File written by Nate Nys

Email me with any questions: nnys16@blakeschool.org

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

Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the
grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was 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 world’s 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
world—and 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 man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s
getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t 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 cinematically—unless 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
clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archiveof progressive scholars, and the
plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is 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 how—and, for some, what—would 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 analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation
and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S.
attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in
the presence of Blacks.1 One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s 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 question—and the power to pose
the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who
“retired” from struggle. The question’s 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 estate’s 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 symptoms—it 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 ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism
breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes
unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of
political ethics—the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which 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.

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

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

Blackness operates on an ontological register – it is impossible to make

blackness acceptable within civil society
Yancy 08, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily on
issues of social justice, “Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race “
https://books.google.com/books?id=VQAfAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=%22On+the+elevator,+m
y+Black+body+is+ontologically+mapped,+its+coordinates+lead+to+that+which+is+always+immediately%2
2&source=bl&ots=11lq3QEyJG&sig=m116eKlVHrBtPWmV9AOYb9v0fZU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCAQ6AEwA
GoVChMI7u-
OluGUxgIVhz2MCh0F3gf2#v=onepage&q=%22On%20the%20elevator%2C%20my%20Black%20body%20is
%20ontologically%20mapped%2C%20its%20coordinates%20lead%20to%20that%20which%20is%20alway
s%20immediately%22&f=false, NN

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

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

we are once again in a period of revelation, concern, and debate on national security surveillance. Yet if real change
Today,

is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will need to be fully confronted—or
opposition to surveillance will once again be easily defeated by racial security narratives. The significance of the
Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of the NSA’s mass surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider can have. The result has been a
generalized level of alarm as people have become aware of how intrusive surveillance is in our
society, but that alarm remains constrained within a public debate that is highly abstract, legalistic, and centered

on the privacy rights of the white middle class. On the one hand, most civil liberties advocates are focused
on the technical details of potential legal reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard
privacy. Such initiatives are likely to bring little change because they fail to confront the racist
and imperialist core of the surveillance system. On the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government surveillance can be fixed
simply by using better encryption tools. While encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a government agency would need to monitor an individual, they do nothing to unravel the larger
surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns about loss of sales to foreign customers concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon Valley, what should
be a debate about basic political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits.6 Another and perhaps deeper problem is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit the current
situation—such as George Orwell’s discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the type of government surveillance we face today.70
Reference to Orwell’s 1984 has been widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the book were said to have soared following Snowden’s revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a new form
of Big Brother is, on one level, supported by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groups—Muslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalists—state surveillance certainly looks Orwellian. But this level of
scrutiny is not faced by the general public. The picture of surveillance today is therefore quite different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwell’s 1984, which assumes an undifferentiated
mass population subject to government control. What we have instead today in the United States is total surveillance, not on everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by their race, religion, or

the “bad guys.” In March 2014, Rick Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told an audience:
political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as

“Contrary to some of the stuff that’s been printed, we don’t sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If

you’re not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.”72 In the
national security world, “connected to” can be the basis for targeting a whole racial or political

community so, even assuming the accuracy of this comment, it points to the ways that national security surveillance can
draw entire communities into its web, while reassuring “average people” (code for the
normative white middle class) that they are not to be troubled. In the eyes of the national security state, this average person must also
express no political views critical of the status quo. Better oversight of the sprawling national security apparatus and greater use of encryption in

digital communication should be welcomed. But by themselves these are likely to do little more than reassure technologists , while

racialized populations and political dissenters continue to experience massive surveillance. This is why
the most effective challenges to the national security state have come not from legal reformers
or technologists but from grassroots campaigning by the racialized groups most affected. In New York, the campaign against
the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims has drawn its strength from building alliances with other groups affected by
racial profiling: Latinos and Blacks who suffer from hugely disproportionate rates of stop and frisk. In California’s Bay Area, a campaign
against a Department of Homeland Security-funded Domain Awareness Center was successful because various constituencies were able to unite on the issue, including homeless people, the poor, Muslims, and

a demographics unit planned by the Los Angeles Police Department, which would have
Blacks. Similarly,

profiled communities on the basis of race and religion, was shut down after a campaign that
united various groups defined by race and class. The lesson here is that, while the national security state
aims to create fear and to divide people, activists can organize and build alliances across race lines to
overcome that fear. To the extent that the national security state has targeted Occupy, the antiwar movement, environmental rights activists, radical journalists and campaigners, and whistleblowers,
these groups have gravitated towards opposition to the national security state. But understanding the centrality of race and empire to national

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

Racial equality under the law is not only impossible but the attempts to re-
create and shift the puzzle pieces of civil society mean slavery is reinvented in
different ways
Woan 11, Master of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Law in the Graduate School of
Binghamton University, “The value of resistance in a permanently white, civil society,”
http://gradworks.umi.com/14/96/1496586.html NN

Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, in then influential Black Power, describe reformist
strategies as "playing ball" with the white man. They argue that reform plays the white man's
game in order to gain rights, i.e. appeal to a white supremacist government that is the precise
agent responsible for the original harms they are seeking to alleviate.9 While this may very
well result in the granting of new rights previously denied, it maintains a hierarchical system
between whites and nonwhites, since the latter will have to continue to appeal to the former to
ask for rights they never should have been denied in the first place. This places the former in a
position of power to accept or deny such requests. Thus, in Carmichael and Hamilton's view,
attempting to resist white supremacy by working within white supremacist institutions
maintains a dangerous system of power relations that lock in place the hierarchy between
whites and nonwhites. / It is unfortunate enough that members of minority groups face public
and private racial discrimination. It is worse, however, to place the burden of combating this
discrimination on them. What Carmichael and Hamilton aptly point out is that the hierarchy
between races mentioned above is what is responsible for this undue burden. There is not only
the constant physical struggle of protesting, writing letters, and being dragged through litigation
that can often get expensive, but there is the psychological struggle as well. Why am I not
worthy of equal protection under the law? Why is it that others do not even notice the
disparate impact of the law? Or, even worse, why is it that those who do notice, seem to not
care? / What inevitably comes with these types of reformist strategies is an emotional
struggle, namely, an inferiority complex that makes the victimized individual stop and wonder
— who put the white man in charge of my body? Appeals to the federal government to repeal
discriminatory acts that deny minorities rights becomes analogous to asking whites to
eliminate such policies and to allow others access to the same rights they enjoy every day. The
racial state becomes in charge of what nonwhites can and cannot do, and when nonwhites
continue to go to whites asking them to pass certain policies, nonwhites further legitimate this
system of power relations. It is difficult to see how true equality can be achieved wider such a
system. / B. Missing the Root Cause: The Racial State / Omi and Winant further support this
claim and explain that it is not merely individual policies passed by the United States federal
government that are racist, but that racial oppression is a structure of the government
itself.10 They describe this structure as the "racial state" to show that the state does not
merely support racism, but rather, it supports the concept of race itself. As will be discussed
later in this paper, Omi and Winant explain how the state is the agent that has defined race, and
that this definition has evolved over time, to maintain the concept of race and support racism. /
Given the existence of the racial state, Omi and Winant critique reformist strategies as falling
short of achieving normative goals of eliminating racism since the reforms merely get re-
equilibriated. A look at the history of racial victories in the United States further supports this
critique. Racial victories for one minority were often made possible only with the entrapment of
another racial minority. For example, while many celebrate the racial victory of the 1954 Brown
v. Board decision, many fail to see this happened the same year as Operation Wetback, which
shifted the racial discrimination to a different population, removing close to one million illegal
immigrants, mostly Mexicans, from the United States.11 Moreover, soon after the ratification of
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granting citizenship and suffrage to Blacks. Congress
chose to deny citizenship to Chinese immigrants.12 In 1941, shortly after the establishment of
the Committee on Fair Employment Practices permitted Blacks into defense industries, Japanese
Americans were taken from their homes and sent off to internment camps. Pei-te Lien argues
that all of these "coincidences" support critiques of reformist strategies that merely target
individual policies, since without challenging the racial state as a whole, even the elimination
of these individual policies will fail to eliminate racism, as they will simply replicate
themselves or shift elsewhere and target racial minorities in different ways.14 / C. Separatist
Movements / This helps to explain why political activists began adopting other more
revolutionary strategies. Contrary to Martin Luther King Jr. and many of his followers during the
Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement emerged and began advocating for more
separatist strategies that rejected making reformist appeals to the United States federal
government. In his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X argued: / When you take your
case to Washington D.C., you're taking it to the criminal who's responsible: it's like miming from
the wolf to the fox. They're all in cahoots together. They all work political chicanery and make
you look like a chump before the eyes of the world. Here you are walking around in America,
getting ready to be drafted and sent abroad, like a tin soldier, and when you get over there,
people ask you what you are fighting for, and you have to stick your tongue in your cheek. No,
take Uncle Sam to court, take him before the world. / Critics of reformist strategies, such as
Malcolm X, understood the United States as being inherently racial and thus incapable of
reform. They use the "coincidences" listed above as evidence to support this claim. They view
the United States federal government as a racial state that will merely continue to define race in
new and more modernized ways, ensuring the permanence of racism with the passage of new
policies supporting these definitions. This is why they believe reformists are wrong to attack
individual policies, rather than the racial state itself. / For example, the legal enforcement of a
racially discriminatory housing covenant may have been justified due to a racist belief that
members of the minority race restricted from acquiring title within that neighborhood is inferior
to the Caucasian race. More specifically, one might support said covenant because one believes
the inferiority of that minority race and the potential they might become your neighbor will
result in a decrease in the fair market value of your property. After vigorous ongoing protests
from civil rights activists, that particular law enforcing those covenants might get repealed.
However, the reason for the repeal of that law might arise not from an ethical epiphany, but
rather an economic rationale in which the homeowner is shown his property value will remain
unaffected, or perhaps even increase. Thus, that particular act may get repealed, but the
policymakers responsible for its original draft will still be in power, and will maintain the same
beliefs that motivated that piece of legislation in the first place. Because there has been no
ethical realization of the injustice in their conduct, the chances remain high that they will
construct new, apparently different but equally discriminatory policies that will force activists to
join forces once again and continue the same fight. / This is why it is not the individual policies,
but the government itself that is the "preeminent site of racial conflict."17 Omi and Winant's
proposal of the "racial state" views the government as "inherently racial," meaning it does not
simply intervene in racial conflicts, but it is the locus of racial conflict.18 In addition to
structuring conceptions of race, the government in the United States is in and of itself racially
structured.19 State policies govern racial politics, heavily influencing the public on how race
should be viewed. The ways in which it does so changes over time, often taking on a more
invisible nature. For example, Omi and Winant describe the racial state as treating race in
different ways throughout different periods of time, first as a biologically based essence, and
then as an ideology, etc. These policies are followed by racial remedies offered by government
institutions, in response to political pressures and in accordance to these different treatments of
race, varying in degree depending on the magnitude of the threats those pressures pose to the
order of society. Notable achievements during the Civil Rights Movement have served as a
double-edged sword. While the reformist strategies utilized during that period helped make
certain advances possible, it also drove other more overt expressions of racism underground.
These more invisible instantiations of racial injustice are far more difficult to identify than its
previously more explicit forms. Praising these victories risks giving off the illusion that the fight is
over and that racism is a description of the past. / For example, the ratification of the Fifteenth
Amendment gave off the illusion that all citizens thereafter had equal access to the right to vote.
Those who supported its ratification now felt entitled to the moral credentials necessary to
legitimize their ability to express racially prejudiced attitudes.21 For example, voter turnout
today remains relatively low for Asian-Americans, and many blame this on cultural differences
between Asians and Americans.22 Asian-Americans are labeled as apathetic in the political
community and they themselves have been attributed the blame for relatively low
representation of Asian-Americans in the government today.23 This however, ignores the way in
which other more invisible practices serve to obstruct Asian-Americans from being able to
exercise their right to vote. / Research by the United States Election Assistance Commission by
the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, for example, indicates that restrictive
voter identification requirements have effectively served to disenfranchise Asian Pacific
Islanders (APIs) from voting.24 In the 2004 election, researchers found APIs in states where
voters were required to present proper identification at the polls were 8.5% less likely to
vote.25 This study confirmed that voter ID requirements prevented a large number of APIs from
voting.26 / Voter suppression tactics also play a large role in the disenfranchisement of APIs.
According to a Voter Intimidation and Vote Suppression briefing paper by Demos, a national
public policy center, an estimated 50 Asian Americans were selectively challenged at the polls in
Alabama during August of 2004, as being ineligible to vote due to insufficient English-speaking
skills.27 Many states have allowed this selective challenging of voters to take place at the polls,
resulting in a feeling of fear, intimidation, and embarrassment among APIs, driving them away
from the polls. / The danger in treasuring monumental victories such as the ratification of the
Fifteenth Amendment becomes apparent when people interpret this ratification as an indication
that voting discrimination is no longer a problem, and that if the voter turnout of Asian-
Americans is consistently low, it must be because they are politically apathetic or disinterested
in American ideals. Because they originally supported the ratification of the amendment, whites
can now feel as if they have the moral credentials to make conclusions such as the cultural
differences rationale. The same can be seen after courts ordered the desegregation of public
schools and after affirmative action programs became more widespread. People began
assuming African-Americans now had an equal opportunity for education and that if they did
not succeed, it must be a reflection of their intelligence or work-ethic, failing to see the ways
the problem has not been solved, but rather disguised itself in other costumes, such as tracking
programs in schools or teachers who view their presence as merely "affirmative action babies"
and expect them to fail. / One might ask, then, why can we not change the racial state one
policy at a time? Perhaps one could first work to gain the right to vote, and then move on to
combat discriminatory identification requirements and political scare tactics. It would not seem
entirely implausible to assume that the success of individual piecemeal reforms within the
government could eventually result in a transformation of the institution itself. However, simply
eliminating discriminatory policies is insufficient for an overhaul of a racial institution. /
Understanding the motivating reasons for the elimination of individual racist policies is a critical
factor in determining the success of a movement. While one justification for passing the
Fifteenth Amendment might consist of arguments in favor of equality and exposing racial
injustice, another justification might involve maintaining order and minimizing disruption, which
is important to the federal government and its ability to run smoothly. Thus, the government
often seeks out ways to normalize society through eliminating disruptions to preserve order.
When those being denied certain rights grow significantly discontent, they rebel and become
disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society. This can take the form of civil disobedience,
such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more
revolutionary measures, such as damaging government offices or violently harassing officials to
acknowledge the injustices and change policy. / All of these measures, however peaceful or
violent, disrupt society. A town cannot run smoothly if protesters are filling up the streets or
blocking frequently-used road paths, and most certainly cannot run smoothly if town halls are
being lit on fire. Thus, in order to return to the desired homeostasis, those in power may often
compromise and offer to rectify the situation at hand by granting rights to individuals through
changes in legislation in order to appease them and "eliminate" the disruption (the protests,
demonstrations, etc.). The lack of effort made towards protecting these rights bolsters Bell's
argument that these reforms serve more of a symbolic value rather than functional. If still
operating under the racial state, these piecemeal reforms will fail to solve the original racial
injustices in the long term, as they will only succeed in establishing a new unstable
equilibrium, only to be followed with the replication of new racial problems.28 These new
problems will once again create resentment, generate protest, and the cycle will begin to
replicate itself, ensuring the permanence of racism. Omi and Winant term this cycle of
continuous disruption and restoration of order as the trajectory of racial politics.29 This
trajectory supports the treatment of racism as inevitable since even if the racial state mitigates
racial disruption over a particular policy and "restores order," another policy based off a new
definition of race will emerge triggering another racial disruption, continuing this cycle of racial
politics

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

The final object of contemplation in Mbembe’s rewriting of Agam- ben’s rewriting of Foucault’s
biopolitics is the fin de siè cle figure of resis- tance to the colonial occupation of Palestine: the
(presumptively male) suicide bomber. The slave, “able to demonstrate the protean capabilities
of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by
another,” is thus contrasted subtly with the colonized native, whose “body is transformed into
a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense” — a cultural politics in lieu
of an armed struggle in which “to large extent, resistance and self-destruction are
synonymous.”35 Resistance to slavery in this account is self-preservative and forged by way of
a demonstration of the capabilities of the human bond, whereas resis- tance to colonial
occupation is self-destructive and consists in a demonstra- tion of the failure of the human
bond, the limits of its protean capabilities. One could object, in an empiricist vein, that the
slave too resists in ways that are quite nearly as self-destructive as an improvised explosive
device and that the colonial subject too resists through the creation and perfor- mance of
music and the stylization of the body, but that would be to miss the symptomatic value of
Mbembe’s theorization.¶ Mbembe describes suicide bombing as being organized by “two
apparently irreconcilable logics,” “the logic of martyrdom and the logic of survival,” and it is
the express purpose of the rubric of necropolitics to meditate upon this unlikely logical
convergence.36 However, there is a discrepancy at the heart of the enterprise. Rightly so, the
theorization of necropolitics as a friendly critique of Agamben’s notion of bare life involves an
excursus on certain “repressed topographies of cruelty,” including, first of all, slavery, in which
“the lines between resistance and suicide, sacri- fice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom
become blurred.”37 Yet, as noted, the logic of resistance-as-suicide-as-sacrifice-as-martyrdom
is for Mbembe epitomized by the presumptively male suicide bomber at war with colonial
occupation, “the most accomplished form of necropower” in the contemporary world, rather
than Hartman’s resistant female slave, Celia, engaged in close-quarters combat with the sexual
economy of slave society,¶ “the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.”38
Why the unannounced transposition? Because the restricted notion of homo sacer — alongside
the related notions of bare life and the state of exception— is being used in confusion to
account for the effects of the biopolitics of race too generally. The homo sacer, “divested of
political status and reduced to bare life,” is distinguished not by her vulnerability to a specific
form or degree of state-sanctioned violence but by her social proscription from the honor of
sacrifice.39 The homo sacer is banned from the witness-bearing function of martyrdom (from
the ancient Greek martys, “witness”). Her suffering is therefore imperceptible or illegible as a
rule. It is against the law to recognize her sovereignty or self-possession.
2NC - Links
 Surveillance links
Liberal reformism in the context of surveillance reifies state power – only
complete revolution has the power to be successful
Khalek 13, Rania Khalek is a staff writer for Truth Out, “Activists of Color Lead Charge Against
Surveillance, NSA,” http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19695-activists-of-color-at-forefront-of-anti-
nsa-movement, NN

"We been exposed to this type of surveillance since we got here," declared Kymone Freeman,
director of the National Black LUV Fest as he emceed the historic rally against NSA surveillance
in Washington, DC. He continued, "Drones is a form of surveillance. Racial profiling is a form of
surveillance. Stop-and-frisk is a form of surveillance. We all black today!"∂ This was the mood
that characterized the atmosphere of the Stop Watching Us rally on October 26, 2013,
organized by broad coalition of more than 100 public advocacy groups from across the political
spectrum, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundations
and Color of Change, and attended by thousands. The purpose of the rally, which began as a
march from Union Station to the reflecting pool outside Capitol Hill, was to deliver a petition to
Congress demanding an end to NSA mass spying.∂ A White-Centric Movement? Not Even
Close∂ Throughout the day, Freeman's voice could be heard praising whistleblowers Edward
Snowden and Chelsea Manning or reminding the crowd of the racial significance of surveillance
history. As a result, the intersection of surveillance and race remained at the forefront of the
day's event, which the crowd happily welcomed with applause. Yet somehow this was lost on
most journalists in attendance.∂ Despite the crowd's diversity and repeated acknowledgements
of America's sordid history of aggressive spying on communities of color, the few outlets to
cover the rally portrayed it and the movement against NSA surveillance as one dominated
almost exclusively by privileged white people.∂ USA Today managed to interview white men only
and failed to quote a single speaker of color. Neither the Huffington Post nor The Guardian fared
any better. To be fair, big-name speakers, such as Jesselyn Radack, director of the Government
Accountability Project, and Thomas Drake, former NSA senior executive turned whistleblower,
were featured prominently in news reports most likely because they are well-known. But that
still doesn't explain why almost all the attendees interviewed were white when the crowd was
far from homogenous.∂ Not a single media outlet bothered to mention the moving and powerful
performance of Malachi "Malpractice" Byrd, a member of the DC Youth Poetry Slam Team
whose piece began, "I pledge civil disobedience to the flag of the hypocritical tyrants that expect
us to assimilate and to the republic, which somehow stands, as one nation, under many gods, of
individuals stripped of their liberties and in need of justice for all."∂ ∂ But it was Slate political
reporter Dave Weigel who seemed to have attended a different rally altogether. "Among the
attendees: More than a few Tea Partiers and young, small-l libertarians, possibly equaling those
who could be put on the left," Weigel reported. ∂ While there's certainly nothing wrong with
recognizing the presence of right-leaning civil libertarians who value privacy, this portrayal is
inaccurate and ignores the voices of those who suffer the most from the NSA dragnet.∂
Surveillance State Was Built on Targeting Communities of Color∂ Two days prior to the Stop
Watching Us rally, Busboys & Poets, a progressive DC restaurant, hosted "Enemies of the State?
Government Surveillance of Communities of Color," a panel discussion organized by Free Press,
the Center for Media Justice and Voices for Internet Freedom. The room was packed mostly
with activists of color concerned about the implications of NSA surveillance on already-
marginalized and increasingly surveilled communities.∂ The panel took place at Busboys and
Poets in Washington, DC, on October 24, 2013. Steven Renderos, national organizer for the
Center for Media Justice, who helped put together the panel, told Truthout that examining the
legacy of surveillance in communities of color could help lead to solutions. "It's critical to
understand the history so we can learn how to dismantle it," Renderos said.∂ "Those of us from
marginalized communities grew up in environments very much shaped by surveillance, which
has been utilized to ramp up the criminal justice system and increase deportations," Renderos
said. "It's having real consequences in our communities where children are growing up without
parents in the home and families are being torn apart through raids and deportations, a lot of
which is facilitated through the use of surveillance."∂ Panelist Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy
director for the South Asian-led social justice organization Desis Rising Up and Moving, argued
that mass surveillance is the predictable outgrowth of programs that have targeted
marginalized communities for decades.∂ "Just by the very nature of [the United States] being a
settler-colonialist and capitalist nation, race and social control are central to its project," Ahmed
said. "Anytime we see any levels of policing - whether it's day-to-day policing in the streets,
surveillance by the police or internet surveillance - social control, particularly of those that resist
the existing system, becomes an inherent part of that system."∂ But, he warned, "These policies
are not going to be limited to one particular community. They're going to continue to expand
further and further" because "the surveillance has a purpose, which is to exert the power of
the state and control the potential for dissent."∂ Seema Sadanandan, program director for ACLU
DC, acknowledged the collective resentment felt by people of color who are understandably
frustrated that privacy violations are only now eliciting mass public outrage when communities
of color have been under aggressive surveillance for decades.∂ "The Snowden revelations
represent a terrifying moment for white, middle-class and upper-middle-class people in this
country, who on some level believe that the Bill of Rights and Constitution were protecting their
everyday lives," Sadanandan said. "For people of color from communities with a history of
discrimination and economic oppression that prevents one from realizing any of those rights on
a day-to-day basis, it wasn't a huge surprise."∂ But Sadanandan argued that NSA surveillance still
"has particular concerns for communities of color because of their unique relationship to the
criminal justice or social control system, a billion-dollar industry with regard to, for example,
border patrol or data mining as it's applied to racially profile." Sadanandan warned that NSA
surveillance more than likely would strengthen that system of control.∂ Former political prisoner
and Black Panther Party leader Dhoruba Bin-Wahad declared that "the United States has moved
into a full garrison police state," which "has been exported and institutionalized all over the
globe." His antidote? "We have to put together an international movement to check the
development evolution of the modern national security state," which requires linking globalized
labor exploitation to the prison industry to the war on terror to institutionalized white
supremacy rooted in the "European-settler state." Bin-Wahad was skeptical about the ability of
"legal" remedies to reform the system. "You cannot make the police state better. You cannot
reform white supremacy. We need to abolish the system as it now stands," Bin-Wahad said.∂
Disappointed With Obama∂ Bin-Wahad's most scathing indictment was of African-Americans in
positions of power. He referred to Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus as "black
enemies of black people" for sanctioning drone strikes and NSA spying" and called Obama "the
worst thing to happen to black people since Reconstruction."∂ At the rally, Steve, who traveled
from Philadelphia and declined to give a last name, said that growing up as a black man in South
Africa instilled in him a desire to speak out against rights abuses. "I feel sensitive when I see
here in America people having their rights infringed upon," he told Truthout. "The US
government must act consistently with what it preaches around the world. They can't preach to
the world about human rights if they're not providing them to the people over here."∂ Anthony
Wilson, who traveled by bus from Philadelphia with the software company ThoughtWorks, told
Truthout at the rally that despite being an enthusiastic Obama voter, he is disappointed in the
president. "I believed that when Obama was elected things would be more open, but to my
surprise it went in the other direction." Wilson also expressed frustration with his own
community, saying, "A lot of black people give Obama a pass." "When I voted for him, I thought I
was voting for a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X. But he is not progressive enough. He has no
intention of changing anything. And if he hasn't done it by now, then he never will." ∂ Renderos
expressed similar sentiments. "A lot of communities of color are deferring to the president with
very blanketed support for his policies."∂ Renderos said organizing and educating can help
combat this. "When the framing around surveillance is posited around the first and fourth
amendment, that's unfortunately a reality that doesn't necessarily resonate with communities
of color. The fourth amendment has been eroded through programs like stop-and-frisk and
Secure Communities," he said. "We need to build a consensus around the increase in
deportations and the jail population by communities of color and how this is intrinsically
connected with the increase of a surveillance state here in the US."∂ Learning From History∂
Ignoring activists of color does more than just rob marginalized communities of having a voice
in the NSA surveillance conversation. It also overlooks potential strategies for fighting it.∂
Renderos put it best: "We need to learn from history about how movements like the Black
Panther Party, American Indian Movement and the Brown Berets responded to living under a
surveillance state."

Anonymity allows whiteness to remain unchallenged while people of color are

continuously exploitegd
Rodriguez 15, Princess Harmony Rodriguez, 3/27/15, Princess is an afro-latin trans woman,
survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence, creator, otaku, and anti-violence activist. Her
writing has been published on The Feminist Wire, Feministing, Black Girl Dangerous, Know Your
IX, and FeministaJones.com. “Who Are the Real Victims?: SAE Racist Chant, Yik Yak, and the
Weapon of Anonymity

Recently, a video depicting members of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) singing a racial
slur-laden song making reference to lynching shocked and appalled the nation. The outcry
resulted in a near-instantaneous dissolution of the chapter and expulsion of its ringleaders.
However, the attitudes expressed by SAE aren’t exactly isolated. In fact, the outcry spawned
the #NotJustSAE hashtag in which students of color shared our experiences with racism on our
college campuses. An ongoing source of controversy, Twitter and Facebook university
“confessions” pages and anonymous posting apps are making waves for the exact same
reasons. In particular, the app Yik Yak has been highlighted as a source of trouble because of the
chaos it enables. While some posts are innocent, such as those asking about parties or asking
who got the hookup to a good weed man, there are too many that are dedicated to violent and
white supremacist acts. On campuses across America, the app is either creating or worsening
gender, racial, and class divisions. Schools, including schools already under a microscope for
their (mis)handling of sexual violence, are allowing individual students who come forward about
sexual violence to get targeted by those who were reported. A dear friend of mine, who had
already survived violence, was targeted on her college’s Yik Yak. They threatened her with
violence for daring to speak what happened to her. I saw the screenshots and so did the
administration. Similarly, schools already the target of criticism for their racial divisions are rife
with yaks that are filled with violent threats and racial epithets. For example, a school in North
Philadelphia that’s already the target of criticism for gentrifying the area and for having a
disturbingly high number of overt racists has racist yaks posted almost every day. Words that
ordinarily have no negative connotation to them, such as “local”, are racialized and turned into
an acceptable form of the N-word. When posts get reported to college administrators, it’s
almost a given that the administration will wash its hands of the responsibility to handle it. Civil
rights laws such as Title VI and Title IX (among others) and the Department of Education’s
subsequent Dear Colleague Letters say that universities have a responsibility to handle violence
and harassment from students on campus, even if the violence occurs online. By ignoring and
failing to acknowledge incidents of harassment and violence, they’re breaking the law. Even if
they’re unable to track down who is responsible for particular threats, they can at least make an
attempt to acknowledge the problem. This highlights the problem of anonymity. When people
use anonymity, it can either be used for innocuous or outright negative purposes. In Yik Yak’s
case, as has been noted across the country, it’s used mostly for negative purposes. In its short
history, Yik Yak has been used to make bomb threats, target specific students who were already
survivors of sexual violence, target entire races of people, and threaten said people with
violence. In each of those examples, with the exception of only a few, not only did those posts
remain, they got upvoted. And they didn’t get just one or two upvotes, they got dozens of
upvotes. Most yaks don’t even get 5 upvotes. But they got dozens. Juxtapose that with
statements made by one of its creators. Brooks Buffington claimed the app was made for the
“disenfranchised”. With violent yaks not being removed and a constant stream of racist yaks,
who really is disenfranchised to them? Who really is marginalized to them? Who are the real
victims? The answer is simple. The victims are the white bros who use that app, in their own
minds. Then, what purpose does anonymity – especially in terms of this particular app – serve?
Anonymity serves as a weapon for the patriarchy. Why? Because they’re not held accountable
for their words. When someone posts an anti-black, racist, and/or misogynistic yak, the people
who view it – including the people in charge of moderating those posts – support it. They upvote
it. Even if people report the post, it’s probably not gonna go down. In other words, it serves as a
weapon for the patriarchy because the audience of that post, from top to bottom, supports that
viewpoint. And that’s more than just within the app, since this app was targeted at college
students, so the audience then includes administration because it’s inevitable that they’ll get
involved. Usually, “involved” only means that they acknowledge that it’s happening and then
nothing happens from there. Despite their responsibility to protect their students from violence,
particularly violence based on race, gender, etc., they refuse to act. They protect and enable the
status quo: violence towards gender/sexual minorities, people with disabilities, and oppressed
racial groups. With the exclusion of incidents that go viral, such as the SAE chant, this status quo
is never challenged by administration, There is an unspoken agreement between the powers
that be and the students that violence against oppressed people is okay. In an ideal world,
anonymity would protect the oppressed and serve as a means for us to subvert the negative
things forced on us. However, that is not the world we live in and while there are those who
have used anonymity for that purpose, it’s more common to run into racists and misogynists
using anonymity as a shield to keep themselves from being accountable for their words and
actions. In this world, anonymity and the existing power structure make it so that oppressors
don’t have to be accountable for their actions or words unless they become too much of a
burden for the patriarchy to protect. For us to further the conversation started by #NotJustSAE,
we have to acknowledge the challenges that anonymity creates for oppressed people. Some
college students started campaigns to “take back” Yik Yak from students who use it to harm
others. While anonymity serves as a weapon for the oppressors, it can be made to serve us as a
means to fight back and change the environment on the internet, on campus, and in society
overall.

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

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

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

Surveillance reform has no chance of remedying racial inequality

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

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

The affirmative’s reaction to NSA surveillance is a product of white privilege.

The abuses they’re outraged with aren’t exceptions to the rule; they are the
rule.
Wise 13 — Timothy J. Wise, anti-racist activist and writer, holds a B.A. in Political Science from
Tulane University, 2013 (“Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege,” Tim Wise’s
blog, June 19th, Available Online at http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-and-
the-irony-of-racial-privilege/, Accessed 02-17-2015)

The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow struck against
democracy, and that now our liberties are in jeopardy is the kind of thing one can only believe
if one has had the luxury of thinking they were living in such a place, and were in possession
of such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury enjoyed by painfully few
folks of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they
have long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in
housing, the justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have
circumscribed the boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for
the latter, freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic
privation in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and
less than most other nations with which we like to compare ourselves.

In short, when people proclaim a desire to “take back our democracy” from the national
security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin
from a premise that is entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take
back, and that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasn’t
and it hasn’t been.

Blackness is a phonotypical and aesthetic phenomena – black bodies are

already coded in the temporality of modernity – there is no invisibility to a
body marked by gratuitous violence
***CHECK ON THIS CARD BEFORE READING IT – USES N WORD***
Yancy 12, George Yancy is a Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy
of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. “Look, A White!: Philosophical
Essays on Whiteness,” NN

In terms of the clicking sounds, my body, through the gazes of white people, manifests a
particular modality of volatility (etymologically volare, "to fly"). The etymological meaning of
volatility captures the sense in which the black body, within the context of white lies and fears,
can experience instability, flux, where its meaning appears to fail to remain tethered, as it
were, by the power of black self-definitional agency alone. When walking by whites in cars, I
might be said to exist ontologically quadrupled. While it is not possible for me to exist in four
different places at once, I am after some-thing that arises at the phenomenological or lived
level of experience. For example, it can be said that I am "here," taking up space outside on the
side-walk or crossing the street before the appearance of any car. However, I am also "ahead of
myself:" I don't mean this in the way that Heideggerians speak of human beings as always ahead
of themselves qua possibility, or in the way that Sartreans speak of human reality as being for
itself and as always future oriented, as always more. Rather, "being ahead of myself' suggests
the sense in which I am always already fixed, complete, given. From the perspective of white
looks, my being—the dynamic possibility and openness of being other than I am—can never
transcend the fixity of my presumed racial essence. After all, a "nigger" will always be a
"nigger." In other words, before I walk by a car filled with whites, and before they catch a
glimpse of me and lock their doors, I exist in the form of a static racial tem-plate. My being is
"known" by whites before my arrival. I reside in a fixed place, always already waiting for me. In
short, then, I exist ahead of myself. In Charles Johnson's brilliant phrase, and from which the
title of this chapter is derived, I encounter myself "much like a mugger at a boardwalk's end.""
My destiny has already been determined; the meaning of my life is forever foreclosed by my
blackness. As Frantz Fanon writes, "And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is
the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me."" Whiteness has created a
world in which necessity is the foundation of being black-in-the-world. As black, I am
possessed by an essence that always precedes me. I am always "known" in advance. Please
welcome the "person" who needs no introduction: the black. Once next to the car (or once
whites "see" my black body approaching), though physically separated from it, I find myself
"over there" floating like a phantasm in their imaginary—much like a thought bubble. Yet I am
also "alongside" myself as I catch a glimpse of me through their gaze—I have become a
predator, their predator. It is as if I carry myself in the form of an extraneous appendage, a
superfluous meaning. Brent Staples offers a fasci-nating phenomenological description of what
it means when the black body, his black body, experiences a sense of ontological
disjointedness and multi-plicity vis-a-vis white looks: ∂ I'd been a fool. I'd been walking the
street grinning good evening to people who were frightened to death of me. I did violence to
them by just being. How had I missed this? I kept walking at night, but from then on I paid
attention. I became an expert in the language of fear. Couples locked arms or reached for each
other's hands when they saw me. Some crossed to the other side of the street. People who
were carrying on conversations went mute and stared straight ahead, as though avoiding my
eyes would save them. . . . I tried to be innocuous, but didn't know how. The more I thought
about how moved, the less my body belonged to me. I became a false character riding along
side it.. ∂ Staples's point is that he felt removed from his body, disembodied. Under the white
gaze, his body undergoes a process of volatility, a form of ontologi-cal destabilization. In my
case, then, to exist ontologically quadrupled is to experience myself as "here-ahead-over-there-
alongside." In this way, I have become, under the white gaze, "immaterial" and "vaporous." I am
spatially "here." Yet I am "over there," ahead of myself, fixed as a dangerous preda-tor even
before I am "seen" by white gazes. Then again, once "seen," I am also "there," residing in the
minds of whites as a fixed stereotype. Further still, I am "there," alongside myself—a fourth
place. As Robert Gooding-Williams says, the clicking "performances which [produce] this sense
of be-ing enslaved to an image ... leave one feeling literally and utterly dislocated in physical
space."" The metaphor of finding oneself much like a mugger at a boardwalk's end is a profound
way of depicting the black body's meaning as always already ahead of itself. Think about it. One
is typically unaware of the pres-ence of a mugger. The mugger is secretly hiding, waiting to
attack. The mugger, if successful, robs you of something precious, valuable. You feel vio-lated.
To be black, in the context of antiblack racism, is to have one's mean-ing determined—already
in place. As Johnson argues, "All that I am, can be to them [whites], is as nakedly presented as
the genitals of a plant since they cannot see my other profiles. Epidermalization [or reduction to
the black epi-dermis] spreads throughout the body like an odor, like an echoing sound.". So,
then, the meaning of my blackness is no mystery. There is no deeper meaning waiting to
express itself. All is surface; there is no depth; I am known already. In this way, too, the
meaning of my being awaits me. Indeed, just when I thought that I was an individual, someone
with inner complexity and layers of psychological sophistication and subtlety, I am laid bare, the
"secret" of my being is out: "I am your worst nightmare." In fact, when in the presence of many
whites, I discover that I am a universal, one who is plagued by an inner racial teleology that is
indelibly fixed. And like a mugger at a boardwalk's end, I am robbed of ontological upsurge. I
feel as if the capacity to transform the meaning of my life, to define the terms of my
existence, has been stolen from me.
 Reform links
Reform is just reactionary conservatism – their unwillingness to accept that
systemic antagonisms cannot be fixed means their project is permeated with
whiteness
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of sociology, “Queer
Necropolitics,” http://www.deanspade.net/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of 'preservation through∂ transformation' to
describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in this∂ dynamic (Harris 2007: 1539-
1582; Siegel1997: 1111-1148). In the face of∂ significant resistance to conditions of subjection,
law reform tends to provide just∂ enough transfonnation to stabilize and preserve status quo
conditions. In the case∂ of widespread black rebellion against white supremacy in the US, civil
rights law∂ and colourblind constitutionalism have operated as formal reforms that masked
a∂ pe11wtuation of the status quo of violence against and exploitation of black people.∂
Explicit exclusionary policies and practices became officially forbidden, yet the∂ disu·ibution
of life chances remained the same or worsened with the growing∂ racialized concentration of
wealth in the US, the dismantling of social welfare, and∂ the explosion of criminalization that has
developed in the same period as the new∂ logic of race neutrality has declared fairness and
justice achieved. Lesbian and gay∂ rights politics' reproduction of the Inythology of anti-
discrimination law and the∂ non-stop invocation of'equal rights' frameworks by lesbian and gay
rights politics∂ marks an .investment in the legal structures of anti-blackness that have emerged
in∂ the wake of Brown. The emergence of the demand for LGBT inclusive hate crime∂ laws and
the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and james Byrd, Jr. Hate∂ Crimes Prevention Act
as a highly lauded federal legislative 'win' for lesbian and ∂ gay rights offers a particularly
blatant site of the anti-blackness central to lesbian∂ and gay rights -literally an investment in
the expansion ofcriminalization as a core∂ claim and desire of this purported 'frecdom'. 9 In
the context of the foundational∂ nature of slavery in US political formation, it is perhaps not
surprising to see a∂ political formation of white 'gay and lesbian Americans' articulate a demand
fOr∂ fi-eedom that is contingent on the literal caging of black people.∂ The fantasy that fOrmal
legal equality is all that is needed to eliminate∂ homophobia and transphobia is harmfUl not
only because it participates in the antiblack∂ US progress narrative that civil rights law
reforms resolved anti-blackness in∂ the US (thus any remaining suffering or disparity is solely
an issue of 'personal∂ responsibility'), 1IJ but also because it constructs an agenda that is
harmful to black∂ queer and trans people and other queer and trans people experiencing
violent∂ systems mobilized by anti-blackness. Formal marriage rights will not help poor∂ people,
people vvhose kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfire system∂ regardless of
whether or not they can get married, people who do not have∂ immigration status or health
benefits to share with a spouse if they had one, people∂ who have no property to pass on to
their partners, or people who have no need to∂ be shielded from estate tax. In fact, the current
wave of same-sex marriage advocacy∂ emerges at the same rime as another pro-marriage trend,
the push by the right wing∂ to reverse feminist wins that had made marriage easier to get out of
and the Bushera∂ development of marriage promotion programmes (continued by Obama)∂
targeted at women on welfare (Adams and Coltrane 2007: 17-34; Alternatives to∂ l\!larriage
Project 2007; Coltrane and Adams 2003: 363-372; Feld, Rosier and∂ Manning 2002: 173-183;
Pear and Kirkpatrick 2007; Rector and Pardue 2004).∂ The explicitly anti-black focus of the
attacks on welfare and the mobilization of∂ racialized-genclered images to do this go hand in
hand with the pro-marriage gay∂ rights frame that similarly invests in notions of 'personal
responsibility', and∂ racializecl--gendered family formation norm enforcement. The articulation
of a∂ desire for legal inclusion in the explicitly anti-black, anti-poor governance regime∂ of
marriage, and the centralization of marriage rights as the most resourced equality∂ claim of gay
and lesbian rights politics, affirms its alliance with anti-blackness.∂ It is easy to imagine other
queer political interventions that would take a∂ different approach to concerns about parental
rights, child custody and other∂ family law problems. Such approaches centre the experiences of
queers facing the∂ worst violence of family law, those whose problems -will not be resolved by
samesex∂ marriage - parents in prison, parents facing deportation, parents with∂ disabilities,
youth in foster care and juvenile punishment systems, parents whose∂ children have been
removed because of 'neglect' clue to their poverty. The choice∂ of seeking marriage rights, like
the choice to pursue hate crime laws rather than∂ decriminalization, the choice to pursue the
Uniting American Families Act 11∂ rather than opposing immigration enforcement and the war
on terror, the choice∂ to pursue military service rather than demilitarization, is a choice to
pursue a place∂ fOr white gay and lesbian people in constitutively anti-black legal structures.

Plurarlist reform is a smokescreen for whiteness to remain unchallenged – legal

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

The difficulty of a writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Back, and White socially engaged
feature films as aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject
positions of the “Savage” and the Slave is that today’s intellectual protocols are not informed
by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the
wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic]” (Black Skin,
White Masks 110). In sharp contrast to the late 60s and early 70s, we now live in a political,
academic, and cinematic milieu which stresses “diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,”
“hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical fringe of political discourse amounts to
little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between
the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The effect of this upon the academy is
that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of the three domains of subjectivity, namely
preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around “political unity,”
“social attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as
evidenced in the humanities’ postmodern regimes of “diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative
[rather than “master”] narratives”). Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with
structural positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb.
That is to say, it is hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the
generic positions within a structure of power relations— such as man/woman, worker/boss.
Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and “unique”
experience of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions. This would fine if
the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot
of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite effect of cinematic and
political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of
suffering which underwrites the US and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs
exacerbates—or, more precisely, mystifies and veils—the ontological death of the Slave and
the “Savage” because (as in the 1950s) cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of the
current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of
Indigenism and Blackness—academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a
revolutionary critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how Left-
leaning scholars help civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state
of emergency for Indians and Blacks.

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

As stated above, in the 1960s and 70s, as White radicalism’s discourse and political common
sense found authorization in the ethical dilemmas of embodied incapacity (the ontological
status of Blacks as accumulated and fungible objects), White cinema’s proclivity to embrace
dispossession through the vectors of capacity (the ontological status of the Human as an
exploited and alienated subject) became profoundly disturbed. In some films this proclivity was
so deeply disturbed that while many socially and politically engaged film script and cinematic
strategies did not surrender completely to incapacity (that is, to the authority of the Slave’s
grammar of suffering), they also failed to assert the legitimacy of White ethical dilemmas (the
supremacy of exploitation and alienation as a grammar of suffering) with which cinema had
been historically preoccupied.xiii The period of COINTELPRO’S crushing of the Black Panthers
and then the Black Liberation Army also witnessed the flowering of Blackness’s political power
—not so much as institutional capacity but as a zeitgeist, a demand that authorized White
radicalism. But by 1980, White radicalism had comfortably re-embraced capacity without the
threat of disturbance—it returned to the discontents of civil society with the same formal
tenacity as it had from 1532xiv to 1967, only now that formal tenacity was emboldened by a
wider range of alibis than simply Free Speech or the anti-War Movement; it had, for example,
the women’s, gay, anti-nuke, environmental, and immigrants’ rights movements as lines of flight
from the absolute ethics of Redness and Blackness. It was able to reform (reorganize) an
unethical world and still sleep at night. Today, such intra-settler discussions are now the
foundation of the “radical” agenda.
The state will always be bad for blackness – black bodies are in a perpetual
state of warfare against systems of oppression
Rodriguez 2010, Dylan Rodriguez is a Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, “The Terms
of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition”,
http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151, NN

Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil
liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the
next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken
politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare
as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of normalized
and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential
violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the
unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that
compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond
the USA) really does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US
domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of
the present and future. The non-profit and NGO left, in particular, seems content to engage in
desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic
warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically
addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. In so many ways, the US
progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has
called the violent 'abandonments' of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social
welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and
(productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities —which Gilmore (2007b: 44—5)
says are guided by a 'frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice'. Yet, at the same
time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle
against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively
unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass
roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and
everyday terms of the very domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly
declared as the premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the
common narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question
remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this statecraft as the state of
emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally encompasses (war!). Perhaps it is
because critical intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating
the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have generally
undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates)
sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf 'dissent' and counter-state, antiracist,
and antiviolence organizing. Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramscis thoughts on the
formation of contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The State does have and
request consent, but it also 'educates' this consent, by means of the political and syndical
associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling
class. (Gramsci 1995: 259).
 Econ link
Economic growth privileges the white upper class – market structures and
empirical economic exploitation mean black people are disenfranchised from
the very start
Hoescht 2008, Heidi Hoescht is a PhD in Literature from UCSD, “Refusable Pasts: Speculative Democracy, Spectator Citizens,
and the Dislocation of Freedom in the United States,” Proquest Dissertations, NN

This dissertation examines the

intimate connections between emancipatory democracy and
speculative economics. It studies cultural texts that reflect and express national ideals of U.S. democracy
that emereged in three periods of heightened captialist speculation the Jacksonian period of the 1830s, the 1930s Popular Front
period, and the rise of liberal multiculturalism between 1980 to the present. The project engages two kinds of
cultural texts. The project derives its proximate objects of the study--folklore, literature, literary criticism, stage performances,
community festivals and public parks—from a range of critical and cultural texts produced by Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Catlin, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the neighborhood of Powderhorn Park. Yet, the disseration also
explores a second text that connects these seemingly disparate objects and authors. The social text that binds the chapters of
this dissertaion is a broader text of U.S. culture and social practice that is conditioned and inflated by the logic of speculation. This
second text reveals culture as a central link in the economic project of U.S. nationalism. Culture in this text, is a key technology by
which U.S. inequality is reproduced, reiterated, and translated across contexts. I argue that the
cultural logic of
specualiton disables possibilities for participatory democracy and racial, gendered, and class
justice and equality. This logic aligns the emancipatory aspirations of aggreived groups to the
market and property interests of elites. I show that culture has been instrumental for expanding social inequality through the
promises of U.S. nationalism. The speculative logic of U.S. democracy relies on the category of "not yet
freedom" to hide economic and racial inequalities. It preserves the idea of democracy only by
deferring actual justice to a perpetually pushed back future. The pursuit of democracy in the United States
has been haunted by histories of refusal and deferral. When aggrieved groups ask for emancipation, elites
often respond with promises of freedom without doing the hard work of creating justice.
Refusable Pasts explores how the national culture of the United States portrays the deferral of
freedom to some unspecified "not yet" time in the future as evidence of real democratic
inclusion in the present. Promises of future freedom evidence the power and pervasiveness of
popular aspirations for democracy. Yet because national culture offers aggrieved groups
democratic promises rather than democratic practices, it also demonstrates the power of elites to suppress
popular democracy and preserve their own privileges. Speculative logic and market subjectivity permeate U.S. national culture.
Speculative practices originate in economic relations, but their logic structures national
culture as well. Speculative logics promising future growth have connected the expressive
cultures of U.S nationalism to the economic life of the nation's elites. Just as investors anticipate that
economic returns in the future will reward their work in the present, citizens are encouraged to defer their
desires for empowerment, autonomy, dignity and community to some perpetually promised
but never quite realized time of "not yet" freedom in the future. Hope functions as a
fundamental mechanism for deferring freedom to the future and refusing radical change in
the present. Under these conditions, culture serves as a cover story promoting economic
expansion and empire, slavery and racial subordination, plunder and perpetual warfare. The
national culture of the nation works to instantiate, legitimate, and perpetuate economic inequality and social stratification. It is also
one forum that elites use to manage the emancipatory aspirations of popular struggles. Culture counts because stories centered on
the logic of speculation promise symbolic reconciliations as the salve to the wounds caused by the perpetuation of inequalities in
society. The
speculative logics that inform national culture portray inexcusable injustices in the
present as mere preludes to a promised prosperity and freedom in the future. Thus, the
democratic promises inscribed inside national culture actually function as powerful
mechanisms for the perpetuation of decidedly undemocratic practices and policies.

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

The pervasiveness of racial consciousness cannot help but shape the economic relationships in
contemporary capitalist social formations. The interaction of racialized agents shapes the
parameters of a wide range of economic processes such as market exchange transactions,
employment contracts, pricing, capital budgeting decisions, and so on. The fact that one can
observe patterns of differential economic success and failure based on racial ca tegories is
evidence of the impact of racism upon agents. Economic theories, both Marxian and neoclassical, have attempted
to explain rational behavior of agents in the context of the market for labor-power. The Marxian approach has been to make sense
of this market in the context of capitalist exploitation, for which the market in labor-power is a precondition. Capitalism presupposes
the existence of free wage laborers. In the Marxian tradition, direct producers become "free" to sell their labor-power as a result of
determinate social and natural processes. It is in this process of gaining capitalist freedom that the rationality of wage laboring is
formed. Capitalist freedom came to exist in contrast to serfdom and slavery. In
this sense, it was born of a complex
association of ideas. In some instances, this would have included, from the earliest stages of
capitalist development, ideas produced within racist paradigms. The wage laboring consciousness
necessary for an agent to be willing and able to sell her labor power would have been influenced, in the Western Europe and Great
Britain of early capitalist development, by aristocratic racism and then later by white supremacist racism. The perception of capitalist
freedom, in contrast to serfdom or slavery, would certainly have made it easier to create, reproduce and expand the wage laboring
consciousness. Thus, the creation of labor markets would, necessarily, be very different in an environment where direct producers
view themselves as already free. There are countless stories of the difficulties of creating labor markets in African colonies, for
instance. The classic case is that of Tanganyika, under German colonial rule, where resistance to working as wage laborers was so
strong that entire villages would move rather than submit to the labor market in order to meet the imposed hut taxes. These
villagers had lived as communal producers, collectively performing and appropriating surplus labor. Their history was one of
collective decision-making, communal freedom, and the absence of racialized consciousness. Capitalist freedom did not appear to be
an attractive alternative. This was not the case in Britain, Western Europe, or the United States, where the perceived alternative
was, in many but not all cases, serfdom or slavery. Under those conditions, the legitimacy of capitalist freedom was less likely to be
challenged. We have already mentioned the importance of dissociation to creating a wage laboring consciousness, one in which the
individual can sell her labor power like so many bushels of tomatoes. The
various forms of racialized
consciousness that were prevalent in most capitalist social formations, having already
produced forms of dissociation and alienation in the consciousness of direct producers and
others, may have been critical to the rapidity with which labor markets were established and
expanded
 Property links
Concepts of property and privacy are only applicable to white life – blackness is
never situated as a subject but rather object – this means that none of the
surveillance reform the aff solves for is applicable to black bodies
Smith 14, Andrea Lee Smith is an intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist. Smith's work
focuses on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native
American women. A co-founder of INCITE!, “The Colonialism That is Settled and the Colonialism
That Never Happened,” https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/the-colonialism-
that-is-settled-and-the-colonialism-that-never-happened/, NN

I begin my analysis with the infamous Dred Scott (1857) decision. In this decision, Justice Daniel
explains in his concurring opinion, that Black peoples have the ontological status of property
that derives from their origins in Africa, the property of Europe. Consequently, this ontological
status does not change simply because one’s owner relinquishes his property rights. Black
peoples remain property whether or not an individual owns them Because Africa is deemed
the property of Europe, Africa must then appear as always, already colonized. Native studies is
often articulated as concerned being primarily with colonization (and, subsequently,
decolonization) while Black studies is articulated as concerned primarily with race (and,
subsequently, anti-racism). However, this distinction is itself a product of anti-Blacknesss. The
colonization of Africa must disappear so that Africa can appear as ontologically colonized.
According to Justice Daniel, since only “nations” can be colonized, nations in African can never
have existed. It is only through the disavowal of colonization that Black peoples can be
ontologically relegated to the status of property. Within the Dred Scott decision, Native
peoples by contrast, are situated as potential citizens. Native peoples are described as “free”
people, albeit “uncivilized.” While because of their child-like primitive state, they are not worthy
of citizenship at the moment, they may eventually become citizens if they were to renounce
their relationship to their Native nation and demonstrate the “maturity” required to become a
citizen. Native peoples can claim a certain kind of nation; however, it is nation that must
disappear. Thus, Native peoples’ apparent proximity to whiteness should not be understood as a
pathway to freedom but as a pathway to genocide. Indigenous nations are supposed to
disappear into whiteness (or, to borrow from Maile Arvin, to be possessed by whiteness) in
order to effectuate their genocide.∂ As Robert Nichols notes in his essay in Theorizing Native
Studies, settler colonialism sets the very terms of its contestation. And the terms of contestation
set by settler colonialism is anti-racism. That is, the way we are supposed to contest settler
democracy is to contest the gap between what settler democracy promises and what it
performs. But as Nichols notes, contesting the racial gap of setter democracy is the most
effective way of actually ensuring its universality. Thus, borrowing from this analysis, settler
colonialism does not merely operate by racializing Native peoples, positioning them as racial
minorities rather than as colonized nations, but also through domesticating Black struggle
within the framework of anti-racist rather than anti-colonial struggle. Anti-Blackness is
effectuated through the disappearance of colonialism in order to render Black peoples as the
internal property of the United States, such that anti-Black struggle must be contained within
a domesticated anti-racist framework that cannot challenge the settler state itself. Why, for
example, is Martin Luther King always described as a civil rights leader rather than an anti-
colonial organizer, despite his clear anti-colonial organizing against the war in Vietnam? Through
anti-Blackness, not only are Black peoples rendered the property of the settler state, but Black
struggle itself remains its property – solely containable within the confines of the settler
state.∂ Thus, the colonialism that never happened – anti-Blackness – helps reinforce the
colonialism that is settled – the genocide of Indigenous peoples. For the so-called ‘Indian
problem’ to disappear, the United States must itself appear hermetically sealed from both
internal and external threats that would threaten its legitimacy and continued existence.
Indigenous peoples must be made to disappear as internal threats, made to exist in a constant
state of vanishing, in no position to unsettle the settler state. Meanwhile the external threat
posed by a global Black anti-colonial struggle is made to disappear by rendering Africa as the
property of the United States and, subsequently, no longer external to it. Anti-Blackness, then, is
not only constitutive of the settler nation of the United States, but integral to the normalization
of its continuance.∂ The colonialism that is settled and the colonialism that never happened are
further effectuated through colonial constructs of labor. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), the
Supreme Court held that, while Indigenous people had a right to occupancy, they could not hold
title to land on the basis of the doctrine of discovery. The European nation that “discovered” the
land had the right to legal title. Native peoples were disqualified from being “discoverers”
because they did not properly work: “The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce
savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.
To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness.” As they did
not work, Native peoples had the ontological status of things to be discovered – the status of
nature.∂ Similarly, in Lowe v. United States (1902), the court held that the Kickapoo, who had
relocated to Mexico during the Civil War, did not have the legal ability to remain there without
the permission of the United States in part because of their status as non-workers. Because
Native peoples are legally incompetent (i.e. non-workers) they cannot create property in/on
land and, subsequently, they cannot acquire a domicile.

Privacy and property lead to the idea of owning ourselves – this mentality of
autonomy leads to possession of our property and that system has racial
implications that we don’t think of
Ladson-Billings and Tate 95, Both Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate are professors at the
University of Wisconsin, “Toward a Critical Race Theoryof Education,”

Bell examined the events leading up to the Constitution’s development∂ and concluded that
there exists a tension between property rights∂ and human rights.3 4 This tension was greatly
exacerbated by the presence∂ of African peoples as slaves in America. The purpose of the
government∂ was to protect the main object of society—property. The slave status of∂ most
African Americans (as well as women and children) resulted in∂ their being objectified as
property. And, a government constructed to∂ protect the rights of property owners lacked the
incentive to secure∂ human rights for the African American.3 5∂ According to Bell “the concept
of individual rights, unconnected to∂ property rights, was totally foreign to these men of
property; and thus,∂ despite two decades of civil rights gains, most Blacks remain
disadvantaged∂ and deprived because of their race.”3 6∂ The grand narrative of U.S. history is
replete with tensions and struggles∂ over property—in its various forms. From the removal of
Indians (and∂ later Japanese Americans) from the land, to military conquest of the Mexic∂ a n s
,37 to the construction of Africans as property,3 8 the ability to define,∂ possess, and own
property has been a central feature of power in America.∂ We do not suggest that other nations
have not fought over and defined∂ themselves by property and landownership.3 9 However, the
contradiction∂ of a reified symbolic individual juxtaposed tdo the reality of “real estate”∂
means that emphasis on the centrality of property can be disguised. Thus,∂ we talk about the
importance of the individual, individual rights, and civil∂ rights while social benefits accrue
largely to property owners.40∂ Property relates to education in explicit and implicit ways.
Recurring∂ discussions about property tax relief indicate that more affluent communities∂ (which
have higher property values, hence higher tax assessments)∂ resent paying for a public school
system whose clientele is largely nonwhite∂ and poor.4 1 In the simplest of equations, those with
“better” propCritical∂ Race Theory 53∂ erty are entitled to “better” schools. Kozol illustrates the
disparities:∂ “Average expenditures per pupil in the city of New York in 1987 were∂ some $5,500.
In the highest spending suburbs of New York (Great Neck∂ or Manhasset, for example, on Long
Island) funding levels rose above∂ $11,000, with the highest districts in the state at $15,000.”4 2∂
But the property differences manifest themselves in other ways. For∂ example, curriculum
represents a form of “intellectual property.”4 3 T h e∂ quality and quantity of the curriculum
varies with the “property values”∂ of the school. The use of a critical race story4 4 appropriately
represents∂ this notion:∂ The teenage son of one of the authors of this article was preparing∂ to
attend high school. A friend had a youngster of similar age who∂ also was preparing to enter high
school. The boys excitedly poured∂ over course offerings in their respective schools’ catalogues.
One∂ boy was planning on attending school in an upper-middle-class white∂ community. The
other would be attending school in an urban,∂ largely African-American district. The difference
between the course∂ offerings as specified in the catalogues was striking. The boy attending∂
the white, middle-class school had his choice of many foreign∂ languages—Spanish, French,
German, Latin, Greek, Italian, Chinese,∂ and Japanese. His mathematics offerings included
algebra,∂ geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, general math, and business∂ math. The
science department at this school offered biology,∂ chemistry, physics, geology, science in
society, biochemistry, and∂ general science. The other boy’s curriculum choices were not
nearly∂ as broad. His foreign language choices were Spanish and French.∂ His mathematics
choices were general math, business math, and∂ algebra (there were no geometry or trig classes
offered). His science∂ choices were general science, life science, biology, and physical science.∂
The differences in electives were even more pronounced, with∂ the affluent school offering
courses such as Film as Literature, Asian∂ Studies, computer programming, and journalism.
Very few elective∂ courses were offered at the African-American school, which had no∂ band,
orchestra, or school newspaper.∂ The availability of “rich” (or enriched) intellectual property
delimits∂ what is now called “opportunity to learn”4 5—the presumption that along∂ with
providing educational “standards”4 6 that detail what students should∂ know and be able to
do, they must have the material resources that support∂ their learning. Thus, intellectual
property must be undergirded by∂ “real” property, that is, science labs, computers and other
state-of-the-art∂ technologies, appropriately certified and prepared teachers. Of course,∂ 54
Teachers College Record∂ Kozol demonstrated that schools that serve poor students of color
are∂ unlikely to have access to these resources and, consequently, students will∂ have little or
no opportunity to learn despite the attempt to mandate∂ educational standards.4 7
 Democracy link
Democratic deliberation and promotion ignore that not everyone has an equal
vote – blacks are never welcome at the deliberative circle which leads to
exclusionary violence
Wilderson, 03 (Frank, “Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society” an American
writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American
studies at the University of California, Irvine. Pp. 6-8) NN

The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black
subject, lies in the Black subject’s potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital
formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker
demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the
proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its
ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black
subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with
the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries,
and the generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-accumulation crisis, the Black
(incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure
marxist conflict: the categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by
way of the Black subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it
mean to be free? that grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up
against a grammar of suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering
beyond signification itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous terror of
White supremacy is as much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared
pleasures as it is upon a logic—the logic of capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking about
this terror, Cornel West uses the term “black invisibility and namelessness” to designate, at the
level of ontology, what we are calling a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting
assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that of
black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the
first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central
preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic
scars, and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and selfannihilation. This
is why the "ur-text" of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it
is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than
for recognition. (80-81) Thus, the Black subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand
that can not be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics ;
whereas the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by
way of a successful War of Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into
question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of
productivity itself. From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the
question hides the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed
and answered the question, What does it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized
around the categories of exploitation (unfair labor relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the
only category of oppression which concerns Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of
the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again, this is inadequate, because it would call White supremacy
"racism" and articulate it as a derivative phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than
incorporating White supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the base itself.
What I am saying is that the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means
that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)—
the Black body can not give its consent because “generalized trust,” the precondition for the
solicitation of consent, “equals racialized whiteness” (Lindon Barrett). Furthermore, as Orland Patterson points
out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say that a slave has no
symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange: a slave does not enter into a
transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct relations of force, which is to say
that a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. White
supremacy’s despotic irrationality is as foundational to American institutionality as
capitalism’s symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it… …dictates the limits of the operation
of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb vital to its
sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the necessary condition for the flourishing
of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what Richard Wright meant
when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor." (72) And it is well known that a metaphor comes
into being through a violence which kills, rather than merely exploits, the object, that the concept
might live. West's interventions help us see how marxism can only come to grips with America's
structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot come to grips
with America's structuring irrationality: the libidinal economy of White supremacy, and its
hyper-discursive violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society, may live. In other words,
from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of White life. This is
important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements today) which is so
dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles
over hegemony are seldom, if ever,
asignifying—at some point they require coherence, they require categories for the record—
which means they contain the seeds of anti-Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of a hypothetical scenario.
In the early part of the 20th century, civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will, around emerging industries such as meat packing. In
his notes on “Americanism and Fordism” (280-314), Gramsci explores the “scientific management” of Taylorism, the prohibition on
alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of civil society in
places like turn of the century Chicago:

Democracy is a synonym for imperialism and colonialism – whites always

control the conversations
Curry 11, Tommy Curry is an associate professor at Southern Illinois University, “In the Fiat of Dreams:
The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical.,”
http://www.academia.edu/3384301/_Draft_In_the_Fiat_of_Dreams_The_Delusional_Allure_of_Hope_th
e_Reality_of_Anti-Black_Violence_and_the_Demands_of_the_Anti-Ethical, NN

For many philosophers and social political theorists, the eventuation of an egalitarian humanist
society is the teleological impetus, the inevitable consequence, of embracing liberalism and
integrationist theories of democracy.∂ While these proclamations have been by Black thinkers
for centuries as the promulgations of America‘s democratic potential, the Black victims of
America‘s fetish for racism, those who are forced to endure the failure of white∂ theory to
arrest the racist tyranny, have their deaths, their murders, their deprivation interpreted as
caricatures, the brutality of which is taken to be academic capital driving philosophical
engagements with and theorizations about∂ race within the confines America‘s geograp∂ hy.
In this illusory world, Black citizens are aspirations∂ thought experiments rooted in the desire to
motivate political theories through the excoriation of Blackness. The Black thinker becomes a voyeur
gazing upon this thought∂ raced, but not unhumaned by Blackness∂ the citizen, historically white,
empirically violent, but recognized as human instead of animal. Hope is the then made the
concrete political delusion; the idea that is taken to explain all Black social and political
existence since slavery as progress, despite contradiction or regress. In thinking about Blackness,
the Black scholar removes Black existence from the horrors of America preferring to think Blackness as
unrealized. This is a conceptual failing of Black scholarship, a failing that Frank Wilderson describes as∂
people consciously or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of their evidence in order
to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things.‖∂ . It is in this act∂ the cessation of inquiry
whereby the epistemic is collapsed into the political/ontological∂ that the dereliction of Black thought, its
predilection towards becoming a racial normative, is apparent.∂ Much like the dilemmas found in dealing
with Black death and confronting the genocidal tendencies haunting the lives of Black men articulated by
Wynter ∂ in chapter one, there is a need to sanitize, make tolerable,∂ academify ∂ Black existence so
that it does not become nihilistic and fatalist, but a thought experiment that offers the white
listener, reader, or colleague entrance into the possibility of being an anti-racist
compassionate white reformis
 Time link
The echo of slavery transcends linear history, where the slave is murdered out of
the middle passage over and over into both the past and the present. The slave
ship moves through time and space, creating a rupture, which guides bullets,
police surveillance, the prison industrial complex, and the libidinal economy – the
aff’s conception of linear time and progress is a Eurocentric interpretation of
temporality which reifies anti-black violence
Dillon 13, Stephen Dillon is a doctor of philosophy from the university of Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise
of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, Pgs. 24-30, May 2013, Regina Kunzel, Co-adviser, Roderick Ferguson, Co-adviser,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf, NN

Although the connections between slavery and the prison are important to this project, I am also interested in more expansive
understandings of the afterlife of slavery. In particular, I am concerned with theories that can help make the connection between
the market under chattel-slavery and the market under neoliberalism. In other words, the afterlife of slavery structures much more
than the prison or even more than Wacquant’s “carceral continuum.” For instance, Christina Sharpe argues that our very
subjectivity is indebted to, and born out of, the “discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery.” For Sharpe, engaging and analyzing a
“post-slavery subjectivity” means examining subjectivities constituted by trans-Atlantic slavery and connecting them to present (and
past) “mundane horrors that aren’t acknowledged to be horrors.”55 This is one of the main projects of black feminism, as
exemplified by Boggs’ engagement with the seemingly innocuous institutions of insurance, state bureaucracy, and the university.56
This project is also central to Hortense Spillers’s classic essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar book,”
where she connects slavery to the life of the symbolic world. She writes: Even though the captive
flesh/body has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant
symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in
originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if neither time nor history,
nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and
over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.57 Like Jackson and
Shakur, Spillers argues that slavery ruptures the progress of time. The ways meaning and value are
institutionalized have been determined by the violence and terror of slavery. Slavery is a death
sentence enacted across generations, one that changes name and shape as time progresses.
Freedom presupposes and builds on slavery so that post-slavery subjectivities are shaped by
forms of power that resemble and sometimes mimic power under slavery (force, terror, sexual violence, compulsion,
torture) while they are also confined by the post-emancipation technologies of consent, reason, will, and choice.58 Frank Wilderson
summarizes this more expansive understanding of the afterlife of slavery: “The imaginary of the state and civil
society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave no world.”59 According to
Wilderson, slavery connotes an ontological (not experiential) status for blackness, one that is shaped not
by exploitation and alienation, but by accumulation and fungibility (the condition of being owned and traded.).60 In this
way, slavery does not lay dormant in the past, but became attached to the political ontology of blackness.61
What is most crucial for my project on the relationship between the afterlife of slavery and neoliberalism is that as freedom
navigated the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was not innocent and it did not come alone.
Something from the past held on to freedom as it maneuvered time and space. Freedom was
possessed by its opposite, a ghost wished away by liberal thought that did not so easily disappear. In the 1970s, when the market
produced the freedom of capital mobility, individuality, and choice, and the prison manufactured the freedom of safety and
security, the spirit of slavery dictated the movements and meanings of that freedom. Indeed, the
spirit of slavery lives on
in more ways than one can imagine: in the
shade of tree-lined suburban streets, in definitions and
measures of value, in the prosperity and health of some, and in the hail of the police as one
walks down the street. It guides bullets and bombs, makes visible what we see, and vanishes
what is right in front of us. It is laced in the cement and steel of the prison, solidified in
dreams of liberation, and embedded in psychic life. Although it is sometimes recognizable, it also lives on in
what we do not know and cannot remember— in the lives erased, expunged, ended or that were simply never recorded to begin
with. Whether it comes as spectacle or something one cannot see or feel, it is always there. The spirit of slavery does more then
meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and animated contemporary formations of power. Possession
names the ways that the operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies are sometimes beyond the self-
possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control, something that may feel like nothing even as it compels movement,
motivates ideology, and drives the organization of life and death. In this way, slavery is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the
room—rather, its spirit animates the architecture of the house as a whole. The past does not merely haunt the
present; it composes the present. As Toni Morrison writes, “All of it is now, it is always now.”62
 Humanism link
Their focus on equality and a common strand of humanity ignores that blacks don’t meet under
the category of human – turns case
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms,” NN

I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the
disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first,
as White Supremacist event, from which one then embarks upon a demonstration of intent, or
racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black
is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in
other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by marxism
and/or psychoanalysis, then his/her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive
practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This
banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory
meditations of Black people’s staunchest “allies,” and in some of the most “radical” films.
Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative
scholarship—is where the Settler/Master’s sinews are most resilient
 Feminism link
Traditional conceptions of feminism and general equality ignore the specificity
of blackness – their liberty for all is not inclusive of the black positionality which
dooms their movement to failure
Robtheidealist 14, Robtheidealist is the creater of the website OrchestratedPulse, a social justice
blog and forum where he writes about personal experience along with reviews of popular equality works,
“Feminism Ain’t For Black Folks: Why My Mama Had It Right All Along,”
http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/03/feminism-black/, NN

My mom came of age in the late 60’s as a Black woman committed to social change. She had
the afro, she read all the radical books, and she hit the streets when the time called for it. She
is and always has been down for the cause. My mother taught me that struggles for justice had
to be lived, and not just discussed or intellectualized. True to form, she dedicated her life to
creating programs and services that protected and uplifted Black families, particularly Black
women and children.∂ ∂ But, don’t call her a feminist.∂ ∂ I was a teenager and fresh off of my first
year in college. I came home praising feminism and claiming that we should all incorporate it
into our worldviews. My mother balked at that suggestion, and explained that the ideology
was not useful for truly understanding how systemic oppression functioned, particularly as it
related to Black people. At the time, I thought she was just out of touch; yet, as I got older, I
began to realize just how right she was to be critical of conventional articulations of
feminism.∂ ∂ What Beyoncé Can Tell Us About Conventional Feminism∂ ∂ Feminism is a complex
web of ideologies and histories, but let’s turn to a real authority on the issue, Beyoncé, for
some clarity on how to define conventional feminism. On her most recent album, Beyoncé used
a quote from a TED talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The statement ends with the
following definition, “Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political and economic
equality of the sexes”.∂ In another interview Adichie suggests that feminism has an even
broader definition, saying, “it is about being a woman who likes and stands up for other
women”. Although there are multiple definitions of feminism, Adichie is a bit of a popular figure
among feminists, particularly Black feminists, and so her words are significant.∂ ∂ In many
discussions, conventional feminism is not so much an analysis of patriarchy as it is an
emphasis on equality of the sexes and a sense of camaraderie between women. This broad
and vague definition allows it to operate as a big tent ideology that absorbs any and every
idea and person dealing with women and gender. Even when women like my mother object to
its norms and say “I am not a feminist”, they are still viewed as “feminist” because their work
relates to women in some way.∂ ∂ What makes this dynamic so troubling for me is that I
genuinely want to understand patriarchy and its impact on our society. But what happens if I
don’t see myself in feminist articulations of patriarchy? Should I fight for inclusion in a set of
ideas that were not designed with me in mind? As I struggle to find ways of theorizing my own
multidimensional existence as a Black person in the United States, like my mother, I find myself
drifting further and further away from conventional feminism– even Black feminism.∂ ∂ Don’t
get me wrong, I believe that there’s a system called gender. It subjugates people by first
forcing them into gender identities, and then creating a hierarchy of those identities. We’ve
seen this process in the form of colonialism, which forced European gender concepts onto the
colonized people, thus stripping them of their pre-colonial systems of differentiation. (See
Oyeonke Oyewumi’s work)∂ ∂ More broadly, the entire system of gender is founded and
maintained by violence and brutality, which is of course disproportionately experienced by
those at the margins. We typically understand the margins to be made up of women, queer
folks, and trans people; yet, Black men have a special relationship to the gender hierarchy as
well.∂ ∂ Letting White Women Off the Hook∂ ∂ Contrary to the Declaration of Independence’
words, not all men are created equal. As a Black male, I too am one of the hunted. Though I
have a degree of male power under the patriarchal superstructure, and can use that power to
do violence against women (most likely Black/Brown women), I do not have the same systemic
power and cultural authority of a White male. It’s not as simple as men always being
privileged and women always being oppressed.∂ ∂ If we want to talk about patriarchy in the
United States, then we have to talk about the role that White women played/play in
preserving the White patriarchal system at the expense of non-White women AND men.∂ ∂
Under slavery, Black men were raped by White men AND White women (see Thomas Foster’s
work). During the period of mob lynching, White women were instrumental in getting Black
men killed—often with the men’s genitals being mutilated (see Ida B. Wells’ work). There were
numerous White women that used women-only Ku Klux Klan groups as key sites of “feminist”
work and used the Klan to push the “women’s agenda”, which demonstrates that there’s
nothing inherently liberating in the nebulous notion of “equality of the sexes” (see Kathleen
Blee’s work).∂ Those are just a few examples of common and systemic occurrences that muddy
the waters a bit, but these realities are almost never discussed in most feminist spaces– even
Black feminist circles.∂ ∂ So yes, as a Black man in the United States, I of course benefit from the
male supremacy superstructure. However, historically speaking, that structure wasn’t created
for the benefit of Black men, and I don’t fully possess the power of “masculinity”–which was
created by and for White males. In fact, Gail Dines argues “the elevation and mythification of
white masculinity relies on the debasement of black men as sexual savages, Uncle Toms, and
half-wits such as Stepin Fetchit”. I’m being subjugated by the very dynamic that grants me
cursory benefits.∂ ∂ Black Male Privilege?∂ ∂ Yet, when I look at most of our conversations on
feminism, the reality of Black male subjugation is largely ignored. In fact, recent years have
seen a rise in the idea of “Black male privilege”, particularly among Black feminists. In one
popular black male privilege checklist, the writer declares, “I will make significantly more money
as a professional athlete than members of the opposite sex will”. Is this discrepancy a result of
something that Black men have historically or collectively done or is it just a function of the
broader patriarchal superstructure?∂ ∂ Remember, these are the same leagues that wouldn’t let
Black men play, and even after integration these same leagues continued to relegate Black men
to less prestigious (and less well-paid) positions. Black men didn’t found these leagues, and they
are almost completely locked out of ownership (with a handful of exceptions). White men
founded and control these leagues, and moreover, White men are their target audience and
ideal consumer. So while Black men benefit from the sexual inequality in sports, they didn’t
create it and they don’t control the leagues that practice it.∂ ∂ Receiving a benefit is not the
same as possessing the power. Additionally, there’s a difference between situational power and
systemic power; privilege is systemic, not situational. The Black Male Privilege Checklist fails to
understand this reality.∂ ∂ For example, light skinned Brown folks get advantages over darker
people, but that’s not “light skin privilege” or “white privilege”– that’s White supremacy. The
same can be said of Black men’s relationship to patriarchy. You can talk about Black men
benefiting from patriarchy, and even how we perpetuate it, but you can’t say that we control it.∂
∂ Where Do I Go From Here?∂ ∂ Patriarchy exists, and it does provide benefits to those who are

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

White feminism doesn’t discomfort subject positions rather it reifies white

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

I am going to be fairly honest Emma Watson has never really interested me. I am not a Harry
Potter fan and I haven’t seen much of her work as an actress. But I know deep down that the
main reason why I have never really cared for Emma Watson is because she represents
everything that I am not. I am not a white heterosexual middle class woman whose clean cut
is adored by the public and the media and is what society wants me to be. Instead I am a poor
black woman from Peckham who is solely just seen “ghetto”, “ratchet” and a “thot”. I am
highly aware of 4chan threatening to leak nude photos of her because of her speech which I
honestly believe is cruel and extremely misogynistic. However, I will not ignore the fact that the
reason why feminists especially white feminists and the media are not criticising the
problematic nature of her speech is because of her high power status as a white heterosexual
cis middle class.∂ Lack of intersectionality∂ Emma Watson states when she researched the word
feminism and she noticed it has become unpopular. According to Emma Watson she is “among
the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-
men and, unattractive”. In this case Emma Watson is extremely wrong. The idea of feminism
being associated with hating men is soley rooted in lesbophobia. How many times have you
heard “you are a feminist oh shit you must be a lesbian and you totes hate men lmao” from a
random dickhead when you tell them you are feminist? Emma Watson speech continues to
erase women who are more marginalised by her by simply not acknowledging that is black
women who are constantly trapped in the one dimensional racist trope of being as a strong
angry black woman. We have already seen how detrimental this trope is with the New York
Times article about Shonda Rhimes. It is the strong angry black woman trope that silences us
and dismisses our cries when we are sick and tired of everything that is a result of our double
oppression.∂ “What about the Men?” Feminism∂ “What About the Men” feminism is a current
trend within white/mainstream feminism. This type of feminism advocates that women
should make spaces for men in feminism and should essentially pander to men. I strongly
disagree with “What About the Men” feminism not only is this idea extremely patriarchal and
kyrichal but as a black woman I do not see why I have to make the space for men especially for
white cis heterosexual men when their spaces are virtually everywhere in all aspects in society.
Black women have been constantly marginalized and not accepted in the feminist movement
from the very beginning. Instead of white feminists trying to remove the overt racism in the
feminist movement, creating spaces for black women and stop using intersectionality as a
buzzword they would rather focus on praising male feminists and creating space for men.
Emma Watson has been guilty of dismissing Beyonce’s feminism because it “pays too much
attention to men” even though that is not the case and it is actually HER feminism that is male
centric. This all just shows how feminism continues to fonder anti-blackness and further
alienate black women.∂ Malcom X was asked by a journalist when he founded the Organization
of Afro-American Unity if white people were allowed to join. Malcom X simply replied that white
people were not allowed to join the organisation because as black people we had to sort out
detrimental impacts that white supremacy has made on black people. The same rhetoric goes
for feminism. Men should use their privileged position to make society accessible for women it
shouldn’t be the other way around.∂ So much Westernisation…∂ Let us all remember that this
speech and the HeForShe campaign is for the United Nations. The UN (like IMF and WTO)
promote the strong fundamental idea that the West is civilised and any country that is not
Western is deemed as uncivilised, savage and barbaric. These racist and imperialistic
stereotypes of the Global South is inherently linked with the idea that people of colour in the
Global South need to be saved and most importantly saved by white Westerns. The white
saviour complex allows white Westerners to get away with not taking responsibility for the
fact colonialism is the main reason why the Global South is suffering. Emma Watson’s speech
and campaign does not acknowledge the fact it is capitalism and neo liberal policies that has
constantly harmed women of colour in the Global South rather than benefited them. For
instance in the past the use of modernization theories in development polices actually created
gender inequality and contributed to the oppression women in the Global South face today.
Emma Watson does not even pay any respect to African feminists and African women who
have continued to fight for their own liberation which is deeply rooted in black womanhood
livelehood. At the end of the day it was African Women in the Congo who had to fight against
modernisation theories destroying their agricultural livle. Why didn’t she use her privilege and
platform as a celebrity to reaffirm African women and African feminists who have fought for
their liberation rather than Hilary Clinton?∂ I am so done with this type of feminism getting
praised all the time. I am not here to educate/pander to men or let white feminists dismiss me
and other black women’s feminism simply for the fact we are black. The more this continues to
go on the more I think I should follow down the path of womanism because at least my struggle
to exist in a white supremacist, kyriarchal and capitalist society with be fully understood and I
will be accepted with open arms.
 Islamophobia link
The affirmative is the perfect example of #AllLivesMatter – their focus on
contingent violence of Muslim oppression puts anti-blackness as an
afterthought – their erasure of this ontological condition is inexcusable – the
combination of struggles through the perm is genocide
Qalander 15, Mast Qalander is a Pakistani Muslim who advocates anti-racist, anti-colonial feminism.
She has published multiple books and essays/articles on the matters of social justice. “WHY I’M NOT
DOWN WITH #MUSLIMLIVESMATTER,” https://muslimreverie.wordpress.com/tag/anti-black-racism-in-
the-muslim-community/ NN

I don’t have a twitter account, but I’m well aware of how hashtags can be used as tools to
express solidarity, speak out, and mobilize against injustice. Almost immediately after the
Chapel Hill murders, I noticed a lot of Muslims on Facebook using the hashtag
#MuslimLivesMatter. It was heartbreaking to hear the news and I understood the grief
Muslims were expressing online. However, I cringed when I saw the hashtag because I recalled
all of the critiques of #AllLivesMatter, which was used online and in activist rallies/spaces as a
response to #BlackLivesMatter. Though #MuslimLivesMatter is not exactly the same as
#AllLivesMatter, it still co-opts the movement against police brutality and racism that
systematically targets, terrorizes, and devalues black people.∂ It became more unsettling when
I watched South Asian, Arab, white, and other non-black Muslims posting up both
#MuslimLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. While there are many people who mean well when
they post these hashtags, I still see a disturbing amount of people getting very defensive (and
even make racist remarks) when they are informed about how these hashtags co-opt and
appropriate #BlackLivesMatter (and this is yet another example of how we cannot make it about
people’s “intentions”). When they persist in posting these hashtags, it seems like they are
doing it out of defiance against #BlackLivesMatter, as if the latter is “ethnocentric” and
supposedly doesn’t value the lives of non-black people. The persistence and refusal to listen
also reflects the anti-blackness that exists in our communities.∂ I know this is an issue that
needs to be addressed sensitively. We know the lives of brown Muslims are not valued in this
society and I know there are lot of Muslims who are shaken up or feel triggered after the brutal
murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha. Hashtags may seem trivial to
some, but they become more than hashtags when we see them used to organize protests and
movements. #BlackLivesMatter was created by three self-identified Black queer women, Alicia
Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. As Garza writes:∂ Black Lives Matter is an ideological
and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally
targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our
humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression […]∂ When we deploy “All Lives
Matter” as to correct an intervention specifically created to address anti-blackness,, we lose
the ways in which the state apparatus has built a program of genocide and repression mostly
on the backs of Black people—beginning with the theft of millions of people for free labor—and
then adapted it to control, murder, and profit off of other communities of color and immigrant
communities. We perpetuate a level of White supremacist domination by reproducing a tired
trope that we are all the same, rather than acknowledging that non-Black oppressed people in
this country are both impacted by racism and domination, and simultaneously, BENEFIT from
anti-black racism.∂ When you drop “Black” from the equation of whose lives matter, and then
fail to acknowledge it came from somewhere, you further a legacy of erasing Black lives and
Black contributions from our movement legacy. And consider whether or not when dropping
the Black you are, intentionally or unintentionally, erasing Black folks from the conversation or
homogenizing very different experiences. The legacy and prevalence of anti-Black racism and
hetero-patriarchy is a lynch pin holding together this unsustainable economy. And that’s not an
accidental analogy.∂ There are excellent critiques that I will quote and share below about
#MuslimLivesMatter (because I believe they do a better job at explaining the problems of this
hashtag), but I’ll just share a few thoughts here. Yes, the lives of Muslims are not valued in
white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. We know how the media and Hollywood has
demonized Muslims and Islam for a very long time. We know that Islamophobia isn’t something
that “only started after 9/11,” but existed well before that. We know how the massacres against
Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis show us how brown people are not seen as human
beings, especially if they are Muslim. At the same time, we also cannot deny that when we talk
about Islamophobia, it is often centered on the experiences of Arab and South Asian men.
African/black Muslim men and women are frequently left out of the narrative, marginalized in
mosques, otherized, and vilified by Arab, South Asian, white, and other non-black Muslims.∂
Anti-black racism is global. We cannot be preaching Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)
or the Qur’an’s teachings about diversity and how no one is superior to another person on the
basis of race if we are not practicing it in the community. Yeah, we’ll hear Arab, South Asian, and
white imams quote Malcolm X whenever it is convenient or boast about Muhammad Ali, but
then they’ll marginalize black Muslims or make racist remarks about the black people (Muslim
and non-Muslim) in their neighborhood. There is also a colorblind narrative that accompanies
the sermons about Malcolm X. I remember a white imam in one of my local mosques giving a
speech about how Malcolm used to be a “racist black supremacist” until he went for Hajj and
started to accept all Muslims (he liked to emphasize on how Malcolm started to accept white
people). The conclusion the imam drew from this was that Islam advocates colorblindness or
that “race doesn’t exist in Islam.” This narrative not only ignores Malcolm’s post-Hajj speeches
against white supremacy, imperialism, and the western power structure, but also erases his
blackness (side note: I’ll be writing a post one of these days on how religious and community
leaders, especially those in the west, use Islam to silence anti-racism).∂ We’ll hear non-black
Muslims speak highly of Hazrat Bilal (peace be upon him), the Abyssinian companion of the
Prophet, and how he was chosen specifically by the Prophet to be Islam’s first muezzin. We’ll
hear them talk about how beautiful his voice must have been and how he was one of the most
trusted companions of the Prophet. We’ll also hear talk about how Islam doesn’t tolerate racism
and point to Hazrat Bilal as proof. Yet, when it comes to the way we treat black people or talk
about black people, whether Muslim or not, there is no denying that anti-black racism exists
and needs to be actively addressed and challenged. We’ll still hear Arab, South Asian, white,
and other non-black Muslims use the n-word (and even argue that they can “reclaim” the term)
and use derogatory, anti-black words in Arabic, Urdu/Hindi, and other languages.∂ When two
Somali Muslims, Mustafa Mattan and Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, were recently murdered
(Mattan was murdered a day before the Chapel Hill murders), we didn’t see the same outrage
from Muslims in North America nor did we see the start of “Muslim Lives Matter.” It was
necessary and important that Muslims spoke out against the murders of Deah, Yusor, and
Razan, so I am by no means saying that anything was wrong with this. The only thing that is
wrong is how non-black Muslims tend to devalue the lives of black Muslims and non-Muslims.
Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein was 15 years-old and deliberately hit by an SUV that had a message
reading “Islam is worse than Ebola” on the rear-view mirror. The Islamophobia and anti-Muslim
violence was frighteningly explicit in this case, but why wasn’t there a national outcry about his
murder from Muslim communities and national organizations? As Khaled A. Beydoun and
Margari Hill recently wrote in their article, “The Colour of Muslim Mourning”:∂ The curious case
of Mustafa Mattan is as much a story of intra-racial division and anti-black racism within the
Muslim population as it is a narrative about the neglected death of a young man seeking a
better life far from home… The outpouring of support and eulogies that followed their deaths
revealed that Deah, Yusor and Razan were, in life and in death, archetypes of young, Muslim
Americans. Lives neglected by the media, but ones that mattered greatly for Muslims inside and
outside of the US. […] Despite a few vocal critics, Mattan’s erasure in the discussion of
Islamophobia in North America is evident. The exclusion of Mattan and Sheikh-Hussein
perpetuates a harmful hierarchy that privileges Arab narratives and excludes black/African
Muslims. This racial stratification relegating black Muslim lives is evident as much in death as it
is in life.∂ In order to understand the critiques of #MuslimLivesMatter, we need to
acknowledge that anti-black racism exists in our communities. We also need to understand
that these critiques are more than just about hashtags. Because #BlackLivesMatter is not “just
a hashtag,” it represents a movement. We can create our own hashtag and call for justice and
solidarity for all Muslims without co-opting, appropriating, and/or stepping upon the rights of
other communities. #JusticeForMuslims and #OurThreeWinners (the latter was started by the
victims’ family) should be used instead. Below is an excerpt from Anas White’s excellent article,
A Black Muslim Response To #MuslimLivesMatter:∂ #BlackLivesMatter began as a statement to
an establishment – an overall system if you will, declaring the seeming unrecognized value of
black lives. It continues to hold that same meaning, even as it moves to become an expression of
the movement itself. A movement against deep rooted systemic racism, high rates of police
brutality, extra-judicial executions, media smearing and vitriol, and the failure of the justice
system to actually hold anyone accountable for dead black men, except dead black men. It is
important to remember, that #BlackLivesMatter was not born of an occurrence, but of an
atmosphere wrought with repeat occurrence. […] A 12 year old black boy was shot and killed
for playing with a BB gun, his sister then handcuffed to watch him bleed. A black father was
killed in a Walmart, holding a toy gun sold at that very Walmart, in a state where it is legal to
carry guns. A black father was shot in the back, while handcuffed. A black father was essentially
choked to death in high definition. A black protest was met with a para-military, and national
guard troops. A black woman was shot seeking help. A black man was literally lynched. Where
were you then? My respect to every single one of you that ever attended a protest, and to every
Imam that ever gave mention, but I mean this on a deeper level. Where was the Muslim
community in response to these egregious civil rights violations? Where is the Muslim
community in solidarity with a movement against these civil, and even human rights issues?∂
And an excerpt from Sabah’s article, “Stop Using #MuslimLivesMatter”:∂ #BlackLivesMatter
represents an entire movement and its history. It’s not “just” a hashtag, it’s a powerful outcry
born from a racial injustice felt by a people. It cannot, and should not, be molded to fit another
people’s struggle. And solidarity, while important (and in fact, essential), never involves co-
opting another movement. […] There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with saying that
“Muslim lives matter,” but contextually, it’s being used parallel to #BlackLivesMatter — it’s
meant to evoke the same concepts, using the same kind of language. This appropriation of a
movement is counterproductive and frankly unfair to both the Black and Muslim
communities. We should not be blending together two complex, multifaceted issues for the
sake of convenience. It’s a reductive move that simplifies both struggles, and it only
contributes to erasing the very real, very dangerous implications that Islamophobia
specifically holds for Muslims.

Lol Sachin, your aff’s racist – A focus on Islamophobia without recognition of anti-
black violence within Arab communities reproduces white supremacy – a focus
on how blackness exists as an antagonism is the key starting point to eliminating
Islamophobia
Chamseddine 14, Roqayah Chamseddine is a staff writer for Alakhbar, an online journal that writes
on violence and inequality among Muslim communities, “Beyond "conversations:" confronting anti-
Blackness among Arab-Americans,” http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/20159, NN

When discussing anti-Black racism amongst Arab-Americans one often finds themselves
immersed in reductionism, apologetics and ponderous efforts to incapacitate any discourse at
all related to the subject. For some, the very idea that anti-Black racism exists not only abroad
but within Arab-American communities brings with it a wave of humiliation which rapidly
creeps over them, while for others this subject induces a mixture of outright denial peppered
with unashamed bouts of acrimony. This issue is one that demands a much more dynamic and
vigorous response, and it is about time we do more than ‘have a conversation’ about a
worrisome subject that continues to generate immense trauma for its victims.∂ As explained in
Dancing on Live Embers: Challenging Racism in Organizations, by Tina Lopez and Barb Thomas,
institutional racism stems from a network of structures, practices and policies which construct
advantages for white people and oppression, disadvantage and discrimination for racialized
people, this includes specific practices and laws which enforce segregation in housing,
employment and education and the policies and procedures work to marginalize and exclude
people of color.∂ Structural racism is the intersection of many folds of institutional power so as
to normalize and legitimize racism. It allows individuals to practice racism unchecked. Arab-
Americans, in relation to African-Americans, have the advantage of benefiting from white
supremacy and from this network of structures regardless of whether or not they are aware of
this system and of its devastating consequences.∂ “Capitalism is utterly incomprehensible
without connecting it to the rise of race, racism, racial violence, white supremacy, and racial
colonialism." - Professor Reiland Rabaka Our communities must recognize that the active
convergence of racism, colonialism and capitalism is necessary to interpret the historical
context of societal inequality because, in the words of Reiland Rabaka, Professor of African,
African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University
of Colorado, from his work on Black radical politics, “Capitalism is utterly incomprehensible
without connecting it to the rise of race, racism, racial violence, white supremacy, and racial
colonialism" (Du Bois’s Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the Reconstruction of Critical
Social Theory).∂ Psychiatrist, and political radical Frantz Fanon, whose philosophies continue to
impact anti-racist and leftist movements, born in 1925 on what was then a French colony on
the Caribbean island of Martinique, discusses these crossings in chapter 5 of Black Skin, White
Masks (1952) in which he writes of what he calls the “lived experience of the black”; the
discovery of his blackness and the ever-present whiteness around him. In the aforementioned
chapter, Fanon continues to grapple with not only his identity as a black man but the
confluence of class, capitalism and colonialism and their effects on the colonized - from the
racialized political-economic nature of imperialism, including its push for civilizing regions of
the world and the creation of “the other,” to branches of capitalism which deny the very
humanity of said “other.” “The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the problem of
Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved, despised by a
colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white,” writes Fanon in chapter 6 of Black
Skin, White Masks (The Negro and The Psychopathology); expounding upon the manner in
which racism has been institutionalized so as to not only continue but rationalize the
subjugation of one group by another. Fanon’s fiery response to racism and colonialism came
by way of his masterpiece The Wretched of The Earth (1961) - where we find colonialism there
is capitalism, and where there is capitalism there is racism and where these pieces intersect is
where we discover the native robbed of his economic, political and human rights.∂ With this in
mind, the observation of anti-Black racism amongst Arab-Americans should be viewed
through a lense that reaches far beyond the lowest tier, that of social interactions; the
language employed, including the use of dehumanizing terms like “abed” (singular) and
“abeed” (plural), this reprehensible branding of Black persons as slaves, signifies an alarming
reinforcement of racist frameworks - before we challenge these frameworks we must first
admit that we are complicit in the demoralization and subjugation of Black persons and
communities, and that the extensive exploitation of these communities is oftentimes denied
or outright justified.∂ Dawud Walid, the Executive Director of the Michigan chapter of the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI), has been one of many African-Americans
bringing attention to pervasive anti-Blackness both online and on the ground, demanding that
the use of the word “abeed” end and challenging Arab-Americans to do more than endlessly
call for dialogue. “This issue has been dealt with too passively for many years,” writes Walid.
He goes on to note that Arab-Americans should take “a more aggressive stands against anti-
Black racism.”∂ The romanticism surrounding oppressed peoples is pervasive, especially
amongst those involved in anti-racist work who, while claiming to be allies, engage in
increasingly dominant savior-esque fetishism. What comes after recognizing the existence of
racist structures and the identification of our own complicity is a long but necessary course of
action that entails working against these structures and the tokenization that sometimes
follows social justice organizations and activities. The romanticism surrounding oppressed
peoples is pervasive, especially amongst those involved in anti-racist work who, while
claiming to be allies, engage in increasingly dominant savior-esque fetishism and thereby turn
powerful opportunities to learn from and engage with marginalized communities into
narcissistic therapy sessions where their voices overwhelm and muffle the narratives of these
groups; those who tokenize these communities oftentimes come across as well-intentioned
but their actions are no less destructive. We are not giving a voice to the voiceless, as the tired
adage goes, because their voices surround us - in the words of Lilla Watson, Australian
aboriginal artist, activist and educator: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting
our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us
work together.”
 Terrorism link
The image of the terrorist portrays racial prejudice which ensures escalatory
violence
Miah 6, Malik Miah is a staff writer for The Prospect, “Racist Undercurrents in the "War on Terror,”
https://solidarity-us.org/node/166, NN

History teaches us that racism has a way of rising up and being used by the rulers to push
back, divide and advance anti-democratic objectives, even after wars and other adventures
are stopped. Unfortunately, many liberals and left activists don’t pay enough attention to this
aspect of the Bush-Cheney attempt to rewrite the Constitution and impose U.S. will on the
peoples of the Middle East and world.∂ The use of fear and warmongering has convinced most
Americans, including African Americans, that the ends justify the means. The link between
racism and the war on terrorism is therefore generally downplayed or ignored.∂ When Dick
Cheney says the divide between Republicans and Democrats is between the “cut and run”
Democrats and the Bush Administration, he always adds that the critics of their policies (that
includes torture, imprisonment for life and racial proofing) don’t want to “win the war on
terrorism.” Bush said critics of his policy are “enablers of terrorists.”∂ Racial profiling is tacitly
considered an acceptable part of conducting war. The mainstream media, with few exceptions,
most notably the editors of The New York Times, give Bush, Cheney and their operatives a free
pass on these issues. While some debate is taking place on the use of torture and loss of habeas
corpus, little is said about racial profiling. Even civil rights leaders are mostly quiet. Why?
Because no one wants to be labeled as soft on fighting terrorism.∂ If you look like an Iranian,
an Afghani, a South Asian (mainly a Pakistani) or worse an Arab, it is now okay to racial profile
to “protect the country.”∂ Logic of Racial Profiling∂ In my book, racism is racism no matter how it
is justified. It is a disgrace that the topic is so underground and viewed as “that’s the way it is.”∂
The logic of racial profiling, however, is much more serious than simply a few setbacks in our
civil liberties. It opens the door to broader justifications to impose more onerous blows to
affirmative action programs, school desegregation, and fair housing and employment rights for
minorities.∂ The fact that little is written about the issue by the mainstream media shows how
racism in the war on terrorism is considered acceptable. I tried to pull up articles on the
internet to see how many times racial profiling, or racism and terrorism, have been written
about. Amazingly, outside the left press, few critical articles or columns have appeared. The
majority of pieces in fact have been in defense of racial profiling as a necessary step in today’s
world.∂ The depth of the problem is seen in an article written in 2005 by an African American
Washington Post deputy editorial page editor in an op-ed piece entitled, “You can’t fight
terrorism with racism.” (July 30, 2005). Regarding three op-ed pieces that had appeared in the
Post and The New York Times, Colbert King wrote:∂ “A New York Times op-ed piece by Paul
Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow [‘It’s the Age of Terror: What Would You Do?’] and a
Post column by Charles Krauthammer [‘Give Grandma a Pass; Politically Correct Screening Won’t
catch Jihadists’] endorsed the practice of using ethnicity, national origin and religion as primary
factors in deciding when police should regard as possible terrorists—in other words, racial
profiling.∂ “A second Times column, on Thursday, by Haim Watzman [‘When You have to Shoot
First’] argued that the London police officer who chased own and put seven bullets into the
head of a Brazilian electrician without asking him any questions or giving him any warning ‘did
the right thing.’”∂ Krauthammer, King noted, was quick to make clear that he wasn’t talking
about “classes of people who are obviously not suspects.” Who are these classes of people? You
can guess.∂ What is striking is that everything Colbert King wrote in 2005 remains true today. I
know first hand, as an airline employee, that most passengers accept the argument that it is
better to err on the side of racial profiling than to face unknown terror. If anything, most
Americans, including Blacks, make a distinction between their opposition to the war in Iraq
and their support to using racial profiling if necessary.
 Ruse of Analogy link
The affirmative represents the ruse of analogy – the comparison of other
identity groups to the ontological condition of blackness is not only incorrect
but also parasitic – other identity groups maintain their history and their past –
blackness is the door to no return – focus on junior partners re-create anti-black
violence
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and
Structure of US Antagonisms,” NN

Thirty to forty years before the current milieu of multiculturalism, immigrants rights activism,
White women’s liberation, and sweat shop struggles, Frantz Fanon found himself writing in a
post-WWII era fixated on the Jewish holocaust as the affective destination that made legible
the ensemble of questions that animated the political common sense of oppression. The
holocaust provided a “natural” metaphor through which ontologists in Fanon’s time, such as
Sartre, worked out a grammar through which the question, what does it mean to suffer, can
be asked. The Jewish Holocaust as “natural” metaphor continues to anchor many of today’s
meta-commentaries. Giorgio Agamben’s meditations on the Muselmann, for example, allow
him to claim Auschwitz as:∂ [S]omething so unprecedented that one tries to make it
comprehensible by bringing it back to categories that are both extreme and absolutely familiar:
life and death, dignity and indignity. Among these categories, the rue cipher of Auschwitz-the
Muselmann, the ‘core of the camp,’ he whom ‘no one wants to see,’ and who is inscribed in
every testimony as lacuna— wavers without finding a definite position. (Remnants of Auschwitz
81)∂ Agamben is not wrong, so much as he is late. Auschwitz is not “so unprecedented” to one
whose frame of reference is the Middle Passage, followed by Native American genocide. In
this way, Auschwitz would rank third or fourth in a normative, as opposed to∂
“unprecedented,” pattern. Agamben goes on to sketch out the ensemble of questions that
Churchill and Spillers have asked, but he does so by deploying the Jewish Muselmann as the
template of such questions, instead of the Red “Savage,” or the Black Slave:∂ In one case, [the
Muselmann] appears as the non-living, as the being whose life is not truly life; in the other, as
he whose death cannot be called death, but only the production of a corpse—as the
inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living area. In both cases, what is called
into question is the very humanity of man, since man observes the fragmentation of his
privileged tie to what constitutes him as human, that is, the sacredness of death and life. The
Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is the human that cannot
be told apart from the inhuman. (82)∂ In the historiography of intellectual thought, Agamben’s
widely cited template of the Muselmann is an elaboration of Sartre’s work. As philosophers,
they work both to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of widely accepted political
common sense which positions the German/Jewish relation as the sin-qua-non of a structural
antagonism, thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontological—and not just social—
significance to the Jewish Holocaust.∂ Fanon has no truck with all of this. He dismisses the
presumed antagonism between Germans and Jews by calling the Holocaust “little family
quarrels” (115), recasting with this single stroke the German/Jew encounter as a conflict rather
than an antagonism. Fanon returns the Jew to his/her rightful position—a position within civil
society animated by an ensemble of Human discontents. The Muselmann, then, can beseen as a
provisional moment within existential Whiteness, when Jews were subjected to Blackness and
Redness—and the explanatory power of the Muselmann can find its way back to sociology,
history, or political science where it more rightfully belongs. This is one of several moments in
Black Skin, White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between social oppression and structural
suffering, making it possible to theorize the impossibility of a Black ontology (thus allowing us
to meditate on how the Black suffers) without being chained to the philosophical and rhetorical
demands of analogy, demands which the evidentiary register of social oppression (i.e., how
many Jews died in the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the Middle Passage) normally
imposes upon such meditations. The ruse of analogy erroneously locates the Black in the
world—a place where s/he has not been since the dawning of Blackness. This attempt to
position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often
erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of
being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising an enabling
modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because, whereas
Masters may share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as though they have the
same interests as Masters, their respective grammars of suffering are irreconcilable.
 Constitution link
Constitutionalism represents white over black slavery – legal equality and equal
rights ignore that the courthouses themselves were built by black labor
Farley 5, Anthony P. Farley is an Associate Professor at Boston College Law School. J.D.,
Harvard Law School, “Perfecting Slavery” NN

In 1995, Missouri v. Jenkins ended the saga.79 With Missouri v. Jenkins we find “the tradition of
all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”80 Missouri v.
Jenkins returns us to white-over-black, a place we never left; it is a perfect map of the
undiscovered country. As Dylan puts it, “[t]hat long black cloud is coming down.”81 The slave
argues for equal rights. The slave gives his product to the law. The slave fashions a prayer for
relief from white-over-black and gives it to the law. Robert Morris was the second black lawyer
in the United States. He was admitted to the practice of law in Suffolk County, Massachusetts in
1847. The following year he was enlisted by Benjamin Roberts and five-year old Sarah Roberts in
her effort to attain an education free of the colorline.82 The Boston School Committee
separated school children into black and white and assigned each to separate schools. Morris
argued that separation destroys equality and lost at trial. Morris then enlisted white
abolitionist Charles Sumner to argue the case on appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts. The two filed their appeal together. Sumner used Morris’s argument and lost.
The slave’s product, equal rights, was filled with white-over-black and then returned as
“separate but equal.”83 Separate or together, equal or unequal, all of it is white-over-black in
a system that is white-over-black. The empty vessels of law are filled with the lived relations
that we attempt to disavow. The empty vessels of law are filled with white-over-black. The
label on the vessel may say whatever it says but its sum and substance will be white-over-black
as surely as the Triangle Trade that gave the whites of New England the leisure for all their town
meetings followed the molasses-to-rum-toslaves formula. In Plessy, the majority and the
dissent agreed about white-over-black. Justice Harlan, dissenting, argued that the white race
would forever remain “the dominant race in this country . . . if it . . . holds fast to principles of
constitutional liberty.” Harlan’s dissent became Brown I and II. Fifty years after Brown, we see
that the white race is “the dominant race in this country . . . in prestige, in achievements, in
education, in wealth and in power.” Fifty years after Brown, there is no reason to doubt the
truth of Justice Harlan’s statement that “the great heritage” and the “principles of constitutional
liberty” would allow the “the white race” to “continue to be” “the dominant race in this
country” “for all time.”84 Equality of right, the thought-product of the slave, like any
commodity, gives us an uncanny reflection of the lived relations that we disavow. Equality of
right could not be thought except from the position of the slave, the one who suffers. The
slave would not suffer if it were not the slave. The slave attempts to escape through fantasies
of right and equality and dreams a system of equal rights into being. The slave does the
dreamwork needed to make life look like death and death look like life. The slave dreams of all
the equations that are needed to balance the system’s every crisis. The slave builds the law
rooms of the many mansions of the house of law. The slave, in other words, is itself the
author of Justice Harlan’s “great heritage” and “principles of constitutional liberty.”85 The
slave forges its own chains through its juridical strivings. The slave builds the home for the
future good will of the master.86 That is what its dream of equality of right amounts to, a
home for the future good will of the master. If the master of the future might be good then the
crisis of servile insurrection can be deferred again and again and again. But the master cannot
be anything other than the master, just as the slave cannot be anything but the slave. There is a
colorline or there is not. Without the dreamwork of the slave, the many crises of the system of
white-over-black blossom in revolution. The flames are wooed from their buds and continue to
unfold until the entire plantation system is gone. The servile insurrection continues until it
brings down the system of marks, the system of property, and the system of law. Slaves are
trained to not think this way. Slaves are trained to be objects. Slavery is death.
 Death link
The affirmative’s fear of death is equivalent to the fear of blackness – black
bodies are always already dead and the incapacity of blackness to operate
within the codes of civil society means white futurity will always remain as the
dominant system – it’s time to join the dead
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of sociology, “Queer
Necropolitics,” http://www.deanspade.net/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Saidiya Hartman has argued that the transatlantic slave trade constructed a∂ notion of blackness
that is fundamentally fungible and criminal, making blackness∂ permanently available for the
'full enjoyment' of white people and making; black∂ people always already guilty in the eyes
of the law, incapable of being violated∂ (Hartman 1997). The civil and social death of black
people forms the basis on∂ which white life and citizenship become knowable, their compass
and their∂ shadow. Whiteness must be constantly yoked to the future and victirnhood while∂
blackness must be yoked to death and pathology. The story of endangered white∂ futurity and
dangerous black negativity - the sexual politics that motors antiblackness∂ ·-· can be found on
every channel. Lauren Berlant has explored how the∂ celebrated figure of the feminized white
child at risk of racialized violence in the∂ post-Reagan years has been mobilized to justify
claims to state protection and∂ citizenship (Berlant 1997). Joy James has written about how the
widely accepted∂ justification for lynching as the sexual threat posed by black men to white
women∂ and their progeny (as well as the erasure of sexual violence against black women)∂ has
been recalibrated in the contemporary demonization and 'high-tech lynching'∂ of black men in
high-profile legal cases in which white women have been raped∂ O ames 1996). These are just a
few of limitless versions of this same narrative. Cue the gay remix! Gay and lesbian claims to
imperilled domesticity, privacy,∂ and kinship (popular in earlier homophile organizing but
renewed with a fervour∂ since the 1990s) illustrate the capaciousness of white supremacy to
mutate these∂ key 'founding' figures- now it is the wounded white gay citizen who requires
state∂ inclusion and protection to ensure his successful reproduction. These claims,∂ remember,
come amidst and in the wake of ongoing efforts from the right wing∂ to cathect gayness tq
pathology, murder and non-reproductivity (Bersani 1987:∂ 197--222; Delany 1994; Sontag 1989)-
qualities usually reserved for blacknessvvith∂ the emergence ofHIV I AIDS. A few illustrations of
the powerful mobilization∂ of white futurity within contemporary gay and lesbian politics are
useful. First, we∂ point to the widely popular 'It Gets Better' project, started by author Dan∂
Savage and his husband Teny Miller in response to a series of publicized suicides∂ of queer
youth, encouraging teens that life does indeed improve. Thousands of∂ people responded to
their initial video by making their own videos sharing this∂ message of future improvement, and
eventually over 22,000 videos were collected∂ on the 'It Gets Better' website, including ones
created by gay and lesbian∂ police officers and the president of the US himself(Savage 2013). A
book of essays∂ from the project was released in 2011. In the original video, Savage and his∂
husband, two white non-trans gay men, describe their high school years where∂ they faced
bullying for being gay. They then describe how their lives got better∂ after high school because
their natal families came to accept and include them,∂ they met each other and adopted a child.
Savage shares a memmy of walking∂ around Paris with their child and Miller talks about their
love of and accomplishments∂ at snowboarding as a family. The two earnestly address an
audience of 12-l 7-ycar-old viewers, urging them that their lives will get better after high school.∂
Speaking about bullies and bigots, Savage states 'Once I got out of high school,∂ they couldn't
touch me anymore.'∂ The project illustrates how a form of gayness implicitly linked to
whiteness∂ and upward mobility stakes its claim to the future. After all, for whom will it get∂
better? And what kind of better does it get? When we consider this directive that∂ life gets
better against the backdrop of the systemic imprisonment, police murder∂ and state
abandonment of black people at every age, we can sec how it is white∂ suffering that this
campaig11 aims to make legible as worthy of protection. Black∂ suffering, as Jared Sexton has
articulated in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina∂ (Sexton 2006), is unspectacular, banal, self-
induced, a cause for, if anything,∂ shame or fascination, not redress. Savage's assertion that his
departure from∂ high school protected him from the reach of homophobic ·violence is certainly∂
indicative of a white-owning class trajectory of matriculation. What guarantees can∂ be given to
those who will remain in the grasp of foster care systems, homeless∂ shelters, psychiatric
facilities, jails, prisons, and immigration detention centres,∂ regardless of their age? Savage's
story generalizes a particular narrative in∂ which white queers can 'escape' homophobia by
moving to gay enclaves in urban∂ areas, a trajectory out of reach for so many queer and trans
people who will∂ remain targets of policing and immigration enforcement, even and perhaps∂
especially in white gay neighbourhoods where they are read as dangerom outsiders∂ (Hanhardt
2008).∂ The fantasy oflife 'getting better' imagines 'violence' as individual acts that 'bad'∂
people do to 'good' people who need protection and retribution from state∂ protectors (law
enforcement, policymakers, administrators), rather than situating∂ bodily terror as an
everyday aspect of a larger regime of structural racialized and∂ gendered violence congealed
within practices of criminalization, immigration∂ ~nforcement, poverty,'and medicalization
targeted at black people at the population∂ level - from before birth until after death -- and
most frequently exercised by∂ government employees. It is not a leap to see, then, how tills
cultural politics of∂ naturalizing the premature death of black people produces a benevolent
thrall for∂ white gays and lesbians to adopt black children. White gay and lesbian politics must∂
remain silent on anti-black racism, must position itself as anything but black, to∂ keep its
place in line for the future.
 Postmodernism link
The affirmative represents the view from nowhere – white, postmodern
philosophy seeks universalist answers to problems that affect different bodies
in different ways – the personal cannot be divorced from the theory and their
attempt to distance themselves from their subject position is a tactic of white
privilege
Yancy 5, George Yancy is a Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of
race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. “Whiteness and the Return of the
Black Body,” http://www.westga.edu/~mmcfar/George%20Yancy.htm, NN

I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge
connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site
of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument,
a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and
deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is best,
or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to
speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-
consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes:∂ Left to my own devices, I
disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of
authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is
empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an
authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent
transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of
materials.∂ (1998, 6)∂ To
theorize the Black body one must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for
interpreting racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also
functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's
"racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white
body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of
whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize
situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the
white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are
embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through
complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These
acts of self-construction, however, are
myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has
noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale
of human value" (Snead 1994, 4).∂ How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body—in this case, the Black
body—is capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis-à-vis white embodiment. The
body's
meaning—whether phenotypically white or black—its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic
performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation. The
hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological
construction. "The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The
body is codified as this or that in
terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of
negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are
grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a
site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics.
Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural
configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists "its
relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning
is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a
battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other
words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something [End Page 216]
fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score, it is not only the
"Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness,
but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order,
innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In other words, given the three suppositions above, both the "Black body" and the "white
body" lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their
alleged objectivity.∂ To have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have that body returned as distorted is a
powerful experience of violation. The experience presupposes an anti-Black lived context, a context within which whiteness gets
reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed.The late writer, actor, and activist Ossie Davis recalls that at the age of six or
seven two white police officers told him to get into their car. They took him down to the precinct. They kept him there for an hour,
laughing at him and eventually pouring cane syrup over his head. This only created the opportunity for more laughter, as they
looked upon the "silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment, think of how the young Davis was
returned to himself: "I am an object of white laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt appeared to the white police officers in
ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and enjoyed their sadistic pleasure without
blinking an eye. Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain the oppressed [Blacks] to certain approved modes of
visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype) and then gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created" (1998, 11). Davis
notes that he "went along with the game of black emasculation, it seemed to come naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the
ritual was complete" (9). He was then sent home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis knew at that early age, even without the
words to articulate what he felt, that he had been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the process of "niggerization." He notes:∂
The culture had already told me what this was and what my reaction to this should be: not to be surprised; to expect it; to
accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply I was scarred or affected by that, but it was a part of who I was.∂ (9)∂ Davis,
in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who he was, that "niggerized" little Black boy, an insignificant plaything
within a system of ontological racial differences. This, however, is the trick of white ideology; it is to give the appearance of fixity,
where the "look of the white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the black subject from seeing
him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze" (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score, it is white bodies that are deemed
agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217] Black bodies according to their will. But it is no mystery; for "the Negro is
interpreted in the terms of the white man. White-man psychology is applied and it is no wonder that the result often shows the
Negro in a ludicrous light" (Braithwaite 1992, 36). While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors locking as
whites secure themselves from the "outside world," a trope rendering my Black body ostracized, different, unbelonging. This outside
world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are rejected, because they are deemed suspicious,
vile infestations of the (white) social body. The locks on the doors resound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already accompanied by nervous gestures, and eyes that
want to look, but are hesitant to do so. The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their distorted repetition.
The clicks begin to function as coded sounds, reminding me that I am dangerous; the sounds create boundaries, separating the white
civilized from the dark savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they inscribe me, they
materialize my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish a form of recognition that
creates a space of trust and liminality, there are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to become their Black monster,
their bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise. You've just been carjacked by a ghost, a fantasy of your own creation. Now, get
the fuck out of the car." I have endured white women clutching their purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of
my approaching Black body. It is during such moments that my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning
of my body as confiscated. Davis too had the meaning of his young Black body stolen. The surpluses being gained by the whites in
each case are not economic. Rather, it is through existential exploitation that the surpluses extracted can be said to be ontological—
"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry 1997, 33).∂ When I was about
seventeen or eighteen, my
white math teacher initiated such an invasion, pulling it off with complete
calm and presumably self-transparency. Given the historical construction of whiteness as the
norm, his own "raced" subject position was rendered invisible. After all, he lived in the real world, the
world of the serious man, where values are believed anterior to their existential founding. As I recall, we were discussing my plans
for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this choice, spending a great deal of time reading about the
requirements involved in becoming a pilot, how one would have to accumulate a certain number of flying hours. I also read about
the dynamics of lift and drag that affect a plane in flight. After no doubt taking note of my firm commitment,
he looked at me
and implied that I should be realistic (a code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals.
He said that I should become a carpenter or a bricklayer. I was exposing myself, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, and he
returned me to myself as something [End Page 218] that I did not recognize. I had no intentions of being a carpenter or a bricklayer
(or a janitor or elevator operator for that matter).
 State link
State Involvement and federal equality perpetuates white supremacy, shifts
attention away from gratuitous violence
Martinot and Sexton 3, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, “The
Avant-Garde of White Supremacy”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 6-20-15, NN

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

obsessive fashion. The process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the
state, and the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements
that sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the state’s absorption and co-optation of

that opposition for the reconstruction of the white social order has been reoccurring before
our very eyes. White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake
of the social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialisation that it
calls the ‘maintenance of order’, all of which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society — courts, schools, prisons,
police, army, law, religion, the two-party system — become the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalise throughout the social field . It is

not simply by understanding the forms of state violence that the structures of hyper-injustice
and their excess of hegemony will be addressed. If they foster policing as their paradigm — including imprisonment, police
occupations, commodified governmental operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalisation of race as their version of social order — then to merely catalogue these

, we
institutional forms marks the moment at which understanding stops. To pretend to understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding. Instead

have to understand the state and its order as a mode of anti-production that seeks precisely
to cancel understanding through its own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice;however,
the opposite of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of hyperinjustice implies that
neither a consciousness of injustice nor the possibility of justice any longer applies. Justice as such is
incommensurable with and wholly exterior to the relation between ordinary social existence and the ethic of impunity including the modes

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

The problem here is how to dwell on the structures of

tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness.

pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the state as an
apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with de-
centred agency, how the subjects of state authority — its agents, citizens, and captives — are
produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence
 Tokoloshe link
Hey Tokoloshe, I see you!
Wilderson 8, Frank B. Wilderson is a professor of sociology and film study at US Irvine, “Incognegro: A
Memoir of Exile and Apartheid” NN (I had to cut this from the physical book, so if there’s a missing letter
or misspelled words, I sincerely apologize)

This, of course, is not entirely true, for Stimela’s people all knew how the tokoloshes of laissez-
faire – the faces in the files that Trevor spread on the bed – were hard at work. They’d been
working invisibly since the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Eleven months later,
in April 1993, when Chris Hani was assassinated, the tokoloshes of laissez-faire would emerge
from their hovels in the knotty snarl of tree rots and say, “Now, yes, now, is the time of the
trolls.” Leading ethnographers of trolls, specializing in tokologeology, have concluded that
there are an estimated six hundred fifty-eight tokoloshes residing under rocks, in tree trunks,
and beneath the beds of unsuspecting victims throughout South Africa. The tokoloshe is a
small creature that stands above knee high to an adult. Some have very long hair, like
monkeys; others have thick leathery skin, like trolls. “Their eyes are narrow and black and
they have small ears.” According to a renowned tokologeologist. Their long pensis look like
tails and can be slung over their shoulders when running or walking briskly. Tokoloshes make
themselves invisible and go into houses to harm people in their sleep or put poison in their
food. “Many people put their beds on bricks so that the tokoloshe can’t catch them in their
sleep. It might be a good idea when you check into your hotel to ask if they can give you four
bricks … just to be safe.” If you sneak up on a tokoloshe, “He will put a magic stone into his
mouth and disappear. He is also very scared of dogs, mousetraps and chameleons.” Normally,
if you are haunted by a tokoloshe, your sangoma can cast a spell for you, “And if the
tokoloshe walks into it he will become paralyzed and visible. But if you shout ‘Hey, tokoloshe,
I see you!’ then the spell will be broken and he will disappear.” But the laissez-faire
tokoloshes, the one in our files, were no ordinary tokoloshes. They were not knee high trolls
with leathery faces who snorted and grunted as they rose up from beneath the earth to make
mischief. They did not materialize under some unlucky person’s bed and nibble on his toes in
the middle of the night. They did not make dishes fly about the room and crash against the
walls. They did not open doors when you closed them or close them when you opened them.
They had no muti that made you itch or pull your hair out. We could have handled that. We
wouldn’t have needed a safe house in Hillbrow to snort through their policy papers, their
academic work, or the notes we had stolen from their dust bins – since most tokoloshes don’t
write. We wouldn’t have needed a safe house in Hillbrow to study their movements and
mount their photographs on the wall, since most tokoloshes can’t be seen. We wouldn’t have
needed to bug their offices, bribe their secretaries to eavesdrop on their meetings, or send
operatives to monitor their classes-since most tokoloshes are seldom heard and cannot be
recorded. The tokoloshes of laissez-faire were not tiny black creatures with gravel in their
vocal chord, but grown men and women of average height –though some seemed tall and
imposing like Charles van Onselen, the president of the academic senate, or Robert Charlton,
the vice-chancellor of the university. Others seemed downright short, bespeckled, and sad,
like Etiienne Mureinink with his sharp, pointed, downward nose, a small and timid creature,
what’s known in Afrikaans as a bang worse (scared kitten); Mureinik, the lonely law professor
who just wanted the Africans to love him. Some were women. Like Dean Elizabeth Rankin and
professor June Sinclair, a law professor of some renown who held a Wits cabinet post one
step down the food chain from Robert Charlton. I am not at all convinced that any of them
had long tokoloshe penises-certainly not long enough to sling over their shoulders when they
ran or walked briskly; though I must confess that in the five years in which I lived there, I did
not actually see them running or walking briskly. June Sinclair didn’t curry favor with
Mandela’s people. Unlike Mureinik, she craved no feckless fawning from young Africans. No,
there were not run of the mill tokoloshes. They lived in the suburbs, not in trees or under
rocks. They dined at the Parktonian Hotel and not on the toes of children, for such delicacies
as tiny tot’s toes were not on the menu at the Parktonian Hotel. They vacationed in Europe.
They dressed for success. And they were English not Afrikaners. The tokoloshes of laissez-faire
were well-talcumed and well-deodorized little tokoloshes. You could not smell them coming.
But oh, the stench when they’d gone. Like traditional tokoloshes, they made weird noises
when they spoke (they called this gargling “editorials,” “policy papers,” “scholarly articles,”
and “memorandums of understanding, compromise, and reconciliation”). And like other
tokoloshes they wreaked havoc from the inside out and they vanished into thin air when you
raised a broom to sweep them away or a fist to strike them down. They made poor targets,
for they always said they wanted what you wanted, or what you would know you wanted if
only you could want what they wanted, for example. They were all for Black participation
within the existing paradigm-which seemed so reasonable that the paradigm itself could not
be put on the table for critique and dismantling. And unlike normal tokoloshes who screamed
and yelled and ran away in the night, the tokoloshes of laissez-faire were always willing to
listen. They could listen for hours. They could listen for days. They could spend a lifetime
listening. They liked to organize “listening sessions,” like university transformation forums
that would “”listen” for the next ten years and never transform the university-never devolve
power to the masses. Their favorite word was “stakeholder.” Everyone was a “stakeholder”
which meant nothing was ever at stake. Their second favorite word was “process.” The
process of negotiations had to be free of “intimidation” (their third favorite word), free from
mass action, and from civil disobedience. The word they hated was “power.” Talking about
power was like saying, “Hey tokoloshe, I see you!” It could make them disappear. “We should
just shoot one of them.” I can remember that being said in the Hillbrow house. Was it Jabu?
Was it Precious Jabulani or Trevor, as we pored over the writings of the tokoloshes, or was it
me, who said it? At one time or another we all had said it. Some nights we said it together.
Assassinate Robert Charlton as he leaves the Great Hall. Kill June Sinclair in her office. Audit one
of Mureinik’s classes and do the deed as he lectures on how to calibrate the rule of law with the
discontent of the disenfranchised. Blow van Onselen away on the floor of the faculty senate.
Make a spectacle of it. At the very least it would be good for student morale. We were
joking…perhaps. Of course, we couldn’t kill Eddy Webster, he still had friends in COSATU from
his days as a labor union advisor. He was still a friend of the Negro. We certainly had the
capacity to kill them. Stimela kept an arms cache at another safe house on the other side of
Hillbrow; per Chris Hani’s wishes, not all of the weapons in the dead letter boxes scattered
across the country had been handed over to the commission set up by de Klerk and Mandela.
We had the will to kill them. Oupa would have hit anyone Stimela ordered him to hit; Precious
and Jabu had proven themselves in retaliation against the police in the townships; as had
Trevor. Jabu was trained in propaganda and psychological warfare-which is not to say he had no
training in operations; he did. I only knew how he moved about the demonstrations, the rallies,
the caucuses, and meeting; in the wee hours I knew only how we moved among the newspaper,
the file clippings, the stolen memos, the photographs, some surreptitiously obtained, some cut
from newsletters, yearbooks, and the evening gazette; and I only knew how we moved between
a box of push pins and two computers. Peculiar proxies for live ammunition. “Yes,” someone
else would say, as though testing the line between a joke and a plan, “Why don’t we just shoot
one of them.” We’d all be bleary-eyed by then. It might be one in the morning. The night’s
writing would be stale and redundant-how the hell would we get a pamphlet out by dawn? Or
our analysis was on tilt and we’d be irritable and argumentative, instead of sharp and erudite.
So we’d clear the bulletin board of our charts, our clippings, and our scraps of analysis. We’d
take the photographs of the tokoloshes from their files and pin them to the bulletin board.
June Sinclari leaving a restaurant. Etinenne Mureinik shopping at the Rosebank Mall. A portrait
of Charlton from the Johannesburg Star; Ron Carter, before he came to South Africa as an
honorary White man, when he was at Boston University where he worked as the hatchet man
for its neo-con president. Nico Cloete, whose work we interpreted as being tantamount tto the
evisceration of radicalism in the Charterist movement. Eddy Webster, striking poses like
bargains with the workers he had turned his back on. Charles van Onselen, his head held high,
his jaw thrust out like Mussolini, with neither irony nor shame. We’d pint hem side-by-side, like
figures facing a firing squad. We’d asked them if they had any last words. For the first time
ever, none of these tokoloshes spoke. We’d implore them: “Honor us with something pithy
about peace and reconciliation or the rule of law before you die.” Then precious and Jabue
would draw bull’s-eyes on them and I’d retrieve darts from the small rooms that was a
bedroom long ago when someone lived there and it was furnished and in fee to domestic, as
opposed to clandestine, needs and desires. “Ready1” said Precious, as I handed her the darts.
She took ten paces back, “Aim!” Jabu, Trevor, and I stood beside her with darts of our own.
“Fire!” One by one the tokoloshes slumped and fell. Shooting them in real life might have
been worse than letting them run amuck. Invariably, their deaths would spark rancor and
indignation in the media; tears of sympathy from the Whites, long meandering speeches from
the Black bourgeoisie followed by the criminalization of armed struggle and mass action in the
press, the huge and cry for peace and reconciliation (a.k.a. anger management for Blacks).
Yes, the tokoloshe dies but his laissez-faire lives on.
2NC – Impacts
 2NC – OV
Anti blackness comes at the intersection of objective and subjective vertigo
Wilderson ‘3 [Frank Wilderson revolutionary, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of
Black Insurgents,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/79282989/Wilderson-the-Vengeance-of-Vertigo >:]

Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in
an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from
a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life
constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural
as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet,
the intersection of performative and structural violence. [4] Elsewhere I have argued that the
Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate
relationship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human
suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists InTensions Journal
Copyright ©2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011) ISSN# 1913-
5874 Wilderson The Vengeance of Vertigo 4 (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary
discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a
paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and
disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and objective vertigo, is
indicative of a political ontology which is radically different from the political ontology of a
sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence when s/he breaks
with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in
this comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and
lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state’s
disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared
objective vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the
struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and
disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movement’s demand for the return of
Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.’s desire to
maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive
maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the
myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns.
 AT: Util
Racism disproportionately affects people of color – maximizing happiness only
applies to white life
Peter 7, Peter is a staff writer for On Philosophy, an online ethics forum, “Utilitarianism Is Unjust,”
https://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/09/08/utilitarianism-is-unjust/, NN

A system is unjust when it treats people differently without a good reason for this different
treatment. Obviously what counts as a good reason will be debatable, but to get started let us
consider only reasons that all parties can understand as good reasons. Racism then is unjust
because there is no good reason behind the unequal treatment given to the different races. Of
course the racist does have a justification for their bias, they will claim that the other races are
inferior. But this is not a reason that both parties will understand, while people of the same race
as the racist may agree with him, few members of the races being oppressed will consider
themselves naturally inferior. And the racist lacks objectively sound evidence that could in
principle convince everyone of that judgment. On the other hand the fact that people receive
different treatment according to their wealth in a capitalist system is not necessarily unfair. The
justification for this unfair treatment is that the wealthy can spend more money, and hence
catering to their needs receives more generous compensation. Thus pricing a good out of
someone’s ability to purchase it isn’t unjust, because there is an objective fact of the matter
that they simply can’t give as much to you for it as others may be able to. Of course this
doesn’t mean that there may not be a good reason to moderate capitalism as well, the poor
may argue that principle X implies that they should receive some special treatment. But this is
not a rejection of the reasons behind the unequal treatment resulting from a difference in
wealth, and hence such unequal treatment is not unjust.∂ According to this principle
utilitarianism is unjust because it treats people differently based on their capacity for
happiness; although utilitarians can appeal to their principles to justify this different treatment,
so can racists, and like the racist the utilitarian arguments are not based on objective facts. But
before we get into the details allow me to give examples of some groups of people who would
be treated unfairly in a purely utilitarian system. The first are those who have no capacity for
happiness or unhappiness. There are rare people born without this ability, and we can easily
imagine possible species (such as the Vulcans from Star Trek) or conscious computers (such as
Data, also from Star Trek) who lack it as well. Utilitarianism cares only about maximizing
happiness or pleasure, and so these people effectively wouldn’t count; their treatment would
be invisible to the system. Since we can’t make the Vulcans unhappy we would be free to
exploit them, turn them into slaves, or whatever else would make us happy. And since we can’t
make them happy there is no reason for the system to give them any of the rights or privileges
that make us happy. Since they aren’t made unhappy by this treatment the total amount of
happiness may be increased, and hence utilitarianism as a system would endorse it. Also treated
unfairly are people who are in a permanent state of unhappiness. It isn’t inconceivable that
someone might have a condition that prevents them from being happy, and, although many
such people might choose to end their lives, there would probably be some who would still
choose life. A utilitarian system would take that choice away from them, and to execute them
immediately, since they will always be unhappy (negative happiness) eliminating them would
increase the total amount of happiness.∂ If such actions could be considered just it would only
be if we could somehow convince these people that abusing them on the basis of their
capacity for happiness is reasonable, which means convincing them of the validity of
utilitarianism. This may be impossible, and not just because utilitarianism advocates acting
against their interests. Consider an alien species who is rational, and has emotions, but whose
emotions don’t correspond to human emotions. While we are naturally motivated to try to be as
happy as possible these aliens are naturally motivated to bring the strength of their Zeb and Geb
emotions into balance. Could we convince these aliens that maximizing happiness is reason for
them to be treated differently? I am sure that we could make them understand that we are
motivated by happiness, and that we wish to maximize it. But they won’t see that as a good
reason to let themselves be abused, just as we don’t see another’s desire to steal as good
reason to let them steal. No, we will reply that we have interests of our own that stealing from
us hurts, and there is no good reason to favor the desire to steal over the desire to be stolen
from, and every reason to do the opposite. Similarly, the aliens will reply to us that maximizing
total happiness is also against their interests, and that they can’t see a reason to systematically
favor happiness over a balance of Zeb and Geb.∂ Moreover the aliens will wonder how
happiness, a quirk of our physiological construction, can be invoked as an objective reason to
treat people differently. Certainly our own happiness may be taken into account when we act,
but it is irrational to act on the basis of other people’s happiness because we have no direct
access to it. If someone comes up to us an tells us that they are extremely unhappy, but that a
donation of $10 can make then happy again does this supposed suffering give us a reasons to
give them money? Of course they could be lying, but they could be telling the truth as well, and
since happiness is basically internal we aren’t in much of a position to tell the difference. And
because happiness is internal there is nothing stopping us from distorting our judgments of it to
justify all kinds of biases. For example, the racist can argue that other races have a diminished
capacity for happiness, and that this justifies mistreating them to serve our own needs, and no
one can disprove him. Thus it is reasonable to insist that actions be justified by an appeal to
objectively measurable consequences that all parties can have a reason to endorse when it
comes to creating a system for everyone to live under. And maximizing happiness isn’t among
these.

Utility concerns and democratic happiness theory reify power of structures

because whites are the only ones thought of as capable to have happiness
Powell 93, Thomas Powell is a prominent American author who writes books on philosophy and
empire, “The Persistence of Racism in America,”
https://books.google.com/books?id=9IBDlUpIB2sC&pg=PA118&lpg=PA118&dq=utilitarianism+and+racis
m&source=bl&ots=-TUgXs8HJl&sig=_IONzkbuR53K8zyYpv96LvkFOys&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8PWGVevEN8jk-
AHQxoCICg&ved=0CF4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=utilitarianism%20and%20racism&f=false, NN

In the nineteenth century, as both democracy and racism took shape, utilitarian thinking
dominated the English-speaking world. The utility principle became the basis for democratic
racism. Its goal became the greatest good of the greatest number of people like me, with
habits, manners, attitudes and characteristics like mine. Romanticism accentuated differences,
categorical and individual, and glorified the self-reliance and self-assertion that capitalism had
already institutionalized. ∂ The universalist version of utilitarian thought never really captured
America's allegiance, even at the peak of Utilitarianism as presented by John Stuart Mill. The
idea of the greatest good of the greatest number seemed to require a concession that
everyone's good was equivalent to everyone else's, which Americans found difficult to make,
to say the least. But an ingenious adaptation of the principle was already available, combining
egoistic and universal utilitarianism in capitalist fashion by assuming that to serve oneself is to
serve the general welfare. After all, I can't be sure what will add to the aggregate happiness or
good of the society in a general way, but I can be sure that if I increase my own happiness and
those whose happiness contributes to mine, there ismore happiness among the greatest
number that includes me. What had social utility was what worked for the happiness of most
people; and most people were white. Cautioned most notably by James Madison in The
Federalist, especially number ten, by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, and by John
C. Calhoun in his Disquisition and Discourse, American leaders generally took measures to
prevent "tyranny of the majority." Our best political thinkers always realized that democracy in
America meant broadly implementing the will of the majority, while at the same time protecting
the rights of those who were not part of the majority. In the matter of race dispositions,
however, tyranny of the majority flourished, strengthened by capitalism, utilitarianism,
simplistic notions of democracy, and romanticism, all burgeoning in the nineteenth century,
even as scientific racism gained momentum. The divergent and conflicting interests of whites
have always determined how blacks were treated, and what rationalizations were needed to
justify that treatment. After the Civil War, as constitutional and economic conflicts were
agonizingly settled, reconciliation and reunification proceeded on the basis of tacit acceptance
of racism.3 been before the development of full-blown scientific racism late in the century, the
North generally and substantially shared Southern ideas of race. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for
example, embraced popular racist views, despite his insistence on thinking for oneself. In fact,
Emerson's special eloquence in making popular dispositions sound lofty or profound was
devastating. The chief formulator of Transcendentalism, New England's moralistic idealism, was
Theodore Parker. He wrote that Anglo-Saxons were the best of the Teutonic race, the best of
the best, endowed with an "instinct for progress." Albeit under tremendous political pressure,
Abraham Lincoln made explicitly racist statements in 1858, referring to a permanent "physical
difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races
living together on terms of social and political (Apra.," In 1861 he was prepared to sacrifice
blacks' freedom permanently if that would bring about regional reconciliation. Lincoln's views a
a, dispositions represented quite well those of most Americans in the North. He disliked slavery
and found it an embarrassment and a disgrace, particularly since emancipation in the British
Empire in 1833. However, his feelings of revulsion toward slavery did not lead him to
egalitarian acceptance of its victims. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, racism derived
respectability from legal and Populist-democratic points of view, as well as from scientific
arguments and theories of social science. It continued to derive 'righteous" feelings from the
spirit of Redemption -- redeeming the South from the claimed outrages of Reconstruction and
outside interference. Outside the South, racism gathered force from the dispositions associated
with immigration restriction, especially "Anglo-Saxonism." By the end of the century, when
white supremacists were instituting the most rigid segregation by law, scientific racism was so
pervasive that vitriolic racist views found a receptive national audience, through even the
most enlightened and liberal periodicals., As Thomas P. Bailey observed, the "Southern Way"
was close to being the "American Way." Racism was democratic in the simplest sense: it had
overwhelming popular acceptance and support. Preventing blacks from voting ensured that no
white faction or party could use them against its white opposition. Their disfranchisement was
progressive, proceeding in the name of liberalism, good government, and reform. White
solidarity, sometimes exaggerated, nonetheless underlay much of Southern Progressivism in
particular. Later, as blacks moved north Racism was democratic in the simplest sense: it had
overwhelming popular acceptance and support. Preventing blacks from voting ensured that no
white faction or party could use them against its white opposition. Their disfranchisement was
progressive, proceeding in the name of liberalism, good government, and reform. White
solidarity, sometimes exaggerated, nonetheless underlay much of Southern Progressivism in
particular. Later, as blacks moved north in large numbers, the "problem" spread, and racist
views intensified in the North (as witness events following World War One). But what underlies
such views? ∂ To use Kovel's distinction, modern and particularly non-Southern racism is much
more "aversive" than "dominative." In 1835, Tocqueville noted that ". .. the prejudice of race
appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still
exists; and nowhere is it an intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known
...." Tocqueville was noting mainly the racism of aversion, avoidance of people who were looked
down upon: the binary mind-set at work, emphasizing differences of we-they, us-them, and the
analogous good-bad. It drew support from belief in superiority of abilities, "demonstrated"
through equality of opportunity; from massive indoctrination in the ideology of capitalism;
from traditions of individual responsibility, back to Arminianism, from an understanding of
equality among equals in "virtue and talents"; from egoistic utilitarianism, from romanticism,
and from democracy. In short, racism drew support from America's most cherished values and
attitudes.
2NC – Framework
 2NC – Framework - Generic
Their framework is guilty of never challenging the structures that have led us to
this point in the first place – whiteness ensures radical change is never actually
on the table for discussion – whiteness always wants to maintain the future to
ensure domination of others
Wilderson 8, former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe,[Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 407-411] NN

The claim of balance and fair play forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the
practices of the [debate] are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more
extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that [America] itself is racist and
illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo [America]? The White people who constitute its
fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous. We. So, let’s bust. We wide
open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the
compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West
Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different
ways. You’re free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you
need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half to
drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 black folks, intimately—
and if you don’t know 12 then you’re not living in America, you’re living in White America—
knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent. Whites are
guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to
the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards,
norms, harmony between the races. Most of all, Whites are guilty of wanting stability
and reform.White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking
themselves the question, How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at
Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change,
while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible
intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or
otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand
intentions, and naming it change. These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over
which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a
diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White
people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for
having made Cabrillo a better placefor everyone. Before such hubris at high places makes us all
a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it’s scientifically impossible to manufacture
shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing
shit from shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love
their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesn’t
love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space,
your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and
Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third(possible,
but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which
reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and
everywhere a bad thing—this term is never on the table, because the level of abstraction is too
high for White liberals. They’ve got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of
life. Let’s keep it all at eye level, where Whites can keep on eye on everything. So the Black
body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find
valuable I have no use for.
 2NC – Framework is Racist
The idea that policy making can ever structurally include black bodies or change
a system of antagonisms comes from an incredibly privileged position –
conceptions of framework ignore that policy making is built upon black death
Tinson 15, Christopher M. Tinson is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at
Hampshire College, nearest date given is 2015, “Race, Justice, and the Matters of Black Lives,”
http://furmancenter.org/research/iri/tinson, NN

Mollenkopf and Swanstrom have written a thought-provoking commentary that suggests we

give patterns of metropolitan development within cities greater attention in unpacking the
significance of what they call “the Ferguson moment.” In other words, place and space matter
as much if not more than race in understanding these events. I would offer a few points that
intersect with Mollenkopf and Swanstrom’s insights and others that present a different reading
of the circumstances of Black life. Where they err is in their discounting of race as a continuing
central factor in the processes of structural suppression they highlight. I argue that anti-Black
policymaking has been the rule in American society, not an accidental or “old-fashioned”
feature, but one that is continually reshaped and which guarantees certain material outcomes
from a devaluation of difference.∂ Civil society—lawmakers and ostensibly law abiding
citizens—has historically upheld a logic that linked blackness with poverty, ghettos,
inadequate housing, and poor education. That these have become synonymous with Black life
in the U.S. has established a baseline expectation of Black social deficiency, and thus making a
notion of Black “success” exceptional. Even when African Americans effectively engage in the
electoral process, a right that many fought and died to achieve, it appears new forms of
disenfranchisement have emerged in the form of Supreme Court gutting provisions of the
Voting Rights Act and active efforts of voter suppression.[2] Not only have Black people been
forced to live on the negative side of most social indicators of wellbeing, America has shown its
ability to expand, grow, and develop with said inequity in tow.∂ As the authors point out, the city
of Ferguson has tried to make up for revenue shortfalls through fines and fees generated by
writing tickets for a variety of civil violations. The targeting of Black residents for these violations
entangles them in whole spiral of further collateral consequences--a simple traffic stop can lead
to losing a license to losing a job or worse and generally further marginalize Black residents
from civic and political participation.. However, Michael Brown was not approached and killed
over traffic violations, or for allegedly robbing a nearby store. He was killed because he was
Black and “threatening” to a white police officer wielding the power of a lethal weapon and
badge of legal authority. ∂ In analyzing the racial and class dynamics governing Ferguson, the
authors write: “Race adds to the toxic mix. Police systematically target those who look poor,
often black people, because they know they are more likely to have an outstanding warrant –
and arrest provides additional opportunities to pile on more court fees and fines.” The authors
position race as an add-on, not as the salient feature that the police observe. “Poor” describes
an economic standing, but does not always translate visually. Poor people can present
themselves in a variety of forms. By contrast, blackness is a highly visible marker, and as a result
African Americans suffer the brunt of any profiling, regardless of their actual economic position.
Although poverty is often used in economic terms, it can describe political circumstances as
well. Middle- and working class Black people across the country also experience political
impoverishment in that their rights are often suspended instead of protected.∂ In this context,
race need not be made secondary in order to observe the structural and often deadly
dimensions of inequity. Race is central to the structure of contemporary U.S. society. This
current movement for justice is rooted in a long history of racial oppression. New forms of
anti-Black structural arrangements deprioritize Black peoples’ demands for social
advancement. Government policies have supported segregation in housing and education,
two essential platforms for advancement. Rewarding residential segregation through “white
flight” and restrictive covenants, alongside white backlash to calls for racial redress, and the
consolidation of white civic identity and political power under President Reagan, also helps
explain how indifference to longstanding Black suffering and limited aspirational achievement
was institutionalized. This unfortunately has not only persisted but hardened in the decades
since the passage of historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, which were necessary but
did not go far enough.[3]∂ Rather than end with a view of the current energy emerging from
Ferguson and other epicenters as “fighting the last war,” more traction is gained when we
consider current struggles as part of the unfinished agenda of civil rights. One of the
unintended consequences of civil rights advancement was that by outlawing segregation it
signaled that those institutions and individuals who sought to uphold such practices would have
to do so with greater discretion. Ferguson draws attention to some of localized practices of
suppression that have gone unaccounted for or easily forgotten. The lessons of race and racism
are still being learned sixty years after Brown, and fifty years after Selma. This paradox – how a
society advances on some fronts while actively resisting fundamental changes on others – is one
that too few Americans are willing to admit, much less engage.∂ The Black youth-led, trans-
generational, multi-hued activism in Ferguson, New York, Oakland, California and elsewhere
under the banner “Black Lives Matter,” is not misguided, myopic, nor lacking in awareness of
the historical roots, government policies, and persistent patterns of inequity and injustice.
Enveloped in the vocalized and bodily dissent of this movement one finds deep historical
memory, keen insight into gendered forms of antiblack violence, and firm resolve to challenge
the injustices of the status quo in hopes of a liberated future.
 2NC – Permutation
Their leftist discourse utilizes blackness as means for carrying out their own
agenda -- serves to further white domination and black suffering
Taylor 13, Terrell Anderson Taylor, B.A. Master’s candidate, Thesis Advisor: Robert J. Patterson, Ph.D. March
19th, 2013, “OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE,”
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558275/Taylor_georgetown_0076M_12322.pdf?
sequence=1] NN

As Seigel notes, the juxtaposition of the massive presence of Max with the short exchange and revelation of Bigger's
newly found consciousness forces us to think through the contrast between Bigger and Max as symbolic of competing
strategies, locations, and resolutions within black politics. The fact that a wide sweeping analysis of social conditions,
the connections between Mr. Dalton's exploitation of black living conditions, the ideological message of black
inferiority, etc. comes from Max's point of view highlights Bigger’s inability to perform that type of analysis. It is a
strategy located outside of blackness. Gibson notes that Max's defense does not face the lived experience of Bigger
Thomas as an individual, but is pointed towards the fact of Bigger's situation as systemic function of society (81-82).
This is evident in Max's appeals towards preventing further unrest, avoiding the collapse of society at its foundations,
and other invocations of the consequences for the stability and existence of society. This external voice 25 concerned
with consequences external to Bigger's life is perhaps indicative of the West's invocation of black people as a problem
people. Despite the good intentions and efforts of Max, it would seem that the blackness of
Bigger matters more than the human suffering, the shared desire to avoid pain that could potentially
frame Bigger and Max as equals. A reading of this scene through the lens of afro-pessimism would suggest that
Max's position as a sympathetic and liberal white does not absolve him of Anti-blackness.
Wilderson argues that white subjects benefit from the fungibility of blackness even, and perhaps
especially, when white subjects attempt to empathize with black subjects (Red, White & Black 19).
Such attempts require imagining the suffering inherent to the experience of black subjects,
which entails two important consequences. First, imagining the black experience enables a
white project, marxist, feminist, postcolonial, or otherwise, that utilizes blackness as an arena
for executing its own agenda. When marxists explain racism by framing it as a consequence of
capitalism, the situation of blackness becomes an opportunity for challenging capitalism as opposed
to an elucidation of white supremacy, which in turn, masks the way that marxism participates in white
supremacy in the very act. Max's attempt to solve "the problem of blackness" is an appropriation
of blackness as an entity with a type of utility, not an ethical gesture towards a group of
human beings categorized as black. Second, the position of blackness offers a grammar for
white projects. In other words, the slave (or the ontological condition of blackness) becomes a metaphor
for white projects, as the aim for the marxist or white feminist is always explained using the
grammar of freedom (just as the slave wants freedom in an ontological sense, the feminist desires freedom in a
contingent sense of freedom from gendered violence, and the marxist desires freedom from capitalist exploitation)
(21-22). Both of these consequences serve to enforce the illegibility and exclusion of blackness
from civil society. As 26 blackness works to render white endeavors as both active and legible, it in turns becomes
both passive and illegible. The plight of black suffering can only be understood insofar as it can be
likened to a contingent instance of white suffering, and such comparisons only occur when articulating
them serves the interest of a white subject
Permutation re-entrenches whiteness -- renders blacks fungible and denies
basic rights
Taylor 13, Terrell Anderson Taylor, B.A. Master’s candidate, Thesis Advisor: Robert J. Patterson, Ph.D. March
19th, 2013, “OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE,”
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558275/Taylor_georgetown_0076M_12322.pdf?
sequence=1] NN

Wilderson goes through the labor of elaborating this framework of anti-blackness for two particular reasons. First,
illuminating the function of anti-blackness is necessary to reveal how deeply embedded it is in with civil society, and
to highlight the ways that Marxism and other leftist discourses are misguided in targeting capitalism and
other structures of oppression as contingent facts of civil society. Second, Wilderson's theoretical
exposition reveals the way that leftist discourses not only misunderstand racism, but also benefit
from anti-blackness. These discourses are guilty of appropriating the conditions of African
Americans for their particular causes, using the situation of black people within civil society as a
podium upon which to further their own ends, rendering black people fungible by
appropriating them for their own narratives and denying blacks the right to articulate their
own. Additionally, leftist discourses are unable to realize that using the metaphor of slavery to
make their own political demands legible eliminates the only language to speak to the
ontological condition of slavery. Because slavery is now a 7 rhetorical move used to clarify the political
demands of various groups, it makes the presence of slavery within the present unthinkable and invisible.
2NC – Alternative
 Unflinching Alt
Our alternative is to enter a constant interrogation of the black positionality to
render civil society incoherent
Wilderson, ’10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,”]
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.
 Burn it down
BURN IT DOWN YEEEEEEEEE
Farley 5, Anthony Paul is a Professor of Law at Boston College, “Perfecting Slavery,”
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp, NN

What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity,
burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred
desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to
burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of
this unknown anarchist. The slaves burned everything because everything was against them.
Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire
order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation,
everything. “Leave nothing white behind you,” said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of
white-over black. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.” The
slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. Theirs
was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of
their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century. At the dawn of
the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The colorline belts the world.” Du Bois said that
the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline. The problem, now, at
the dawn of the 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. 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 past present future timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave
at the end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under
conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely
choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer
for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The
system of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce
white-overblack, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave
through its prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave,
as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the
undiscovered country only by burning down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal
rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be. 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 calling—it alone
contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our
lives. We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are
made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the
living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The
slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to
objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is
death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is
not a calling.
 AT: You’re White
The question is not whether or not we’re trying to be white anti-racists – it’s
whether or not we acknowledge and understand our social location in the
realm of white civil society – you’re right in the fact that we will never be able
to be anti-racists but wrong in the fact that we should never combat anti-black
violence
Applebaum 5, Barbara Applebaum, associate professor and chair of cultural foundations of
education, is trained in philosophy of education. “In the name of morality: moral responsibility, whiteness
and social justice education,” http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03057240500206089, NN

In a course on schooling and diversity, the topic for the week was different meanings∂ of racism.
I asked my students, ‘Who comes to your mind when you think of white∂ people who are
complicit in sustaining racism?’ Most of my white students gave∂ examples of overtly
prejudiced people or groups – the Klu Klux Klan, the television∂ sitcom character Archie
Bunker, someone they happened to know. Significantly,∂ they mentioned anyone except
themselves. One student, however, meekly∂ responded, ‘all of us’. When challenged, this
student explained that whereas racism∂ in the past was all about organizations like the Klu Klux
Klan, Archie Bunker types∂ and Jim Crow laws, today racism is more subtle and often not seen
by those who do∂ not have to experience it.∂ This opened up a heated exchange in which I
attempted to explain the different∂ meanings of racism, accentuating what certain
understandings of social injustice∂ they make available and what they keep hidden. Rather than
being willing to engage∂ in the different meanings of racism and their implications, many of
these∂ predominantly white students were obstinately focused on denying their complicity.
They were more concerned with proving how they were good antiracist whites than∂ they
were in trying to understand how systemic oppression works and the possibility∂ that they
might have a role in sustaining such systems. In his journal, a white student∂ wrote, ‘In any
situation you cannot be held responsible for something that you did∂ not do. Even on the
smallest scale, if you don’t think that you’ve done anything∂ wrong, then you will be reluctant to
change or to try and examine the problem’.∂ In their study of how white subjects perceive civil
rights and equal opportunity,∂ Nancy Ditomaso and her colleagues (2003) attempt to
demonstrate that one of the∂ ironic characteristics of white privilege is that white people do not
have to think of∂ themselves as ‘racist’ for racial inequality to be reproduced (p. 189). The
intimated∂ irony underlying what these researchers found is not that blatant, overt racism can
be∂ implemented without the perpetrator’s awareness, but rather that the subtle but lethal∂
types of covert racism can be maintained even when whites believe themselves to be∂ part of
the solution rather than part of the problem. Indeed, it is my contention that it is∂ especially
when white people believe themselves to be good and moral antiracist citizens∂ that they may
be contributing to the perpetuation of systemic injustice.∂ Although what I will refer to as the
‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’∂ has many enabling features that ground such
values as autonomy, respect for persons∂ and equality, such a conception of moral
responsibility can also authorize denials of∂ complicity on the part of my white students. In
what follows, I first describe what I∂ mean by the ‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’.
This is not to imply that∂ any particular moral philosopher or theorist holds this view, but rather
the point is to∂ emphasize that it is a view widely assumed by my students and that aspects of
this∂ view are implied and tacitly supported in the many debates around the meaning of∂
moral responsibility taken up by moral theorists. These both enabling and∂ disenabling features
of the traditional conception of moral responsibility are evident∂ in moral theorizing about moral
responsibility, not so much in debates around what∂ it means to be a moral agent but, more
conspicuously, in discussions around the∂ criteria that make one morally accountable for
particular actions. Then I will turn to∂ three seemingly good, antiracist discourses that my
white students engage in around∂ issues of difference and inequality – the discourse of
colour-blindness, the discourse∂ of meritocracy and the discourse of choice. I argue that the
traditional conception of∂ moral responsibility authorizes these discourses and contributes to
camouflaging∂ their limitations. By giving examples of how these discourses conceal systemic∂
oppression, hinder the development of cross-racial understanding, veil the relational∂ dimension
of the social construction of race and promote a ‘race to innocence’, I∂ illustrate how such
ostensibly moral discourses work to conceal the very complicity∂ that some social justice
educators endeavour to expose.
Affirmative
 No Social Death
Wilderson ignores African diaspora and thus provides an incomplete picture of
blackness within civil society
Ba 11, Saer Maty Ba is a professor at Portsmouth university, “The US Decentred From Black Social Death
to Cultural Transformation” http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2304/2474,
NN

And yet Wilderson’s highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the ∂ ‘Diaspora’ or

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

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

Red, White and Black is particularly undermined by Wilderson’s propensity for ∂ exaggeration
and blinkeredness. In chapter nine, ‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes:∂ The philosophical
anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle ∂ Passage, African culture became Black
‘style’ ... Blackness can be placed ∂ and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold
territories, by ∂ whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people ∂ can
do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’ ∂ because anyone can be a
‘nigger’. (235)7∂ Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’, Wilderson addresses the
issue of ∂ ‘Black time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it ∂
been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other ∂ words, the
black moment and place are not right because they are ‘the ship hold of ∂ the Middle Passage’:
‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time’ but ∂ also ‘the “moment” of no time
at all on the map of no place at all’. (279)∂ Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose
this point as preposterous ∂ (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless
historians’ and ∂ sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the
Middle ∂ Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazz‐studies books on cross‐cultural dialogue like ∂
The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson ∂ theorises
blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as ∂ ‘belonging nowhere and to
no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to ∂ be no way back. It is therefore
hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to ∂ provide a solution or alternative to both his
sustained bashing of blacks and anti‐∂ Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends
like a badly plugged ∂ announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel: ‘How does
one ∂ deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle ∂ approaches
with its answers in tow.’ (340)

Blackness is not ontological but instead contingent and subject to change

Hudson 13 — Peter Hudson, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2013 (“The
state and the colonial unconscious,” Social Dynamics, Volume 39, Number 2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor &
Francis Online, p. 265-266)

Colonialism, anxiety and emancipation3 Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There
always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the
existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as it is
necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered “ontological”), its content (what fills
it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the
meaning of the signifier
of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-
determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in
ontological stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the “curvature of intersubjective space” (Critchley
2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of “otherness” are nowhere decided in
advance (as [end page 265] a certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The
social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is
never necessary – because they are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological
division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks – who are not. But this ontological relation is
really on the side of the ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than
the ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of
the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the
colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial
division. “Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the
“ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as
ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very
possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it
does not follow that the “void” of “black being” functions as the ultimate substance, the
transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost
here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its “ontological” differential. A
crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the
place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed
in the “lived experience” (vécu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is “traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) all the time;
the void of the verb “to be” is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom
the symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 “Fixed” into “non-fixity,” he is eternally
suspended between “element” and “moment”5 – he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the production of meaning and is thus
the point of entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism. Be this as it may, whitenessand blackness are
(sustained by) determinate and contingent practices of signification; the “structuring relation”
of colonialism thus itself comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can always be
undone. Anti-colonial – i.e., anti-“white” – modes of struggle are not (just) “psychic”6 but involve the “reactivation” (or “de-
sedimentation”)7 of colonial objectivity itself. No matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is
not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chap- ter 11, 771 n48),
immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same
time – because it is the presence of one object in another – undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a
differential relation is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism
that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself, reducing it to a condition of its
possibility.8

Social death is an oversimplification of the condition of blackness

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

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

Equating present conditions with slavery annihilates agency—their ontological

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

While I deploy these terms for analytic convenience, the study pivots on the desire to make dear tbe false
homogeneity of subjects that are denoted by these terms and the arbitrariness of race per se. In the same
moment that I employ these terms as critical tools of analysis, then, I hope to expose the mechanisms of their
production and mark possibilities for their rearticulation. The final portion of this study is
concerned with examining what forms of agency and resistance are possible within the context of
this binary construction of black and white identities. Guiding this analysis is the question of how individuals
struggle against subjection and how racial norms might be recited in new directions, given that the coercive demands of discipline
and performative constraints make it seem like race is an insurmountable limit or closed system. That
race operates as a
limit appears particularly so for black subjects. For despite the fact that all subjects are produced
and positioned within and by the discursive formations of race, the impact of that positioning
and what it means for experience is markedly different. Black subjects are situated within an
antiblack context where the black body/self continues to be torn asunder within the relations of civil society. This means
that, as Yancy (2008, 134 n. n) insists, " the capacity to imagine otherwise is seriously truncated by
ideological and material forces that are systematically linked to the history of white racism!'

A number of scholars have examined these realities and advanced critical accounts of what they identify as the resulting condition of
black existence. David Marriot, for instance, argues
that "the occult presence of racial slavery" continues
to haunt our political and social imagination: "nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time
which never arrives and does not stop arriving" (2007, xxi). Saidiya Hartman, in her provocative Lose Your Mother: A journey Along
the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) refers to this haunting as slavery's afterlife. She insists that we do not live with the residue or legacy
of slavery but, rather, that slavery lives on. It 'survives' (Sexton 2010, 15), through what Loic Wacquant (2002, 41) has identified as
slavery's fu nctional surrogates: Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. For Hartman, as echoed by other scholars, slavery has yet to
be undone:

Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is
the afterlife of slavery- skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and
impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6)

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

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

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

For Vincent Brown, a historian of slavery, ''violence, dislocation, and death actually generate
politics, and consequential action by the enslaved" (2009, 1239) . He warns that focusing on an
overarching condition or state potentially obscures seeing these politics. More than this, however, it
risks positioning relations of power as totalizing and transhistorical , and it risks essentializing
experience or the lived realities of individuals. 14 I scale down to the level of the subject to analyze both (a) how
subjects are formed, and (b) how subjects – black and white alike – have struggled against conditions in
ways that refuse totalizing, immutable understandings of race. This book does not seek to mark a
condition or situa tion then, but instead takes up Brown's challenge (made within the context of studies of slavery) to
pay attention to efforts to remake condition. Looking to those efforts to remake condition and identity grapples
with the microphysics of power and the practices of daily life, enacted by individuals and i11 collective politics, to consider what
people do with situations: those dynamic, innovative contestations of (a never totalizing) power. Echoing the call raised by Brown
(2009, 1239), my
work focuses then on "examining ... social and political lives rather than assuming .
. . lack
of social being" in order to think about how subjects can and have "made a social world
out of death itself" (Brown 2009, 1233) or how, more generally, race can be reconfigured within the
broader workings of what I am calling racial discipline and performative imperatives.

But in addressing the quotidian and those efforts to remake condition and identity, this study insists on a shift in
perspective in terms of how power is thought about. As I have remarked, I am not focused on biopolitics or what
can be seen as solely sovereign forms of power that are deployed to condition who will live and who will die. Instead, I am
concerned with disciplinary power, which is articulated simultaneously but at a different level to biopolitics (and despi te the
exercise of sovereign forms of power} (Foucault 2003a, 250). For Foucault, this form of power is not absolute, nor
does it exist in opposition to resistance. Rather, power is seen as always fragmentary and
incoherent, and power and resistance are seen as mutually constitutive. Disciplinary power is productive,
in that it generates particular capacities and forms of subjectivity (and, necessarily, agency). And finally, though subjects are
formed in power, they are not reducible to it, not determined by power.
[BEGIN ENDNOTE]

14. Historian Vincent Brown, in his "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery" (2009), has
examined a number
of scholars who seemingly take up such a viewpoint, in that they broadly position blackness as a totalizing state
that, historically and in the present, renders slavery synonymous with social death and blackness
as always already synonymous with slavery. Brown focuses specifically on the academic uptake
and what he sees as the problematic distillation and extension of Orlando Patterson's (1981)
concept of"slavery as social death;' where social death indicates a lack of social being. As a scholar of slavery, Brown
is most concerned with examining the limitations of this idea in relation to the enslaved, but he is also interested in how
the idea is used in relation to the present. For Brown, Patterson's "slavery as social death," and
contemporary usages of this concept to account for the present, advance a troubling
transhistorical characterization of slavery He argues in line with I-Ierman Bennett (quoted in Brown 1009, 1133),
who has observed:

As the narrative of the slave experience, soclardeath assumes a uniform African, slave, and ultimately black subject rooted in a static
New World history whose logic originated in being property and remains confined to slavery. It absorbs and renders exceptional
evidence that underscores the contingent nature of experience and consciousness. Thus, normative
assumptions about
the experiences of peoples of African descent assert a timeless, ahistorical, epiphenomenal
"black" cultural experience.
[END ENDNOTE]
 AT: Reform Links
The affirmative’s negative state action is the best process to fight against the
surveillance state – legal policies might not be perfect but they are a step in the
right direction to racial justice
Gray 15, Erin Gray is a staff writer for Mute; an online journal on racial equality and injustice, “WHEN
THE STREETS RUN RED: FOR A 21ST-CENTURY ANTI-LYNCHING MOVEMENT,”
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/when-streets-run-red-21st-century-anti-lynching-
movement, NN

If we are to mobilise a 21st-century anti-lynching movement, we must engage not only Wells’s
attention to the intersections of racial and sexual violence, but also her critiques of capital and
the state, her internationalism, the shift in focus in her later writings to the militant spirit
guiding the survival efforts of black industrial workers and sharecroppers, her advocacy of
armed self-defence, and her abolitionist analysis of the policing apparatus that captures blacks
in a racialised penal relation. [34]∂ These aspects of Wells’s praxis grew out of a black
abolitionist tradition of testifying to the fully national vagaries of white sexual domination,
political control, and the violence of the law. The women who demanded freedom before
Congress in the aftermath of their sexual brutalisation at the hands of KKKops during the
Memphis Riots of 1866 drew on this abolitionist tradition, as did the black feminist literary
tradition that emerged after Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to demand that
violence directed at individual women be placed in a larger public context and thus in relation
to the collective violence aimed at their communities. Other post-Reconstruction writers like
Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Weld Grimke, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell,
Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer similarly
emphasised the continuities between sexual attacks on black women and the lynchings of
black men through the abolitionist strategies of urgent political speechmaking, coalition-
building, and internationalism. [35]∂ Those of us fighting to realise a world in which all black
lives matter must take seriously this abolitionist framework and place it in historical
relationship to our contemporary abolitionist movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex
(PIC). [36] Prison abolitionists maintain that the US system of mass incarceration – which
includes surveillance and policing and cannot be located solely inside prisons and jails – is a
geographic solution to the social, economic, and political relations it has been designed to
contain. These relations include unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and mental
illness, and they stem in large part from the unfinished project of the nineteenth-century
movement to abolish racial slavery. They are the vestiges of the political compromises that
shaped the language of the 13th Amendment and that allowed for the recuperation of white
supremacist power after the great promise of Reconstruction.∂ The PIC is the primary weapon
that has been wielded against black life since conservatives sought to retrench the gains made
by civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s. Following the wave of riots that
erupted in urban centers in the late 1960s to challenge private property relations that promote
the under-employment and super-exploitation of black labour, as well as police brutality and
other state-backed injustices, conservatives responded by mobilising a moral panic about crime
levels that they erroneously alleged were on the rise. Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential
campaign was grounded in the rhetoric of ‘Law and Order’ that marshaled US lynching culture’s
historical suturing of criminalisation to black bodies. By individualising revolt in the image of the
black criminal, this conservative backlash sought to weaken black revolutionary consciousness
and the successful interracial alliances that black radicals were forming with Latino activists and
members of the white working class. [37] This law and order project instantiated a punishment
industry that, throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, would cut into and largely
destroy the social programs and political-educational initiatives undertaken by groups like the
Black Panther Party. [38]

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

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

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

Interpretations of whiteness/structural antagonism understands it solely as

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

Their essay has an overly tendentious tone and sometimes misreads and misinterprets our book. Still there
are many points
of agreement between the racial formation and systemic racism theories. Where we disagree
most strongly is over our respective understanding of racial politics. Feagin and Elias focus so intensely
on racism that they lose sight of the complexities of race and the variations that exist among
and within racially defined groups. In their ‘systemic racism’ account white racist rule is so
comprehensive and absolute that the political power and agency of people of colour virtually
disappear. Indeed, the ‘white racial frame’ (Feagin 2009) is so omnipotent that white racism seems to
usurp and monopolize all political space in the USA. Yes, ‘counter framing’ is present, but it
appears marginal at best, unable effectively to challenge the pervasiveness, persistence and power
of white racism. Since Feagin and Elias dismiss ideas of ‘racial democracy’ tout court, their
perspective makes it difficult to understand how anti-racist mobilization or political reform
could ever have occurred in the past or could ever take place in the future. They see racism as
so exclusively white that any notion of white anti-racism is virtually ignored and completely unexplained.

Despite Feagin and Elias's good intentions of linking their analysis to anti-racist practice, we believe their views have
quite the opposite effect: without intending to do so, they dismiss the political agency of people of
colour and of anti-racist whites. In Feagin/Elias's view, ‘systemic racism’ is like the Borg in the
Star Trek series: a hive-mind phenomenon that assimilates all it touches. As the Borg
announce in their collective audio message to intended targets, ‘Resistance is futile’.
We have a smaller space than the main essay, so we'll dispense with a point-by-point refutation of their understanding of racial
formation theory. We assume readers of Racial Formation and of our other work know that we are not closet neocons, that we
consider racism a foundational and continuous part of US history (and indeed modern world
history), that we agree that whites have been the primary creators and beneficiaries of racist
institutions and practices, and that we not only respect but also situate ourselves in the black radical tradition, especially the
Duboisian tradition. We will focus on our fundamental point of disagreement with Feagin and Elias – how we
respectively understand the very nature of racial politics in the USA.

Here we will engage Feagin and Elias on a few important questions that will highlight both where we agree and where we disagree.
Our topics are as follows:

• What is the relationship between race and racism?

• What is distinctive about our own historical epoch in the USA – from post-Second World War to the present – with respect to race
and racism?

• What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends?

We discuss these questions with the intent of clarifying racial formation theory as well as sharpening the debate with the systemic
racism perspective. We appreciate the opportunity to do so.

What is the relationship between race and racism?

In Racial Formation we suggest that the

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

In contrast to this perspective, we

consider race to be real because it is ‘real in its consequences.’1 Our
ideas about how the meaning of race is produced are basically Duboisian and Jamesian: we all make our racial
identities, though we do not make them under circumstances of our own choosing. Race and
racism do not exist merely because of white domination, but also because of resistance and
independent action: what C. L. R. James called ‘self-activity’ (James, Lee, and Castoriadis 2005 [1958], p. 99). The
process of making and remaking race – racial formation – is fundamentally political. It is about the
‘freedom dreams’ (Kelley 2002) that shape racial conflict as much as the white racism emphasized by Feagin and Elias.

As Feagin and Elias acknowledge, we

have developed a fairly detailed approach to racial politics,
centred on the constant and cumulative interaction of what we call ‘racial projects’. In our account, racial
formation proceeds through such projects, which both signify upon race (representing it,
interpreting it) and reciprocally structure social relationships (of power, inequality, solidarity,
etc.) according to race. If there is a disagreement with Feagin and Elias here, it seems to be about how
much power people of colour have in this process of race-making, this racial formation
process. In their account, the very meaning of race is overwhelmingly, if not totally, shaped by a ‘white
racial frame’. By contrast, we believe that people of colour have a lot of power in the production of
racial meanings, much more than Feagin and Elias are willing to concede.
OK, what about racism? There are points of agreement and difference between Feagin and Elias's perspective and ours. We provide
a hard-core definition and extensive discussion (Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 69–76), defining racism as
a racial project that
combines essentialist representations of race (stereotyping, xenophobia, aversion, etc.) with patterns of
domination (violence, hierarchy, super-exploitation, etc.). Racism ‘marks’ certain visible characteristics of
the human body for purposes of domination. It naturalizes and reifies these instrumental
distinctions. Racism is the product of modern history: empire and conquest, race-based
slavery, and race-based genocide have shaped the modern world; they have been met with
resistance and sometimes revolution, also race-based in crucial ways. This is where race comes from:
the drive to rule, and the imperative to resist.

Feagin and Elias think (white) racism shapes race. Although they read us quite selectively and negatively here,
they recognize that we also identify whites as the most comprehensive practitioners and by far the
greatest beneficiaries of racist practices. We agree that racism is a ferocious force, a deeply
structured-in dimension of US (and world) society. But this is apparently not enough: Feagin and Elias also
want to confine racist agency to whites and whites alone. We argue that not all racism is white, and
that people of colour can practise racism as well.

Let us look more deeply at this question. Who

is white? Beyond the question of the contingent and highly
porous boundaries of this group lies the question of whether there are any ‘positive’ dimensions
of white identity or whether it is a purely ‘negative’ quality, signifying only the absence of
‘colour’.2
Then there is the ‘white privilege’ question, which builds on Du Bois's analysis (1999, p. 700) of the ‘psychological wage’ received by
poor whites in virtue of their race. While we are in substantial agreement with the ‘privilege’ argument regarding whites’ ‘possessive
investment’ in racism (Lipsitz 1998), there are problems there too. How
do we account for white anti-racism if we
understand privilege as the source of racism? Is white anti-racism even possible, if racism is
envisioned as an economistic zero-sum game in which clear winners and losers are demarcated?

We think that raceis so profoundly a lived-in and lived-out part of both social structure and
identity that it exceeds and transcends racism – thereby allowing for resistance to racism. Race,
therefore, is more than ‘racism’; it is a fully fledged ‘social fact’

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

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

In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is
little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in
significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as
merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue
to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’
to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely
engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression.

Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a
figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to
race and racism issues, we agree. If
they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or
political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in
our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards
more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter,
imperial policies.
What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism?
Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil
rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in
different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have
increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis,
for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices;
many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It
would be easy to conclude, as
Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout
US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that
have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.
Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we
‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed
in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as
well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us.
While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll
back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to
what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape.

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

The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues,
hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights
reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under
movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms –
which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective:
oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not
absolute rule.So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial
state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories
can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of
social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways
the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the
USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially
defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation
by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands
broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the
black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other
‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.
By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far
from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe
2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’ and its variants ; indeed all these
movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even
their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with the various ‘backlash’ phenomena of the past
few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of ‘colourblindness’,
reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not possible here to
explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into
the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social movements
that are evident in US politics today.
 AT: State Link
The state has and still does messed up stuff toward black individuals – but
racism can only be solved through policy reforms – we don’t link to any of their
“state bad” arguments because we categorically agree that the state is bad, we
just have a better method of approaching that fact
Bouie 13, Jamelle Bouie is a staff writer for The American Prospect, “Making (and Dismantling)
Racism,” http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism, NN

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public
policy, with a focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of
government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand
it is a creation of explicit policy choices—the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize
Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic
tribalism. And second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy. Here is
Coates in his own words:∂ Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant
historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that
racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see racism being inscribed in
the law and the country changing as a result.∂ If we accept that racism is a creation, then we
must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must
then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin
to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy.∂
Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply:∂ I don’t believe the law created racism any more
than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound
aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or
Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary
strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs
sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNC’s
utopianism.∂ I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to
Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan
writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just
prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any
more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred."∂ But Coates is making a more precise
claim: That there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined American
history. White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave
trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made by
particular people—in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a
stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred
years. By enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance
for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy
the ideology of America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued
enslavement—blacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves.∂ Slavery (and later, Jim
Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in
the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black
people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use
the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for
suburbs.∂ In other words, create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging
in socially sanctioned behavior—owning a home, getting married—and then blame them for
the adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to conservative
critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for
The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas:∂ Gay men--not because they're gay but because
they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more
partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they
could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more
than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not
true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships,
for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to
engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But
with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in
gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added]∂ What else is this but a
variation on Coates' core argument, that society can create stigmas by using law to force
particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it
almost certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to recognize their
humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and
desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too
degenerate to participate in this institution."∂ If the prohibition against gay marriage helped
create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting it—as we've seen over the last decade—has helped
destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way.
 AT: Surveillance Link
Surveillance destroys black insurgency – only the aff provides a system where
blackness can survive – proves the perm solves
McAdam 10, Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author or co-
author of over a dozen books and over fifty articles, and is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the
political process model in social movement analysis. “Political Process and the Development of Black
Insurgency, 1930-1970,” NN

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

organizations or leaders occurred prior to the period under examination here. Perhaps the most
infamous of these early in-stances was the FBI's use of electronic surveillance to obtain
information on the alleged sexual improprieties of Martin Luther King, Jr., for the purpose of
dissemination to the press (Marx, 1976: 5). However, the pace of such efforts increased
markedly during the late 1960s in the face of the escalating rhetorical militance of certain
insurgent leaders. Indeed, from a tactical standpoint, many of these leaders can be criticized
for pursuing what Gamaon describes as the "strategy of speaking loudly and carrying a small
stick" (1975: 87). That is, many insurgent groups aggressively advocated the use of violence
without ever practicing it systematically. As Gamson points out, this strategy makes little tactical
sense given the social control costs that the open advocacy of violence is likely to entail. Groups
that pursue this strategy, "seem to pay the cost of violence without gaining the benefits of
employing it. They are both threatening and weak, and their repression becomes a low-cost
strategy for those whom they attempt to displace" (Gamson, 1975: 87). Certainly this
description can be accurately applied to a number of black-power groups active during the late
1960s. Perhaps the most cele-brated of these was the Black Panther party founded in Oakland in
Oc-tober, 1966. The Panthers were subjected to a wide array of official control efforts ranging
from infiltration, to harassment through arrests for minor offenses, to efforts to involve them
in violent encounters with other black- power groups, to violent confrontations with law
enforcement personnel (Goldstein, 1978: 523-30; Major, 1971). Some idea of the extensiveness
of these control efforts can be gained by reading Major (1971), who pre-sents a selective
compilation of acts of official repression directed against the Panthers between 1966 and 1970.
Though unique in the extent of official attention they received, the Pan-thers were by no means
the only insurgent group subjected to government-initiated control activities. Several other
examples will help illustrate the pervasiveness of such efforts: —In Cleveland, three members of
a black nationalist group died in a 1968 shoot-out with police triggered by an unsubstantiated
report by an FBI informant that the group, the Black Nationalists of New Libya, were stockpiling
weapons to carry out an assassination plot against moderate black leaders (Masotti and Corsi,
1969). —FBI officials planted a series of derogatory articles in papers during the SCLC-sponsored
Poor Peoples Campaign in 1968 as a means of discrediting it (Marx, 1976: 5). —Police raided the
Los Angeles office of SNCC on April 5, 1968, while chapter members were attending a memorial
service for Martin Luther King (Major, 1971: 297). —In his study of a local black-power group,
Helmreich reports count- less instances of official violence, harassment, and intimidafion
directed at the organization's leadership. In the most flagrant incident, two lead-ers were
arrested on a charge of faulty brake lights, taken to the police station, and beaten severely
(Helmreich, 1973: 120-21). —No fewer than twenty-four known black insurgent groups were
sub-jected to tax surveillance as part of a larger effort to use the IRS to harass "extremist"
groups of varying (though primarily leftist) Political philosophies (U.S. Congress, Senate Select
Committee, vol. 3, 1975: 50-52). Such instances could be multiplied indefinitely without adding
appre-ciably to our understanding of the phenomenon. Suffice to say, in the late 1960s law
enforcement officials at all levels of govemment responded to what they perceived to be the
growing threat posed by insurgents by initiating a stepped-up campaign of repression
designed to destroy the black-power wing of the movement. This campaign served to diminish
the ongoing prospects for black insurgency in a number of important ways. Al the most basic
level, stepped-up control efforts increased sig-nificantly the risks associated with movement
participation. Accordingly, the recruitment of new members grew especially difficult as
repression against insurgents intensified in the period from 1968 to 1970. lust as damaging to
the movement were the programmatic constraints insurgents had to endure as a result of their
increasingly antagonistic encounters with government officials. The escalating conflict forced
black-power groups to assume a defensive stance that transformed the sub- Massive thrust of
their programs from community organizing to efforts aimed at preserving and defending the
organization against external threats. Quite apart from the substantive impotence embodied in
this transformation, this shift also reduced the ability of insurgents to with. stand repression by
undermining their support within, and ties to, the larger black community (Helmreich, 1973:
147). Official repression also imposed extraordinary financial burdens on in-surgents that
further diminished their capacity to act. Indeed, as Ober-schen perceptively notes, the
precipitation of financial cysis may well have been the real motive underlying the federal
government's aggressive prosecution of movement activists in the late 19604 "the
government's strategy appeared to be to tie down leaders M costly and time consuming legal
battles which would impede their activities and put a tremendous drain on financial resources
regardless of whether the government would be successful in court" 11978: 277-78). On the
local level, as Helmreich notes in his study of a particular black power group, law enforcement
officials achieved much the same results through constant harassment of insurgents: "raising
bail money was a constant problem for the organi. zation. This drained their financial resources
to the point where they bad tremendous difficulty in even surviving as a group, not to mention
ex-panding their activities within the community" (1973: 147-48). Finally, it would be hard 10
overestimate the divisive internal effect that increased government surveillance had on
insurgents. Fear of informers was sufficient in many cases to generate the climate of suspicion
and distrust needed to precipitate =iota internal problems. And where fear itself failed to
produce the desired results, social control agents could be counted on to stir up dissension. As
one example, Gary Marx cites a 1970 memo in which "FBI agents were instructed to plant in the
hands of Panthers phony documents (on FBI stationery) that would lead them to suspect one
another of being police informers" (1974: 435). He concludes, "Sociologists who have often
observed the bickering and conflict among sectarian protest groups holding the same goals, and
their ever-present problems of unity, most ask what role 'counterintelligence' activities may be
playing" (Marx, 074: 436).
Mass surveillance uniquely harms people of color -- warrant
Malkia Amala Cyril, March 30, 2015, Malkia Amala Cyril is founder and executive director of
the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a
national network of 175 organizations working to ensure media access, rights, and
representation for marginalized communities. - See more at:
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-
surveillance#sthash.6HGGP9oF.dpuf, “Black America's State of Surveillance,”
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance JJ

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

Instead of
about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice.

reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls
the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police
practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate
more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment.
In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken Windows.” This approach
to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling loose cigarettes, the
kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability,
transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—indiscriminate
data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies
increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in
on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and
groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated
technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the
Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color
and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric
scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by
local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and
dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based
on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues,
remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray
technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and
sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and
identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather
information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is
true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct
routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are
considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers,
and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency
collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm
of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are
currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used
“suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior
reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal
activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-
Verify and Prism . As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to
racial and religious profiling—it relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet
approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me.
Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the

The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and
invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts.

electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to
FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat
“mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as
“a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be
destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local
law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling
against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all
Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the
United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and
the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are
therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According
to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States,
more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over
black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More
black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest
some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that
black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the
same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the
detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already
spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly
adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made
invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context
of structural racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, it’s a sexier read. To
me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to
reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain,
reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the
technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin
Luther King Jr. once said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”
Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an
incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for
black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed
right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the
Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural
racism in the twenty-first century. We can help black lives matter by ensuring that technology
is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail . Our

communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can
change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that ain’t been heard yet. Let’s birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century create equity and justice for
all—so all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more. - See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance#sthash.6HGGP9oF.dpuf
 AT: Time/Death Link
Ignorance of the inevitability of the future means we never create pragmatic
change – their rejection of systems of temporality dooms us to nihilism
WFS 2 — World Future Society, nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization
founded in 1966, 2002 (“A brief overview of the study of the future and the services of the
World Future Society,” Available Online at http://www.wfs.org/ownermanual.htm, Accessed 04-
10-2007)

To meet the challenges of the future, we need to find out about what we can plausibly expect
in the years ahead so we can understand what our options are. We can then set reasonable
goals and develop effective strategies for achieving them.∂ Many people believe it is impossible
to know anything about the future, so the future can simply be ignored. This is a very serious
mistake. It's true, of course, that we can know only a little about the future, but that little is
extremely important, because a knowledge of the future—even when it's very uncertain—is
critical in making wise decisions, in both our professional and personal lives.∂ Learning what we
can know about the future enables us to think constructively about it and do things that will
contribute to our achieving a desirable future, because preparation is needed to meet the
challenges of the future and take advantage of the new opportunities opening up.∂ We
humans really do have the ability to think constructively about the future, anticipate many
future events, envision desirable goals, and develop effective strategies for realizing our
purposes. By learning about current trends and likely future developments, we can develop a
mental data bank and set of blueprints for improving our future life. These assets can help us to
succeed in whatever we seek to achieve.∂ Proactive, future-oriented thinking can lead to greater
success in both work and private affairs. The future will happen, no matter what we do, but if
we want it to be a good future, we need to work at it. As Adlai Stevenson put it, "Change is
inevitable; change for the better is a full-time job."

Hope is what gives value to life – they might be right that the present creates
violence against marked bodies but never imagining a world in which these
bodies can survive is a tactic of white supremacy
Unger 7 — Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University,
2007 (The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, Published by Harvard University Press, ISBN
0674023544, p. 151)

The hope held out by the thesis that we can change our relation to our contexts will remain
hollow unless we can change this relation in biographical as well as in historical time,
independent of the fate of all collective projects of transformation. It will be hollow as well
unless that change will give us other people and the world itself more fully. That the hope is
not hollow in any such sense represents part of the thesis implicit in the idea of futurity: to
live for the future is to live in the present as a being not fully determined by the present
settings of organized life and thought and therefore more capable of openness to the other
person, to the surprising experience, and to the entire phenomenal world of time and change. It
is in this way that we can embrace the joy of life in the moment as both a revelation and a
prophecy rather than discounting it as a trick that nature plays on spirit the better to reconcile
us to our haplessness and our ignorance.∂ The chief teaching of this book is that we become
more godlike to live, not that we live to become more godlike. The reward of our striving is
not arousal to a greater life later; it is arousal to a greater life now, a raising up confirmed by
our opening up to the other and to the new. A simple way to grasp the point of my whole
argument, from the vantage point of this its middle and its center, is to say that it explores a
world of ideas about nature, society, personality, and mind within which this teaching makes
sense and has authority.
 AT: Islamophobia Link
Anti-black violence is just a factor of anti-brown violence – their bracketing off
of Muslim Americans is a tactic of white supremacy
Bowie 8, Niko Bowie is a staff writer for Yale Daily knews as well as CBS, “Column: Has Anti-black
Racism Been Replaced By Islamophobia?,” http://www.cbsnews.com/news/column-has-anti-black-
racism-been-replaced-by-islamophobia/, NN

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

took issue with the anti-Muslim sentiments that have been rampant through the campaign.
These are the kinds of images going out on Al Jazeera that are killing us around the world,
Powell said. And we have got to say to the world it doesnt make any difference who you are and
what you are. If youre an American, youre an American. ∂ Regardless of whether anti-Muslim
fears among the electorate have influenced votes, the next president will need to face the
reality that racism may not be dying in America, but instead just taking on a different color. As
far as I know neither candidate in this race is Muslim, but that should not stop either one of
them from condemning this new form of racism head-on.
 Framework
Meaningful dialogue about what actions the government should take
overcomes the conversational impasse and paves the way for material racial
change. Disavowing the policy consequences of one’s ideological positions
makes things worse, not better.
Bracey 6 — Christopher A. Bracey, Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of African & African American Studies at
Washington University in St. Louis, holds a B.S. from the University of North Carolina and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, 2006 (“The
Cul De Sac of Race Preference Discourse,” Southern California Law Review (79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231), September, Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)

IV. A Foundation for Renewed Racial Dialogue A deepened appreciation and open acknowledgment of this pedigree is crucial to
restoring public conversation on race preferences. Opponents of race preferences must come to understand that this pedigree, if
left unaddressed, tends to overwhelm the underlying merit of arguments against race preferences in the eyes of proponents. At the
same time, proponents should understand that the deployment of these pedigreed rhetorical themes does not necessarily signal
agreement with the nineteenth-century racial norms from which they are sourced. For both proponents and opponents, the
avoidance of a rapid retreat into ideological trench warfare not only preserves space for
reasoned, substantive debate regarding race preferences, but also allows for the possibility of overcoming
our collective fixation on race preferences as the issue in American race relations and advancing the conversation to
reach the larger issue of producing a more racially inclusive society. Our failing public
conversation on race matters not only presents a particularly tragic moment in American race
relations, but also evinces a greater failure of democracy. Sustained, meaningful dialogue is a
critical, if not indispensable feature of our liberal democracy. n260 It is through [*1312]
meaningful public conversation about what actions government should take (or refrain from
taking) that public policy determinations ultimately gain legitimacy. Conversation is
particularly important in our democracy, given the profoundly diverse and often contradictory
cultural and political traditions that are the sine qua non of American life. Under these
particular circumstances, "persons ought to strive to engage in a mutual process of critical
interaction, because if they do not, no uncoerced common understanding can possibly be
attained." n261 Sincere deliberation, in its broadest idealized form, ensures that a broad array of input is heard and considered,
legitimizing the resulting decision. Under this view, "if the preferences that determine the results of democratic procedures are
unreflective or ignorant, then they lose their claim to political authority over us." n262 In the absence of self-conscious, reflective
dialogue, "democracy loses its capacity to generate legitimate political power." n263 In
addition to legitimizing the
exercise of state authority in a liberal democracy, dialogue works to promote individual
freedom. The power to hash over our alternatives is an important exercise of human agency.
n264 If democracy is taken to mean rule by the people themselves, then conversation and
deliberation are the principal means through which we declare and assert the power to shape
our own belief systems. The roots of this idea of dialogue as freedom-promoting are traceable to the Kantian view that
individual motivation that is either uncriticized or uncontested can be understood on a deeper level as a mode of subjugation. As
Frank Michelman explains, "in Kantian terms we are free only insofar as we are self-governing, directing our actions in accordance
with law-like reasons [*1313] that we adopt for ourselves, as proper to ourselves, upon conscious, critical reflection on our identities
(or natures) and social situations." n265 Because "self-cognition and ensuing self-legislation must, to a like extent, be socially
situated," Michelman continues, "norms must be formed through public dialogue and expressed as public law." n266 In this way,
dialogue as democratic modus operandi can be understood both as a material expression of
freedom and as a mechanism to promote individual freedom. Robust dialogue on public policy
matters also promotes the individual growth of the dialogue participants. Conversation helps
people become more knowledgeable and hold better developed opinions because "opinions
can be tested and enlarged only where there is a genuine encounter with differing opinions."
n267 Moreover, meaningful conversation serves to broaden people's moral perspectives to include matters of public good, because
appeals to the public good are often the most persuasive arguments available in public deliberation. n268 Indeed, even if people are
thinking self-interested thoughts while making public good arguments, cognitive dissonance will create an incentive for such
individuals to reconcile their self interest with the public good. n269 At the same time, because
political dialogue is a
material manifestation of democracy in action, it promotes a feeling of democratic community
and instills in the people a will for political action to advance reasoned public policy in the
spirit of promoting the public good. n270 For these reasons, the collective aspiration of those
interested in pursing serious, sustained, and policy-legitimating dialogue on race matters must
be to cultivate a reasoned discourse that is relatively free of retrograde ideological baggage
that feeds skepticism, engenders distrust, and effectively forecloses constructive conversation
on the most corrosive and divisive issue in American history and contemporary life. As the forgoing
sections suggest, the continued reliance upon pedigreed rhetorical themes has and continues to poison racial legal discourse. Given
the various normative and ideological commitments that might be ascribed to [*1314] opponents of race preferences, the question
thus becomes, how are we to approach the task of breaking through the conversational impasse and creating intellectual space for
meaningful discourse on this issue? One can imagine at least three responses to this question. As an initial matter, one might
subscribe to the view that pedigree is not destiny, and thus conclude that the family resemblance tells us little, if anything, definitive
about the normative commitments of today's opponents of race preferences. Consider the argument that the benefits of white
privilege do not extend equally among all whites, and that policies that treat all whites as equally guilty of racial subordination
advance a theory of undesirable rough justice. n271 Although this argument is a staple of modern opponents of race preferences, it
would be a mistake to conclude that it can only be deployed by those persons who normatively oppose race preferences. Indeed,
one might very well support race preferences, but believe quite strongly that such programs should be particularly sensitive to
individual candidate qualifications. Similarly, although one might believe that diversity does not comport with merit based
decisionmaking in education and employment, it would be incorrect to interpret this belief as necessarily indicative of a greater
commitment to preserving status quo racial inequality. One might reject the diversity rational as insufficient to justify a system of
race preferences that one strongly believes must be justified. In short, one may be inclined to simply engage the argument and
ignore the possibility of retrograde normative underpinnings. Interestingly, a small cadre of scholars has adopted this approach.
Derrick Bok and William Bowen, in The Shape of the River, investigated whether racial minorities feel stigmatized or otherwise
adversely affected as a result of being denoted beneficiaries of affirmative action policy in college admissions. n272 Thomas Ross has
critically examined claims of collective white innocence. n273 More recently, Goodwin Lui has researched the scope of the burden
that affirmative action in college admissions imposes upon aspiring white students. n274 In each instance, these scholars chose to
place to one side their skepticism about the normative commitments of those advancing the viewpoint, and launch directly into
substantive critiques of that viewpoint. [*1315] This approach, however, may prove unsatisfactory for those more strongly
committed to racial justice - those for whom it is not enough to simply challenge ideas in the abstract. As the late Robert Cover
famously wrote, "legal interpretation takes place within a field of pain and death." n275 By this, he meant that the stakes of legal
discourse are elevated when bodies are on the line. A vigorous critique of the substantive position alone leaves the normative
underpinnings - the motivational force behind the proposal - dangerously intact. It may stymie the particular vehicle that attempts
to reinforce racial subordination, but it leaves unaddressed the fundamental motive driving policy positions that seek to undermine
racial minorities in the first place. At the other end of the responsive spectrum is wholesale rejection. One might view the
pedigree as providing good reason to dismiss opponents of race entirely. Proponents of this view may choose to indulge fully this
liberal skepticism and simply reject the message along with the messenger. n276 The tradition of legal discourse on American race
relations [*1316] has been one steeped in racial animus and characterized by circumlocution, evasiveness, reluctance and denial.
When opponents avail themselves of rhetorical strategies used by nineteenth-century legal elites, they necessarily invoke the
specter of this tragic racial past. Moreover, their continued reliance upon pedigreed rhetoric to justify a system that only modestly
responds to persistent racial disparities in the material lives of racial minorities suggests a deep, unarticulated normative
commitment to preserving the racial status quo in which whites remain comfortably above blacks. The steadfast reliance upon
pedigreed rhetoric, coupled with the apparent disconnect between claims of racial egalitarianism and material conditions of racial
subordination as a result of persistent racial disparities, spoils the credibility of modern opponents of race preferences and creates
an incentive for proponents to dismiss them without serious interrogation, consideration, and weighing of the arguments they
advance. The principal deficit of this approach is that it would
serve only to concretize the existing
conversational impasse and subvert the larger aspiration of seeking constructive solutions to
pressing racial issues. It creates an incentive to view race matters in purely ideological terms
and further subverts the possibility of reasoned policy debate. Speaking of race matters in
purely ideological terms poses a serious impediment to racial conversation because, in advancing
one's position, one essentially argues that a particular set of circumstances demands a particular outcome. In this [*1317] way,
purely ideological race rhetoric functions much like philosopher Immanuel Kant described in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals. n277 According to Kant, a moral imperative is categorical insofar as it is presented as objectively necessary, without
reference to some purpose or outcome. The imperative is the end in and of itself. As Kant explained, the moral imperative "has to do
not with the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form and the principle from which the action itself
follows; and the essentially [sic] good in the action consists in the disposition, let the result be what it may." n278 Because the moral
imperative embodies that which is morally good, it necessarily makes a claim about justice. In short, an act is deemed morally just to
the extent that it retains fidelity to the moral imperative. By
contrast, a policy argument reflects a set of
choices or priorities and asserts a claim about the impact of a particular set of decisions upon
the world. n279 A policy argument does not embody a claim to justice. Indeed, the correctness of a policy choice is often tested
against the backdrop of some agreed upon conception of justice. As the late Jerome Culp, Jr. explained: Neither side of a moral
debate is likely to be persuaded by proof that the policy claims support or discredit their moral positions. Policy arguments can be
disproved by empirical evidence and challenged by showing in some situations the policy does not work or has contrary results. To
refute a moral claim, however, first requires some agreement on the moral framework. Only then can one discuss whether the
moral policy advocated conforms to the agreed-upon framework. n280 Speaking about race matters in purely ideological or moral
terms creates the impression that a particular racial policy is rooted in some theory of what is morally just. In this way, opposition to
race preferences is made to appear "above the fray" of politics and less susceptible to public choice debate. In addition, it enables
opponents to claim that race [*1318] preferences merely reflect the political whims of its proponents, unanchored by principle or a
coherent theory of social justice. Second, reducing
conversation on race matters to an ideological contest
allows opponents to elide inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy are
desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances create the
impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available alternatives, but the
embodiment of some higher moral principle. Thus, the "principle" becomes an end in itself,
without reference to outcomes. Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse.
Colorblindness has come to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives
of racial minorities. This explains Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and
race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize, respect, and protect us
as equal before the law." n281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial
subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression. Critics may point out that colorblindness in practice has the
effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in
framing the debate in purely
ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious issue of outcomes and make
viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially progressive measures exude
fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by
ideological exchange, which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of
resentment. n282

Reformation is a prerequisite to revolution—focus on instantaneous individual

action/rhetoric results in wide spread backlash, failed organization, and re-
entrenchment of right-wing domination. Building alliances are necessary
Saul ALINSKY, community organizer and writer, 1971 [Rules for Radicals, p. xix-xxiii (Gender Modified – Sigalos)]

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the
world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire 'to change it into what we believe it should be-it is necessary to begin
where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means
working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what
people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-
challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so
frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to
let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring
on this reformation re-[END PAGE XIX] quires that the organizer work inside the system, among not
only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families-more than seventy million people-whose
incomes range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue
collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate
with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right .
Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default. Our youth are impatient with the
preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the
desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation
rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in play writing; the first act introduces the characters and the plot, in
the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience's attention. In the final act good and
evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third
act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for
confrontation's sake-a flare-up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is
tedious, but that's the way the game is played-if you want to play and not just yell, "Kill the
umpire." What is the alternative to working "inside" the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage
about "Burn the system down!" Yippie yells of "Do it!" or "Do your thing." What else? Bombs?
Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of "murdering fascist pigs" when others are
killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide? "Power comes out of the barrel of a
gun!" is an absurd rallying cry [END PAGE XX] when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a
pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood
for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns! Militant
mouthings? Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our
highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear- powered, mass media society as a
stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport? Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget
that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration,
attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government
harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to
organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the
Red Guard to the "cultural revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes
of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a
sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some
perspective.We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except
political lunacy. It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be
preceded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the
supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics. Men [and
women] don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from
their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer [END PAGE XXI] must shake up the prevailing
patterns of their lives- agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to
produce, .if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. "The Revolution was 'effected before
the war commenced," John Adams wrote. "The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people…This radical change in the
principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution." A revolution
without a
prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that
masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They
don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating,
frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The
time is then ripe for revolution. Those who, for whatever combination of reasons, encourage the opposite
of reformation, become the unwitting allies of the far political right. Parts of the far left have
gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right. It reminds
me of the days when Hitler, new on the scene, was excused for his actions by "humanitarians" on the grounds of a paternal rejection
and childhood trauma. When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the
Marin County Courthouse kidnapping and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as "revolutionary acts," then we
are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask. The
masses of people recoil with
horror and say, "Our way is bad and we were willing to let it change, but certainly not for this
murderous madness-no matter [END PAGE XXII] how bad things are now, they are better than
that." So they begin to turn back. They regress into acceptance of a coming massive repression
in the name of "law and order."

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

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

"Critique," however, never built anything, and liberalism, for all its shortcomings, is at least

constructive. It provides broadly-accepted, reasonably well-defined principles to which political advocates

may appeal in ways that transcend sheer power, with at least some hope of incremental
success:26' Critical race theory would "deconstruct" this imperfect tradition, but offers nothing in its
place.¶ An apt example of how unconstructive CRT is can be found in its approach to equality. To the extent that race-crits discuss "equality" at all, they do so less to
advance tangible goals than to disparage liberalism's different approaches, including the ultimate goal of a society where race does not matter. 265 The race-crits are
particularly hostile to the liberal ideal of "color blindness," expressed most eloquently by Martin Luther King's dream that his children "will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."266 To the race-crits, this integrationist goal of color-blind constitutionalism is not just naive or
preinature. 2"7 In Neil Gotanda's words, it "supports the supremacy of white interests and must therefore be regarded as racist." !08 Unlike King, who saw affirmative action as
a color-conscious means to a more inclusive, integrated nation ,"9 race-crits consider affirmative action an end in itself, more akin to an award of permanent damages than

Critical
transitional assistance:270 To the race-crits, any doctrine that gets in the way of that end, including egalitarian colorblindness, is ipso facto "racist." 271¶ <cont>¶

race theory's failure to address the difficulties of administering a reparations-based, "equality of result!'
system leaves one with the impression that either they really are not. serious, or their invocation of "equality" is little more than an
assertion of group interests. Indeed, the more pessimistic race-crits, like Derrick Bell, would be happiest if social reformers jettisoned

the goal of "equality" altogether, because that goal "merely perpetuates our
disempowerment."291 Illegal doctrine is to be judged solely by how it advances the interest of racial minorities, the race-crits implicitly dismiss any vision of
equality that could aid other disadvantaged groups, or that could treat disadvantaged members of the racial majority with equal concern and respect.29' To the race-crits, the
proper inquiry is not how the law lives up to aspirations or principles, but how it serves the interests of a constituen cy.297¶ In this respect, the race-crits are more political

legal
advocates than legal scholars.2"8 There is, of course, nothing wrong with being an advocate, and disadvantaged people certainly need advocates. But

theories—the principles and ideas that guide the determination of legal outcomes—must transcend mere factional interests if
they are to aid minorities. They must win the majority's acquiescence, if not its active support. So far, race-
crits have not provided such a theory. CRT is only "scholarly resistance" that lives within, and
indeed depends upon, the liberal legal order . 2"" Without liberalism to "critique," critical race

theory would have little meaning. In the end, critical race theory could no more supplant liberalism
than the mission statement of a political action committee could replace the Constitution.

The status of modern blacks is profoundly different from that of slaves- even if
some famous cases have had little impact on the status of blacks their authors
ignore a multiplicity of minor changes that prove state action is a useful tool for
improving civil society
Driver, 11- Justin is an Assistant Professor, University of Texas School of Law. In 2004, he graduated from Harvard Law School,
where he was an Articles Editor and Book Reviews Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Driver served as a law clerk to Judge Merrick B.
Garland, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (ret.) and Justice
Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court of the United States. His principal research interests include constitutional law, constitutional
theory, and the intersection of race with legal institutions.(“Rethinking the Interest-Convergence Thesis”, 105 Northwestern
University Law Review 149, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v105/n1/149/LR105n1Driver.pdf)
B. Consistency and Inconsistency of Racial Status The interest-convergence theory holds that, because black
people re- ceive relief from racial oppression only when it suits the interests of the white
establishment, the status of blacks and the status of whites remained relatively constant
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century-and perhaps even throughout the nation's
entire history. According to Professor Bell, as discussed above,119 the interest-convergence theory at work throughout United
States history links contemporary racial developments to the unvamished racism of seemingly bygone eras. This
misperception- that the status of blacks and whites has been characterized by continuity ra- ther
than change during the last several decades-erroneously minimizes one of the leading
transformations of American society during that time. One need not believe that racism has
been completely vanquished or that there is no longer any advantage associated with whiteness
to acknowledge that the status of both racial groups has experienced profound transforma-
tions since World War ll. I . Status of Blacks.-Professor Bell has long asserted that the inter- est-convergence theory reveals how
contemporary blacks have a good deal in common with their enslaved ancestors: "The difference in the condition of slaves in one of
the gradual emancipation states and black people today is more of degree than of kind.'''''' Under this view,
the fall of Jim
Crow was largely a formality, as conditions for African-Americans in the modern era retain an
eerie similarity to the days of yore. Even though signs indicat- ing separate water fountains for blacks and whites have
long since disap- peared, Professor Bell asserts that "contemporary color barriers are less visible but
neither less real nor less oppressive.""' While it may seem that to state this point is to refute it, arguments as- serting
an absence of genuine racial change for contemporary black citizens are surprisingly widespread. Indeed, in the face of the
overwhelming evi- dence of the tremendous strides that the United States has made with re- spect to race relations since World War
II,''' the notion that conditions have improved for blacks only on the margins enjoys prominent support both in the legal academy"'
and in the larger culture.'3' Accordingly, it is necessary to observe that the racial existence of blacks in
modern America would be unrecognizable, and perhaps even unfathomable, to their enslaved
forefa- thers. Contending that the existence of blacks today can be analogized to people who
were literally (not metaphorically) denied their freedom or to people who had their liberty
thoroughly circumscribed by Jim Crow mini- mizes the suffering of individuals who endured the
yoke of unrelenting ra- cial oppression. While the goal of racial equality has certainly not yet been fully rea- lized, the
racial progress that has been made over the generations has dra- matically elevated the racial status of blacks. Examples
abound of racial progress for blacks in their everyday lives.'" To appreciate the genuine ra- cial
progress that has been made, it is necessary merely to recall the Su- preme Court's statements
in notorious cases openly acknowledging and affirming the inferior social status of blacks. In
Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Taney's opinion stated that, in the eyes of the Framers,
blacks "had for more tha[n] a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and
altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations."l26 In
Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court made the then-unremarkable point that a black man "is not
lawfully entitled to the reputa-tion of being a white man."'27 Not only would such arguments no
longer appear in the U.S. Reports but they would no longer be uttered in polite company. The
significance of that change cannot be underestimated. The Supreme Court has, moreover, played at
least some role in closing the gap between the status of blacks and the status of whites. While
many Supreme Court cases involving race received a great deal of attention be-cause they
seemed dramatic, it is perhaps most helpful here to remember a case that affected the
quotidian. Not long ago, black people were typically denied the honor of being addressed
formally, even in formal settings. Among the list of racial slights that Martin Luther King Jr. listed in his
Let-ter from Birmingham City Jail as justifying his civil disobedience was the refusal of white
people to accord blacks the respect of using formal titles: I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the
stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown
your sisters and brothers at whim; ... when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy"... and when
your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs." ... then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.'28 One
year after King wrote his celebrated letter, the Supreme Court decided Hamilton v. Alabama.'29
In that case, the Supreme Court reversed the con-tempt conviction of a black woman who
refused to answer questions ad-dressed to "Mary" as opposed to "Miss Hamilton." Hamilton thus
offers a prime instance of the judiciary refusing to permit black citizens to be treated with diminished status before the law. And in
so doing, Hamilton represents a sharp break from the past in a way that is at once simple and
profound.
 Alt Fails
Revolutionary black resistance generates backlash from the right and the left—
it materially reverses efforts towards racial justice
Shelby 07 – Tommie Shelby is the Professor of African and African American Studies and of
Philosophy at Harvard University. (“We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black
Solidarity”)

Even if it were possible to effectively mobilize a multicorporatist Black Power program

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

Discussion alone fails—demands upon the state can change the way it functions
Sharpton 13 – Al Sharpton. (“We Need More Than Just a Conversation on Race; We Need
Legislative Action,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-al-sharpton/we-need-more-than-just-
a-_b_3636142.html?utm_hp_ref=black-voices, July 22, 2013)

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