism exists and needs to be actively addressed and challenged. Well still hear Arab,
South Asian, white, and other non-black Muslims use the n-word (and even argue that they can
reclaim the term) and use derogatory, anti-black words in Arabic, Urdu/Hindi, and other
languages. When two Somali Muslims, Mustafa Mattan and Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, were
recently murdered (Mattan was murdered a day before the Chapel Hill murders), we didnt see
the same outrage from Muslims in North America nor did we see the start of Muslim Lives
Matter. It was necessary and important that Muslims spoke out against the murders of Deah,
Yusor, and Razan, so I am by no means saying that anything was wrong with this. The only thing

that is wrong is how non-black Muslims tend to devalue the lives of black Muslims and nonMuslims. Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein was 15 years-old and deliberately hit by an SUV that had a
message reading Islam is worse than Ebola on the rear-view mirror. The Islamophobia and antiMuslim violence was frighteningly explicit in this case, but why wasnt there a national outcry
about his murder from Muslim communities and national organizations? As Khaled A. Beydoun
and Margari Hill recently wrote in their article, The Colour of Muslim Mourning: The curious
case of Mustafa Mattan is as much a story of intra-racial division and anti-black racism within the
Muslim population as it is a narrative about the neglected death of a young man seeking a better
life far from home The outpouring of support and eulogies that followed their deaths revealed
that Deah, Yusor and Razan were, in life and in death, archetypes of young, Muslim Americans.
Lives neglected by the media, but ones that mattered greatly for Muslims inside and outside of
the US. [] Despite a few vocal critics, Mattans erasure in the discussion of Islamophobia in
North America is evident. The exclusion of Mattan and Sheikh-Hussein perpetuates a harmful
hierarchy that privileges Arab narratives and excludes black/African Muslims. This racial
stratification relegating black Muslim lives is evident as much in death as it is in life. In order to
understand the critiques of #MuslimLivesMatter, we need to acknowledge that anti-black racism
exists in our communities. We also need to understand that these critiques
are more than just about hashtags. Because #BlackLivesMatter is
not just a hashtag, it represents a movement. We can create our
own hashtag and call for justice and solidarity for all Muslims
without co-opting, appropriating, and/or stepping upon the rights of
other communities. #JusticeForMuslims and #OurThreeWinners (the latter was started by
the victims family) should be used instead. Below is an excerpt from Anas Whites excellent
article, A Black Muslim Response To #MuslimLivesMatter: #BlackLivesMatter began as a
statement to an establishment an overall system if you will, declaring the seeming unrecognized
value of black lives. It continues to hold that same meaning, even as it moves to become an
expression of the movement itself. A movement against deep rooted systemic racism, high rates
of police brutality, extra-judicial executions, media smearing and vitriol, and the failure of the
justice system to actually hold anyone accountable for dead black men, except dead black men. It
is important to remember, that #BlackLivesMatter was not born of an
occurrence, but of an atmosphere wrought with repeat occurrence.
[] A 12 year old black boy was shot and killed for playing with a BB gun, his sister then
handcuffed to watch him bleed. A black father was killed in a Walmart, holding a toy gun sold at
that very Walmart, in a state where it is legal to carry guns. A black father was shot in the back,
while handcuffed. A black father was essentially choked to death in high definition. A black
protest was met with a para-military, and national guard troops. A black woman was shot seeking
help. A black man was literally lynched. Where were you then? My respect to every single one of
you that ever attended a protest, and to every Imam that ever gave mention, but I mean this on a
deeper level. Where was the Muslim community in response to these egregious civil rights
violations? Where is the Muslim community in solidarity with a movement against these civil,
and even human rights issues? And an excerpt from Sabahs article, Stop Using
#MuslimLivesMatter: #BlackLivesMatter represents an entire movement and its history. Its
not just a hashtag, its a powerful outcry born from a racial injustice felt by a people. It cannot,
and should not, be molded to fit another peoples struggle. And solidarity, while important (and in
fact, essential), never involves co-opting another movement. [] There is obviously nothing
inherently wrong with saying that Muslim lives matter, but contextually, its being used parallel
to #BlackLivesMatter its meant to evoke the same concepts, using the same kind of language.

This appropriation of a movement is counterproductive and frankly

unfair to both the Black and Muslim communities. We should not be
blending together two complex, multifaceted issues for the sake of
convenience. Its a reductive move that simplifies both struggles, and it only contributes to
erasing the very real, very dangerous implications that Islamophobia specifically holds for
Muslims.

Lol Sachin, your affs racist A focus on Islamophobia without recognition of

anti-black violence within Arab communities reproduces white supremacy a
focus on how blackness exists as an antagonism is the key starting point to
eliminating Islamophobia
Chamseddine 14, Roqayah Chamseddine is a staff writer for Alakhbar, an online journal that writes
on violence and inequality among Muslim communities, Beyond "conversations:" confronting antiBlackness among Arab-Americans, http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/20159, NN

When discussing anti-Black racism amongst Arab-Americans one often finds themselves
immersed in reductionism, apologetics and ponderous efforts to incapacitate any discourse at all
related to the subject. For some, the very idea that anti-Black racism exists not
only abroad but within Arab-American communities brings with it a
wave of humiliation which rapidly creeps over them, while for others this
subject induces a mixture of outright denial peppered with unashamed bouts of acrimony. This
issue is one that demands a much more dynamic and vigorous response, and it is about time we
do more than have a conversation about a worrisome subject that continues to generate immense
trauma for its victims. As explained in Dancing on Live Embers: Challenging Racism in
Organizations, by Tina Lopez and Barb Thomas, institutional racism stems from a network of
structures, practices and policies which construct advantages for white people and oppression,
disadvantage and discrimination for racialized people, this includes specific practices and laws
which enforce segregation in housing, employment and education and the policies and procedures
work to marginalize and exclude people of color. Structural racism is the intersection of many
folds of institutional power so as to normalize and legitimize racism. It allows individuals to
practice racism unchecked. Arab-Americans, in relation to African-Americans,
have the advantage of benefiting from white supremacy and from
this network of structures regardless of whether or not they are
aware of this system and of its devastating consequences. Capitalism is
utterly incomprehensible without connecting it to the rise of race, racism, racial violence, white
supremacy, and racial colonialism." - Professor Reiland Rabaka Our communities must recognize
that the active convergence of racism, colonialism and capitalism is necessary to interpret the
historical context of societal inequality because, in the words of Reiland Rabaka, Professor of
African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the
University of Colorado, from his work on Black radical politics, Capitalism is utterly
incomprehensible without connecting it to the rise of race, racism, racial violence, white
supremacy, and racial colonialism" (Du Boiss Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the
Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory). Psychiatrist, and political radical Frantz Fanon, whose
philosophies continue to impact anti-racist and leftist movements, born in 1925 on what was then
a French colony on the Caribbean island of Martinique, discusses these crossings in chapter 5 of
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) in which he writes of what he calls the lived experience of the
black; the discovery of his blackness and the ever-present whiteness around him. In the
aforementioned chapter, Fanon continues to grapple with not only his identity as a black man but

the confluence of class, capitalism and colonialism and their effects on the colonized - from the
racialized political-economic nature of imperialism, including its push for civilizing regions of
the world and the creation of the other, to branches of capitalism which deny the very humanity
of said other. The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the
problem of Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes
exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that
is only accidentally white, writes Fanon in chapter 6 of Black Skin, White Masks (The
Negro and The Psychopathology); expounding upon the manner in which racism has been
institutionalized so as to not only continue but rationalize the subjugation of one group by
another. Fanons fiery response to racism and colonialism came by way of his masterpiece The
Wretched of The Earth (1961) - where we find colonialism there is capitalism, and where there is
capitalism there is racism and where these pieces intersect is where we discover the native robbed
of his economic, political and human rights. With this in mind, the observation of antiBlack racism amongst Arab-Americans should be viewed through a
lense that reaches far beyond the lowest tier, that of social
interactions; the language employed, including the use of
dehumanizing terms like abed (singular) and abeed (plural), this
reprehensible branding of Black persons as slaves, signifies an
alarming reinforcement of racist frameworks - before we challenge these
frameworks we must first admit that we are complicit in the demoralization and subjugation of
Black persons and communities, and that the extensive exploitation of these communities is
oftentimes denied or outright justified. Dawud Walid, the Executive Director of the Michigan
chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI), has been one of many
African-Americans bringing attention to pervasive anti-Blackness both online and on the ground,
demanding that the use of the word abeed end and challenging Arab-Americans to do more
than endlessly call for dialogue. This issue has been dealt with too passively for many years,
writes Walid. He goes on to note that Arab-Americans should take a more
aggressive stands against anti-Black racism. The romanticism surrounding
oppressed peoples is pervasive, especially amongst those involved in anti-racist work who, while
claiming to be allies, engage in increasingly dominant savior-esque fetishism. What comes after
recognizing the existence of racist structures and the identification of our own complicity is a
long but necessary course of action that entails working against these structures and the
tokenization that sometimes follows social justice organizations and activities. The romanticism
surrounding oppressed peoples is pervasive, especially amongst those involved in anti-racist work
who, while claiming to be allies, engage in increasingly dominant savior-esque fetishism and
thereby turn powerful opportunities to learn from and engage with marginalized communities into
narcissistic therapy sessions where their voices overwhelm and muffle the narratives of these
groups; those who tokenize these communities oftentimes come across as well-intentioned but
their actions are no less destructive. We are not giving a voice to the voiceless, as the tired adage
goes, because their voices surround us - in the words of Lilla Watson, Australian aboriginal artist,
activist and educator: If you have come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you
have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Terrorism link

The image of the terrorist portrays racial prejudice which ensures escalatory
violence
Miah 6, Malik Miah is a staff writer for The Prospect, Racist Undercurrents in the "War on Terror,
https://solidarity-us.org/node/166, NN

History teaches us that racism has a way of rising up and being used by the rulers to push back,
divide and advance anti-democratic objectives, even after wars and other adventures are stopped.
Unfortunately, many liberals and left activists dont pay enough attention to this aspect of the
Bush-Cheney attempt to rewrite the Constitution and impose U.S. will on the peoples of the
Middle East and world. The use of fear and warmongering has convinced
most Americans, including African Americans, that the ends justify
the means. The link between racism and the war on terrorism is
therefore generally downplayed or ignored. When Dick Cheney says the divide
between Republicans and Democrats is between the cut and run Democrats and the Bush
Administration, he always adds that the critics of their policies (that includes torture,
imprisonment for life and racial proofing) dont want to win the war on terrorism. Bush said
critics of his policy are enablers of terrorists. Racial profiling is tacitly
considered an acceptable part of conducting war. The mainstream media,
with few exceptions, most notably the editors of The New York Times, give Bush, Cheney and
their operatives a free pass on these issues. While some debate is taking place on the use of
torture and loss of habeas corpus, little is said about racial profiling. Even civil rights
leaders are mostly quiet. Why? Because no one wants to be labeled
as soft on fighting terrorism. If you look like an Iranian, an Afghani,
a South Asian (mainly a Pakistani) or worse an Arab, it is now okay
to racial profile to protect the country. Logic of Racial Profiling In my book,
racism is racism no matter how it is justified. It is a disgrace that the topic is so underground and
viewed as thats the way it is. The logic of racial profiling, however, is much more serious than
simply a few setbacks in our civil liberties. It opens the door to broader justifications to impose
more onerous blows to affirmative action programs, school desegregation, and fair housing and
employment rights for minorities. The fact that little is written about the issue by the mainstream
media shows how racism in the war on terrorism is considered acceptable. I tried to pull up
articles on the internet to see how many times racial profiling, or racism and terrorism, have been
written about. Amazingly, outside the left press, few critical articles or columns have appeared.
The majority of pieces in fact have been in defense of racial profiling as a necessary step in
todays world. The depth of the problem is seen in an article written in 2005 by an African
American Washington Post deputy editorial page editor in an op-ed piece entitled, You cant
fight terrorism with racism. (July 30, 2005). Regarding three op-ed pieces that had appeared in
the Post and The New York Times, Colbert King wrote: A New York Times op-ed piece by Paul
Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow [Its the Age of Terror: What Would You Do?] and a
Post column by Charles Krauthammer [Give Grandma a Pass; Politically Correct Screening
Wont catch Jihadists] endorsed the practice of using ethnicity, national origin and religion as
primary factors in deciding when police should regard as possible terroristsin other words,
racial profiling. A second Times column, on Thursday, by Haim Watzman [When You have to
Shoot First] argued that the London police officer who chased own and put seven bullets into the
head of a Brazilian electrician without asking him any questions or giving him any warning did
the right thing. Krauthammer, King noted, was quick to make clear that he wasnt talking about

classes of people who are obviously not suspects. Who are these classes of people? You can
guess. What is striking is that everything Colbert King wrote in 2005 remains true today. I know
first hand, as an airline employee, that most passengers accept the argument that it is better to err
on the side of racial profiling than to face unknown terror. If anything, most Americans, including
Blacks, make a distinction between their opposition to the war in Iraq and their support to using
racial profiling if necessary.

Ruse of Analogy link

The affirmative represents the ruse of analogy the comparison of other
identity groups to the ontological condition of blackness is not only incorrect
but also parasitic other identity groups maintain their history and their past
blackness is the door to no return focus on junior partners re-create antiblack violence
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms, NN

Thirty to forty years before the current milieu of multiculturalism, immigrants rights activism,
White womens liberation, and sweat shop struggles, Frantz Fanon found himself writing in a
post-WWII era fixated on the Jewish holocaust as the affective destination that made legible the
ensemble of questions that animated the political common sense of oppression. The holocaust
provided a natural metaphor through which ontologists in Fanons time, such as Sartre, worked
out a grammar through which the question, what does it mean to suffer, can be asked. The Jewish
Holocaust as natural metaphor continues to anchor many of todays meta-commentaries.
Giorgio Agambens meditations on the Muselmann, for example, allow him to claim Auschwitz
as: [S]omething so unprecedented that one tries to make it comprehensible by bringing it back to
categories that are both extreme and absolutely familiar: life and death, dignity and indignity.
Among these categories, the rue cipher of Auschwitz-the Muselmann, the core of the camp, he
whom no one wants to see, and who is inscribed in every testimony as lacuna wavers without
finding a definite position. (Remnants of Auschwitz 81) Agamben is not wrong, so much as he is
late. Auschwitz is not so unprecedented to one whose frame of reference is the Middle Passage,
followed by Native American genocide. In this way, Auschwitz would rank third or
fourth in a normative, as opposed to unprecedented, pattern.
Agamben goes on to sketch out the ensemble of questions that Churchill and Spillers have asked,
but he does so by deploying the Jewish Muselmann as the template of such questions, instead of
the Red Savage, or the Black Slave: In one case, [the Muselmann] appears as the non-living, as
the being whose life is not truly life; in the other, as he whose death cannot be called death, but
only the production of a corpseas the inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living
area. In both cases, what is called into question is the very humanity
of man, since man observes the fragmentation of his privileged tie
to what constitutes him as human, that is, the sacredness of death
and life. The Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is the human
that cannot be told apart from the inhuman. (82) In the historiography of intellectual thought,
Agambens widely cited template of the Muselmann is an elaboration of Sartres work. As
philosophers, they work both to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of widely accepted
political common sense which positions the German/Jewish relation as the sin-qua-non of a
structural antagonism, thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontologicaland not just
socialsignificance to the Jewish Holocaust. Fanon has no truck with all of this. He dismisses
the presumed antagonism between Germans and Jews by calling the Holocaust little family
quarrels (115), recasting with this single stroke the German/Jew encounter as a conflict rather
than an antagonism. Fanon returns the Jew to his/her rightful positiona position within civil
society animated by an ensemble of Human discontents. The Muselmann, then, can beseen as a
provisional moment within existential Whiteness, when Jews were subjected to
Blackness and Rednessand the explanatory power of the Muselmann can find its way

back to sociology, history, or political science where it more rightfully belongs. This is one of
several moments in Black Skin, White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between
social oppression and structural suffering, making it possible to
theorize the impossibility of a Black ontology (thus allowing us to meditate on
how the Black suffers) without being chained to the philosophical and rhetorical demands of
analogy, demands which the evidentiary register of social oppression (i.e., how many Jews died in
the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the Middle Passage) normally imposes upon such
meditations. The ruse of analogy erroneously locates the Black in the
worlda place where s/he has not been since the dawning of
Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of
analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blacknesss
grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of
being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil
society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas.
It is a mystification and an erasure because, whereas Masters may
share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as though
they have the same interests as Masters, their respective grammars
of suffering are irreconcilable.

Constitution link
Constitutionalism represents white over black slavery legal equality and
equal rights ignore that the courthouses themselves were built by black labor
Farley 5, Anthony P. Farley is an Associate Professor at Boston College Law School. J.D.,
Harvard Law School, Perfecting Slavery NN
In 1995, Missouri v. Jenkins ended the saga.79 With Missouri v. Jenkins we find the tradition of
all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.80 Missouri v.
Jenkins returns us to white-over-black, a place we never left; it is a perfect map of the
undiscovered country. As Dylan puts it, [t]hat long black cloud is coming down.81 The slave
argues for equal rights. The slave gives his product to the law. The slave fashions a prayer for
relief from white-over-black and gives it to the law. Robert Morris was the second black lawyer
in the United States. He was admitted to the practice of law in Suffolk County, Massachusetts in
1847. The following year he was enlisted by Benjamin Roberts and five-year old Sarah Roberts in
her effort to attain an education free of the colorline.82 The Boston School Committee separated
school children into black and white and assigned each to separate schools. Morris argued that
separation destroys equality and lost at trial. Morris then enlisted white abolitionist Charles
Sumner to argue the case on appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The two
filed their appeal together. Sumner used Morriss argument and lost. The slaves product, equal
rights, was filled with white-over-black and then returned as separate but equal.83 Separate or
together, equal or unequal, all of it is white-over-black in a system that is white-over-black. The
empty vessels of law are filled with the lived relations that we attempt to disavow. The empty
vessels of law are filled with white-over-black. The label on the vessel may say whatever it says
but its sum and substance will be white-over-black as surely as the Triangle Trade that gave the
whites of New England the leisure for all their town meetings followed the molasses-to-rumtoslaves formula. In Plessy, the majority and the dissent agreed about white-over-black. Justice
Harlan, dissenting, argued that the white race would forever remain the dominant race
in this country . . . if it . . . holds fast to principles of constitutional
liberty. Harlans dissent became Brown I and II. Fifty years after Brown, we see that the
white race is the dominant race in this country . . . in prestige, in achievements, in education, in
wealth and in power. Fifty years after Brown, there is no reason to doubt the truth of Justice
Harlans statement that the great heritage and the principles of constitutional liberty would
allow the the white race to continue to be the dominant race in this country for all
time.84 Equality of right, the thought-product of the slave, like any
commodity, gives us an uncanny reflection of the lived relations that
we disavow. Equality of right could not be thought except from the
position of the slave, the one who suffers. The slave would not suffer
if it were not the slave. The slave attempts to escape through
fantasies of right and equality and dreams a system of equal rights
into being. The slave does the dreamwork needed to make life look like death and death look
like life. The slave dreams of all the equations that are needed to balance the systems every
crisis. The slave builds the law rooms of the many mansions of the house of law. The slave, in
other words, is itself the author of Justice Harlans great heritage and principles of
constitutional liberty.85 The slave forges its own chains through its juridical strivings. The slave
builds the home for the future good will of the master.86 That is what its dream of equality of
right amounts to, a home for the future good will of the master. If the master of the future might
be good then the crisis of servile insurrection can be deferred again and again and again. But the

master cannot be anything other than the master, just as the slave cannot be anything but the
slave. There is a colorline or there is not. Without the dreamwork of the slave, the many crises of
the system of white-over-black blossom in revolution. The flames are wooed from their buds and
continue to unfold until the entire plantation system is gone. The servile insurrection continues
until it brings down the system of marks, the system of property, and the system of law. Slaves
are trained to not think this way. Slaves are trained to be objects. Slavery is death.

Death link
The affirmatives fear of death is equivalent to the fear of blackness black
bodies are always already dead and the incapacity of blackness to operate
within the codes of civil society means white futurity will always remain as the
dominant system its time to join the dead
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of sociology, Queer
Necropolitics, http://www.deanspade.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Saidiya Hartman has argued that the transatlantic slave trade constructed a notion of blackness
that is fundamentally fungible and criminal, making blackness permanently available for the 'full
enjoyment' of white people and making; black people always already guilty in the eyes of the
law, incapable of being violated (Hartman 1997). The civil and social death of black
people forms the basis on which white life and citizenship become
knowable, their compass and their shadow. Whiteness must be constantly
yoked to the future and victirnhood while blackness must be yoked
to death and pathology. The story of endangered white futurity and
dangerous black negativity - the sexual politics that motors
antiblackness - can be found on every channel. Lauren Berlant has
explored how the celebrated figure of the feminized white child at risk of racialized violence in
the post-Reagan years has been mobilized to justify claims to state protection and citizenship
(Berlant 1997). Joy James has written about how the widely accepted justification for lynching
as the sexual threat posed by black men to white women and their progeny (as well as the
erasure of sexual violence against black women) has been recalibrated in the contemporary
demonization and 'high-tech lynching' of black men in high-profile legal cases in which white
women have been raped O ames 1996). These are just a few of limitless versions of this same
narrative. Cue the gay remix! Gay and lesbian claims to imperilled domesticity, privacy, and
kinship (popular in earlier homophile organizing but renewed with a fervour since the 1990s)
illustrate the capaciousness of white supremacy to mutate these key 'founding' figures- now it is
the wounded white gay citizen who requires state inclusion and protection to ensure his
successful reproduction. These claims, remember, come amidst and in the wake of ongoing
efforts from the right wing to cathect gayness tq pathology, murder and non-reproductivity
(Bersani 1987: 197--222; Delany 1994; Sontag 1989)- qualities usually reserved for
blacknessvvith the emergence ofHIV I AIDS. A few illustrations of the powerful mobilization
of white futurity within contemporary gay and lesbian politics are useful. First, we point to the
widely popular 'It Gets Better' project, started by author Dan Savage and his husband Teny Miller
in response to a series of publicized suicides of queer youth, encouraging teens that life does
indeed improve. Thousands of people responded to their initial video by making their own videos
sharing this message of future improvement, and eventually over 22,000 videos were collected
on the 'It Gets Better' website, including ones created by gay and lesbian police officers and the
president of the US himself(Savage 2013). A book of essays from the project was released in
2011. In the original video, Savage and his husband, two white non-trans gay men, describe their
high school years where they faced bullying for being gay. They then describe how their lives got
better after high school because their natal families came to accept and include them, they met
each other and adopted a child. Savage shares a memmy of walking around Paris with their child
and Miller talks about their love of and accomplishments at snowboarding as a family. The two

earnestly address an audience of 12-l 7-ycar-old viewers, urging them that their lives will get
better after high school. Speaking about bullies and bigots, Savage states 'Once I got out of high
school, they couldn't touch me anymore.' The project illustrates how a form of gayness implicitly
linked to whiteness and upward mobility stakes its claim to the future. After all, for
whom will it get better? And what kind of better does it get? When we consider
this directive that life gets better against the backdrop of the
systemic imprisonment, police murder and state abandonment of
black people at every age, we can sec how it is white suffering that
this campaig11 aims to make legible as worthy of protection. Black
suffering, as Jared Sexton has articulated in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina (Sexton 2006), is
unspectacular, banal, self-induced, a cause for, if anything, shame or fascination, not redress.
Savage's assertion that his departure from high school protected him from the reach of
homophobic violence is certainly indicative of a white-owning class trajectory of matriculation.
What guarantees can be given to those who will remain in the grasp of foster care systems,
homeless shelters, psychiatric facilities, jails, prisons, and immigration detention centres,
regardless of their age? Savage's story generalizes a particular narrative in which white queers
can 'escape' homophobia by moving to gay enclaves in urban areas, a trajectory out of reach for
so many queer and trans people who will remain targets of policing and immigration
enforcement, even and perhaps especially in white gay neighbourhoods where they are read as
dangerom outsiders (Hanhardt 2008). The fantasy oflife 'getting better' imagines 'violence' as
individual acts that 'bad' people do to 'good' people who need protection and retribution from
state protectors (law enforcement, policymakers, administrators), rather than situating
bodily terror as an everyday aspect of a larger regime of structural
racialized and gendered violence congealed within practices of
criminalization, immigration ~nforcement, poverty,'and
medicalization targeted at black people at the population level - from
before birth until after death -- and most frequently exercised by government employees. It is not
a leap to see, then, how tills cultural politics of naturalizing the premature death of black people
produces a benevolent thrall for white gays and lesbians to adopt black children. White gay
and lesbian politics must remain silent on anti-black racism, must
position itself as anything but black, to keep its place in line for the
future.

Postmodernism link
The affirmative represents the view from nowhere white, postmodern
philosophy seeks universalist answers to problems that affect different bodies
in different ways the personal cannot be divorced from the theory and their
attempt to distance themselves from their subject position is a tactic of white
privilege
Yancy 5, George Yancy is a Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy
of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. Whiteness and the Return of
the Black Body, http://www.westga.edu/~mmcfar/George%20Yancy.htm, NN

I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a

profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body . Hence, I
write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure.
In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a
weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power.
The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory,
superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is best, or
so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white
philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of "us" without the
slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a
white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the
"whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to
speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here
only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure
of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power
expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials. (1998, 6) To theorize the Black body one must "turn to
the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1 It is important to note
that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique
whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive
modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the
social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection . In this paper, my objective is to
describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to
instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2
These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at selfconstruction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people. These

acts of self-construction, however, are

myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted,
"Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human
value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the bodyin this case, the Black bodyis

The body's
meaningwhether phenotypically white or blackits ontology, its modalities of aesthetic
performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation . The
capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis--vis white embodiment.

hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological
construction. "The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The

body is codified as this or that in

terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation
that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further
power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to
the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being
than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the

"Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists "its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is
fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits
certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular
historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of selfevidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something [End Page 216] fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of
particular social groups" (301). On this score, it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the
white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring
demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In other words, given the
three suppositions above, both the "Black body" and the "white body" lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to
strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their alleged objectivity. To have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze
and then to have that body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation. The experience presupposes an anti-Black lived
context, a context within which whiteness gets reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed.The late writer, actor, and activist
Ossie Davis recalls that at the age of six or seven two white police officers told him to get into their car. They took him down to the
precinct. They kept him there for an hour, laughing at him and eventually pouring cane syrup over his head. This only created the
opportunity for more laughter, as they looked upon the "silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment,
think of how the young Davis was returned to himself: "I am an object of white laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt
appeared to the white police officers in ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and
enjoyed their sadistic pleasure without blinking an eye. Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain the oppressed
[Blacks] to certain approved modes of visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype) and then gazes obsessively on the
spectacle he has created" (1998, 11). Davis notes that he "went along with the game of black emasculation, it seemed to come
naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the ritual was complete" (9). He was then sent home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis
knew at that early age, even without the words to articulate what he felt, that he had been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the
process of "niggerization." He notes: The culture had already told me what this was and what my reaction to this should be: not to be
surprised; to expect it; to accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply I was scarred or affected by that, but it was a part
of who I was. (9) Davis, in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who he was, that "niggerized" little Black boy, an
insignificant plaything within a system of ontological racial differences. This, however, is the trick of white ideology; it is to give the
appearance of fixity, where the "look of the white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the black
subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze" (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score, it is white bodies
that are deemed agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217] Black bodies according to their will. But it is no mystery; for "the
Negro is interpreted in the terms of the white man. White-man psychology is applied and it is no wonder that the result often shows
the Negro in a ludicrous light" (Braithwaite 1992, 36). While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors locking
as whites secure themselves from the "outside world," a trope rendering my Black body ostracized, different, unbelonging. This
outside world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are rejected, because they are deemed
suspicious, vile infestations of the (white) social body. The locks on the doors resound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already accompanied by nervous gestures, and eyes
that want to look, but are hesitant to do so. The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition.
The clicks begin to function as coded sounds, reminding me that I am dangerous; the sounds create boundaries, separating the white
civilized from the dark savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they inscribe me, they
materialize my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish a form of recognition that
creates a space of trust and liminality, there are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to become their Black monster, their
bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise. You've just been carjacked by a ghost, a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get the
fuck out of the car." I have endured white women clutching their purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of my
approaching Black body. It is during such moments that my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of
my body as confiscated. Davis too had the meaning of his young Black body stolen. The surpluses being gained by the whites in each
case are not economic. Rather, it is through existential exploitation that the surpluses extracted can be said to be ontological
"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry 1997, 33). When I was about
seventeen or eighteen, my

white math teacher initiated such an invasion, pulling it off with complete
calm and presumably self-transparency. Given the historical construction of whiteness as the
norm, his own "raced" subject position was rendered invisible . After all, he lived in the real world, the world of
the serious man, where values are believed anterior to their existential founding. As I recall, we were discussing my plans for the
future. I told him that I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this choice, spending a great deal of time reading about the
requirements involved in becoming a pilot, how one would have to accumulate a certain number of flying hours. I also read about the
dynamics of lift and drag that affect a plane in flight. After no doubt taking note of my firm commitment,

he looked at me and
implied that I should be realistic (a code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals. He said
that I should become a carpenter or a bricklayer. I was exposing myself, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, and he returned
me to myself as something [End Page 218] that I did not recognize. I had no intentions of being a carpenter or a bricklayer (or a janitor
or elevator operator for that matter).

State link
State Involvement and federal equality perpetuates white supremacy, shifts
attention away from gratuitous violence
Martinot and Sexton 3, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, The
Avant-Garde of White Supremacy, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 6-20-15, NN

The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing to the instability of white supremacy, the social structures of whiteness must ever be re-secured in an obsessive

The process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state,
and the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that sought to
shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the states absorption and co-optation of that
opposition for the reconstruction of the white social order has been reoccurring before our very
eyes. White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the social
paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialisation that it calls the
maintenance of order, all of which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law,
religion, the two-party system become the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalise throughout the social field . It is not simply
by understanding the forms of state violence that the structures of hyper-injustice and their excess
of hegemony will be addressed. If they foster policing as their paradigm including imprisonment, police occupations, commodified governmental
fashion.

operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalisation of race as their version of social order then to merely catalogue these institutional forms marks the moment at which

, we have to understand the state

and its order as a mode of anti-production that seeks precisely to cancel understanding through its
own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice;however, the opposite of hyper-injustice is not
justice. The existence of hyperinjustice implies that neither a consciousness of injustice nor the
possibility of justice any longer applies. Justice as such is incommensurable with and wholly exterior to the relation between ordinary social
existence and the ethic of impunity including the modes of gratuitous violence that it fosters. The pervasiveness of
understanding stops. To pretend to understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding. Instead

state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where we must begin our theorising. Though state practices create and
reproduce the subjects,discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of
political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary. This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical leftist politics

The problem here is how to dwell

on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the
state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes
with de-centred agency, how the subjects of state authority its agents, citizens, and captives
are produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence
that presuppose (and close off) the question of structure, its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness.

Tokoloshe link
Hey Tokoloshe, I see you!
Wilderson 8, Frank B. Wilderson is a professor of sociology and film study at US Irvine, Incognegro:
A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid NN (I had to cut this from the physical book, so if theres a missing
letter or misspelled words, I sincerely apologize)

This, of course, is not entirely true, for Stimelas people all knew how the tokoloshes of laissezfaire the faces in the files that Trevor spread on the bed were hard at work. Theyd been
working invisibly since the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Eleven months later,
in April 1993, when Chris Hani was assassinated, the tokoloshes of laissez-faire would emerge
from their hovels in the knotty snarl of tree rots and say, Now, yes, now, is the time of the trolls.
Leading ethnographers of trolls, specializing in tokologeology, have concluded that there are an
estimated six hundred fifty-eight tokoloshes residing under rocks, in tree trunks, and beneath the
beds of unsuspecting victims throughout South Africa. The tokoloshe is a small creature that
stands above knee high to an adult. Some have very long hair, like monkeys; others have thick
leathery skin, like trolls. Their eyes are narrow and black and they have small ears. According
to a renowned tokologeologist. Their long pensis look like tails and can be slung over their
shoulders when running or walking briskly. Tokoloshes make themselves invisible and go into
houses to harm people in their sleep or put poison in their food. Many people put their beds on
bricks so that the tokoloshe cant catch them in their sleep. It might be a good idea when you
check into your hotel to ask if they can give you four bricks just to be safe. If you sneak up
on a tokoloshe, He will put a magic stone into his mouth and disappear. He is also very scared of
dogs, mousetraps and chameleons. Normally, if you are haunted by a tokoloshe, your sangoma
can cast a spell for you, And if the tokoloshe walks into it he will become paralyzed and visible.
But if you shout Hey, tokoloshe, I see you! then the spell will be broken and he will disappear.
But the laissez-faire tokoloshes, the one in our files, were no ordinary tokoloshes. They were not
knee high trolls with leathery faces who snorted and grunted as they rose up from beneath the
earth to make mischief. They did not materialize under some unlucky persons bed and nibble on
his toes in the middle of the night. They did not make dishes fly about the room and crash against
the walls. They did not open doors when you closed them or close them when you opened them.
They had no muti that made you itch or pull your hair out. We could have handled that. We
wouldnt have needed a safe house in Hillbrow to snort through their policy papers, their
academic work, or the notes we had stolen from their dust bins since most tokoloshes dont
write. We wouldnt have needed a safe house in Hillbrow to study their movements and mount
their photographs on the wall, since most tokoloshes cant be seen. We wouldnt have needed to
bug their offices, bribe their secretaries to eavesdrop on their meetings, or send operatives to
monitor their classes-since most tokoloshes are seldom heard and cannot be recorded. The
tokoloshes of laissez-faire were not tiny black creatures with gravel in their vocal chord, but
grown men and women of average height though some seemed tall and imposing like Charles
van Onselen, the president of the academic senate, or Robert Charlton, the vice-chancellor of the
university. Others seemed downright short, bespeckled, and sad, like Etiienne Mureinink with his
sharp, pointed, downward nose, a small and timid creature, whats known in Afrikaans as a bang
worse (scared kitten); Mureinik, the lonely law professor who just wanted the Africans to love
him. Some were women. Like Dean Elizabeth Rankin and professor June Sinclair, a law professor
of some renown who held a Wits cabinet post one step down the food chain from Robert
Charlton. I am not at all convinced that any of them had long tokoloshe penises-certainly not long
enough to sling over their shoulders when they ran or walked briskly; though I must confess that

in the five years in which I lived there, I did not actually see them running or walking briskly.
June Sinclair didnt curry favor with Mandelas people. Unlike Mureinik, she craved no feckless
fawning from young Africans. No, there were not run of the mill tokoloshes. They lived in the
suburbs, not in trees or under rocks. They dined at the Parktonian Hotel and not on the toes of
children, for such delicacies as tiny tots toes were not on the menu at the Parktonian Hotel. They
vacationed in Europe. They dressed for success. And they were English not Afrikaners. The
tokoloshes of laissez-faire were well-talcumed and well-deodorized little tokoloshes. You could
not smell them coming. But oh, the stench when theyd gone. Like traditional tokoloshes, they
made weird noises when they spoke (they called this gargling editorials, policy papers,
scholarly articles, and memorandums of understanding, compromise, and reconciliation).
And like other tokoloshes they wreaked havoc from the inside out and they vanished into thin air
when you raised a broom to sweep them away or a fist to strike them down. They made
poor targets, for they always said they wanted what you wanted, or
what you would know you wanted if only you could want what they
wanted, for example. They were all for Black participation within the
existing paradigm-which seemed so reasonable that the paradigm
itself could not be put on the table for critique and dismantling. And
unlike normal tokoloshes who screamed and yelled and ran away in
the night, the tokoloshes of laissez-faire were always willing to
listen. They could listen for hours. They could listen for days. They could spend a
lifetime listening. They liked to organize listening sessions, like university transformation
forums that would listen for the next ten years and never transform the university-never
devolve power to the masses. Their favorite word was stakeholder. Everyone was a
stakeholder which meant nothing was ever at stake. Their second favorite word was process.
The process of negotiations had to be free of intimidation (their third favorite word), free from
mass action, and from civil disobedience. The word they hated was power. Talking about power
was like saying, Hey tokoloshe, I see you! It could make them disappear. We should just shoot
one of them. I can remember that being said in the Hillbrow house. Was it Jabu? Was it Precious
Jabulani or Trevor, as we pored over the writings of the tokoloshes, or was it me, who said it? At
one time or another we all had said it. Some nights we said it together. Assassinate Robert
Charlton as he leaves the Great Hall. Kill June Sinclair in her office. Audit one of Mureiniks
classes and do the deed as he lectures on how to calibrate the rule of law with the discontent of
the disenfranchised. Blow van Onselen away on the floor of the faculty senate. Make a spectacle
of it. At the very least it would be good for student morale. We were jokingperhaps. Of course,
we couldnt kill Eddy Webster, he still had friends in COSATU from his days as a labor union
advisor. He was still a friend of the Negro. We certainly had the capacity to kill them. Stimela
kept an arms cache at another safe house on the other side of Hillbrow; per Chris Hanis wishes,
not all of the weapons in the dead letter boxes scattered across the country had been handed over
to the commission set up by de Klerk and Mandela. We had the will to kill them. Oupa would
have hit anyone Stimela ordered him to hit; Precious and Jabu had proven themselves in
retaliation against the police in the townships; as had Trevor. Jabu was trained in propaganda and
psychological warfare-which is not to say he had no training in operations; he did. I only knew
how he moved about the demonstrations, the rallies, the caucuses, and meeting; in the wee hours I
knew only how we moved among the newspaper, the file clippings, the stolen memos, the
photographs, some surreptitiously obtained, some cut from newsletters, yearbooks, and the
evening gazette; and I only knew how we moved between a box of push pins and two computers.
Peculiar proxies for live ammunition. Yes, someone else would say, as though testing the line

between a joke and a plan, Why dont we just shoot one of them. Wed all be bleary-eyed by
then. It might be one in the morning. The nights writing would be stale and redundant-how the
hell would we get a pamphlet out by dawn? Or our analysis was on tilt and wed be irritable and
argumentative, instead of sharp and erudite. So wed clear the bulletin board of our charts, our
clippings, and our scraps of analysis. Wed take the photographs of the tokoloshes from their files
and pin them to the bulletin board. June Sinclari leaving a restaurant. Etinenne Mureinik
shopping at the Rosebank Mall. A portrait of Charlton from the Johannesburg Star; Ron Carter,
before he came to South Africa as an honorary White man, when he was at Boston University
where he worked as the hatchet man for its neo-con president. Nico Cloete, whose work we
interpreted as being tantamount tto the evisceration of radicalism in the Charterist movement.
Eddy Webster, striking poses like bargains with the workers he had turned his back on. Charles
van Onselen, his head held high, his jaw thrust out like Mussolini, with neither irony nor shame.
Wed pint hem side-by-side, like figures facing a firing squad. Wed asked them if they had any
last words. For the first time ever, none of these tokoloshes spoke. Wed implore them: Honor us
with something pithy about peace and reconciliation or the rule of law before you die. Then
precious and Jabue would draw bulls-eyes on them and Id retrieve darts from the small rooms
that was a bedroom long ago when someone lived there and it was furnished and in fee to
domestic, as opposed to clandestine, needs and desires. Ready1 said Precious, as I handed her
the darts. She took ten paces back, Aim! Jabu, Trevor, and I stood beside her with darts of our
own. Fire! One by one the tokoloshes slumped and fell. Shooting them in real life might have
been worse than letting them run amuck. Invariably, their deaths would spark rancor and
indignation in the media; tears of sympathy from the Whites, long meandering speeches from the
Black bourgeoisie followed by the criminalization of armed struggle and mass action in the press,
the huge and cry for peace and reconciliation (a.k.a. anger management for Blacks). Yes, the
tokoloshe dies but his laissez-faire lives on.

2NC Impacts

2NC OV
Anti blackness comes at the intersection of objective and subjective vertigo
Wilderson 3 [Frank Wilderson revolutionary, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the
Political Trials of Black Insurgents, http://www.scribd.com/doc/79282989/Wilderson-the-Vengeance-ofVertigo >:]

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 InTensions Journal Copyright
2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011) ISSN# 1913-5874
Wilderson The Vengeance of Vertigo 4 (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.

AT: Util
Racism disproportionately affects people of color maximizing happiness
only applies to white life
Peter 7, Peter is a staff writer for On Philosophy, an online ethics forum, Utilitarianism Is Unjust,
https://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/09/08/utilitarianism-is-unjust/, NN

A system is unjust when it treats people differently without a good reason for this different
treatment. Obviously what counts as a good reason will be debatable, but to get started let us
consider only reasons that all parties can understand as good reasons. Racism then is unjust
because there is no good reason behind the unequal treatment given to the different races. Of
course the racist does have a justification for their bias, they will claim that the other races are
inferior. But this is not a reason that both parties will understand, while people of the same race as
the racist may agree with him, few members of the races being oppressed will consider
themselves naturally inferior. And the racist lacks objectively sound evidence that could in
principle convince everyone of that judgment. On the other hand the fact that people receive
different treatment according to their wealth in a capitalist system is not necessarily unfair. The
justification for this unfair treatment is that the wealthy can spend more money, and hence
catering to their needs receives more generous compensation. Thus pricing a good out of
someones ability to purchase it isnt unjust, because there is an objective fact of the matter that
they simply cant give as much to you for it as others may be able to. Of course this doesnt mean
that there may not be a good reason to moderate capitalism as well, the poor may argue that
principle X implies that they should receive some special treatment. But this is not a rejection of
the reasons behind the unequal treatment resulting from a difference in wealth, and hence such
unequal treatment is not unjust. According to this principle utilitarianism is unjust
because it treats people differently based on their capacity for
happiness; although utilitarians can appeal to their principles to justify this different
treatment, so can racists, and like the racist the utilitarian arguments are not based on objective
facts. But before we get into the details allow me to give examples of some groups of people who
would be treated unfairly in a purely utilitarian system. The first are those who have no capacity
for happiness or unhappiness. There are rare people born without this ability, and we can easily
imagine possible species (such as the Vulcans from Star Trek) or conscious computers (such as
Data, also from Star Trek) who lack it as well. Utilitarianism cares only about maximizing
happiness or pleasure, and so these people effectively wouldnt count; their treatment would be
invisible to the system. Since we cant make the Vulcans unhappy we would be free to exploit
them, turn them into slaves, or whatever else would make us happy. And since we cant make
them happy there is no reason for the system to give them any of the rights or privileges that
make us happy. Since they arent made unhappy by this treatment the total amount of happiness
may be increased, and hence utilitarianism as a system would endorse it. Also treated unfairly are
people who are in a permanent state of unhappiness. It isnt inconceivable that someone might
have a condition that prevents them from being happy, and, although many such people might
choose to end their lives, there would probably be some who would still choose life. A utilitarian
system would take that choice away from them, and to execute them immediately, since they will
always be unhappy (negative happiness) eliminating them would increase the total amount of
happiness. If such actions could be considered just it would only be if we could somehow
convince these people that abusing them on the basis of their capacity for happiness is reasonable,
which means convincing them of the validity of utilitarianism. This may be impossible, and not
just because utilitarianism advocates acting against their interests. Consider an alien species who

is rational, and has emotions, but whose emotions dont correspond to human emotions. While we
are naturally motivated to try to be as happy as possible these aliens are naturally motivated to
bring the strength of their Zeb and Geb emotions into balance. Could we convince these aliens
that maximizing happiness is reason for them to be treated differently? I am sure that we could
make them understand that we are motivated by happiness, and that we wish to maximize it. But
they wont see that as a good reason to let themselves be abused, just as we dont see anothers
desire to steal as good reason to let them steal. No, we will reply that we have interests of our
own that stealing from us hurts, and there is no good reason to favor the desire to steal over the
desire to be stolen from, and every reason to do the opposite. Similarly, the aliens will reply to us
that maximizing total happiness is also against their interests, and that they cant see a reason to
systematically favor happiness over a balance of Zeb and Geb. Moreover the aliens will wonder
how happiness, a quirk of our physiological construction, can be invoked as an objective reason
to treat people differently. Certainly our own happiness may be taken into account when we act,
but it is irrational to act on the basis of other peoples happiness because we have no direct access
to it. If someone comes up to us an tells us that they are extremely unhappy, but that a donation of
$10 can make then happy again does this supposed suffering give us a reasons to give them
money? Of course they could be lying, but they could be telling the truth as well, and since
happiness is basically internal we arent in much of a position to tell the difference. And because
happiness is internal there is nothing stopping us from distorting our judgments of it to justify all
kinds of biases. For example, the racist can argue that other races have a
diminished capacity for happiness, and that this justifies mistreating
them to serve our own needs, and no one can disprove him. Thus it is
reasonable to insist that actions be justified by an appeal to objectively measurable consequences
that all parties can have a reason to endorse when it comes to creating a system for everyone to
live under. And maximizing happiness isnt among these.

Utility concerns and democratic happiness theory reify power of structures

because whites are the only ones thought of as capable to have happiness
Powell 93, Thomas Powell is a prominent American author who writes books on philosophy and
empire, The Persistence of Racism in America, https://books.google.com/books?
id=9IBDlUpIB2sC&pg=PA118&lpg=PA118&dq=utilitarianism+and+racism&source=bl&ots=TUgXs8HJl&sig=_IONzkbuR53K8zyYpv96LvkFOys&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8PWGVevEN8jkAHQxoCICg&ved=0CF4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=utilitarianism%20and%20racism&f=false, NN

In the nineteenth century, as both democracy and racism took shape, utilitarian thinking
dominated the English-speaking world. The utility principle became the basis for
democratic racism. Its goal became the greatest good of the
greatest number of people like me, with habits, manners, attitudes
and characteristics like mine. Romanticism accentuated differences, categorical and
individual, and glorified the self-reliance and self-assertion that capitalism had already
institutionalized. The universalist version of utilitarian thought never really captured America's
allegiance, even at the peak of Utilitarianism as presented by John Stuart Mill. The idea of the
greatest good of the greatest number seemed to require a concession that everyone's good was
equivalent to everyone else's, which Americans found difficult to make, to say the least. But an
ingenious adaptation of the principle was already available, combining egoistic and universal
utilitarianism in capitalist fashion by assuming that to serve oneself is to serve the general
welfare. After all, I can't be sure what will add to the aggregate happiness or good of the society
in a general way, but I can be sure that if I increase my own happiness and those whose happiness

contributes to mine, there ismore happiness among the greatest number that includes me. What
had social utility was what worked for the happiness of most people; and most people were white.
Cautioned most notably by James Madison in The Federalist, especially number ten, by Alexis de
Tocqueville in Democracy in America, and by John C. Calhoun in his Disquisition and Discourse,
American leaders generally took measures to prevent "tyranny of the majority." Our best political
thinkers always realized that democracy in America meant broadly implementing the will of the
majority, while at the same time protecting the rights of those who were not part of the majority.
In the matter of race dispositions, however, tyranny of the majority flourished, strengthened by
capitalism, utilitarianism, simplistic notions of democracy, and romanticism, all burgeoning in the
nineteenth century, even as scientific racism gained momentum. The divergent and conflicting
interests of whites have always determined how blacks were treated, and what rationalizations
were needed to justify that treatment. After the Civil War, as constitutional and economic
conflicts were agonizingly settled, reconciliation and reunification proceeded on the basis of tacit
acceptance of racism.3 been before the development of full-blown scientific racism late in the
century, the North generally and substantially shared Southern ideas of race. Ralph Waldo
Emerson, for example, embraced popular racist views, despite his insistence on thinking for
oneself. In fact, Emerson's special eloquence in making popular dispositions sound lofty or
profound was devastating. The chief formulator of Transcendentalism, New England's moralistic
idealism, was Theodore Parker. He wrote that Anglo-Saxons were the best of the Teutonic race,
the best of the best, endowed with an "instinct for progress." Albeit under tremendous political
pressure, Abraham Lincoln made explicitly racist statements in 1858, referring to a permanent
"physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the
two races living together on terms of social and political (Apra.," In 1861 he was prepared to
sacrifice blacks' freedom permanently if that would bring about regional reconciliation. Lincoln's
views a a, dispositions represented quite well those of most Americans in the North. He disliked
slavery and found it an embarrassment and a disgrace, particularly since emancipation in the
British Empire in 1833. However, his feelings of revulsion toward slavery did not lead him to
egalitarian acceptance of its victims. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, racism derived
respectability from legal and Populist-democratic points of view, as well as from scientific
arguments and theories of social science. It continued to derive 'righteous" feelings from the spirit
of Redemption -- redeeming the South from the claimed outrages of Reconstruction and outside
interference. Outside the South, racism gathered force from the dispositions associated with
immigration restriction, especially "Anglo-Saxonism." By the end of the century, when white
supremacists were instituting the most rigid segregation by law, scientific racism was so
pervasive that vitriolic racist views found a receptive national audience, through even the most
enlightened and liberal periodicals., As Thomas P. Bailey observed, the "Southern Way" was
close to being the "American Way." Racism was democratic in the simplest
sense: it had overwhelming popular acceptance and support.
Preventing blacks from voting ensured that no white faction or party could use them against its
white opposition. Their disfranchisement was progressive, proceeding in the name of liberalism,
good government, and reform. White solidarity, sometimes exaggerated, nonetheless underlay
much of Southern Progressivism in particular. Later, as blacks moved north Racism was
democratic in the simplest sense: it had overwhelming popular acceptance and support.
Preventing blacks from voting ensured that no white faction or party could use them against its
white opposition. Their disfranchisement was progressive, proceeding in the name of liberalism,
good government, and reform. White solidarity, sometimes exaggerated, nonetheless underlay
much of Southern Progressivism in particular. Later, as blacks moved north in large numbers, the
"problem" spread, and racist views intensified in the North (as witness events following World

War One). But what underlies such views? To use Kovel's distinction, modern and particularly
non-Southern racism is much more "aversive" than "dominative." In 1835, Tocqueville noted that
". .. the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in
those where it still exists; and nowhere is it an intolerant as in those states where servitude has
never been known ...." Tocqueville was noting mainly the racism of aversion, avoidance of people
who were looked down upon: the binary mind-set at work, emphasizing differences of we-they,
us-them, and the analogous good-bad. It drew support from belief in superiority of abilities,
"demonstrated" through equality of opportunity; from massive indoctrination in the ideology of
capitalism; from traditions of individual responsibility, back to Arminianism, from an
understanding of equality among equals in "virtue and talents"; from egoistic utilitarianism, from
romanticism, and from democracy. In short, racism drew support from America's most cherished
values and attitudes.

2NC Framework

2NC Framework - Generic

Their framework is guilty of never challenging the structures that have led us
to this point in the first place whiteness ensures radical change is never
actually on the table for discussion whiteness always wants to maintain the
future to ensure domination of others
Wilderson 8, former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe,[Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 407-411] NN
The claim of balance and fair play forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the
practices of the [debate] are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended,
comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that [America] itself is racist and illegitimate. And
what do we mean by Cabrillo [America]? The White people who constitute its fantasies of
pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous. We. So, lets bust. We wide open and
start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of
substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a
thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. Youre free to go to West
Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the
mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half to drive to the inner city. Knock on any
door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 black folks, intimatelyand if you dont know 12 then youre
not living in America, youre living in White Americaknows the statement to be true. White
people are guilty until proven innocent. Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of
standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like
fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all, Whites
are guilty of wanting stability and reform.White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English
Division, are guilty of asking themselves the question, How can we maintain the maximum
amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the
minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselvesif but only to ourselvesas having the
best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species,
human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand
intentions, and naming it change. These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over
which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screena diversionary
play of interlocutionsthat keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus
able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo
a better placefor everyone. Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me
offer a cautionary note: its scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But
White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from
shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their
country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesnt love the
things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space, your terrain
of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to
either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third(possible, but always
unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the
institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad
thingthis term is never on the table, because the level of abstraction is too high for White
liberals. Theyve got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Lets keep it
all at eye level, where Whites can keep on eye on everything. So the Black body is

incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have
no use for.

2NC Framework is Racist

The idea that policy making can ever structurally include black bodies or
change a system of antagonisms comes from an incredibly privileged position
conceptions of framework ignore that policy making is built upon black
death
Tinson 15, Christopher M. Tinson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at
Hampshire College, nearest date given is 2015, Race, Justice, and the Matters of Black Lives,
http://furmancenter.org/research/iri/tinson, NN
Mollenkopf and Swanstrom have written a thought-provoking commentary that suggests we give
patterns of metropolitan development within cities greater attention in unpacking the significance
of what they call the Ferguson moment. In other words, place and space matter as much if not
more than race in understanding these events. I would offer a few points that intersect with
Mollenkopf and Swanstroms insights and others that present a different reading of the
circumstances of Black life. Where they err is in their discounting of race as a continuing central
factor in the processes of structural suppression they highlight. I argue that anti-Black
policymaking has been the rule in American society, not an
accidental or old-fashioned feature, but one that is continually
reshaped and which guarantees certain material outcomes from a
devaluation of difference. Civil societylawmakers and ostensibly law abiding
citizenshas historically upheld a logic that linked blackness with poverty, ghettos, inadequate
housing, and poor education. That these have become synonymous with Black life in the U.S. has
established a baseline expectation of Black social deficiency, and thus making a notion of Black
success exceptional. Even when African Americans effectively engage in
the electoral process, a right that many fought and died to achieve,
it appears new forms of disenfranchisement have emerged in the
form of Supreme Court gutting provisions of the Voting Rights Act
and active efforts of voter suppression.[2] Not only have Black people been
forced to live on the negative side of most social indicators of wellbeing, America has shown its
ability to expand, grow, and develop with said inequity in tow. As the authors point out, the city
of Ferguson has tried to make up for revenue shortfalls through fines and fees generated by
writing tickets for a variety of civil violations. The targeting of Black residents for these
violations entangles them in whole spiral of further collateral consequences--a simple traffic stop
can lead to losing a license to losing a job or worse and generally further marginalize Black
residents from civic and political participation.. However, Michael Brown was not approached
and killed over traffic violations, or for allegedly robbing a nearby store. He was killed because
he was Black and threatening to a white police officer wielding the power of a lethal weapon
and badge of legal authority. In analyzing the racial and class dynamics governing Ferguson, the
authors write: Race adds to the toxic mix. Police systematically target those who look poor,
often black people, because they know they are more likely to have an outstanding warrant and
arrest provides additional opportunities to pile on more court fees and fines. The authors position
race as an add-on, not as the salient feature that the police observe. Poor describes an economic
standing, but does not always translate visually. Poor people can present themselves in a variety
of forms. By contrast, blackness is a highly visible marker, and as a result African Americans
suffer the brunt of any profiling, regardless of their actual economic position. Although poverty is
often used in economic terms, it can describe political circumstances as well. Middle- and

working class Black people across the country also experience political impoverishment in that
their rights are often suspended instead of protected. In this context, race need not be made
secondary in order to observe the structural and often deadly dimensions of inequity. Race is
central to the structure of contemporary U.S. society. This current movement for
justice is rooted in a long history of racial oppression. New forms of
anti-Black structural arrangements deprioritize Black peoples
demands for social advancement. Government policies have
supported segregation in housing and education, two essential
platforms for advancement. Rewarding residential segregation through white flight
and restrictive covenants, alongside white backlash to calls for racial redress, and the
consolidation of white civic identity and political power under President Reagan, also helps
explain how indifference to longstanding Black suffering and limited aspirational achievement
was institutionalized. This unfortunately has not only persisted but hardened in the decades since
the passage of historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, which were necessary but did
not go far enough.[3] Rather than end with a view of the current energy emerging from Ferguson
and other epicenters as fighting the last war, more traction is gained when we consider current
struggles as part of the unfinished agenda of civil rights. One of the unintended consequences of
civil rights advancement was that by outlawing segregation it signaled that those institutions and
individuals who sought to uphold such practices would have to do so with greater discretion.
Ferguson draws attention to some of localized practices of suppression that have gone
unaccounted for or easily forgotten. The lessons of race and racism are still being learned sixty
years after Brown, and fifty years after Selma. This paradox how a society advances on some
fronts while actively resisting fundamental changes on others is one that too few Americans are
willing to admit, much less engage. The Black youth-led, trans-generational, multi-hued activism
in Ferguson, New York, Oakland, California and elsewhere under the banner Black Lives
Matter, is not misguided, myopic, nor lacking in awareness of the historical roots, government
policies, and persistent patterns of inequity and injustice. Enveloped in the vocalized and bodily
dissent of this movement one finds deep historical memory, keen insight into gendered forms of
antiblack violence, and firm resolve to challenge the injustices of the status quo in hopes of a
liberated future.

2NC Permutation
Their leftist discourse utilizes blackness as means for carrying out their own
agenda -- serves to further white domination and black suffering

Taylor 13, Terrell Anderson Taylor, B.A. Masters candidate, Thesis Advisor: Robert J. Patterson, Ph.D. March
19th, 2013, OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558275/Taylor_georgetown_0076M_12322.pdf?
sequence=1] NN
As Seigel notes, the juxtaposition of the massive presence of Max with the short exchange and revelation of Bigger's
newly found consciousness forces us to think through the contrast between Bigger and Max as symbolic of competing
strategies, locations, and resolutions within black politics. The fact that a wide sweeping analysis of social conditions,
the connections between Mr. Dalton's exploitation of black living conditions, the ideological message of black
inferiority, etc. comes from Max's point of view highlights Biggers inability to perform that type of analysis. It is a
strategy located outside of blackness. Gibson notes that Max's defense does not face the lived experience of Bigger
Thomas as an individual, but is pointed towards the fact of Bigger's situation as systemic function of society (81-82).
This is evident in Max's appeals towards preventing further unrest, avoiding the collapse of society at its foundations,
and other invocations of the consequences for the stability and existence of society. This external voice 25 concerned
with consequences external to Bigger's life is perhaps indicative of the West's invocation of black people as a problem
people. Despite the good intentions and efforts of Max, it would seem that the blackness of Bigger
matters more than the human suffering, the shared desire to avoid pain that could potentially frame Bigger and
Max as equals. A reading of this scene through the lens of afro-pessimism would suggest that Max's position as a
sympathetic and liberal white does not absolve him of Anti-blackness. Wilderson argues that white

subjects benefit from the fungibility of blackness even, and perhaps

especially, when white subjects attempt to empathize with black subjects (Red, White & Black 19).
Such attempts require imagining the suffering inherent to the experience of black subjects, which
entails two important consequences. First, imagining the black experience enables a white project,
marxist, feminist, postcolonial, or otherwise, that utilizes blackness as an arena for
executing its own agenda. When marxists explain racism by framing it as a consequence of
capitalism, the situation of blackness becomes an opportunity for challenging capitalism as opposed to
an elucidation of white supremacy, which in turn, masks the way that marxism participates in white supremacy
in the very act. Max's attempt to solve "the problem of blackness" is an appropriation of blackness
as an entity with a type of utility, not an ethical gesture towards a group of human beings
categorized as black. Second, the position of blackness offers a grammar for
white projects. In other words, the slave (or the ontological condition of blackness) becomes a
metaphor for white projects, as the aim for the marxist or white feminist is always explained using
the grammar of freedom (just as the slave wants freedom in an ontological sense, the feminist desires freedom in a
contingent sense of freedom from gendered violence, and the marxist desires freedom from capitalist exploitation) (2122). Both of these consequences serve to enforce the illegibility and

exclusion of blackness from civil society. As 26 blackness works to render white endeavors
as both active and legible, it in turns becomes both passive and illegible. The plight of black suffering can only
be understood insofar as it can be likened to a contingent instance of white suffering, and such
comparisons only occur when articulating them serves the interest of a white subject

Permutation re-entrenches whiteness -- renders blacks fungible and denies

basic rights

Taylor 13, Terrell Anderson Taylor, B.A. Masters candidate, Thesis Advisor: Robert J. Patterson, Ph.D. March
19th, 2013, OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558275/Taylor_georgetown_0076M_12322.pdf?
sequence=1] NN

Wilderson goes through the labor of elaborating this framework of anti-blackness for two particular reasons. First,
illuminating the function of anti-blackness is necessary to reveal how deeply embedded it is in with civil society, and to
highlight the ways that Marxism and other leftist discourses are misguided in targeting capitalism and other
structures of oppression as contingent facts of civil society. Second, Wilderson's theoretical exposition
reveals the way that leftist discourses not only misunderstand racism, but

also benefit from anti-blackness. These discourses are guilty of appropriating the
conditions of African Americans for their particular causes , using the situation of black people within
civil society as a podium upon which to further their own ends, rendering
black people fungible by appropriating them for their own narratives and denying blacks
the right to articulate their own. Additionally, leftist discourses are unable to realize that using the
metaphor of slavery to make their own political demands legible eliminates the only language to
speak to the ontological condition of slavery. Because slavery is now a 7 rhetorical move used to clarify the
political demands of various groups, it makes the presence of slavery within the present unthinkable and invisible.

2NC Alternative

Unflinching Alt
Our alternative is to enter a constant interrogation of the black positionality
to render civil society incoherent
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]
During the last years of
apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground
capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I
began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is
to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing
order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist
Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our
inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political
agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis . Instead, we
allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto
pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the
questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa.

have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid),
so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and
academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in
a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and
ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander,
Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan
Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile
Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

Burn it down
BURN IT DOWN YEEEEEEEEE
Farley 5, Anthony Paul is a Professor of Law at Boston College, Perfecting Slavery,
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp, NN
What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity,
burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred
desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn
what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this
unknown anarchist. 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.
Leave nothing white behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-over
black. God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time. The slaves burned
everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. 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. At the dawn of the twentieth century,
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The colorline belts the world. Du Bois said that the problem of the
twentieth century was the problem of the colorline. The problem, now, at the dawn of the twentyfirst century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the
slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has
become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains
to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. We begin
as children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What
becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are
brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves
are called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its
loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or,
rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be
and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is not a
beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the
slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the
grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from
slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to whiteoverblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the 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 nonknowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by

burning down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice
to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and
then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we
pursue a calling. Freedom is the only callingit alone contains all possible directions, all of the
choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free. Slavery is
death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that
which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave
must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the calling
that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death.
Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the
slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.

AT: Youre White

The question is not whether or not were trying to be white anti-racists its
whether or not we acknowledge and understand our social location in the
realm of white civil society youre right in the fact that we will never be able
to be anti-racists but wrong in the fact that we should never combat antiblack violence
Applebaum 5, Barbara Applebaum, associate professor and chair of cultural foundations of education,
is trained in philosophy of education. In the name of morality: moral responsibility, whiteness and social
justice education, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03057240500206089, NN

In a course on schooling and diversity, the topic for the week was different meanings of racism.
I asked my students, Who comes to your mind when you think of white people who are
complicit in sustaining racism? Most of my white students gave examples of overtly prejudiced
people or groups the Klu Klux Klan, the television sitcom character Archie Bunker, someone
they happened to know. Significantly, they mentioned anyone except themselves. One
student, however, meekly responded, all of us. When challenged, this
student explained that whereas racism in the past was all about organizations like the Klu Klux
Klan, Archie Bunker types and Jim Crow laws, today racism is more subtle and often not seen
by those who do not have to experience it. This opened up a heated exchange in which I
attempted to explain the different meanings of racism, accentuating what certain understandings
of social injustice they make available and what they keep hidden. Rather than being willing to
engage in the different meanings of racism and their implications, many of these predominantly
white students were obstinately focused on denying their complicity. They were more concerned
with proving how they were good antiracist whites than they were in trying to understand how
systemic oppression works and the possibility that they might have a role in sustaining such
systems. In his journal, a white student wrote, In any situation you cannot be held responsible
for something that you did not do. Even on the smallest scale, if you dont think that youve done
anything wrong, then you will be reluctant to change or to try and examine the problem. In their
study of how white subjects perceive civil rights and equal opportunity, Nancy Ditomaso and her
colleagues (2003) attempt to demonstrate that one of the ironic characteristics of white privilege
is that white people do not have to think of themselves as racist for racial inequality to be
reproduced (p. 189). The intimated irony underlying what these researchers found is not that
blatant, overt racism can be implemented without the perpetrators awareness, but rather that the
subtle but lethal types of covert racism can be maintained even when whites believe themselves
to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Indeed, it is my contention that it is
especially when white people believe themselves to be good and moral antiracist citizens that
they may be contributing to the perpetuation of systemic injustice. Although what I will refer to
as the traditional conception of moral responsibility has many enabling features that ground
such values as autonomy, respect for persons and equality, such a conception of moral
responsibility can also authorize denials of complicity on the part of my white students. In what
follows, I first describe what I mean by the traditional conception of moral responsibility. This
is not to imply that any particular moral philosopher or theorist holds this view, but rather the
point is to emphasize that it is a view widely assumed by my students and that aspects of this
view are implied and tacitly supported in the many debates around the meaning of moral
responsibility taken up by moral theorists. These both enabling and disenabling features of the
traditional conception of moral responsibility are evident in moral theorizing about moral

responsibility, not so much in debates around what it means to be a moral agent but, more
conspicuously, in discussions around the criteria that make one morally accountable for particular
actions. Then I will turn to three seemingly good, antiracist discourses that my white students
engage in around issues of difference and inequality the discourse of colour-blindness, the
discourse of meritocracy and the discourse of choice. I argue that the traditional conception of
moral responsibility authorizes these discourses and contributes to camouflaging their
limitations. By giving examples of how these discourses conceal systemic oppression, hinder the
development of cross-racial understanding, veil the relational dimension of the social
construction of race and promote a race to innocence, I illustrate how such ostensibly moral
discourses work to conceal the very complicity that some social justice educators endeavour to
expose.

Affirmative

No Social Death
Wilderson ignores African diaspora and thus provides an incomplete picture
of blackness within civil society
Ba 11, Saer Maty Ba is a professor at Portsmouth university, The US Decentred From Black Social
Death to Cultural Transformation
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2304/2474, NN

And yet Wildersons highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the Diaspora or African
Diaspora, a key component in Yearwoods thesis that, crucially, neither navelgazes (that is, at
the US or black America) nor pretends to properly engage with black film. Furthermore,
Wilderson separates the different waves of black film theory and approaches them, only, in
terms of how a most recent one might challenge its precedent. Again, his approach is
problematic because it does not mention or emphasise the inter connectivity of/in black film
theory. As a case in point, Wilderson does not link Tommy Lotts mobilisation of Third Cinema
for black film theory to Yearwoods idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course,
Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally questioned since
Lotts 1990s theory of black film was formulated. Yet another consequence of ignoring the
African Diaspora is that it exposes Wildersons corpus of films as unable to carry the weight of
the transnational argument he attempts to advance. Here, beyond the UScentricity or social
and political specificity of [his] filmography, (95) I am talking about Wildersons choice of
films. For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for
failing to acknowledge a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black body, the
Black home, and the Black community (111) while films like Alan and Albert Hughess
Menace II Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally,
problematise Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP) policing. The above
examples expose the fact of Wildersons dubious and questionable conclusions on black film

Social death theory is wrong it ignores black insurrection and cultural

heritage proves violence is contingent and reform is possible
Ba 11, Saer Maty Ba is a professor at Portsmouth university, The US Decentred From Black Social
Death to Cultural Transformation
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2304/2474, NN

Red, White and Black is particularly undermined by Wildersons propensity for exaggeration
and blinkeredness. In chapter nine, Savage Negrophobia, he writes: The philosophical
anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black
style ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold
territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do
to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say nigger because anyone can be a
nigger. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, A Crisis in the Commons, Wilderson addresses the
issue of Black time. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it
been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the
black moment and place are not right because they are the ship hold of the Middle Passage:
the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time but also the moment of no time at
all on the map of no place at all. (279) Not only does Pinhos more mature analysis expose this
point as preposterous (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the
countless historians and sociologists works on slave ships,

shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of

groundbreaking jazzstudies books on crosscultural dialogue like
The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson
theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing
jazz as belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the
taking, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson
ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and
anti Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged
announcement of a bad Hollywood films badly planned sequel: How does one deconstruct life?
Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.
(340)

Blackness is not ontological but instead contingent and subject to change

Hudson 13 Peter Hudson, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2013 (The
state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics, Volume 39, Number 2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor
& Francis Online, p. 265-266)
Colonialism, anxiety and emancipation3 Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There
always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the
existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isnt excluded insofar as it is
necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered ontological), its content (what fills
it) as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction are contingent. In other words, the

meaning of the signifier of

exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined,
i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is
political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the curvature of intersubjective space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the

specific modes of the othering of otherness are nowhere decided in advance (as [end page 265] a
certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does
not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never
necessary because they are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological
division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks who are not. But this ontological relation is
really on the side of the ontic that is, of all contingently constructed
identities, rather than the ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the
indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesnt exist, the black man doesnt exist (Fanon
1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations division is constitutive of
the social, not the colonial division. Whiteness

may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but

respect for the ontological difference (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological
status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the
very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it
does not follow that the void of black being functions as the ultimate substance, the
transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost
here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its ontological differential .
A crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the
place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed
in the lived experience (vcu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is traversing the fantasy (Zizek 2006a, 4060) all the time;
the void of the verb to be is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom
the symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 Fixed into non-fixity, he is eternally
suspended between element and moment5 he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the production of meaning and is thus the
point of entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism. Be this as it may, whiteness

and blackness are (sustained

by) determinate and contingent practices of signification; the structuring relation of colonialism thus
itself comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can always be
undone. Anti-colonial i.e., anti-white modes of struggle are not (just) psychic6 but involve the reactivation (or desedimentation)7 of colonial objectivity itself. No matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is

not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chap- ter 11,
771 n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the
same time because it is the presence of one object in another undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a
differential relation is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism
that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself, reducing it to a condition of its
possibility.8

Social death is an oversimplification of the condition of blackness

Brown 9, Vincent Brown is a Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and
African American Studies, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/vbrown/files/brown-socialdeath.pdf, NN

Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and
conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy general definition of
slavery, for many historians and non-historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of
social death is a distillation from Pattersons breathtaking surveya theoretical abstraction that
is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a
least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn
of meaningful heritage.6 As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an agentless
abstraction that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social
and political experience of enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations.7
Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in
much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Pattersons
abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. Having
emerged from the discipline of sociology, social death fit comfortably within a scholarly
tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing
social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black
communities. Together with Pattersons work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black
families, social death reflected sociologys abiding concern with social pathology; the
pathological condition of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the
damage that black people had suffered during slavery. University of Chicago professor Robert
Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: the Negro, when he
landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his
tropical temperament.8 Pattersons distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative of
social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would
be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more
tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death
took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United
States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Pattersons expansive view was
meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as the institution
developed through time. Thus one might see social death as an obsolete product of its time
and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it
not for the concepts reemergence in some important new studies of slavery.9

Equating present conditions with slavery annihilates agencytheir

ontological account is wrong.
Nadine Ehlers, Professor, School of Social Sciences, Media, and Communication Faculty of
Law, Humanities, and Arts University of Wollongong, 12 [Racial Imperatives: Discipline,
Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection, p. 9-12, footnote from p. 145]

While I deploy these terms for analytic convenience, the

study pivots on the desire to make dear tbe false

homogeneity of subjects that are denoted by these terms and the arbitrariness of race per se. In the same moment
that I employ these terms as critical tools of analysis, then, I hope to expose the mechanisms of their production
and mark possibilities for their rearticulation. The final portion of this study is concerned with
examining what forms of agency and resistance are possible within the context of this binary
construction of black and white identities. Guiding this analysis is the question of how individuals struggle against
subjection and how racial norms might be recited in new directions, given that the coercive demands of discipline and performative
constraints make it seem like race is an insurmountable limit or closed system. That

race operates as a limit appears

particularly so for black subjects. For despite the fact that all subjects are produced and
positioned within and by the discursive formations of race , the impact of that positioning and
what it means for experience is markedly different . Black subjects are situated within an antiblack
context where the black body/self continues to be torn asunder within the relations of civil society. This means that, as
Yancy (2008, 134 n. n) insists, " the capacity to imagine otherwise is seriously truncated by ideological
and material forces that are systematically linked to the history of white racism!'
A number of scholars have examined these realities and advanced critical accounts of what they identify as the resulting condition of
black existence. David Marriot, for instance, argues

that "the occult presence of racial slavery" continues to

haunt our political and social imagination: "nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which
never arrives and does not stop arriving" (2007, xxi). Saidiya Hartman, in her provocative Lose Your Mother: A journey Along the
Atlantic Slave Route (2007) refers to this haunting as slavery's afterlife. She insists that we do not live with the residue or legacy of
slavery but, rather, that slavery lives on. It 'survives' (Sexton 2010, 15), through what Loic Wacquant (2002, 41) has identified as
slavery's fu nctional surrogates: Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. For Hartman, as echoed by other scholars, slavery has yet to be
undone:
Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is
the afterlife of slavery- skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and
impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6)
Frank B. Wilderson III, in his Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms (2009), powerfully

frames slavery's afterlife as resulting in a form of social death for black subjects and, more than this,
he argues that black subjectivity is constituted as ontological death. For Wilderson, " the Black [is) a subject
who is always already positioned as Slave" (2009, 7) in the United States, while everyone else exists as "Masters" (2009, 10 ).8

Studies of slavery's afterlife and the concept of social death have inarguably made essential
contributions to understandings of race.9 The strengths of such analyses lie in the salient ways they have theorized broad social
systems of racism and how they have demanded the foregrounding of suffering, pain, violence, and death. Much of this scholarship
can be put or is productively in conversation with Foucault's account ofbiopolitics that, as I noted earlier, regulates at the level of the
population. Where sovereignty 'took life and let live,' in the contemporary sphere biopolitics works to 'make live.' However, certain
bodies are not in the zone of protected life, are indeed expendable and subjected to strategic deployments of sovereign power that
'make die.' It is here that Foucault positions the function of racism. It is, he argues, "primarily a way of introducing a break into the
domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die" (2003b, 254). Thus, certain
bodies/subjects are killed - or subjected to sovereign power and social death- so that others might prosper. 10
In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Hartman

examines the
'must die' imperative of social death understood broadly as a lack of social being-but she also
illuminates how, within such a context, slave "performance and other modes of practice . ..
exploit[ed), and exceed[ed] the constraints of domination" (1997, 54, my emphasis). Hartman analyzes
quotidian enactments of slave agency to highlight practices of "(counter)investment" (1997, 73) that
produced "a reconstructed self that negates the dominant terms of identity and existence" (1997, 72).
11 She thus argues that a form of agency is possible and that , while "the conditions of domination and
subjugation determine what kinds of actions are possible or effective" (1997, 54), agency is not
reducible to these conditions (1997, 55).'2 The questions that I ask in this analysis travel in this direction,
and aim to build on this aspect of Hartman's work. In doing so I make two key claims: first, that despite undeniable
historical continuities and structural d)'namics, race is also marked by discontinuity; and second, race is
constantly reworked and transformed within relations of power by subjects. 13

For Vincent Brown, a historian of slavery, ''violence, dislocation, and death actually generate
politics, and consequential action by the enslaved" (2009, 1239) . He warns that focusing on an
overarching condition or state potentially obscures seeing these politics. More than this,
however, it risks positioning relations of power as totalizing and
transhistorical, and it risks essentializing experience or the lived realities of individuals . 14 I
scale down to the level of the subject to analyze both (a) how subjects are formed, and (b) how subjects black and white
alike have struggled against conditions in ways that refuse totalizing, immutable understandings
of race. This book does not seek to mark a condition or situa tion then, but instead takes up Brown's challenge (made
within the context of studies of slavery) to pay attention to efforts to remake condition. Looking to those efforts to
remake condition and identity grapples with the microphysics of power and the practices of daily life, enacted by individuals and i11
collective politics, to consider what people do with situations: those dynamic, innovative contestations of (a never totalizing) power.
Echoing the call raised by Brown (2009, 1239), my

work focuses then on "examining ... social and political

lives rather than assuming . . . lack of social being" in order to think about how
subjects can and have "made a social world out of death itself" (Brown 2009, 1233) or how, more generally,
race can be reconfigured within the broader workings of what I am calling racial discipline and
performative imperatives.
But in addressing the quotidian and those efforts to remake condition and identity, this

study insists on a shift in

perspective in terms of how power is thought about. As I have remarked, I am not focused on biopolitics or what
can be seen as solely sovereign forms of power that are deployed to condition who will live and who will die. Instead, I am concerned
with disciplinary power, which is articulated simultaneously but at a different level to biopolitics (and despi te the exercise of

form of power is not absolute, nor

does it exist in opposition to resistance. Rather, power is seen as always fragmentary and incoherent,
and power and resistance are seen as mutually constitutive . Disciplinary power is productive, in that it generates
particular capacities and forms of subjectivity (and, necessarily, agency). And finally, though subjects are formed in
power, they are not reducible to it, not determined by power .
sovereign forms of power} (Foucault 2003a, 250). For Foucault, this

[BEGIN ENDNOTE]
14. Historian Vincent Brown, in his "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery" (2009), has

examined a
number of scholars who seemingly take up such a viewpoint, in that they broadly position blackness as a
totalizing state that, historically and in the present, renders slavery synonymous with social death
and blackness as always already synonymous with slavery. Brown focuses specifically on the
academic uptake and what he sees as the problematic distillation and extension of Orlando
Patterson's (1981) concept of"slavery as social death;' where social death indicates a lack of social being. As a
scholar of slavery, Brown is most concerned with examining the limitations of this idea in relation to the enslaved, but he is also
interested in how the idea is used in relation to the present . For Brown, Patterson's "slavery as
social death," and contemporary usages of this concept to account for the present, advance
a troubling transhistorical characterization of slavery He argues in line with I-Ierman Bennett (quoted in
Brown 1009, 1133), who has observed:
As the narrative of the slave experience, soclardeath assumes a uniform African, slave, and ultimately black subject rooted in a static
New World history whose logic originated in being property and remains confined to slavery. It absorbs and renders exceptional
evidence that underscores the contingent nature of experience and consciousness. Thus, normative

assumptions about the

experiences of peoples of African descent assert a timeless, ahistorical, epiphenomenal "black"
cultural experience.
[END ENDNOTE]

AT: Reform Links

The affirmatives negative state action is the best process to fight against the
surveillance state legal policies might not be perfect but they are a step in
the right direction to racial justice
Gray 15, Erin Gray is a staff writer for Mute; an online journal on racial equality and injustice, WHEN
THE STREETS RUN RED: FOR A 21ST-CENTURY ANTI-LYNCHING MOVEMENT,
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/when-streets-run-red-21st-century-anti-lynching-movement, NN

If we are to mobilise a 21st-century anti-lynching movement, we must engage not only Wellss
attention to the intersections of racial and sexual violence, but also her critiques of capital and the
state, her internationalism, the shift in focus in her later writings to the militant spirit guiding the
survival efforts of black industrial workers and sharecroppers, her advocacy of armed selfdefence, and her abolitionist analysis of the policing apparatus that
captures blacks in a racialised penal relation. [34] These aspects of Wellss
praxis grew out of a black abolitionist tradition of testifying to the fully national vagaries of white
sexual domination, political control, and the violence of the law. The women who
demanded freedom before Congress in the aftermath of their sexual brutalisation
at the hands of KKKops during the Memphis Riots of 1866 drew on this abolitionist
tradition, as did the black feminist literary tradition that emerged after Harriet Jacobss Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, to demand that violence directed at individual
women be placed in a larger public context and thus in relation to
the collective violence aimed at their communities. Other postReconstruction writers like Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Weld Grimke, Francis Ellen Watkins
Harper, Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Lizelia Augusta
Jenkins Moorer similarly emphasised the continuities between sexual attacks on black women
and the lynchings of black men through the abolitionist strategies of urgent political
speechmaking, coalition-building, and internationalism. [35] Those of us fighting to realise a
world in which all black lives matter must take seriously this abolitionist
framework and place it in historical relationship to our contemporary
abolitionist movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). [36]
Prison abolitionists maintain that the US system of mass
incarceration which includes surveillance and policing and cannot
be located solely inside prisons and jails is a geographic solution to
the social, economic, and political relations it has been designed to
contain. These relations include unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and mental
illness, and they stem in large part from the unfinished project of the
nineteenth-century movement to abolish racial slavery. They are the
vestiges of the political compromises that shaped the language of
the 13th Amendment and that allowed for the recuperation of white
supremacist power after the great promise of Reconstruction. The PIC
is the primary weapon that has been wielded against black life since conservatives sought to
retrench the gains made by civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s. Following the
wave of riots that erupted in urban centers in the late 1960s to challenge private property relations
that promote the under-employment and super-exploitation of black labour, as well as police
brutality and other state-backed injustices, conservatives responded by mobilising a moral panic
about crime levels that they erroneously alleged were on the rise. Richard Nixons 1968

presidential campaign was grounded in the rhetoric of Law and Order that marshaled US
lynching cultures historical suturing of criminalisation to black bodies. By individualising revolt
in the image of the black criminal, this conservative backlash sought to weaken black
revolutionary consciousness and the successful interracial alliances that black radicals were
forming with Latino activists and members of the white working class. [37] This law and order
project instantiated a punishment industry that, throughout the remainder of the twentieth century,
would cut into and largely destroy the social programs and political-educational initiatives
undertaken by groups like the Black Panther Party. [38]

Reform in the context of decriminalization is the best system of incremental

change legal change and public advocacy is critical
Carruthers 15, Charlene A. Carruthers is a political organizer and writer for Black Voices, Black
Future Month: End the Anti-Black Police State, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlene-carruthers/endthe-antiblack-police-_b_6604488.html, NN

A future for Black people in America must include full decriminalization of acts not considered to
be criminal when performed in non-Black bodies. Where we go from here requires approaches to
public safety that don't hinge on the control of Black people, empowerment of police and reliance
on punitive measures. Our call to action must support restorative justice practices, quality public
school systems and good living-wage jobs. The call for an end to mass criminalization must
include a call to the end of the Anti-Black Police State. BYP100 Agenda to Keep Us Safe defines
criminalization as a process in which behaviors and people are presumed criminal.
Criminalization has less to do with what is actually done, and more to do with society's ideas
about who is "other," whose behavior is wrongful and who should be punished. The law, media
and public perception drive criminalization. Black people who fall outside of the protected norms
of whiteness, gender conformity, heterosexuality, middle-class and otherwise so-called
respectable appearances are routinely harassed, arrested, sexually assaulted, incarcerated and
killed. No person should have to live under the threat, fear or reality of criminalization from a
neighbor, police officer or teacher. However, this threat is a reality for many young Black people
in the United States. Whether it is Trayvon Martin walking down the street or Renisha McBride
knocking on a door for help, Black people are systemically criminalized and killed for acts
generally recognized as harmless when non-Black bodies perform them. Criminalization impacts
all Black people. Last year Monica Jones, a Black trans woman and activist, was arrested for
"walking while trans." Jones explains that "it's a known experience in our community of being
routinely and regularly harassed and facing the threat of violence or arrest because we are trans
and therefore often assumed to be sex workers." All people should be able to walk down the street
without fear of being profiled. From the local beat cop to the police chief, law enforcement
agencies, have too much power over our lives. I want to live in a world where police department
budgets don't take up over 20% of overall budgets while community services are allocated 6% or
less, as they do in cities like Chicago and Oakland. I want to live in the world where society
prioritizes quality public education, well-rounded social and mental health services and
sustainable infrastructure. The officers who killed Aura Rosser in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tanisha
Anderson in Cleveland, Ohio and Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri are reflections of a broad
and powerful Anti-Black Police State. Individual police officers are just one party in the
breathing-while-Black-pipeline to jail, prison, sexual assault or death. I am less invested in
focusing on the character of an individual police officer than the character of the entire system.
The Anti-Black Police State protects elected officials who advocate for more police officers while
public schools in Black communities are closed and underfunded en masse. Communities must

organize against candidates who call for more police and support candidates who have
commitments and records of protecting teachers, parents and the public school system. Where we
go from here requires us to see that the systems that fund tear gas in Ferguson, MO, the police
officers gun in Cleveland, OH, the tanks in occupied Palestine and the detention centers in
Arizona are all connected. If enslaved Africans in the Americas could imagine a future where
their grandchildren would not be slaves, we can imagine a future without mass criminalization,
incarceration and the Anti-Black Police State. Our freedom dreams must be radical. Our way
forward must be radically inclusive or it will repeat the same strategies, tactics, policies and ideas
that have failed our people before. We'll know Black lives matter when the anti-black police state
no longer exists and all people can live with dignity.

Interpretations of whiteness/structural antagonism understands it solely as

transhistorical domination of one racial class over another. This erases the
political power and inputs people of color have in racial formationsturns
any positive potential for movements
Michael OMI, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, AND Howard WINANT, Sociology at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, 13 [Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and
Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36, Issue 6, 2013]

Their essay has an overly tendentious tone and sometimes misreads and misinterprets our book. Still there

are many points of

agreement between the racial formation and systemic racism theories. Where we disagree most
strongly is over our respective understanding of racial politics. Feagin and Elias focus so intensely on
racism that they lose sight of the complexities of race and the variations that exist among and
within racially defined groups. In their systemic racism account white racist rule is so
comprehensive and absolute that the political power and agency of people of
colour virtually disappear. Indeed, the white racial frame (Feagin 2009) is so omnipotent that
white racism seems to usurp and monopolize all political space in the USA. Yes, counter
framing is present, but it appears marginal at best, unable effectively to challenge the pervasiveness,
persistence and power of white racism. Since Feagin and Elias dismiss ideas of racial
democracy tout court, their perspective makes it difficult to understand how antiracist mobilization or political reform could ever have occurred in
the past or could ever take place in the future. They see racism as so
exclusively white that any notion of white anti-racism is virtually ignored and completely unexplained.
Despite Feagin and Elias's good intentions of linking their analysis to anti-racist practice, we believe their views have
quite the opposite effect: without intending to do so, they dismiss the political agency of people of colour
and of anti-racist whites. In Feagin/Elias's view, systemic racism is like the Borg in the
Star Trek series: a hive-mind phenomenon that assimilates all it touches. As the
Borg announce in their collective audio message to intended targets, Resistance is futile.
We have a smaller space than the main essay, so we'll dispense with a point-by-point refutation of their understanding of racial
formation theory. We assume readers of Racial Formation and of our other work know that we are not closet neocons, that we

consider racism a foundational and continuous part of US history (and indeed modern world
history), that we agree that whites have been the primary creators and beneficiaries of racist
institutions and practices, and that we not only respect but also situate ourselves in the black radical tradition, especially the
Duboisian tradition. We will focus on our fundamental point of disagreement with Feagin and Elias how we
respectively understand the very nature of racial politics in the USA.

Here we will engage Feagin and Elias on a few important questions that will highlight both where we agree and where we disagree.
Our topics are as follows:
What is the relationship between race and racism?
What is distinctive about our own historical epoch in the USA from post-Second World War to the present with respect to race
and racism?
What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends?
We discuss these questions with the intent of clarifying racial formation theory as well as sharpening the debate with the systemic
racism perspective. We appreciate the opportunity to do so.
What is the relationship between race and racism?
In Racial Formation we suggest that the

concepts of race and racism should be distinguished and not be

used interchangeably (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 71). Some have argued that race is solely a product of
racist domination; on that account race does not exist outside of racism . As readers of Ethnic and Racial
Studies well know, many writers place quotation marks around race (race) to distinguish their use of the concept from popular
biological notions of human variation. This is meant to designate the wobbly social scientific status of the race concept.
In contrast to this perspective, we

consider race to be real because it is real in its consequences. 1 Our ideas

all make our racial identities,
though we do not make them under circumstances of our own choosing. Race and racism do not
exist merely because of white domination, but also because of resistance and
independent action: what C. L. R. James called self-activity (James, Lee, and Castoriadis 2005 [1958], p. 99).
The process of making and remaking race racial formation is fundamentally
political. It is about the freedom dreams (Kelley 2002) that shape racial conflict as much as the white racism emphasized by
about how the meaning of race is produced are basically Duboisian and Jamesian: we

Feagin and Elias.

As Feagin and Elias acknowledge, we

have developed a fairly detailed approach to racial politics, centred

on the constant and cumulative interaction of what we call racial projects. In our account, racial
formation proceeds through such projects, which both signify upon race
(representing it, interpreting it) and reciprocally structure social relationships (of power,
inequality, solidarity, etc.) according to race. If there is a disagreement with Feagin and Elias here, it
seems to be about how much power people of colour have in this process of race-making, this
racial formation process. In their account, the very meaning of race is overwhelmingly, if not totally,
shaped by a white racial frame. By contrast, we believe that people of colour have a lot
of power in the production of racial meanings, much more than Feagin and Elias are willing to concede.
OK, what about racism? There are points of agreement and difference between Feagin and Elias's perspective and ours. We provide a
hard-core definition and extensive discussion (Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 6976), defining racism

as a racial project that

combines essentialist representations of race (stereotyping, xenophobia, aversion, etc.) with patterns of
domination (violence, hierarchy, super-exploitation, etc.). Racism marks certain visible characteristics of
the human body for purposes of domination. It naturalizes and reifies these instrumental
distinctions. Racism is the product of modern history: empire and conquest, racebased slavery, and race-based genocide have shaped the modern world; they have been met with
resistance and sometimes revolution, also race-based in crucial ways. This is where race comes
from: the drive to rule, and the imperative to resist .
Feagin and Elias think (white) racism shapes race . Although they read us quite selectively and negatively here, they
recognize that we also identify whites as the most comprehensive practitioners and by far the greatest
beneficiaries of racist practices. We agree that racism is a ferocious force, a deeply structured-in
dimension of US (and world) society. But this is apparently not enough: Feagin and Elias also want to
confine racist agency to whites and whites alone. We argue that not all racism is white, and that people of

colour can practise racism as well.

Let us look more deeply at this question. Who

is white? Beyond the question of the contingent and highly porous

boundaries of this group lies the question of whether there are any positive
dimensions of white identity or whether it is a purely negative quality,
signifying only the absence of colour .2
Then there is the white privilege question, which builds on Du Bois's analysis (1999, p. 700) of the psychological wage received by
poor whites in virtue of their race. While we are in substantial agreement with the privilege argument regarding whites possessive
investment in racism (Lipsitz 1998), there are problems there too. How

do we account for white anti-racism if we

understand privilege as the source of racism? Is white anti-racism even possible, if racism is
envisioned as an economistic zero-sum game in which clear winners and losers are demarcated?
is so profoundly a lived-in and lived-out part of both social structure and
identity that it exceeds and transcends racism thereby allowing for resistance
to racism. Race, therefore, is more than racism; it is a fully fledged social
fact
We think that race

like sex/gender or class. From this perspective, race

shapes racism as much as racism

shapes race. Racial identities (individual and group), and other race-oriented concepts as well, are
unstable. They are not uniforms; races are not teams; they are not defined solely
by antagonism to one another. They vary internally and ideologically; they overlap
and mix; their positions in the social structure shift; in other words they are shaped by political conflict.
In Feagin and Elias's account, white

racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is

little sense that the white racial frame evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant
ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely a
distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US
society (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility to argue
that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to
reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression .
Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial democracy is an oxymoron a word defined in the dictionary as a
figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to
race and racism issues, we agree. If

they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political

power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it
is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less
inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies.
What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism?

Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil
rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in
different institutional sites employment, health, education persist and in many cases have
increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for
example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost
their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It

would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and

white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout
US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have
occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.
Elias do, that

Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we

overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed
in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about racial reaction in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as
well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us.

While we argue that the right wing was able to rearticulate race and racism issues to roll
back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to
what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape .
So we agree that the present

prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that
is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period,
in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved
irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations
were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement,
but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as
well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act , the Immigration and
Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not
believe that his interest convergence hypothesis effectively explains all these developments. How does
Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the
South for a generation count as convergence?

The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues,
hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971,
p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial
regime under movement pressure was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists
that such reforms which he calls passive revolutions cann ot be merely symbolic if
they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process . Once again, we are in
the realm of politics, not absolute rule.So yes, we think there were important if
partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life.
And yes, we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the
more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed
we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the
politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based

movements demanded not only the

inclusion of racially defined others and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the
recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and
identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself . They facilitated not only the democratic
gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and
inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and antiwar movements among others.

By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated

success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same rearticulation (Laclau
and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of colourblindness and its variants ; indeed all
these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even
their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with the various backlash phenomena of the past few
decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of colourblindness, reveal
the transformative character of the politicization of the social . While it is
not possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and
self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic
social movements that are evident in US politics today.

AT: State Link

The state has and still does messed up stuff toward black individuals but
racism can only be solved through policy reforms we dont link to any of
their state bad arguments because we categorically agree that the state is
bad, we just have a better method of approaching that fact
Bouie 13, Jamelle Bouie is a staff writer for The American Prospect, Making (and Dismantling)
Racism, http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism, NN

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public
policy, with a focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of
government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we
understand it is a creation of explicit policy choicesthe decision to
exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial
prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's possible to dismantle
this prejudice using public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had
the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes
that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgans work
and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If we
accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we
accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed
by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to
creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be
ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I
dont believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It
can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology it can create racist
structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it
can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to
become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more
manageable goal than TNCs utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm
not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our
DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty
basically just prejudicethen Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can
"create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making
a more precise claim: That there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined
American history. White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic
slave trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made by
particular peoplein this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginiato make black skin a
stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred
years. By enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance
for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy
the ideology of America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued
enslavementblacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim
Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in
the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black
people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use
the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for

suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in
socially sanctioned behaviorowning a home, getting marriedand then blame them for the
adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to conservative critics,
Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The
New Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are
men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than
most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away
with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses
and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men.
Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support
and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft
bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal marriage,
their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual
life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates'
core argument, that society can create stigmas by using law to force particular kinds of behavior?
Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to
do with the fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships.
The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged behavior that led this same
culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution." If the
prohibition against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting itas we've seen
over the last decadehas helped destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way.

AT: Surveillance Link

Surveillance destroys black insurgency only the aff provides a system where
blackness can survive proves the perm solves
McAdam 10, Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author or coauthor of over a dozen books and over fifty articles, and is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the
political process model in social movement analysis. Political Process and the Development of Black
Insurgency, 1930-1970, NN

Repression of Black-Power Groups. Certainly official efforts to damage specific movement

organizations or leaders occurred prior to the period under examination here. Perhaps the most
infamous of these early in-stances was the FBI's use of electronic surveillance to obtain
information on the alleged sexual improprieties of Martin Luther King, Jr., for the purpose of
dissemination to the press (Marx, 1976: 5). However, the pace of such efforts increased markedly
during the late 1960s in the face of the escalating rhetorical militance of certain insurgent leaders.
Indeed, from a tactical standpoint, many of these leaders can be criticized for pursuing what
Gamaon describes as the "strategy of speaking loudly and carrying a small stick" (1975: 87). That
is, many insurgent groups aggressively advocated the use of violence without ever practicing it
systematically. As Gamson points out, this strategy makes little tactical sense given the social
control costs that the open advocacy of violence is likely to entail. Groups that pursue this
strategy, "seem to pay the cost of violence without gaining the benefits of employing it. They are
both threatening and weak, and their repression becomes a low-cost strategy for those whom they
attempt to displace" (Gamson, 1975: 87). Certainly this description can be accurately applied to a
number of black-power groups active during the late 1960s. Perhaps the most cele-brated of these
was the Black Panther party founded in Oakland in Oc-tober, 1966. The Panthers were
subjected to a wide array of official control efforts ranging from
infiltration, to harassment through arrests for minor offenses, to
efforts to involve them in violent encounters with other black- power
groups, to violent confrontations with law enforcement personnel
(Goldstein, 1978: 523-30; Major, 1971). Some idea of the extensiveness of these control efforts
can be gained by reading Major (1971), who pre-sents a selective compilation of acts of official
repression directed against the Panthers between 1966 and 1970. Though unique in the extent of
official attention they received, the Pan-thers were by no means the only insurgent group
subjected to government-initiated control activities. Several other examples will help illustrate the
pervasiveness of such efforts: In Cleveland, three members of a black nationalist group died in
a 1968 shoot-out with police triggered by an unsubstantiated report by an FBI informant that the
group, the Black Nationalists of New Libya, were stockpiling weapons to carry out an
assassination plot against moderate black leaders (Masotti and Corsi, 1969). FBI officials
planted a series of derogatory articles in papers during the SCLC-sponsored Poor Peoples
Campaign in 1968 as a means of discrediting it (Marx, 1976: 5). Police raided the Los Angeles
office of SNCC on April 5, 1968, while chapter members were attending a memorial service for
Martin Luther King (Major, 1971: 297). In his study of a local black-power group, Helmreich
reports count- less instances of official violence, harassment, and intimidafion directed at the
organization's leadership. In the most flagrant incident, two lead-ers were arrested on a charge of
faulty brake lights, taken to the police station, and beaten severely (Helmreich, 1973: 120-21).
No fewer than twenty-four known black insurgent groups were sub-jected to tax surveillance as
part of a larger effort to use the IRS to harass "extremist" groups of varying (though primarily
leftist) Political philosophies (U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee, vol. 3, 1975: 50-52).

Such instances could be multiplied indefinitely without adding appre-ciably to our understanding
of the phenomenon. Suffice to say, in the late 1960s law enforcement officials at all levels of
govemment responded to what they perceived to be the growing threat posed by insurgents by
initiating a stepped-up campaign of repression designed to destroy the black-power wing of the
movement. This campaign served to diminish the ongoing prospects for black insurgency in a
number of important ways. Al the most basic level, stepped-up control efforts increased significantly the risks associated with movement participation. Accordingly, the recruitment of new
members grew especially difficult as repression against insurgents intensified in the period from
1968 to 1970. lust as damaging to the movement were the programmatic constraints insurgents
had to endure as a result of their increasingly antagonistic encounters with government officials.
The escalating conflict forced black-power groups to assume a defensive stance that transformed
the sub- Massive thrust of their programs from community organizing to efforts aimed at
preserving and defending the organization against external threats. Quite apart from the
substantive impotence embodied in this transformation, this shift also reduced the ability of
insurgents to with. stand repression by undermining their support within, and ties to, the larger
black community (Helmreich, 1973: 147). Official repression also imposed extraordinary
financial burdens on in-surgents that further diminished their capacity to act. Indeed, as Oberschen perceptively notes, the precipitation of financial cysis may well have been the real motive
underlying the federal government's aggressive prosecution of movement activists in the late
19604 "the government's strategy appeared to be to tie down leaders M costly and time
consuming legal battles which would impede their activities and put a tremendous drain on
financial resources regardless of whether the government would be successful in court" 11978:
277-78). On the local level, as Helmreich notes in his study of a particular black power group,
law enforcement officials achieved much the same results through constant harassment of
insurgents: "raising bail money was a constant problem for the organi. zation. This drained their
financial resources to the point where they bad tremendous difficulty in even surviving as a
group, not to mention ex-panding their activities within the community" (1973: 147-48). Finally,
it would be hard 10 overestimate the divisive internal effect that increased government
surveillance had on insurgents. Fear of informers was sufficient in many cases to generate the
climate of suspicion and distrust needed to precipitate =iota internal problems. And where fear
itself failed to produce the desired results, social control agents could be counted on to stir up
dissension. As one example, Gary Marx cites a 1970 memo in which "FBI agents were instructed
to plant in the hands of Panthers phony documents (on FBI stationery) that would lead them to
suspect one another of being police informers" (1974: 435). He concludes, "Sociologists who
have often observed the bickering and conflict among sectarian protest groups holding the same
goals, and their ever-present problems of unity, most ask what role 'counterintelligence' activities
may be playing" (Marx, 074: 436).

Mass surveillance uniquely harms people of color -- warrant

Malkia Amala Cyril, March 30, 2015, Malkia Amala Cyril is founder and executive director of
the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a
national network of 175 organizations working to ensure media access, rights, and representation
for marginalized communities. - See more at:
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance#sthash.6HGGP9oF.dpuf, Black America's State of Surveillance,
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance JJ

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died
from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our
door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers
or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that
they would be watching her. They didnt get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My
mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law
enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for
being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that
African Americans, J. Edger Hoovers largest target group, didnt have to be perceived as
dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy
is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement
agencies across the United States. Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laserfocused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on
by the NSA. Yet my mothers visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to
laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of
color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy.
Its time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes
learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been
overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an
impoverished underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of
data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able
to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not
caught up to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the
problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit may
be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the
inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate
collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. For
targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate
surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect
policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken
dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public
benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the
streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill
Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this
organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of
this department technology that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago.
Predictive policing, also known as Total

Information Awareness, is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is

Instead of reducing
discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New
Jim Crowa de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices,
conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system
of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York City,
the predictive policing approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an
undue focus on quality of life crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which
Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights,
predictive policing is just high-tech racial profilingindiscriminate data collection that drives
discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt
surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific
deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice.

conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to
observe data trends. Police departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do
all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier
Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the
process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which
the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any
criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been
touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and
archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone
interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance
device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into
transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspects cellphone,
they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby.
The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to
conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are
considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and
tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration
for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence
community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on
record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed
as official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning
related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often
stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism
. As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even

when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesnt just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom
turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of
policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power.

The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement

agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States.
According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat
mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as a
funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be
destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law
enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against
Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims.
At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United
States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the
elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore
subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the
Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than
60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black
communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are
incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some
misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black
defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime.
This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all.
The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black
people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and
integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a
media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural
One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts.

racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier read. To me, freedom
from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy.
As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up,
too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial
hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, Everything we see
is a shadow cast by that which we do not see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories
that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have
blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer,
and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet
makes that possible. But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens
to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century. We can help black lives matter by ensuring
that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead
or in jail
. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are

democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that aint been heard yet. Lets birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century create equity
and justice for allso all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more. - See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance#sthash.6HGGP9oF.dpuf

AT: Time/Death Link

Ignorance of the inevitability of the future means we never create pragmatic
change their rejection of systems of temporality dooms us to nihilism
WFS 2 World Future Society, nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization founded
in 1966, 2002 (A brief overview of the study of the future and the services of the World Future
Society, Available Online at http://www.wfs.org/ownermanual.htm, Accessed 04-10-2007)
To meet the challenges of the future, we need to find out about what we can plausibly expect in
the years ahead so we can understand what our options are. We can then set reasonable goals and
develop effective strategies for achieving them. Many people believe it is impossible to know
anything about the future, so the future can simply be ignored. This is a very serious
mistake. It's true, of course, that we can know only a little about the future, but that little is
extremely important, because a knowledge of the futureeven when it's very uncertainis
critical in making wise decisions, in both our professional and personal lives. Learning
what we can know about the future enables us to think
constructively about it and do things that will contribute to our
achieving a desirable future, because preparation is needed to meet
the challenges of the future and take advantage of the new
opportunities opening up. We humans really do have the ability to think constructively
about the future, anticipate many future events, envision desirable goals, and develop effective
strategies for realizing our purposes. By learning about current trends and likely future
developments, we can develop a mental data bank and set of blueprints for improving our future
life. These assets can help us to succeed in whatever we seek to achieve. Proactive, futureoriented thinking can lead to greater success in both work and private affairs. The future
will happen, no matter what we do, but if we want it to be a good
future, we need to work at it. As Adlai Stevenson put it, "Change is
inevitable; change for the better is a full-time job."

Hope is what gives value to life they might be right that the present creates
violence against marked bodies but never imagining a world in which these
bodies can survive is a tactic of white supremacy
Unger 7 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University,
2007 (The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, Published by Harvard University Press, ISBN
0674023544, p. 151)
The hope held out by the thesis that we can change our relation to our contexts will remain
hollow unless we can change this relation in biographical as well as in historical time,
independent of the fate of all collective projects of transformation. It will be hollow as well unless
that change will give us other people and the world itself more fully. That the hope is not
hollow in any such sense represents part of the thesis implicit in the
idea of futurity: to live for the future is to live in the present as a
being not fully determined by the present settings of organized life
and thought and therefore more capable of openness to the other
person, to the surprising experience, and to the entire phenomenal world of time and change.
It is in this way that we can embrace the joy of life in the moment as both a revelation and a
prophecy rather than discounting it as a trick that nature plays on spirit the better to reconcile us
to our haplessness and our ignorance. The chief teaching of this book is that we become more

godlike to live, not that we live to become more godlike. The reward of our striving is
not arousal to a greater life later; it is arousal to a greater life now,
a raising up confirmed by our opening up to the other and to the
new. A simple way to grasp the point of my whole argument, from the vantage point of this its
middle and its center, is to say that it explores a world of ideas about nature, society, personality,
and mind within which this teaching makes sense and has authority.

AT: Islamophobia Link

Anti-black violence is just a factor of anti-brown violence their bracketing
off of Muslim Americans is a tactic of white supremacy
Bowie 8, Niko Bowie is a staff writer for Yale Daily knews as well as CBS, Column: Has Anti-black
Racism Been Replaced By Islamophobia?, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/column-has-anti-black-racismbeen-replaced-by-islamophobia/, NN

Historians will likely attribute George W. Bushs successful 2004 reelection campaign at least in
part to anti-Muslim fear after September 11. But might they also credit Barack Obamas success
so far to the same phenomenon? September 11 has dramatically altered race relations in the
United States, but not necessarily positively. Perceptions of hostility between
blacks and whites in the United States have certainly dissipated, and
polling data shows that the number of people who claim they would
never vote for a black president has dropped significantly in the last
eight years. But this trend might be less due to racial reconciliation
than to a displacement of racism from blacks to a conflated image of
Muslims, Arabs and terrorists. In a 2000 stand-up comedy routine, Dave Chappelle
quipped: Sometimes racism works out in black peoples favor, referencing Muslims in particular.
Chappelle began to tell the audience of being on an airplane during a hijacking. When he
surreptitiously turned to another black passenger and gave him a thumbs-up, a white person
sitting nearby whispered appreciatively, Oh my God, I think those black guys are going to save
us! But their take was a misinterpretation: really, Chappelle was confident the hijackers would
spare him and the other passenger because black people are bad bargaining chips. After
September 11, many other comedians, writers and pundits noticed a similar pattern in our
country: Black people began to be viewed more favorably by whites as
hostility toward Arab-Americans and Muslims increased. A week before
the attacks, American delegates walked out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban,
South Africa. Now, Americans see black people as far less threatening than Arabs. Though Dave
Chappelle is Muslim, after the attacks he joked he was getting through the system or at least
airport security lines much faster than before. Has anti-black racism been replaced by
Islamophobia? One glaring answer can be found in changes to the presidential campaigns. At the
beginning of last century, candidates feared not that they would be seen as Muslims, but as
Negroes. In 1920, a biographer of presidential candidate Warren G. Harding published a pamphlet
that suggested Harding was the great-grandson of a black woman and therefore could become the
countrys first Negro president. Hardings supporters were furious. As the Yale history professor
Beverly Gage has written, the taint of Negro blood was political death. Hardings supporters drove
the biographer out of his job and destroyed as many of the pamphlets as they could find. Fastforward to 2008, when candidates running against Barack Obama have circulated photographs of
him wearing a headscarf and encouraged rumors he attended a madrassa. At a recent rally, John
McCain told a supporter who feared that Obama might be Arab that it wasnt true because Obama
was a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with. And while
McCain has declared Reverend Jeremiah Wrights sermons out-of-bounds for political attacks, his
campaign has nevertheless attacked Barack Hussein Obama for palling around with terrorists,
using his association with teacher and former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers to scare many
Americans into thinking of dangerous sheiks living in caves. Obama has responded to this
Islamophobia less by condemning the bigotry than by affirming his Christian values and
distancing himself from Islam. In one unfortunate turn this summer, Obama campaign volunteers

even repositioned Muslim women at rallies so they wouldnt be caught in television footage of the
candidate. (The campaign later apologized and said the action was unsanctioned.) It wasnt until
Colin Powells endorsement of Obama last week tat a prominent political figure took issue with
the anti-Muslim sentiments that have been rampant through the campaign. These are the kinds of
images going out on Al Jazeera that are killing us around the world, Powell said. And we have got
to say to the world it doesnt make any difference who you are and what you are. If youre an
American, youre an American. Regardless of whether anti-Muslim fears among the electorate
have influenced votes, the next president will need to face the reality that racism may not be
dying in America, but instead just taking on a different color. As far as I know neither candidate
in this race is Muslim, but that should not stop either one of them from condemning this new
form of racism head-on.

Framework
Meaningful dialogue about what actions the government should take
overcomes the conversational impasse and paves the way for material racial
change. Disavowing the policy consequences of ones ideological positions
makes things worse, not better.
Bracey 6 Christopher A. Bracey, Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of African & African American Studies
at Washington University in St. Louis, holds a B.S. from the University of North Carolina and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2006
(The Cul De Sac of Race Preference Discourse, Southern California Law Review (79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231), September, Available
Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
IV. A Foundation for Renewed Racial Dialogue A deepened appreciation and open acknowledgment of this pedigree is crucial to
restoring public conversation on race preferences. Opponents of race preferences must come to understand that this pedigree, if left
unaddressed, tends to overwhelm the underlying merit of arguments against race preferences in the eyes of proponents. At the same
time, proponents should understand that the deployment of these pedigreed rhetorical themes does not necessarily signal agreement
with the nineteenth-century racial norms from which they are sourced. For both proponents and opponents, the

avoidance of a
rapid retreat into ideological trench warfare not only preserves space for reasoned,
substantive debate regarding race preferences, but also allows for the possibility of overcoming our
collective fixation on race preferences as the issue in American race relations and advancing the
conversation to reach the larger issue of producing a more racially inclusive society. Our
failing public conversation on race matters not only presents a particularly tragic moment in
American race relations, but also evinces a greater failure of democracy. Sustained,
meaningful dialogue is a critical, if not indispensable feature of our liberal democracy.
n260 It is through [*1312] meaningful public conversation about what actions government
should take (or refrain from taking) that public policy determinations ultimately
gain legitimacy. Conversation is particularly important in our democracy, given the profoundly
diverse and often contradictory cultural and political traditions that are the sine qua non of
American life. Under these particular circumstances, "persons ought to strive to engage in a
mutual process of critical interaction, because if they do not, no uncoerced common
understanding can possibly be attained." n261 Sincere deliberation, in its broadest idealized form, ensures that a broad
array of input is heard and considered, legitimizing the resulting decision. Under this view, "if the preferences that determine the
results of democratic procedures are unreflective or ignorant, then they lose their claim to political authority over us." n262 In the
absence of self-conscious, reflective dialogue, "democracy loses its capacity to generate legitimate political power." n263 In

addition to legitimizing the exercise of state authority in a liberal democracy, dialogue works to
promote individual freedom. The power to hash over our alternatives is an important
exercise of human agency. n264 If democracy is taken to mean rule by the people
themselves, then conversation and deliberation are the principal means through which we declare
and assert the power to shape our own belief systems . The roots of this idea of dialogue as freedom-promoting are
traceable to the Kantian view that individual motivation that is either uncriticized or uncontested can be understood on a deeper level
as a mode of subjugation. As Frank Michelman explains, "in Kantian terms we are free only insofar as we are self-governing, directing
our actions in accordance with law-like reasons [*1313] that we adopt for ourselves, as proper to ourselves, upon conscious, critical
reflection on our identities (or natures) and social situations." n265 Because "self-cognition and ensuing self-legislation must, to a like
extent, be socially situated," Michelman continues, "norms must be formed through public dialogue and expressed as public law."

as democratic modus operandi can be understood both as a material

expression of freedom and as a mechanism to promote individual
freedom. Robust dialogue on public policy matters also promotes the individual
growth of the dialogue participants. Conversation helps people become more
knowledgeable and hold better developed opinions because "opinions can be
tested and enlarged only where there is a genuine encounter with differing
opinions." n267 Moreover, meaningful conversation serves to broaden people's moral perspectives to include matters of
n266 In this way, dialogue

public good, because appeals to the public good are often the most persuasive arguments available in public deliberation. n268 Indeed,

even if people are thinking self-interested thoughts while making public good arguments, cognitive dissonance will create an incentive
for such individuals to reconcile their self interest with the public good. n269 At the same time, because

political dialogue is
a material manifestation of democracy in action, it promotes a feeling of
democratic community and instills in the people a will for political action to advance
reasoned public policy in the spirit of promoting the public good. n270 For these reasons,
the collective aspiration of those interested in pursing serious, sustained, and policylegitimating dialogue on race matters must be to cultivate a reasoned discourse
that is relatively free of retrograde ideological baggage that feeds skepticism, engenders
distrust, and effectively forecloses constructive conversation on the most
corrosive and divisive issue in American history and contemporary life . As the forgoing sections suggest,
the continued reliance upon pedigreed rhetorical themes has and continues to poison racial legal discourse. Given the various
normative and ideological commitments that might be ascribed to [*1314] opponents of race preferences, the question thus becomes,
how are we to approach the task of breaking through the conversational impasse and creating intellectual space for meaningful
discourse on this issue? One can imagine at least three responses to this question. As an initial matter, one might subscribe to the view
that pedigree is not destiny, and thus conclude that the family resemblance tells us little, if anything, definitive about the normative
commitments of today's opponents of race preferences. Consider the argument that the benefits of white privilege do not extend
equally among all whites, and that policies that treat all whites as equally guilty of racial subordination advance a theory of
undesirable rough justice. n271 Although this argument is a staple of modern opponents of race preferences, it would be a mistake to
conclude that it can only be deployed by those persons who normatively oppose race preferences. Indeed, one might very well support
race preferences, but believe quite strongly that such programs should be particularly sensitive to individual candidate qualifications.
Similarly, although one might believe that diversity does not comport with merit based decisionmaking in education and employment,
it would be incorrect to interpret this belief as necessarily indicative of a greater commitment to preserving status quo racial inequality.
One might reject the diversity rational as insufficient to justify a system of race preferences that one strongly believes must be
justified. In short, one may be inclined to simply engage the argument and ignore the possibility of retrograde normative
underpinnings. Interestingly, a small cadre of scholars has adopted this approach. Derrick Bok and William Bowen, in The Shape of
the River, investigated whether racial minorities feel stigmatized or otherwise adversely affected as a result of being denoted
beneficiaries of affirmative action policy in college admissions. n272 Thomas Ross has critically examined claims of collective white
innocence. n273 More recently, Goodwin Lui has researched the scope of the burden that affirmative action in college admissions
imposes upon aspiring white students. n274 In each instance, these scholars chose to place to one side their skepticism about the
normative commitments of those advancing the viewpoint, and launch directly into substantive critiques of that viewpoint. [*1315]
This approach, however, may prove unsatisfactory for those more strongly committed to racial justice - those for whom it is not
enough to simply challenge ideas in the abstract. As the late Robert Cover famously wrote, "legal interpretation takes place within a
field of pain and death." n275 By this, he meant that the stakes of legal discourse are elevated when bodies are on the line. A vigorous
critique of the substantive position alone leaves the normative underpinnings - the motivational force behind the proposal dangerously intact. It may stymie the particular vehicle that attempts to reinforce racial subordination, but it leaves unaddressed the
fundamental motive driving policy positions that seek to undermine racial minorities in the first place. At the other end of the
responsive spectrum is wholesale rejection. One might view the pedigree as providing good reason to dismiss opponents of
race entirely. Proponents of this view may choose to indulge fully this liberal skepticism and simply reject the message along with the
messenger. n276 The tradition of legal discourse on American race relations [*1316] has been one steeped in racial animus and
characterized by circumlocution, evasiveness, reluctance and denial. When opponents avail themselves of rhetorical strategies used by
nineteenth-century legal elites, they necessarily invoke the specter of this tragic racial past. Moreover, their continued reliance upon
pedigreed rhetoric to justify a system that only modestly responds to persistent racial disparities in the material lives of racial
minorities suggests a deep, unarticulated normative commitment to preserving the racial status quo in which whites remain
comfortably above blacks. The steadfast reliance upon pedigreed rhetoric, coupled with the apparent disconnect between claims of
racial egalitarianism and material conditions of racial subordination as a result of persistent racial disparities, spoils the credibility of
modern opponents of race preferences and creates an incentive for proponents to dismiss them without serious interrogation,
consideration, and weighing of the arguments they advance. The principal deficit of this approach is that it would

serve only to
concretize the existing conversational impasse and subvert the larger
aspiration of seeking constructive solutions to pressing racial issues. It
creates an incentive to view race matters in purely ideological terms and further
subverts the possibility of reasoned policy debate. Speaking of race matters in purely
ideological terms poses a serious impediment to racial conversation because, in advancing one's
position, one essentially argues that a particular set of circumstances demands a particular outcome. In this [*1317] way, purely
ideological race rhetoric functions much like philosopher Immanuel Kant described in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
n277 According to Kant, a moral imperative is categorical insofar as it is presented as objectively necessary, without reference to some
purpose or outcome. The imperative is the end in and of itself. As Kant explained, the moral imperative "has to do not with the matter
of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form and the principle from which the action itself follows; and the essentially
[sic] good in the action consists in the disposition, let the result be what it may." n278 Because the moral imperative embodies that
which is morally good, it necessarily makes a claim about justice. In short, an act is deemed morally just to the extent that it retains

fidelity to the moral imperative. By

contrast, a policy argument reflects a set of choices or priorities and

asserts a claim about the impact of a particular set of decisions upon the world. n279 A
policy argument does not embody a claim to justice. Indeed, the correctness of a policy choice is often tested against the backdrop of
some agreed upon conception of justice. As the late Jerome Culp, Jr. explained: Neither side of a moral debate is likely to be
persuaded by proof that the policy claims support or discredit their moral positions. Policy arguments can be disproved by empirical
evidence and challenged by showing in some situations the policy does not work or has contrary results. To refute a moral claim,
however, first requires some agreement on the moral framework. Only then can one discuss whether the moral policy advocated
conforms to the agreed-upon framework. n280 Speaking about race matters in purely ideological or moral terms creates the
impression that a particular racial policy is rooted in some theory of what is morally just. In this way, opposition to race preferences is
made to appear "above the fray" of politics and less susceptible to public choice debate. In addition, it enables opponents to claim that
race [*1318] preferences merely reflect the political whims of its proponents, unanchored by principle or a coherent theory of social
justice. Second, reducing

conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to

elide inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy are desirable.
Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances create the impression that a racial
policy is not simply a choice among available alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher
moral principle. Thus, the "principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to
outcomes. Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come to be
understood as the embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains
Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic
assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." n281 For
Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate
conditions of oppression. Critics may point out that colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in

framing the debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are

able to avoid the contentious issue of outcomes and make viability determinations based
exclusively on whether racially progressive measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle of
colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by ideological exchange, which
further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment.
health, wealth, and society. But in

n282

Reformation is a prerequisite to revolutionfocus on instantaneous

individual action/rhetoric results in wide spread backlash, failed
organization, and re-entrenchment of right-wing domination. Building
alliances are necessary
Saul ALINSKY, community organizer and writer, 1971 [Rules for Radicals, p. xix-xxiii (Gender Modified Sigalos)]
from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept
is necessary to
begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means
working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new
step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive , affirmative, nonchallenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated,
so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past
and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation
re-[END PAGE XIX] quires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class
but the 40 per cent of American families-more than seventy million people-whose incomes range from
$5,000 to $10,000 a year. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue
collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate
with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they
will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default. Our youth are
impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective
organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic
As an organizer I start

the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire 'to change it into what we believe it should be-it

change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of
thing we see in play writing; the first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed

The
present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there
is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation's sake-a flare-up and back
to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is
played-if you want to play and not just yell , "Kill the umpire." What is the alternative to working
"inside" the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about "Burn the system
down!" Yippie yells of "Do it!" or "Do your thing." What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police
are killed and screams of "murdering fascist pigs" when others are killed? Attacking and baiting
the police? Public suicide? "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!" is an absurd rallying cry
[END PAGE XX] when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when
he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power
through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns! Militant mouthings? Spouting quotes
from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological,
computerized, cybernetic, nuclear- powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway
at Kennedy airport? Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its
repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build
an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that
relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it.
That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the "cultural
revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a
courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and
mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective .We will start with the
system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is most important for
those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be preceded by
reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a
popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics . Men [and women] don't like to step
abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A
revolutionary organizer [END PAGE XXI] must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives- agitate,
create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, .if not a passion for change, at least a passive,
as the play strives to hold the audience's attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.

affirmative, non-challenging climate. "The Revolution was 'effected before the war commenced," John Adams wrote. "The Revolution
was in the hearts and minds of the peopleThis radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was
the real American Revolution." A revolution

without a prior reformation would collapse or become a

totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of
disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the
prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't
strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution. Those who, for whatever combination
of reasons, encourage the opposite of reformation, become the unwitting allies of the far
political right. Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but
indistinguishable from the extreme right. It reminds me of the days when Hitler, new on the scene, was excused for his
actions by "humanitarians" on the grounds of a paternal rejection and childhood trauma. When there are people who espouse the
assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnapping and killings or the
University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as "revolutionary acts," then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding
psychosis behind a political mask. The

masses of people recoil with horror and say, "Our way is bad and
we were willing to let it change, but certainly not for this murderous madness-no matter [END PAGE
XXII] how bad things are now, they are better than that." So they begin to turn back. They regress
into acceptance of a coming massive repression in the name of "law and order."

b. Incremental reform is better than pure rejection---the alternative fails and

infinitely replicates the SQ
Jefferey Pyle 99, Boston College Law School, J.D., magna cum laude, Race, Equality and the Rule of Law: Critical Race
Theory's Attack on the Promises of Liberalism, 40 B.C.L. Rev. 787

Critique," however, never built anything, and liberalism, for all its shortcomings, is at least
constructive. It provides broadly-accepted, reasonably well-defined principles to which political advocates
may appeal in ways that transcend sheer power, with at least some hope of incremental success :26'
Critical race theory would "deconstruct" this imperfect tradition, but offers nothing in its
place. An apt example of how unconstructive CRT is can be found in its approach to equality. To the extent that race-crits discuss "equality" at all, they do so less to
"

advance tangible goals than to disparage liberalism's different approaches, including the ultimate goal of a society where race does not matter. 265 The race-crits are particularly
hostile to the liberal ideal of "color blindness," expressed most eloquently by Martin Luther King's dream that his children "will one day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."266 To the race-crits, this integrationist goal of color-blind constitutionalism is not just naive or preinature.
2"7 In Neil Gotanda's words, it "supports the supremacy of white interests and must therefore be regarded as racist." !08 Unlike King, who saw affirmative action as a colorconscious means to a more inclusive, integrated nation ,"9 race-crits consider affirmative action an end in itself, more akin to an award of permanent damages than transitional

Critical race
theory's failure to address the difficulties of administering a reparations-based, "equality of result!' system
leaves one with the impression that either they really are not. serious, or their invocation of "equality" is little more than an assertion of group
interests. Indeed, the more pessimistic race-crits, like Derrick Bell, would be happiest if social reformers jettisoned the goal of
"equality" altogether, because that goal "merely perpetuates our disempowerment."291 Illegal doctrine is to be
assistance:270 To the race-crits, any doctrine that gets in the way of that end, including egalitarian colorblindness, is ipso facto "racist." 271 <cont>

judged solely by how it advances the interest of racial minorities, the race-crits implicitly dismiss any vision of equality that could aid other disadvantaged groups, or that could
treat disadvantaged members of the racial majority with equal concern and respect.29' To the race-crits, the proper inquiry is not how the law lives up to aspirations or principles,
but how it serves the interests of a constituen cy.297 In this respect, the race-crits are more political advocates than legal scholars.2"8 There is, of course, nothing wrong with

legal theoriesthe principles and ideas that guide the determination of legal outcomes
must transcend mere factional interests if they are to aid minorities . They must win the majority's
acquiescence, if not its active support. So far, race-crits have not provided such a theory. CRT is only
"scholarly resistance" that lives within, and indeed depends upon, the
liberal legal order . 2"" Without liberalism to "critique," critical race
theory would have little meaning. In the end, critical race theory could no more supplant
liberalism than the mission statement of a political action committee could replace the
Constitution.
being an advocate, and disadvantaged people certainly need advocates. But

The status of modern blacks is profoundly different from that of slaves- even
if some famous cases have had little impact on the status of blacks their
authors ignore a multiplicity of minor changes that prove state action is a
useful tool for improving civil society
Driver, 11- Justin is an Assistant Professor, University of Texas School of Law. In 2004, he graduated from Harvard Law
School, where he was an Articles Editor and Book Reviews Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Driver served as a law clerk to Judge
Merrick B. Garland, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (ret.) and
Justice Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court of the United States. His principal research interests include constitutional law, constitutional
theory, and the intersection of race with legal institutions.(Rethinking the Interest-Convergence Thesis, 105 Northwestern University
Law Review 149, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v105/n1/149/LR105n1Driver.pdf)
B. Consistency and Inconsistency of Racial Status The

interest-convergence theory holds that, because black

people re- ceive relief from racial oppression only when it suits the interests of the white
establishment, the status of blacks and the status of whites remained relatively constant
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century-and perhaps even throughout the nation's entire
history. According to Professor Bell, as discussed above,119 the interest-convergence theory at work throughout United States
history links contemporary racial developments to the unvamished racism of seemingly bygone eras. This misperception- that
the status of blacks and whites has been characterized by continuity ra- ther than change during
the last several decades-erroneously minimizes one of the leading transformations of American
society during that time. One need not believe that racism has been completely vanquished or that

there is no longer any advantage associated with whiteness to acknowledge that the status
of both racial groups has experienced profound transforma- tions since
World War ll. I . Status of Blacks.-Professor Bell has long asserted that the inter- est-convergence theory reveals how contemporary
blacks have a good deal in common with their enslaved ancestors: "The difference in the condition of slaves in one of the gradual
emancipation states and black people today is more of degree than of kind.'''''' Under

this view, the fall of Jim Crow

was largely a formality, as conditions for African-Americans in the modern era retain an eerie
similarity to the days of yore. Even though signs indicat- ing separate water fountains for blacks and whites have long since
disap- peared, Professor Bell asserts that "contemporary color barriers are less visible but neither less
real nor less oppressive.""' While it may seem that to state this point is to refute it, arguments as- serting an absence of
genuine racial change for contemporary black citizens are surprisingly widespread. Indeed, in the face of the overwhelming evi- dence
of the tremendous strides that the United States has made with re- spect to race relations since World War II,''' the notion that
conditions have improved for blacks only on the margins enjoys prominent support both in the legal academy"' and in the larger
culture.'3' Accordingly,

it is necessary to observe that the racial existence of blacks in modern

America would be unrecognizable, and perhaps even unfathomable, to their enslaved forefathers. Contending that the existence of blacks today can be analogized to people who were
literally (not metaphorically) denied their freedom or to people who had their liberty thoroughly
circumscribed by Jim Crow mini- mizes the suffering of individuals who endured the yoke of
unrelenting ra- cial oppression. While the goal of racial equality has certainly not yet been fully rea- lized, the racial
progress that has been made over the generations has dra- matically elevated the racial status of blacks. Examples abound of
racial progress for blacks in their everyday lives.'" To appreciate the genuine ra- cial progress that
has been made, it is necessary merely to recall the Su- preme Court's statements in notorious
cases openly acknowledging and affirming the inferior social status of blacks. In Dred Scott v.
Sandford, Chief Justice Taney's opinion stated that, in the eyes of the Framers, blacks "had for
more tha[n] a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to
associate with the white race, either in social or political relations." l26 In Plessy v. Ferguson, the
Court made the then-unremarkable point that a black man "is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man."'27 Not only would such arguments no longer appear in the U.S.
Reports but they would no longer be uttered in polite company. The significance of that change
cannot be underestimated. The Supreme Court has, moreover, played at least some role in closing the
gap between the status of blacks and the status of whites. While many Supreme Court cases
involving race received a great deal of attention be-cause they seemed dramatic, it is perhaps
most helpful here to remember a case that affected the quotidian. Not long ago, black people were
typically denied the honor of being addressed formally, even in formal settings. Among the list of racial
slights that Martin Luther King Jr. listed in his Let-ter from Birmingham City Jail as justifying his
civil disobedience was the refusal of white people to accord blacks the respect of using formal
titles: I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious
mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; ... when your first name becomes "nigger"
and your middle name becomes "boy"... and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs." ... then you will
understand why we find it difficult to wait.'28 One

year after King wrote his celebrated letter, the Supreme

Court decided Hamilton v. Alabama.'29 In that case, the Supreme Court reversed the con-tempt
conviction of a black woman who refused to answer questions ad-dressed to "Mary" as opposed
to "Miss Hamilton." Hamilton thus offers a prime instance of the judiciary refusing to permit black citizens to be treated with
diminished status before the law. And in so doing, Hamilton represents a sharp break from the past in a way
that is at once simple and profound.

Alt Fails
Revolutionary black resistance generates backlash from the right and the left
it materially reverses efforts towards racial justice
Shelby 07 Tommie Shelby is the Professor of African and African American Studies and of
Philosophy at Harvard University. (We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black
Solidarity)
Even if it were possible to effectively mobilize a multicorporatist Black Power program without
running afoul of democratic values or compromising broader egalitarian concerns, this form of
black solidarity may not be pragmatically desirable because of factors that are exogenous to black
communities. Thus far I have discussed this program without much consideration for how other
ethnoracial groups would be likely to respond to its institutional realization. It is reasonable to
assume that Black Power politics would engender a countermobilization
on the part of nonblacks, and not just whites, seeking to protect
their own interests. Indeed, if Carmichael and Hamilton were correct about the
essentially ethnic basis of American politics, we should fully expect this kind ofresistance. With
increased political centralization and organizational autonomy, openly aimed at advancing black
interests, we would also likely see a rise in white nationalism, where
some whites increase their collective power through greater group
self-organization and solidarity, as they have often done in the past and, to some
extent, continue to do even now.51 Such resistance would not come solely from racists, however.
Some potential allies would also be alienated by this nationalist program and may
consequently become(further) disillusioned with the ideal of racial integration, indifferent to
black problems, or disaffected from black people. Nonblacks would naturally view their
relegation to "supporting roles" within black political organizations as a sign that their help in the
struggle for racial justice is unneeded or unwanted; that their commitment to racial justice is in
question; that blacks are more concerned with advancing their group interests than with fighting
injustice; or that blacks do not seek a racially integrated society. Moreover, because those who
have status and exercise power within institutions generally have a stake in preserving these
institutional structures, even if they no longer serve the goals for which they were initially
established, nonblacks have well-founded reasons to worry that black political organizations may,
through sheer inertia or opportunism, become ends in themselves. Thus, although institutional
autonomy might increase the organizational independence of blacks, the overall power of the
group could be reduced because of isolation from other progressive forces. This situation would
be particularly disastrous for blacks who live in minority-black electoral districts, for they cannot
elect effective political representation without the support of like-minded nonblack citizens.

Discussion alone failsdemands upon the state can change the way it
functions
Sharpton 13 Al Sharpton. (We Need More Than Just a Conversation on Race; We Need
Legislative Action, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-al-sharpton/we-need-more-than-just-a_b_3636142.html?utm_hp_ref=black-voices, July 22, 2013)
This past Saturday, we witnessed a historic moment across this country. In 100 cities from coastto-coast, people rallied against 'Stand Your Ground' laws and called on the Department of Justice
to investigate whether the unarmed teenager's civil rights were violated. With only days to
organize, the National Action Network (NAN) spearheaded these demonstrations that proved how

people were engaged, visibly frustrated by injustice and most importantly, knew that nothing
would change going forward without a demand for substantive
action. Discussions about race are good, we need that as well, but
unless those conversations are leading to legislative change, they
aren't doing much for us as a nation. Many thought organizing a 100-city vigil in
four days was unthinkable; many simply didn't believe we could do it. But we did. It was
grassroots mobilization that brought tens of thousands out on a Saturday where the weather
ranged from pouring rain to sweltering heat in different cities. We watched men, women,
children, Black, White, Brown, the elderly, the young and folks from all socioeconomicbackgrounds join together to rally on the side of truth, fairness and justice. We
witnessed celebrities like Beyonc and Jay-Z lend their support in places like New York. And we
saw peaceful protesters in these cities energized to take the battle for equality to the next level.
Now we just need the law to catch up. There are those that try to pull the wool over people's eyes.
They try to twist and alter facts so that we may not get a clear picture of reality. That may work
sometimes. But sooner or later, the truth shall prevail. And sooner rather than later, the people
will demand change. Trayvon Martin was an unarmed 17-year-old. Trayvon Martin committed no
crime. Trayvon Martin went to store to buy Skittles and an iced tea. Trayvon Martin was shot
dead by a civilian who had no authority to stop him. Trayvon Martin's killer wasn't
arrested for weeks until after the horrible incident. Those are facts.
And facts cannot be denied no matter how they may be twisted or spun. In another case in the
state of Florida, an African-American mother by the name of Marissa Alexander fired a warning
shot to scare off her abusive husband. She was denied the ability to use 'Stand Your Ground' in
her defense and is currently serving a 20-year sentence. How is that justice? The man who killed
Trayvon, George Zimmerman, gets to return to his old life; meanwhile, this mother of three who
was protecting herself and her children is rotting in a prison cell. That sort of blatant injustice
cannot be hidden. People will see through the hypocrisy and they will
accept nothing less than our laws becoming modified so as to
protect all of us equally. We cannot live in a society that continues to give preferential
treatment to some, while castigating and punishing others. That is not progress; that is where our
work remains. Whenever I speak about the fight for civil rights today, some try to attack me and
say this isn't the 1960s. Well on August 24th, NAN and Martin Luther King III will actually be
conducting a massive demonstration to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s 'March on Washington'. As we pay homage to his vision, some try to argue that there's
no need to rally anymore. To compare today's challenges to those of the '60s is just as
disingenuous as comparing the '60s to the days of slavery. Even though sitting at the back of the
bus was better than being a slave, it did not mean that segregation should be accepted. Sure, times
are much better now overall because so many of us fought tirelessly to make it that way, but that
does not mean that we have arrived at a fully equal and fair society. Women today earn more than
their grandmothers did, but that doesn't solve the problem of gender income disparity. Every
generation makes progress, but every generation must continue the
journey. Our next step is making sure we all receive equal protection under the law. In the
aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict, we've seen a lot of talk. A discussion on the state of race in
America is of course needed, but to reduce the worth of our lives into highbrow intellectual
discourse is in itselfprofiling. When young men of color in places like New York City are
disproportionately stopped and frisked by the police, we need more than just talk. When a mother
of three fires a warning shot to scare off an abusive husband (whom she had a protective order
against) gets 20 years in prison, we need more than just talk. When our prisons and

courtrooms are overwhelmingly filled with minorities, we need more than just talk. And when a
young boy like Trayvon Martin can be shot to death while simply heading home from the store,
the time for talk is over. Now's the time for legislative action.