1NC PIK

ending your genealogy with the simple, easily-digestible recommendation that marijuana
should be legalized ruins the entire point of genealogical investigation in the first place
Foucault wrote genealogies as a direct rejection of Lenins question What is to be done?
by providing a direct instruction manual for political action, the affirmative has
corrupted the unsettling critical potential of genealogy the goal of our genealogy is to
make you feel uncomfortable with everything about how we are currently acting, and that
uneasiness cannot be achieved if we tell you exactly what to do!
Flyvberg & Richardon 2 dept of development @ Aalborg University
(Bent, Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning & Tim, University of Sheffield, Department
of Town and Regional Planning, Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory,
http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/DarkSide2.pdf.) JPG
3. Towards Foucault Instead of side-stepping or seeking to remove the traces of power from planning, an alternative approach accepts power as
unavoidable, recognising its all pervasive nature, and emphasising its productive as well as destructive potential. Here, theory engages squarely
with policy made on a field of power struggles between different interests, where knowledge and truth are contested, and the rationality of
planning is exposed as a focus of conflict. This s wt Fyvr s rrttt r r-f rtty (Fyvr 1996) wr t
focus shifts from what should be done to what is actually done. Ts yss mrs t tt rtty s ptrt
y pwr t ymc between the two is critical in understanding what policy is about. It therefore becomes meaningless, or
misleading - for politicians, administrators and researchers alike - to operate with a concept of rationality in
which power is absent (Flyvbjerg 1998, 164-65). Bt Fuut Hrms r pt tkrs. Hrmss tk s w
vp s rs pt s ut wk ts urst f tu pt prsss. Fuuts tk versely, is weak with
reference to generalised ideals--Foucault is a declared opponent of ideals, understood as definitive answers to Kants
question, What ought I to do? or Lenins What is to be done? --but his work reflects a sophisticated understanding of
Realpolitik. Both Foucault and Haberms r tt pts must s wt rs. Rfrr t Hrms smr tkrs wvr
Fuut (1980) wrs tt t rspt rtsm s su vr sttut km t prvt t yss f the rationalities
ry t wrk (Rm 1988 170). Hrmss m mpt ut Fuut s wt Hrms ss s Fuuts rtvsm. Thus
Hrms (1987 276) rsy smsss Fuuts strrps s rtvst ryptrmtv usry s. Su rtqu
for relativism is correct, if by relativistic we mean unfounded in norms that can be rationally and universally grounded. Foucaults norms
are t futst k Hrmss: ty r xprss sr to challenge every abuse of power, whoever the
author, whoever the victims (Miller 1993, 316) and in this way to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the
undefined work of freedom (Foucault 1984a, 46). Foucault here is the Nietzschean democrat, for whom any form of
government - liberal or totalitarian - must be subjected to analysis and critique based on a will not to be dominated,
voicing concerns in public and withholding consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable. Such norms cannot be given a
universal grounding independent of those people and that context, according to Foucault. Nor would such grounding be
desirable, since it would entail an ethical uniformity with the kind of utopian-totalitarian implications that Foucault
would warn against in ay txt t tt f Mrx Russu r Hrms: T sr fr frm f mrty pt y vry t
ss tt vry wu v t sumt t t sms tstrp t m (Fuut 1984 37 qut Dryfus Rw 1986, 119). In a
Foucauldian interpretation, such a morality would endanger freedom, not empower it. Instead, Foucault focuses on the analysis of evils and
shows restraint in matters of commitment to ideas and systems of thought about what is good for man, given the historical experience that few
things have produced more suffering among humans than strong commitments to implementing utopian visions of the good. For Foucault the
socially and historically conditioned context, and not fictive universals, constitutes the most effective bulwark against relativism and nihilism,
and the best basis for action. Our sociality and history, according to Foucault, is the only foundation we have, the only solid ground under our
feet. And this socio-historical foundation is fully adequate. Foucault, perhaps more than any recent philosopher, reminded us of the crucial
importance of power in the shaping and control of discourses, the production of knowledge, and the social construction of spaces. His analysis of
modern power has often been read by planning theorists as negative institutionalised oppression, expressed most chillingly in his analysis of the
disciplinary regime of the prison in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). However, it is Foucaults explanation of power as
productive and local, rather than oppressive and hierarchical, that suggests real opportunities for agency and change
(MNy 1994). Wst Fuut sw surs s mum w trsmts prus pwr pts ut tt t s s hindrance, a
stumbling-k pt f rsst strt pt fr pps strty. S t t sm tm s surs rfrs pwer, it also
urms xpss t rrs t fr mks t pss t twrt t (Fuut 1990 101). Fuut rarely separated knowledge from
pwr t f pwr/kw ws f ru mprt: w su w trt tt ws us t magine that
knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and
its interests ... we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions
of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produced knowledge .. that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no
pwr rt wtut t rrtv sttut f f f kw ... (Fuut 1979 27). Fr Fuut t rtionality was contingent,
shaped by power relations, rather than context-fr tv. Ar t Fuut Hrmss (ut 8) utrst f pwr y
w s qut (mpss t). [The juridical system] is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power,
sys Fuut (1980 89) mts tt r mpy vs frms tt y t stt ts pprtus... Our historical
rt rrs us furtr furtr wy frm r f w. The law, institutions - or policies and plans - provide no
guarantee of freedom, equality or democracy. Not even entire institutional systems, according to Foucault, can
ensure freedom, even though they are established with that purpose. Nor is freedom likely to be achieved by imposing abstract theoretical
systms r rrt tk. O t trry stry s mstrt--says Foucault--horrifying examples that it is precisely those social
systems which have turned freedom into theoretical formulas and treated practice as social engineering, i.e., as an epistemically derived techne,
that become most repressive. [People] reproach me for not presenting an overall theory, says Foucault (1984b, 375-6),
I am attempting, to the contrary, apart from any totalisation - which would be at once abstract and limiting - to open up
problems that are as concrete and general as possible. What Foucault calls his political task is to criticise
the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent ; to criticise them in such a manner
that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that
one can fight them (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171). This is what, in a Foucauldian interpretation, would be seen as an effective
approach to institutional change , including change in the institutions of civil society. With direct reference to
Hrms Fuut (1988 18) s: T prm s t f try t ssv [rts f pwr] t utp f prftly transparent
communication, but to give...the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics...which would allow these games of power to be
py wt mmum f mt. Hr Fuut vrstmts s ffrs wt Hrms fr Hrms s vs that the ideal
speech situation cannot be established as a conventional reality in actual communication. Both thinkers see the regulation of actual relations of
dominance as crucial, but whereas Habermas approaches regulation from a universalistic theory of discourse, Foucault seeks out a
genealogical understanding of actual power relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas
Hrmss rtt s twrs pstm. For Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or theories.
Freedom is a practice , and its ideal is not a utopian absence of power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus, is for Foucault
the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Whereas Habermas emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses
substantive micro politics, though with the important shared feature that neither Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual
content of political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and Fouut r ttm-up tkrs s rs t tt
f pts ut wr Hrms tks tp-w mrst fs s rrs prur rtty - having sketched out the procedures to
be followed - Fuut s ttm-up tkr s rards both process and content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell
individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the
outcome of this procedure. Foucault would prescribe neither process nor outcome ; he would only recommend a
focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective point of departure for the fight against domination. It
s us f s u ttm-up tk tt Foucault has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981)
says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those who work in the institutional setting of planning: Its true that
certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison...are not likely to find advice or instructions
in my books to tell them what is to be done. But my project is precisely to bring it about that they no
longer know what to do, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without
saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller 1993, 235). The depiction of Foucault as non-action oriented is correct
to the extent that Foucault hesitates to give directives for action, and he directly distances himself from the kinds of
universal What is to be done? formulas w rtrs prur Hrmss mmutv rtty. Foucault
believes that solutions of this type are themselves part of the problem. Seeing Foucault as non-action oriented
would be misleading, however, insofar as Foucaults genealogical studies are carried out only in order to show
how things can be done differently to separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no
lor r tk wt w r r tk (Fuut 1984 45-7). Thus Foucault was openly pleased when during a revolt in
sm f t Fr prss t prsrs tr s r s Dsp Pus. Ty sut t txt t tr prsrs Fuut t
trvwr. I kw ts prttus t sy Fuut s ut tts prf f trut--a political and actual truth--which started after the book
ws wrtt (D 1980 5). Ts s t typ f stut t Fucault would endorse, and as a genealogist, Foucault saw himself as highly
t rt s r strumts rp mkr tr f tvs rtrpr sktr f ps usmt (Ez
1985, 14). The establishment of a concrete genealogy opens possibilities for action by describing the genesis of a
given situation and showing that this particular genesis is not connected to absolute historical necessity. Foucaults
genealogical studies of prisons, hospitals and sexuality demonstrate that social practices may always take an
alternative form v wr tr s ss fr vutrsm r sm. Cm wt Fuuts fus mt t s sy t
understand why this insight has been embraced by feminists and minority groups. Elaborating genealogies of, for instance, gender and race leads
to an understanding of how relations of domination between women and men, and between different peoples, can be changed (McNay 1992,
Bordo and Jaggar 1990, Fraser 1989, Benhabib a Cr 1987). T vu f Fuuts ppr s s mpss t yms f pwr.
Understanding how power works is the first prerequisite for action , because action is the exercise of power.
And such an understanding can best be achieved by focus t rt. Fuut p us wt mtrst urst f Rptk
Rrttt w ts mt spf txt. T prm wt Fuut s tt us urstanding and action
have their points of departure in the particular and the local, we may come to overlook more generalised conditions concerning, for example,
institutions, constitutions and structural issues. In sum, Foucault and Habermas agree that rationalisation and the misuse of power are among the
most important problems of our time. They disagree as to how one can best understand and act in relation to these problems. From the perspective
of the history of philosophy and political theory, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact that Foucault works within a
particularistic and contextualist tradition, with roots in Thucydides via Machiavelli to Nietzsche. Foucault is one of the more important twentieth
century exponents of this tradition. Habermas is the most prominent living exponent of a universalistic and theorising tradition derived from
Srts Pt pr vr Kt. I pwr trms w r spk f strt vrsus sttut tk ut struggle versus
control, conflict versus consensus.
genealogical strategies are easily coopted unless there is an unending, constant stream of
critical investigation and epistemic questioning their concrete advocacy is a closure of
epistemic uncertainty in favor of a universal truth of what should be done, turns all of case
and solidifies new hegemonies
Medina 11 prof @ Vanderbilt
(Jose, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla
Pluralism, Foucault Studies, No. 12, pp. 9-35, October 2011)
As Fuut puts t s sr s t ttmpt t - subjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to
enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discours.40 But s mpszs
genealogies do not simply rt kw r invoke or celebrate some immediate experience that has yet to be captured by
knowledge. This is not what they are about. They are about the insurrection of knowledges. 41 Genealogical
investigations proceed by way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges off against
the unitary theoretical instance that filters them out or absorbs them by putting them in their proper place within a hierarchy.
Genealogies are insurrections of subjugated knowledges. And the plurals here are crucial , for the plurality of
insurrections and of subjugated knowledges has to be kept always alive in order to resist new
hegemonic unifications and hierarchizations of knowledges. The danger that the critical work of genealogies
can be reabsorbed by hegemonic power/knowledges is brilliantly described by Foucault: Once we have
excavated our genealogical fragments, once we begin to exploit them and to put in circulation these elements of
knowledge that we have been trying to dig out of the sand, isnt there a danger that they will be recoded,
recolonized by these unitary discourses which, having first disqualified them and having then ignored them when they reappeared, may now
be ready to reannex them and include them in their own discourses and their own power- knowledge? And if we try to protect the fragments we
have dug up, dont we run the risk of building, with our own hands, a unitary discourse? 42 Insurrections of (de-
)subjugated knowledges and their critical resistance can be co- opted for the production of new forms of
subjugation and exclusion ( new hegemonies ) or for the reinforcement of old ones. The only way to resist this danger is by
guaranteeing the constant epistemic friction of knowledges from below, whichas I have argued elsewhere
means guaranteeing that eccentric voices and perspectives are heard and can interact with mainstream ones, that the experiences
and concerns of those who live in darkness and silence do not remain lost and un-attended, but are allowed to
exert friction. Genealogies have to be always plural , for genealogical investigations can unearth an indefinite number of
paths from for- gotten past struggles to the struggles of our present. And the insurrections of subjugated knowledges they
produce also need to remain plural if they are to retain their critical power , that is, the capacity to
empower people to resist oppressive power/knowledge effects. In the next section I will put this Foucaultian pluralism in
conversation with other epistemological pluralistic approaches to memory and knowledge of the past.
our alternative is simple endorse the genealogy, do not endorse the prescription for
action. this is substantively different than the affirmative doing genealogy means a
constant uncertainty about the affirmative which the permutation cannot access it means
constant historical investigation

1NC K
The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itselfthe affirmative
represents a conflict within the paradigm of America but refuses to challenge the
foundational antagonism that produces the violence that undergirds the that same
paradigm
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine
s P.D. frm UC Brky R Wt & Bk: Cm t Strutur f U.S. Atsms]

Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of
their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are
the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention
not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful
interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern worlds capacity to think, act, and exist spatially
and temporally . The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual
dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to
account but to call the world itself to account , and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not
demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within
capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, 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 worldand not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself
was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her
claim. Instead, it calls her crazy. And to what does the 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 case by way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to
maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential
candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.i 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 allretreated 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 estatesii destruction , to manifest itself at
the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the
streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as
political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly 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.iii 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 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.
Black positionality renders their notions of counterhegemony and resistance incoherent
blackness is the site of absolute dereliction and blackness can only be the total
disconfiguration of civil society
Wilderson 2007 [Frk B. T Prs Sv s Hmys St S Warfare in the American
Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 31-2]

Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality . The black American subject does not generate
historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with
respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-
generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis.
This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However,
it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position becauseand this is keyour presence works back on the grammar
of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject even-the most massacred among them, Indiansis
required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom
the nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other
analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."12 If
we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely
as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of
the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence, through
which civil society is possible namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the
site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic , for blackness in America generates no categories for
the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience
without analog a past without a heritage . Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the
Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever
says "aids" says blackthe "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic
object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas
this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowalnot at least, for a true
revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither
social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting
whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They
have been, and remain todayeven in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition
movementinvested elsewhere . This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually
antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more
dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control
of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic:
a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder ." One must embrace its
disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, ones politics are to be
underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites ones politics, then
through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this
movements lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the
embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and
of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all."
Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of
blackness and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very
Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more
terrifying about the foy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to
remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil societywith hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through
this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work
from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or
prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between
workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as
revolutionary promises than as crowding y out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration.
Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman
demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject
(whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society . From the coherence
of civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims blackness not as
a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that
rends civil society asunder . Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of
hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via
reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.
Their descriptions of statistics mystifies the true violence of anti blackness
Wilderson-2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument 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 on 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 psy- choanalysis, then his or 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 people's staunchest
"allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Herenot in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or
conservative scholarshipis where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research
stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-
three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political
praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I
read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and
Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy,
Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One
suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of
multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this
expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the
seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of
structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or
threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a
position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to
genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians
would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the
state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and
political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words,
why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could
answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on
the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated
and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at
the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us
in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than
clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers
of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a
downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I
am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic
whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it.
The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he
demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is
removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"the proposition
that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory
project for the Black positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the
Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological
position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes,
maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to
gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our
analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil
society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on
one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between
Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an
answer.
We must burn civil society to the ground.
Burn and leave nothing white behind you. We have been trained to think in a narrative of progress that takes us up
from slavery, but there is no up from slavery. From segregation to neosegregation, t f t 1ACs prrss s
only the perfection of the slave, under conditions of total 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 and
ask to be free. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. The legal system becomes the
plantation, and the plantation never kills itself no matter how much it is changed. We must kill it.
Farley 5 [Boston College (Aty Prft Svry
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)]

VII. BURN What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity,
burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn
everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own
labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. 48 The slaves burned everything because everything was against them.
Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which
they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything. 49 Leave nothing white
behind you said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-vrk. 50 G v N t rw s. N mr wtr t fr
xt tm. 51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. 52
Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire
to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du
Bs wrt T r ts t wr. 54 Du Bs s tt the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the
colorline. 55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The
colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire
world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing
but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children.
We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the 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 white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresent-future
timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline, only under conditions of total
juridical freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself
as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a
prayer for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The
system of law is a plantatio n. These plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white-
overblack, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers
for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated above, has knowing
non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning
down every plantation . When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it
makes the free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We
become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only callingit alone
contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives . We can
only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained
to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be
trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to
objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the
slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.
Our act of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis allows us to deny intellectual legitimacy to
the compromises that radical elements have made because of an unwillingness to hold
moderates feet to the fire predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine
s P.D. frm UC Brky R Wt & Bk: Cm t Strutur f U.S. Atsms]

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

1NC Case
Legalizing marijuana doesnt address the larger systems of oppression that motivates the
police state it just displaces marijuana dealers into other forms of criminality
Nakagawa 2014 - Lifelong political activist, community organizer, organization builder, and trouble-maker
(Juy 31 Stt Wy I Supprt Mru Lzt But Nt s Strty fr W R Just
http://www.racefiles.com/2014/07/31/why-i-support-marijuana-legalization-but-not-as-a-strategy-for-winning-
racial-justice/)
But, while I support legalization as an incremental step in the right direction, I think we are wrong to promote
legalization as a means of achieving racial justice . Making that claim minimizes the very real problem of
structural racism that has made the war on drugs such a hugely devastating law enforcement strategy for
Black people. The legalization of marijuana, in my opinion, would not lead to less over-policing, racial
profiling, or over-incarceration of Black and brown people. What relief legalization would provide, and I do
believe there would be some immediate relief, would be mostly temporary . Why? The New York Times report on
reader response to their legalization editorials sums it up nicely, Times readers favor legalization for the same
reasons the Times editorial board does: They think the criminalization of marijuana has ruined lives; that the
public health risks have been overstated; and that law enforcement should focus its resources on graver
problems. Those graver problems bother me. They bother me because the illegal drug trade is as much an
economic issue as it is public health issue. My experience growing up in a drug economy tells me that folk turn to
illegal means of making money when legal jobs arent available. And decent paying legal jobs have rarely
been harder to find than right now. As a sociologist friend of mine recently reminded me, prison is a form of
disguised unemployment. Tts prt f t rs programs meant to reduce recidivism so often dont work.
Without a job, people are often forced to commit crimes, like selling marijuana. Once convicted of that crime,
a criminal record can make you unemployable. Those whove been to prison too often end up back in prison,
and keeping them there is a way of managing unemployment, even if this effect is, perhaps, mostly incidental. If
we added incarcerated Black people to the unemployment rolls, Black unemployment statistics would be
noticeably higher ( ts rady twice that of whites). This would more accurately reflect the status of Black
people in the U.S. labor market. Large numbers of poor Black people have been structurally excluded from the
legitimate economy, ironically in part because Black people as a class won the right to ordinary worker
protections nationwide via the Civil Rights Movement. This made other excluded workers, like
undocumented migrants, cheaper, more compliant, and, following the logic of the market, more desirable.
Being excluded from decent employment opportunities will drive some people to drug dealing. Unless we deal
with this reality, legalizing marijuana will only drive current, low-end marijuana dealers to graver
problems for which there are often more stringent punishments and less public sympathy. From the
perspective of a poor person dependent on the marijuana trade for their living, legalization is a dead-end.
Richer people with the capital to invest in grow operations, licensing, retail stores, etc., will come in after
ordinary drug dealers have suffered all the risk involved in developing marijuana markets illegally and
squeeze them out. Those of us concerned with racial justice must ask, squeezed out to where?
People in jail for marijuana possession are only .2% of the total population the aff does
nothing in the most ambitious scenarios
Caulkins and Sevigny 2009 - Cr M Uvrstys Hz S f Pu Py AND Grut
School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh (July 31, Jonath P. Er L. Hw My
Pp Ds t US Imprs fr Dru Us W Ar Ty?
http://ibhinc.org/pdfs/CaulkinsSevignyHowanydoestheUSimprison2005.pdf)
The vast majority (85%) of the 274,324 people in prison in the U.S. in 1997 for drug-law violations were
clearly involved in drug distribution in one way or another. Many of the remaining 15% (41,047) had at least
some suggestion of possible current or past involvement in distribution. The precise proportion of drug
offenders in prison solely because they used drugs is thus hard to pin down, but appears to be somewhere in the
range of 2%-15%, representing 5,380 to 41,047 individuals. Furthermore, only about one- third of the 41,047
individuals were in prison as new court commitments; most were already on parole or probation before the
infraction that led to their current incarceration. Almost half had a current nondrug infraction that may have
contributed to their incarceration. Even taking the upper bound figure of 15%, the number of people in prison for
their drug use is far lower than would be implied by naively assuming that everyone convicted of drug possession
was not involved in distribution. Incarceration for drug use/possession thus appears to be a very modest
contributor (0.5%-3.6%) to the total sentenced U.S. prison population (1,137,210 in 1997). One reason is that
the expected time served by these individuals is about half that for those who were clearly involved in drug
distribution. It is also worth noting that 50-80% of arrestees test positive for some illicit drug and -15% of drug
arrests are for possession (Maguire and Pastore, 1997), so presumably if the criminal justice system wanted to
incarcerate many more drug users, that would be possible . Among those in prison for drug use, almost 90%
were involved with cocaine, heroin, and/or (meth) amphetamines. Just 5-7% possessed only marijuana. Hence,
the number of marijuana users in prison for their use is perhaps 800-2,300 individuals or on the order of 0.1-
0.2% of all prison inmates . This figure is roughly consistent with ONDCP (2005) and is well below Thomas'
(1999) estimate of 9,700 based on the same survey because Thomas assumes that all inmates convicted of
possession were not involved in trafficking. An implication of the new figure is that marijuana decriminalization
would have almost no impact on prison populations , although it might well have a bigger effect on other
components of the criminal justice system. Another implication is that the imprisonment risk due to drug use is
low, perhaps on the order of one-and-a-half days per year of use for cocaine, heroin, and (meth)amphetamines, and
no more than about an hour per year of use for marijuana. That is not to say that there are not many drug users
in prison. However, for heavy users of these four major drugs, the vast majority are in prison because of
nondrug offenses (68%- 75%) or drug distribution offenses (22%-26%). This implies that comparing
characteristics of imprisoned drug offenders with those of drug users is not helpful for determining whether drug-
related imprisonment falls disproportionately on one group or another. Since most imprisoned drug offenders are
involved in distribution, the relevant referent group is drug distributors, not drug users.
The status quo is decriminalization but legalization causes regulations that
disproportionately harm poor people and minorities causes net more persecution
Gulite 2014 - rut um u frm T Gr Wst Uvrstys Hrs Prrm wt rs
Pt S Crm Just. Dur r tm t s s srv s t GW Lrty Stys prst
wrk sy wt t DC Frum fr Frm t t Stuts fr Lrty (K 3 Wys Mru
Legalization Can Screw Poor Mirts ttp://tutsrty.m/3-ways-marijuana-legalization-can-screw-
poor-minorities)
Luckily, the nationwide decriminalization of marijuana is almost here. In October, Maryland will be the
seventeenth state to decriminalize the possession of maru. Its t urs t v tt t tw
legalization, commercial production, and regulation of marijuana will soon follow. A majority of Americans support
legalization, the New York Times recently came out in full support of federal legalization, and the two states that
have already legalized marijuana, Colorado and Washington, have only reported positive results. With the dawn of
the commercial production of legal pot, it is important to keep in mind those who the drug war has affected most,
poor minorities. Yes, marijuana legalization would generate millions in tax revenue and could provide a substantial
boost to the economy. However, we should be wary of regulations surrounding the legalized commercial
production of weed that protect big business or state interests to the detriment of poor minorities. Here are three
potentially harmful regulations: 1. Criminal Background Checks and Occupational Licensing In Colorado and
Washington, marijuana businesses have been subject to fairly strict licensing laws. The Colorado Department of
Revenue has an entire Marijuana Enforcement Division to review marijuana business and professional license
applications. To obtain an occupational license in Colorado, owners must undergo a full criminal background
check as licensees may not have any Controlled Substance Felony Convictions that have not been fully
discharged for five years prior to applying. Given the well-documented disproportionate enforcement of drug
policy on minorities, such licensing requirements could easily and unfairly skew the new legal marijuana
market in favor of whites. 2. The Overbearing Costs of Marijuana Retail Licenses and Taxation Legalization
proponents have consistently argued that states should legalize in order to tax marijuana businesses and
collect revenue from licensing fees. The states that have legalized marijuana have taken this mantra to heart.
Colorado made nearly $6 million in revenue from marijuana dispensaries just this past month. One Colorado
marijuana business owner reported that permit and licensing fees cost him $20,000 just in one year. While poor
minorities were able to participate in the illegal marijuana economy, they will not be able to participate in the
legal drug economy if the state continues to charge such enormous fees and taxes. 3. Zealously Persecuting
Black Market Distribution As it stands now, marijuana legalization has created a perfect storm to continue to
imprison poor minorities for nonviolent weed offenses. Poor minorities, who are more likely to have felony drug
charges, are largely unable to participate in the legal marijuana market. If they do have a clean criminal
history, they are still priced out of the market by bigger businesses who can afford outrageously high state taxes
and fees upfront. While dispensaries are charging high premiums to cover their overhead, a black market for
cheap marijuana will emerge in poor communities. But now, laws intended to protect legal marijuana
business interests will be used to persecute those participating in the black market, as decriminalization
doesnt yet protect distributors or dealers.


1nr
AT Singh
The risks of failure should not deter the action to assault the structures of civil societythe
black body is a doomed body living a spiritual death lapsing into quiet desperationthe
only possible ethics requires us to act even with the risk of failure and death looming
Newton 73
(Huy P. Nwt Bk Cptsm Rys Rvutry Su ps 2-6)
Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and degrading, is a spiritual death that has been the
experience of millions of Black people in the United States. This death is found everywhere today in the Black
community. Its victims have ceased to fight the forms of oppression that drink their blood. The common attitude has long been:
Whats the use? If a man rises up against a power as great as the United States, he will not survive. Believing
this, many Blacks have been driven to a death of the spirit rather than of the flesh, lapsing into lives of quite
desperation. Yet all the while, in the heart of every Black, there is the hope that life will somehow change in
the future. I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment [The power
structure, based on the economic infrastructure, propped up and reinforced by the media and all the secondary educational and cultural
institutions.], which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of
revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure
them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of
changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon
hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are allBlack and white alikeill in the same
way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is
the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite.
We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.
When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be
driven out with a stick. Che Guevara said that to a revolutionary death is the reality and victory the dream. Because the revolutionary
lives so dangerously, his survival is a miracle. Bakunin, who spoke for the most militant wing of the First International, made a
similar statement in his Revolutionary Catechism. To him, the first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he
is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. When Fidel
Castro and his small band were in Mexico preparing for the Cuban Revolution, may f t mrs tt urst f Bkus ru.
A few hours before they set sail, Fidel went from man to man asking who should be notified in case of death. Only then did the deadly
seriousness of the revolution hit home. Their struggle was no longer romantic. The scene had been exciting and animated but when the simple,
overwhelming question of death arose everyone fell silent. Many so-called revolutionaries in this country, black and white,
are not prepared to accept this reality. The Black Panthers are not suicidal; neither do we romanticize the consequences of revolution
in our lifetime. Other so-called revolutionaries cling to an illusion that they might have their revolution and die of old age. That cannot be. I do
not expect to live through our revolution, and most serious comrades probably share my realism. Therefore, the expression
revolution in our lifetime means something different to me than it does to other people who sue it. I think
the revolution will grow in my lifetimes, but I do not expect to enjoy its fruits. That would be a contradiction.
The reality will be grimmer

Their focus on conservative backlash actively obscures the role of liberal reforms in in
maintaining racial powerthe only risk is that we dont act radical enough out of fear of
backlash
Murakawa 14, Associate Professor
[2014 Nm Murkw s Asst Prfssr Ctr fr Afr Amr Stus Frst Cv Rt: Hw Lrs But Prs Amr.
ProQuest ebrary]

If t prm f t twtt tury ws W. E. B. Du Bss fmus wrs t prm f t r t the problem of the twenty-first
century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring
racial stratification. 20 In the context of this stubborn refusal, many scholarly and journalistic accounts explain racialized
carceral expansion as the outcome of a conservative backlash r Nxs Sutr Strty the narrative pivoting on
readily identifiable actors with known motives: anxious or resentful white voters, and Republican sentiments through coded
anti-black appeals. Referenced since at least the 1964 presidential et z Tms Mry Ess 1991 Putzr Prz fst C Rt
the backlash thesis holds that Republicans used racially coded appeals to win white voters who had became
disillusioned with the late 1960s excesses of civil rights, Black Power, and the disorder of mass protests and
violent uprisings. 21 For more than four decades, the backlash thesis has traveled through journalistic and academic
works; su trv frms t trys m ut smutusy strts ts trmy. Tt the backlash thesis holds
conventional-wisdom status is evidenced by the fact that so many scholars offer it en route to presenting their
original research. 22 As a theory that pivots on anxious whites and opportunistic conservatives, backlash encourages certain analytical
practices of finding racial power in a post civil rights context. 23 Evidence of conservative racialization flows in a stream of
fmr mmts: Brry Gwtrs 1964 qut f v s wt k rmty Rr Nxs 1971 mmment of the drug war, and George
H. W. Buss fmus 1988 W Hrt mp . 24 T strst v f trfr s smk u prf f rst sm r t
moment when the real motive slips out from the cover of colorblindness. Perhaps this is why dozens of backlash tomes cite Kevin Phpss T Emr Rpu
Majority as nothing less than the official playbook for anti-k mps ry s my rut Rr Nxs 1968 mp vrtsmt fw y
his candid racial slip. In an advertisement addressing a recent trs strk Nx xp T rt f t prm s w-and-rr ur ss. Hs
vvr tu Dsp t ssrm s sst f ur r r t r. Hv r s srpt Nx ccidentally recorded this statement to his
stff: Yp ts ts t rt t s t t ut ts w tr ts ut w-and-order and the damn Negro Purt R rups ut tr. 25 T
code is to disguise racism for political gain; the moniker itself retains m s rt sutrfu. Uy rpusv Nxs sp xpss t tt t
the disavowal. With eyes fixed on the incendiary sins of conservative law-and-order, liberal agendas become
contrast background, glossed quickly and presumed virtuous . Accounts of conservative backlash are not
wrong; rather, I believe that they are so overwhelmingly persuasive that they eclipse the specificity of racial
liberalism against which they respond. Our explanations too quickly dichotomize the late-1960s rm t t tw ss f tut:
srvtvs m rm k utur rs y trst sst tt s rfrms k t Wr Pvrty and civil rights legislation would get at
t rt uss f rm vr strss t s ts tt prty rt rm. 26 Polarizing conservative law-and-
order versus liberal civil rights risks depoliticizing racial power by reducing racism to white animus, and it
risks naturalizing some non-racial backdrop against which conservative racialization was dramatized .
Searching for racism as emotional white resentment or strategic, subtextual coding means missing
liberal racial criminalization that thrived in the full light of day . 27 Recognizing racial power requires
eschewing the search for animus or calculation that Republicans cynically manipulated the anxieties of
southern and working-class whites by focusing on issues like crime and welfare fraud that served as code
words for race. White animus too often propels backlash accounts, as if some primordial racism among southern and working-class
whites simply presented a political opportunity for conservatives. 28 Racial power is not something that an individual or a group
exercises directly or intentionally over another individual or group s pt stst Cr Km ts us; it is rather a
system property, permeating, circulating throughout and continuously constituting society. 29 I t mt t
discount intentions must extend to what might appear to be goodwill. On the dangers of liberal reforms mobilized through white pity
or paternalism, it is worth quoting historian Daryl Michael Scotts Contempt & Pity at length: Oppression
was wrong, liberals suggested, because it damaged personalities, and changes had to be made to protect and
promote the well-being of African Americans. Rtr t st t s f t Amr r mk rprts fr t ts
failure to live up to the separate-but-equal doctrine set fort Pssy v. Frus rs ptut t t str ty f ps ks s ts f pty. 30

AT Nihilism
Marriott, 2007 (David, Professor of History @ UC Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black
Modernity Pg 237-240)

In Fanon it may be that the imperative of decolonization becomes an ethical law hence his ambiguous references to
Kanta law justifying risk and ruin rather than sacrifice and resignation. Hence, the move from colonialism to decolonization
represents a move, not from the ethical into history, but involves a radical leap into a way of life based on
indeterminate negation, a negation without end but always at work in the depths of history . On the other hand,
Fanon also states, "My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values. It is a long time since the starry sky that took away Kant's breath
revealed the last of its secrets to us. And the moral law is not certain of itself" (Fanon; Black Skin, 227). This statement follows another explicit
reference to Kant: "One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices" (229). The text referred to here is Kant's Critique of
Practical Reason, which concludes as follows: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more
steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."19 It is important to note that Fanon is not denying Kant's
confidence in the sublime presentation of moral ideas, which, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues discloses the whole power (Macht) of the
mind. Rather he is stating that Kant's enthusiasm for the infinitude of the starry heavens-the infinitude of which allows us to recognize, in turn,
the infinite destiny of our own moral nature-cannot happen in the Antilles. It cannot happen there precisely because of the racial distribution of
guilt and its paralysis at the level of the imaginary. Fanon's critique of Kant echoes that of Nietzsche's. For Nietzsche, the sacrificial exercise of
morality in Kantian ethics results in impotence when the will to obey the law against natural desire and out of no interested motive-not even fear-
overwhelms the individual and produces the resort to ressentiment, the culture of reaction. Nietzsche is not condemning the disciplining of natural
desire, on the contrary, he commends it, but what he objects to is its moralized accountability, when it is justified as disinterested submission to
categorical law For Nietzsche (and Fanon), the law is interested, which is not to deny it is sovereign or universal, but to
imply that the meaning of sovereignty depends on a principle of calculability, which, in his view, is to suspend
the law itself and the opposition of disinterested reverence and natural desire. For the genealogist the moral law in the
universality of its form constitutes the misrecognized form, not of law, but of will to power. Its crueltyfrm Kts prsptv ts ffr
to heteronomous interestsis the displaced symptom of its affective truth. For Fanon, it is this cruelty and this impotence which is
deeply racialized both in terms of its psychology and historical sociology. In considering the uncertainty of moral law, of
racism and of time, Fanon holds fast to a notion of the colonial subject as always divided and never fully present to
itself. The aporias between blackness and history, for example, illustrated this in the form of blacks as reactive or
nihilistic Black Skin, White Masks explores this aporia in terms of a question: namely, what is it about colonial authority that allows it to
rt frms f st pssvty rtr t Kts r frm f mr w? Wt s t ut t utmus mpstion of duty that
turns the black subject into a reactive affect, thematized here as a submission to racialized time and history? Colonial power reveals the limits of
Kts tr w r urst s t utmus mpst f uty. T mr w s urt f tsf t Atlles because colonial
racism makes that law, in terms of duty, an impossible demand which is aporetic: be like me and do not be like me, be white but not quite. As
such, colonialism transforms the moral law into a will to power based on racial exclusion. In order to grasp why Fanon thinks this is the case, I
have explored the relation between the loss that racial forgetting represents and the negative sublimity of moral law in the Antilles. A
negativity that exposes , almost inevitably, the extent to which the will to power in the colonial nation-state is one
defined by its perpetual readiness to wage war against the colonized at the level of both ideological fantasy
and psyche. For Fanon, colonialism operates a pure power politics completely divested of ethical and
universalistic considerations. A war in which blackness is understood as a source of historical failure in need
of cathartic cure and/or annihilation . A war in which the death of blacks, as utter abjection, is a nothingness without history and so
indistinguishable from the unhistorical nothingness of a people without time. In conclusion, given that Fanon's last work-The Wretched of the
Earth-was an attempt to work out the idea of an ethical state in the context of decolonization, many commentators have tended to lose sight of
how the political question of social justice and revolutionary struggle was, for Fanon, invariably tangled up with questions of responsibility and
risk. 20 In other words, the difficult task Fanon set himself was how to resolve the problem of power and justice in cultures distinguished by
Manichaeism. What could the idea of an ethical state mean in nations divided according to whether blacks are the remnants of an unhistorical,
unethical substance, .neither life nor being, but the unhappy existence of spectral life? Notions which were not only inscribed in economic and
social relations but, more often than not, in judicial procedures and constitutional and parliamentary practices of executive governance.
Fanon's idea of revolution should therefore not be restricted to the political but must also be seen as an
attempt to describe how national desires come to be bound by somatic fantasies. Fanon's error, according to many,
may have been in conceiving imperialism too psychologically, but his ideal of the decolonized cultural nation and political
state cannot be understood without taking into account his ideas on the heteronomy of political demands and
unconscious desires. If Fanon's political vision of the world was essentially Nietzschean-divided between sovereign life and
slavish abjection his call for national liberation and unity in the developing nations went hand in hand with a call
to look at death in the face, to make death as such possible for blacks otherwise condemned to the
nothingness of death, death as the representation of lawless violence. In Fanon's oeuvre the politics of black
experience calls for the endurance of such negation and hence its movement, but only in the knowledge that
the death within us cannot be determined , and this is the price we pay for life lived at the limits of both
political virtue and political violence

AT Yancy
All your social death reductionist arguments about social death do not matter because
social death does not mean one does not have life rather they dont have political ontology
because civil society locks them in inevitable dereliction
Sexton 10
(Jared Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities , Associate Professor, African American
Studies
School of Humanities, Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies School of Humanities at University of California
Irv T S Lf f S Dt: O Afr-Pssmsm Bk Optmsm)
To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life
as black social death, black social life in black social deathall of this is to find oneself in the midst of an
argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and
(dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life
does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living.
Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in
the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of
people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the
colonized, of all that capital has in common with laborthe modern world system. Black life is not lived in
the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what
Moten asserts against afropessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical
dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namelyblack life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in
social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. Thats the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It
is all about the implications of this agreed- upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet)
proceed.

AT Progress Possible
Progress is a lie and parasitic on the black
Wilderson III, 2010 (Frank B., Prof of African American studies and drama @ UC Irvine, Red White and Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Pg 21-23)

Furthermore, the circulation of Blackness as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile and
progressive moments in history (e.g. the French, English, and American Revolutions), produces dreams of
liberation which are more inessential to and more parasitic on the Black , and more emphatic in their
guarantee of Black suffering , than any dream of human liberation in any era heretofore. Black slavery is
foundational to modern Humanisms ontics because freedom is the hub of Humanisms infinite conceptual
trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be infinite. They are finite in the sense that they are
predicated on the idea of freedom from some contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized.
The contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from
political tyranny (for example, taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What
I am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and then it works
to disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontologywhere it rightfully began
but through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses its ontological foundations.
Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone start off with, quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in
the process of meditating on it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do Humans
take such pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying, the project of liberation (how did
w t frm 68 t te present)? Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical
purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose ones Human coordinates and become Black . Which is
to say one would have to die. For the Black, freedom is an ontological, rather than experiential, question.
There is no philosophically credible way to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of
freedom when one considers the Blacksuch as freedom from gender or economic oppression, the kind of
contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather, the riders that one
could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolicthough no less trueand ultimately untenable: i.e.,
freedom from theworld, freedom from humanity, freedom from everyone (including ones Black self). Given
the reigning episteme, what are the chances of elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and
communicable, political project out of the necessity of freedom as anabsolute? Gratuitous freedom has never
been a trajectory of Humanist thought, which is why the infinite trajectories of freedom that emanate from
Humsms u r yt ut ftfor they have no line of flight leading to the Slave.
Anti-blackness is factually antagonistic
Wilderson III, 2010 (Frank B., Prof of African American studies and drama @ UC Irvine, Red White and Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Pg 42)

The three structuring positionalities of the U.S. (Whites, Indians, Blacks) are elaborated by a rubric of three
demands: the (White) demand for expansion, the (Indian) demand for return of the land, the (Black) demand
for flesh reparation (Spillers). The relation between these positionalities demarcate antagonisms and not
conflicts because, as I have argued, they are the embodiments of opposing and irreconcilable principles/forces that
hold out no hope for dialectical synthesis; and because they are relations that form the foundation upon which
all subsequent conflicts in the Western hemisphere are possible. In other words, the originary, or ontological,
violence that elaborates the Settler/Master, the Savage, and the Slave positions is foundational to the
violence of class warfare, ethnic conflicts, immigrant battles, and the womens liberation struggles of
Settler/Masters. It is these antagonismswhether acknowledged through the conscious and empirical
machinations of political economy, or painstakingly disavowed through the imaginative labor (Sxt T
Csqus f R Mxtur) of libidinal economywhich render all other disputes as conflicts, or what
Haunani Kay- Trask calls intra-settler discussions.



i
After the Watts Rebellion, RFK observed: There is no point in telling Negroes to observe the lawIt has
almost always been used against themAll these placesHarlem, Watts, South Side [of Chicago]are riots wating to
happen. Quote in: Clark, Kenneth B. The Wonder is There Have Been So Few Riots. New York Times Magazine,
September 5, 1965.
ii
Slave estate is a term borrowed from Hortense Spillers.
iii
See Emile Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami
Press, 1971.