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1NC Shell
<<Insert Link>>
Race framing directly trades off with a prioritization of class
vote negative to move past the politics of racial difference into
a radical critique of the material conditions of racial
oppression
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
Callinicos observations are similar, in many ways, to the classic insights of Oliver Cromwell Cox in
Caste, Class, and Race, first published in 1948. Recently, Reed (2001) has argued that Coxs work is
particularly valuable in light of some of the problematic aspects of contemporary theorizing around race.
Cox proceeded consistently and rigorously from the "conviction that making sense of the meaning
of race" and the character of racialized relations required "an understanding of the dynamics of
capitalism as a social system" (p. 24). For Cox, race was most fundamentally an "artifact of
capitalist labor dynamics"a relation that "originated in slavery"and racial antagonism as
essentially "political-class conflict" (p. 27). Cox "emphasized the ruling-class foundations of racism as
part of his critique of the liberal scholars of race rela- tions who theorized race relations without regard to
capitalist political econ- omy and class dynamics" (p. 27). Reed suggested that Coxs perspective goes
right to the heart of how we should try to understand race by encouraging us to move beyond categories
for defining and sorting supposedly discrete human populations, beyond concepts of racial hierarchies,
and beyond racist ideolo- gies ... and instead recognize that race is a product of social relations within history and political economy.... Coxs interpretation is a refreshing alternative to the idealist frames
that have persisted in shaping American racial discourse and politics. . . . Racism is ... a pattern of
social relations. ... It exists only as it is reproduced in specific social arrangements in specific
societies under historically specific conditions of law, state and class power, (pp. 27-28) This implies
that to abolish racism in any substantive sense, a serious challenge to capitalism must be launched."
It does not mean that racism will simply dis- appear if democratic socialism is established, but we agree
with Callinicos (1993, p. 68) that the struggles for socialism and Black liberation are inseparable
something well understood by Black revolutionaries in the past and something seemingly forgotten
by contemporary champions of "difference" politics (Fletcher, 1999). As Bannerji (2000) has noted,
a politics based on differences be it in the form of cultural/racial nationalism or religious
fundamentalism is far more tolerable to those in power than would be "class based social
movements" among "minority" populations (pp. 7-8).12 Remarkably, much contemporary social
theory, particularly those theories ostensibly concerned with race and difference, has failed to
acknowledge that struggles based on class are funda- mentally different from others for such
struggles are aimed at the very founda- tions of capitalist societyincluding its racist, exploitative
underpinnings. Class struggle, rooted "as it is in the objective structures of capital itself, is ontoically distinct" (Harvey, 1998, p. 7) from those forms of oppression that motivate the various agendas
of difference and cultural politics. Multiple forms of oppression do exist, but these are best understood
within the overarching system of class domination and the variable discriminating mechanisms central to
capitalism as a system. This position is emphasized by Foster (2002) when he insisted that it is a serious
mistake to view the working class, except as an artificial abstraction, as cut off from issues of race,
gender, culture and community. In the United States the vast majority of the working class consists

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of women and people of color. The power to upend and reshape society in decisive ways will come
not pri- marily through single-issue movements for reform, but rather through forms of
organization and popular alliance that will establish feminists, opponents of rac- ism, advocates of
gay rights, defenders of the environment, etc. as the more advanced sectors of a unified, class-based,
revolutionary political and economic movement, (p. 45) We have argued that it is virtually impossible
to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but this does not imply
that class struggle is now supplanted by the politics of difference. Indeed, we are now in the midst of
returning to the "most fundamental form of class struggle" in light of current global conditions (Jameson,
1998, p. 136). Todays climate suggests that class struggle is "not yet a thing of the past" and that
those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only "morally callous" and "seriously out of
touch with reality" but also largely blind to the "needs of the large mass of people who are barely
surviving capitals newly-honed mechanisms of global- ized greed" (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7-9). In our
view, a more comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical
juncture neces- sitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the working class as the
fundamental agent of change.14

Discourses of difference distract attention from capitalismthe

impact is the continuation of superexploitation of colored labor
pools by multinational corporations
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understand- ing the emergence of an
acutely polarized labor market and the fact that dispro- portionately high percentages of "people of
color" are trapped in the lower rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren &
Farahmandpur, 1999). Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings, movements,
and profit levels of multinational corporations, but those types of complex relations cannot be mapped out
without attending to capitalist class formations (Ahmad, 1998). To sever issues of difference from class
conve- niently draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which "peo- ple of color"
(and more specifically "women of color") provide capital with its superexploited labor poolsa
phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world . Most social relations constitutive of racialized
differences are consider- ably shaped by the relations of production, and there is undoubtedly a
racialized and gendered division of labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one
is situated in the capitalist global economy (Meyerson, 2000; Stabile, 1997). That racism and sexism
are necessary social relations for the organization of capitalism and new forms of emerging neocolonialism seems to escape the collective imaginations of those who theorize difference in a truncated
and exclusively culturalist manner. Bannerji (2000, pp. 8-9) forcefully argued that culturalist discourses
of difference have had the effect of "deflecting critical attention" from an increasingly "racialized" political economy.

Only a historical materialist approach to critical pedagogy can

break down the dialectical relation between capital and labor
and the material force used to perpetuate racist ideologies
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

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A historical materialist approach adopts the imperative that categories of difference are
social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological formations and that they
often play a role in "moral" and "legal" state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the
"material" force of ide- ologiesparticularly racist ideologiesthat assign separate cultural and/or
biological essences to different segments of the population that, in turn, serve to reinforce and
rationalize existing relations of power. But more than this, a historical materialist understanding
foregrounds the manner in which differ- ence is central to the exploitative production/reproduction
dialectic of capital, its labor organization and processes, and the way labor is valued and enumerated. The real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor
within the capitalist production process itselfa social rela-tion in which capitalism is
intransigently rooted. This social relationessen- tial or fundamental to the production of abstract labor
deals with how already existing value is preserved and surplus value is created. If, for example, the
process of actual exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value are to be seen as a state of
constant manipulation and as a realization process of con- crete labor in actual labor timewithin a
given cost-production system and a labor marketwe cannot underestimate the ways in which
differenceracial as well as gender differenceis encapsulated in the production/reproduction
dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is mainly responsible for the ineq- uitable and unjust
distribution of resources. Hence, we applaud E. San Juan's goal of racial/ethnic semiotics that is
"committed to the elimination of the hegemonic discourse of race in which peoples of color are produced
and repro- duced daily for exploitation and oppression under the banner of individualized freedom and
pluralist, liberal democracy" (1992, p. 96).

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UniquenessAT: Squo solves

Class disparities have been exacerbated the past 50 years
increase equality in other sectors have justified class
inequalities
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), What Matters, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)
But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic
society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40
years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about
declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per
cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile
made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, its
less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US
population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasnt done
them any good; it hasnt even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we
succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have
made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were
proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented
in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more
just; it would be proportionately unjust.

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LinkStarting point
The affs starting point reinforces capitalismignorance of the
material sources marginalization cements an ahistorical form
of culturalism that reduces their strategy to pseudopolitics
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

Hence, we would not discount the salience of such concerns, but nor should
progressives be straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond the
dis- cursive/cultural/textual realms. Such approaches have sometimes
tended to redefine politics as a signifying activity generally confined
to the realm of "representation" while displacing a politics grounded
in the mobilization of forces against the material sources of political
and economic marginalization. In this regard, textual/discursive
politics have their limitations for they fail to guar- antee the
"material power necessary for social flourishing and living freely"
(Goldberg, 1994, p. 13).* In their rush to avoid the "capital" sin or
"economism," far too many post-al theorists (who often ignore their own
class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical form of culturalism
that holds, among other things, that cultural antagonism external to
class analysis and struggle provide the cutting edge of
emancipatory politics. In many respects, this posturing has yielded an
intellectual pseudopolitics that has served to empower "the theorist
while explicitly disempowering" real citizens (Turner, 1994, p. 410).
Although space limitations prevent us from elaborating this point further, we
contend that such positions are deeply problematic in terms of their
penchant for de-emphasizing the totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and
function of capital and for their attempts to employ culture as a
construct that would diminish the centrality of class.6 In a proper
historical materialist account, "culture" is not the "other" of class but
rather constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of
class relations in different contexts (cf. Scatamburlo-D'Annibale &
Langman, 2002).

One is an alibi for the otherdiversity is the neoliberal

substitute for class equality
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), What Matters, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)
My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently
have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can
be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they
were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when

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you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up
at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour
taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity
almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two
are compatible but that they have a causal connection that diversity is good for business. But a
diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for
equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.

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Link--Inclusion
The affs focus on inclusion reinscribes neoliberal pluralism
liberty is achieved when all vendors can display their different
cultural goods
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
Because post-al theories of difference often circumvent the material dimen- sions of difference and
tend to segregate questions of difference from analyses of class formation and capitalist social
relations, we contend that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing on Marx's
materialist and historical formulations. Difference needs to be understood as the product of social
con- tradictions and in relation to political and economic organization. Because sys- tems of
difference almost always involve relations of domination and oppres- sion, we must concern ourselves
with the economies of relations of difference that exist in specific contexts. Drawing on the Marxist
concept of mediation enables us to unsettle the categorical (and sometimes overly rigid) approaches to
both class and difference for it was Marx himself who warned against creat- ing false dichotomies at
the heart of our politicsthat it was absurd to choose between consciousness and the world,
subjectivity and social organization, personal or collective will, and historical or structural
determination. In a simi- lar vein, it is equally absurd to see "difference as a historical form of
conscious- ness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class politics" (Bannerji,
1995, p. 30). Bannerji has pointed to the need to historicize differ- ence in relation to the history and
social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies) and to
acknowledge the changing configurations of difference and "otherness." Apprehending the meaning
and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the importance of exploring (a) the
institutional and structural aspects of differ- ence; (b) the meanings and connotations that are
attached to categories of dif- ference; (c) how differences are produced out of, and lived within,
specific his-torical, social, and political formations; and (d) the production of difference in relation
to the complexities, contradictions, and exploitative relations of capitalism. Moreover, it presents a
challenge to "identitarian" understandings of differ- ence based almost exclusively on questions of
cultural and/or racial hegemony. In such approaches, the answer to oppression often amounts to
creating greater cultural space for the formerly excluded to have their voices heard (repre- sented).
Much of what is called the "politics of difference" is little more than a demand for an end to
monocultural quarantine and for inclusion into the met- ropolitan salons of bourgeois
representationa posture that reinscribes a neoliberal pluralist stance rooted in the ideology of free
market capitalism. In short, the political sphere is modeled on the marketplace, and freedom
amounts to the liberty of all vendors to display their different "cultural" goods. A paradigmatic
expression of this position is encapsulated in the following pas- sage that champions a form of difference
politics whose presumed aim is to make social groups appear. Minority and immigrant ethnic groups have
laid claim to the street as a legitimate forum for the promotion and exhibition of tra- ditional dress, food,
and culture... . [This] is a politics of visibility and invisibil- ity. Because it must deal with a tradition of
representation that insists on sub- suming varied social practices to a standard norm, its struggle is as
much on the page, screen ... as it is at the barricade and in the parliament, traditional forums of political
intervention before the postmodern. (Fuery & Mansfield, 2000, p. 150)

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Inclusion is a guise by the marketplace to encourage the

fetishization of identities and cements cultural particularities
as markers of groups
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
This position fosters a "fetishized" understanding of difference in terms of pri- mordial and seemingly
autonomous cultural identities and treats such "differ- ences" as inherent, as ontologically secure cultural
traits of the individuals of particular cultural communities. Rather than exploring the construction of
difference within specific contexts mediated by the conjunctural embeddedness of power
differentials, we are instead presented with an over- flowing cornucopia of cultural particularities
that serve as markers of ethnicity, race, group boundaries, and so forth. In this instance, the
discourse of differ- ence operates ideologicallycultural recognition derived from the rhetoric of
tolerance averts our gaze from relations of production and presents a strategy for attending to difference
as solely an ethnic, racial, or cultural issue. What advocates of such an approach fail to acknowledge is
that the forces of diversity and difference are allowed to flourish provided that they remain within
the prevailing forms of capitalist social arrangements. The neopluralism of difference politics
cannot adequately pose a substantive challenge to the pro- ductive system of capitalism that is able
to accommodate a vast pluralism of ideas and cultural practices. In fact, the post-al themes of
identity, difference, diversity, and the like mesh quite nicely with contemporary corporate interests
precisely because they revere lifestylethe quest for, and the cultivation of, the selfand often
encourage the fetishization of identities in the marketplace as they compete for "visibility" (Boggs,
2000; Field, 1997). Moreover, the uncritical, celebratory tone of various forms of difference politics can
also lead to some disturbing conclusions. For example, if we take to their logical conclusion the
statements that "postmodern political activism fiercely contests the reduction of the other to the
same," that post-al narratives believe that "dif- ference needs to be recognized and respected at all
levels" (Fuery & Mansfield, 2000, p. 148), and that the recognition of different subject positions is
para- mount (Mouffe, 1988, pp. 35-36), their political folly becomes clear. Eagleton (1996)
sardonically commented on the implications: Almost all postmodern theorists would seem to imagine that
difference, variabil- ity and heterogeneity are "absolute" goods, and it is a position I have long held
myself. It has always struck me as unduly impoverishing of British social life that we can muster a mere
two or three fascist parties.... The opinion that plurality is a good in itself is emptily formalistic and
alarmingly unhistorical. (pp. 126-127)

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LinkIndividualism
The use of individual action detracts from breaking down
machinations of capitalist institutionsidentitarianism is a
cornerstone of neoliberal ontology
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No
Politics at All, and Why, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-helphow-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)
Never mind that, for what its worth, Kerry Washingtons character, as she actually appears in the film, is
mainly a cipher, a simpering damsel in distress more reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original King Kong
than heroines of the blaxploitation eras eponymous vehicles Coffy or Foxy Brown. More
problematically, Wieners juxtapositions reproduce the elevation of private, voluntarist action as a
politicssomehow more truly true or authentic, or at least more appealing emotionallyover the
machinations of government and institutional actors. That is a default presumption of the
identitarian/culturalist left and is also a cornerstone of neoliberalisms practical ontology. In an
essay on Lincoln published a month earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its
dedication to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves and concludes, after considerable
meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings the term pettifoggery to mind, slavery died as a
result of the actions of former slaves.19 This either/or construct is both historically false and
wrong-headed, and it is especially surprising that a professional historian like Wiener embraces it. The
claim that slaves actions were responsible for the death of slavery is not only inaccurate; it is a
pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation. What purpose is served by denying the
significance of the four years of war and actions of the national government of the United States in ending
slavery? Besides, it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. Slaves mass
departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition. Their doing so weakened the
southern economy and undermined the secessionists capacity to fight, and the related infusion of
black troops into the Union army provided a tremendous lift both on the battlefield and for
northern morale. How does noting that proximity of Union troops greatly emboldened that selfemancipation diminish the import of their actions? But it was nonetheless the Thirteenth
Amendment that finally outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States and provided a legal
basis for preempting efforts to reinstate it in effect. Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincolns
motives, the sincerity of his commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and
notwithstanding its technical limits with respect to enforceability, the Emancipation Proclamation
emboldened black people, slave and free, and encouraged all slaverys opponents. And, as Wiener notes
himself, the proclamation tied the war explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system.

Use of inspiration stories about individual Overcoming plays

into neoliberal ideology and is class politics
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No
Politics at All, and Why, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-helphow-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)
The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror
appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of
oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory
dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current

11
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moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig
Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school,
white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans
understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood
Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables

disparaging efforts either to differentiate

discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as irresponsible
dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face .38 But more is at work here as well. Insistence on the
transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. Its the politics of a stratum
of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose ideological
commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in
terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the
intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as
racial disparities.39 And that project shares capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races

foundations, as well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific
political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural
politics are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a
terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see the industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the
notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for
inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort of politics of representation is no more
than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something
more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, theres that Upton Sinclair point.

12
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LinkMass Culture
Use of specialty market niches like <<INSERT AFFS THING>>
are a ploy by the mass industry to fuel consumption of mass
culture
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No
Politics at All, and Why, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-helphow-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)
In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological terms. Injustice
appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposedwhich are all
about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projectionlook a lot like selfesteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal
ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices
constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain
that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is
thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I
prefer the usage mass culture to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I
recognize that it may seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at
least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more,
instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy,
the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this
precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their
material identity as commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite the dogged
commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who
want to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches
centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and
politically resistive, it should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually
shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of popular culture posits a spurious autonomy and
organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them, especially in the
putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the fiction of the authentic to
announce the birth of new product cycles.

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LinkHistorical Example/Historical Starting Point

Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism is class
politics that masks the true foundations these ascriptive
hierarchies
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No
Politics at All, and Why, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-helphow-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)
That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind
continue to shape Americans understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a line of anti-racist argument and
mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current racial inequalities and either
slavery or the Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexanders The
New Jim Crow, which analogizes contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much huffing and puffing and
asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book, ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And it would have to fail

because the segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in
a particular social order. Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or slavery derives from the fact that those
regimes are associated symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because they have been vanquished. In that sense all
versions of the lament that its as if nothing has changed give themselves the lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed
significantly. The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview

mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of
oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory
dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current
moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig
Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school,
white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans
understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood
Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables

disparaging efforts either to differentiate

discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as irresponsible
dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face .38 But more is at work here as well. Insistence on the
transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. Its the politics of a stratum
of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose ideological
commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in
terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the
intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as
racial disparities.39 And that project shares capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races

foundations, as well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific
political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural
politics are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a
terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see the industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the
notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for
inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort of politics of representation is no more
than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something
more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, theres that Upton Sinclair point.

14
File Title

Impact
Liberal pluralism endorses capitalismthe impact is
exploitation
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
The liberal pluralism manifest in discourses of difference politics often means a plurality without
conflict, contestation, or contradiction. The inherent limita- tions of this position are also evident if we
turn our attention to issues of class. Expanding on Eagleton's observations and adopting the logic that
seems to inform the unqualified celebration of difference, one would be compelled to champion
class differences as well. Presumably, the differences between the 475 billionaires whose combined
wealth now equals the combined yearly incomes of more than 50% of the world's population are to
be celebrateda posturing that would undoubtedly lend itself to a triumphant endorsement of
capitalism and inequitable and exploitative conditions. San Juan (1995) noted that the cardinal flaw in
current instantiations of culturalism lies in its decapi- tation of discourses of intelligibility from the
politics of antagonistic relations. He framed the question quite pointedly: "In a society stratified by
uneven property relations, by asymmetrical allocation of resources and of power, can there be equality of
cultures and genuine toleration of differences?" (pp. 232- 233).

15
File Title

Alternativehistorical materialism
Only a historical materialist approach to critical pedagogy can
break down the dialectical relation between capital and labor
and the material force used to perpetuate racist ideologies
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
A historical materialist approach adopts the imperative that categories of difference are
social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological formations and that they
often play a role in "moral" and "legal" state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the
"material" force of ide- ologiesparticularly racist ideologiesthat assign separate cultural and/or
biological essences to different segments of the population that, in turn, serve to reinforce and
rationalize existing relations of power. But more than this, a historical materialist understanding
foregrounds the manner in which differ- ence is central to the exploitative production/reproduction
dialectic of capital, its labor organization and processes, and the way labor is valued and enumerated. The real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor
within the capitalist production process itselfa social rela-tion in which capitalism is
intransigently rooted. This social relationessen- tial or fundamental to the production of abstract labor
deals with how already existing value is preserved and surplus value is created. If, for example, the
process of actual exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value are to be seen as a state of
constant manipulation and as a realization process of con- crete labor in actual labor timewithin a
given cost-production system and a labor marketwe cannot underestimate the ways in which
differenceracial as well as gender differenceis encapsulated in the production/reproduction
dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is mainly responsible for the ineq- uitable and unjust
distribution of resources. Hence, we applaud E. San Juan's goal of racial/ethnic semiotics that is
"committed to the elimination of the hegemonic discourse of race in which peoples of color are produced
and repro- duced daily for exploitation and oppression under the banner of individualized freedom and
pluralist, liberal democracy" (1992, p. 96).

A dialectical approach is key to deconstruct capitalist social

relationsthat deconstructs the ideological legitimization of
racialized labor
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
Given these limitations, we agree with Gilroys (2000, p. 12) bold call for "transcending" and
deliberately renouncing race. We understand, as did Gilroy, that efforts to eliminate race as a metaphor
in scholarly work and as a general category that frames social understandings will be met with resis- tance
particularly by those who fear delegitimating the historical movements for liberation that have been
principally defined in terms of race struggles. Yet we agree with San Juan (2002) that race too often
"conceals the predatory sys- tem of class relations" (p. 59) and as such must be abandoned as a lens
through which social relations are explored and explained. Rather than attempting to advance a

16
File Title
critical theory of race, progressive scholars should instead seek to understand race as a social
construct that is embedded in the structures of power and privilege, in particular historical and
geographical configurations, and that its signifying power is largely derived from its relationship to
a "mode of production centered on capital accumulation and its attendant ideological apparatuses"
that serve to rationalize inequitable property relations (p. 143). This does not imply that we ignore the
realities of racism and racial oppression; rather, it suggests that an analytical shift from race to a
pluralized conceptual- ization of racisms and their historical articulations with other ideologies and
capitalist social relations is warranted (McLaren & Torres, 1999). In our view, this plural notion of
racisms would more accurately capture the historically specific nature of racism and the variety of
meanings/connotations attributed to evaluations of difference and assessments of the "superiority"
and "inferior- ity" of various groups of people. An understanding of the plurality of racisms and a
more dialectically oriented approach to examining the exclusionary social processes that function to
perpetuate racialized social relations under capitalism are necessary. We do not seek to subsume race
into class for such a gesture would be anti- thetical to the animating principles of historical materialism
(San Juan, 2002, p. 57). Rather, we advocate a position that strives to contextualize an under-standing
of racisms within a broader framework of capitalist class relations one that is similar to what
Meyerson (2000) has called a "class rule social con- trol explanation." Callinicos (1993) has argued that
racism as we witness it today is related to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production on a global scale. He noted that in hierarchical (precapitalist) societies that relied on
extraeconomic force, slavery was "merely one of a spectrum of unequal statuses, requiring no
special explanation" (p. 27). This changed with the advent of capitalist society. As Callinicos has
explained, the capitalist mode of production is premised on the exploitation of free wage labor and
the work- ers' separation from the means of production and their compulsion to sell their labor
power (the only productive resource available to them). Capitalism relied on slave labor and needed
an ideological legitimizationthat Black people were subhumanto proceed apace.10

17
File Title

AlternativeDismantle Capitalism
Only deconstructing and redistributing wealth creates true
equalitythe affs inclusion of marginalized people into
mainstream society simply justifies capitalism
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), What Matters, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you
start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice once you
complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism you no
longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor
people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right
way to go, politically its just as empty as contempt. This is pretty obvious when it comes to class.
Kjartan Pll Sveinsson declares that the white working classes are discriminated against on a range of
different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear and its no
doubt true. But the elimination of such discrimination would not alter the nature of the system that
generates the large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security described by
Bottero. It would just alter the technologies used for deciding who had to take them. And its hard
to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for tracksuits and gold chains could make
up for the disadvantages produced by those jobs. Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful
technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white
people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of
anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black
people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of identity and ethnic diversity, it seeks to
create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who
cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much
money as she does because she can be confident that Im not racist or sexist and that I respect her
culture. And shes also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who makes much more
than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the chancellor of our
university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is not only African-American but a
woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her.
But, and I acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the
downside of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing
disparities not produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact
that the increase in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social
analyst as clear-eyed as a University of Illinois cleaning woman would start from there.

18
File Title

Root Cause
Capitalism comes firstthe alternative reveals individuals
must confront the social system collectively or risk being
confined to isolated difference prisons that perpetuate the
status quo
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
Kovel's remarks raise questions about the primacy given to class analysis and class strugglea debate that continues unabated in most leftist circles. Con- trary to what many have claimed, not all Marxian forms of class analysis
rele- gate categories of difference to the conceptual mausoleum. In fact, recent Marxist theory has sought to reanimate them by interrogating how they are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to

Marx himself made clear how constructions of race and ethnicity

are "implicated in the circulation process of variable of capital. To the
extent that "gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather than as essentialist categories," the effect of exploring
their insertion into the "circulation of variable capital (including
positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence,
within the division of labor and the class system)" must be interpreted as
a "powerful force recon- structing them in distinctly capitalist ways
the irrefragable power of historical
materialism resides in its ability to reveal (a) how forms of oppression
based on categories of difference do not pos- sess relative autonomy from
class relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is
lived/experienced within a class-based system and (b) how all forms of
social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system. T
lass is
not simply another ideology legitimating oppression"
Rather, class
denotes "exploitative relations between people mediated by their
relations to the means of production
We are not renouncing the
concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe that it is imperative to
retain the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of
misguided post-Marxist critiques that imply that all forms of Marxian class
analysis are dismissive of subjectivity.
we advance a
framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly iso-lated
situations and/or particular experiences by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social conditions
They are linked
by their "internal relations" (
Expe- riential
understandings, in and of themselves, are initially suspect because dialectically they constitute a unity of oppositesthey are at once unique,
spe- cific, and personal but also thoroughly partial, social, and the
products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or
nothing A rich description of immediate experience
can easily become an isolated difference prison unless it transcends
the immediate perceived point of oppres- sion, confronts the social system
in which it is rooted, and expands into a com- plex and multifaceted
analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the
rela- tions of production.

"

" (Harvey, 2000, p.

106). Unlike contemporary narratives that tend to focus on one or another form of oppres- sion,

his framework must

be further distinguished from those who invoke the terms classism and/or class elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that "class matters" (cf. hooks, 2000) because we agree with Gimenez (2001) that "c
(p. 24).

" (p. 24). To marginalize such an understanding of class is to conflate individuals' objective locations in the intersection

of struc- tures of inequality with individuals' subjective understandings of how they are situated based on their "experiences."7 Another caveat.

We are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of "experience" that tends to assume that personal

experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge and that often treats expe- rience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather,

, in other words,

understanding

Oilman, 1993).

can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure, but such an

19
File Title
general organization of social relations. That
based approach
.

, however,

requires a broad class-

20
File Title

Turns case
Discourses of difference distract attention from capitalismthe
impact is the continuation of superexploitation of colored labor
pools by multinational corporations
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understand- ing the emergence of an
acutely polarized labor market and the fact that dispro- portionately high percentages of "people of
color" are trapped in the lower rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren &
Farahmandpur, 1999). Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings, movements,
and profit levels of multinational corporations, but those types of complex relations cannot be mapped out
without attending to capitalist class formations (Ahmad, 1998). To sever issues of difference from class
conve- niently draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which "peo- ple of color"
(and more specifically "women of color") provide capital with its superexploited labor poolsa
phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world . Most social relations constitutive of racialized
differences are consider- ably shaped by the relations of production, and there is undoubtedly a
racialized and gendered division of labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one
is situated in the capitalist global economy (Meyerson, 2000; Stabile, 1997). That racism and sexism
are necessary social relations for the organization of capitalism and new forms of emerging neocolonialism seems to escape the collective imaginations of those who theorize difference in a truncated
and exclusively culturalist manner. Bannerji (2000, pp. 8-9) forcefully argued that culturalist discourses
of difference have had the effect of "deflecting critical attention" from an increasingly "racialized" political economy.

Racial antagonism plays into the hands of the powerfulit

allows them to keep the working class subdued and detracted
from class movements
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
Callinicos observations are similar, in many ways, to the classic insights of Oliver Cromwell Cox in
Caste, Class, and Race, first published in 1948. Recently, Reed (2001) has argued that Coxs work is
particularly valuable in light of some of the problematic aspects of contemporary theorizing around race.
Cox proceeded consistently and rigorously from the "conviction that making sense of the meaning
of race" and the character of racialized relations required "an understanding of the dynamics of
capitalism as a social system" (p. 24). For Cox, race was most fundamentally an "artifact of
capitalist labor dynamics"a relation that "originated in slavery"and racial antagonism as
essentially "political-class conflict" (p. 27). Cox "emphasized the ruling-class foundations of racism as
part of his critique of the liberal scholars of race rela- tions who theorized race relations without regard to
capitalist political econ- omy and class dynamics" (p. 27). Reed suggested that Coxs perspective goes
right to the heart of how we should try to understand race by encouraging us to move beyond categories
for defining and sorting supposedly discrete human populations, beyond concepts of racial hierarchies,

21
File Title
and beyond racist ideolo- gies ... and instead recognize that race is a product of social relations within history and political economy.... Coxs interpretation is a refreshing alternative to the idealist frames
that have persisted in shaping American racial discourse and politics. . . . Racism is ... a pattern of
social relations. ... It exists only as it is reproduced in specific social arrangements in specific
societies under historically specific conditions of law, state and class power, (pp. 27-28) This implies
that to abolish racism in any substantive sense, a serious challenge to capitalism must be launched."
It does not mean that racism will simply dis- appear if democratic socialism is established, but we agree
with Callinicos (1993, p. 68) that the struggles for socialism and Black liberation are inseparable
something well understood by Black revolutionaries in the past and something seemingly forgotten
by contemporary champions of "difference" politics (Fletcher, 1999). As Bannerji (2000) has noted,
a politics based on differences be it in the form of cultural/racial nationalism or religious
fundamentalism is far more tolerable to those in power than would be "class based social
movements" among "minority" populations (pp. 7-8).12 Remarkably, much contemporary social
theory, particularly those theories ostensibly concerned with race and difference, has failed to
acknowledge that struggles based on class are funda- mentally different from others for such
struggles are aimed at the very founda- tions of capitalist societyincluding its racist, exploitative
underpinnings. Class struggle, rooted "as it is in the objective structures of capital itself, is ontoically distinct" (Harvey, 1998, p. 7) from those forms of oppression that motivate the various agendas
of difference and cultural politics. Multiple forms of oppression do exist, but these are best understood
within the overarching system of class domination and the variable discriminating mechanisms central to
capitalism as a system. This position is emphasized by Foster (2002) when he insisted that it is a serious
mistake to view the working class, except as an artificial abstraction, as cut off from issues of race,
gender, culture and community. In the United States the vast majority of the working class consists
of women and people of color. The power to upend and reshape society in decisive ways will come
not pri- marily through single-issue movements for reform, but rather through forms of
organization and popular alliance that will establish feminists, opponents of rac- ism, advocates of
gay rights, defenders of the environment, etc. as the more advanced sectors of a unified, class-based,
revolutionary political and economic movement, (p. 45) We have argued that it is virtually impossible
to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but this does not imply
that class struggle is now supplanted by the politics of difference. Indeed, we are now in the midst of
returning to the "most fundamental form of class struggle" in light of current global conditions (Jameson,
1998, p. 136). Todays climate suggests that class struggle is "not yet a thing of the past" and that
those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only "morally callous" and "seriously out of
touch with reality" but also largely blind to the "needs of the large mass of people who are barely
surviving capitals newly-honed mechanisms of global- ized greed" (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7-9). In our
view, a more comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical
juncture neces- sitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the working class as the
fundamental agent of change.14

Neoliberalism creates bonds between the poor and rich via

celebration of identitythe poor black woman has no need
to resent his employer who earns 10 times his wages because
his employer isnt racist or sexist
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), What Matters, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining
the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice once you
complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism

22
File Title
and classism you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of
wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with
contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically its just as empty as
contempt. This is pretty obvious when it comes to class. Kjartan Pll Sveinsson declares that the
white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear

the elimination of such discrimination would not alter the

nature of the system that generates the large numbers of low-wage, lowskill jobs with poor job security described by Bottero. It would just alter
the technologies used for deciding who had to take them . And its hard to see
how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for tracksuits and gold
chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by those jobs. Race, on
and its no doubt true. But

the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white
people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a

, in the form of the celebration of

identity and ethnic diversity, it seeks to create a bond between poor
black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who
cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make
almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be
confident that Im not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture. And shes also supposed
to feel pride because the dean of our college, who makes much more than ten
times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the
chancellor of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she
does, is not only African-American but a woman too (the fruits of both
anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her. But, and I
acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the downside of the politics of anticrucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore

discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing disparities not produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes
visible the fact that the increase in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social analyst as clear-eyed as a University of
Illinois cleaning woman would start from there.

Exposing racism fails as a political strategyits too porous to

effectively describe inequalities and has no political warrant
Reed Jr 05 (Adolph, is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, The Real
Divide, November 1 2005, http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed1105, MC)
Before the yes, buts begin, I am not claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not
significantly racialized. The evidence of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to
deny, and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial injustice. Nor am I saying that
we should overlook that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me be
blunter than Ive ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing racism is
wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a
useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment thats usually innocuous but can flare up and
become harmful. There are two reasons for this judgment. One is that the language of race and racism
is too imprecise to describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized
in a post-Jim Crow world. Racism can cover everything from individual prejudice and bigotry,
unself-conscious perception of racial stereotypes, concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or
the results of ostensibly neutral market forces. It can be a one-word description and explanation of
patterns of unequal distribution of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a
stockbrokers inability to get a cab, neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism
of black or Latino athletes, or being denied admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous,
it doesnt really explain anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation. Exposing racism
apparently makes those who do it feel good about themselves. Doing so is cathartic, though safely so,
in the same way that proclaiming ones patriotism is in other circles. It is a summary, concluding

23
File Title
judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete argument. It doesnt allow for politically significant
distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the discrete features of a
political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power of racism as an
abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment. Many liberals gravitate to the
language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but also because it doesnt carry
any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite
of a call to action. Such formulations as racism is our national disease or similar pieties imply that
racism is a natural condition. Further, it implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose
blacks and therefore cant be expected to align with them around common political goals. This view
dovetails nicely with Democrats contention that the only way to win elections is to reject a social justice
agenda that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white constituency
concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit. Upper-status liberals are more likely
to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate housing, and prospects for
providing for the kids education, and are much less likely to be in danger of seeing their nineteen-yearold go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher threshold of tolerance for political compromises
in the name of electing this years sorry pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging racismand, of course,
being pro-choiceis one of the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their
Republican co-workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding
inequality in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of
habit and partly because it connects with the material interests of those who would be race relations
technicians. In this sense, race is not an alternative to class. The tendency to insist on the primacy of
race itself stems from a class perspective. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect
that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response
from the federal government. But thats no longer the case; nor has it been for quite some time. That
approach presumed a federal government that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a
government no longer exists.

24
File Title

AT: Intersectionality/Race comes first

Cap comes firstonly prioritization of the class struggle has
any hope of rebuilding society because it is what entailed the
state with power and is the only man-made category
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
We need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those who invoke the
hackneyed race/class/gender triplet that can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It
is not. Although race, class, and gender invariably intersect, they are not coprimary. On the surface,
the triplet may be convincingsome people are oppressed because of their race, some as a result of
their gender, and others because of their classbut this "is grossly misleading" and approximates
what philosophers call a "category mistake." For it is not that "some individuals manifest certain
characteristics known as 'class' which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a
member of a social class just is to be oppressed," and in this regard, class is "a wholly social category"
(Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even when "class" is invoked as part of the aforementioned
triptych, it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon or
cat- egoryas just another form of difference. In these instances, class is trans- formed from an economic
and, indeed, social category to an exclusively cul- tural or discursive one or one in which class merely
signifies a "subject position." Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism, and
class power is severed from exploitation and a power structure "in which those who control
collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not"
(Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). This has had the effect of replacing a historical materialist class
analysis with a cul- tural analysis of class. As a result, many post-Marxists have also stripped the concept
of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it radical namely, its status as a universal form
of exploitation whose abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of
oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) was particularly insightful for
the explicitly tackled the priority given to different categories (i.e., gender, class, race, ethnic, and
national exclusion) of what he called " dominative splitting. " Kovel argued that we need to ask the
question: Priority with respect to what? He noted that if we mean priority with respect to time, then the
category of gender would have priority because there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of
oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential signifi- cance, Kovel suggested that we
would have to depend on the immediate histori- cal forces that bear down on distinct groups of
peoplehe offered examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of antiSemitism and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The
question of what has political priority, however, would depend on which transformation of relations
of oppression is practically more urgent, and although this would certainly depend on the preceding
categories, it would also depend on the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are
deployed. As to the question of which split sets into motion all the others, the priority would have to be
given to class because class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control,
and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class
is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of
"classism" to go along with "sexism" and "racism" and "species- ism"). This is, first of all, because class
is an essentially man-made category, with- out root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine
a human world without gender distinctionsalthough we can imagine a world without domination

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by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginableindeed, such was the human world
for the great majority of our species' time on earth, during all of

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Aff

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Cap fails to solve our impacts

Cap fails--Only contemporary methods of theorization are able
to help us uncover the genealogy of hidden terror and help
subordinated groups reconstruct their histories and identities
deconstructing capitalism does nothing to break down
hegemonic articulations of race and otherness
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference , 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
To suggest that culture is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces and social relations
linked to production does not reinscribe the sim- plistic and presumably deterministic
base/superstructure metaphor, which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, such a
formulation draws on Marx's own writings from both the Grundrisse (Marx, 1858/1973) and Cap- ital
(Marx, 1867/1967) in which he contended that there is a consolidating logic in the relations of
production that permeates society in the complex vari- ety of its "empirical" reality.4 This
emphasizes Marx's understanding of capital- ism and capital as a "social" relationone that stresses the
interpenetration of these categories and one that offers a unified and dialectical analysis of history,
ideology, culture, politics, economics, and society (see Marx, 1863/1972, 1867/1976a, 1866/1976b, 1865/
1977a, 1844/1977b). Moreover, fore- grounding the limitations of "difference" and
"representational" politics does not suggest a disavowal of the importance of cultural and/or
discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation. We readily acknowledge the significance of theorizations
that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of difference that have historically been
denigrated. They have helped to uncover the geneal- ogy of terror hidden within the drama of
Western democratic life. This has been an important development that has enabled subordinated
groups to reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities
(Bannerji, 1995; Scatamburlo-D'Annibale & Langman, 2002). Contemporary theorists have also
contributed to our understanding of issues Contemporary theorists have also contributed to our
understanding of issues of "otherness" and "race" as hegemonic articulations (Hall, 1980, 1987, 1988), the
cultural politics of race and racism and the implications of raciology (Gilroy, 1990, 2000), as well as the
epistemological violence perpetrated by Western theories of knowledge (Goldberg, 1990, 1993). Miron
and Indas (2000) work, drawing on Judith Butlers theory of performativity, has been insightful in showing
how race works to constitute the racial subject through a reiterative discursive practice that achieves its
effect through the act of naming and the practice of shaming.