Anti-Blackness Kritik UTNIF

2015
Anti-Blackness Kritik UTNIF 2015...............................................................................1
Notes............................................................................................................................................ 6
1NC..................................................................................................................................................8
1NC Generic.............................................................................................................................9
1NC Shell-Policy................................................................................................................16
Generic Links.........................................................................................................................44
Surveillance Links.............................................................................................................45
Legalism...............................................................................................................................50
State......................................................................................................................................54
Reformism...........................................................................................................................63
White Privelege/Surveillance Management............................................................69
Dissent Politics...................................................................................................................72
Liberalism Link...................................................................................................................74
Silence Link.........................................................................................................................77
Otherness Link...................................................................................................................78
Natal Alienation.................................................................................................................80
Social Death.......................................................................................................................84
Empathetic Identification..............................................................................................88
Intersectionality/Multiculturalism Link..................................................................................89
War Back Home.................................................................................................................92
General Dishonor....................................................................................................................93
View from No Where..............................................................................................................94
Aff Specific Links..................................................................................................................96
Anxiety Links......................................................................................................................97
Border Security/Drone Link.........................................................................................100
Bitcoin Links.....................................................................................................................104
Biometric Technologies.................................................................................................108
Becoming/Deleuze Links..............................................................................................113
Bulk Data Collection......................................................................................................121
Brave New Economy/Marxism/Cap Link............................................................124
Drones.................................................................................................................................126
Faciality..............................................................................................................................132
XO Links.............................................................................................................................135
Foucault/Biopower Links..............................................................................................138
Necropolitics.........................................................................................................................148
Welfare Links....................................................................................................................149
Citizenship.........................................................................................................................155

Civil Liberties....................................................................................................................157
Criminality Links.............................................................................................................158
Death Links.......................................................................................................................160
Double Conscious/Dubois............................................................................................162
Queerness.........................................................................................................................170
Migrants.............................................................................................................................173
Heidegger..........................................................................................................................176
Humanization...................................................................................................................183
Public-Private Distinctions...........................................................................................185
Affect/Cultural Expression...........................................................................................186
Spectactular Violence...................................................................................................188
Settler Discourse............................................................................................................191
Sociolgical.............................................................................................................................192
Social Relations...............................................................................................................194
Free Speech......................................................................................................................195
International Relations..................................................................................................197
Internet Link.....................................................................................................................200
History Links.....................................................................................................................201
Advantage Links.................................................................................................................203
Risk Assessment.............................................................................................................204
Terrorism............................................................................................................................206
Heg/Imperialism Links..................................................................................................210
Economy Links.................................................................................................................212
Nuclear War......................................................................................................................215
Democracy Link..............................................................................................................218
Russia..................................................................................................................................219
Africa Advantage Links.................................................................................................220
Root Cause...........................................................................................................................221
Surveillance......................................................................................................................222
Biopower/Necropolitics.................................................................................................225
Cap........................................................................................................................................227
Impacts..................................................................................................................................229
Impact Genocide.........................................................................................................230
Impact- Objective Vertigo.....................................................................................................231
Impact Global Violence.............................................................................................232
Impact Ableism............................................................................................................234
Impact Ethics................................................................................................................235
Impact Global Warming............................................................................................236
Alternatives..........................................................................................................................238
Fugitivity............................................................................................................................239
Opacity...............................................................................................................................241
Black Celebration...........................................................................................................244
Haunting............................................................................................................................246
Counter Gaze.........................................................................................................................248
Reclaiming Flesh.............................................................................................................249
Alt Solvency- Conciousness Raising........................................................................250

Alt Solvency- Opacity....................................................................................................253

Alt. Pre-requisite- Historical........................................................................................255
Answers to Answers........................................................................................................256
AT: Speaking for others................................................................................................257
AT: Black/White Binaries bad......................................................................................259
AT: Policy Focus...............................................................................................................261
AT: Lacan..............................................................................................................................263
Perm Answers......................................................................................................................264
AT: Reformism=Revolution..........................................................................................265
AT: Multiracialism perm/coalition perm..................................................................267
AT: Liberation Theology................................................................................................269
AT: State Reform.............................................................................................................270
AFF Answers........................................................................................................................ 272
Perms........................................................................................................................................273
Perm do both.........................................................................................................................274
Permutation-XO/Bitcoin................................................................................................279
Perm- Biopower....................................................................................................................282
Link Turns................................................................................................................................283
Random Foucault Link Turn.........................................................................................284
Bitcoin Link Turn..................................................................................................................285
Welfare Link Turn.................................................................................................................286
Alt Answers..............................................................................................................................289
AT: Opacity........................................................................................................................290
AT: Optimism/Haunting........................................................................................................292
AT: Fugitivity........................................................................................................................296
AT: Counter Surveillance......................................................................................................298
AT: Unflinching Paradigmatic Analysis................................................................................302
Totalizing Alts/Utopianism Bad............................................................................................304
Other Things.............................................................................................................................305
State Good.............................................................................................................................306
AT: Suffering Reps...........................................................................................................317
AT: Hartman..........................................................................................................................319
A2: Sexton.............................................................................................................................321
Social Death Indites..............................................................................................................322
AT: Blackness Ontological....................................................................................................328
AT: Ballot K2 Movement...............................................................................................331

Notes
This file is made with love by Kristiana, Q_Yonc, Varun and the Diamonds <3

1NC

1NC Generic
Modern day surveillance practices were created and
perfected on the plantation. These tactics marked certain
bodies as enslavable objects to be monitored, managed
and criminalized.
Simone Browne 2012.(Browne is an Assistant Professor, African and
African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas @ Austin, She
researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance, Social Media, Social
Network Sites, and Black Diaspora Studies Cultural Studies Publication
details. EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN.Taylor and
Francis. http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20) VR
According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be
traced to the simple accounts of slave owners (2003: 15). Of course, the
accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These
simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo,
plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about
plantation life and instructions for governing slaves . One example involved

the General Rules recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas
plantation: 4th In giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave
the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of
reection. The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of
disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is
exercised through its invisibility, while imposing a compulsory visibility
on its targets (1979: 187). Disciplinary power, then, operated on the
enslaved as a racializing surveillance that individuals were at once
subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslavable,
subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation
security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three
information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols,
and wanted posters for runaways (2003: 15). Here, surveillance and

literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could
read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter
existing ones by replacing dates, names and other unique identifiers, in this
way functioning as antebellum hackers able to crack the code of the
planters security system (20). These forged passes were used for
unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were produced by fugitives
upon demand by slave patrollers, or pattie rollers, who were often nonproperty owning but armed white men who policed slave mobilities.
Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed
text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware that many of these
pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these passes when
apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the racially defined
contours of (white) literacy and (Black) illiteracy, a dichotomy that was not
so readily upheld (18). Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned
out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in

the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for

runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a
white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in
consuming these texts became part of the apparatus of surveillance, the
eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing
physical descriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave
advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as out
of place. For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazette

Race and surveillance 73 offering a Two Dollars reward for a Mulatto, or

Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall,
attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly wanted posters, in
upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: sometimes
says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception. Seths,
or Salls, duplicity is not limited to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us,
but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to selfidentify or pass as white, rather than as a Mulatto (one black parent and
one white parent) or a Quadroon Girl (one black grandparent) as per the
racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classications as a
form of population management were made ocial with the rst US
federal census in 1790. I will return to the census as a technology that
formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for
fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as
now race was a social construct that required constant policing and
oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the

form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An

1851 handbill produced by abolitionist Theodore Parker attests to this as it
cautioned colored people of Boston to steer clear of watchmen and police
ocers and to keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye
open.Top eye here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent
as police ocers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive
slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists
and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at
racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze

and looking relations during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in
the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often
cultivated the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear
uppity. To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality (1992:
168). hooks suggests that the often violent ways in which blacks were denied
the right to look backthink of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-yearold Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman
had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire,
an oppositional gaze (116). Such politicized and oppositional looking were
agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway
slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Sam, who is
described in the notice as five feet high and remarkable in turning up the
whites of his eyes when spoken to. This notice records Sams oppositional
gaze, his looking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in

the simple act of rolling ones eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble
surveillance as a technology of whiteness (Fiske: 1998: 69)

The belief that surveillance policies effect bodies similarly

underscores the white panoptic gaze that makes
expression of blackness hyper-visible while concealing
whiteness, relegating black bodies to a constant state of
gratuitous violence
John Fiske 1998. (Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the
world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of
WisconsinMadison. His areas of interest include popular culture, mass
culture, media semiotics and television studies. Surveilling the City
Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.Theory, Culture &
Society 1998 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 6788) VR
The urban scanscape has developed rapidly since Davis coined the phrase.
We have grown familiar with the video cameras watching stores and
shopping malls, airports, banks and cash machines, we know they watch the
entrances, elevators and hallways of oce buildings. In an anxious
scanscape the controlling look of video cameras cannot be restricted to
owned public space such as airports and shopping malls: so their sight lines
are being extended to cover all so-called public space. In the US the whole
of downtowns in cities like Minneapolis, Newark and Detroit are now covered
by cameras that can zoom in to read a credit card. In Australia, Wainwright
(1995) counted 200 cameras surveilling Sydneys central district (and there
are many more that cannot be counted, for owners need no permission to
install cameras to watch the street in front of their premises, and many have
done so). In Britain, according to the Home Oce, 95 percent of town and
city councils are considering installing video surveillance of all their streets
and open spaces. By early in 1995, 29 percent of British towns and cities had
already done so, another 29 percent had firm plans to and 23 percent hoped
to. According to one estimate 81 percent of British streets will soon be video
surveilled (Polman, 1995). Surveillance is a perfect technology for nonracist racism, for the ubiquity and apparent impartiality of its
technology and the benignity of the assumption that all citizens
benet from increasing public safety, enhancing public order and
improving trac flow enable it to mask the racial difference in its
operations and effects. It is the very supportability of its claim to operate
for a generalized public good that enables it to hide so effectively those of its
operations that are oppressive, exclusionary and racist. Understanding and
possibly supporting its socially benign operations does not require
us to recognize that it is always also constructing the eye of
whiteness as the power to make the racial other visible, and thus to
hold him (or, more rarely, her) within the disciplinary mechanism.
The apparently non-racist nature of discipline as technique of social order to
which all citizens are subject masks the racial dimensions of the norms by

which a threat to disorder may be recognized and dealt with. Because the
Black man is the focus of white fear and is made to embody all that
appears to threaten the social order, he has to be always watched:
while the development of the surveilled society may not have
intentionally been directed upon him, in practice it often is. And
Black men are acutely aware that surveillance is discriminatory: the
Korean stores were targets of Black anger in LA partly because of their
constant surveillance of Black customers, a surveillance routinized into
mundanely painful experiences of disrespect and social othering. Street
behaviors of white men (standing still and talking, using a cellular phone,
passing an unseen object from one to another) may be coded as normal
and thus granted no attention, whereas the same activity performed
by Black men will be coded as lying on or beyond the boundary of
the normal, and thus subject to disciplinary action. For such action to
serve the public good, these Black men, at least, have to be excluded from
the notion of the public, and thus the public as an instrumental concept, is
whitened. Black behavior is seen, white behavior is not, and the
difference is solely one of color: blackness is that which must be
made visible, just as invisibility is necessary for whiteness to
position itself as where we look from, not what we look at.
Foucaults conflation of surveillance and discipline describes
whiteness accurately if unwittingly: The perfect disciplinary
apparatus, he writes, would make it possible for a single gaze to
see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source
of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for
everything that must be known (Foucault, 1979). The Los Angeles Police
Department helicopters that hovered over the Rodney King beating and the
O.J. Simpson chase bristled with searchlights and cameras: they are the
technological form of Foucaults theoretical formulation. Coding normality is,
as I argue later, crucial to surveillance, for the function of surveillance is
to maintain the normal by disciplining what has been abnormalized.
The racialized other, of course, is one of the most urgent objects of
abnormalization, for his or her visibility is a formative factor in the
constant normalization of whiteness.

Anti-Blackness structurally underpins all violencewhile racialized violence is still

a daily reality for people caught in the position of the slave, the rhetoric of
oppression or exploitation alone asks only how we might redeem this failed
American experiment. There is no analogy for the structural suffering of the slave,
meaning authentic engagement with social violence must begin with the anti-human
void known as Blackness
Pak 2012 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage
of Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, Dissertation through Proquest)
Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in autobiographical
narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and performance studies, as the structural
organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being inter in between... intergenric [sic],
interdisciplinary, intercultural and therefore inherently unstable (What is Performance Studies Anyway? 360). My abstract ideation of the
dissertation was one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors respective texts from the ways in which they have been read in
particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my research redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes,

Baldwin and Jones novels, a despondency and sorrow that seemed to reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in these
works. What

does it mean, they seem to speculate, to suffer beyond the individual, beyond the collective,
and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure? What does it mean to exist beyond social
oppression and veer instead into what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls structural suffering (Red, White & Black 36)?
Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanons splitting of the hair[s] between social oppression and structural suffering; in other
words, Wilderson

refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness with any other positionality in the
world. Others may be oppressed, indeed, may suffer experientially, but only the black, the
paradigmatic slave, suffers structurally. Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I attempt to answer this query,
provides the integral term and parameters with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to
propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts. The

structural suffering of blackness seeps into all

elements of American history, culture, and life, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers
concept of an American grammar in Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book. To theorize blackness is to
begin with the slave ship, in a space that is in actuality no place.7 In discussing the transportation of human cargo
across the Middle Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies was a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance)
severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire (Spillers 67). She contends here that in

this mass gathering and

transportation, what becomes illuminated is not only the complete and total deracination of
native from soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness, the evacuation of will
and desire from the body; in other words, we see that even before the black body there is flesh,
that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography (67).

Black flesh, which arrives in the United States to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is
a primary narrative with its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ships hole, fallen,
or escaped overboard (67). These markings lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions,
rendings, punctures of the flesh are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed against
blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an American grammar that grounds itself in the rupture and a radically different kind of
cultural continuation, a grammar that is the fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes, Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks (Red, White & Black 38). In other words,

in the same moment they are (re)born as blacks,

they are doomed to death as slaves. This rupture, I argue, is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in
his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal alienation, general dishonor and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is
constructed with torn flesh, is laid bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not align
slavery with labor. The slave can and did work, but what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object, the masters
whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather, the

slaves powerlessness is
heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by social death and the
permanent, violent domination of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers radically different kind of cultural continuation
finds an articulation of the object status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of slave and black. As Jared
Sexton and Huey Copeland inquire, [h]ow might it feel to be... a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the
final analysis, does it mean to suffer? (Sexton and Copeland 53). Blackness

functions as a scandal to ontology

because, as Wilderson states, black suffering forms the ethical backbone of civil society. He writes, [c]hattel
slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of cultural disparate identities from
Europe to the East... Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of
domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent, and with these joys and struggles, the
Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political
ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Red, White & Black 20 21) Again, the African is made black,
and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is not my intention (nor of other Afropessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been committed against black individuals and
communities in the United States, or in the world, but rather that the structural suffering that defines blackness,
the violence enacted against blackness to maintain its positioning outside of civil society, that
demarcates the black as slave, has no horizontal equivalent and, indeed, provides the logical
ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities; by this I mean that all other subjects (and I use this word quite
intentionally) retain a body and not the zero degree of flesh. As Sexton writes, we might say of the colonized: you may
lose your motherland, but you will not lose your mother (Hartman 2007) (The Curtain of the Sky 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the
succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way (The

Social Life of Social Death 23). Furthermore, Afro-pessimists

contest the idea that the modern world is one

wherein the price of labor determines the price of being equally for all people. In this capitalistic
reading of the world, we summon blacks back into civil society by utilizing Marxism to assume a
subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy (Gramscis Black Marx 1). While it is undeniable, of course, that
black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we return
again to the point that what defines enslavement is accumulation and fungibility, alongside natal
alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence; the slave, then, is not
constituted as part of the class struggle.8 While it is true that labor power is exploited and that the worker is alienated in it, it
is also true that workers labor on the commodity, they are not the commodity itself is, their labor power is (Red, White & Black 50). The slave
is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The

slave
cannot be defined as loss as can the postcolonial subject, the woman, or the immigrant but
can only be configured as lack, as there is no potential for synthesis within a rubric of
antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase rubric of antagonism in opposition to rubric of conflict to clarify the positionality of
blacks outside relationality. The former is an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the
resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions, whereas the
latter is a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, [i]f a Black is the very
antithesis of a Human subject... then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (9).
Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the slave is not a laborer but what
he calls anti- Human, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity (11). In

contrast to
imagining the black other in opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists
theorize blackness as being absent in the dialectic, as anti-Human.

Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the ontological

position of Blacknessthe very possibility of ethics and freedom resides in a
rejection of the affirmatives ratification of democracy, the state and civil society.
Resisting the lure of anti-blackness through a genealogy of historys constitutive
void is the starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley, Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy
and performativity in the American racial state, Dissertation available on Proquest)
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative
toward the pursuit of social reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology,
particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their
circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil.
The analogical uses of the story enabled a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of despair and
disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that

presupposes a set of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial,
religious, sexual, social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to behave according to an
ostensibly correct set of moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying
terms of the state and civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize antiblackness
and/or policies that adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle class, rather
than to critique or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state
and civil society: for her, they are inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered
centuries of black social death and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward
freedom demands an unflinching critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of
these institutions and the terms on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political
implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated
on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions
of a conservative social gospel: a

toppled faith in the redemptive possibilities of the struggle has the

potential to open the door to invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling together
something from nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable freedom
dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and absence and the history of processes of

dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic, social,
political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of its persistence rather than
being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption.
Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and the possibilities
and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say that the
past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker
interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort of
teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from
a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she
calls for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component
of the black freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of
psychic structures and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic
in the (racial) order of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a
ghost story, an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process
toward understanding. Hartman constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of
the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching. Projects that make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional
or poetic devices cant rest with not-knowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or
construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of some large-scale sense of collective
responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both. The

imaginative devices dont exist for the sake of being

imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being imaginative, they allow for radical
possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different
keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but
encouragement of what uncertainty can yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are
impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has
been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to slip into a gaping negative space. This I
would call genealogy as an object. A different version is

used in order to understand the gaps, to underscore or

illuminate the negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the context around the
blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship between the past,
present, and future. This I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or even radical
in roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most
interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages
in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not
conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are
inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present (which has devolved in some way) or a future
that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant
example: it is a wished-for, utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of
its adherents toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomeli 1991). Hartman writes: To

believe, as I do, that the

enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they
were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to
abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of
freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom
that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...] The demands of the slave on the
present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much
more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the
only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs an
unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes
of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical, and part of what I
demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and bolster the
racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with
normativity: do genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive
patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically marginalized groups of people? All three of these

projects

attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of African-Americans are configured as being
integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver
between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we have left slavery behind and
have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental and
unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical narratives that not only attends to
the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the possibilities and necessities of
invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they present the necessity of grappling with the
past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging
a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of
the future as well as more or less significant red flags. Hartmans

vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly

liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or
significance of ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience
have already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the
fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something
from nothing; they have an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo
that excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized
stance, but rather a staunch activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural
analysis, and a sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the
possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence
and loss.

1NC Shell-Policy
Modern day surveillance practices were created and
perfected on the plantation. These tactics marked certain
bodies as enslavable objects to be monitored, managed
and criminalized.
Simone Browne 2012.(Browne is an Assistant Professor, African and
African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas @ Austin, She
researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance, Social Media, Social
Network Sites, and Black Diaspora Studies Cultural Studies Publication
details. EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN.Taylor and
Francis. http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20) VR
the history of surveillance in America can be traced to
the simple accounts of slave owners (2003: 15). Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic
slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave
vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which
contained observations about plantation life and instructions for
governing slaves. One example involved the General Rules recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus,
According to Christian Parenti,

Texas plantation: 4th In giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of

cataloguing of slave life was a

mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is
exercised through its invisibility, while imposing a compulsory visibility on its
targets (1979: 187). Disciplinary power, then, operated on the enslaved as a
racializing surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that
produced them as racial, and therefore enslavable, subjects . Such a
racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a
system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three information technologies: the
written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for
runaways (2003: 15). Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured
the negro that what you say is the result of reection. The detailed

servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by
replacing dates, names and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers able to crack
the code of the planters security system (20). These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of
the plantation and were produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or pattie rollers, who were often
non-property owning but armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was
not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware that many of these pattie
rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these passes when apprehended. This security system, then, relied
on the racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (Black) illiteracy, a dichotomy that was not so readily
upheld (18). Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal .

The compulsory
visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper
advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant
servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was
assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts
became part of the apparatus of surveillance, the eyes and ears of face-toface watching and regulating. In detailing physical descriptions, the
surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the
already hypervisible racial subject legible as out of place . For instance, a March
15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazette Race and surveillance 73 offering a Two Dollars reward for a
Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall, attests to the role of fugitive
slave notices, and similarly wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state:
sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception. Seths, or Salls, duplicity is not
limited to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing
to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as a Mulatto (one black parent and one white parent) or a Quadroon
Girl (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery .

Later such

classications as a form of population management were made ocial

with the rst US federal census in 1790. I will return to the census as a technology that
formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as
an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a
social construct that required constant policing and oversight . However, the
format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of countersurveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionist Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned colored
people of Boston to steer clear of watchmen and police ocers and to keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and
have top eye open.Top eye here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police ocers were

Black spectatorship, along with

the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of
oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance . In her discussion of black
empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws.

spectatorship, the gaze and looking relations during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern
United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often cultivated the habit of casting the gaze downward so as
not to appear uppity. To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality
(1992: 168). hooks suggests that the often violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look backthink of
the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white
womanhad produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze (116).

Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be
seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Sam,

who is described in the notice as five feet high and remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken

This notice records Sams oppositional gaze, his looking back, and
shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling
ones eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a
technology of whiteness (Fiske: 1998: 69)
to.

The armatives reactionary politics to bulk-data

collection and NSA surveillance comes from a color-blind
position of power meant to reify the myth of equitable
democracy that has been built on the criminalization of
black bodies--only an absolute refusal of the state solves
Time Wise 2013. (Wise, is an American anti-racism activist and writer.
Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege.www.timwise.org.
http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-and-the-irony-ofracial-privilege/) VR
Its not that Im not angry. Its not that Im not disturbed, even horrified by the
fact that my government thinks it appropriate to spy on people, monitoring their
phone calls to whom we speak and when among other tactics, all in the supposed service of the national
interest. That any government thinks it legitimate to so closely monitor its people is indicative of the inherent

the power to intrude into the

most private aspects of our lives is more possible than ever , thanks to the datagathering techniques made feasible by technological advance. That said, I also must admit to a
certain nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations about the National Security
sickness of nation-states, made worse in the modern era, where

Agencys snooping into phone records, and the dust-up over the leaking of the NSAs program by Ed Snowden. And
as I tried to figure out why I wasnt more animated upon hearing the revelations and, likewise, why so many

Those who are especially chapped about the program,

about the very concept of their government keeping tabs on them in
effect proling them as potential criminals, as terrorists are almost
entirely those for whom shit like this is new: people who have never
before been presumed criminal, up to no good, or worthy of suspicion. In
others were it struck me.

short, they are mostly white. And male. And middle-class or above. And most assuredly not Muslim. And although I
too am those things, perhaps because I work mostly on issues of racism, white privilege and racial inequity and
because my mentors and teachers have principally been people of color, for whom things like this are distressingly

familiar the latest confirmation that the U.S. is far from the nation we were sold as children is hardly Earth-

After all, it is only those who have had the relative luxury of
remaining in a child-like, innocent state with regard to the empire in which
they reside who can be driven to such distraction by something that,
compared to what lots of folks deal with every day, seems pretty weak tea .
As Yasuragi, a blogger over at Daily Kos reminded us last week: ( This is) the nation that killed
shattering.

protesters at Jackson and Kent State UniversitiesThe nation that executed Fred Hampton in his bed, without so

holds Leonard Peltier in prison. The nation that

supported Noriega, the Shah, Trujillo, and dozens of other fascist monsters who did nothing but fuck over
their own people and their neighbors. The nation of Joseph McCarthy and his current-day descendants.
The nation that allows stop-and-frisk. Before all that: The nation that enforced Jim Crow laws .
Before that, the nation that built itself on slavery and the slave trade . And before all
of that, the nation that nearly succeeded in the genocide of this continents indigenous peoples. So why are
you so surprised that our government is gathering yottabytes of data on
our phone calls? Lets be clear, its not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last two administrations,
much as a warrant. The nation that still, still, still

are no big deal. Theyre completely indefensible, no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire from the
corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney to legitimize them. A free people should not stand for it.

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
Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein lies the rub.

privation in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most other
nations with which we like to compare ourselves. In short, when people proclaim a desire

to take back

our democracy from the national security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats
who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a premise that is entirely untenable ;
namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back, and that the hijacking of said

utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasnt and it hasnt been. Reaction to the most recent
confirmation of this truth ranks right along with the way so many were stunned by the September 11 attacks. The
shock in that instance also came from a place of naivet, wrought by the luxury of believing that the rest of the
world viewed us as we did: as a paragon of virtue, which had brought only light and happiness to the world, rather
than military occupations, hellfire missiles, brutal and crippling economic sanctions, and support for dictators so
long as they were serving our presumed interests. But some people and again, they were mostly black and brown
were not stunned at all. Having long had no choice but to see the nations warts for what they were, and having
never possessed the benefit of viewing America as most whites had, peoples of color, while horrified by that days
events, were hardly likely to be knocked off stride by them. They had always known what it was like to be hated.
And hunted. And solely because of who they were. For myself, I long ago stopped being shocked by anything the
empire did in the service of its continuity. Ever since I was in college, and it was revealed that the Central American
solidarity group of which I was a member was being actively spied on by the FBI, Ive taken it as a matter of faith
that such things were probably happening, and that it would have been silly to the point of idiotic for me to assume
such surveillance were a one-off thing, confined to the inner-workings of the Reagan Administration. By 1988, at
which point I was still a Democrat hoping against hope to turn that party in a truly left direction the realization
that the government was actively spying on its citizens was fully concretized for me. It was then that I was
disallowed from riding in a campaign motorcade for Michael Dukakis (despite being the head of the largest College
Democrats chapter in the New Orleans area), because my activism against U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador

So yeah, the
government is spying on you precious. And now youre pissed ? This is the
irony of privilege: the fact that some have for so long enjoyed it, in its largely unfettered state,
is precisely why some of those those same persons are now so exorcised at the
thought of potentially being treated like everyone else has been, forever; and it is
had earned me an FBI file and caused me to fail a Secret Service background check.

also why the state was able to get away with it for such an extended period. So long as the only possible targets
were racial and religious and class others, shock and outrage could be kept at a minimum. And so the apparatus of

profiling and monitoring and snooping and data collection and even targeted assassination grew like mushrooms in
the dark. And deep down, most of the same white folks who are now so unhinged by the mere possibility and a
remote one at that that they will be treated like those others, knew what was going on. And they said little or
nothing. White liberals with some notable exceptions mostly clucked their tongues and expressed how
unfortunate it was that certain people were being profiled, but they rarely spoke out publicly, or challenged those
not-so-random searches at the airport, or dared to challenge cops when they saw them harassing, or even
brutalizing the black and brown. Plenty of other issues were more pressing. The white conservatives, of course,
largely applauded either or both of those. And now, because they mostly ignored (or even in some cases cheered)
the violations of Constitutional rights, so long as the violations fell upon someone other than themselves, they are
being freshly confronted with the surly adolescent version of the infant to which they gave birth, at least indirectly.
And they arent too happy with his insolence. Yeah, well, tell it to pretty much every Arab American, every Persian
American, every Afghan American, everyone with a so-called Middle Eastern name walking through an airport in
this country for the past decade or more. Tell them how now youre outraged by the idea that the government

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of black men

in New York, stopped and frisked by the NYPD over the past fifteen years, whose
names and information were entered into police databases, even though
they had committed no crime, but just as a precautionary measure, in case they ever decided to
commit one. Tell them how tight it makes you to be thought of as a potential criminal, evidence be damned. Tell
it to brown folks in Arizona, who worry that the mere color of their skin might provoke a local
might consider you a potential terrorist.

ocial, operating on the basis of state law (or a bigoted little toad of a sheriff), to stop them and force them to
prove they belong in the country. Explain to them how patently offensive and even hurtful it is to you to be

Tell it to the veterans of

the civil rights struggle whose activities in the Black Panthers, SNCC,
the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement,
among others were routinely monitored (and more to the point actively disrupted and
presumed unlawful in such a way as to provoke ocial government suspicion.

ripped apart) by government intelligence agencies and their operatives. Tell them how incredibly steamed you are
that your government might find out what websites you surf, or that you placed a phone call last Wednesday to
someone, somewhere.

Make sure to explain how such activities are just a step

away from outright tyranny and surely rank up there alongside the murder
and imprisonment to which their members were subjected. Indeed. And then

maybe, just maybe, consider how privilege being on the upside, most of the time, of systems of inequality can
(and has) let you down, even set you up for a fall. How maybe, just maybe, all the apoplexy mustered up over the
NSAs latest outrage, might have been conjured a long time ago, and over far greater outrages, the burdens of
which were borne by only certain persons, and not others. And yes, I know full well that some were speaking out,
loudly and clearly from the start and have never stopped. I am not speaking to them (to you?), so relax (after all, if
what Im saying doesnt apply to you, why so defensive, buttercup?) But so too, there are those who know (perhaps
you?) if they are among those who, like Rand Paul or Glenn Beck or for that matter Edward Snowden had never
before raised too much fuss about those other things, until it began to potentially affect them and people like them.
Or provide them an opportunity for some publicity. Hero worship. Perhaps (at least in their own minds) martyrdom?

Maybe it is time to remind ourselves that the only things worse than what
this government and its various law enforcement agencies do in secret,
are the things theyve been doing blatantly, openly, but only to some for a
long time now. This nations government has killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, openly,
in front of the world. This nations sanctions on Iraq in the 90s contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands
more, by the admission of Secretary of State Albright. All of it, out in the open. No secrets. This nation stood by and
even helped propagate massacre after massacre an attempted genocide even in Guatemala throughout the
1980s; and not only did we not hide that we were doing it, President Reagan openly praised the architects of the
slaughter while proclaiming they were committed to social justice. We incarcerate 2.5 million people and have
roughly 7 million people under the control of the justice system in all openly, and increasingly for non-violent

We have the highest child poverty rate in the

developed world, and there is nothing secret about it. Our leaders dont
even care about covering it up. In fact, an awful lot of them just dont
care. At all. These are the crimes of empire. These and a lot more. And it
didnt take Edward Snowden to tell you about them. Theyve been hiding
in plain sight for a long time
offenses: more than any nation on Earth.

Anti-Blackness structurally underpins all violencewhile racialized violence is still

a daily reality for people caught in the position of the slave, the rhetoric of
oppression or exploitation alone asks only how we might redeem this failed
American experiment. There is no analogy for the structural suffering of the slave,
meaning authentic engagement with social violence must begin with the anti-human
void known as Blackness
Pak 2012 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage
of Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, Dissertation through Proquest)
Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in autobiographical
narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and performance studies, as the structural
organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being inter in between... intergenric [sic],
interdisciplinary, intercultural and therefore inherently unstable (What is Performance Studies Anyway? 360). My abstract ideation of the
dissertation was one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors respective texts from the ways in which they have been read in
particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my research redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes,
Baldwin and Jones novels, a despondency and sorrow that seemed to reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in these
works. What

does it mean, they seem to speculate, to suffer beyond the individual, beyond the collective,
and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure? What does it mean to exist beyond social
oppression and veer instead into what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls structural suffering (Red, White & Black 36)?
Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanons splitting of the hair[s] between social oppression and structural suffering; in other
words, Wilderson

refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness with any other positionality in the
world. Others may be oppressed, indeed, may suffer experientially, but only the black, the
paradigmatic slave, suffers structurally. Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I attempt to answer this query,
provides the integral term and parameters with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to
propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts. The

structural suffering of blackness seeps into all

elements of American history, culture, and life, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers
concept of an American grammar in Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book. To theorize blackness is to
begin with the slave ship, in a space that is in actuality no place.7 In discussing the transportation of human cargo
across the Middle Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies was a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance)
severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire (Spillers 67). She contends here that in

this mass gathering and

transportation, what becomes illuminated is not only the complete and total deracination of
native from soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness, the evacuation of will
and desire from the body; in other words, we see that even before the black body there is flesh,
that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography (67).

Black flesh, which arrives in the United States to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is
a primary narrative with its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ships hole, fallen,
or escaped overboard (67). These markings lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions,
rendings, punctures of the flesh are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed against
blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an American grammar that grounds itself in the rupture and a radically different kind of
cultural continuation, a grammar that is the fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes, Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks (Red, White & Black 38). In other words,

in the same moment they are (re)born as blacks,

they are doomed to death as slaves. This rupture, I argue, is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in
his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal alienation, general dishonor and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is
constructed with torn flesh, is laid bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not align
slavery with labor. The slave can and did work, but what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object, the masters
whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather, the

slaves powerlessness is
heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by social death and the
permanent, violent domination of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers radically different kind of cultural continuation
finds an articulation of the object status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of slave and black. As Jared
Sexton and Huey Copeland inquire, [h]ow might it feel to be... a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the
final analysis, does it mean to suffer? (Sexton and Copeland 53). Blackness

functions as a scandal to ontology

because, as Wilderson states, black suffering forms the ethical backbone of civil society. He writes, [c]hattel
slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of cultural disparate identities from

Europe to the East... Put another way, through chattel slavery the

world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of

domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent, and with these joys and struggles, the
Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political
ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Red, White & Black 20 21) Again, the African is made black,
and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is not my intention (nor of other Afropessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been committed against black individuals and
communities in the United States, or in the world, but rather that the structural suffering that defines blackness,
the violence enacted against blackness to maintain its positioning outside of civil society, that
demarcates the black as slave, has no horizontal equivalent and, indeed, provides the logical
ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities; by this I mean that all other subjects (and I use this word quite
intentionally) retain a body and not the zero degree of flesh. As Sexton writes, we might say of the colonized: you may
lose your motherland, but you will not lose your mother (Hartman 2007) (The Curtain of the Sky 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the
succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way (The
Social Life of Social Death 23). Furthermore, Afro-pessimists

contest the idea that the modern world is one

wherein the price of labor determines the price of being equally for all people. In this capitalistic
reading of the world, we summon blacks back into civil society by utilizing Marxism to assume a
subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy (Gramscis Black Marx 1). While it is undeniable, of course, that
black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we return
again to the point that what defines enslavement is accumulation and fungibility, alongside natal
alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence; the slave, then, is not
constituted as part of the class struggle.8 While it is true that labor power is exploited and that the worker is alienated in it, it
is also true that workers labor on the commodity, they are not the commodity itself is, their labor power is (Red, White & Black 50). The slave
is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The

slave
cannot be defined as loss as can the postcolonial subject, the woman, or the immigrant but
can only be configured as lack, as there is no potential for synthesis within a rubric of
antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase rubric of antagonism in opposition to rubric of conflict to clarify the positionality of
blacks outside relationality. The former is an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the
resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions, whereas the
latter is a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, [i]f a Black is the very
antithesis of a Human subject... then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (9).
Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the slave is not a laborer but what
he calls anti- Human, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity (11). In

contrast to
imagining the black other in opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists
theorize blackness as being absent in the dialectic, as anti-Human.

The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itselfthe
affirmative represents a conflict within the paradigm of America but refuses to
challenge the foundational antagonism that produces the violence that undergirds
the that same paradigm
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of
their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars
are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they
draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by
enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern
worlds capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body

and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they

would have to be
crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world
itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a
participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital,
a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the
loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a
being for the captor (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity
production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of
everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she

had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to

show for it. In her eyes, the worldand not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world
itselfwas unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and
disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her crazy. And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity?
Hes crazy if he thinks hes getting any money out of us? Surely, that doesnt make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication
that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the
most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are
these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and
unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the Savage. Repair

the demolished subjectivity of the Slave.

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

of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are

anything to go byis that what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two
hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple
sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker crazy but become themselves
impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films
began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship
were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but rather when
and howand, for some, whatwould come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there
remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin
Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie
Kennedy Democrats) were

accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black

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

U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability.
Consequently, the
1

power of Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose the

question is the greatest power of allretreated as did White radicals and progressives who
retired from struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers,
AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them
have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the
academy where the crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant
voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols
of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then
certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of
the Settlement and the Slave estates2 destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic
discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of
intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse
in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes in the sense that in even

the most taciturn

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

and Redness manifests only in the

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

grammar of antagonism breaks in

on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar
is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethicsthe
grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich underwrite Film Theory and political
discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and 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
3

ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is,
2

Vote negative to affirm the end of the world

the act of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis allows us to deny intellectual
legitimacy to the compromises that radical elements have made because of an
unwillingness to hold moderates feet to the fire predicated on an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
3

Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]

nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.

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 questionand
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.

Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the ontological

position of Blacknessthe very possibility of ethics and freedom resides in a
rejection of the affirmatives ratification of democracy, the state and civil society.
Resisting the lure of anti-blackness through a genealogy of historys constitutive
void is the starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley, Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy
and performativity in the American racial state, Dissertation available on Proquest)
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative
toward the pursuit of social reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology,
particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their
circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil.
The analogical uses of the story enabled a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of despair and
disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that

presupposes a set of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial,
religious, sexual, social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to behave according to an
ostensibly correct set of moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying
terms of the state and civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize antiblackness
and/or policies that adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle class, rather

Generic Links

than to critique or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state
and civil society: for her, they are inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered
centuries of black social death and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward
freedom demands an unflinching critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of
these institutions and the terms on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political
implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated
on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions
of a conservative social gospel: a

toppled faith in the redemptive possibilities of the struggle has the

potential to open the door to invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling together
something from nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable freedom
dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and absence and the history of processes of
dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic, social,
political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of its persistence rather than
being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption.
Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and the possibilities
and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say that the
past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker
interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort of
teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from
a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she
calls for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component
of the black freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of
psychic structures and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic
in the (racial) order of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a
ghost story, an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process
toward understanding. Hartman constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of
the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching. Projects that make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional
or poetic devices cant rest with not-knowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or
construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of some large-scale sense of collective
responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both. The

imaginative devices dont exist for the sake of being

imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being imaginative, they allow for radical
possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different
keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but
encouragement of what uncertainty can yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are
impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has
been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to slip into a gaping negative space. This I
would call genealogy as an object. A different version is

used in order to understand the gaps, to underscore or

illuminate the negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the context around the

Surveillance Links
The armatives nave belief in policy solutions to
surveillance merely conceals and sanitizes the racist colorblind policies of the status while operating under the
guise of white objectivity- the impact is racial fascism
John Fiske 1998. (Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the
world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of
WisconsinMadison. His areas of interest include popular culture, mass
blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship between the past,
present, and future. This I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or even radical
in roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most
interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages
in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not
conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are
inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present (which has devolved in some way) or a future
that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant
example: it is a wished-for, utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of
its adherents toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomeli 1991). Hartman writes: To

believe, as I do, that the

enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they
were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to
abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of
freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom
that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...] The demands of the slave on the
present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much
more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the
only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs an
unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes
of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical, and part of what I
demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and bolster the
racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with
normativity: do genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive
patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically marginalized groups of people? All three of these

projects
attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of African-Americans are configured as being
integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver
between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we have left slavery behind and
have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental and
unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical narratives that not only attends to
the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the possibilities and necessities of
invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they present the necessity of grappling with the
past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging
a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of
the future as well as more or less significant red flags. Hartmans

vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly

liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or
significance of ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience
have already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the
fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something
from nothing; they have an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo
that excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized

culture, media semiotics and television studies. Surveilling the City

Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.Theory, Culture &
Society 1998 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 6788) VR
Giddens (1987) has alerted us to totalitarian tendencies that are
endemic in the complex democracies of late capitalism; they are, to put it
briey: widespread surveillance; appeals to moral totalism; terror and
intensified policing; and the attraction of charismatic leadership. All are
widely recognizable in the contemporary US. The combination, in
stance, but rather a staunch activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural
analysis, and a sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the
possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence
and loss.

Representations of future nuclear war rest on racist fears of irrational non-whites

the bomb is the epitome of the destructive capacity of Whiteness, naturalizing
structural violence through the projection of a spectacular extinction.
Williams 11 [Paul, lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts
and Studies, 2011, p.1-3]

nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (1) the invention and use of the first atomic bombs; (2)
nuclear weapons testing stockpiling of the Cold War superpowers; and (3) nuclear war (often referred to as World War Three)
and life after such a cataclysm. Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and
national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its emergence (and deployment against
Japan) was read by some commentators as an act of genocidal racist violence, and by some as the
apex of Western civilizations scientific achievement. These opposing perspectives are interpretative poles that have been central
In this study,

to nuclear representations. By posing white moral and technological superiority against the destructive technology it supposedly invented, cultural producers have
cited nuclear weapons as evidence against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism. From this point of view, the scientific achievement of splitting the atom does not reveal

the enormity of nuclear weapons reminds one that the technology first created by
the white world imperils the whole Earth. Through a range of media, from novels to poetry, short stories to film, comics to oratory, the
terms that modern European imperialism depended upon civilization, race, and nation, in
particular often recur in nuclear representations. Some of these representations, emerging when Europes empires were
relinquishing direct control of their colonies, share the uncertainty that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent decolonizing preocess. The
historical congruence of nuclear representations and decolonization intimates the importance of
this context to future visions of World war Three: tropes of genocide, technological and and
scientific modernity, and the (re)population of the planet are relevant to this apocalyptic subgenre of SF as well
as being recurrent elements in colonial history. Several of the nuclear representations discussed reproduce
the justifications of the modern imperial project. But an alternative tradition makes these justifications visible and demonstrates their
corrosive, lingering presence in contemporary culture through the depiction of nuclear technology and its possible consequences. Significantly, the idea that
nuclear weapons are used to buttress a racial order that privileges whiteness an idea that
prohibits non-white peoples from accessing such technology remains a potent current running
from 1945 until the present day. Having raised this point to emphasize the importance of the themes in this study, I am mindful to repeat that my
white superiority; instead,

focus is literary, cultural and filmic texts. I am not seeking to explain how race and ethnicity have structured Cold War history. If I may be excused a brief aside, I do

US foreign policy had to negotiate the

American governments response to domestic systems of racial discrimination, and vice versa.
think such moments have occurred. Civil rights and Cold War historians have long understood that

Recently decolonized nations whose populations had been excluded along similar lines by European imperialism followed the narrrative of American desegregation
closely, and the allegiances of these nations played and important role in the Cold War. When the black student James Meredith was not permitted to join the
University of Mississippi in 1962, President Kennedy ordered federal marshals to force his registration through. This took place on 1 October 1962, after a night of
fighting between demonstrators and troops. While not universally praised, Kennedys actions were widely perceived in the international press as evidence to resolve to
oppose racial discrimination. When the Cuban Missile Crisis took place three weeks later, the presidents of Guinea and Ghaa denied refuelling facilities to Soviet

particular, of surveillance, intensied policing and moral totalism

accelerates totalitarian tendencies whose effectiveness depends upon
their ability to operate underneath the structures of democracy: the
effect is that the totalitarian creeps forward unnoticed because its advance
apparently leaves democracy untouched. Surveillance is, arguably, the most
significant of the three, for without it, moral totalism is ineffective and policing cannot be
intensified efficiently. We live in a technologized scanscape (Davis, 1992) in which the

operations of the video camera, the computer, as well as those of nontechnological surveillance, are extending to cover all the practices and
spaces of public life, and are constantly shrinking the terrain of the private,
planes flying to the Caribbean. Kennedy aside Arthur Schlesinger directly attributed the African presidents actions to the intervention in Mississippi. The subject of

representations of nuclear weapons and the

world after nuclear war postulate meanings that are not only fully activated when considered
through a lens of race, ethnicity, nationhood and civilization. In many of the texts discussed, a primary
consideration is whether the vestigial master narrative of white supremacy, the narrative of racial
superiority that underpinned modern European colonization, is being resuscitated. I have in mind Fredric
this book is not the mechanisms of history. The subject of this book is the way that

Jamesons expression, if interpretation in terms of [] allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have
inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them. For Jameson the interpretative act runs the risk of being an act of hermeneutic bad faith the
risk that the critic finds what they are looking for all along because they gathered up a series of texts whose selection is far from arbitrary, and consequently the
reading of said texts confirms the ubiquity of the historical essence with which they were initially ascribed. Yet, as Jameson writes, one should not be too cynical about
the act of interpretation. If the critical analysis of a text finds evidence of the historical trends it set out to discover the success of the interpretation is not in itself a
reason to reject the idea that texts allow one to think closely and critically about historical attitudes. The act of interpretation can sometimes be the imposition of a
preconvieved set of ideas onto a series of texts chosen precisely because they corroborate the hypothesis being tested, but it can also be credible because texts are
inscribed by history and by master naratives. As a way of referring to an explanation of the movement of history and its future direction, Jamesons sense of master

the master narrative of white supremacism

that proved so useful to European colonialism and the settlement of North America. How do
texts come to be inscribed by master narratives? What justification do I have in reading the master narrative o white supremacism
narratives is worth retaining. My usage here designates the explanation itself, specifically

and related narratives of settlement through the literary, cultural and filmic texts analysed here?

The demand for political coherence and reformism obliterates the position of the
slave their integrationist optimism cannot take into account the gratuitous
violence directed towards Blackness
Hartman and Wilderson 3 [Saidiya, professor of English and comparative literature and women's and gender studies at
Columbia University, Frank, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Drama at UC Irvine, THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT,
Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003, JSTOR]

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. Your book, in moving through
these scenes of subjection as they take place in slavery, refuses to do that. And just as importantly, it does not allow the reader to think
that there was a radical enough break to reposition the black body after Jubilee.' That is a tremendous and courageous move. And I think what's important
What I mean, is that so often in black scholarship,

about it, is that it corroborates the experience of ordinary black people today, and of strange black people like you and me in the academy [laughter]. But there's something else that the book does,

If we think about the registers of subjectivity as being

preconscious interest, unconscious identity or identifications, and positionality, then a lot of the work in the social sciences organizes
itself around precon-scious interest; it assumes a subject of consent, and as you have said, a subject of exploitation, which you reposition as the
subject of accumulation.2 Now when this sort of social science engages the issue of positionality if and when it does it assumes that it
can do so in an un-raced manner. That's the best of the work. The worst of the work is a kind of multiculturalism that
assumes we all have analogous identities that can be put into a basket of stories, and then that
basket of stories can lead to similar interests. For me, what you've done in this book is to split the hair here. In other words, this is not a book that
and I want to talk about this at the level of methodology and analysis.

celebrates an essential Afrocentrism that could be captured by the multicultural discourse. And yet it's not a book that remains on the surface of preconscious interest, which so much history and
social science does. Instead, it demands a radical racialization of any analysis of positionality. So. Why don't we talk about that? Saidiya V Hartman Well! That's a lot, and a number of things
come to mind. I think for me the book is about the problem of crafting a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that narrative enable?" That's where the

every attempt to employ the slave in a narrative

ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration, regardless of whether it was a leftist narrative of
whole issue of empathic identification is central for me. Because it just seems that

which we must now define as that which can be made invisible.

Surveillance, as an agency of the totalitarian, is not readily opposed by
traditional democratic politics, for it works through techniques rather
than policy, and a technique is much harder to oppose than a plank
in a party political platform, not only because we have less
experience of doing so, but, more importantly, because a technique
always has benecent, if not utopian uses, which are enthusiastically
endorsed by its proponents and most readily recognized by those who are
not the immediate object of its constraints. Foucault constantly reminds us
political agency the slave stepping into someone else's shoes and then becoming a political
agent or whether it was about being able to unveil the slave's humanity by actually finding
oneself in that position. In many ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the
limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved. On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national
order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position
into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our claims are
more radical. This goes to the second part of the book that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is always towards an
integration into the national project, and partic-ularly when that project is in crisis, black people
are called upon to affirm it. So certainly it's about more than the desire for inclusion with-in the limited set of possibilities that the national project provides.
What then does this language the given language of freedom enable? And once you realize its limits and
begin to see its inex-orable investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that
language of freedom no longer becomes that which res-cues the slave from his or her former
condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition, rather than its transformation. F. W.
This is one of the reasons why your book has been called "pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.' But it's interesting that she does-n't say what I said when we first started talking, that it's enabling. I'm

a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are

attempt to make the narrative of defeat into
an opportunity for cel-ebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few
centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about our-selves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the project of a
assuming that she's white I don't know, but it certainly sounds like it. S.V.H. But I think there's

variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the

number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory

, as if there was a space you could carve out of the ter-rorizing

state apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in
narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration

partic-ular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave.
F.W. That's very interesting, because it's something I've been thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that Gramsci breaks down hegemony into
three categories: influence, leadership, and consent.' Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then, using the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,' a white antislavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only explain how the positionality of
black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness disarticulates the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[B]eing forced to submit
to the will of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (S, 110). In other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say that she is
ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured laborer, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this
case, sex] is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option. . . . Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of subjectivity is predicated upon
the negation of will" (S, 111).

The rush to declare Whiteness as a positive and heterogeneous identity beyond

structural oppression is the height of narcissism and the privileged reassertion of
privilegefragmenting whiteness as an ontological position absolves everyone for
racialized violence
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism, eborderlands, 3.2)
Another risk is that in centering

on whiteness, whiteness studies might become a discourse of love,

which would sustain the narcissism that elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal. The reading
of whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The whiteness of academic disciplines, including philosophy and
anthropology has been subject to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998; Asad 1973). For example, a postcolonial critique of

that modern power is so effective because its repressive effects are

always hidden by its eciency and benecence. Benthams panopticon
was, above all else, designed to be a humane as well as an ecient prison,
and the eye at its center was Godlike. Video surveillance is reaching into
every corner of our cities because it can claim real social benefits that range
from trac management, through reducing drug-dealing and street crime, to
counter-terrorism. But its benecence hides an icily oppressive side; it
acts as an agent of the totalitarian, for the law-abiding citizens who
are most subject to it have no say in its operation and no ability to
influence its impact upon their daily lives. The high visibility of the structures of
anthropology would argue that the anthropological desire to know the other functioned as a form of narcissism: the other functioned as a mirror, a
device to reflect the anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in the very display of the colour of difference. So

if disciplines are in a way already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject, then it
follows that whiteness studies sustains the direction or orientation of this gaze, whilst removing
the detour provided by the reflection of the other. Whiteness studies could even become a
spectacle of pure self-reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness is an identity too.
Does whiteness studies function as a narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the
subject as the origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study, which might
mean that whiteness studies could get stuck on whiteness, as that which gives itself to itself.
Dyer talks about this risk when he admits to another fear: I dread to think that paying attention to whiteness might lead to white people saying
they need to get in touch with their whiteness (1997, 10). Whiteness

studies would here be about white people

learning to love their own whiteness, by transforming it into an object that could be loved. 6. Dyer is
right, I think, to feel such dread. Whiteness studies is potentially dreadful, and scholarship within the field is full of admissions of anxiety about
what whiteness studies could be if was allowed to become invested in itself, and its own reproduction. We should I think, pay attention to such
critical anxieties, and ask what the enunciation of such anxieties is doing. In terms of the constitution of the field, for example, the anxiety is not
so much that the borders will be invaded by inappropriate others (as with traditional disciplines), but that the borders will themselves be
inappropriate. But at the same time, and somewhat paradoxically,

the anxiety about borders works to install

borders: whiteness becomes an object through the expression of anxiety about becoming an
object. The repetition of the anxious gesture, that is, gestures toward a field. Fields can be
understood, after all, as the forgetting of gestures that are repeated over time. Is there a
relationship between the emergence of a field through the enunciation of anxiety and the
emergence of a new form of whiteness, an anxious whiteness? Is a whiteness that is anxious
about itself its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its self-centeredness better? What kind of
whiteness is a whiteness that is anxious about itself? What does such an anxious whiteness do? 7. Such an anxious whiteness would be different
to the worrying whiteness that Ghassan Hage critiques in White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003). This worrying
whiteness is one that worries that others may threaten its existence. An anxious whiteness would be one that is anxious about such worrying:
this white subject would come into existence in its very anxiety about the effects it has on others, or even in fear that it is taking something away
from others. This white subject might even be anxious about its own tendency to worry about the proximity of others. So lets repeat my question:
is an anxious whiteness that declares its own anxiety about its worry better, where better might even evoke the promise of "non-racism" or "antiracism? 8. Before posing this question through an analysis of the effects of how whiteness becomes declared, we could first point to the placing
of critical before whiteness studies, as a sign of this anxiety. I am myself very attached to being critical, which is after all what all forms of
transformative politics will be doing, if they are to be transformative. But I think the critical often functions as a place where we deposit our
anxieties. We might assume that if we are doing critical whiteness studies, rather than whiteness studies, that we can protect ourselves from doing
or even being seen to do the wrong kind of whiteness studies. But the

word critical does not mean the elimination

of risk, and nor should it become just a description of what we are doing over here, as opposed to them, over there. 9. I felt my desire to be
critical as the site of anxiety when I was involved in writing a race equality policy for the university at which I work in the UK, where I tried to
bring what I thought was a fairly critical language of anti-racism into a neo-liberal technique of governance, which we can inadequately describe
as diversity management, or the business case for diversity. All public organisations in the UK are now required by law to have and implement a
race equality policy and action plan, as a result of the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000). My current research is tracking the significance of
this policy, in terms of the relationship between the documentation it has generated and social action. Suffice to say here, my own experience of
writing a race equality policy, taught me a good lesson, which of course means a hard lesson: the language we think of as critical can easily lend
itself to the very techniques of governance we critique. So we wrote the document, and the university, along with many others, was praised for
its policy, and the Vice-Chancellor was able to congratulate the university on its performance: we did well. A document that documented the
racism of the university became usable as a measure of good performance. 10. This

story is not simply about assimilation

democracy masks totalitarian undercurrents and offers those who prefer not to see an alibi for their
blindness. In the realm of race relations this motivated blindness has

produced what we may call a non-racist racism (Fiske, 1994). This is

the form of racism that has been developed by white-powered
nations that avow themselves to be non-, or even anti-, racist. It is a
racism recoded into apparently race-neutral discourses, such as those
of the law, of economics, of IQ and education, of health, of housing or of
capital accumulation: each of the social domains within which these
discourses operate has racially differentiated effects for which the causes
can always be made to appear non-racial. Indeed, racism is illegal in most of
or the risks of the critical being co-opted, which would be a way of framing the story that
assumes we were innocent and critical until we got misused (in other words, this would
maintain the illusion of our own criticalness). Rather, it reminds us that the transformation of the
critical into a property, as something we have or do, allows the critical to become a performance
indicator, or a measure of value. The critical in critical whiteness studies cannot guarantee that it
will have effects that are critical, in the sense of challenging relations of power that remain
concealed as institutional norms or givens. Indeed, if the critical was used to describe the field, then we would become complicit with the
transformation of education into an audit culture, into a culture that measures value through performance. 11. My commentary on the risks of
whiteness studies will involve an analysis of how whiteness

gets reproduced through being declared, within

academic texts, as well public culture. I will hence be reading Whiteness Studies as part of a broader shift towards what we
could call a politics of declaration, in which institutions as well as individuals admit to forms of bad
practice, and in which the admission itself becomes seen as good practice. By reading Whiteness Studies
in this way, I am not suggesting that it is a symptom of bad practice: rather, I think it is useful to consider turns within the academy as having
something to do with other cultural turns. The examples are drawn from the UK and Australia, as the two places in which my own anti-racist
politics have taken shape. My argument is simple: anti-racism is not performative. I use performative in Austins (1975) sense as referring to a
particular class of speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says: the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action
(1975, 6). 12. I will suggest that declaring

whiteness, or even admitting to ones own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be
does not do what it says. In other words, putting whiteness into
speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and nor
does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action that we could describe
as anti-racist. To put this more strongly, I will show how declaring ones whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can
evidence of an anti-racist commitment,

reproduce white privilege in ways that are unforeseen. Of course, this is not to reduce whiteness studies to the reproduction of whiteness, even if
that is what it can do. As Mike Hill suggests: I cannot know in advance whether white critique will prove politically worthwhile, whether in the
end it will be a friendlier ghost than before or will display the same stealth narcissism that feminists of color labeled a white problem in the late
1970s (1997, 10).

Fear of violence is a conservative political maneuver the question is not whether or

not there will be violence but whether it will be directed at an unjust social order
Wilderson 2011 [Frank B., University of California Irvine African American Studies/Drama Department, The Vengeance of Vertigo:
Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions Journal, Issue 5, Fall/Winter 2011]
Many pacifist

scholars and activists consider the strategies and tactics of armed revolutionaries in
First World countries to be short-sighted bursts of narcissism.xvii What pacifist detractors forget, however, is that for
Gramsci, the strategy of a War of Position is one of commandeering civic and political spaces one trench
at a time in order to turn those spaces into pedagogic locales for the dispossessed; and this process is
one which combines peaceful as well as violent tactics as it moves the struggle closer to an all-out violent
assault on the state. The BLA and their White revolutionary co-defendants may have been better Gramscians than those who critique
them through the lens of Gramsci. Their tactics (and by tactics I mean armed struggle as well as courtroom performances) were no less effective

the domains of US public life, and many whites, while enjoying all the advantages of
whiteness, profess to believe that, in post-civil rights America, racism, if not actually eliminated, has
been reduced to the status of a non-problem. It is of deep concern that such a belief

can ourish in the face of so many economic, educational and other

indicators that the gaps between white and Black Americans are increasing,
not narrowing. The belief is, of course, confined almost exclusively to whites:
in Black America there is a widespread knowledge that racism is waxing, not
waning. The fact that race relations are perceived so differently by white and
Black America is, I believe, a critical indication of the depth of the current
at winning hearts and minds than candle light vigils and orderly protests. If

the end-game of Gramscian struggle is the

isolation and emasculation of the ruling classes ensemble of questions, as a way to alter the
structure of feeling of the dispossessed so that the next step, the violent overthrow of the state,
doesnt feel like such a monumental undertaking, then I would argue the pedagogic value of
retaliating against police by killing one of them each time they kill a Black person, the
expropriating of bank funds from armored cars in order to further finance armed struggle as well
as community projects such as acupuncture clinics in the Bronx where drug addicts could get clean, and the bombing of
major centers of U.S. commerce and governance, followed by trials in which the defendants used the majority of the trial
to critique the government rather than plead their case, have as much if not more pedagogic value than peaceful
protest. In other words, if not for the pathological pacifism (Churchill) which clouds political debate and scholarly
analysis there would be no question that the BLA, having not even read Gramsci,xviii were among the best Gramscian theorists the U.S. has ever
known.

But though the BLA were great Gramscian theorists, they could not become Gramscian subjects. The political character of ones
actions is inextricably bound to the political status of ones subjectivity; and while this status goes without
saying for Gilbert and Clark, it is always in question for Balagoon and Bukhari. [34] How does one calibrate the gap between
objective vertigo and the need to be productive as a Black revolutionary? What is the political significance of
restoring balance to the inner ear? Is tyranny of closure the only outcome of such interventions or could
restoration of the Black subjects inner ear, while failing at the level of conceptual framework,
provide something necessary, though intangible, at the level of blood and sweat political
activism? These unanswered questions haunt this article. Though I have erred in this article on the side of paradigm as opposed to praxis, and
cautioned against assuming that we know or can know what the harvest of their sacrifice was, I believe we are better political
thinkersif not actorsas a result of what they did with their bodies, even if we still dont know
what to do with ours. *

Whiteness Supremacy is affectively and discursively produced it circulates

through an assumed grammar that produces Blackness as ontologically abject. The
affirmative disrupts the attempt to ahistorically pass off the violence of the White
Gaze.
Yancy 5 [George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series,
Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse]

The burden of the white gaze disrupts my first-person knowledge, causing "difficulties in the
development of [my] bodily schema" (110). The white gaze constructs the Black body into "an object in the midst of other
objects" (109). The nonthreatening "I" of my normal, everyday body schema becomes the threatening "him" of the Negro kind/type. Under

racial crisis; the racial gap produces not only different life experiences of US
society, but different knowledge systems, different ways of knowing what it
is to be American. Polls taken during the months of 0 .J. Simpsons trial, for
instance, showed consistently that a large majority of whites believed him to
be guilty, whereas an almost equal majority of African-Americans believed he
had been framed by the police: such different knowledges of the legal
system and of methods of policing are not only products of different life
experiences, but exemplify non-racist racism in practice - for the white
knowledge of the state apparatuses of the courts and of policing is
imprinted with ideas of objectivity, equality and justice that ascribes
pressure, the corporeal schema collapses. It gives way to a racial epidermal schema.6 "Below the corporeal schema," writes Fanon, "I had
sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by 'residual sensations and perceptions of a primarily
tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,' but by the other, the white man [woman]" (111). In other words, Fanon

began to
"see" himself through the lens of a historico-racial schema. Note that there was nothing intrinsic to his physiology
that forced his corporeal schema to collapse; it was the "Black body" as always already named and made sense
of within the context of a larger semiotics of privileged white bodies that provided him with the
tools for self-hatred. His "darkness," a naturally occurring phenomenon,7 became historicized, residing within the purview of the white
gaze, a phenomenal space created and sustained by socioepistemic and semiotic communal constitutionality. On this score, the Black body is
placed within the space of constitutionality vis--vis the racist white same, the One. Against the backdrop of the sketched historico-racial (racist)
scheme, Fanon's "darkness" returns to him, signifying a new genus, a new category of man: A Negro! (116). He inhabits a space of anonymity (he
is every Negro), and yet he feels a strange personal responsibility for his body. He writes: I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my
race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered
down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "sho' good eaten'."
(112)8 [End Page 222] Fanon writes about the

Black body and how it can be changed, deformed, and made into an
ontological problem vis--vis the white gaze. Describing an encounter with a white woman and her son, Fanon narrates
that the young boy screams, "Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!" (113).9 Fanon: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted,
recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a
Negro, it's cold, the Negro is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with
cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little
white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up.. (11314) The white imagery of the Black as a savage
beast, a primitive and uncivilized animal, is clearly expressed in the boy's fear that he is to be eaten by the "cannibalistic" Negro. "The more that
Europeans dominated Africans, the more 'savage' Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery" (Brantlinger 1985, 203).
Presumably, the young boy does not know that his words will (or how they will) negatively affect Fanon. However, for Fanon, the young white
boy represents the broader framework of white society's perception of the Black. The boy turns to his white
mother for protection from the impending Black doom. The young white boy, however, is not simply operating at the affective level, he is not
simply being haunted, semi-consciously, by a vague feeling of anxiety. Rather, he is

operating both at the affective and the

discursive level. He says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." This locutionary act carries a perlocutionary force of effecting a
phenomenological return of Fanon to himself as a cannibalistic threat, as an object to be feared. Fanon, of course, does not "want this revision,
this thematization."10 African-American philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams notes: For Fanon, the boy's view of the Negro (of Fanon himself
in this case) as an object of fear is significant, as it suggests (1) that the image (racial epidermal schema) of the Negro posited by the boy's verbal
performance has a narrative significance and (2) that such images are available to the boy as elements of a socially shared stock of images that
qualify the historicity (the historical situatedness) both of the boy and of the Negro he sees. (1993, 165) One

is tempted to say that

the young white boy sees Fanon's Black body "as if " it was cannibal-like. The "seeing as if,"
however, is collapsed into a "seeing as is." In Fanon's example, within the lived phenomenological transversal context of
white racist behavior, the "as if " reads too much like a process of "conscious effort." On my reading, "youngwhiteboyexperiencesniggerdarkbodycannibalevokestrepidation" [End Page 223] is what appears in

the uninterrupted lived or phenomenological flow

of the young white boy's racist experience. There is no experience of the "as if." Indeed, the
young white boy's linguistic and nonlinguistic performance is indicative of a definitive
structuring of his own self-invisibility as: "whiteinnocentselfinrelationshiptothedarkniggerself." This definitive
structuring is not so much remembered or recollected as it is always present as the constitutive imaginary
background within which the white boy is both the effect and the vehicle of white racism; indeed,
he is the orientation of white epistemic practices, ways of "knowing" about one's (white) identity
vis--vis the Black Other. The "cultural white orientation" is not an "entity" whose origin the white boy needs to grasp or recollect

race-free causes to the racially disproportionate effects of those

apparatuses. The Black knowledge, however, knows that white
racism informs the operations of those apparatuses despite its
absence from their public faces. All racism is totalitarian, so the
apparent paradox of a non-racist racism is the form it must take in a
society whose democracy appears undisturbed by its totalitarian
undercurrents.

before he performs whiteness. He

is not a tabula rasa, one who sees the Black body for the first time and instinctively says, "Mama,
boy does indeed undergo an experience of the dark body as
frightening, but there is no concealed meaning, as it were, inherent in the experience qua
experience of Fanon's body as such. Rather, the fright that he experiences vis--vis Fanon's dark body is always already
"constructed out of . . . social narratives and ideologies" (Henze 2000, 238). The boy is already discursively and
affectively acculturated through micro-processes of "racialized" learning (short stories, lullabies,
children's games,11 prelinguistic experiences, and so forth) to respond "appropriately" in the
presence of a Black body. The gap that opens up within the young white boy's perceptual field as he "sees" Fanon's Black body has
already been created while innocently sitting on his mother's lap.12 His mother's lap constitutes a "raced" zone of security. This point
acknowledges the fundamental "ways the transactions between a raced world and those who live
in it racially constitute the very being of those beings" (Sullivan 2001, 89). The association of Blackness with "nigger"
and cannibalism is no mean feat. Hence, on my view, he is already attending to the world in a particular fashion;
his affective and discursive performances bespeak the (ready-to-hand) inherited white racist
background according to which he is able to make "sense" of the world. Like moving my body in the direction
of home, or only slightly looking as I reach my hand to retrieve my cup of hot tea that is to the left of my computer screen, the young
white boy dwells within/experiences/engages the world of white racist practices in such a way
that the practices qua racist practices have become invisible. The young boy's response is part and
parcel of an implicit knowledge of how he gets around in a Manichean world. Being-in a racist
world, a lived context of historicity, the young boy does not "see" the dark body as "dark" and
then thematically proceed to apply negative value predicates to it, where conceivably the young boy would say,
the nigger's going to eat me up." On this score, the

"Yes, I 'see' the dark body as existing in space, and I recognize the fact that it is through my own actions and intentions that I predicate evil of it."
"In order even to act deliberately," as philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus maintains, "we must orient ourselves in a familiar world" (1991, 85). [End
Page 224] My point here is that the young white boy is situated within a

familiar white racist world of intelligibility, one

that has already "conceded" whiteness as "superior" and Blackness as "inferior" and "savage."
Involved within the white racist Manichean world, the young boy has found his orientation, he has already become part and parcel of a
constituted and constituting force within a constellation of modes of being that are deemed natural. However, he

is oblivious to the
historicity and cultural conditionedness of these modes of being. Despite the fact that "race"
neither exists as a naturally occurring kind within the world nor cuts at the joints of reality, notice
the evocative power of "being Black," which actually points to the evocative power of being
white. The dark body, after all, would not have evoked the response that it did from the young white boy were it not for the historical mythos
of the white body and the power of white normativity through which the white body has been pre-reflectively structured, resulting in forms of
action that are as familiar and as quotidian as my reaching for my cup of tea. His

white racist performance is a form of

everyday coping within the larger unthematized world of white social coping. On this score, one might say
that the socio-ontological structure that gives intelligibility to the young white boy's racist performance is prior to a set of beliefs of which he is
reflectively aware. Notice that Fanon undergoes the experience of having his body "given back to him." Thus Fanon undergoes a profound
phenomenological experience of being disconnected from his body schema. Fanon experiences his body as flattened out or sprawled out before
him. And, yet, Fanon's "body," its corporeality, is forever with him. It never leaves. So, how can it be "given back"? The physical body that
Fanon has/is remains in space and time. It does not somehow disappear and make a return. And, yet, there is a profound sense in which his
"corporeality"

is interwoven with particular discursive practices. Under the white gaze, Fanon's body is not simply

The belief that surveillance policies effect bodies similarly

underscores the white panoptic gaze that makes
expression of blackness hyper-visible while concealing
whiteness resulting in black bodies being relegated to a
constant state of gratuitous violence
John Fiske 1998. (Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the
world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of
WisconsinMadison. His areas of interest include popular culture, mass
culture, media semiotics and television studies. Surveilling the City
the res extensa of Cartesian dualism. Within the context of white racist practices vis--vis the "Black" body, there is a blurring of boundaries
between what is "there" as opposed to what has been "placed there." Hence, the body's "corporeality," within the context of lived history, is
shaped through powerful cultural schemata. This does not mean that somehow the "body" does not exist. After all, it

is my body that
forms the site of white oppression. To jettison all discourse regarding the body as "real," being
subject to material forces, and such, in the name of the "postmodern body," is an idealism that
would belie my own philosophical move to theorize from the position of my real lived
embodiment. The point here is that the "body" is never given as such, but always "appears there" within the context of some set of
conditions of emergence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 108). The conditions of emergence for the phenomenological return of Fanon's body qua
inferior or bestial are grounded in the white social imaginary, its discursive and nondiscursive manifestations. Having undergone a gestalt-switch
in his body image, his knowledge/consciousness of his body has become "solely a negating activity. It is a third-person [End Page 225]
consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (1967, 11011). Linda Alcoff discusses this phenomenological
sense of being disjointed as a form of "near-incommensurability between first-person experience and historico-racial schema that disenables
equilibrium" (1999, 20). What this points to is the "sociogenic" basis of the "corporeal malediction"experienced by Blacks (Fanon 1967, 111). On
this score, "the black man's [woman's] alienation

is not an individual question" (11). In other words, the distorted

historico-racial schema that occludes equilibrium takes place within the realm of sociality, a
larger complex space of white social intersubjective constitutionality "of phenomena that human
beings have come to regard as 'natural' in the physicalist sense of depending on physical nature" (Gordon 1997, 38). Of
course, within the context of colonial or neocolonial white power, the objective is to pass off what is historically
contingent as that which is ahistorically given.

Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of the ontological

position of Blacknessthe very possibility of ethics and freedom resides in a
rejection of the affirmatives ratification of democracy, the state and civil society.
Resisting the lure of anti-blackness through a genealogy of historys constitutive
void is the starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley, Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy
and performativity in the American racial state, Dissertation available on Proquest)
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative
toward the pursuit of social reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology,
particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans elevated their common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their
circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil.
The analogical uses of the story enabled a sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of despair and
disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration of the social gospel that

presupposes a set of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of training racial,
religious, sexual, social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to behave according to an
ostensibly correct set of moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the underlying
terms of the state and civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize antiblackness
and/or policies that adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle class, rather

Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.Theory, Culture &

Society 1998 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 6788) VR
The urban scanscape has developed rapidly since Davis coined the phrase.
We have grown familiar with the video cameras watching stores and
shopping malls, airports, banks and cash machines, we know they watch the
entrances, elevators and hallways of oce buildings. In an anxious
scanscape the controlling look of video cameras cannot be restricted to
owned public space such as airports and shopping malls: so their sight lines
are being extended to cover all so-called public space. In the US the whole
than to critique or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state
and civil society: for her, they are inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered
centuries of black social death and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward
freedom demands an unflinching critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of
these institutions and the terms on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political
implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated
on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions
of a conservative social gospel: a

toppled faith in the redemptive possibilities of the struggle has the

potential to open the door to invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling together
something from nothing, presence from absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable freedom
dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and absence and the history of processes of
dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the wound and its psychic, social,
political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of its persistence rather than
being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress or redemption.
Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world and the possibilities
and imperatives of a black freedom struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say that the
past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a much bleaker
interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort of
teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from
a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she
calls for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible, which is as fundamental a component
of the black freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of
psychic structures and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic
in the (racial) order of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a
ghost story, an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process
toward understanding. Hartman constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of
the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of searching. Projects that make use of imaginative, performative, quasi-fictional
or poetic devices cant rest with not-knowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or
construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of some large-scale sense of collective
responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both. The

imaginative devices dont exist for the sake of being

imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being imaginative, they allow for radical
possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer the study of history is a) different
keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but
encouragement of what uncertainty can yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are
impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has
been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to slip into a gaping negative space. This I
would call genealogy as an object. A different version is

used in order to understand the gaps, to underscore or

illuminate the negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the context around the

of downtowns in cities like Minneapolis, Newark and Detroit are now covered
by cameras that can zoom in to read a credit card. In Australia, Wainwright
(1995) counted 200 cameras surveilling Sydneys central district (and there
are many more that cannot be counted, for owners need no permission to
install cameras to watch the street in front of their premises, and many have
done so). In Britain, according to the Home Oce, 95 percent of town and
city councils are considering installing video surveillance of all their streets
and open spaces. By early in 1995, 29 percent of British towns and cities had
already done so, another 29 percent had firm plans to and 23 percent hoped
blank spaces, inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship between the past,
present, and future. This I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or even radical
in roots-seeking genealogy projects? There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most
interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages
in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not
conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are
inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present (which has devolved in some way) or a future
that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant
example: it is a wished-for, utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of
its adherents toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomeli 1991). Hartman writes: To

believe, as I do, that the

enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they
were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to
abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of
freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom
that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...] The demands of the slave on the
present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much
more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the
only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs an
unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes
of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical, and part of what I
demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and bolster the
racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with
normativity: do genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive
patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically marginalized groups of people? All three of these

projects
attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the circumstances of African-Americans are configured as being
integral instead of outside the dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver
between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in which we have left slavery behind and
have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental and
unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to uncritical narratives that not only attends to
the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but the possibilities and necessities of
invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is that they present the necessity of grappling with the
past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging
a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive vision of
the future as well as more or less significant red flags. Hartmans

vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly

liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or
significance of ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience
have already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the
fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something
from nothing; they have an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo
that excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized

to. According to one estimate 81 percent of British streets will soon be video
surveilled (Polman, 1995). Surveillance is a perfect technology for nonracist racism, for the ubiquity and apparent impartiality of its
technology and the benignity of the assumption that all citizens
benet from increasing public safety, enhancing public order and
improving trac flow enable it to mask the racial difference in its
operations and effects. It is the very supportability of its claim to operate
for a generalized public good that enables it to hide so effectively those of its
operations that are oppressive, exclusionary and racist. Understanding and
stance, but rather a staunch activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural
analysis, and a sensitive and equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the
possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence
and loss.

Representations of future nuclear war rest on racist fears of irrational non-whites

the bomb is the epitome of the destructive capacity of Whiteness, naturalizing
structural violence through the projection of a spectacular extinction.
Williams 11 [Paul, lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts
and Studies, 2011, p.1-3]

nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (1) the invention and use of the first atomic bombs; (2)
nuclear weapons testing stockpiling of the Cold War superpowers; and (3) nuclear war (often referred to as World War Three)
and life after such a cataclysm. Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and
national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its emergence (and deployment against
Japan) was read by some commentators as an act of genocidal racist violence, and by some as the
apex of Western civilizations scientific achievement. These opposing perspectives are interpretative poles that have been central
In this study,

to nuclear representations. By posing white moral and technological superiority against the destructive technology it supposedly invented, cultural producers have
cited nuclear weapons as evidence against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism. From this point of view, the scientific achievement of splitting the atom does not reveal

the enormity of nuclear weapons reminds one that the technology first created by
the white world imperils the whole Earth. Through a range of media, from novels to poetry, short stories to film, comics to oratory, the
terms that modern European imperialism depended upon civilization, race, and nation, in
particular often recur in nuclear representations. Some of these representations, emerging when Europes empires were
relinquishing direct control of their colonies, share the uncertainty that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent decolonizing preocess. The
historical congruence of nuclear representations and decolonization intimates the importance of
this context to future visions of World war Three: tropes of genocide, technological and and
scientific modernity, and the (re)population of the planet are relevant to this apocalyptic subgenre of SF as well
as being recurrent elements in colonial history. Several of the nuclear representations discussed reproduce
the justifications of the modern imperial project. But an alternative tradition makes these justifications visible and demonstrates their
corrosive, lingering presence in contemporary culture through the depiction of nuclear technology and its possible consequences. Significantly, the idea that
nuclear weapons are used to buttress a racial order that privileges whiteness an idea that
prohibits non-white peoples from accessing such technology remains a potent current running
from 1945 until the present day. Having raised this point to emphasize the importance of the themes in this study, I am mindful to repeat that my
white superiority; instead,

focus is literary, cultural and filmic texts. I am not seeking to explain how race and ethnicity have structured Cold War history. If I may be excused a brief aside, I do

US foreign policy had to negotiate the

American governments response to domestic systems of racial discrimination, and vice versa.
think such moments have occurred. Civil rights and Cold War historians have long understood that

Recently decolonized nations whose populations had been excluded along similar lines by European imperialism followed the narrrative of American desegregation
closely, and the allegiances of these nations played and important role in the Cold War. When the black student James Meredith was not permitted to join the
University of Mississippi in 1962, President Kennedy ordered federal marshals to force his registration through. This took place on 1 October 1962, after a night of
fighting between demonstrators and troops. While not universally praised, Kennedys actions were widely perceived in the international press as evidence to resolve to
oppose racial discrimination. When the Cuban Missile Crisis took place three weeks later, the presidents of Guinea and Ghaa denied refuelling facilities to Soviet

possibly supporting its socially benign operations does not require

us to recognize that it is always also constructing the eye of
whiteness as the power to make the racial other visible, and thus to
hold him (or, more rarely, her) within the disciplinary mechanism.
The apparently non-racist nature of discipline as technique of social order to
which all citizens are subject masks the racial dimensions of the norms by
which a threat to disorder may be recognized and dealt with. Because the
Black man is the focus of white fear and is made to embody all that
appears to threaten the social order, he has to be always watched:
while the development of the surveilled society may not have
planes flying to the Caribbean. Kennedy aside Arthur Schlesinger directly attributed the African presidents actions to the intervention in Mississippi. The subject of

representations of nuclear weapons and the

world after nuclear war postulate meanings that are not only fully activated when considered
through a lens of race, ethnicity, nationhood and civilization. In many of the texts discussed, a primary
consideration is whether the vestigial master narrative of white supremacy, the narrative of racial
superiority that underpinned modern European colonization, is being resuscitated. I have in mind Fredric
this book is not the mechanisms of history. The subject of this book is the way that

Jamesons expression, if interpretation in terms of [] allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have
inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them. For Jameson the interpretative act runs the risk of being an act of hermeneutic bad faith the
risk that the critic finds what they are looking for all along because they gathered up a series of texts whose selection is far from arbitrary, and consequently the
reading of said texts confirms the ubiquity of the historical essence with which they were initially ascribed. Yet, as Jameson writes, one should not be too cynical about
the act of interpretation. If the critical analysis of a text finds evidence of the historical trends it set out to discover the success of the interpretation is not in itself a
reason to reject the idea that texts allow one to think closely and critically about historical attitudes. The act of interpretation can sometimes be the imposition of a
preconvieved set of ideas onto a series of texts chosen precisely because they corroborate the hypothesis being tested, but it can also be credible because texts are
inscribed by history and by master naratives. As a way of referring to an explanation of the movement of history and its future direction, Jamesons sense of master

the master narrative of white supremacism

that proved so useful to European colonialism and the settlement of North America. How do
texts come to be inscribed by master narratives? What justification do I have in reading the master narrative o white supremacism
narratives is worth retaining. My usage here designates the explanation itself, specifically

and related narratives of settlement through the literary, cultural and filmic texts analysed here?

The demand for political coherence and reformism obliterates the position of the
slave their integrationist optimism cannot take into account the gratuitous
violence directed towards Blackness
Hartman and Wilderson 3 [Saidiya, professor of English and comparative literature and women's and gender studies at
Columbia University, Frank, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Drama at UC Irvine, THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT,
Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2003, JSTOR]

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. Your book, in moving through
these scenes of subjection as they take place in slavery, refuses to do that. And just as importantly, it does not allow the reader to think
that there was a radical enough break to reposition the black body after Jubilee.' That is a tremendous and courageous move. And I think what's important
What I mean, is that so often in black scholarship,

about it, is that it corroborates the experience of ordinary black people today, and of strange black people like you and me in the academy [laughter]. But there's something else that the book does,

If we think about the registers of subjectivity as being

preconscious interest, unconscious identity or identifications, and positionality, then a lot of the work in the social sciences organizes
itself around precon-scious interest; it assumes a subject of consent, and as you have said, a subject of exploitation, which you reposition as the
subject of accumulation.2 Now when this sort of social science engages the issue of positionality if and when it does it assumes that it
can do so in an un-raced manner. That's the best of the work. The worst of the work is a kind of multiculturalism that
assumes we all have analogous identities that can be put into a basket of stories, and then that
basket of stories can lead to similar interests. For me, what you've done in this book is to split the hair here. In other words, this is not a book that
and I want to talk about this at the level of methodology and analysis.

celebrates an essential Afrocentrism that could be captured by the multicultural discourse. And yet it's not a book that remains on the surface of preconscious interest, which so much history and
social science does. Instead, it demands a radical racialization of any analysis of positionality. So. Why don't we talk about that? Saidiya V Hartman Well! That's a lot, and a number of things
come to mind. I think for me the book is about the problem of crafting a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that narrative enable?" That's where the

every attempt to employ the slave in a narrative

ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration, regardless of whether it was a leftist narrative of
whole issue of empathic identification is central for me. Because it just seems that

intentionally been directed upon him, in practice it often is. And

Black men are acutely aware that surveillance is discriminatory: the
Korean stores were targets of Black anger in LA partly because of their
constant surveillance of Black customers, a surveillance routinized into
mundanely painful experiences of disrespect and social othering. Street
behaviors of white men (standing still and talking, using a cellular phone,
passing an unseen object from one to another) may be coded as normal
and thus granted no attention, whereas the same activity performed
by Black men will be coded as lying on or beyond the boundary of
political agency the slave stepping into someone else's shoes and then becoming a political
agent or whether it was about being able to unveil the slave's humanity by actually finding
oneself in that position. In many ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the
limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved. On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national
order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position
into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our claims are
more radical. This goes to the second part of the book that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is always towards an
integration into the national project, and partic-ularly when that project is in crisis, black people
are called upon to affirm it. So certainly it's about more than the desire for inclusion with-in the limited set of possibilities that the national project provides.
What then does this language the given language of freedom enable? And once you realize its limits and
begin to see its inex-orable investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that
language of freedom no longer becomes that which res-cues the slave from his or her former
condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition, rather than its transformation. F. W.
This is one of the reasons why your book has been called "pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.' But it's interesting that she does-n't say what I said when we first started talking, that it's enabling. I'm

a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are

attempt to make the narrative of defeat into
an opportunity for cel-ebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few
centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about our-selves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the project of a
assuming that she's white I don't know, but it certainly sounds like it. S.V.H. But I think there's

variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the

number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory

, as if there was a space you could carve out of the ter-rorizing

state apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in
narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration

partic-ular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave.
F.W. That's very interesting, because it's something I've been thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon suggests that Gramsci breaks down hegemony into
three categories: influence, leadership, and consent.' Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then, using the examples of Harriet Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,' a white antislavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this. Now, what's really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only explain how the positionality of
black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness disarticulates the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[B]eing forced to submit
to the will of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery" (S, 110). In other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say that she is
ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured laborer, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this
case, sex] is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option. . . . Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of subjectivity is predicated upon
the negation of will" (S, 111).

The rush to declare Whiteness as a positive and heterogeneous identity beyond

structural oppression is the height of narcissism and the privileged reassertion of
privilegefragmenting whiteness as an ontological position absolves everyone for
racialized violence
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism, eborderlands, 3.2)
Another risk is that in centering

on whiteness, whiteness studies might become a discourse of love,

which would sustain the narcissism that elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal. The reading
of whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The whiteness of academic disciplines, including philosophy and
anthropology has been subject to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998; Asad 1973). For example, a postcolonial critique of

the normal, and thus subject to disciplinary action. For such action to
serve the public good, these Black men, at least, have to be excluded from
the notion of the public, and thus the public as an instrumental concept, is
whitened. Black behavior is seen, white behavior is not, and the
difference is solely one of color: blackness is that which must be
made visible, just as invisibility is necessary for whiteness to
position itself as where we look from, not what we look at.
Foucaults conflation of surveillance and discipline describes
whiteness accurately if unwittingly: The perfect disciplinary
apparatus, he writes, would make it possible for a single gaze to
anthropology would argue that the anthropological desire to know the other functioned as a form of narcissism: the other functioned as a mirror, a
device to reflect the anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in the very display of the colour of difference. So

if disciplines are in a way already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject, then it
follows that whiteness studies sustains the direction or orientation of this gaze, whilst removing
the detour provided by the reflection of the other. Whiteness studies could even become a
spectacle of pure self-reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness is an identity too.
Does whiteness studies function as a narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the
subject as the origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study, which might
mean that whiteness studies could get stuck on whiteness, as that which gives itself to itself.
Dyer talks about this risk when he admits to another fear: I dread to think that paying attention to whiteness might lead to white people saying
they need to get in touch with their whiteness (1997, 10). Whiteness

studies would here be about white people

learning to love their own whiteness, by transforming it into an object that could be loved. 6. Dyer is
right, I think, to feel such dread. Whiteness studies is potentially dreadful, and scholarship within the field is full of admissions of anxiety about
what whiteness studies could be if was allowed to become invested in itself, and its own reproduction. We should I think, pay attention to such
critical anxieties, and ask what the enunciation of such anxieties is doing. In terms of the constitution of the field, for example, the anxiety is not
so much that the borders will be invaded by inappropriate others (as with traditional disciplines), but that the borders will themselves be
inappropriate. But at the same time, and somewhat paradoxically,

the anxiety about borders works to install

borders: whiteness becomes an object through the expression of anxiety about becoming an
object. The repetition of the anxious gesture, that is, gestures toward a field. Fields can be
understood, after all, as the forgetting of gestures that are repeated over time. Is there a
relationship between the emergence of a field through the enunciation of anxiety and the
emergence of a new form of whiteness, an anxious whiteness? Is a whiteness that is anxious
about itself its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its self-centeredness better? What kind of
whiteness is a whiteness that is anxious about itself? What does such an anxious whiteness do? 7. Such an anxious whiteness would be different
to the worrying whiteness that Ghassan Hage critiques in White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003). This worrying
whiteness is one that worries that others may threaten its existence. An anxious whiteness would be one that is anxious about such worrying:
this white subject would come into existence in its very anxiety about the effects it has on others, or even in fear that it is taking something away
from others. This white subject might even be anxious about its own tendency to worry about the proximity of others. So lets repeat my question:
is an anxious whiteness that declares its own anxiety about its worry better, where better might even evoke the promise of "non-racism" or "antiracism? 8. Before posing this question through an analysis of the effects of how whiteness becomes declared, we could first point to the placing
of critical before whiteness studies, as a sign of this anxiety. I am myself very attached to being critical, which is after all what all forms of
transformative politics will be doing, if they are to be transformative. But I think the critical often functions as a place where we deposit our
anxieties. We might assume that if we are doing critical whiteness studies, rather than whiteness studies, that we can protect ourselves from doing
or even being seen to do the wrong kind of whiteness studies. But the

word critical does not mean the elimination

of risk, and nor should it become just a description of what we are doing over here, as opposed to them, over there. 9. I felt my desire to be
critical as the site of anxiety when I was involved in writing a race equality policy for the university at which I work in the UK, where I tried to
bring what I thought was a fairly critical language of anti-racism into a neo-liberal technique of governance, which we can inadequately describe
as diversity management, or the business case for diversity. All public organisations in the UK are now required by law to have and implement a
race equality policy and action plan, as a result of the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000). My current research is tracking the significance of
this policy, in terms of the relationship between the documentation it has generated and social action. Suffice to say here, my own experience of
writing a race equality policy, taught me a good lesson, which of course means a hard lesson: the language we think of as critical can easily lend
itself to the very techniques of governance we critique. So we wrote the document, and the university, along with many others, was praised for
its policy, and the Vice-Chancellor was able to congratulate the university on its performance: we did well. A document that documented the
racism of the university became usable as a measure of good performance. 10. This

story is not simply about assimilation

see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source

of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for
everything that must be known (Foucault, 1979). The Los Angeles Police
Department helicopters that hovered over the Rodney King beating and the
O.J. Simpson chase bristled with searchlights and cameras: they are the
technological form of Foucaults theoretical formulation. Coding normality is,
as I argue later, crucial to surveillance, for the function of surveillance is
to maintain the normal by disciplining what has been abnormalized.
The racialized other, of course, is one of the most urgent objects of
abnormalization, for his or her visibility is a formative factor in the
or the risks of the critical being co-opted, which would be a way of framing the story that
assumes we were innocent and critical until we got misused (in other words, this would
maintain the illusion of our own criticalness). Rather, it reminds us that the transformation of the
critical into a property, as something we have or do, allows the critical to become a performance
indicator, or a measure of value. The critical in critical whiteness studies cannot guarantee that it
will have effects that are critical, in the sense of challenging relations of power that remain
concealed as institutional norms or givens. Indeed, if the critical was used to describe the field, then we would become complicit with the
transformation of education into an audit culture, into a culture that measures value through performance. 11. My commentary on the risks of
whiteness studies will involve an analysis of how whiteness

gets reproduced through being declared, within

academic texts, as well public culture. I will hence be reading Whiteness Studies as part of a broader shift towards what we
could call a politics of declaration, in which institutions as well as individuals admit to forms of bad
practice, and in which the admission itself becomes seen as good practice. By reading Whiteness Studies
in this way, I am not suggesting that it is a symptom of bad practice: rather, I think it is useful to consider turns within the academy as having
something to do with other cultural turns. The examples are drawn from the UK and Australia, as the two places in which my own anti-racist
politics have taken shape. My argument is simple: anti-racism is not performative. I use performative in Austins (1975) sense as referring to a
particular class of speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says: the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action
(1975, 6). 12. I will suggest that declaring

whiteness, or even admitting to ones own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be
does not do what it says. In other words, putting whiteness into
speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and nor
does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action that we could describe
as anti-racist. To put this more strongly, I will show how declaring ones whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can
evidence of an anti-racist commitment,

reproduce white privilege in ways that are unforeseen. Of course, this is not to reduce whiteness studies to the reproduction of whiteness, even if
that is what it can do. As Mike Hill suggests: I cannot know in advance whether white critique will prove politically worthwhile, whether in the
end it will be a friendlier ghost than before or will display the same stealth narcissism that feminists of color labeled a white problem in the late
1970s (1997, 10).

Fear of violence is a conservative political maneuver the question is not whether or

not there will be violence but whether it will be directed at an unjust social order
Wilderson 2011 [Frank B., University of California Irvine African American Studies/Drama Department, The Vengeance of Vertigo:
Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions Journal, Issue 5, Fall/Winter 2011]
Many pacifist

scholars and activists consider the strategies and tactics of armed revolutionaries in
First World countries to be short-sighted bursts of narcissism.xvii What pacifist detractors forget, however, is that for
Gramsci, the strategy of a War of Position is one of commandeering civic and political spaces one trench
at a time in order to turn those spaces into pedagogic locales for the dispossessed; and this process is
one which combines peaceful as well as violent tactics as it moves the struggle closer to an all-out violent
assault on the state. The BLA and their White revolutionary co-defendants may have been better Gramscians than those who critique
them through the lens of Gramsci. Their tactics (and by tactics I mean armed struggle as well as courtroom performances) were no less effective

constant normalization of whiteness.

Pursuit of surveillance started with notion to collect all

black bodies as a way to prevent the dismantling those
bodies can construct on social and cultural rationality.
Surveillance is another form of policing black communities
in order to moderate their subjectivity.
Wilderson 10 (Frank B. III, He Is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker
at winning hearts and minds than candle light vigils and orderly protests. If

the end-game of Gramscian struggle is the

isolation and emasculation of the ruling classes ensemble of questions, as a way to alter the
structure of feeling of the dispossessed so that the next step, the violent overthrow of the state,
doesnt feel like such a monumental undertaking, then I would argue the pedagogic value of
retaliating against police by killing one of them each time they kill a Black person, the
expropriating of bank funds from armored cars in order to further finance armed struggle as well
as community projects such as acupuncture clinics in the Bronx where drug addicts could get clean, and the bombing of
major centers of U.S. commerce and governance, followed by trials in which the defendants used the majority of the trial
to critique the government rather than plead their case, have as much if not more pedagogic value than peaceful
protest. In other words, if not for the pathological pacifism (Churchill) which clouds political debate and scholarly
analysis there would be no question that the BLA, having not even read Gramsci,xviii were among the best Gramscian theorists the U.S. has ever
known.

But though the BLA were great Gramscian theorists, they could not become Gramscian subjects. The political character of ones
actions is inextricably bound to the political status of ones subjectivity; and while this status goes without
saying for Gilbert and Clark, it is always in question for Balagoon and Bukhari. [34] How does one calibrate the gap between
objective vertigo and the need to be productive as a Black revolutionary? What is the political significance of
restoring balance to the inner ear? Is tyranny of closure the only outcome of such interventions or could
restoration of the Black subjects inner ear, while failing at the level of conceptual framework,
provide something necessary, though intangible, at the level of blood and sweat political
activism? These unanswered questions haunt this article. Though I have erred in this article on the side of paradigm as opposed to praxis, and
cautioned against assuming that we know or can know what the harvest of their sacrifice was, I believe we are better political
thinkersif not actorsas a result of what they did with their bodies, even if we still dont know
what to do with ours. *

Whiteness Supremacy is affectively and discursively produced it circulates

through an assumed grammar that produces Blackness as ontologically abject. The
affirmative disrupts the attempt to ahistorically pass off the violence of the White
Gaze.
Yancy 5 [George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series,
Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse]

The burden of the white gaze disrupts my first-person knowledge, causing "difficulties in the
development of [my] bodily schema" (110). The white gaze constructs the Black body into "an object in the midst of other
objects" (109). The nonthreatening "I" of my normal, everyday body schema becomes the threatening "him" of the Negro kind/type. Under

and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the
University of California, Irvine, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, book, page 298,
file:///C:/Users/Nicole/Downloads/Red%20White%20and%20Black%20-%20FB
%20Wilderson.pdf, July 28 | Alfredo)
Skins, in with the savage filmography to which it belongs imagines
Blackness as a force that threatens the social and cultural coherence of
Savage sovereignty. Skins operates through a myriad of strategies which
demonstrate its delity to the same project of sovereign restoration that
is brought to life in the work of ontologists like Deloria, Silko, Alfred,

pressure, the corporeal schema collapses. It gives way to a racial epidermal schema.6 "Below the corporeal schema," writes Fanon, "I had
sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by 'residual sensations and perceptions of a primarily
tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,' but by the other, the white man [woman]" (111). In other words, Fanon

began to
"see" himself through the lens of a historico-racial schema. Note that there was nothing intrinsic to his physiology
that forced his corporeal schema to collapse; it was the "Black body" as always already named and made sense
of within the context of a larger semiotics of privileged white bodies that provided him with the
tools for self-hatred. His "darkness," a naturally occurring phenomenon,7 became historicized, residing within the purview of the white
gaze, a phenomenal space created and sustained by socioepistemic and semiotic communal constitutionality. On this score, the Black body is
placed within the space of constitutionality vis--vis the racist white same, the One. Against the backdrop of the sketched historico-racial (racist)
scheme, Fanon's "darkness" returns to him, signifying a new genus, a new category of man: A Negro! (116). He inhabits a space of anonymity (he
is every Negro), and yet he feels a strange personal responsibility for his body. He writes: I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my
race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered
down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "sho' good eaten'."
(112)8 [End Page 222] Fanon writes about the

Black body and how it can be changed, deformed, and made into an
ontological problem vis--vis the white gaze. Describing an encounter with a white woman and her son, Fanon narrates
that the young boy screams, "Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!" (113).9 Fanon: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted,
recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a
Negro, it's cold, the Negro is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with
cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little
white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up.. (11314) The white imagery of the Black as a savage
beast, a primitive and uncivilized animal, is clearly expressed in the boy's fear that he is to be eaten by the "cannibalistic" Negro. "The more that
Europeans dominated Africans, the more 'savage' Africans came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery" (Brantlinger 1985, 203).
Presumably, the young boy does not know that his words will (or how they will) negatively affect Fanon. However, for Fanon, the young white
boy represents the broader framework of white society's perception of the Black. The boy turns to his white
mother for protection from the impending Black doom. The young white boy, however, is not simply operating at the affective level, he is not
simply being haunted, semi-consciously, by a vague feeling of anxiety. Rather, he is

operating both at the affective and the

discursive level. He says, "Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up." This locutionary act carries a perlocutionary force of effecting a
phenomenological return of Fanon to himself as a cannibalistic threat, as an object to be feared. Fanon, of course, does not "want this revision,
this thematization."10 African-American philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams notes: For Fanon, the boy's view of the Negro (of Fanon himself
in this case) as an object of fear is significant, as it suggests (1) that the image (racial epidermal schema) of the Negro posited by the boy's verbal
performance has a narrative significance and (2) that such images are available to the boy as elements of a socially shared stock of images that
qualify the historicity (the historical situatedness) both of the boy and of the Negro he sees. (1993, 165) One

is tempted to say that

the young white boy sees Fanon's Black body "as if " it was cannibal-like. The "seeing as if,"
however, is collapsed into a "seeing as is." In Fanon's example, within the lived phenomenological transversal context of
white racist behavior, the "as if " reads too much like a process of "conscious effort." On my reading, "youngwhiteboyexperiencesniggerdarkbodycannibalevokestrepidation" [End Page 223] is what appears in

the uninterrupted lived or phenomenological flow

of the young white boy's racist experience. There is no experience of the "as if." Indeed, the
young white boy's linguistic and nonlinguistic performance is indicative of a definitive
structuring of his own self-invisibility as: "whiteinnocentselfinrelationshiptothedarkniggerself." This definitive
structuring is not so much remembered or recollected as it is always present as the constitutive imaginary
background within which the white boy is both the effect and the vehicle of white racism; indeed,
he is the orientation of white epistemic practices, ways of "knowing" about one's (white) identity
vis--vis the Black Other. The "cultural white orientation" is not an "entity" whose origin the white boy needs to grasp or recollect

Churchill and Trask: Rudys quest to avenge himself, his family, and his
culture. But the film, in its argument as regards what exactly puts this
project in peril, makes an emotional, if not intellectual, claim that what

needs to be avenged is not so much the violence of White Settler

supremacy, but rather the (perceived) intrusion of Black style. lxxviii In
Skins oeuvre, the cinematic imaginary of the most life-threatening
constellation of encroachments to Native American sovereignty (e.g.,
language, kinship structure, modes of address, and cultural memory ) are
deployed by what is commonly thought of as Black urban culture (rap
before he performs whiteness. He

is not a tabula rasa, one who sees the Black body for the first time and instinctively says, "Mama,
boy does indeed undergo an experience of the dark body as
frightening, but there is no concealed meaning, as it were, inherent in the experience qua
experience of Fanon's body as such. Rather, the fright that he experiences vis--vis Fanon's dark body is always already
"constructed out of . . . social narratives and ideologies" (Henze 2000, 238). The boy is already discursively and
affectively acculturated through micro-processes of "racialized" learning (short stories, lullabies,
children's games,11 prelinguistic experiences, and so forth) to respond "appropriately" in the
presence of a Black body. The gap that opens up within the young white boy's perceptual field as he "sees" Fanon's Black body has
already been created while innocently sitting on his mother's lap.12 His mother's lap constitutes a "raced" zone of security. This point
acknowledges the fundamental "ways the transactions between a raced world and those who live
in it racially constitute the very being of those beings" (Sullivan 2001, 89). The association of Blackness with "nigger"
and cannibalism is no mean feat. Hence, on my view, he is already attending to the world in a particular fashion;
his affective and discursive performances bespeak the (ready-to-hand) inherited white racist
background according to which he is able to make "sense" of the world. Like moving my body in the direction
of home, or only slightly looking as I reach my hand to retrieve my cup of hot tea that is to the left of my computer screen, the young
white boy dwells within/experiences/engages the world of white racist practices in such a way
that the practices qua racist practices have become invisible. The young boy's response is part and
parcel of an implicit knowledge of how he gets around in a Manichean world. Being-in a racist
world, a lived context of historicity, the young boy does not "see" the dark body as "dark" and
then thematically proceed to apply negative value predicates to it, where conceivably the young boy would say,
the nigger's going to eat me up." On this score, the

"Yes, I 'see' the dark body as existing in space, and I recognize the fact that it is through my own actions and intentions that I predicate evil of it."
"In order even to act deliberately," as philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus maintains, "we must orient ourselves in a familiar world" (1991, 85). [End
Page 224] My point here is that the young white boy is situated within a

familiar white racist world of intelligibility, one

that has already "conceded" whiteness as "superior" and Blackness as "inferior" and "savage."
Involved within the white racist Manichean world, the young boy has found his orientation, he has already become part and parcel of a
constituted and constituting force within a constellation of modes of being that are deemed natural. However, he

is oblivious to the
historicity and cultural conditionedness of these modes of being. Despite the fact that "race"
neither exists as a naturally occurring kind within the world nor cuts at the joints of reality, notice
the evocative power of "being Black," which actually points to the evocative power of being
white. The dark body, after all, would not have evoked the response that it did from the young white boy were it not for the historical mythos
of the white body and the power of white normativity through which the white body has been pre-reflectively structured, resulting in forms of
action that are as familiar and as quotidian as my reaching for my cup of tea. His

white racist performance is a form of

everyday coping within the larger unthematized world of white social coping. On this score, one might say
that the socio-ontological structure that gives intelligibility to the young white boy's racist performance is prior to a set of beliefs of which he is
reflectively aware. Notice that Fanon undergoes the experience of having his body "given back to him." Thus Fanon undergoes a profound
phenomenological experience of being disconnected from his body schema. Fanon experiences his body as flattened out or sprawled out before
him. And, yet, Fanon's "body," its corporeality, is forever with him. It never leaves. So, how can it be "given back"? The physical body that
Fanon has/is remains in space and time. It does not somehow disappear and make a return. And, yet, there is a profound sense in which his
"corporeality"

is interwoven with particular discursive practices. Under the white gaze, Fanon's body is not simply

music, handshakes, vestmentary codes, dialect, and disrespect for elders).

The FBI, the banal freedoms of everyday White life (e.g., White family life in
the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska), and /or the logic of policing (patrols,
surveillance, detention) carry neither the intellectual nor emotional
weight nor are they meditated on with the same intensity as Black
urban style. Black style, or Black youth culture, seems to form the

most emotionally charged constellation of threats to Native American

sovereignty. Anxiety regarding the violent effects of Blackness on the

ontological structure of Red sovereignty bloom to such grandiose

proportions that they crowd out the lms capacity to be properly anxious
about the violent effects of latter and present-day agents of genocide.

Surveillance is a tool of anti-black violence that has been

perfected on black communities from COINTELPRO to NSA
surveillance programs.
Kayyali, 14 (Nadia, February 14, is a member of EFFs activism team. And
focuses on surveillance, national security policy, and the intersection of
criminal justice, racial justice, and digital civil liberties issues, The History of
Surveillance and the Black Community,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/history-surveillance-and-blackcommunity) RM; AD: 5/9
the res extensa of Cartesian dualism. Within the context of white racist practices vis--vis the "Black" body, there is a blurring of boundaries
between what is "there" as opposed to what has been "placed there." Hence, the body's "corporeality," within the context of lived history, is
shaped through powerful cultural schemata. This does not mean that somehow the "body" does not exist. After all, it

is my body that
forms the site of white oppression. To jettison all discourse regarding the body as "real," being
subject to material forces, and such, in the name of the "postmodern body," is an idealism that
would belie my own philosophical move to theorize from the position of my real lived
embodiment. The point here is that the "body" is never given as such, but always "appears there" within the context of some set of
conditions of emergence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 108). The conditions of emergence for the phenomenological return of Fanon's body qua
inferior or bestial are grounded in the white social imaginary, its discursive and nondiscursive manifestations. Having undergone a gestalt-switch
in his body image, his knowledge/consciousness of his body has become "solely a negating activity. It is a third-person [End Page 225]
consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (1967, 11011). Linda Alcoff discusses this phenomenological
sense of being disjointed as a form of "near-incommensurability between first-person experience and historico-racial schema that disenables
equilibrium" (1999, 20). What this points to is the "sociogenic" basis of the "corporeal malediction"experienced by Blacks (Fanon 1967, 111). On
this score, "the black man's [woman's] alienation

is not an individual question" (11). In other words, the distorted

historico-racial schema that occludes equilibrium takes place within the realm of sociality, a
larger complex space of white social intersubjective constitutionality "of phenomena that human
beings have come to regard as 'natural' in the physicalist sense of depending on physical nature" (Gordon 1997, 38). Of
course, within the context of colonial or neocolonial white power, the objective is to pass off what is historically
contingent as that which is ahistorically given.

February is Black History Month and that history is intimately linked with surveillance by the
federal government in the name of "national security." Indeed, the history of surveillance in the
African-American community plays an important role in the debate around spying today and in the
calls for a congressional investigation into that surveillance. Days after the first NSA leaks emerged last
June, EFF called for a new Church Committee. We mentioned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the targets
of the very surveillance that eventually led to the formation of the first Church Committee. This Black History
Month, we should remember the many African-American activists who were targeted by intelligence agencies.

Their stories serve as cautionary tales for the expanding surveillance state. The latest revelations
about surveillance are only the most recent in a string of periodic public debates around domestic
spying perpetrated by the NSA, FBI, and CIA. This spying has often targeted politically unpopular groups or
vulnerable communities, including anarchists, anti-war activists, communists, and civil rights leaders.

Government surveillance programs, most infamously the FBIs COINTELPRO, targeted Black
Americans fighting against segregation and structural racism in the 1950s and 60s. COINTELPRO,
short for Counter Intelligence Program, was started in 1956 by the FBI and continued until 1971. The program
was a systemic attempt to infiltrate, spy on, and disrupt activists in the name of national security.
While it initially focused on the Communist Party, in the 1960s its focus expanded to include a wide swathe
of activists, with a strong focus on the Black Panther Party and civil rights leader s such as Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. FBI papers show that in 1962 the FBI started and rapidly continued to gravitate toward
Dr. King. This was ostensibly because the FBI believed black organizing was being influenced by
communism. In 1963 FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan recommended increased coverage of
communist influence on the Negro. However, the FBIs goal in targeting Dr. King was clear: to
find avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader, because the
FBI was concerned that he might become a messiah. The FBI subjected Dr. King to a variety of
tactics, including bugging his hotel rooms, photographic surveillance, and physical observation of
Kings movements by FBI agents. The FBI's actions went beyond spying on Dr. King, however.
Using information gained from that surveillance, the FBI sent him anonymous letters attempting to
blackmail him into suicide. The agency also attempted to break up his marriage by sending
selectively edited personal moments he shared with friends and women to his wife. The FBI also
specifically targeted the Black Panther Party with the intention of destroying it. They infiltrated the
Party with informants and subjected members to repeated interviews. Agents sent anonymous letters
encouraging violence between street gangs and the Panthers in various cities, which resulted in the
killings of four BPP members and numerous beatings and shootings, as well as letters sowing
internal dissension in the Panther Party. The agency also worked with police departments to harass
local branches of the Party through raids and vehicle stops . In one of the most disturbing examples of this,
the FBI provided information to the Chicago Police Department that aided in a raid on BPP leader Fred Hamptons
apartment. The raid ended with the Chicago Police shooting Hampton dead. The FBI was not alone in targeting civil
rights leaders. The NSA also engaged in domestic spying that included Dr. King. In an eerily prescient statement,
Senator Walter Mondale said he was concerned that the NSA could be used by President 'A' in the future to spy
upon the American people, to chill and interrupt political dissent. The Church Committee was created in response
to these and other public scandals, and was charged with getting to the bottom of the government's surveillance
overreach. In response to its findings, Congress passed new laws to provide privacy safeguards, including the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But ever since these safeguards were put in place, the intelligence community
has tried to weaken or operate around them. The NSA revelations show the urgent need to reform the laws

Today were responding to those domestic

surveillance abuses by an unrestrained intelligence branch. The overreach weve seen in the past
underscores the need for reform. Especially during Black History Month, lets not forget the
speech-stifling history of US government spying that has targeted communities of color.
governing surveillance and to rein in the intelligence community.

Legalism
The 1ACs demand for legal relief re-establishes the
master/slave relationship by acknowledging the states
ability to grant or withhold rights.
Farley 5, (Anthony, professor in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory Perfecting Slavery
Page 221-222)

Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. Whiteover-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the
distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to
segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with postmodernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is
neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-overblack, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a
lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the
form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The
slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its
own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the
impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree. 3 When
exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master
when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it
cultivates the eld of law hoping for an answer.

Legal solutions to human rights issues are insucient and fail

to recognize the history of racist laws that perpetuated antiblack violence.
Henderson 9 [Carol E. Henderson, B.A. University of California, Los Angeles; M.A.
California State University of Dominguez Hills; Ph.D. University of California, Riverside,
America and the Black Body: Identity Politics in Print and Visual Culture, page 30-31, Rosemont
Publishing]//JC//
ANGLO-AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. ESPECIALLY SINCE THE enlightenment, has sought to
create putatively objective legal doctrines that operate without respect to
a particular person's identity or standing in society . Some commentators have
characterized this shift as one that has moved from status to contract because law
has moved away from imposing a social hierarchy and allowed individuals
to determine Social relationships based on their preferences or desires .
Despite this general trend toward creating legal doctrines based on abstracted no- tions Of personhood, race
along with gender, has continued to shape legal discourse. Law permitted
racebased slavery through 1865 and sanctioned race-based segregation
until the 1950s. As Ian Haney Lopez demonstrates in his analysis of immigration, courts applied
the rights Of citizenship to white (male) bodies while they excluded bodies
found to be nonwhite from citizenship and/or denied them the full exercise
of their rights.' As the scholarship of Haney Lopez and others documents, African Americans, Latinos, and
Asian Americans consis- tently challenged their exclusion from and special status within legal discourse. During the

numerous racial and ethnic groups sought to expand

existing doctrines to include historically marginalized groups . Movement
lawyers persuaded courts to adopt innovative strategies for realizing the
egalitarian impulses Of Anglo-American law by crafting specic remedies
Civil Rights Movement,

for African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans who had long suffered
from acts of individual and institutional discrimination . During the 1970s, Courts
began moving away from constructing remedies for racism and racial hierarchyboth historical and ongo- ing. In

the United States Supreme

Court limited the kinds of integration strategies that could be created ..
Increasingly, the courts gued, as they did in Bakke, any mention of race was impermissible
because "when a State's distribution Of benets or imposition Of burdens
hinges on ancestry or the color of a person's skin , that individual is
entitled to a demonstration that the challenged classication is necessary
to promote a substantial state interest."' The Court held that the system of admissions for
cases such as Milliken vs. Bradley: and Bakke vs. Regents of Cali- fornia,s

medical school at issue in Bakke failed to meet this strict test and, in effect, demanded a colorblind or neutral

legal scholars began

questioning why legal discourse retreated from questions of racial
equality during the postcivil rights period.' Influenced by the burgeoning
of postmodernism and post- structuralism, many white legal scholars,
primarily associated with critical legal studies (CLS), concluded that legal
reasoning was indeterminate due to the malleability of legal language , the
methodology for making judgments and allocating resources.6 In the 1980s,

instability of the fact-value distinction, and the commitment to legal process over substantive equality.* These

rights discourse offered

merely a fundamental contradiction because those who most need it are
the ones failed by current institutional arrangements and legal doctrines ."
scholars expresed deep skepticism about rights discourse as well. For CLS,

Peter Gabel, in a famous dialogue with Duncan Kennedy, asserts that rights "don't exist" and that they ought to be
"trashed. "10 For Gabel and Kennedy, rights discourse constitutes an overbroad, abstract Strat- egy to resolve the

They advocate
abandoning formal legal analysis in favor Of developing human
relationships and communal ties as more fruitful avenues for addressing
the persistence Of in- equality. Although they initially join in the conferences and conversations associated with CLS, legal scholars of color soon found that "racial power was exerting itself within CLS." r These
scholars developed an alternative forum and discourse , critical race theory
(CRT), to discuss issues of racialized power, which CLS tended to ignore." They
forces Of alienation and dehumanization, which civil rights activism sought to remedy.J1

iden- tify a number of themes and/or methods, which highlighted their critique of CLS: intersectionality,l' multiple
consciousness," interest convergence thesis, 1 e' anti-essentialism," and storytelling.'" Between 1987 and 1997,

Although numerous positions existed within

the movement, CRT primarily focuses on exploring how racial subjectivity
infused and affected legal thought even when legal discourse has omitted
specic mention of race. Contra CLS claims, the civil rights movement failed to
realize its ultimate vision, not because legal reasoning was indeterminate and thus alienating, but
because lawyers, judges, and lawmakers' commitments to objectivity,
neutrality, and legal process masked and enabled racial hierarchy and
oppression.
CRT ourished within the legal academy.'"

Legal reform is the perfection of slavery

Farley 5 Anthony, J.D., Harvard Law School, Professor at Boston College,
CUNY School of Law, Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern
University, and Albany Law School, Perfecting Slavery, January 27th 2005
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1028&context=lsfp)
Slavery is with us still . We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by
slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every
situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows
the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of whiteover-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement

from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of

slavery perfecting itself . White-over-black is neosegregation. Whiteover-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is whiteover-black , only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up
from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told
juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law . And
slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down
before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the
slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its
unfreedom by willing itself unfree .3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place?
The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief,
when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the eld of law
hoping for an answer . The slaves free choice, the slaves leap of faith, can only
be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation
and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a
slave . Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to
enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of
the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and
freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these festivals of the universal.
Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not
forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery has not been
forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not
been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the
gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not forgotten its
origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it
serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to see
that everything must go, every law room,7 every great house, every
plantation, all of it, everything . Requests for equality and freedom will
always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will
fail . The request for equality and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the
request is granted or denied. The request is produced through an
injury .8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for lessless respect,
less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark must be made on the esh
because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that
childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common esh. The
mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those
essencesrace, gender, class, and so onthat are said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property
and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our
hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our

Our education cultivates our

desire in the direction of our hierarchies. If we are successful, we acquire an
orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis--vis
all the other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and
move in the generally expected way. White-overblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a
desire that enables us to nd our place, and therefore our way, in our
institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact
childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on.

of need means that the request will fail. The request for rightsfor equalitywill always fail because there are
always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less han zero, to be marked as a negative attractor,
is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the
calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be.

The slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities
organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities

The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the

end of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can
only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice . The
perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slaves nal
and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the
organized? How is freedom ended?

manifest content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or
uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves table manners, do not
matter. The story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent

The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to ourselves.

The dream of equality, of rights, is the disguised wish for hierarchy . The
prayer for equal rights is the disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is
death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the disguise of the
deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slaves perfect moment . The
slaves perfect prayer, the prayer of the perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows
not what it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from
itself. Of its own inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own
wish that does matter.

property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce the final commodity law. In

The slave produces itself as a

slave (as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights . And that
prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and
prays for equal rights. The slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no
law before the slave bows down. The slaves delity becomes the law,
and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle for the universal,
through the slaves struggle for equality of right . The slave prays for equality of
right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities open, like the
other words, the slave produces itself as a slave through law.

gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the endless ambiguities
of law rains down. White over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of
forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of
forever.

State
The armatives reactionary politics to bulk-data
collection and NSA surveillance comes from a color-blind
position of power meant to reify the myth of equitable
democracy that has been built on the criminalization of
black bodies--only an absolute refusal of the state solves
Time Wise 2013. (Wise, is an American anti-racism activist and writer.
Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege.www.timwise.org.
http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-and-the-irony-ofracial-privilege/) VR

Its not that Im not angry. Its not that Im not disturbed, even horrified by the
fact that my government thinks it appropriate to spy on people, monitoring their
phone calls to whom we speak and when among other tactics, all in the supposed service of the national
interest. That any government thinks it legitimate to so closely monitor its people is indicative of the inherent

the power to intrude into the

most private aspects of our lives is more possible than ever , thanks to the datagathering techniques made feasible by technological advance. That said, I also must admit to a
certain nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations about the National Security
sickness of nation-states, made worse in the modern era, where

Agencys snooping into phone records, and the dust-up over the leaking of the NSAs program by Ed Snowden. And
as I tried to figure out why I wasnt more animated upon hearing the revelations and, likewise, why so many

Those who are especially chapped about the program,

about the very concept of their government keeping tabs on them in
effect proling them as potential criminals, as terrorists are almost
entirely those for whom shit like this is new: people who have never
before been presumed criminal, up to no good, or worthy of suspicion. In
others were it struck me.

short, they are mostly white. And male. And middle-class or above. And most assuredly not Muslim. And although I
too am those things, perhaps because I work mostly on issues of racism, white privilege and racial inequity and
because my mentors and teachers have principally been people of color, for whom things like this are distressingly
familiar the latest confirmation that the U.S. is far from the nation we were sold as children is hardly Earth-

After all, it is only those who have had the relative luxury of
remaining in a child-like, innocent state with regard to the empire in which
they reside who can be driven to such distraction by something that,
compared to what lots of folks deal with every day, seems pretty weak tea .
As Yasuragi, a blogger over at Daily Kos reminded us last week: ( This is) the nation that killed
shattering.

protesters at Jackson and Kent State UniversitiesThe nation that executed Fred Hampton in his bed, without so

holds Leonard Peltier in prison. The nation that

supported Noriega, the Shah, Trujillo, and dozens of other fascist monsters who did nothing but fuck over
their own people and their neighbors. The nation of Joseph McCarthy and his current-day descendants.
The nation that allows stop-and-frisk. Before all that: The nation that enforced Jim Crow laws .
Before that, the nation that built itself on slavery and the slave trade . And before all
of that, the nation that nearly succeeded in the genocide of this continents indigenous peoples. So why are
you so surprised that our government is gathering yottabytes of data on
our phone calls? Lets be clear, its not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last two administrations,
much as a warrant. The nation that still, still, still

are no big deal. Theyre completely indefensible, no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire from the
corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney to legitimize them. A free people should not stand for it.

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
Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein lies the rub.

folks of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they have
long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in housing, the
justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have
circumscribed the boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and
for the latter, freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic
privation in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most other
nations with which we like to compare ourselves. In short, when people proclaim a desire

to take back

our democracy from the national security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats
who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a premise that is entirely untenable ;
namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back, and that the hijacking of said

utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasnt and it hasnt been. Reaction to the most recent
confirmation of this truth ranks right along with the way so many were stunned by the September 11 attacks. The
shock in that instance also came from a place of naivet, wrought by the luxury of believing that the rest of the
world viewed us as we did: as a paragon of virtue, which had brought only light and happiness to the world, rather
than military occupations, hellfire missiles, brutal and crippling economic sanctions, and support for dictators so
long as they were serving our presumed interests. But some people and again, they were mostly black and brown
were not stunned at all. Having long had no choice but to see the nations warts for what they were, and having
never possessed the benefit of viewing America as most whites had, peoples of color, while horrified by that days
events, were hardly likely to be knocked off stride by them. They had always known what it was like to be hated.
And hunted. And solely because of who they were. For myself, I long ago stopped being shocked by anything the
empire did in the service of its continuity. Ever since I was in college, and it was revealed that the Central American
solidarity group of which I was a member was being actively spied on by the FBI, Ive taken it as a matter of faith
that such things were probably happening, and that it would have been silly to the point of idiotic for me to assume
such surveillance were a one-off thing, confined to the inner-workings of the Reagan Administration. By 1988, at
which point I was still a Democrat hoping against hope to turn that party in a truly left direction the realization
that the government was actively spying on its citizens was fully concretized for me. It was then that I was
disallowed from riding in a campaign motorcade for Michael Dukakis (despite being the head of the largest College
Democrats chapter in the New Orleans area), because my activism against U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador

So yeah, the
government is spying on you precious. And now youre pissed ? This is the
irony of privilege: the fact that some have for so long enjoyed it, in its largely unfettered state,
is precisely why some of those those same persons are now so exorcised at the
thought of potentially being treated like everyone else has been, forever; and it is
had earned me an FBI file and caused me to fail a Secret Service background check.

also why the state was able to get away with it for such an extended period. So long as the only possible targets
were racial and religious and class others, shock and outrage could be kept at a minimum. And so the apparatus of
profiling and monitoring and snooping and data collection and even targeted assassination grew like mushrooms in
the dark. And deep down, most of the same white folks who are now so unhinged by the mere possibility and a
remote one at that that they will be treated like those others, knew what was going on. And they said little or
nothing. White liberals with some notable exceptions mostly clucked their tongues and expressed how
unfortunate it was that certain people were being profiled, but they rarely spoke out publicly, or challenged those
not-so-random searches at the airport, or dared to challenge cops when they saw them harassing, or even
brutalizing the black and brown. Plenty of other issues were more pressing. The white conservatives, of course,
largely applauded either or both of those. And now, because they mostly ignored (or even in some cases cheered)
the violations of Constitutional rights, so long as the violations fell upon someone other than themselves, they are
being freshly confronted with the surly adolescent version of the infant to which they gave birth, at least indirectly.
And they arent too happy with his insolence. Yeah, well, tell it to pretty much every Arab American, every Persian
American, every Afghan American, everyone with a so-called Middle Eastern name walking through an airport in
this country for the past decade or more. Tell them how now youre outraged by the idea that the government

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of black men

in New York, stopped and frisked by the NYPD over the past fifteen years, whose
names and information were entered into police databases, even though
they had committed no crime, but just as a precautionary measure, in case they ever decided to
commit one. Tell them how tight it makes you to be thought of as a potential criminal, evidence be damned. Tell
it to brown folks in Arizona, who worry that the mere color of their skin might provoke a local
might consider you a potential terrorist.

ocial, operating on the basis of state law (or a bigoted little toad of a sheriff), to stop them and force them to
prove they belong in the country. Explain to them how patently offensive and even hurtful it is to you to be

Tell it to the veterans of

the civil rights struggle whose activities in the Black Panthers, SNCC,
the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement,
among others were routinely monitored (and more to the point actively disrupted and
presumed unlawful in such a way as to provoke ocial government suspicion.

ripped apart) by government intelligence agencies and their operatives. Tell them how incredibly steamed you are
that your government might find out what websites you surf, or that you placed a phone call last Wednesday to
someone, somewhere.

Make sure to explain how such activities are just a step

away from outright tyranny and surely rank up there alongside the murder
and imprisonment to which their members were subjected. Indeed. And then
maybe, just maybe, consider how privilege being on the upside, most of the time, of systems of inequality can
(and has) let you down, even set you up for a fall. How maybe, just maybe, all the apoplexy mustered up over the
NSAs latest outrage, might have been conjured a long time ago, and over far greater outrages, the burdens of
which were borne by only certain persons, and not others. And yes, I know full well that some were speaking out,
loudly and clearly from the start and have never stopped. I am not speaking to them (to you?), so relax (after all, if
what Im saying doesnt apply to you, why so defensive, buttercup?) But so too, there are those who know (perhaps
you?) if they are among those who, like Rand Paul or Glenn Beck or for that matter Edward Snowden had never
before raised too much fuss about those other things, until it began to potentially affect them and people like them.
Or provide them an opportunity for some publicity. Hero worship. Perhaps (at least in their own minds) martyrdom?

Maybe it is time to remind ourselves that the only things worse than what
this government and its various law enforcement agencies do in secret,
are the things theyve been doing blatantly, openly, but only to some for a
long time now. This nations government has killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, openly,
in front of the world. This nations sanctions on Iraq in the 90s contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands
more, by the admission of Secretary of State Albright. All of it, out in the open. No secrets. This nation stood by and
even helped propagate massacre after massacre an attempted genocide even in Guatemala throughout the
1980s; and not only did we not hide that we were doing it, President Reagan openly praised the architects of the
slaughter while proclaiming they were committed to social justice. We incarcerate 2.5 million people and have
roughly 7 million people under the control of the justice system in all openly, and increasingly for non-violent

We have the highest child poverty rate in the

developed world, and there is nothing secret about it. Our leaders dont
even care about covering it up. In fact, an awful lot of them just dont
care. At all. These are the crimes of empire. These and a lot more. And it
didnt take Edward Snowden to tell you about them. Theyve been hiding
in plain sight for a long time
offenses: more than any nation on Earth.

Our analysis of the state must begin with the Slave only
an unflinching paradigmatic analysis of the Slaves
position in regards to the state can we challenge the
dichotomy separating civil society and Blackness
Wilderson, 10 (Frank, Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Pg.
16-19)//ctb
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

If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in

the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is
the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by marxism and/or psychoanalysis,
then his/her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive
practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This
banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the
emancipatory meditations of Black peoples staunchest allies , and in some of
the most radical films. Herenot in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative
scholarshipis where the Settler/Masters sinews are most resilient . The polemic
proposed.

animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native- and Black American metacommentaries on Indian and
Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and (2) a sense of how much that work appears out
of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular
cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the
meta-commentaries on Red positionality by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine
Deloria, and Haunani Kay-Trask; and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality by theorists such as David

Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe, against the

One suddenly realizes that, though the

semantic eld on which subjectivity is imagined has expanded
phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization
theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more
unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic eld than they
were during the height of COINTELPRO repression . On the semantic field upon which the
deluge of multicultural positivity, is overwhelming.

new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed become partially legible through a programmatics ofas fits our
globalized erastructural adjustment. In other words, for the Indian subject position to be legible, her/his positive
registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register
of dispossession that Indians possess is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill
points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one
for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which the Indian would not,

Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after

claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I
insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that
paradoxically, exist.viii

appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of

One could
answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely
approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In
other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass
incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing,
astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away
en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life . But
todays Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters?

such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on solid ground,
which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to facts, the historical
record, and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the

Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science,

history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am
calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and
alienation , the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is
arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and
those who acquire it . The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty
same.

ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not

Once the solid plank of work is removed from

slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of claims against the
statethe proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough
to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the
Black positiondisintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is
parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world . And, in addition, as Patterson
argues, no slave is in the world . If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of
suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality
against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence,
its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally
dishonored , perpetually open to gratuitous violence , and void of kinship
structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of
relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of
gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless
and until the interlocutor rst explains how the Slave is of the world . The
onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one
who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness . How,
a constituent element of slavery.

when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

State measures only reproduce anti-black violence

Heitzig 2015 (Nancy A., Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race
and Ethnicity at St. Catherine University, "On The Occasion Of The 50th
Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy,
Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law." Hamline University's
School of Law's Journal of Public Law and Policy 36.1: 54-79)
In the post -bellum era, the stain of slavery has been impossible to
remove. Constitutional Amendments, Supreme Court rulings, and
legislation notwithstanding, the exploitation of captive/caged Black
labor continues, largely uninterrupted. As Dillon observes: Slaverys production of
social and biological death did not end with emancipation, did not
cease with the end of segregation, and refused to heed under civil
rights legislation. Its logic and power exceeds the realm of law. The
past comes back not just to haunt, but to structure and drive the
contemporary operations of power.25 The primary mechanism for
the perpetual denial of full citizenship has been the criminal law, with
its attendant systems of policing and punishment. As Frederick Douglas
observed nearly 150 years ago, there is no escaping the general
disposition in this country to impute crime to color. 26 Post slavery, the
criminalizing narrative has been a central cultural feature of on-going
efforts at oppression; from convict lease/plantain prison farms to the
contemporary prison industrial complex, the control of black bodies for
profit has been furthered by the criminal justice system. A substantial
body of work documents the post -bellum transformation of Black Codes
into Slave Codes, slave patrols into police forces, plantations into prisons,
and, in to post-Civil Rights era, into the contemporary prison industrial
complex.27 At no point was the law able to stop this; to the contrary, the
law and its enforcement apparatus remain consistent, albeit shifting,
centerpieces of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. A. THE POST -BELLUM
ERA: CONVICT LEASE AND PLANATION PRISONS In the aftermath of the
Civil War, the passage of the 13th, 14 th , and 15th Amendments seemed
to promise an end the abolition of slavery, due process and equal protection
at both state and federal levels, and full citizenship via the franchise (at
least for Black men). Angela Y. Davis, in Are Prisons Obsolete?, traces the
initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery; [I]n the
immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a
criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom
for the newly released slaves. 28 There was a subsequent
transformation of the Slave Codes into the Black Codes and the plantations
into prisons. Southern states quickly passed laws that echoed the
restrictions associated with slavery, re-inscribed the property interests of
whiteness, and criminalized a range of activities of the perpetrator was
black.29 These laws were enforced by former slave patrols turned police
agencies, with the assistance of extra-legal militias, and the white citizenry

in general, who are merely protected by these same police, but per
Wilderson not simply protected by the police, they are in their very
corporeality the police. 30 All this becomes possible because the 13th
Amendment Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the
United States contained a dangerous loophole- except as a
punishment for crime. This allowed for the conversion of the old
plantations to penitentiaries the 18,000 acre Louisiana Penitentiary at
Angola is a case in point and the creation of prison farms such as
Parchmann in Mississippi and the infamous Tucker Prison Farm and Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas.31
Sheriffs, jailors and wardens leased out entire prisons to private contractors who literally worked thousands of
prisoners to death in labor camps, on chain gangs, and in prison farms. These prisoners were largely black; in the
post-Civil War South the racial composition of prison and jail populations shifted dramatically from majority White
to majority Black, and in many states increased ten-fold.32 As Davis notes, the expansion of the convict lease
system and the county chain gang meant that the antebellum criminal justice system, defined criminal justice
largely as a means for controlling black labor. The re-institutionalization of slavery via the criminal legal system
also served to effectively undo the newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote. This was legislatively curtailed
by the tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently
committed by blacks. In the postCivil War period, existing felony disenfranchisement laws were expanded
dramatically, especially in the South, and modified to include even minor offenses. This legislation, in combination
with literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and ultimately, the threat of white terror, essentially denied
Blacks the right to vote until the mid-twentieth century. The 14th Amendments promise of due process and
equal protection was insucient to override this continued economic exploitation and civic exclusion. This was
due to a series of Supreme Court rulings that interpreted the 14th in support of states rights, white supremacy,
and against Black inclusion. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that that The
fourteenth amendment prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another. 34This decision, in a case involving
the bloody Colfax Massacre, forbade the Federal Government from relying on the Enforcement Act of 1870 to
prosecute actions by white paramilitary groups that had been violently suppressing the Black vote. 35 This
decision paved the way for nearly a century of unchecked white extra-legal violence and lynching that served to
enforce white supremacy in both law and practice. On matters of racial equality, the most famous Supreme Court
ruling of the era was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).36 Post slavery, white supremacy in the law was accomplished by
the introduction of a series of segregationist Jim Crow laws that mandated Black exclusion from white spaces,
even in public accommodations. In a challenge to legalized segregation of public transportation in the state of
Louisiana, Plessy argues that these laws have denied him equality before the law. The majority disagrees and sets
forth the principle of separate but equal. Justice Brown (1896) writes for the majority, It is claimed by the
plaintiff in error that, in an mixed community, the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance
the white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action or of inheritance is property. . . We are unable
to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man,
and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of
his so-called property. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man, and be so assigned, he has been deprived of
no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.37 The sole dissenter in
Plessy sets up the juxtaposition between Jim Crow and color-blindness that frames the contemporary debate on
race today. Justice Harlan, while acknowledging the reality of white supremacy, decries its support with the law,
but with cold comfort: The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in
prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time,

heritage, and holds fast to the principles of

constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law,
there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.
There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows
nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens
are equal before the law. 38 Even post-Emancipation, Blacks had no claim
to the property rights of whiteness, nor full and equal access to rights of
citizenship that entailed. White supremacy and anti-Blackness persisted in
law, even in the face of Amendments to the Constitution, which purported
to undo the same. B. THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA, MASS INCARCERATION
AND COLOR-BLINDNESS The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board
of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) is often used as the benchmark for
chronicling the start of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and
if it remains true to its great

1960s.39 The Courts unanimous rejection of Plessys separate but equal

provided a new Federal framework with which to challenge Jim Crow
segregation on the state and local levels. It offered the back drop for the
Montgomery bus boycott, the resistance in Birmingham, Bloody Sunday, the
voter registration drives of Freedom Summer, and ultimately, passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Right Act of 1965, the Fair Housing
Act of 1968, and the 24th Amendment to the Constitution.40 While there
was hope again that the law itself could be pressed into the service of racial
equality, those victories now seem bittersweet. Bell argues that the Brown
decision and the ensuing Federal legislation were silent covenants of interest-convergence, where
perceived self-interest of whites rather than the racial injustices suffered by Blacks have been the major
motivation in racial-remediation policies. 41 Judge Robert L. Carter, one of the attorneys who argued Brown
goes further, . . .the fundamental vice was not legally enforced racial segregation itself; this was a mere byproduct, a symptom of the greater and more pernicious disease - white supremacy. 42 Legally supported
segregation was uprooted without dislodging either white supremacy or anti-Blackness, now cloaked in race-

The color-blind Constitution and the raceneutral requirement of Federal Civil Rights legislation now serves
as convenient cover for the persistence of institutionalized racism.
Racially coded but race-neutral rhetoric is widely used in debates
over welfare reform, armative action, and particularly law and
order criminal justice policy;43 in all these cases, the coded racial
sub-text reads clearly, and the resultant policies, while purportedly
race neutral, have resulted in disproportionate harm to people of
color, especially African Americans. While race is now widely the
text/subtext of political debate, systemic racism still remains
largely absent from either political discourse or policy debates of
all sorts, including those related to criminal injustice. In the Post-Civil Rights
neutral rhetoric of color-blindness.

Era, there has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and legal systems to
a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the
laws, excessive surveillance, police terror, extreme segregation, a brutal and biased death penalty, and neo-slave
labor via incarceration all in the name of crime control. 44 Law and order criminal justice policies are all
guided by thinly coded appeals to white fears of high crime neighborhoods, crack epidemics, gang proliferation,
juvenile super predators, urban unrest, school violence, and more. In all these case, the sub-text reads clearly

As before, law, policing and punishment

are central to the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from civic life. Post
slavery, the criminalizing narrative was a cultural feature of ongoing efforts at oppression; from convict lease/plantain prison
farms to the contemporary prison industrial complex the control of
black bodies for prot has been furthered by the criminal justice
system.45 Slave Codes become Black Codes and now Black Codes become gang legislation, three-strikes
fear of brown and especially Black people.

and the War on Drugs in the persistent condemnation of Blackness. 46 As before, the criminal legal system is the
primary mechanism for undoing the promised protections of Federal Civil Rights legislation and constitutes again,
the major affront to the fulfillment of the 13th, 14th and 25th Amendments. The United States has the highest
incarceration rate in the world, with a population of 2.3 million behind bars that constitutes 25% of the worlds
prisoners.47 The increased rate of incarceration can be traced to the War on Drugs and the rise of lengthy
mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes and other felonies. These policies have proliferated, not in
response to crime rate or any empirical data that indicates their effectiveness, due to newfound sources of profit
for prisons.48 As Brewer and Heitzeg (2008) observe: The prison industrial complex is a self-perpetuating
machine where the vast profits (e.g. cheap labor, private and public supply and construction contracts, job
creation, continued media profits from exaggerated crime reporting and crime/punishment as entertainment) and
perceived political benefits (e.g. reduced unemployment rates, get tough on crime and public safety rhetoric,
funding increases for police, and criminal justice system agencies and professionals) lead to policies that are
additionally designed to insure an endless supply of clients for the criminal justice system (e.g. enhanced
police presence in poor neighborhoods and communities of color; racial profiling; decreased funding for public

education combined with zero-tolerance policies and increased rates of expulsion for students of color; increased
rates of adult certification for juvenile offenders; mandatory minimum and three-strikes sentencing; draconian
conditions of incarceration and a reduction of prison services that contribute to the likelihood of recidivism;
collateral consequences-such as felony disenfranchisement, prohibitions on welfare receipt, public housing,
gun ownership, voting and political participation, employment- that nearly guarantee continued participation in
crime and return to the prison industrial complex following initial release.)49 The 13th Amendment claim of
abolition remains unfulfilled, as the neo- slavery of the prison industrial complex becomes the current vehicle for
controlling Black bodies for political and economic gain. The trend towards mass incarceration is marred by racial
disparity. While 1 in 35 adults is under correctional supervision and 1 in every 100 adults is in prison, 1 in every 36
Latino adults , 1 in every 15 black men, 1 in every 100 black women, and 1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 are
incarcerated.50 Despite no statistical differences in rates of offending, approximately 50% of all prisoners are
black, 30% are white, and 20% are Latino;.51 These disparities are indicative of differential enforcement practices
rather than any differences in criminal participation. This is particularly true of drug crimes, which account for the
bulk of the increased prison population. Even though Blacks and whites use and sell drugs at comparable rates,
African Americans are anywhere from 3 to 10 times more likely to be arrested, and additionally likely to receive
harsher sentences than their white counterparts.52 It is no mistake that the subtitle of Michelle Alexanders epic
indictment of The New Jim Crow is this: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness 53 The Drug War, from
start to finish, has always been racist: draconian sentences, crack versus powder disparities, police patrol
patterns, stop/frisk practices, racial profiling and death at the hands of law enforcement, arrests, convictions,
sentencing including death and incarceration, and collateral consequences that include bans on voting, bars to
employment, education, housing and economic assistance, and the diminishment of parental rights, all fall
heaviest on Blacks.54 This racial disparity is by design. As Alexander observes criminal justice policies serve to
regulate and segregate communities of color in the Post-Civil Rights era: What has changed since the collapse of
Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the
era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination,
exclusion, and social contempt. So we dont. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label
people of color criminals and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

Today it is
perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the
ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African
Americans. Once youre labeled a felon, the old forms of
discriminationemployment discrimination, housing discrimination,
denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial
of food stamps and other public benets, and exclusion from jury
serviceare suddenly legal. As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less
respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial
caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

The affs reliance on the state misses the boat antiblackness is encoded in the very fabric of American
society and the Constitution any attempt to work
through the state only increases its power.
Robinson 15 (Janessa, Janessa E. Robinson earned her Bachelor of Arts
degree in Communication with a minor in Philosophy from Tulane University
in New Orleans, LA. She is a Black feminist and racial justice activist. 4/17,
Mass Incarceration: The Latest System Of Social Control Over Blackness,
http://www.ravishly.com/2015/04/17/system-will-not-indict-itself-why-merereform-wont-change-thing)
Every day there is a different
Black child, woman, or man who has been killed at the hands of statesanctioned violence. Every day a new video surfaces depicting the
inhumanity with which Black life is regarded. Every day there is a new hashtag and a new
Im sick and tired of being sick and tired. Fannie Lou Hamer

campaign to indict a killer cop. This demoralizing narrative seeks retroactive justice as we endure a never-ending
cycle of mourning each victim. It is unbearable. Fallen victims absolutely deserve to be honored in our words and
actions, and perhaps it is necessary to integrate their stories into attacking the systems of oppression responsible

allowing the media to center individual narratives of police

ocers who have senselessly stolen Black lives perpetuates the bad
for their deaths. But

apple myth. This myth says that individual ocers or departments lack
necessary training, decorum, or resources to properly serve communities .
It denies the reality that American police departments interaction with
Black communities is rooted in the gruesome past of slave patrols sent out to chase, terrorize, capture,
and return Black bodies to slave owners. The bad apple myth tells us that there are
good cops and bad ones that, with just a bit of reform, could easily be
turned into good cops. This narrative is harmful to developing an
understanding on how systems of oppression function ; good and bad cops are
irrelevant when all law enforcement ocials are insulated by a system that bestows upon them unfettered
authority. Good and bad cops are irrelevant to Black lives when American law enforcement culture indoctrinates

The idea that Blacks are targeted by the legal

system due to some inherent inclination to commit crimes is routinely debunked and yet these
stereotypes persistubiquitouslyin media and police practice. In 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union
people into anti-Blackness ideologies.

released a study done in Illinois determining that Black and Latinos are four times more likely to be searched by
police while whites were far more likely to possess contraband. There are also numerous studies detailing how
implicit racial bias is responsible for unfoundedly perceiving Blacks as more dangerous than other ethnic groups.

Anti-Blackness is
embedded into the fabric of American society. This is evident in the threefths compromise within the U.S. Constitution, which commodied
Blackness during slavery, and the terrors of Jim Crow. Even prior to
snatching Black bodies and shipping them to the Western world,
imperialists set a precedent for depicting Blackness as subhuman. They kept

With so much data negating stereotypeswhy does the public fear Blackness?

detailed accounts viciously depicting African people as uncivilized savages. Throughout history, each of these
systems justified the vile treatment of Blacks by dehumanizing the population. The current system of social control
over Blackness is mass incarceration. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander articulates how mass incarceration
was ushered in using policies with race-neutral language in a less overtly racist society after Jim Crow was
dismantled. The result of mass incarceration is that an overwhelming amount of Blacks are under social control
through prison, probation, or parole. Criminalizing Blackness legally reinstitutes the oppression of Jim Crow as felons
are barred from public benefits, participating on juries, disenfranchised as well as subjected to housing, education,
and employment discrimination. Here are staggering facts on mass incarceration: President Reagan declared his
drug war in 1982, three years prior to the crack epidemic. In the late 1990s, the CIA admitted it had previously run
operations supporting Nicaraguan gangs who manufactured crack which ended up in Black communities. Recycling
tough on crime rhetoric from the 1950s that purported Black activists as criminals and saturating media with
imagery of the criminal Black man, Reagan launched a full-edged attack on Black communities. Local and state
police militarization was encouraged, with federal grants supported by every seated U.S. President from Ronald
Reagan to George W. Bush. This created an actual war, positioning police as occupying forces terrorizing Black
communities. Programs offered to local police allow access to Pentagon military weaponry and tactical training from
DEA programs to boost up their SWAT teams. Through civil asset forfeiture, police are allowed to maintain for their
departments cash, vehicles, controlled substances, and other suspects possessions seized during arrest even if
later found innocent of a crime. Through incentivizing the war on drugs with grants, equipment, and rhetoric ,

America has ostensibly incentivized a war on Blackness. War causes causalities and
thus communities bear witness to souls snatched from the bodies of Black girls and boys. Reforms such as
equipping ocers with body cameras or providing them with additional training are suggested to combat
extrajudicial killings of Blacks. However, these solutions increase resources of the police state
while providing the public-filmed terror on Black bodies in high definitionif police even turn their body cams on.
Efforts to change the grand jury system for indicting ocers and forcing the Department of Justice to lead
investigations are not viable long-term solutions for four major reasons: Neither prevents future extrajudicial
killings The DOJ is an inseparable tool of the police state with its own racist history

The injustice

system cannot be trusted to indict and convict itself Jail time veritably does not deter
crime and police are simply criminals by another name When one realizes that society has
maliciously constructed Black bodies to appear inherently violent,
subhuman, and protableit becomes apparent that current systems of
governance cannot reform away our oppression . Systems are emotionless; they cannot
be reasoned with. The systems we have today were built to hoist up one persons privilege on the back of another
persons oppression. Suggesting reformation as a means of eradicating oppression is to say that the system will

cede its own power to the oppressedthis is entirely unheard of. It is time we begin to imagine a society that is
free of these inherently poisonous systems incapable of governing populations humanely. Imagine what a society
with a new system looks like, what it feels like, and how we can build it.

The state is incommensurable with justice and reform-Legal

solutions are co-opted by the state and fail to change the
foundation of white supremacy that legitimizes these forms of
violence.
Martinot and Sexton, 03 [2003, Steve Martinot is a profesor at San Francisco State University and
Jared Sexton has a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, Director, African American Studies at UC Irvine, The
Avant-garde of white supremacy, http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm]

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 reinventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state, and
the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political
cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that sought to shatter this
invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the states absorption and cooptation 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 racialization that it calls the

"maintenance of order" all of which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold,
gray institutions of this societycourts, schools, prisons, police, army,
law, religion, the two-party systembecome the arenas of this brutality ,
its excess and spectacle, which they then normalize throughout the social field. It is not simply by
understanding the forms of state violence that the structures of hyperinjustice 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

to merely catalogue these

institutional forms marks the moment at which understanding stops . To
pretend to understand at that point would be to arm what denies understanding. Instead, we have
to understand the state and its order as a mode of anti-production that
seeks precisely to cancel understanding through its own common
sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice; however, the
re-criminalization of race as their version of social orderthen

opposite of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of hyper-injustice implies that neither a consciousness of

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 theorizing . 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
injustice nor the possibility of justice any longer applies.

empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror

This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical

leftist politics that presuppose (and close off) the question of structure ,
its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness . The problem here is how to dwell
on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than
simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a
becomes primary.

formation or confluence of processes with de-centered agency, how the

subjects of state authorityits agents, citizens, and captivesare
produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence.

Reformism
The armatives radical dissent towards U.S surveillance
policies is merely a call for white liberal reformism all the
while obfusicating the history of anti-black violence done
against communities of color for decades that created the
modern surveillance state
Rania Khalek 2013.(Khalek, is an independent journalist reporting on the
underclass and marginalized. In addition to her work for Truthout, she's
written for Extra, The Nation, Al Jazeera America, the Electronic Intifada.
Activists of Color Lead Charge Against Surveillance, NSA Truth Out News.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19695-activists-of-color-at-forefront-ofanti-nsa-movement) VR
"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 proling 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 reecting 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 Attendees of Stop Watching Us
rally hold up Thank You Edward Snowden sign. (Photo: Rania Khalek).
Attendees of Stop Watching Us rally hold up "Thank You Edward Snowden"
sign. (Photo: Rania Khalek). 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 Hungton 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 ag 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. Enemy of the state panel from left to
right: Fahd Ahmed, Adwoa Masozi, Alfredo Lopez, Seema Sadanandan,
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Jared Ball. The panel took place at Busboys and Poets in
Washington, DC, on October 24, 2013. (Photo: Rania Khalek) Enemy of the
state panel from left to right: Fahd Ahmed, Adwoa Masozi, Alfredo Lopez,
Seema Sadanandan, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Jared Ball. The panel took place at
Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, on October 24, 2013. (Photo: Rania
Khalek) 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." Demonstrators rally against mass surveillance outside Capitol Hill
in Washington, DC, on Saturday, October 26. (Photo: Rania Khalek).
Demonstrators rally against mass surveillance outside Capitol Hill in
Washington, DC, on Saturday, October 26. (Photo: Rania Khalek). Renderos
said organizing and educating can help combat this. "When the framing

around surveillance is posited around the rst 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 ghting 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."

The affs belief in legal reform is misguided-the law itself

is a violent manifestation of white privilege and power
that is used to maintain the white male order.
Jackson 2014 (Marissa, Law, Order, and the Impotence of the Civil Rights
Paradigm, Excerpted from: Marissa Jackson, Crossing the Bridge: AfricanAmericans and the Necessity of a 21st Century Human Rights Movement 5
Human Rights & Globalization Law Review 56, Fall 2013-Spring 2014, 62-64,
http://racism.org/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=1827:law-ordercivilrights&catid=27&Itemid=159)
The failure of even the most triumphant civil rights accomplishments to improve the social capital of AfricanAmericans demonstrates that traditional civil rights methods and approaches, and even the civil rights paradigm
itself, are increasingly irrelevant. Thanks to the "colorblind" right-wing, civil rights discourse is now disingenuously

complaints of racism from

black people are discounted as "playing of the race card" without further
thought from conservatives, who are willfully blind to the racist world they
intentionally perpetuate. The prevailing civil rights narrative relies on a black versus white or women
characterized as divisive and racist, and is therefore of limited effect. Any

versus men dichotomy, resulting in an inherently combative and hostile paradigm, which excludes the experiences
of other peoples negatively impacted by racism and sexism. As the realities of race-who is white and who is notshift over time and according to class, language, location, and various other factors, it becomes increasingly clear

the
problem is white supremacy, white privilege, and white empire. People of all
that people should not be the object of attack. People raced as white are not the problem; rather,

races contribute to these social, political, and legal ills, and people of all races can unite to destroy them. Presentday racism and sexism in the United States-especially those racist and sexist debates being played out in the
waitmedia, legislative chambers, and courtrooms-have clearly demonstrated that

bigotry is not, at its core,

about personal feelings of animus, but power. Bigotry and prejudice are the byproducts of racism, and racism itself is a system and a strategy for
obtaining and preserving power. Race and racism are tools that have been used by mankind since
antiquity to construct classes in society. They create order, invariably of a hegemonic nature. Recognizing the true
nature of racism and sexism allows one to view most clearly the nexus between these oppressions and the law, and
reveals the importance of the law in destroying both. Law, after all, exists to create and maintain order; law is order.
Therefore ,

it is not only those laws that mandate racial segregation or

oppression that can be termed "racist" or "sexist", but also those laws
created in order to maintain racist and sexist law and order. In the United
States , as in many other nations, the order is one of white male supremacy. Insofar
as white male supremacy is able to sustain itself in the United States, the
law is necessarily complicit in its survival. Conservative law and policy
regarding race and gender can be generally understood as those policies
that would literally "conserve" a racist and sexist status quo. The idea that
racism and misogyny are the result of ignorance is one of white male
supremacy's greatest shields against identication and censure. Bigotry is
intentional and strategic: it is the expression of a belief in a pecking order in which women and racial minorities do
not leave their lowly place in society, so that those on top maintain their elevated social, economic, and political

Order is generally not accidental; and where it is accidental, the

decision to preserve or destroy that order is most certainly not . Prominent and

status.

powerful conservative American politicians and political pundits have, in recent months, been willing to step out
from behind the veil of conservative code words to plainly state their disparaging positions on non-white people and

Power is the
motivation for the maintenance of order. Those invested in white male
supremacy are so invested because they wish to maintain control over
political, economic, and social resources. "Politics is deeply connected to economics by
women, revealing that racism is a machine that is (still) being operated by the privileged elite.

nature" and racial politics are obsessed with economics. But for a desire to gain, preserve, and protect wealth (and

Racism exists as a
way of ordering society and distributing power , largely economic power. In
the power that comes with wealth), it is unlikely that institutional racism would exist.

short, social and economic power are inherently intertwined, as are ordering demographics such as race, gender,
religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and, most obviously, class. I have previously written that political persecution
in the developing world often stems from the efforts of people to maintain and consolidate power, "which is too
often tied to monopolistic control over scarce resources." Such is the case with race. Racism can be understood as
political persecution, and it is exists precisely in order to do what political persecution is meant to do-particularly in
the inner-cities, which are underdeveloped local polities indistinguishable from those found in so-called developing
nations. Therefore, when I wrote that political persecution was often tied, at core, to socioeconomic rights, I could
have just as easily been referring to racism, as race and racism, too, are inherently tied to the denial of
socioeconomic rights to certain groups of people. Ultimately, the fundamental limitation of the civil rights paradigm
is that it is fundamentally American, and American conceptions of civil rights are themselves the product of the
United States' internal colonial empire. African-Americans, like other subjects, have produced labor and wealth for
the empire; they are a valuable resource. In order to maintain control over African-Americans, as with other colonial
subjects, the empire withholds full citizenship from them and ensures that they remain socioeconomically
dependent upon the empire (even as the empire is dependent upon them), all the while attributing that
dependence to personal laziness or other character aws. What African-Americans have been lobbying for, under
a civil rights paradigm, is better treatment as subjects under colonial rule. Over time, and pursuant to various court
rulings, the country's colonial administration over Black Americans has been reformed. However, as has become
evident, reforms are not always improvements. Mass incarceration, for example, has been substituted for slavery as
a new method of managing and profiting from black bodies and labor. According to Michelle Alexander, the sua
sponte killings of African-Americans by white Americans claiming self-defense (which she calls the ""Zimmerman
mindset") are a new way of controlling, and disposing of, black bodies. The goal of the colonized is not improved

just as colonized West Indians and

Africans lobbied for the denitive end of colonialism and for a new legal,
political, and economic framework, African-Americans must pursue a
completely new paradigm if they are ever to achieve social, economic, and
political equality.
conditions in the colony, but liberation. Therefore,

Their negative state action means nothing-they keep

power centered in the system of white power that justies
gratuitous violence and police brutality againt the Black
body.
Satter 2014(Beryl, Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. When are we going to
wake up? Anti-Blackness, Police Power, and Profit. Published on the Feminist Wire, September
4, 2014. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/09/going-wake-anti-blackness-police-powerprofit/)
The tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Gardner, and Michael Brown are among the most recent of a
series of murderous attacks on African Americans. The question is why. What is anti-blackness and

Anti-blackness is a manifestation of a common cultural

tendency to create an outsider caste Indias Untouchables, Europes Jews, and Japans
burakumin are typical examples. And in the modern world, anti-blackness becomes
enmeshed in political systems and business models (often working in
conjunction) that reallocate resources away from the least powerful. One
how do we ght it.

person who understood the workings of anti-blackness from the inside was Chicago African-American
police ocer Renault Robinson. In 1970, when Robinson was on the force, a black Chicagoan was six
times more likely than a white one to be killed by police. In response, Robinson and other black
ocers created the Afro-American Patrolmens League, dedicated to ghting police brutality. They

beatings, arbitrary arrests, and murders of black Chicagoans

were caused by many things, from the politically protable pushing of
organized vice into black communities to the psychological biases of
individual ocers. Police ocers refusal to provide black Chicagoans with
the protection from crime routinely offered to white communities, on the
one hand, and their indiscriminate and often violent harassment of black
people in general, on the other, left black communities to fend for
themselves against combined police and gang terror. Indiscriminate arrests
of black people further inflamed white fantasies of blacks as inherently
criminal, providing justication in white minds for the quarantine of black
communities. Racially segregated housing markets, in turn, enabled clever real estate interests
understood that

to extract one million dollars a day from Chicagos captive, housing-starved black neighborhoods.

Robinson traced police brutality to the existing power structure in

the political machine headed by Mayor Richard J. Daley. Robinson pointed out that
the police department was entirely controlled by the city administration, the
white power structure. Machine politicians appointed racist police superintendents and
Ultimately,
this case,

controlled the racially biased distribution of re and police department resources. They appointed
Board of Education members who thwarted black parents efforts to improve their childrens schools.
They approved urban renewal plans that pushed black property owners off of valuable land. They
allocated public transit and park district funding to favor white neighborhoods. Their actions
channeled citywide resources to the machines white ethnic base, while isolating black Chicagoans in

anti-blackness served
the economic and political ends of the white power structure . Robinson did not
address how anti-blackness functioned in majority black cities, but clearly the same
dynamics are at work, though at a state or federal level. In Michigan, for example, the
resource-starved neighborhoods. Their behavior demonstrated how

appointment of emergency managers in cities with large black populations (including Detroit, Flint,
Benton Harbor, Pontiac, and Ecorse) means that a hefty proportion of Michigans black residents are
denied democratic self-government. Detroit itself now stands as a showcase for the dilution or

the isolation and

demonization of African-American communities. Such actions impede
interracial coalitions, thereby clearing the way for political systems to
extract black wealth and reallocate public resources in favor of the
already powerful. While Renault Robinson pointed out the broad political and structural
components of anti-blackness, he remained convinced that anti-blackness was in many
complete denial of the black communitys political power, as well as

ways exemplied by police terror against black citizens. Police violence

enacted a larger cultural belief that black life had no value. Anti-black
violence thereby grounded the system of white supremacy that was
destroying this nation from the inside out by ruining the credibility of
the nations basic philosophies, Robinson explained. It functioned as a cloak for power
and greed, and it kept the black and white working classes in line, thereby
holding the power where it iswith the money. He asked in 1972, When are
we going to wake up? Its a question every bit as relevant today.

White Privelege/Surveillance Management

The armatives manipulation of surveillance policy is a
form of discplinary power to control and manage black
flesh under the guise of white racial privelege
Delia D. Douglas 2012. (Dr. Douglas, is a Sessional Instructor at the,
Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of
British Columbia.Venus, Serena, and the inconspicuous consumption of
blackness: a commentary on surveillance, race talk, and new racism(s).
Journal of Black Studies. Volume 43, pgs 127-45) VR

As the U.S. population becomes more racially diverse and different groups
move in to previously White-dominated spaces, new techniques of
exclusion and marginalization are being employed in an effort to regulate
the opportunities and progress available to racialized minority groups. In

this article, the author argues that mass medias preoccupation with the
Williams sisters on-court play and off-court activities constitutes a form
of surveillance that is used by Whites to identify, observe, and ultimately,
limit the range of available representations of Venus and Serena Williams.
The author also suggests that this kind of public scrutiny produces racialized
images and narratives constitutive of race talk, a key manifestation of the
new racism(s) characteristic of the politics of this sociohistorical moment.
Neither the end of ocial segregation nor the increased diversity of the U.S.
population has led to the expansion of democratic ideals. Rather, in response
to these judicial and demographic shifts, this postcivil rights era has been
marked by Whites increased sense of anxiety about the undermining of
White racial domination (Bonilla-Silva, 2004; McKinney, 2005; Winant, 1997).

Consequently, we are witnessing a number of discursive moves that work

to maintain White racial privilege and power while simultaneously
downplaying the persistence of racial inequality . Many agree, for example,
that the form and content of contemporary racism(s) are subtle and
covert, in that racialized discrimination and animosity are embedded in
our everyday practices, attitudes, identications, social relations, and
organizations (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Essed, 2002). In addition, research
indicates that in this presumed era of color blindness and postraciality, the
presence of Blacks takes on a particular conspicuousness in relation to
other racial groups; anti-Black hostility is alive and well (Feagin, 1991;
Joseph, 2009; Reeves, 1998). Furthermore, the end of legal racial separation
is marked by the emergence of a new politics of containment (Collins,

1998, p. 35), made manifest through the application of various formations of

power such that surveillance has become an important method of social
control. Surveillance refers not only to the practice of observing people in
public spaces; it is also linked to the rapid and seemingly endless display of
media representations that inuence public discourse (Collins, 1998; Fiske,
1996). Consequently, mass media have become a key pedagogical device
as visual and print media imagery and narratives have inltrated our lives

in an unprecedented manner (Gabriel, 1998; Giroux, 1997). As a result, the

volume of narratives obscures the increasingly limited range of ideas and
interpretations that are available to us in our efforts to make sense of and
respond to the social world (Gray, 2005; Morrison, 1992, 1997). Thus
surveillance is significant precisely because it currently functions as a
sophisticated form of suppression and control in multiracial and
multicultural societies (Essed, 1991; Goldberg, 2005). This article considers

White-dominated television and print media as well as those directed toward

Black American audiences in an effort to understand how public discourses
about race and gender difference inform contemporary relations and
structures of domination (Gray, 2005). 1 That is, whereas some may view the
Williams sisters appearance and success on the tennis tour as evidence of
the end of racial inequality, I contend that neither the presence of these two
Black American women nor their achievements signals the end of racism in a
simple way. Thus the ensuing discussion is aligned with the work of those
who recognize that race continues to matter insofar as it remains a symbol
of difference, identity, and inequality. As Alexander and Douglas 129 (2005)
explain, recognition of race as a social formation allows for an
understanding of race and racial identities as changing and complex , as a
product of culture rather than nature, produced and sustained through power
and subject to resistance, reappropriation and subversion (p. 1).

The rush to declare Whiteness as a positive and heterogeneous identity beyond

structural oppression is the height of narcissism and the privileged reassertion of
privilegefragmenting whiteness as an ontological position absolves everyone for
racialized violence
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism, eborderlands, 3.2)
Another risk is that in centering

on whiteness, whiteness studies might become a discourse of love,

which would sustain the narcissism that elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal. The reading
of whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The whiteness of academic disciplines, including philosophy and
anthropology has been subject to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998; Asad 1973). For example, a postcolonial critique of
anthropology would argue that the anthropological desire to know the other functioned as a form of narcissism: the other functioned as a mirror, a
device to reflect the anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in the very display of the colour of difference. So

if disciplines are in a way already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject, then it
follows that whiteness studies sustains the direction or orientation of this gaze, whilst removing
the detour provided by the reflection of the other. Whiteness studies could even become a
spectacle of pure self-reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness is an identity too.
Does whiteness studies function as a narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the
subject as the origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study, which might
mean that whiteness studies could get stuck on whiteness, as that which gives itself to itself.
Dyer talks about this risk when he admits to another fear: I dread to think that paying attention to whiteness might lead to white people saying
they need to get in touch with their whiteness (1997, 10). Whiteness

studies would here be about white people

learning to love their own whiteness, by transforming it into an object that could be loved. 6. Dyer is
right, I think, to feel such dread. Whiteness studies is potentially dreadful, and scholarship within the field is full of admissions of anxiety about
what whiteness studies could be if was allowed to become invested in itself, and its own reproduction. We should I think, pay attention to such
critical anxieties, and ask what the enunciation of such anxieties is doing. In terms of the constitution of the field, for example, the anxiety is not
so much that the borders will be invaded by inappropriate others (as with traditional disciplines), but that the borders will themselves be
inappropriate. But at the same time, and somewhat paradoxically,

the anxiety about borders works to install

borders: whiteness becomes an object through the expression of anxiety about becoming an
object. The repetition of the anxious gesture, that is, gestures toward a field. Fields can be
understood, after all, as the forgetting of gestures that are repeated over time. Is there a
relationship between the emergence of a field through the enunciation of anxiety and the
emergence of a new form of whiteness, an anxious whiteness? Is a whiteness that is anxious
about itself its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its self-centeredness better? What kind of
whiteness is a whiteness that is anxious about itself? What does such an anxious whiteness do? 7. Such an anxious whiteness would be different
to the worrying whiteness that Ghassan Hage critiques in White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003). This worrying
whiteness is one that worries that others may threaten its existence. An anxious whiteness would be one that is anxious about such worrying:
this white subject would come into existence in its very anxiety about the effects it has on others, or even in fear that it is taking something away
from others. This white subject might even be anxious about its own tendency to worry about the proximity of others. So lets repeat my question:
is an anxious whiteness that declares its own anxiety about its worry better, where better might even evoke the promise of "non-racism" or "antiracism? 8. Before posing this question through an analysis of the effects of how whiteness becomes declared, we could first point to the placing
of critical before whiteness studies, as a sign of this anxiety. I am myself very attached to being critical, which is after all what all forms of
transformative politics will be doing, if they are to be transformative. But I think the critical often functions as a place where we deposit our
anxieties. We might assume that if we are doing critical whiteness studies, rather than whiteness studies, that we can protect ourselves from doing
or even being seen to do the wrong kind of whiteness studies. But the

word critical does not mean the elimination

of risk, and nor should it become just a description of what we are doing over here, as opposed to them, over there. 9. I felt my desire to be
critical as the site of anxiety when I was involved in writing a race equality policy for the university at which I work in the UK, where I tried to
bring what I thought was a fairly critical language of anti-racism into a neo-liberal technique of governance, which we can inadequately describe
as diversity management, or the business case for diversity. All public organisations in the UK are now required by law to have and implement a
race equality policy and action plan, as a result of the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000). My current research is tracking the significance of
this policy, in terms of the relationship between the documentation it has generated and social action. Suffice to say here, my own experience of
writing a race equality policy, taught me a good lesson, which of course means a hard lesson: the language we think of as critical can easily lend
itself to the very techniques of governance we critique. So we wrote the document, and the university, along with many others, was praised for
its policy, and the Vice-Chancellor was able to congratulate the university on its performance: we did well. A document that documented the
racism of the university became usable as a measure of good performance. 10. This

story is not simply about assimilation

or the risks of the critical being co-opted, which would be a way of framing the story that
assumes we were innocent and critical until we got misused (in other words, this would
maintain the illusion of our own criticalness). Rather, it reminds us that the transformation of the
critical into a property, as something we have or do, allows the critical to become a performance
indicator, or a measure of value. The critical in critical whiteness studies cannot guarantee that it
will have effects that are critical, in the sense of challenging relations of power that remain
concealed as institutional norms or givens. Indeed, if the critical was used to describe the field, then we would become complicit with the
transformation of education into an audit culture, into a culture that measures value through performance. 11. My commentary on the risks of
whiteness studies will involve an analysis of how whiteness

gets reproduced through being declared, within

academic texts, as well public culture. I will hence be reading Whiteness Studies as part of a broader shift towards what we
could call a politics of declaration, in which institutions as well as individuals admit to forms of bad
practice, and in which the admission itself becomes seen as good practice. By reading Whiteness Studies
in this way, I am not suggesting that it is a symptom of bad practice: rather, I think it is useful to consider turns within the academy as having
something to do with other cultural turns. The examples are drawn from the UK and Australia, as the two places in which my own anti-racist
politics have taken shape. My argument is simple: anti-racism is not performative. I use performative in Austins (1975) sense as referring to a
particular class of speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says: the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action
(1975, 6). 12. I will suggest that declaring

whiteness, or even admitting to ones own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be
evidence of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what it says. In other words, putting whiteness into
speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and nor
does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action that we could describe
as anti-racist. To put this more strongly, I will show how declaring ones whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can
reproduce white privilege in ways that are unforeseen. Of course, this is not to reduce whiteness studies to the reproduction of whiteness, even if
that is what it can do. As Mike Hill suggests: I cannot know in advance whether white critique will prove politically worthwhile, whether in the
end it will be a friendlier ghost than before or will display the same stealth narcissism that feminists of color labeled a white problem in the late
1970s (1997, 10).

Dissent Politics
The criticism of surveillance culture without material
challenges to power merely normalizes and legitimates
the process of racialization that asserts a violent relation
to spaciality and interpollates black social life to violent
zones of exclusion
John Fiske 1998. (Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the
world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of
WisconsinMadison. His areas of interest include popular culture, mass
culture, media semiotics and television studies. Surveilling the City
Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.Theory, Culture &
Society 1998 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 6788) VR
As whiteness is put into crisis in both the US and Europe by the
transnational ows of those who have been raced as non-white its need to
abnormalize and surveille the racialized other will intensify . The racialization of the other is, of course, part of the white process of
abnormalization, so the category of non-white may, in different historical
and social contexts, include the Turkish and the Irish: blackness is a product

of whiteness, not of melanin. We should dispute, too, any claim for the social
neutrality of technology. Although surveillance is penetrating deeply
throughout our society, its penetration is differential. The lives of the white
mainstream are still comparatively untouched by it. But in Black America, its

penetration is deep. The urban scanscape is invisibly mapped, both

physically and conceptually, into areas where a Black presence is known to
be normal or abnormal, where the Black body can be seen to be in place or
out of place. A man categorized as black, for example, is out of place in a

car with two white women, or on a certain sidewalk when wearing certain
clothes in daytime. Neighborhood watch programs train residents to report
anyone out of the ordinary, anyone acting suspiciously. Racial identity is a
prime identifier of someone out of the ordinary in the suburb, it is a non
ordinariness that can be readily seen from behind the lace curtains of the
ordinary. And many neighborhood watch organizations are equipped with
video cameras. We should recognize, too, that surveillance is not just a
means of gathering knowledge that can then be used to exert power by
other means, but that the process of surveillance itself is an exertion of
power, a power that is differentiated racially while being spatially
universal. Surveillance zones the city in ways that give both spatial and
temporal dimensions to racial categories. The norms that define such

invisible but very real places, their times of occupation, and the behavior or
dress deemed appropriate to them, operationalize the totalitarian, for they

are norms that are outside the control of those subject to them: they are
imposed, and those upon whom they are imposed have no say either in
their production or in their application. Such norms, then, are physically
experienced by their abnormalized objects as constraints, as divisive and

exclusionary mechan isms. For those whose normality has produced them,

however, they are unseen and thus unfelt. Norms may be universal in extent,
but are they differential in operation. The invisibility of norms for the normal
lies behind the social demand to extend surveillance (between 80 percent
and 90 percent of Britons want more surveillance according to Davies, 1995).
We have already noted that the price of such a supposed increase in security
includes an intensified normalization process that, in a society where ethnic,
racial and economic differences are increasing, is certain to prove divisive
and inammatory. A more insidious part of the price may be its effects upon
the socially normal: their comfort with increased surveillance leads to an
internalized accep tance of a totalitarian tendency. This normalizing of the
totalitarian is one of the more frightening features of our willed and
willing development of a surveillance society. Any increase in the social
tolerance of totalitarianism in one domain dulls the vigilance necessary to
spot its creeping advances in others: it constantly moves the line of
acceptability in a direction that reduces the democratic. The implications
of this extend far beyond the processes of surveillance, for extending the
tolerance of one totalitarian agency inevitably prepares the ground where
others can take root and flourish. Whiteness has the social power to
dene itself as the normal, as the point where normality can be produced
and elided with the orderliness of the social order: whiteness is both the
source and the practice of normal ization. Under pressure, and it is under
pressure, whiteness appears all too ready to resort to increasingly
totalitarian strategies. Surveillance makes the city operate as a machine
of whiteness. It is the means by which the sense making system in white
heads is externalized into the spatial system of our cities; it is the
mechanism that gives a material dimension to abstract or theoretical
concepts such as social position or social space , for it makes them
literal as well as metaphorical. Surveillance gives a physical geography to
the socio-political construct of race. Whiteness is carto graphic: as it
always has, it colors its maps of the world according to its own norms and
interests.

Liberalism Link
Managing human suffering is not good its reliant upon
an epistemology of avoiding the worst which reduces
politics to the reduction of pain rather than the creation of
a social good - this validates the structures of oppression
by reforming rather than revolutionizing politics.
Abbas, 10 Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science,
Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies at Bard College
at Simons Rock (Asma, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist
Reections on Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics, Pg. 68-71, London: Palgrave
Macmillan)

Liberalism is a family of modern epistemologies and political programs

unied by the commitment of each of its variants to the cause of
managing and abating human suffering. This commitment is both informed

by and frames liberalisms emphasis on preserving an individuals liberties.

Liberalism demarcates the space for different kinds of contentions in

society, devotes itself to the suffering that dwells in certain spaces and
not others, and deems representation as a means toward redress of
suffering. Within juridical discourse, for injury (and thus suffering understood

only as injury) to be addressed and corrected, it must be representedin

speech, in legislature, in court, on the highway, after rape, and so on. The
many-layered relation between suffering and making it present that inheres
in the sensorium of modern liberal capitalist politics begs examining.
Examining the demands of presence that liberal modernity makes on

suffering brings up the question of how the problem of suffering is

framed. In the aftermath of religious wars, modern political thought
betroths itself to the question of suffering and ways of avoiding it, and
formulations of justice in various ideologies correspond to how they
understand sufferingall involving a certain insistence on the coordinates of
presence. Every performance of justice requires a performance of
suffering. Such enactments, whether sufferers represent themselves or
are represented by others, are the struggles to make suffering matter that
are at once political, ethical, and aesthetic. In being the realm where we
make our sufferings matter, the political is constituted by struggles over
what matter is, no less than what suffering is. Politics is thus not limited to

the battles of appropriations that begin once the form and content of
presence and absence, and the sensing 10.1057/9780230113541 Liberalism and Human Suffering, Asma Abbas Copyright material from
www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect 2011-09-05 and suffering of these, have been determinedit includes every
act that negotiates the materiality, the life, and the death of these forms.
Collaborations between liberal politics, ethics, and aesthetics edify
presence exemplied by voicespeaking for oneself or others, ultimately
of ones suffering, instrumental to a prescribed endas an indisputable
element of a liberal democracy and an index of ones inclusion in it. 3

These collaborations keep this ideology of representation and inclusion intact

as a lifeworldthrough the privileges granted to voice and the work of the
resulting representations out there and among usshaping, undercutting,
and maiming the suffering meant to be made present. An approach to

suffering that factors in the labor of making it present for liberal structures
would require reconfiguring the role of these collaborations in yielding the
political as a domain where suffering is more than an object of political
action or a resource harnessed as injury, identity, or other currency in

liberal politics.4 Conversations about suffering abound in what we may call

the ocial public sphere. Suffering is made present in a standard way: it
is domesticated into pain and harm, which become the central,
overarching, occluding motifs in our experience of our own and others
suffering and in our relation and response to it. The usual locus of ethical-

political discourses that take suffering seriously is why and how someone
would be driven to cause harm, what history unleashes suffering, and how
we must respond to scenarios of human suffering that defy human
imagination. In all these, the positions of the perpetrator and the observerrespondent are often the coordinates within which the victim is evidenced. In

their focus on how to acknowledge, arm, and remove suffering, such

conversations about victims and their injuries (codied harms) have
suffering and sufferers as the object of diagnosis, prognosis, and remedy.
Debates feature questions of whether, for whom, and for what to speak;
who speaks for others; who speaks for themselves; how to make space for
people to speak for themselves; whom to bid speak; whether or not we
can know someones pain; and how to make them or their speech go away .

These puzzles revolve around, ironically, the agents qua respondents to

someones suffering the saviors, liberators, lip-readers, empowerers
whose regard for others is fed by a fervor steeped in the unacknowledged
privilege of framing these conversations and puzzles and is subsequently
quite taxing to those who already suffer. Moreover, it is striking and, at
times, incredible how much these agents are the ones most needy of
reassurance and tending in forms ranging from, say, a regular serving of
abstract hope in the future of humanity, to relief from guilt of
10.1057/9780230113541 - Liberalism and Human Suffering, Asma Abbas
Copyright material market after a tragedy somewhere else. It seems that

the eager anxiety about the perspective of the victims, whether in

hearing their voices, forcing them to speak, or speaking for them, is
indulged as long as it completes my knowledge, my picture, or my
sense of justice. This scenario accords consolatory functions to
sensuousness, speech, and representation not only, or even primarily, for
those who suffer and are the plaintiffs but also for those in power when
they demand that sufferers speak and act their suffering in certain,
prescribed ways. There is no room here for the vast space between the said

and the unsaid, the enacted and the undone, where those for whom speech
is always a response persist. For many, even speaking for oneself is almost
always a response whose burden is never felt by those who always get to
interrogate and sympathize. This voice seemingly necessitated by suffering

in turn polices the modes of suffering and subjectivity possible. Harm and

representation turn out to be reciprocal as the haunted negotiations between

liberalism and democracy continue, rendering liberal democratic politics
always in debt to suffering. This voice does carry, shaping the experience
and the dominant aesthetic and political imaginations of people outside
liberal democracies, to the extent that such voice becomes an index of their
democratic desire insofar as those with the goods find it familiar. These
forced familiarities severely compromise the fundamental experience
channeled in this performance that could lead to different intimacies and
alternative liberatory counter-discourses in the face of such scripted and
mimicked desire to begin with. For suffering to be allowed to live and
desire differently, we must turn to those moments where its life and its
becomings threaten an imperialist politics that moves predictably and
swiftly to contain this living suffering. We may thus witness not only what

liberalism does to its unwilling subjects but also what they do to itand this
may itself require a special capacity, and a new demand on our senses, not
unlike the liminal shadows of William Hopes spirit photos. My work here is
thus charged with the arts and labors of suffering that vie for survival in
different spaces under the current regimes of neoliberalism, neocolonialism,
and imperialism, and in the mostly unrequited social and political struggles
that comport their incompletions with honor. How living suffering survives
amid dead suffering suffering congealed into artifacts of liberal politics in
the form of garrulous pain, legal harms, legible injuries, codified identities, or
spectacular disasteris the fact, miracle, question, and challenge that
10.1057/9780230113541 - Liberalism and Human Suffering, Asma Abbas
Copyright material suffering within and across ourselves and our societies

reveals a complex economy of the production and distribution of suffering,

kept in tact by the life that confronts dead suffering, sustains this
deadness, and maintains its dominance, but often also dees it, asking,
instead, for more life. In the chapters that follow, I am interested in
addressing what this political and poetical economy of injury and victims
does to those who suffer. A critique of liberalism is in order precisely in and

through the moments where, as a philosophy and a program, it is most

committed to a politics of redress through justice, law, representation,
inclusion, and so on. To this, Part I, Suffering Liberalism, is dedicated. One
of the key premises of my inquiry here is that there is a fidelity between
suffering and its many forms of presence that is much more elemental than
the one on which contemporary notions of justice rely in academic or popular
discourse. The familiar connection central to the legacy of liberalism is

between suffering as harm and injury; politics as institutions seeking to

redress it; and political actors as agents who make sure that both
suffering and politics stick to their roles thus dened. In this triangulation,
the mutually constitutive relation between suffering and representation is
reduced to a passive, functional, and external one. One obvious challenge

to this approach comes in the postmodern and postcolonial reexivity about

language. By espousing somewhat of a linguistic transubstantiation of

victims into agents, and of suffering into power, much of this often serves

only to lubricate the movement of political actors between suffering,

domesticated as harm and injury, and politics, domesticated as the power
to undo the former. The actual frame of this encrusted relation between
suffering, politics, and representation thus remains undented. This
relation desperately seeks (re)animation, and Part I of the book inaugurates

this process.

Silence Link
This is not a link of omission- the aff is strategically silent
on the issue of anti-black violence- this makes them
complicit in this system and makes the permutation
impossible.
Crenshaw 97 (Kimberl Williams, Professor of Speech and Communications
at the UCLA School of Law and the Columbia Law School, WESTERN
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, 1997)

the ideology of white privilege

operates through rhetorical silence. Helms statement was an argument
over the meaning of the UDCits members, its actions, and its insignia. It was an
ideological struggle to maintain silence about the members whiteness
and its implications through a strategic use of gender . Two key issues arise here.
First, rhetorical silence about whiteness sustains an ideology of white
privilege. Second, intersecting gendered discourses work to preserve this
silence. Helms silence about whiteness naturalized the taken-forgranted assumptions contained in his framework for understanding who
is harmed by this decision. The colossal unseen dimensions [of] the
silences and denials surrounding whiteness are key political tools for
protecting white privilege and maintaining the myth of meritocracy
This analysis of Helms opening argument illustrates how

(McIntosh 35). This silence is rhetorical and has important ideological implications. Scott observes that

silence and speaking have symbolic impact and as such are both
rhetorical. When considering the dialectic of speaking and silence, he thinks of silence as the absence of
speech. Silence is active, not passive; it may be interpreted. Furthermore, silence
and speech may be both simultaneous and sequential. The absence of speech about
whiteness signies that it exists in our discursive silences. It may often
be intentional; it can be interpreted, and it can occur simultaneously
with the spoken word. Whiteness silence is ideological because it signies that
to be white is the natural condition, the assumed norm. Scott notes that silences
symbolize the nature of thingstheir substance or natural condition. Silences symbolize
hierarchical structures as surely as does speech (15). Indeed, the very
structure of privilege generates silences, and ironically, the most
powerful rhetoric for maintaining an existing scheme of privilege will be
silent (10). Thus, silent rhetorical constructions of whiteness like Helms protect material white privilege
because they mask its existence.

Otherness Link
We control the root cause of otherness anti-blackness
has been exported all over the world. Blackness functions
as the prime racial signier which governs the way the
globe and civil society functions the face of the other is
always black
Copeland & Sexton 03 (Raw Life: An Introduction Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland Qui Parle,
Volume 13, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2003) published University of Nebraska Press Copeland; Ph.D., History of Art,
University of California, Berkeley, 2006) is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Art History with
aliations in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies Sexton Director, African American
Studies School of Humanities Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities Ph.D., University
of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies)
It is at this impasse and with such questions that the essays collected here begin: with the notion derived from
Fanon, of the impossibility of representing race, either for the slave or the master, outside of an entrenched visual
schema predicated on the fungibility of the black slave that this reckoning comes to the fore at this moment and
that it connects cultural practitioners working across a range of disciplines art, history, literature, film, critical

Fanons insight, but also underlines the pressing need

think the structural and structuring function of racial difference for
our symbolic economies. For it is that very function which contemporary racial theory
more often than not seeks to leap over, in the process revealing its
own ineffectuality, a kind of willful blindness that cannot be
overstated. In its single-minded capacity to concentrate on everything except that which
matters most in the restructuring of white supremacy, such theory is
theory not only suggests the longevity of
to

undoubtedly more egregious than intellectual faux pas or public disservice. It is a modality of complicity, or better,
fraud. But the fraudulence of this diverse intellectual project is not only analytic; it is also ethical. Besieged by the
conservative restoration, the Left finds itself today enamored of political pragmatism and in thrall to the lures of
counter-hegemonic populism. From the emergent networks of anti-globalization to the reinvigorated peace
movement, from the embattled environmentalist campaigns to the desperate efforts at urban police reform, the
ocial rhetoric is multiracial and the organizational logic is coalition. Yet, for whatever energies are dispensed in
elaborating the new complexity of race in the age of globality, the radical imagination inexorably comes to rest on
the assumption of horizontality, that is ot say, a progressive community-in-struggle, even if only a possible one.
Indeed, it has become commonplace in the U.S. to call for a paradigm shift with respect to racial theory and the
politics of anti-racism. This clarion call resonates in the ivory towers of academe, in the pages of the most useless
print media outlets, certainly in the alternative press, and in the policy papers and strategic deliberations of

we are told, in a variety

of tones and tenors, is that race matters are no longer if they ever
were simply black and white at the least, the focus of such a
Manichean lens is deemed inadequate to apprehend the current and
historical relatity of U.S. racial formation (to say nothing of the Americas more generally
or other regions of the world) At its worst, this dichotomous view is rendered as
politically stunting and, moreover, as effectively excluding discussion of the colors in
the middle, now inexorable parts of the Black/White spectrum. We now
progressive non-profit institutes and community-based organizations. What

enjoy a vast literature in the social sciences and humanities detailing the vexed position (or positions), between the
black and the white. Neither black nor white thus indicates not only the articulation of multiracial (or Mixed race)
identity claims in the post-civil rights era, but also the contemporary reformulations of critique and political
mobilization among Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Native American peoples. Of
course, racial discourse in what would become the U.S., from the colonial era onward, has always been multi-polar,
so to speak, and the psychodynamics of race have always been quite complex; the lines of force and the relations
of racial power have been reconfigured regularly across a multiplicity of times and spaces. In fact, the notion of a
black/white paradigm is something of a theoretical fiction, deployed for a wide range of purposes. In our attempts
to displace it, then, we do well to recognize it as a recent emergence, involved in an imaginary lure that says more
about the historical preoccupations of white supremacy than it does about, say, the blind insistence of black
scholars, activists, or communities. When perusing the critical literature on the explanatory diculty of presentday racial politics, one frequently wonders exactly to whom the demand to go beyond black and white is being
addressed. Also puzzling is the singularly incoherent nature of the reasoning demonstrated in current race talk, a

failure, that is, to offer cogent accounts of the implications of this newfound (or, more precisely, rediscovered)
complexity. Taken together, these twin ambiguities beg a key question: what economies of enunciation are involved
in this broadly atterned discursive gesture to put an end to biracial theorizing? Legal scholar Mari Matsuda offers
a provocative thought on this score. During a symposium on critical race theory at the Yale Law School in 1997 she

We when say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what
whole lot of people say or feel or think: thank goodness we can get off
that paradigm, because those black people made me feel so
uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really dont know
anything about Asians, and while were deconstructing that Black-white paradigm, we also need to
claimed:
a

reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and thank god I
dont have to take those angry black people seriously anymore. Importantly, the comment is drawn from an
otherwise sympathetic mediation on a particular danger attendant to the desire for new analyses, and the often
anxious drive for multiracial coalition, namely, the persistent risk of forgetting the centrality of anti-blackness to
global white supremacy. Fanon, again, is prescient: Wherever he goes, the negro remains a Negro (B, 173).
Wherever; there is no outside. Too often we forget, here in the U.S. especially, that there are blacks everywhere.
When so many speak of the peculiarity of race as a North American obsession (one hears of the odd rigidity of the
Anglo-Saxon racial formation), it is important to think about black people as situated in those myriad locales
supposedly outside of or alternate to the black-white binary. Lewis Gordon, philosopher and leading contemporary
commentator on Fanon, writes:

Although there are people who function as the

blacks of particular contexts, there is a group of people who

function as the blacks everywhere. They are called, in now-archaic
language Negroes. Negroes are the blacks of everywhere, the
black of blacks, the blackest blacks. Blackness functions as the
prime racial signier. It is the element that enters a room and
frightens Reason out The historical specicity of blackness as a
point from which the greatest distance must be forged
metaphor.

entails its status as

Natal Alienation
Blackness as ontological becomes muted bodies there
exists no history, no resistance, only meaningless violence
against abstraction that calls for terror in the streets
Wilderson, 10 (Frank, Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Pg.
51-56)//ctb

Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become
existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition ,
Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman
maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the
Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering
dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into
a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black
through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the little family
quarrels which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the
Blacks rst ontological instance, the Middle Passage, wiped out [his/her]
metaphysicshis [her] customs and sources on which they are based (BSWM
110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews . Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks . The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a
metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the

This violence which turns a

body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the
possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an innite and
indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made
available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, the black has no
ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man (110) or, more precisely, in
the eyes of Humanity . How is it that the Black appears to partner with the senior and junior partners of
Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.

civil society (Whites and colored immigrants, respectively), when in point of fact the Black is not in the world? The

By acting as if the Black is present, coherent, and

above all human, Black lm theorists are allowed to meditate on cinema
only after consenting to a structural adjustment.xvii Such an adjustment,
required for the privilege of participating in the political economy of
academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must
adhere to for the privilege of securing a loan : signing on the dotted line
means feigning ontological capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness
is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form . It means theorizing
Blackness as borrowed institutionality.xviii Ronald Judys (Dis)Forming the American Canon:
answer lies in the ruse of analogy.

African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular and On the Question of Nigga Authenticity critique the Black
intelligentsia for building aesthetic canons out of slave narratives and hardcore rap on the belief that Blacks can

in such
projects one nds genuine and rigorous attention to the issue that
concerns Blacks as a social formation, namely, resistance. But he is less than
write [themselves] into being ((Dis)Forming the American Canon: 88, 97). Judy acknowledges that

sanguine about the power of resistance which so many Black scholars impute to the slave narrative in particular

In writing the death

of the African body, Equiano[s] 18th century slave narrative] gains voice
and emerges from the abject muteness of objectivity into productive
subjectivity. It should not be forgotten that the abject muteness of the body is not to
not exist, to be without effect. The abject body is the very stuff, the material, of experiential effect.
and, by extension, to the canon of Black literature, Black music, and Black film:

Writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction . It is an

interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without
The muted African body is overwritten by the
Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink ow of Equianos pen is that which has overwritten itself and so
effect, without agency, without thought.

becomes the representation of the very body it sits on. (Emphasis mine, 89) Judy is an Afro-Pessimist, not an Afro-

the Negro is a symbol that cannot enable the representation

of meaning [because] it has no referent (107). Such is the gratuitousness of the violence that
Centrist. For him

made the Negro. But it is precisely to this illusive symbolic resistance (an aspiration to productive subjectivity), as
opposed to the Negros abject muteness, and certainly not to the Slaves gratuitous violence, that many Black

My
claim regarding Black lm theory, modeled on Judys claim concerning Black Studies more
broadly, is that it tries to chart a project of resistance with an ensemble of
questions that fortify and extend the interlocutory life of what might be called a
Black film canon. But herein lies the rub, a rub in the form of a structural
adjustment imposed on the Black lm scholar her/himself . Resistance through
scholars in general, and Black film theorists in particular, aspire when interpreting their cultural objects.

canon formation, Judy writes, must be legitimated on the grounds of conservation, the conservation of
authenticitys integrity (19). A tenet that threads through Judys work is that throughout modernity and postmodernity (or post-industrial society, as Judys echoing of Antonio Negri prefers) Black

authenticity is
an oxymoron, a notion as absurd as rebellious property (On the Question of Nigga
Authenticity 225), for it requires the kind of ontological integrity which the
Slave cannot claim . The structural adjustment imposed upon Black
academics is, however, vital to the well-being of civil society. It provides the political
economy of academia with a stable collegial atmosphere in which the selection of topics, the distribution of
concerns, esprit de corps, emphasis, and the bounding of debate within acceptable limits appear to be shared by

the mere presence of the Black

and his/her project, albeit adjusted structurally, threatens the fabric of
this stable economy, by threatening its structure of exchange : Not only
are the conjunctive operations of discourses of knowledge and power that
so dene the way in which academic elds get authenticated implicated in
the academic instituting of Afro-American studies , but so is the instability
entailed in the nature of academic work. That instability is discernable even
in the universitys function as conservator. ((Dis)Forming the American Canon Emphasis
all because all admit to sharing them. But Judy suggests that

mine 19) This academy-wide instability, predicated on the mere presence of the Black and his/her object, has three
crisis-prone elements which Blackness, should it ever become unadjusted, could unleash. First is a realization that
African-American studies cannot delimit a unique object field (i.e., a set literary texts, or a Black film canon) which

Black Studies itself is indexical of the fact that

the object eldi.e. the textshas no ontological status, but issues from
specic historical discursive practices and aesthetics (20). Secondly, these
specic historical discursive practices and aesthetics, heterogeneous as
they might be at the level of content, are homogeneous to the extent that
their genealogies cannot recognize and incorporate the gure of the
Slave . As a result, interjecting the slave narrative into the privileged site of literary expression achieves, in
threatens the nature of academic work, for

effect, a (dis)formation of the field of American literary history (20-21) and, by extension, the field of Black film
studies. The

slave narrative as a process by which a textual economy is

constitutedas a topography through which the African American achieves an emancipatory subversion of
the propriety of slaveryjeopardizes the genealogy of Reason (97). Once Reasons
very genealogy is jeopardized then its content, for example, the idea of dominium,
has no ground to stand on. We will see, below, how and why dominion is recognized as a
constituent element of the Indians subjectivity and how this recognition enables partial incorporation. But a third

if Slave
narratives as an object eld have no ontological status such that the
elds insertion into the eld of literary history can disform not just the
eld of literary studies but the eld of knowledge itself (the paradigm of exchange
point proves just as much, if not more, unsettling than a crisis in the genealogy of Reason. For

and (dis)form the hegemony of Reasons

genealogy, then what does this tell us about the ontological status of the
narrating slave her/himself? This question awaits both the Black filmmaker and the Black film
theorist. It is menacing and unbearable. The intensity of its ethicality is terrifying, so
terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to be embraced, it
can be seized by a signicant number of Black artists and theorists only at
those moments when a critical mass of Slaves have embraced this terror
in the streets.
within the political economy of academia),

Natal alienation link- The 1AC is rooted in the

methodology of conforming anxiety through policing the
creation of this began on black kinships in Africa as the
superrace deemed those bodies dead, forcibly removing
them from their language and culture. The superrace fears
the other and embraces the anxiety of surveillance as a
way to subject black bodies to be objects in their eyes.
James 07 (Joy, She is a senior research fellow at the John L. Warfield
Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas,
Austin, Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal
Democracy, book, page 1-3, https://books.google.com/books?
d=LOkYzy4t2VEC&pg=PA14&dq=Warfare+in+the+American+Homeland:
+Policing+and+Prison+in+a+Penal+Democracy+pdf&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0
CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMIjPPsxIf8xgIVSDuICh1aaAtB#v=onepage&q=Warfare
%20in%20the%20American%20Homeland%3A%20Policing%20and
%20Prison%20in%20a%20Penal%20Democracy%20pdf&f=false, July 17 |
Alfredo)
The contemporary world's work has become, halting, forming policy regarding, and trying to administer the

Nationhood-the very denition of citizenship-is constantly

being demarcated and demarcated in response to exiles refugees,
Gaslarbeiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, and the
besieged. The anxiety of belonging is entombed within the central
metaphors in the discourse E globalism, transnationalism, nationalism,
the break-up of federations, the rescheduling of alliances, and the ctions
of sovereignty . Yet these figurations of nationhood and identity are frequently as raced themselves as the
movement of people.

originating racial house that defined them. When they are not raced they are . . . imaginary landscape, never

There is a question of "voice" or

"voices" here, perhaps this contestation over literary legitimacy is an
issue of familiarity and validation, of comfort and recognition. Most readers will
inscape; Utopia never home. -TONI MORRISON. "HOME"

not recognize themselves or kin in these voices; over time, those numbers will likely diminish. The voices most
necessary for this intellectual and political project-consider this anthology a manifesto, or some- thing more lofty, or
more debased-arc not those best amplified in or by academe or government or corporate life, but those that

occupy landscapes where practically no one wishes to walk, those only the
most denigrated call "home." These voices register here as desperately needed for clarification. Of
what? Our demise as a quasi-democratic state predicated slavery and subjugation. Why this desperation? This is

Containment, police powers, state violence, global and

imperial wars, and radiating rings of terror and counterterror foster the
disappearance of bodies and rights. They render the concepts of "home"
or "homeland" as coherent spaces of safety worth occupying an irony.
When warfare is present and pervasive, and political, intellectual,
not an easy death.

emotional, and spiritual survival seem fairly precarious, to read those possessing neither
authoritative voice nor roosts among academic, government, or corporate elites (even if their words appear in elite
constitutes an investment ''voice" as a political project . The
very project of elevating dismissed voices redenes the political functions
of voice, writing and speaking. The political powers of narratives shared
by prisoners and professors create potential for either a mangled
discourse of political performance and storytelling or a convergence of
radical desire and will that crosses boundaries in a search for hom e -a
academic presses)

democratic enclave, and will that crosses boundaries in a search for "home"-a democratic enclave, communities of

The request to explain the role of voices here (as made by one
suggests a search for justication for the stories of "the displaced,
the fleeing, and the besieged," and the revolutionary "slave," as having
signicance that warrants our attention or, at least, equal attention or
distracted or agitated attentiveness given to press, diminishes (at least more
noticeably for its more privileged occupants) as its police and prison archipelago grows.
The voices that critically witness democratic delusions, demise, and
change with perhaps the least romantic desires (or illusions) about the
American homeland are found in narratives offered through the "Voices of
Katrina" project organized by former Black Panther Party members in response
resistance, a maroon camp.
reader)

to governmental devastation and abandonment in New Orleans. Or they are found in the voices in the "Black
Genocide" project, which revisits the Civil Rights Congress's 1951 appeal to the United Nations in a book-length

To charge and resist

racial "genocide" or penal "slavery" (in this anthology, the voices that will
dene these terms emanate from bodies situated in conditions of caged
existence) require narratives that depart from convention. Such narratives offer
new forms of instruction it one plans to be a survivor or even a resistor. For instance, the "shootto-kill" edicts issued by the president and the governor of Louisiana for
black Hurricane Katrina survivors overly determined as "looters" dictate
that desperate, responsible, but not law-abiding, mothers acquire bulletproof vest prior to taking bottle water, baby formula, and pampers. Yet what
instruction is to be taken from marginal voices if one plans to be a
liberator in the resistance to warfare and to survive uncaged as such? Perhaps
instructions from political prisoners valued by conservative would be
useful.
menu script documenting crimes against black peoples in the United States.

Social Death
Denial of an impossibility for black inclusion in the
political forecloses all revolutionary thought the 1AC
cannot squash the political capacity of the human to
reverse centuries of social death only outside the
structure can we destroy the structure
Wilderson, 10 (Frank, Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Pg.
186-93)//ctb

If the structure of political desire in socially engaged film hopes to stake out an
antagonistic relationship between its dream and the idiom of power that
underwrites civil society, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of objects of social death . If we are to be honest with
ourselves, we must admit that the Negro has been inviting Whites and
civil societys junior partners to the dance of death for hundreds of years.
Cinema is just one of many institutions that have refused to learn the steps. In the 1960s and 70s, as White
radicalisms (especially The Weather Undergrounds) discourse and political common sense was beginning to be
authorized by the ethical dilemmas of embodied incapacity (i.e. Blackness), White cinemas historical proclivity to
embrace dispossession through the vectors of capacity (alienation and exploitation) was radically disturbed. In
some films, this proclivity was so profoundly ruptured that while the films in question did not surrender to the
authority of incapacity (did not openly signal their having been authorized by the Slave), they were nonetheless

The period of
COINTELPROS crushing of the Black Panthers and then the Black
Liberation Army was also a period which witnessed the flowering of the
political power of Blacknessnot as institutional capacity but as a
zeitgeist, a demand capable of authorizing White (Settler/Master) radicalism. By
1980, White radicalism had comfortably re-embraced capacitythat is to
unsuccessful in their attempts to assert the legitimacy of the White ethical dilemmas.lv

say, it returned to the discontents of civil society with the same formal
tenacity as it had from 1532lvi to 1967, only now that formal tenacity was
emboldened by a wider range of alibis than just Free Speech or Vietnam; for
example, womens, gay, anti-nuke, and environmental movements. Cinema has been, and remains today
even in its most politically engaged momentsinvested elsewhere, away from the ethical dilemmas of beings
positioned by social death. This is not to say that the desire of all socially engaged cinema today is pro- White. But

Black liberation,
as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. not because it
raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of
existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture
of resistance function as both a politics of refusal and a refusal to arm;
that is, it functions as a program of complete disorder (Fanon Wretched36). Bush
it is to say that it is almost always anti-Blackwhich is to say it will not dance with death.

Mama was able to embrace this disorder, this incoherence and allow for their cinematic elaboration. For a brief

strategies of
able to contend with, deconstruct, and ultimately break
through the zeitgeist and political common sense which normally reify
White civil society under the banner of the universal we, and open a
portal through which the descriptive and prescriptive registers of Black
ethical dilemmas could be raised without apology; that is, without the
need to comfort the Human spectator by justifying the violence as a
response to an inessential grammar of suffering . The descriptive register
can be imagined as an ensemble of questions through which cinema and
moment in history, Black film assumed the Black desire to take this country down. The cinematic
films like Bush Mama were

political discourse do not blink in the face of an unflinching analysis of the

Blacks absolute dereliction, a complete abandonment by the
cartography of civil society. The descriptive imaginary of these filmmakers which accrued to them
and their films in the 1970s held them in good stead even beyond the period of the 1970s. Witness Julie Dashs
Daughters of the Dust. What prevents this film from having the life sucked out of it by some grandiose pabulum
that proclaims its universal message (for example, the universal message of immigration and all its trials and
tribulations) is the fact that the spectator is made painfully aware that what is essential about the journey being
contemplated and argued over by various members of the family is the fact that it cannot be reduced to an

analogy. Certainly, immigrants all over the world leave one country for
another countrywhich is to say, they leave one place for another. But only
Black folks migrate from one place to the next while remaining on the same
plantation. Like Julie Dashs Daughters of the Dust, Gerimas editing and
Burnetts cinematography of Bush Mama are skeptical about the universality
of migration. While eating dinner one evening, T.C., Dorothy, and Luanne
joyously muse about the possibility of emigrating to somewhere, anywhere,
outside of the US. They believe that their range of mobility will be greatly
extended as result of T.C.s first job since he came back to the world from
Vietnam. The editing and the cinematography work inside of a black-inspired
shorthand which squashes the necessity of narrative/storyline explanation
for what is about to happen. The next morning, after this joyful dinner scene,
T.C. leaves the apartment for his new job. Theres an abrupt edit in which we
cut from Dorothy, waving a smiling goodbye, to the image of T.C. being
escorted down long seemingly endless prison corridors to a cell. Rather than
script the how or why of his incarceration, the cinematography and editing
know what all Black people know, that the circuit of mobility is between what
Jared Sexton calls the social incarceration of Black life and the institutional
incarceration of the prison industrial complexso much for the cinematic
elaboration of the descriptive register of Black ethical dilemmas. The
prescriptive register, on the other hand, might be called the Nat Turner
syndrome. Blacks articulate and ruminate on these ensembles of questions,
in hushed tones, in back rooms, quietly, alone, or sometimes only in our
dreams. Save for a select few films like Up Tight!, The Lost Man, The Spook
Who Sat by the Door, and Jamaa Fanakas Soul Vengeance, this ensemble of questions rarely found its way
into the narrative coherence of a screenplay. Even in Haile Gerimas Bush Mama, one gets the sense that whereas

acknowledge the
gratuitousness of violence that structures the chaos of Black life and
simultaneously structures the relative calm of White life, the screenplay, on
the other hand, insists on contingent and commonsense notions of police
brutality and therefore is only willing or able to identify policing in the
spectacle of police violence (e.g., Luann being raped) and not in the
everyday banality of ordinary White existence. Still this is a shift, a
breakthrough, and we have every reason to believe that this cinematic
breakthrough finds its ethical correspondence not in the archive of film
history but in actions such as those taken by the BLA and by random, angry,
and motivated Black people who were emerging all across America at this
time with just a brick and a bottle and certainly no more than a rie and a
scope. As sites of political struggle and loci of philosophical meditation,
cultural capacity, civil society, and political agency give rise to maps and
Burnetts cinematography and Gerimas editing and acoustic innovation

chronologies of loss and to dreams of restoration and redemption. The

Marxist, postcolonial, ecological, and feminist narratives of loss followed by
restoration and redemption are predicated on exploitation and alienation as
the twin constitutive elements of an essential grammar of suffering. They are
political narratives predicated on stories which they have the capacity to tell
and this is keyregarding the coherent ethics of their time and space
dilemmas. The Slave needs freedom not from the wage relation, nor sexism,
homophobia, and patriarchy, nor freedom in the form of land restoration.
These are part and parcel of the diverse list of contingent freedoms of the
multitudes (Hardt & Negri, Empire). The Slave needs freedom from the
Human race , freedom from the world. The Slave requires gratuitous
freedom . Only gratuitous freedom can repair the object status of his/her
flesh, which itself is the product of accumulation and fungibilitys
gratuitous violence. But what does the Slaves desire for gratuitous freedom mean for the Humans
desire for contingent freedom? This difference between contingent freedom and gratuitous freedom brings us to
Bush Mama and the specter of the BLA, to the irreconcilable imbroglio between the Black as a social and political
being and the Human as a social and political beingwhat Jalil Muntaquim termed, a bit too generously, a major

inability
of the Humans political discourses to think gratuitous freedom is less
indicative of a contradiction than of how anti-Blackness subsidizes
Human survival in all its diversity. Given this state of affairs, the only way the Black
can be imagined as an agent of politics is when s/he is crowded out of
politics . Politics, for the Black, has as its prerequisite some discursive
move which replaces the Black void with a positive, Human, value. Thus, if the
Black is to be politically within the world, rather than against the world, s/he only
reflects upon politics as an ontologist, pontificates about politics as a pundit, or gestures
contradiction between the Black underground andEuro-American [revolutionary] forces (109). The

Since
exploitation and alienations grammar of suffering has crowded out the
grammar of suffering of accumulation and fungibility whipped a police
action on itthe Black can only meditate, speak about, or act politically as a
worker, as a postcolonial, or as a gay or female subjectbut not as a Black
object. One might perform an anthropology of sentiment on the Black and
write ontological meditations, political discourse, or agitate politically,
based on how often the Black feels like a man, feels like a women, feels like a
gendered subject, feels like a worker, or feels like a postcolonial, and those
feelings are important; but they are not essential at the level of ontology.
They cannot address the gratuitous violence which structures that which is
essential to Blackness and suffering, and they are imaginatively constrained
in their will: they cannot imagine the kind of violence the Black must harness
to break that structure. There is nothing in those Black sentiments
politically as an activist or revolutionary, to the extent that s/he is willing to be structurally adjusted.

powerful enough to alter the structure of the Blacks 700-year-long

relation to the world, the relation between one accumulated and fungible
thing and a diverse plethora of exploited and alienated human beings . In
other words, there are no feelings powerful enough to alter the structural
relation between the living and the dead , not if feelings are pressed into
service of a project which seeks to bring the dead to life. But one can imagine

feelings powerful enough to bring the living to death. Whenever Black people walk into a room, spines tingles with
such imagination. Will they insist upon a politics predicated on their grammar of suffering or will they give us a

break and talk about exploitation and alienation? Will they pretend to join the living or will they make us join the

The work of exploitation and alienation labors to make politics both

possible and impossible. It is a two-pronged labor: it must animate the political
capacity of the Human being while at the same time police the political
capacity of the Black. In the 1960s and 1970s, cinema benefited from the specter of the Black Liberation
Armys power to wrench the question of political agency from the grasp of the Human being. Transposed by
the ethical dilemmas of the Slave, the question of political agency began
to go something like this: what kind of imaginative labor is required to
squash the political capacity of the human being so that we might catalyze
the political capacity of the Black? If one were a Gramscian, the word hegemony would spring
dead?

to mind, and from that word, the political ontologist would begin to meditate on and brainstorm around various
ethical dilemmas implied in the phrase hegemonic struggle. This, of course, would be ontologically and ethically
misguided, because struggles for hegemony put us back on the terrain of Human beingsthe ground of exploited
and alienated subjects whereas we need to think this question through not on the terrain of the living exploited
and alienated subject, but on that of the accumulated and fungible object. Again, a more appropriate word than

If, when caught between the pincers of the imperative to meditate on Black dispossession
we do not dissemble, but instead allow our minds to
reflect upon the murderous ontology of chattel slaverys gratuitous
violence 700 years ago, 500 years ago, 200 years ago, last year, and today, then maybe, just
maybe, we will be able to think Blackness and agency together in an
ethical manner. This is not an Afro-Centric question. It is a question through which the
dead ask themselves how to put the living out of the picture .
hegemony is murder.

and Black political agency,

Black existence is a paradox existing not as life, but as

death engaging the impossibility of Black is the only
choice
Wilderson, 10 (Frank, Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Pg.
89-91)//ctb
Embracing Black people's agency as subjects of the law (i.e., subjects of rights and
liberties), and even their potential to act as or partner with enforcers of the
law (i.e., Denzel Washington in Training Day), presents itself as an acting out of the
historic paradox of Black non-existence (i.e., the mutable continuity of social death). Here,
Black "achievement" in popular culture and the commercial arts requires the bracketing out of that non-existence in
hopes of telling a tale of loss that is intelligible within the national imagination (Hartman, Position187). The

insistence on Black personhood (rather than a radical questioning of the

terror embedded in that very notion) operates most poignantly in the
examples discussed through the problematic coding of gender and
domesticity. In perceiving Black folk as being alive, or at least having the
potential to live in the world, the same potential that any subaltern might
have, the politics of Black lm theorists aesthetic methodology and desire
disavowed the fact that: [ Black folk] are always already dead wherever you nd
them . The nurturing haven of black culture which assured memory and provided a home beyond the ravishing
growth of capitalism is no longer. There cannot be any cultural authenticity in
resistance to capitalism. The illusion of immaterial purity is no longer
possible. It is no longer possible to be black against the system . Black folk
are dead, killed by their own faith in willfully being beyond , and in spite of, power.
(Ronald Judy, On the Question of Nigga Authenticity 212) In short, a besetting hobble of the theorization itself is
one which the theory shares with many of the Black films it scrutinizes: both the films and the theory tend to posit a

Black existence, instead of taking cognizance of the

ontological claim of the so-called Afro-Pessimists that Blackness is both
possibility of, and a desire for,

that outside which makes it possible for White and non-White (i.e., Asians and
Latinos) positions to exist and, simultaneously, contest existence . As such, not
only is Blackness (slaveness) outside the terrain of the White (the master) but it is
outside the terrain of the subaltern . Unfortunately, almost to a person, the film theorists in
question see (i.e., their assumptive logic takes as given) themselves as subjectsdominated, oppressed,
downtrodden, reduced to subaltern status, but subjects nonethelessin a world of other subjects.xxv The

assumptions that Black academics are subalterns within the academy (rather
than the slaves of their colleagues), slavery was a historical event long ended rather
than the ongoing paradigm of Black (non)existence, and that Black lm
theory can harness the rhetorical strategy of simile are most prominent in
the work of Second Wave Black lm theorists, who simply cant bear to
live in the impasse of being an object and so turn to hyper-coherent
articulations of Third Cinema in order to propose a politics for cinematic
interpretation. Lott, for example, short-circuits what could otherwise be a profoundly iconoclastic
intervention, i.e., the proposal that the Third World can fight against domination and for the return of their land as
people with a narrative of repair, whereas slaves can only fight against slaverythe for-something-else can only be
theorized, if at all, in the process and at the end of the requisite violence against the Settler/Master, not before
(Fanon, Wretched 35-45). Despite having ventured into the first unfortunate movea need to communicate with
other groups of people through the positing of, and anxiety over, Black coherenceLotts work does make brilliant

not only does the drive toward a presentation of

a Black lm canon show a desire to participate in the institutionality of
cinema, but the work itself shows a desire to participate in the
institutionality of academia. And participation is a register unavailable to
slaves . Black film theory, as an intervention, would have a more destructive
impact if it foregrounded the impossibility of a Black film, the impossibility of a Black
interventions. Im saying, however, that

film theory, the impossibility of a Black film theorist, and the impossibility of a Black person except, and this is key,
under cleansing (Fanon) conditions of violence.

Once real violence is coupled with

representational monstrosity (Spillers notion of a Black embrace of absolute vulnerability,

2003: 229), then and only then is there a possibility for Blacks to move from
the status of things to the status ofof what, well just have to wait and
see. In thinking the Black spectator as exploited rather than accumulated,
the Second Wave of Black film theorists failed to realize that slaves are not
subalterns , because subalterns are dominated, in the ontological rst
instance, by the machinations of hegemony (of which cinema is a vital machine) and then,
after some symbolic transgression, in other words in the second instance, by violence. Blackness is
constituted by violence in the ontological rst instance . This, Hortense Spillers
reminds us, is the essence of Black being: being for the captor (Spillers )the very antithesis of cultural
expression or performative agency.

Empathetic Identication
The use of empathy for black people only objecties them
further and makes them even more fungible.
Hartman 97 (Saidiya V., Ph. D., professor at Columbia University
specializing in African-American literature and history, Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford
University Press 1997, pg 19) J.S.
Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order

to better understand the other or the projection of ones own personality

into an object, with the attribution to the object of ones own emotions .
Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankins efforts to identify
with the enslaved because in making the slaves suffering his own, Rankin
begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in
imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting the
vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and
feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently
conrms the expectations and desires denitive of the relations of chattel
slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankins empathetic identication is as
much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to
the fungibility of the captive body. By making the suffering of others his
own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only conrmed the diculty of
understanding the suffering of the enslaved? Can the white witness of the
spectacle of suffering arm the materiality of black sentience only by
feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black
sentience is inconceivable and unimaginable but, in the very ease of
possessing the abased and enslaved body, ultimately elide an
understanding and acknowledgement of the slaves pain? Beyond evidence

of slaverys crime, what does this exposure of the suffering body of the
bondsman yield? Does this not reinforce the thingly quality of the

captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to establish

the humanity of the enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness
of the powerless

Intersectionality/Multiculturalism Link
The affs claim to resolve multiple and intersecting forms of oppression lacks
any method and obscures the reality of a black-white world The affs
departure from a structural analysis doesnt resolve the structural antagonism
of anti-blackness
Sexton 08 [Jared Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities UC Irvine,AmalgamationSchemes:Antiblackness and
the Critique of Multiracialism.Introduction. Pg. 248-52.]
By now, however, the

blanket injunction against situating multiple forms of oppression has

become articulated with the neoliberal containment strategies of multiculturalism, wherein
cultural diversity is managed as a depoliticized term of experience. 9 The most pertinent
dimension of this tension between black studies THE TRUE NAMES OF RACE 247 and ethnic studies
makes itself felt in the continuing pressure to produce comparative analyses without
benefit of any viable methodological or analytic frameworks to ground such
comparisons. How, after all, does one draw comparisons without occluding not only important contrasts, but also incommensurable
differences in the respective formations?It is out of this inability or unwillingness to address difference
in and as hierarchy (Spillers 2003) that the persistent return of differential value issues
forth, spotted now and again in the disclaimers and complications that pepper multiracial discourse but that have yet to fundamentally alter its assumptive logic.
A pretense of concern is granted to the fact that one cannot, for instance, assume all mixes are on equal terms, the product of a harmonious balance between the
mixing elements, that the reasons for, and consequences of, the mixture cannot be reduced to a universally positive designation (Parker and Song 2000a,

However, when it comes time to elaborate the specific power relations and historical
influences shaping this mixture, analyses of the multiracial experience fail to deliver. Katya
Azoulays Black, Jewish and Interracial (1997) is one of the rare exceptions. She echoes our concern for particularity when she writes, Although issues
of interethnic identities include any combination, the Black/white theme has a dominance
that eclipses other racial combinations. This historical legacy is one of the reasons that
Black students [often] insist on focusing on the specificity of the African American
experience with interracial liaisons (4). The historical character of this insistence is
emphasized in order to counter the tendency to assign mental pathology or atavistic Wxation to
black peoples difficult questioning of both interracial sexuality and multiracial identity
politics. The ethical compromise of multiracialism obtains in proponents desire to move
beyond the blackwhite binary in order to ignore its centrality to racial formation. To do
more than pay lip service to a foundational antiblackness, that is, to theorize its
centrality, both to the overall Wguration of race mixture and to the constitution of the entire Weld of ethnic studies (multiracial studies
included), seems an unconscionable capitulation to an outdated model. It is to take up residence in the camp of the
9).

unenlightened, the backwardlooking, the narrow-minded, the plain and the simple.10 248 THE TRUE NAMES OF RACE On this point, the full range of the
multiracialism gains consistency, where multiracial studies and the Welds of Asian American and Chicano/ Latino studiesand their counterparts in the political

This presumptive distinction is found in the now obligatory claims

that one complicate, update, and expand upon the limited capacities of the black
white binary model. Inits more dramatic moments, the multiracial scholar-activist must work to

domain proper Wnd common ground.

escape; she must struggle to move away from the BlackWhite racial binary that

prevails in a majority of U.S. discourse, for such a binary, at a basic level, problematizes
the multiracial communitys existence as [a] . . . collective social movement. Suggestions for doing so
are typically nondescript save the rather unimaginative calls for new subject matter or new focus. But as Spencer (1999) reminds us, the blackwhite
binary is neither dismantled nor superseded by the mere addition of other racialized
groups: The traditional racial groups in the United States . . . are, in . . . descending order:
whites, Asians, Native Americans, and blacks. In the United States, blacks and whites are
in a binary opposition even when the other racial groups are recognized, since the
American racial construct is a hierarchical scale, with whites most valued at the one end
and blacks least valued at the other. (23; emphasis added) At a loss about what else to do in the face of this living
legacy, the

editors of a special multiracial issue of Amerasia Journal go so far as to propose that an

interdisciplinary approach would do the trick, thereby ascribing to the blackwhite
binary yet another theoretical shortcoming, the stricture of a single-discipline
approach (Houston and Williams 1997, xi). By assembling these distinct strains of thought , I am drawing attention to a
broad-based grievance with a rhetorical Wgure that remains vague by deWnition but that
has nonetheless become a popular trope in recent years: the blackwhite, monochrome
analysis of race. Inthe mass media, a recent Newsweek article boldly announces that the color line in the post civil rights United States is not just a

matter of black and white anymore; the nuances of brown and yellow and red mean moreand lessthan ever THE TRUE NAMES OF RACE 249 (Meacham
2000). This headline marks in shorthand the convergence of several trends, all of which bear directly on the politics of multiracialism under critique in this study.

the decentering of blackness: a shift in focus from the conditions of black people as the
metonym of domestic race relations to a supposedly more encompassing ,indeed, more
nuanced, commentary on nonblack nonwhites (described earlier by Cho (1993) as the colors in the middle). This shift was at the
First,

forefront of controversy regarding President Clintons hackneyed 1997 Initiative on Race, in which the chair, esteemed black historian John Hope Franklin, offered at
the inaugural meeting that the United States cut its eye teeth on racism in the black/white sphere. A brief debate ensued among the panelists. Linda ChavezThompson argued that the American dilemma had become a proliferation of racial and ethnic dilemmas. Angela Oh [who also suggested the Initiative dump unusual
concepts like race] argued that the national conversation needed to move beyond discussions of racism as solely directed atBlacks.. . . Although the Board members

their distinct perspectives continued to provoke debate within

academic, policy, and community activist settings regarding the BlackWhite race
paradigm (Omi 2001, 250).11In fact, Oh, a noted Korean American attorney, self-described liberal feminist, member of the Los Angeles City Human

subsequently downplayed their differences,

Relations Commission, and former Special Counsel to the California Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis (i.e., the 1992 LA uprising), rebuffed
Franklins claim in a subsequent interview in the Los Angeles Times with comments that would be bafXing were they not so noticeably instrumental to the moral and
conceptual grounds of her stance: Asian-Americans because of how we look. . . . Our susceptibility or vulnerability to being called foreigner is never going to go
away. I have had people ask me, How does it feel to always be viewed as a foreigner? African-Americans actually have said to me, At least we know we
belonghere.. . . That is a very unsettling question when it is put to you. African-Americans are never told, Go back to your own country (Yoshihara 1997,

This contention, that Asian Americans in particular (and other immigrants of color), are
faced with a qualitatively different
and, as it is usually implied, additional form of racism (e.g., 250 THE TRUE NAMES OF RACE nativism or
xenophobia) from that faced by native-born blacks, is a popular position in the formation of
Asian American identity per se. It is found throughout the Weld of Asian American studies and is particularly acute in the Weld of Asian
American jurisprudence (Han 2006). However, it is an assertion that can only be maintained (like the imaginary
correlative of a black who knows he or she belongs here) against the full force of history, the continuing and
palpable construction of blacks as foreigners within or intimate enemies of U.S.
3).

culture and society, and the quotidian regularity with which blacks are told to go back to
Africa without so much as the privilege of deportation or repatriation to a speciWed
countryany African country whatsoever will do. Second, the decentering of race more
generally, a trend marked by the ascendancy of antiessentialist critique and the
development of intersectional analyses of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality. (It entails as
well the more disconcerting rise of colorblindness and/as class-not-race analyses [Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003], both of which perspectives
can be found readily in multiracial discourse.) These

theoretical innovations a certain deconstruction of

race and the multiplication of analytic dimensions are, inturn, c losely associated with the
blurring of racial categories supposed by the multiracial subject (even as multiracialism reinforces notions of

race purity unavoidably, implicitly, perhaps insidiously). Some even imagine multiracial studies to be avant-garde in this respect: [In multiracial studies,] notions of
boundary-creation,boundary-busting, and boundary-expansion have been explored; and the deeply personal and highly political nature of identity has thus been
articulated. As the discourse on multiple identities expands to include class, language, gender, sexuality, and body, along with race, ethnicity, and nation, multiracial
individuals and their identity formation remain theoretically and experientially cutting edge. (Houston and Williams 1997, ixx; emphasis added) I have no quarrels

and it should be said that both antiessentialist critique and

intersectional analyses have enriched the Weld of black studies (they have often been pioneered by black

with either of these trends per se,

expanded our understanding of antiblackness immensely. As THE TRUE NAMES OF RACE 251

intellectuals) and

the appropriations of these critical approaches within multiracial discourse

often fail to do justice to their animating political projects. What concerns me in the
articulation of these various developments within the horizon of the multiracial pointing toward
both racial multiplicity and racial mixture is their common point of reference, their common antagonism
with a figure of blackness supposed to stand in the way of future progress, silencing the
expression of much needed voices on the political and intellectual scene.
well, it is quite clear that

War Back Home

Militarized abuse in foreign affairs nds its roots in
domestic violence agains the black body
James 7

[Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities and a professor in political science,
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Duke University Press, 2007] l.gong

Amid the horror of the revelations of torture of prisoners by American

soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cubas Guantnamo Bay, some
journalists highlighted the presence of torture in U.S. prisons . Yet,

according to Laura Whitehorns Resisting the Ordinary, few examined

standard, daily abusive operating procedures and routines at U.S. penal
sites. Whitehorn argues that torture and institutional abuse are similarly
geared toward the destruction of the human personality. Looking at
humiliation as one aspect of torture, Whitehorn relies on examples from her
personal experiences in federal prison and administrators dehumanizing
acts against other prisoners to describe how ordinary practices become
acceptable even when they fall within the categories of torture and abuse.
Whitehorn discusses the diculties in countering abuse when it is defined as
standard operating procedure. Incorporating into her essay excerpts from
personal correspondence with activists (some of whom identify themselves
as combatants) in the Black Liberation Army, American Indian Movement,
and white anti-imperialist movements, Whitehorn maintains that the
treatment of political captives in the United States has set the stage for the
maltreatment of detainees today. Countering the ordinary as excessive
force directed against the racialized other, William F. Pinar argues that the
abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib becomes more fully intelligible
when situated in cultural traditions of racialized torture and warfare in the
United States. Pinars Cultures of Torture situates the Abu Ghraib scandal
in three cultures of torture in U.S. racial history: lynching ; the

nineteenth-century convict-lease system; and twentieth-century, racialized

abuse by prison guards. Since emancipation, Pinar argues, criminalization
has been fashioned racially in the United States as legalized lynchings
have slowly replaced extralegal executions. In the late nineteenth century,

black men were imprisoned for social infractions that would have been noncriminal offenses for whites, and once imprisoned, they were exploited in a
vicious convict-lease system, with exorbitant death rates and casualties that
surpassed the cruelties of slavery. Currently, Pinar maintains, black and
Latino men are still disproportionately imprisoned, at times for arbitrary
reasons or as victims of a racially fashioned war on drugs. Historical and

contemporary cultures of torture, argues Pinar, contradict President George

W. Bushs 2004 assertion that the Abu Ghraib photographs do not represent
America. Suffering and abandonment and the policing of black bodies and
communities in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans are examined by
Manning Marable in the closing chapter, Katrinas Unnatural Disaster: A
Tragedy of Black Suffering and White Denial, which originally appeared in
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. The
devastation in New Orleans, which was not necessarily a natural

disaster, brought global attention to punitive measures taken against

black survivors and the existence of impoverished black communities as
trauma sites. These spaces are distinct from the trauma sites of formal
prisons, but inhabitants or residents in certain urban areas are still regulated
by government control (or neglect) and policed in racially fashioned ways
that contradict the stated ideals of American democracy yet, nevertheless,
represent another aspect of dispossession rather than security in and
belonging to the homeland.

General Dishonor
General dishonor turns public deliberation
Hartman 9 (Saidiya, professor of English and comparative literature and women's and gender
studies at Columbia University, Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a Theory of Practice, in
American Studies: An Anthology, Pages 343-344)
In order to illuminate the significance of performance and the articulation of social struggle in seemingly innocuous events, everyday forms of
practice must be contextualized within the virtually unbounded powers of the slave-owning class, and whites in general, to use all means
necessary to ensure submission. Thus it is no surprise that these everyday forms of practice are usually subterranean . I
am reluctant to simply describe these practices as a "kind of politics," not because I question whether the practices considered here are smallscale forms of struggle or dismiss them as cathartic and contained.' Rather, it is the concern about the possibilities of

practice as they are related to the particular object constitution and subject
formation of the enslaved outside the "political proper" that leads me both to
question the appropriateness of the political to this realm of practice and to reimagine the political
in this context. (As well, f take seriously Jean Comaroff's observations that "the real politick of oppression dictates that resistance be
expressed in domains seemingly apolitical.")" The historical and social limits of the political must be
recognized in order to evaluate the articulation of needs and the forwarding of claims in
domains relegated to the privatized or nonpolitical. If the public sphere is reserved for the white
bourgeois subject and the public/private divide replicates that between the political and the nonpolitical, then the agency
of the enslaved, whose relation to the state is mediated by way of
another's rights, is invariably relegated to the nonpolitical side of this
divide . This gives us some sense of the full weight and meaning of the slaveholder's dominion. In effect, those subjects
removed from the public sphere are formally outside the space of politics .
The everyday practices of the enslaved generally fall outside direct forms of confrontation ; they are not
systemic in their ideology, analysis, or intent, and, most important, the slave is neither civic man nor free
worker but excluded from the narrative of "we the people" that effects the linkage of the
modern individual and the state. The enslaved were neither envisioned nor afforded the privilege of envisioning themselves as part of the
"imaginary sovereignty of the state" or as "infused with unreal universality."" Even the Gramscian model, with its

reformulation of the relation of state and civil society in the concept of the historical bloc and its
expanded definition of the political, maintains a notion of the political inseparable from the effort
and the ability of a class to effect hegemony ? By questioning the use of the term "political," I hope to illuminate the
possibilities of practice and the stakes of these dispersed resistances. All of this is not a preamble to an argument about the "prepolitical"
consciousness of the enslaved but an attempt to point to the limits of the political and the difficulty of
translating or interpreting the practices of the enslaved within that framework. The everyday
practices of the enslaved occur in the default of the political, in the absence of the rights of man or
the assurances of the self-possessed individual, and perhaps even without a "person, " in the usual meaning
of the term.

View from No Where

Their framework enacts and comes from a view from nowhere that obscures
embodiment and makes Whiteness invisible
Yancy 5 [George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series,
Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse]
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

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
exposure.

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

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
"comprehension" of a range of materials. (1998, 6)

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

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
objective is to describe and theorize situations where

and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological
constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black]
demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the bodyin this case, the Black bodyis capable of undergoing a

The body's meaningwhether phenotypically white or blackits ontology, its modalities

, 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
sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis--vis white embodiment.
of aesthetic performance

"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

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
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)

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

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
something [End Page 216] fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score,

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

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
ontological racial differences. This, however, is

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). The situation, though, is more complex. It is not that he simply returned me to myself as a carpenter or a bricklayer when all along I
had this image of myself as a pilot. Rather, he returned me to myself as a fixed entity, a "niggerized" Black body whose epidermal logic had already foreclosed the possibility of being anything
other than what was befitting its lowly station. He was the voice of a larger anti-Black racist society that "whispers mixed messages in our ears" (Marable 2000, 9), the ears of Black people who
struggle to think of themselves as a possibility. He mentioned that there were only a few Black pilots and that I should be more realistic. (One can only imagine what his response would have
been had I said that I wanted to be a philosopher, particularly given the statistic that Black philosophers constitute about 1.1% of philosophers in the United States). Keep in mind that this event
did not occur in the 1930s or 1940s, but around 1979. The message was clear. Because I was Black, I had to settle for an occupation suitable for my Black body,4 unlike the white body that
would no doubt have been encouraged to become a pilot. As with Davis, having one's Black body returned as a source of impossibility, one begins to think, to feel, to emote: "Am I a nigger?"
The internalization of the white gaze creates a doubleness within the psyche of the Black, leading to a destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance and self-interrogation. This was indeed
a time when I felt ontologically locked into my body. My body was indelibly marked with this stain of darkness. After all, he was the white mind, the mathematical mind, calculating my future by

I occupied that paradoxical status of "visible

invisibility." Within this dyadic space, my Black body phenomenologically returned to me as
inferior. To describe the phenomenological return of the Black body is to disclose how it is returned as an appearance to consciousness, my consciousness. The (negatively) "raced"
factoring in my Blackness. He did not "see" me, though. Like Ellison's invisible man,

manner in which my body underwent a phenomenological return, however, presupposes a thick social reality that has always already been structured by the ideology and history of whiteness.

when my body is returned to me, the white body has already been constituted over
centuries as the norm, both in European and Anglo-American culture, and at several discursive
levels from science to philosophy to religion. In the case of my math teacher, his whiteness was invisible to him as my Blackness was hypervisible to both of us. Of course, his invisibility to his own normative here is a function of my hyper-visibility. It is important to keep in mind that
More specifically,

white Americans, more generally, define themselves around the "gravitational pull," as it were, of the Black.5 The not of white America is the Black of white America. This not is essential, as is
the invisibility of the negative relation through which whites are constituted. All of embodied beings have their own "here." My white math teacher's racist social performances (for example, his
"advice" to me), within the context of a [End Page 219] white racist historical imaginary and asymmetric power relations, suspends and effectively disqualifies my embodied here. What was the
message communicated? Expressing my desire to be, to take advantage of the opportunities for which Black bodies had died in order to secure, my ambition "was flung back in my face like a
slap" (Fanon 1967, 114). Fanon writes: The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a
black manor at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged. (11415) According to
philosopher Bettina Bergo, drawing from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, "perception and discoursewhat we see and the symbols and meanings of our social imaginariesprove
inextricably the one from the other" (2005, 131). Hence, the white math teacher's perception, what he "saw," was inextricably linked to social meanings and semiotic constructions and

There is nothing passive about the white gaze. There are

racist sociohistorical and epistemic conditions of emergence that construct not only the Black
body, but the white body as well. So, what is "seen" when the white gaze "sees" "my body" and it
becomes something alien to me?
constrictions that opened up a "field of appearances" regarding my dark body.

Aff Specic Links

Anxiety Links
The affirmatives embracement of anxiety fails to account for the evacuation of
social life and spiritual death of the black body that is endemic to the material
existence of black life and fails to challenge the establishment that produces
inevitable anxiety- the only alternative is revolutionary suicide
Newton 72 (Huey P. Newton, Co-Founder of The Black Panther Party and its Minster of Defense and all around
badass, got his PhD at UC:Santa Cruz, Revolutionary Suicide pp.4-6)

Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and degrading, is a spiritual
death that has been the experience of million of Black people in the United States. This death is
found everywhere today in the black community. Its victims have ceased to fight the forms of
oppression that drink their blood. The common attitude has long been: Whats the use? If a man rises up
against a power as great as the United States, he will not survive. Believing this, many Blacks
have been driven to death of the spirit rather than of the flesh, lapsing
into lives of quiet desperation. Yet all the while, in the heart of every Black, there is the hope that
life will somehow change in the future. I do not think that life will somehow change in the future. I
do not think that life will not change for the better without an assault on the
establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies is at the
heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would
drive me to self-murder than to endure them . Although I risk the likelihood of death,
there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions .

This possibility is
important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding
of the odds. Indeed, we are all Black and white alike ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how
shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is thee result, that if death has a
meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the
opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that
existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move
against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick. Che Guevara said that to a

Because the revolutionary lives so dangerously,

his survival is a miracle. Bajunin, who spoke for the most militant wing of the First International,
made a similar statement in his Revolutionary Catechism. To him, the first lesson a revolutionary
must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential
meaning of life. When Fidel Castro and his small band were in Mexico preparing for the Cuban Revolution, many
revolutionary death is the reality and victory the dream.

of the comrades had little understanding of Bakunins rule. I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The
people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism, reactionary
intercommunalism reactionary suicide. The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the

Revolutionaries must accept this fact, especially the black

revolutionaries in America, whose lives are in constant danger from the evils of a colonial society
must accept this fate, Considering how we must live, it is not hard to accept the concept of
revolutionary suicide. In this we are different from white radicals. They are not faced with
genocide. The greater, more immediate problem is the survival of the entire world. If the world
does not change, all its people will be threatened by the greed, exploitation, and violence of the
power structure in the American empire. The handwriting is on the wall. The United States is jeopardizing its
revolution, I cannot predict their survival.

own existence of all humanity. If Americans knew the disasters that lay ahead, the would transform this society

The black Panther Party is in the vanguard of the revolution that

seeks to relieve this country of its crushing burden of guilt. We are determined to establish true
equality and the means for creative work. Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide
tomorrow for their own preservation.

among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive

Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of
an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent
and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonists,
difference.

the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews od Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the
North Vietnamese any people who struggles against a brutal and powerful force are suicidal. Also, if the black
panthers symbolize the suicidal trend among Blacks, then the whole thirst world is suicidal, because the third world

If scholars wish to carry their

analysis further, they must come to terms with that four-fifths of the world which is bent on wiping
out the power of empire. In those terms the Third World would be transformed from suicidal to
homicidal, although homicide is the unlawful taking of life, and the third world is involved only in
defense. Is the coin then turned? Is the government of the United States suicidal? I think so. With this
redefinition, the term revolutionary suicide is not as simplistic as it might seem initially. In
coining the phrase, I took two knowns and combined them to make an unknown, a neoteric phrase
in which the word revolutionary transforms the word suicide into an idea that has
different dimensions and meaning , applicable to a new and complex situation.
fully intends to resist and overcome the ruling class of the United States.

The static relationships between black bodies and the

world will exist within an innite state of objectivity- the
1AC ignores this embodiment as those black bodies will
never be able to arm anxiety and achieve the liberation
of the Dasein from theyself.
Wilderson 93 (Frank B. III, He Is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker
and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the
University of California, Irvine, The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent)
Scandal, book, page 25,
http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/archive/92_30_2/92_04Wilderson.pdf, July
27 | Alfredo)
Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subjects positionality . American subject
We are
off the map with respect to the cartography that charts civil societys
semiotics; we have a past, but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the
Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank , much like that which the Khoisan presented to the
Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position , one that is
does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record.

outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position
because and this is key our presence works back upon the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with

If every subject even the most massacred among them, Indians is required to
have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience
of one subject, upon whom the nations order of wealth was built, is
without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other
analogs. Fanon (1968: 37) writes, Decolonization, which sets out to change the
order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. If we take
incoherence.

him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so

Blackness is the site of

absolute dereliction at the level of the Real , for in its magnetizing of
bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through
which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is,
or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for
completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body.

Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of
immigration or sovereignty.

It is an experience without analog a past without a

heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the

Imaginary, for whoever says rape says Black (Fanon), whoever says
prison says Black, and whoever says AIDS says Black (Sexton) the
Negro is a phobogenic object (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic
object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a
program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should
not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary

If a social movement is to be neither social

democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the
invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death . If we are
to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the Negro has been
inviting whites, as well as civil societys junior partners, to the dance of
social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and
movement such as prison abolition.

remain today even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement invested elsewhere.

oppositional political desire today is pro-white , but it is

usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.
This is not to say that all

The rhetoric of the 1AC embraces the conception that one

can accept death through the armation of anxiety.
However, the 1AC neglects that black bodies are subjected
to premature death by the theyself. The exclusion of social
life by the 1AC creates an obscured binary that the black
body cant bypass.
Woods 07 (Tryon, Dr. Woods is Assistant Prof of Sociology, Anthropology,
and Crime & Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth,
where he is aliated with the African and African American and Women and
Gender Studies programs, The Fact of Anti-Blackness Decolonization in
Chiapas and the Niger River Delta, book, page 321-322,
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2T_cBJkJvqFb3YzYW5kZFpEc28/edit, July 28
| Alfredo)
The anti-globalization and anti-war movements have developed eloquent critiques of the vagaries of neo-liberalism,

By obscuring
the blacks singular relation to suffering, however, these important challenges
serve to reconstitute the anti-black world. To make it plain: when critiques of globalization,
including the machinations of corporate media and the omnipresence of market relations.

such as those proffered by the Zapatistas out of southern Mexico, speak of solidarity with all peoples injured and
threatened with extinction by neo-liberalism, they do nothing to undo the Manichean world Fanon shows us. In this

the Black is over determined from the outside; to use Nigel

Gibsons formulation of Fanon, the Black is body and the bodys death is death (2003: 20).
In other words, black people experience bodily punishment; they are
imprisoned, harassed, beaten, or murdered; criminalized, stigmatized,
tortured or killed; impoverished, diseased, exiled, or homeless not because of a particular
political economy, nor because of national oppression or under
development. They are not hunted down because they have organized themselves militarily to resist state
Manichean delirium,

violence and the designs of capital for the exploitation of their lands, as in the case of the Zapatista Rebellion, the

they are subjected to

premature death because they are black, and as such, they are the violence
that must be countered and expunged. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes clear the
most prominent social movement currently active in Chiapas. Rather,

distinction between domination and colonialism. The difference is that being dominated racially is not the same as

the humanity of the colonized

becomes the thing that requires justication: as Fanon puts it, not only must the
having ones humanity expunged. In the colonial condition,

colonialism has
created, that lexicon of endlessly repeating and entangled opposites, is
therefore qualitatively distinct from the structure of the political economy .
Although both levels structure the lived experiences of Africans and indigenous
Americans, Fanon reminds us that the materiality of the colonized subject cannot be
found in labor exploitation or national oppression. Rather, violence
provides the materiality of the colonial subject (Judy 1998). The historical circumstances
of being locked in thingness by non-recognition, as B. Marie Perinbam puts it, or in Fanons
words, fixed into the position of the thing slave, as one who is condemned to
bite himself, means that consciousness is predicated on violence (Perinbam
designated inferior race ask who am I, but also, what am I? The universe of meanings that

1982: 20). This section briey considers, then, the violence that colonialism produces.

Border Security/Drone Link

Frontier violence is a product of comparitive-racialization
from above that is an extension of the European
juridical order founded on the gratuitous violence of the
slave/indigenous body
Madhu Dubey 2015( Dubey is a Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
African American literature, cultural studies, postmodernism.The Biopolitics
of Race in Futureland. Social Text 123.Vol. 33, No. 2.) VR
How should we come to see this late-modern resuscitation of frontier
violence, a move whose own reiterative logic is strewn across a history of
US imperial warfares double-voiced linkage of secure national borders
and their persistent eclipse (Silliman, 2008)? On display in Bin Ladens

assassination have not been images of a mutilated body extricated fromthe

ambiguous Af/Pak frontier, that key site for the performance of Holbrookes
singular theater of war. There are no spider holes or grainy cell-phone
images of death by hanging, a l Saddam Hussein after the US invasion of
Iraq. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of Bin Ladens killing, we are
invited to view the widely-circulated photograph of a crowded White House
Situation Room, with Barack Obama surrounded by a dozen prominent
figures in his administration. They gaze at an off-camera screen whose video
content we learn was supplied by feeds from both the Central Intelligence
Agencys RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle hovering several miles
above the Abbottabad, Pakistan compound where Bin Laden was located and
killed, and the cameras mounted on the helmets of the Navy SEAL Team 6
operatives penetrating the compounds fortifications (see Figure 1). In an
image variously described in the blogosphere as mesmerizing and
captivating, the target of imperial retribution remains just outside the visual
field, even as its presence haunts our reading. We are drawn to witness the
witnessing of Bin Ladens assassination, with its spectral performance
registered in the attempt to represent the imperial states right to
extraterritorial killing. In this way, the Situation Room photograph frames
sovereign power through the absent presence of late modern warfares, and
indeed the homeland security states, constitutive frontier violence, one
whose geography abruptly extended from the illdefined space of the
Durand Line to a zone deep in one of Pakistans urban regions. While this
highly-mediated scene captures something new about the present an
innovation I elaborate below the photograph likewise allows us to see how
the EMPIRES VERTICALITY 327 production of ambiguous national borders
and their modes of racialization are hardly novel. Such forced ambiguity
punctuates histories of US imperial sovereignty, whose contours routinely
exceed the ction of a stably-bounded nation-state. Indeed, they were

drawn with typical blur in the late-nineteenth US policy to apprehend the

Chiricahua Apache Geronimo inside Mexico through what historian Daniel S.
Margolies (2011) calls elastic approaches to issues of extraterritorial
jurisdiction. The longue dure of the modern colonial world system itself

evidences how the geographic homology of nation-state borders promised

by the Treaty of Westphalia have stubbornly refused to remain still.
Instead, they have been constituted through the persistent reproduction,
constellation, and contestation of borders in manifestly unstable relation
to one another, an instability indexed by the infusion of the Euro
American juridical order by the externalized violence of the colony and
the internalized circumscription of political life under transatlantic
slavery and indigenous genocide (Mbembe, 2003; Mignolo, 2000; Sexton,

2010). Analyses premised on this insight are obliged to track carefully

histories of imperial sovereigntys shifting categories and moving parts
whose designated borders at any one time were not necessarily the force
fields in which they operated (Stoler, 2006: 138). The contemporary US
homeland security state has elaborated and capitalized on this instability
through practices of ubiquitous bordering at a variety of local, regional, and
transnational scales that persistently rub against the Westphalian system
(Graham, 2010: 132). In doing so, it propagates zones of differentiated
inclusion and exclusion that comprise the geographic warp and weft of
globalized warfare. Amy Kaplan suggests the ideological function of the term
homeland security itself is meant to legitimate these practices by suturing
the intra-national contraction of figure 1 Pete Souza, Situation Room, May 1,
2011. 328 KEITH P FELDMAN proper spaces and subjects of the political with
the transnational expansion of US imperial sovereignty (2003: 87). For Allen
Feldman, the borders of the homeland no longer function solely as barriers
between nationally-defined zones, but operate instead as a exible spatial
pathogenesis that shifts around the globe and can move from the exteriority
of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic state (Feldman,
2004: 336). In this heteronymous organization of territorial rights and
claims, argues Achille Mbembe, it makes little sense to insist on distinctions
between internal and external political realms, separated by clearly
demarcated boundaries (2003: 3132). This transmutation and persistent
eclipse of national borders by the contemporary US homeland security state
has at least two key effects. Felicitously captured in the classic phrase
papers, please. . ., the ubiquity of borders generates forms of verification
meant to stabilize, make legible, and manage the ineluctable plurality of a
population. In doing so, they incite the truth-telling desired by the nationstate of increasingly inscrutable and increasingly surveilled subjects of
power in sites both beyond and beneath the horizon of the national. At the
same time, the extension of bordering processes outside the geography of
the nation-state creates flexible biopolitical zones capable of traversing
the globe, in which certain subjects whose apogee in this case are the
human gures in the [US Government] Situation Room photograph, the
operators of the unmanned aerial system, the members of Navy SEAL Team

6, and, if the photograph retains its structure of address, those interpellated

into its frame are invited to occupy categories of life and wield power over
the lives of others, while others are banished from sociality to the point of
death. I submit that this latter figure, of life-in-death, constitutes the kernel

of the raciality of the war on terror. While its genealogy emerges out of forms
of settler colonial violence that hails indigenous genocide, manifest destiny,
and other products of US imperial sovereignty, at its back is what Jared
Sexton calls the structure of gratuitous violence in which a body is
rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged that is, the
reproduction of the structure of racial slavery (2010: 38). Junaid Rana calls
this the fungibility of comparative racialization, which moves swiftly in
these socio-spatial processes of exchange, from the criminal to the illegal
alien to the security threat to the terrorist (2011: 5057). Considering the

production of the figure of life-in-death and its fungibility thus becomes a

way to theorize the mutual constitution and effects of national and imperial
race-making. While the nascent field of border studies has emphasized
(though not exclusively) questions of national borders and the transnational
space of US/ Mexico, and American Studies has followed the interchange
between North American and intercontinental imperial projects, I aim to
understand how the domestic borders of the US nation-state are
transmuted by conceptions of the globalized homeland. I track how the
reproduction of biopolitical frontiers reenacts older imperial patterns that
also remain connected to domestic histories and policies of racialization
that legitimate the production of targets understood through rubrics of
threat, fear, and terror. I take up technologies of visuality in particular in
order to contend with one of the more dramatic spectacles of the post-9/11
era: the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Building
on recent scholarship in critical human geography (Elden, 2009; Graham,
2010; Gregory, 2004; Weizman, 2007), critical race theory (Goldberg, 2008;
Lipsitz, 2011), and visual culture studies (Chow, 2006; Kaplan, 2011), I show
how the fungibility of comparative racialization operates through a
dynamic sociospatial process that traverses local, national, and imperial
geographies (Pulido, 2000: 13). This trac across geographic scales has
developed a vector of verticality, what I call racialization from above,
which supplements the long history of racialization on the ground, whose
contours have been well-documented, particularly around US/Mexico. But

racialization from above accomplishes what racialization on the ground has

been ill-equipped to achieve: it has contorted the temporality of warfare

through notions of preemption and endurance, recalibrated Orientalist

imagined geography through far more porous concepts of proximity that
challenge received notions of state territoriality and national borders, and
xated on the mystique of precision targeting in highly ambiguous
structures of race and space (Kaplan, 2006). In this way, racialization from
above arrays visual technologies along a vertical vector in order to
supplement imperial sovereigntys practices of ubiquitous bordering on
the ground. By beginning to chart this vertical vector, I consider how the war

on terrors logistics of perception link the sight of imperial visioning with the
raciality of the war on terror, before concluding with a glimpse at a counterarchive that asks us to see these processes otherwise (Virilio, 1989).

The 1ACs attempt to reform border politics strategically

ignores how immigration legislation is premised on antiblackness-only leads to more racialized violence on the
border.
Vilna Bashi 2004. (Vilna, Professor and Chair, Black and Latino Studies,
Baruch College, City University of New York, Professor, Sociology Program,
Graduate Center, City University of New York. Globalized anti-blackness:
Transnationalizing Western immigration law, policy, and practice. Published
in Ethnic and Racial Studies, July 2004.)
International migration scholarship acknowledges racism in Western nations immigration policies, but mainly in
nation-specific writings that expound upon whiteness as the preferred category, or trace prejudices against groups
both non-white and non-black (Kubat 1979; Solomos 1993; Boyko 1995; Ignatiev 1995; Salyer 1995; Bashi and
McDaniel 1997; Clifford 1997; Paul 1997; Brodkin 1998; Lee 2002. Richmond 1994 and Bonilla-Silva 2000 are

Western preferences for white immigrants

construct whites position at the top of two intersecting hierarchical
systems: one a racial system, and the other a hierarchy of nations that some
refer to as the world system.1 Whiteness is not shaped in isolation, for the processes
that construct the top construct a hierarchies bottom (Bashi 1998, Winant 2001). I
focus on one group that has (arguably) hovered at the bottom of these systems for
centuries, noting that disdain for black (and especially Caribbean) admittance
characterized the migration policies of the English-speaking West, by
exceptions that offer a global perspective).

examining antiblack Canadian, British, and American immigration policy. Here, I am less proving anti-black

global nature of anti-blackness

in Western immigration history,2 arguing that Western lawmakers denial of
access to the privilege of immigration to phenotypically black persons
from black nations functions as systemic and global anti-blackness .3 Several
intentionality than I am making a theoretical argument about the

themes emerge in this portrait of transnationally anti-black immigration policy. One is a continuing reliance upon
cultural and biological arguments in ocial statements declaring the unsuitability of Caribbean blacks to the
demands of regular employment and cold climates. Another is the use of contract labour agreements and other
forms of recruitment, temporary arrangements meant to ensure that black workers and warriors fulfilled immediate

blacks were expected to return

from whence they came, an expectation based on the certainty that black
persons were inassimilable. Third, contradictory public policy that both has great
disdain for black immigration yet also makes available opportunities to
recruit temporary black labour establishes an ambivalence in immigration
policy around blacks. This ambivalence, however, is tempered by fear of a
permanent addition to the black population a fear partially fuelled by the
racial climate each nation sees in the others, and also the extent to which
other nations successfully excluded blacks, or failed to do so . That is,
governments monitored one anothers handling of the black
(immigration) question. Fifth, over time, immigration policy has become less overtly racist in
language, for Western nations now employ non-racial language to achieve similarly
racialized ends.
demands for labour, soldiers and seamen. Once the need was met,

Bitcoin Links
Bitcoin is a privileged system of currency that excludes
black and feminine bodies
Reisenwitz 14 [Cathy Reisenwitz, a D.C.-based writer. She is Editor-in-Chief of Sex and the
State and her writing has appeared in The Week, Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast,
VICE Motherboard, Reason magazine, Talking Points Memo and other publications. She has
been quoted by the New York Times Magazine and has been a columnist at Townhall.com and
Bitcoin Magazine. Her media appearances include Fox News and Al Jazeera America. She serves
on the Board of Advisors for the Center for a Stateless Society, Bitcoins Actual Privilege
Problems, Bitcoin Magazine, March 10, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/10943/bitcoins-actualprivilege-problems/]//JC//
ThinkProgress has published a blistering critique of bitcoin called Bitcoin: By The Privileged, For The Privileged. Its
full of misunderstandings, misinformation, and, most distressingly, a few points that are actually really spot-on and

bitcoin is
now primarily held and used by the most privileged people . This is
unfortunate because its greatest promise , I would argue, is for the people at the
bottom. The fallout from an argument made ignorantly is that people who know better then feel free to dismiss
the entire premise. Right now people who actually know something about bitcoin are
tearing the piece apart, and rightly so. But just as Annie-Rose Strasser has more to learn about
bitcoin, there is no doubt that the bitcoin community has more to learn about
privilege. So, first, the corrections, mostly culled from my numbered Twitter rant, where I for some reason
missed #5. The rst misunderstanding is a common one , and can be found in
my rst writings about bitcoin. For the uninitiated, bitcoin is the currency,
Bitcoin is the protocol. Then Strasser writes, The whole idea behind Bitcoin is that
it segregates economic markets and currency from a countrys
government. The truth is that there is no one whole idea behind bitcoin.
And that seemingly minor point is actually key. While some person or group of people
manage other currencies, bitcoin is decentralized. No one controls it. Bitcoin does
have a creator, but he or she never laid out a plan to separate money from
government. The plan was only to create an open-source decentralized
network on which one can build a currency, and more. So if there were one idea behind
bitcoin, it would be that. It wants to replace our current economic system and
practices in their entirety. Sounds sinister, doesnt it? But bitcoin is a currency.
It doesnt have agency, so its not aiming to do anything. Some people would like to
important for bitcoin foes and friends to understand. The piece points out the unfortunate fact that

see it upset the extremely unfair and inecient economic system. Others want to use it as an escape hatch for
oppressive regimes. Many are interested in mircopayments and near-feeless remittances abroad. Retailers are
interested in a more-secure-by-default online payment system with no chargebacks and low transaction costs. Many
people are interested in trustless systems. Describing bitcoiners: Theyre the same people who want to end the
fed. As a libertarian Ill go ahead and let you know that those people generally prefer gold. And it doesnt take a
libertarian mindset, just a pinch of critical thinking, to realize no one should trust the government to handle their
money. One thing Strasser isnt totally wrong about is bitcoins demographic makeup: According to an online poll
from Simulacrum, the average user is a 32.1-year-old libertarian male. By users accounts, those men are mostly
white. Breaking that down, about 95 percent of Bitcoin users are men, about 61 percent say theyre not religious,
and about 44 percent describe themselves as libertarian / anarcho-capitalist. In my personal experience, bitcoin
developers are not overwhelmingly, or even mostly, white. Almost none of the developers whove reached out to
me were. They are all, however, male. What explains the demographics, whatever they are? Well, theres a fair
amount of privilege built directly into the currency: In order to buy the sometimes wildly expensive currency, Bitcoin
users need to be wealthy. Brian Doherty at Reason eviscerated this claim: In fact, for years the price of a bitcoin
remained under $10, not quite the sign of something meant to block the less-well-to-do by design. Maybe she
meant to say that if you were smart enough to get involved in Bitcoin early, that you are now wealthy? (You also
dont need to buy an entire Bitcoin, so any amount of any other money is sucient to get you that-much-worth of

one of bitcoins best

qualities is making microtransactions possible. If you have to be rich to
Bitcoin. Its like complaining money is expensive.) Ill just add on that ironically,

use anything, its a credit card. Despite the fact that Strasser is wrong in her identification of why
(and maybe whether) bitcoin is overwhelmingly white and male , It matters who uses it. It
matters because, as Strasser also correctly points out, The unbanked, comprised of women
and people of color, are much more frequently turned down for auto loans,
mortgages, and investment advice. And bitcoin has the potential to bank
the unbanked, if they use it. To understand why, we must first understand why some people lack
access to credit. Lending and check cashing are a game of risk-versus-reward. Risk is determined primarily through
error-prone credit scores. Reward is reaped through interest rates and fees. The unbanked are primarily made up of
people who have poor credit scores, people for whom the risk of non-repayment or bounced checks is high.
Unfortunately, banking regulations make it impossible for banks to charge high enough interest rates to make up for
the risk these people pose. As Strasser points out, Instead [of using banks], theyre taken advantage of by
unregulated banking unbanked households on average spend over $2,400, about 10 percent of their income, to
use services like payday lending and check cashing. Even though payday lenders can charge higher interest rates
than banks, they still are barred by law from automatically deduct payments from a delinquent customers checking
account. This artificially makes lending much more expensive by drastically raising the cost of recovering funds. So
while payday lenders are calling up customers and sending angry letters, both of which cost time and money,
bitcoin contracts can be set up in such a way as to automatically transfer bitcoin to repay a loan. It also obviates
the need for check cashing, as bitcoin can be sent immediately from employer to employee, and spent, without
fees, or trust. There

is no easier or cheaper way to transfer currency from

person-to-person than bitcoin right now, except maybe an in-person cash transfer. So how
do we get the unbanked on bitcoin? Heres where privilege comes in. Using
bitcoin right now requires either a patient guide or a fair amount of
computer literacy. The gap in computer literacy between blacks and whites
is nearly 20%. According to Exploring the Digital Nation, 76 percent of white American
households use the Internet, compared with 57 percent of AfricanAmerican households. In addition, people with some college experience and
household income of more than $50,000, you know, the people who are most
likely to be white and male, are high heavier internet users. Not growing up
in a white, middle-class household vastly decreases your exposure to
computers and computer literacy. As does being female. Women are told,
subtly and less subtly that they dont belong and arent needed in tech and bitcoin .
True, there are people telling women that they do belong. But messages of exclusion, and
instances of harassment, however limited they may be, are extraordinarily
powerful. One more reason the privileged may get into bitcoin rst is that
they can afford the risk. The spectacular crash of Mt. Gox put millions of dollars of wealth into the
hands of thieves. Not everyone can afford to put that kind of money on the line. But rather than paint people as
villains for having the time and energy and risk capacity to get screwed by Gox, we should instead thank these
people. Through their sacrifice were learning how to build a better currency, which, eventually, will tremendously
benefit everyone. Strasser doesnt make bitcoin her beat. Its understandable that theres a lot about the complex
currency that she doesnt understand. But what Strasser clumsily points to are real challenges that will absolutely

Bitcoin
enthusiasts dont generally spend any time thinking about privilege . But
greater computer literacy among the poor and easier-to-use interfaces ,
along with addressing techs gender problems should be a goal we all
strive toward. Its not essential, or possible, that the privilege crowd fully understand bitcoin or that the
need to be overcome for bitcoin to really help the unbanked and reach widespread adoption.

bitcoin crowd fully understand privilege. What would be very helpful, however, is for both parties to admit the vast
sums which comprise what they do not know.

Bitcoin decouples black people from the economy

Coward 15(Kyle, a freelance writer based in Chicago. He has written for The Root, Jet, and
The Chicago Tribune. Why so few black people are using Bitcoin The
Atlantic,http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/why-are-so-few-black-peopleusing-bitcoin/384268/)
A study conducted in May 2014 by
the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the Massachusetts Division of Banks showed that
From the looks of things, thats where the currency needs a higher profile.

African Americans are less likely than whites and Hispanics to have heard about virtual currencies
in general. Another study, released in July 2014 by the digital media company Morning Consult, found that
African Americans are less likely than white and Hispanics to know a lot about Bitcoin. Bitcoin
traders might interpret those findings to mean that there isnt a market for the currency in the
black community. Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist of the brokerage firm ConvergEx Group, doesnt
believe thats the case. Having written online commentaries and appeared on cable financial-news outlets, Colas is
one of Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal evangelists. He believes the currency would be useful to a variety of
demographics. Bitcoin is a Rorschach test for anybody interested in banking, because different people see different
things in what Bitcoin can offer different communities, he says. With the African American community, Colas sees
the currency filling a significant financial-services void. As support, he cites a Senate committee letter written in
2013 by then-Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, along with a Bitcoin primer published by the Chicago Fed.
Neither offered any ocial endorsement of the currency, but both missives noted the possible benefits of
facilitating low-cost transactions in communities where currency exchanges, pre-paid cards and payday loan
services are prevalent. Thats where the promise is for the African American community, because in a finished
form, it allows for a cheaper money-transfer system than anything that the current financial system can provide,
Colas says.According to Shawn Wilkinson, the founder of Storj, a cloud-storage service, Bitcoin could enable people
to engage in online microloans. Bitcoin,

or some kind of cryptocurrency, has the

ability to decouple African Americans from the economic system in a
positive manner, he says. With Bitcoin, there are a lot more methods with microlending, where you can have
communities using cryptocurrencies to help themselves without any intermediaries." Wilkinson, who became
fascinated by Bitcoin in 2012 while studying computer science at Morehouse College, is more interested in the
currency as a way of teaching people about how technology works. Beyond microlending, he sees the real value of
Bitcoin for African Americans coming from mining the currencythe process of using software programs to solve
complex algorithms verifying Bitcoin transactions, which grants Bitcoin to individuals for their efforts. Mining,
Wilkinson believes, will inuence more African Americans to become knowledgeable about back-end technology. In
terms of the Bitcoin ecosystem among African Americans, it really doesnt offer any benefit over any other
demographic, he notes. That said, he does think it could be quite useful for Africans and Afro-Caribbean natives
living in America who want to send money, at a lower cost, to relatives in other countries. Nonetheless, Pearce
stops short of a full-on embrace of the currency, and he's not convinced that anyone besides early adopters will

For African Americans in particular, I think the issue with Bitcoin

is that it stimulates arms-length transactions, he says. In the African American community, by and
large, people tend to be more relationship-oriented than transactionally-driven." Pearce believes
there's a distrust in the black community of the financial landscape at largea distrust that might
go back as far as the bank runs from the Depression era. The fact that many African Americans
dont use PayPal," he says, "or are even afraid to do retail banking, demonstrates this lack of trust
in financial institutions, even when there is a face on the other side. Many times, youll hear them
say, I dont trust banks, Id rather put my money under a mattress and risk it being stolen than
put it in a bank for some unnamed institution to steal it. Additionally, Bitcoin's volatility might raise red
start using it in the black community.

ags in the black community. African Americans are, to be sure, a powerful consumer forcea Nielsen study last
year projected that the buying power of the demographic would reach $1.3 trillion by 2017. But black wealth
continues to lag considerably behind that of whites, and according to a study released last year by the Center for
Global Policy Solutions and Duke University, black households own only five cents of wealth for every dollar owned
by whites. That level of economic disparity means that African Americans accumulate less less in savings and stock
holdings compared to other groupswhich doesnt make the strongest case for owning an asset as volatile as
Bitcoin. And this is to say nothing of the security worries surrounding the currency, which were proved at least
somewhat valid after Mt. Gox, the leading Bitcoin exchange, was hacked in 2013, costing investors hundreds of
millions of dollars. For most African American investors, these effects can be disproportionately devastating. Even a
financial analyst as bullish on Bitcoin as Colas acknowledges these concerns should not be taken lightly. Typically,
lower-income households should primarily focus on trying, as best they can, to build up a small savings buffer, he
says. That isnt necessarily well-served by having it in Bitcoin because of the volatility of the currency .

But in
economically-distressed black communities especially vulnerable to the ravages of drugs and
violence, the prevalence of Bitcoin could be particularly unnerving. In addition to his academic post,
Pearce is an assistant pastor of the Apostolic Church of God in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicagos South
Side. For years, parts of Woodlawn have witnessed rampant drug use, violence and gang activity (the well-known
Blackstone Rangers gang was established there). As a notable figure in the neighborhood, Pearce can empathize
with residents looking at Bitcoin with a wary eye. " There's

no question that Bitcoin has the capacity to

accelerate other activities in the community that are destructive, because of its arms-length
nature," he says. "I think for many people in the black community who have heard of Bitcoin and
have associated it with the an illicit marketplace, they will keep away from it so as not to introduce
it into a community that has enough issues with alternative economies." Ultimately, Pearce doesn't

foresee Bitcoin exacerbating black communities' socioeconomic ills any more than he foresees it promoting AfricanAmerican financial empowerment. "Bitcoin is not going to be the cause of illegal activity," he says. " People

are

the issue." Colas, for his part, thinks the concern of criminal activity can be dealt with as the
currency moves into the regulatory sphere of the financial system, both at the state and federal
level. The New York State Department of Finance, for example, has been one the more prominent regulatory

bodies, attempting in the past year to establish regulations. As Bitcoin gets cleaned up, as regulators put rules
around it, that will get resolved, Colas says. Given that there are demonstrable upsides to using Bitcoin, how might
more African Americans come around to using the currency in their everyday lives? Kinnis Gosha, an assistant
computer-science professor at Morehouse College, says that African American merchants could play a large role,
since they are ever-mindful of transaction costs. "If you're a small business owner, and you say, 'We're not doing
PayPal, we're only doing Bitcoin,' and it is actually in places where African Americans shop, it's going to be hard to
get African Americans to refuse it. But on top of all those issueswealth disparities, Bitcoin's volatility, facilitation
of crimeseven a Bitcoin aficionado like Jackson believes there is another obstacle that needs to be surmounted
before the currency becomes more widely adopted by African Americans: the obstacle of racial perception itself. "I
think what has hindered Bitcoin in some respects is that its early adopters have been largely counterculture,
libertarian white males," he says. "There's nothing wrong with those early adopters at all, and they don't exclude
anyone. It's just that they tend to sit in their own coffee klatch of like-minded demographic folks, and some of them
may eventually say, 'Oh, we haven't reached out to minority communities, to women, and to certain parts of the
globe to bring them into Bitcoin.'" Its why Jackson is so passionate about getting African Americans onboard with
Bitcoin, even with all the issues that need to be worked out. "Just like with poker, Bitcoin right now is a very
egalitarian game," he says. "There are so many avenues that are set up where you can buy Bitcoin, there are no
real institutional blockages between you getting Bitcoin, and it's still relatively early and cheap enough."

A Bitcoin economy exacerbates the gap between whites

and blacks, not more equality.
Jacobs 14 (Tom, Staff Writer Tom Jacobs is a veteran journalist and former
staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Bar, Slaverys
Legacy: Race-Based Economic Inequality, June 19, 2014. Pacific-Standard,
http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/slaverys-legacy-race-basedeconomic-inequality-83854)
Thanks largely to the advocacy of Atlantic magazine writer Ta-Nehisi Coates,
the idea of paying reparations to African-Americans for slavery and various
post-slavery indignities has re-entered the public debate. Inevitably, it has
been dismissed by those who view slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws as
an unfortunate legacy, but one that has left no relevant remnants.
Contradicting that assumption, two European economists report they have found a
robust and persistent relationship between slavery and economic inequality between blacks and
whites in todays America. The legacy of slavery still plays a major role in the U.S. economy and
society, conclude Graziella Bertocchi of the University of Modena in Italy and
Arcangelo Dimico of Queens University Belfast. "Those U.S. counties that in the past
exhibited a higher slave share over population turn out to be still more unequal in the present day."

Their study finds that, in economic terms, those U.S. counties that in the
past exhibited a higher slave share over population turn out to be still more
unequal in the present day. The primary reason, they suggest, is a continuing gap in
educational attainment between blacks and whites. The study, published in the European
Economic Review, uses a sample of U.S. counties to investigate the longterm impact of slavery on economic inequality. The researchers examined
counties in 42 states, including 15 slave states, using as a starting point the
share of slaves over population in the year 1860. They then compared those
figures with current-day economic inequality in those same counties. We find
that slavery has a positive and significant effect on overall inequality, the researchers write.
Further digging into the numbers reveals that this finding is driven almost

entirely by racial inequality (they found no significant effect of slavery on

inequality within races). Whats driving this continuing correlation? Bertocchi
and Dimico cite the persistence of the racial gap in education, which is driven in large part
by the legacy of slavery and the local nature of education provision and funding. The
property tax is the main source of funding for locations/counties, and thus for public education
support, they note. Because of the separate but equal educational policies applied in Southern
states until the 1960s, local officers could divert state funding for blacks to finance education for
whites. As a result, they could impose a lower property tax and spend less on education. Even

after legally mandated school segregation was abolished, those counties

still kept a lower tax rate, the researchers report, with negative effects on
public school funding and, therefore, education for blacks. While that may
not be the sole reason why blacks continue to lag behind whites
economically, the researchers' basic conclusion is clear: The past use of
slave labor persistently affects current inequality." The legacy, sadly, lives
on.

Biometric Technologies
Biometric enrolment is a tool of anti-blackness that serves
to occlude blackness and delegitimize black existence.
Pugliese 5 (Joseph, Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the
Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at
Macquarie University,IN SILICO RACE AND THE HETERONOMY OF BIOMETRIC
PROXIES: BIOMETRICS IN THE CONTEXT OF CIVILIAN LIFE, BORDER SECURITY
AND COUNTER-TERRORISM LAWS The Australian Feminist Law Journal 2005
Volume 23, pg 3-5)
The process of biometric enrolment appears, in the first instance, to be a
straightforward process: subjects present themselves to a biometric
system, their biometric data is extracted and algorithmically converted
into a template that is consequently used for either verication or
identication. Yet, within the biometric industry, there is also what is
termed 'failure to enrol [FTE]' whereby certain subjects' features cannot
be 'extracted' or 'acquired' by the relevant biometric systems.
Significantly, this failure to enrol is neither random nor arbitrary. Rather, it
is marked by the fact that only certain ethnic or dermographic groups
appear to experience this phenomenon. 'Certain ethnic and dermographic

populations,' write Nanavati et al, 'are more prone to high FTE rates than
others.... Those of Pacific Rim/Asian descent are more prone to FTE than
control groups.... Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint
fingerprint 9 ridges - especially female users. This failure to enrol occurs
across a number of biometric systems, including finger-scan, iris-scan and
facial-scan technologies. I want to focus specifically on FTE in the context of
finger- scan and facial-scan technologies. 'Testing of facial-scan solutions
indicates,' write Nanavati et al, 'that the technology may not be as adept at
enrolling very dark-skinned users. The increased FTE rate is not
attributable to the lack of distinctive features, of course, but to the
quality of the images provided to the facial-scan systems by video
cameras optimised for lighter-skinned users.' Despite the

acknowledgement that FTE does not result because dark-skinned users 'lack
distinctive features,' the fact that biometric technologies might be
'optimized for lighter-skinned users' still fails to prompt the authors to
proceed to name the constitutive role of whiteness in setting the
operating parameters of these image acquisition technologies . Nanavati et

al are attentive to the question of lighting/race without ever unpacking the

larger ramifications of this powerful nexus: 'facial-scan technologies are
generally unable to acquire images that are somewhat overexposed or
underexposed.' n In his critique of the unacknowledged racialised gauges
that set the image-acquisition parameters of such technologies as
photography, Richard Dyer brings into critical focus the manner in which
whiteness functions as the normative standard in such visual technologies;
this results, Dwyer explains, in the repeated imaging of black subjects as
'black blobs' in the context, for example, of photographs. 12 Nanavati et al

continue to circle the problematic of what I will term whiteness as an

infrastructural racialised gauge. Yet, even as Nanavati et al circle this

racially inected problematic, they fail to name it as such: Facial-scan

systems' sensitivity to lighting and gain can actually result in reduced ability
to acquire faces from individuals of certain races and ethnicities. Select
Hispanic, black and Asian individuals can be more dicult to enrol and verify
in some facial-scan systems because acquisition devices are not always
optimised to acquire darker faces. At times, an individual may stand in front
of a facial-scan system and simply not be found. While the issue of failureto-enrol is present in all biometric systems, many are surprised that facialscan systems occasionally encounter faces they cannot enroll. 13 The
articulation that 'many are surprised' at this FTE regarding facial-scan
systems marks a double moment of occlusion: the systemic, empirical
occlusion of the non-white face before the biometric system calibrated to
the white gauge, and the ideological occlusion of the calibration to
whiteness that precludes the biometric acquisition of the features of nonwhite subjects. This double occlusion must be named in terms of a
racialised blind-spot: a technological and discursive point of irreflectivity
that cuts in two directions at once: failure to begin to theorise on the
technological/race nexus of these systems (thus the disingenuous
'surprise' that some subjects are 'simply not found') and failure of nonwhite bodies to function as reflective subjects that emit sucient light to
register precisely as template subjects of enrolment in the face of
biometric scan systems occasionally encounter faces they cannot enrol.
systems whose image acquisition parameters are predetermined by an
infrastructrual whiteness. Everything from this point gestures towards a
racialised zero degree of non-representation.

The calibration of biometric technologies is not neutral or

benign, rather it serves to prioritize a white subject while
simultaneously marking the non-white subject as
incomprehensible and therefore deviant and fungible.
Pugliese 5 (Joseph, Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the
Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at
Macquarie University,IN SILICO RACE AND THE HETERONOMY OF BIOMETRIC
PROXIES: BIOMETRICS IN THE CONTEXT OF CIVILIAN LIFE, BORDER SECURITY
AND COUNTER-TERRORISM LAWS The Australian Feminist Law Journal 2005
Volume 23, pg 2-7)
Rather than view this racialised zero degree of non-representation in
terms of a mystifying technological 'anomaly,' I would argue, as I outlined
above, that particular biometric technologies are infrastructurally
calibrated to whiteness - that is, whiteness is congured as the universal
gauge that determines the technical settings and parameters for the
visual imaging and capture of a subject. I will draw on the term calibration

as it effectively encapsulates the three key levels of signification that

inscribe the operation of whiteness in biometric technologies. On one level,

to calibrate a technology is 'to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance
for its irregularities. ' 5 As a universal gauge, whiteness is the absolute

standard within certain biometric technologies, targeting the capture of

white subjects but also allowing for a degree of white variations in skin
tone and colour - that is, allowing for certain 'irregularities' that may fall
outside this standard. These 'irregularities,' however, are circumscribed
within a clearly delineated zone of whiteness and its various chromatic
variations. Outside of this diffuse, greyscale zone of whiteness, lie non- white
subjects who are literally beyond the pale. As I have demonstrated, this
degree of allowance literally cuts off when biometric imaging technologies
are confronted by subjects whose biometric details - for example, their
dark skin colour - are so 'irregular' as to fall outside the technical
parameters set for image capture. Here the term 'irregular' graphically
illustrates the disciplinary power of the white gauge in determining the
normative standards of imaging technologies. In such instances, the nonwhite subject, in literally failing to appear before the biometric system
despite their physical presentation, is dispatched to the outer-limits of
non-appearance, to the zero degree of non-representation . Calibration

perfectly resonates with this imaging economy in that it is a term that

effectively belongs to the lexical set of camera settings: a camera operator
has a repertoire of calibrations at hand when filming; these calibrations
operate at the level of lighting, aperture and lens focus. On another level, the
process of calibrating a technology means not only to establish 'a set of
graduations or markings,' but also to generate a 'classification. '16 The
calibration to whiteness of biometric systems, in other words, not only
determines the universal gauge of these imaging technologies, it also
implicitly reproduces the legendary racial system of classication and
hierarchy that places whiteness at the apex followed, in a graduating
scale, by Asians and Blacks.' 7 Within western economies of visual
representation, this racial hierarchy has systemically guaranteed the nonrepresentation of non-whites within a wide spectrum of visual media,
including lm and television. Finally, the semantic core of calibration is
derived from the term calibre. Calibre refers to a 'degree of social
standing or importance, quality, rank; "stamp," degree of merit or
importance.' 18 In the context of the calibration to whiteness of biometric
technologies, the term calibre underscores questions of power and
hierarchy that inflect the physical settings of imaging technologies, as
whiteness assumes the gauge of 'merit or importance' that determines
who may or may not be visually captured within the calibrated zone of
representation. I have spent some time unpacking the infrastructural

calibration to whiteness in particular facial-scan technologies in order to

interrogate ongoing, doctrinal assertions in the scientific literature that
biometric technologies are to be celebrated because of their objectivity and
impartiality in processing racial and ethnic subjects. For example, Woodward
et al argue that: The technological impartiality of facial recognition... offers a

significant benefit for society. While humans are adept at recognizing facial
features, we also have prejudices and preconceptions. The controversy
surrounding racial profiling is a leading example. Facial recognition systems
do not focus on a person's skin color, hairstyle, or manner of dress, and they
do not rely on racial stereotypes. On the contrary, a typical system uses
objectively measurable facial features, such as the distances and angles
between geometric points on the face, to recognize a specific individual.
With biometrics, human recognition can become relatively more 'human-free'
therefore free from many human aws.19 The 'technological impartiality' of
facial recognition can only be maintained by continuing to invisibilise the
infrastructural calibration to whiteness that inscribes specic facial-scan
systems. Contra Woodward et al, I would argue that this calibration to
whiteness constitutes simply another example of racial 'prejudice and
preconception' in that it biometrically discriminates between white and
non-white subjects. The untenability of arguing that facial recognition
systems 'do not focus on a person's skin colour' is graphically exemplied
when one considers that it is precisely a non-white subject's skin colour specically, the degree of epidermal and chromatic saturation to
blackness - that will determine whether they will be situated outside the
operating parameters of a biometric system's image acquisition zone (of
whiteness), despite its inbuilt 'allowance' for chromatic 'irregularities.'

Woodward et al's consequent invocation of 'objectively measurable facial

features' and 'the distances and angles between geometric points on the
face,' in order to prove their argument for technological impartiality, clearly
resonates with the language of such discredited nineteenth-century racist
scientific disciplines as anthropometry, craniology, phrenology and so on (as
racialising and racist disciplines all predicated on the so-called objectivity of
geometry in the measurement and classification of human bodies). In the
discourses of the sciences, whenever the spectre of race is evoked,
inevitably the discourse of mathematics, specically of geometry, is
mobilised in order magically to transcend the prejudices and
preconceptions of the observer that are in danger of contaminating their
object of inquiry. Through this sleight-of-hand, the human elements that
labour to construct the racialised software of biometric systems are
effectively effaced, leaving a 'human free' geometry to carry out its
impartial scanning of subjects.

Biometric surveillance is a tool of whiteness that simply

classies bodies as black or white while ignoring their
identitythis reies the boundaries that you deconstruct
Browne 12 [Simone Browne, PhD in 2007. She began her faculty position in
the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, d. Race
and surveillance, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Routledge,

page 76-77]//JC//
A key area from which to understand the role of surveillance in the cultural production of race is that of biometrics.

Biometrics is a technology of measuring the body that is put to work for

verication and identication purposes, enabling the body to function as
evidence (see van der Ploeg, this volume). This is the idea that the body will reveal a
truth about a subject despite the subjects claims . This seems simple enough.
However, how such technology is researched, developed and deployed
sometimes reveals itself to be racializing. This is not to say that biometric technology is
inherently racist, but that it is sometimes used to draw and uphold racial lines. A look at the
history of such practices is helpful here. The metal outside caliper, a device used to compare the
outside linear dimensions of objects with those measurements made with other tools, such as a ruler, was
the instrument of choice for Alphonse Bertillon, creator of anthropometry.
Anthropometry, or Bertillonage, was a system of measuring and cataloguing the
human body for purposes of identication and crime solving , and as such it
anticipates contemporary biometric technologies, such as ngerprint
analysis, hand geometry and facial recognition technologies. This early biometric
system was put to work as a scientific method, alongside the pseudo-sciences of craniometry and phrenology, to
classify many as criminal. As for craniometry, its measurements were used to support polygenism and other
theories around racial difference in matters such as intelligence, classifying some as more primitive than others and
therefore outside of the category of rights-bearing human beings. Bertillonage used a series of measurements of
the torso, head and limbs obtained through a choreographed routine that saw the subject sit, stand on stools and
extend limbs so that they could be measured. Once recorded, these measurements were indexed on a database
that amounted to the first ostensible link between body measurements and identity. Although Bertillonage later
gave way to the fingerprint as the standard criminal justice biometric, it continued to be used as a means of
administrative surveillance directed at particular racialized populations. For example, in 1912 the French republican
government passed a law aimed at controlling the mobility of Frances itinerant Roma population that required
individuals without fixed addresses to be issued identity cards. These cards listed name, place and date of birth,
and included photographs as well as anthropometric measurements such as head size, length of cubit (left forearm
from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger), length of the right ear and other measurements first developed by
Bertillon. Current biometric technology converts measurements of the human body into digitized code, making for
unique templates that computers can sort by relying on a searchable database (on-line or one-to-many
identification), or use to verify the identity of the bearer of a document, like a passport, within which the unique
biometric is encoded. The latter use is termed one-to-one or off-line authentification. Popular biometric surveillance

One feature
that this technology shares with earlier biometric technologies like
craniometry is that in some instances it is inscribed in classicatory
schemes that see particular biometric systems privileging whiteness , or
lightness, in how certain bodies are lit and measured in the enrolment
process. Some racial groupings have higher fail to enroll (FTE) rates than
others. For nger-scan technologies these groups that often FTE are the
elderly, workers who come in contact with caustic chemicals and heavy
hand-washing like hospital workers, and those referred to as of Pacic
Rim/Asian descent. On this point, Joseph Pugliese writes, the Social Darwinian resonances of lower
technologies include iris and retinal scans, facial and vascular patterns, and fingerprint data.

quality fingerprints must not be ignored, as they paradigmatically situate Asian bodies on a lower position on that
racial hierarchy, constituted, respectively, by Caucasian, Mongoloid (Asians), and Negroid races (2005: 8). It is
rarely acknowledged that this notion that certain racialized bodies fail to enroll only makes sense when whiteness

a logic of prototypical
whiteness informs such research, development and practice, digitally
segregating racialized populations. A 2009 publication on Face Gender Classification on
provides the unspoken standard against which such groups are compared. Hence,

Consumer Images in a Multiethnic Environment, basically a study that examined how face detection technology
could be employed, for example, in shopping mall settings or for digital photosharing applications, makes use of
archaic racial terminology. In the end, this study found that when programmed generically for all ethnicities the
gender classifier is inclined to classify Africans as males and Mongloids as females (Gao and Ai 2009: 175). The
idea of feminized Asian males and masculinized African females has its roots in the same classificatory schemes
introduced by proponents of polygenism and craniometry

Biometric surveillance is deployed to pre-emptively and

arbitrarily mark bodies as criminal to justify discrimination
and anti-black violence.
Pugliese 5 (Joseph, Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the
Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at
Macquarie University,IN SILICO RACE AND THE HETERONOMY OF BIOMETRIC
PROXIES: BIOMETRICS IN THE CONTEXT OF CIVILIAN LIFE, BORDER SECURITY
AND COUNTER-TERRORISM LAWS The Australian Feminist Law Journal 2005
Volume 23, pg 2)
My focus on the racialising schemas that inscribe biometric technologies in
the context of the spaces and contexts of everyday working life serves to
establish a relation of continuity between the civic and the military uses and
effects of biometrics . Having mapped the racialised, explicitly
discriminatory and exclusionary effects of certain biometric systems in
the context of civilian life, I proceed to elaborate on the systemic status
of biometric racialised schemas that ensure the reproduction of
discriminatory and exclusionary effects within military and governmental
contexts. Effectively, what I want to place under interrogation is the

assertion that biometrics 'offer a natural convenience and technical

eciency'3 in ensuring the production of identity authentication and
assurance. The 'natural convenience,' I argue, is so indissociably tied to a
racialised techn/'technical eciency' that it must be seen as another
instantiation of unacknowledged whiteness; in the context of the facial-,
iris- and finger-scan technologies I examine, it becomes evident that the
'natural convenience' and 'technical eciency' of these biometric systems
are not guaranteed for non-white subjects. On the contrary, non-white
subjects biometrically processed by these systems stand to throw into
crisis the very biometric relation between physis and techn, body and
machine, epistemology and ontology, and whiteness and its others . In the
latter sections of this essay, I situate biometric technologies within the so-

called 'war on terror' and, in the Australian context, a raft of new counterterrorism laws that, I argue, are predicated on racially proling Australia's
Arab and/or Muslim citizens. I draw attention to the powerful convergence
of technologies of surveillance (such as a nationally networked system of
closed circuit televisions [CCTVs]) and biometric systems of identification
and verification. This convergence of scopic technologies must be seen as
generating a biopolitical theatre of war constituted by regimes of hypersurveillance targeting racially proled subjects who, by denition, are
situated as interlopers within the body politic of the nation and who risk
being criminalised and imprisoned before the fact of having committed
any criminal offence.

Becoming/Deleuze Links
Assemblages replicate antiblack violence their analysis
ignores the grid of intelligibility that makes bodies legible
in the rst place
Douglass and Wilderson 13 (Patrice, Patrice Douglass is a PhD
candidate at the University of California, Irvine, Her work explores the
relationship between sexual violence and black subjection under slavery as a
theoretical framework to think through the position of blackness within
contemporary political theory. Frank B. Wilderon III is a professor of AfricanAmerican studies and drama at the University of California, Irvine straight
up shot racists, The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened
World. The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4, Special Issue: Role of Black
Philosophy (Winter 2013), Pages 117-123.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.43.4.0117)
A focus on violence should be at the center of this project because violence
not only makes thought possible, but it makes black metaphysical being
and black relationality impossible , while simultaneously giving rise to the
philosophical contemplation of metaphysics and the thick description of
human relations. Without violence, critical theory and pure philosophy
would be impossible. Marx and others have intimated as much. But what is
often left unexamined is that this violence is peculiar in that, whereas some
groups of people might be the recipients of violence, after they have been
constituted as people, violence is a structural necessity to the constitution
of blacks. Ideally, philosophers (studying metaphysics) and critical
theorists (studying the relational status of the subject) should not be able to
labor without contemplating the violence that enables black (non)being ;
but, in fact, the evasion of blackness-qua-violence is what gives these
disciplines their presumed coherence. This unthought dynamic is a

bestcase scenario, as will be seen below with a critique of Elaine Scarrys The
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.3 A worst-case scenario
ensues when the critical theorist deploys anti-black violence in her/ his
critiqueand restricting of subjectivities and genres, as will be seen with a
critique of Jasbir K. Puars Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times.4 Jasbir Puar frames Terrorist Assemblages by taking further the
underwriting assumptive logics of critical theory and cultural criticisms, the
fields the text both draws on and contributes to. The text foregrounds
theories of subject resistance in relation to violence by atomizing the logic of
analysis down to the level of genre distinctions.5 This framework posits a
critical interrogation of how subject categories are incorporated by the state.
The terrorist assemblage is a theoretic that resists subsumption into the
war machine of the homonationalist nation-state formation, by
contesting, refusing, morphing, and acting against classications in a
manner that suggests an incomprehensibility rather than legibility . This
increases the possibility to apprehend the ontological and affective

possibilities that resonate in queer futurity. By situating two genres of

subjectivity, race and sexuality, in tension with one another, Terrorist

Assemblages maneuvers to mark an investment in upholding the
underlying structures upon which these terms are constituted. Puar
argues, It is precisely within the interstices of life and death that we find the
differences between queer subjects who are being folded (back) into life and
the racialized queerness that emerges through the naming of populations,
thus fueling the oscillation between the disciplining of subjects and the
control of populations. . . . We can complicate, for instance, the centrality of
biopolitical reproductive biologism by expanding the terrain of who
reproduces and what is reproduced . . . rather than being predominately
understood as implicitly or explicitly targeted for death.6 While this

argument unhinges many protocols for thinking subjectivity in the

humanities, it does not contest the grounds upon which genres, as
subcategories of the subject, are produced and enacted. That is to say, the
gesture to think outside of the constrictors and binds of race and sexuality

as distinctive orientations by assessing the mergers, overlaps, and

divergences of their competing and coalescing concerns, does not
interrogate the parameters that suture race and sexuality as categories,

and life and death as legible modes of existing and suffering within those
categories. Instead it demands a more suitable relationship to genre and

while the forms of relationality may at times be unnamable for Puar, this
assessment still maintains that existing in the world is in fact a possibility.
Also what is apparent in the formation of the terrorist assemblage as an
inhabitance of resistance is the assumption of the state as the
predominating force of violence and it furthermore asserts that all violence
has the potential to be denitively recognized as such, violence.
Metaphysics, in this context, is wholly unattended to, yet present in its
absent consideration. Violence is assumed as the constitution of a singular,
refracted, and namable predominating force, the state and its extension,
and is blind to considerations of violence located at the constitution of
being itself and present prior to the arrival of the state. In Scenes of

Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America,

Saidiya Hartman provides a critical collapsing of the analysis put forth by
Puar by placing the legibility of resistance in question when explicitly
considering the status of the female slave. What is brought to bear in
Hartmans analysis of the case, Missouri v. Celia (the slave), and countless
other legal (non)accounts of sexual violence involving both female and male
gendered slaves, is a mediation on metaphysical violence that asks rst
under what conditions of existence can injury become legible. In the case
of slave women, the laws circumscribed recognition of consent and will
occurred only in order to intensify and secure the subordination of the
enslaved, repress the crime, and deny injury, for it asserted that the captive
female was both will-less and always willing. Moreover, the utter negation of
the captives will required to secure absolute submission was identied as
willful submission to the master in the topsy-turvy scenario of onerous

passions. Within this scenario, the constraints of sentiments were no less

severe than those of violence. Critical theorys questions are silenced in
the face of the evidence presented by Hartman. While Puar places concern

on the formation of the terrorist assemblage as a queer praxis of

assemblage [which] allows for a scrambling of sides that is illegible to state
practices of surveillance, control, banishment, and extermination,9 Hartman
places in peril the assumption that such a choice alignment of being is in fact
a sustaining resistance to violence for all. The anxious intent to sidestep
blackness , which is wholly apparent in Terrorist Assemblages, cannot
underwrite the reality of an existence for which space and time do not
shift. Through an intentional mediation on black existence, Scenes of
Subjection brings to bear a witnessing that cannot be witnessed in the
precarious existence of a being that is simultaneously injured and
injurious, harmed and harmful, resistant and complicit, willful and
unwilling, at the level of its constitution . That is to say, blackness is not
deformed by slavery but quite the contrary. Slavery as an ancient political
system nds itself disgured by blackness, as its structural components
proliferate the constraints and denitive power of the masters gaze
beyond the reach of actual physical property status and proximity . Black
philosophical inquiries push introspections to shift concerns beyond
thinking direct relations of violence as a tractable force by instead
engaging the innite refractions of violence at the level of being and
existence within the world . What Hartman uncovers in her world-shifting

theoretical engagement with slavery is the question of exactly whose agency

and suffering is revealed through an engagement with a blackened
existence. Is it the suffering of the black, or is the status of something else
altogether revealed?

Becoming is a political project to relegate the black body

to a permanent state of deterritorialized identity marked
by difference from the majority this results in the
consumption of otherness
Nealon 98 Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University
(Jeffrey Thomas Nealon, 1998, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative
Subjectivity, Duke University Press, p. 129, edge malia)
And this brings us back to Deleuze and Guattari's odd claim that even
blacks must become-black. As they go on to clarify, "if blacks must becomeblack, it is because only a minority is capable of serving as the active
medium of becoming , but under such conditions that it ceases to be a
denable aggregate in relation to the majority" (Thousand, 291). If indeed
we all must become-other, this becoming-other presupposes remaining in
a minority status in a state other than "whole." Becoming-minority is, in
other words, a status that "ceases to be a denable aggregate in relation
to the majority" because the majority is itself deterritorialized by the
minority's repetition with a difference.18 As Baraka writes about the

specificity of African American cultures, "Without the dissent, the struggle,

the outside of the inside, the aesthetic is neither genuinely Black nor Blue"
("Blues Aesthetic," 109; my italics). The deterritorialization performed by
the "Black" aesthetic or the "Blue[s]" tradition deploys directional,
conflicted vectors of becomingthe forceful interruptive movement of "the
outside of the inside," the minority's alteration of the majority. Both

blackness and whiteness are inexorably transformed by the performative

movements of becoming-black. / All that having been said , however, we
still seem to nd ourselves within a familiarly binary vocabulary : even if it
is not exactly the opposite of majority reterritorialization, minority
deterritorialization seems clearly to be the privileged , good term of active

becoming, with the static weight of some chimeric "mainstream" having

been left in the dust. So-called whites, it might seem, must simply abandon
their whiteness and become-black. But, if this is indeed the case, what get
iterated in deterritorialization are the stale platitudes of the twentiethcentury white avant-garde, sentiments increasingly translatable into late
capital's orientalizing lingo of advertising: calling for site-specic
improvisation deterritorializing lines of flightseems merely a call to
"make it new."

You cant just imagine away facial recognition the idea

that certain bodies including previously black ones can
escape the objective vertigo through the destruction of
the faciality machine only further reies blackness as the
ontological zero point and increases the extermination of
blackness
Sexton 8 (Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film
and media studies, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique
of Multiracialism, 2008, Pages 231-234)
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Fredric Jameson (1998b) announced that the state of things the word globalization attempts
to designate will be with us for a long time to come; and . . . its theorization . . . will constitute the horizon of all theory in the years

any intellectual project accompanying the historical

movement of black liberationwhose intervention sustains the current position of enunciationmust
take as central the series of questions posed by the term . We might posit the reverse as
well: anyone thinking seriously about globalization , particularly those hoping to organize political
resistance to it, cannot afford to elide the question of black liberation without
missing something essential to its unfolding . It is my suspicion that this vital
consideration, made only more pointed by the ambivalent rendering of race mixture, forces an uncanny
encounter with the black bodyits capacities, its energies, its appearance
as well as its structured installation in the nexus of sexuality and violence .
In each case noted previously (the white supremacist movement, the global sex industries, the discourse of multiracialism), it is
the image of the black body that throws the apparatus of representation
into unmitigated crisis. The history of racism is a narrative in which the
congruency of micro- and macrocosm has been disrupted at the point of
their analogical intersection: the human body (Gilroy 1997, 192). This prescient point, offered by
Paul Gilroy in his essay Scales and Eyes, bears significantly on the present effort. The body presents a
ahead (xvi). It would thus seem that

problem, a point of disruption , for the historical narrative of racism. It has

failed to lend itself, once and for all, to a stable designation . As Gilroy asks, Has
anyone ever been able to say exactly how many races there are, let alone how skin shade should correspond to them (195)? Of

race in the order of active differentiation (192) has

not proved insurmountable, even if it is inescapable . Quite the contrary, this
perennial diculty has given rise to a frenetic succession of methods
designed for specifying human difference that characterize the protean
nature of modernitys most pernicious signature (192). In the current moment, we confront
a novel question: What does that trope race mean in the age of molecular biology (192)? For Gilroy, we now inhabit
a space beyond comparative anatomy where the body and its obvious,
functional components no longer delimit the scale upon which
assessments of the unity and variation of the species are to be made (194).
Our collective estrangement from anatomical scale has rendered the eye
inadequate, if it ever was, to the tasks of evaluation and description demanded
by racial segregation. Thus, the ascendancy of what he terms nanopolitics departs from
the scalar assumptions asso-ciated with anatomical difference and
accelerates a vertiginous, inward movement towards the explanatory
power of ever-smaller scopic regimes (193). Indeed, this one-way movement, downwards and
inwards, locks the racializing project into a perpetual search for the zero
degree of difference. However, if racial difference cannot be readily correlated with genetic variation (194), the
course, the answer is no, but we have seen that the indeterminacy of

most basic level of differentiation known to date, at what level can it be asserted, maintained, legitimated? Or is it destined simply
to remain anxious and uncertain, forever suspicious? Gilroy is less than sanguine about these developments. Although skepticism

there
is no indication that the calibration of human sameness and human
diversity will diminish in political importance . The frustration of this procedure at one scale
about the status of visible differences is welcomed for the trouble it causes to the paradigm of comparative anatomy,

does not prevent its seeking refuge by burrowing deeper into the esh, the viscera, the blood, the DNA. Gilroy asks, Can a different
sense of scale and scaling form a counterweight to the appeal of absolute particularity celebrated under the sign of race? Can it

the repudiation of
surface-level sameness by the proliferation of invisible differences
remains an object of aggravated fascination insofar as such differences
are understood to produce catastrophic consequences where people are
not what they seem to be (192). We are familiar with the vast literature
regarding the thematic of racial passing in and beyond the United States,
which often sensationally features the scandal of seeming to be white
when one is, in truth, something else (Ginsberg 1996; Sanchez and Schlossberg 2001). Today, the
fear of invisible blackness commingles with the global trac in hypervisible
blackness , the premier consumer product. Across the globe, one can play at blackness,
selectively appropriating everything but the burden, to borrow Greg Tates (2003) apt
phrase. Yet, Gilroys remarks on the crisis of visible difference invoke another catastrophic consequence not unrelated
to an unsuspected or invisible blackness. Visible differences, he notes, not only prove unreliable in
determinations of race, they also do not . . . tell us everything we need to
know about the health- status of the people we want to have sex with (192).
answer the seductions of self and kind projected onto the surface of the body? Scarcely:

They really never did, of course, but Gilroys comment here makes reference to another catastrophic consequence associated with
the age of molecular biology: AIDS. He concludes his essay as follows: With the body figured an epiphenomenon of coded

this aesthetics of racial difference is now residual. The skin may no

longer be privileged as the threshold of identity. There are good reasons
to suppose that the line between inside and outside now falls elsewhere .
(196) This other threshold of identity, this newly privileged elsewhere that now houses
the persistent dividing line, is located within the body, tracking an
invisible presence that demotes and denotes the signicance of the bodily
surface. It is, in effect, a displacement of the skin as the preeminent sign of
information,

race . Here we note a convergence with the project of multiracialism discussed at the outset: for different reasons, both
developments portend the obstruction or unraveling of racialization in the
eld of vision one betting on the increasing diculty of making clear discriminations on the surface, the other devaluing
the surface altogether. However, nothing in Gilroys account alludes to the wholesale
replacement of the surface by the interior, wherein the latter simply
supplants the former . More likely, we have an augmentation of racial
difference, an alloy of the inner and outer, by way of the discourses of
biotechnology and genetic science . Similarly, the blurring of the color line
prophesied by multiracialism provides the occasion, within the
imagination of white supremacy and antiblackness, for a redoubled effort
to police it. In this respect, the surface becomes a more intense object of
observation precisely because it has become more unreliable as a sign of
race

Lines of flights cant escape the structure of antiblackness corporeal experience is effaced and becoming
is interrupted by the process of racial epidermalization
that either results in the black body whitening themself or
open to gratuitous violence
Fanon 52 (Frantz, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and inuential
writer in the field of post-colonial studies, Black Skin White Masks, 1952,
Pages 82-85)

I came into the world imbued with the will to nd

a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found
that I was an object in the midst of other objects . Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I
"Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look, a Negro!"

turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing
me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the
other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical
solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have

As long as the black person is among their own, he

will have no occasion, except in minor internal conicts, to experience their being through
others. There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made
unattainable in a colonized and civilized society . It would seem that this fact has not been
given sucient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an
impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation . Someone may object that this is the
case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology-once it is finally admitted as
leaving existence by the wayside-does not permit us to understand the being of the
black person. For not only must the black person be black; he must be black in relation
to the white person. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say
that this is false. The black person has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the
white person . Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place herself.
Their metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, their customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped
out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that
imposed itself on them. The black person among their own in the twentieth century does not
know at what moment their inferiority comes into being through the other.
been put together again by another self.

Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely, with American Negroes. Together we protested, we

asserted the equality of all people in the world. In the Antilles there was also that little gulf that exists among the almost-white, the
mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic. And
then And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white person's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world
challenged my claims. In the white world the person of color encounters diculties in the development of their bodily schema.

Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person

consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain
uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at
the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these
movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a
spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the
self and of the world-definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world. For several years certain

laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for "denegrication";

with

all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches

that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten themself
and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction. Below the corporeal
schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by "residual sensations
and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character;" but by the other, the white person who had

I thought that what I had in hand was to

construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called
on for more. "Look a Negro!" It was an external stimulus that icked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
"Look, a Negro!" It was true. It amused me. "Look, a Negro!" The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no
secret of my amusement. 'Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! Now
they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but
laughter had become impossible. I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends,
stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the
corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema .
In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third
person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped
woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.

being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the

I was
responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I
other and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. . .

subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by
tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else above all "Sho' good eatin'

I
took myself far off from my own presence far indeed, and made myself an
object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a
hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this
On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white person, who unmercifully imprisoned me,

revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a person among other people. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that
was ours and to help to build it together.

Destroying the notion of a white face in favor of a

vibrant notion of becoming is impossible for the blackbody that exists in a state of nonbeing and is already
constructed through the social
Gordon 5

[Lewis R. Gordon, Yale University Ph.D with Distinction in philosophy, Through the Zone of
Nonbeing A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon's Eightieth Birthday, Clr James Journal 11
(1):1-43, https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wp-content/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v1d3_LGordon.pdf] l.gong

The convergence of the black problem with desire (want) already

marks a distinction in Fanons analysis. When Du Bois considered the black
problem half a century earlier, he argued against the question itself; it
confuses, he argued, blacks with their problems. Blacks themselves are
not the problem. The problem is the tendency to construct blacks as the
problem, and that construction often emerged from white communities. By
adding the dimension of what blacks want, Fanon raises the question of
the subjective life of blacks, of black consciousness, that parallels the

Freudian question of womenwhat do women want? This question of

want, of desire, is not as simple as it may at first seem, for the life of desire
is pre-reective and reective. What one claims to want is not always what
one actually wants. And what one actually wants could become discarded

upon reection. That Fanon has raised the subjective life raises, as well, the
split between livedreality and structure. An individual blacks desire may
not comport with the structural notions of black desire . As Fanon cautions
the reader, Many Negroes will not nd themselves in what follows. This is
equally true of many whites. But the fact that I feel a foreigner in the worlds
of the schizophrenic or the sexual cripple in no way diminishes their reality
(Pn 9 /BS 12). He arms this focus later on: I am speaking here, on the one
hand, of alienated (mystified) blacks, and, on the other, of no less alienated
(mystifying and mystified) whites(Pn 23 /BS 29). Fanon raises this schism
between individual and structure through making an important
distinction. That the study of the black as a form of human study requires
understanding what he calls ontogenic and phylogenic approaches .
Ontogenic approaches address the individual organism . Phylogenic

approaches address the species. The distinction pertains to the individual

and structure. Fanon adds that such distinctions often miss a third factor
the sociogenic. The sociogenic pertains to what emerges from the social
world, the intersubjective world of culture, history, language, economics. In
that world, he reminds us, it is the human being who brings such forces into
existence. What does recognition of such a factor offer our understanding

of the black problem and what blacks want? The black is marked by the
dehumanizing bridge between individual and structure posed by antiblack
racism; the black is, in the end, anonymous, which enables the black
to collapse into blacks. Whereas blacks is not a proper name,
antiblack racism makes it function as such, as a name of familiarity that
closes off the need for further knowledge. Each black is, thus, ironically
nameless by virtue of being named black. So blacks nd themselves,

Fanon announces at the outset, not structurally regarded as human beings.

They are problematic beings, beings locked in what he calls a zone of
nonbeing. What blacks want is not to be problematic beings, to escape
from that zone. They want to be human in the face of a structure that
denies their humanity. In effect, this zone can be read in two ways. It

could be limbo, which would place blacks below whites but above creatures
whose lots are worse; or it could simply mean the point of total absence, the
place most far from the light that, in a theistic system, radiates reality, which
would be hell. His claim that In the majority of cases, the black lacks the
benet of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell (Enfers)
(Pn / BS 8) suggests the first read, but Fanon has much in store for the
reader. For even if the majority of blacks lack such ability, it does not follow
that in this case namely, Fanons unfolding narrativethe descent into
Enfers cannot be made. Such thoughts suggest that although the text has an
epigraph from Aim Csaires Discours sur le colonialisme, the suffering of
which he speaks gains its poetic avor from the mythopoetics of hell that

have governed many writers in the western worldnamely, Dante Alighieris

Inferno.4 That Fanons formal education was exclusively western, and that
the Martinique of his childhood was (and continues to be) predominantly
Roman Catholic means that the grammar of normative life would take the
form of the Churchs founding imagery in spite of Fanons existential
atheism. The connection with Dantes mythopoetic vision of church doctrine
raises the question, however, of Fanons role in the text. Is Fanon Dante the
seeker threatened by sin (the fire he brought to truth) or Virgil the
(cooled) guide from Limbo? Or is he both? The social world is such that it is
not simply a formal mediation of phylogeny and ontogeny. It also offers the
content, the aesthetics, the lived dimensions of mediation. Fanon our
guide, then, plans to take us through the layers of mediation offered to the
black. As such, he functions as Virgil guiding us through a world that many of
us, being imbeciles, need but often refuse to see. So, utilizing Fanons
observation of sociogenic dimensions of this structural denial, the argument
takes the following turn. Constructivity and the semiotic folly of the dialectics
of recognition There is a white construction called the black. This
construction is told that if he or she really is human, then he or she can go
beyond the boundaries of race. The black can really choose to live
otherwise as a form of social being that is not black and is not any racial
formation. Racial constructions are leaches on all manifestations of human

ways of living: language, sex, labor (material and aesthetic), socializing

(reciprocal recognition), consciousness, the soul. Chapters 1 through 7 thus
become portraits of an anonymous black heros efforts to shake off these
leaches and live an adult human existence. Each chapter represents options
offered the black by modern Western thought. In good faith, then, the
black hero attempts to live through each of these options simply as a
human being. But the black soon discovers that to do so calls for living
simply as a white. Antiblack racism presents whiteness as the normal
mode of humanness. So, the black reasons, if blackness and whiteness
are constructed, perhaps the black could then live the white construction,

which would reinforce the theme of constructivity. Each portrait, however, is

a tale of how exercising this option leads to failure. And in fact, failure
takes on a peculiar role in the work; it is the specialized sense in which Fanon
is using the term psychoanalysis: If there can be no discussion on a
philosophical levelthat is, the plane of the basic needs of human realityI
am willing to work on the psychoanalytical levelin other words, the level of
the failures, in the sense in which one speaks of engine failures(Pn 18 /BS
23). We should bear in mind that he says willing to work so, for, as we will
see, Fanon raises, as well, the question of whether the approach of working
on the level of failure is, too, a form of failure, which raises the question of
whether such a psychoanalytical approach is exemplified or transcended.

Bulk Data Collection

The shift from bulk data collection to targeted surveillance
is an explicit method used to target black communities
and crminalize blackness
Malkia Amala Cyril 2015 ( Cyril is a 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. Progressive
News. http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americasstate-surveillance) AG
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 mothers visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the
slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim
Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with

surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. Its time for

journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged
classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that
data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor
perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished
underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and

secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law

enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of
indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up
to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance
as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance
is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the
privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The
trouble is , targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate
collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved
in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of
privacy from government or corporate surveillance . Instead, we are
watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to
protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culture from jazz

to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T

and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as
much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a
recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear:
2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this
organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give
to every member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard
of even a few years ago. Predictive policing, also known as Total
Information Awareness, is described as using advanced technological
tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns,
sequences, and anities found in data to make determinations about

when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however,

because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In a racially

discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce
injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face
of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de facto
system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices,
conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that

operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime

prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach
in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus
on quality of life crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for
which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability,

transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial proling

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 specic conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of

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

its almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the
data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesnt just
lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop and frisk
legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of
color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime,
suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers
target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los
Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the
future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies
me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk
than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in
the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying
aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it
disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law
enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on
Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials
uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat mainstream
Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims
as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death
Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York
City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded
unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not
suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all
Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention
facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum
seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant
communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal
policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the
Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the
United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by
far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone
represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated
than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some
misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study
confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be
imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is
a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA

could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying
on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are
increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today,
racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that
has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural
racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier

read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the
newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections
catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too.

Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not
the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr.
once said, Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not
see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from
view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked
deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when
women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center.
The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the
Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to
drive structural racism in the twenty-rst century. We can help black lives
matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial
hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our
communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the
cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter
inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police
departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on
surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are
no voiceless people, only those that aint been heard yet. Lets birth a new
norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-rst century create
equity and justice for allso all bodies enjoy full and equal protection , and

the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more.

Brave New Economy/Marxism/Cap Link

The armatives brave economic shift is just rewriting
the rubric of alienationtheir shift away from current
economic structures fail to recognize the structural
antagonism that is leveraged against the black body
Wilderson 08 [Frank B. Wilderson III, an American writer, dramatist,
filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American
studies at the University of California, Irvine, Biko and the Problematic of
Presence, page 1, http://www.incognegro.org/pdf/Biko%20and%20the
%20Problematic%20of%20Presence.pdf]//JC//
When I first arrived in South Africa in 1989, I was a Marxist. Toward the end of 1996, two and one half years after

so many
repentant Marxists had come around to what policy wonks and highly
placed notables within the ANC National Executive Committee called for
then, a so-called mixed economy; a phrase that explained less than
nothing but was catchy and saturated with common sense , thus making it
unassailable. No, I had not been converted to the ethics of the free
market, but I was convinced the rubric of exploitation and alienation (or a
grammar of suffering predicated on the intensification of work and the extraction of surplus value) was not up
to the task of (a) describing the structure of the antagonism, (b) delineating
a proper revolutionary subject, or (c) elaborating a trajectory of institutional
iconoclasm comprehensive enough to start, the only thing in the world thats worth the
Nelson Mandela came to power, I left not knowing what I was. This is not to say that I, like

effort of starting: the end of the world, by God!

Capitalism is a product of anti-Blacknessthe armatives

engagement in current economic and political structures
allows anti-Black racism to continue
Heitzeg 15 [Nancy A. Heitzeg, professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of
Race and Ethnicity. Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race and
Ethnicity, On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act
Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The
Limits Of The Law, Hamline University's School of Law's Journal of Public
Law and Policy Volume 36 Issue 1, pages 57-59]//JC//
While all communities of color suffer from racism in general and its manifestation in criminal justice in particular,
Black

has been the literal and gurative counterpart of white. Anti-black

racism is arguably at the very foundation of white supremacy ; the two
constitute the foundational book-ends for the legal, political and every day
constructions of race in the United States.12 For this reason, in combination with the
excessive over-representation of African Americans in the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex,

the law has been a tool for the

oppression of African Americans via the furtherance of white supremacy
and antiblackness in both law and practice. While race has never reected any biological
reality, it is indeed a powerful social and political construct . In the U.S. and
elsewhere, it has served to delineate whiteness as the unraced norm
the unmarked marker while hierarchically devaluing other racial/ethnic
categories with Blackness always as the antithesis.13 The socio-political
construction of race coincides with the age of exploration, the rise of
scientic classication schemes, and perhaps most signicantly
this analysis will largely focus on the ways in which

capitalism . In the United States, the solidication of racial hierarchies cannot be

disentangled from the capitalist demands for unfree labor and expanded
private property. By the late 1600s, race had been a marker for either free
citizens or slave property, and colonial laws had reied this decades before
the Revolutionary War.14 The question of slavery was at the center of
debates in the creation of the United States and is referenced no less than
ten times.15 By the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the racial lines defining slave and free had
already been rigidly drawn white was free and black was slave and the result according to
Douglass was this: assume the Constitution to be what we have briey attempted to prove it to be, radically and
essentially pro-slavery. 16 The Three-Fifths Clause, the restriction on future bans of the slave trade and limits on
the possibility of emancipation through escape were all clear indications of the significance of slavery to the
Founders. The legal enouncement of slavery in the Constitution is one of the first of many racial sacrifice

The social and

constitutional construction of white as free and Black as slave has ongoing political and economic ramications . According to Harris, whiteness not
only allows access to property, may be conceived of per se as whiteness
as property. 18 These property rights produce both tangible and intangible
value to those who possess it; whiteness as property includes the right to
prot and to exclude, even the perceived right to kill in defense of the
borders of whiteness.19 As Harris notes: The concept of whiteness was premised
on white supremacy rather than mere difference. White was dened and
constructed in ways that increased its value by reinforcing its exclusivity .
Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right to exclude, whiteness as a theoretical
construct evolved for the very purpose of racial exclusion. Thus, the concept
of whiteness is built on both exclusion and racial subjugation . This fact was
covenants to come, where the interests of Blacks were sacrificed for the nation. 17

particularly evident during the period of the most rigid racial exclusion, as whiteness signified racial privilege and
took the form of status property

Drones
The armatives belief that drone vision creates the
subject-object dichotomy between drone user and target
merely masks the whiteness inherent to the operator
created through visual regimes signifed through raciospeciest hiearchies that asserts the universal subject as
European and the migrant as the killable affectual other
Pugliese, 13 (Joseph, Research Director of the Department of Media,
Music, Communication and Cultural Studies. State Violence and the
Execution of Law. Routledge. Pg. 194-95.)//ctb
The CIAs Counterterrorism Centers chief has boasted that, thanks to their drone automated execution program,

the human
subjects targeted as suspect, yet anonymous, patterns of life by the
drones become equivalent to forms of pathogenic life . The operators of the
drones exterminatory attacks must, in effect, be seen to conduct a type of
scientic ethnic cleansing of pathogenic life forms. In the words of one of the US
We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now.33 Analogically,

military ocers: Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield.34 The Muslim target is here constituted by the
intertwining of racism, sexism and speciesism. Muslim women are framed as non-human animal bitches that
breed their Muslim progeny. The wives of terrorists, indeed, have been termed by on US academic as legitimate

through the
implementation of the biopolitical caesura, reduced to pathogenic life
forms that need to be sanitized through the exterminatory process of
ethnic cleansing . The drones effectively transmute patterns of life into
shattered patterns of death: after a drone attack that killed 13 Afghans, a tribesman said the
place was littered with body parts and it was dicult to recognize the victims. He said that the
villagers collected body parts from rubble and put them into sacks for burial.36 Here the identities of the
drone targets become unknown even to their friends and relations as they
are dismembered beyond recognition. As I will presently discuss, inscribing this
clinical discourse on drones is the gure of immunization against foreign
and pathogenic bodies. As mere patterns of pathogenic life, these targeted human
subjects are effectively reduced to what Agamben would term a kind of
absolute biopolitical substance that can be killed with no concern about
the possibility of juridical accountability .37 Anonymous patterns of life signify in
contradistinction to legally named persons: they possess no subjecthood . They exemplify da Silvas
no-bodies that can be killed with impunity through the deployment of a
type of ontological hygiene legislated by US government policy in order to
secure the reproduction of the principle of scarcity with respect to agency
and personhood.38 Within this Heideggerian telo-techno regime of visuality, the subject of the
drone strike is gured as mere object-thing. Yet this transmutation of
human subject into object-thing is not solely the result of the mediative
operations of instrumentalizing technology and its securing of the real in
its objectness. Things are more complex. Undergirding this regime of
visuality is that dynamic constituted by what da Silva names the self-determined
subject that occupies the transparent I and the killable others of
Europe situated in affectability as the condition of being violently
subjected to the exercise of power.99 I want to reaccentuate da Silvas
arsenal of raciality with the sux of speciesism in order to disclose how
drone bait and their children as terror spawn.33 Civilian women and children are,

the arsenal of racio-speciesism determines the subject/object relations of

this regime of visuality. The drone pilots and sensor operators, as subjects
of the transparent I are nowhere to be seen in this visual schema: they
are at once omniscient, transparent ad self-determining subjects that
secure their universal juridicality, and its attendant rigts and
protections, in relation to the affectable animal others of the tautological
European-human: Muslim/Arab bitches and terror spawn that must be
sanitized through drone strikes. As affectable object-things, these others
are governed by what da Silva terms the logics of exclusion (from universal
juridicality) and obliteration (of difference). As object-things excluded from universal juridicality, they
can be obliterated without unleashing an ethical crisis .40

The militaristic appraoch to border policing is merely a

continuation of the homeland security state- Drones
remain an extension of the liberal ideologies of empire
that utilize historical relationships to blackness, visuality
and the defense of territorial sovereignty from inferior
races as a justication for violence( War on Terror Link)
Madhu Dubey 2015( Dubey is a Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
African American literature, cultural studies, postmodernism.The Biopolitics
of Race in Futureland. Social Text 123.Vol. 33, No. 2.) VR
The paradigmatic motor for this process of conversion may remain the colorline theorized by W. E. B. Du Bois at an earlier moment of imperial terrors
link with anti-blackness (Kramer, 2006). However, the mid-twentieth century
break with formal white supremacy and the absorption of a nominal
antiracism by the neoliberal state has given way to forms of race-making
that exceed Du Bois mapping (Melamed, 2006; Winant, 2001). That the
raciality of the war on terror its capacity to produce a fungible
constellation of gures exposed to the everyday violence of life-in-death

no longer adheres to white supremacist rubrics of the color-line is among

the so-called post-racial eras signal achievements. The moment when the
effects of racism are no longer addressed by the state as structurally
unequal distributions of human value and valuelessness, and instead are
seen as operating solely through the market logic of individual
preference and choice is simultaneously the moment when the raciality
of the war on terror becomes inscribed in the homeland security states
governing legal, military, and policing apparatus, and infuses its visual
logics (Goldberg, 2008). In this contemporary regime, racializations spatial

vectors illuminate and police the states ambiguous borders in order to

expose categories of embodied difference 330 KEITH P FELDMAN to an
interpretive grid of threat. One vector of this process has been reproduced
in horizontally-defined sociospatial relationships, what I call racialization on
the ground. Through processes of inclusion, seclusion, exclusion, and
extermination, the dialectic that racializes space and spatializes race
generates territorializations and regionalizations . . . of lifes possibilities

(Goldberg, 2008: 30; Lipsitz, 2011). George W. Bush succinctly put it this
way, in what has become the commonsensical imagined geography for the

war on terror: we are taking the fight to these terrorists with our military in
Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the
streets of our own cities. Bushs geography links frontier expansion (the
beyond in excess of state sovereignty) to an imperial defense of
internalized space, tidily activating a recognizable genealogy of US
racialization on the ground. Histories of indigenous violence, for instance,
have narrated a persistent telos that expands the boundaries of civilization
westward (Drinnon, 1980; Slotkin, 1973). The imperial construction of US
national borders has drawn routinely on the legacy of the War of 1848
(Sadowski-Smith, 2008; Streeby, 2002). Flourishing walls, barriers, fences,
and other assorted passage-points dramatize a form of territorial sovereignty
increasingly on the wane (Brown, 2010). And the carceral continuum that
structures US regimes of connement transfers bodies from the space of
the slave plantation through cartographies of Jim Crow and the urban
ghetto to the largest and most raciallystratied prison system in human
history (Alexander, 2010; Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2002). Likewise,

empires imagined geographies fold geographic distance into Orientalist

hierarchies of human value (Gregory, 2004; Said, 1979). Recent scholarship
in cultural geography has extended this insight to map the racialized logistics
of perception that prepare soldiers for counterinsurgency deployments on
the ground of targeted cities resolutely not, or not quite, our own (Gregory,
2008). What Mahmood Mamdani has usefully termed culture talk
supplements the waning of white supremacy with instrumentalized cultural
content deployed at checkpoints and border-crossings to submit cultural
difference to an interpretive grid of threat (Mamdani, 2004; Balibar and
Wallerstein, 1991: 21). This culturalization of counterinsurgencys dayto-day
and face-to-face encounters narrows the contours of observable human
action into categories of threat infused with Orientalist frameworks (Davis,
2010). Under contemporary regimes of homeland security, racialization on
the ground has been supplemented by a differentially-embodied vertical
vector of racialization, what I call racialization from above. This politics of
verticality leaves behind the strategic outposts of the border crossing, the
fence, the check point, the guard tower, the high ground, and the hilltop as it
heads skyward (Weizman, 2007). A particularly prominent technology of
racialization from above has been condensed in the assemblage of aerial
surveillance, policing, and state-sanctioned killing known as the
unmanned aircraft system (UAS). By fusing visuality, pre-emption, and a
disregard for territorial sovereignty, unmanned aerial systems have
become among the most popular technologies of the homeland security
state . While more than 40 countries have developed UAS capacities in the

past hundred years, the last decade has seen massive growth in these
machines of death-dealing, with scholars and policy-makers predicting
widespread expansion in the years ahead. Under the auspices of security,
they have been deployed across police, surveillance, and military theaters.

While the screening of warfare is intimately linked to technological

developments in what James Der Derian calls the militaryindustrialmedia

entertainment network, assuming that unmanned aerial systems leave

either the human or territory behind when they head skyward misses the
centrality of visual perception so important to racialization from above
(Der Derian, 2001). As Derek Gregory has recently explicated, a network of
over 180 people are involved in any single mission, including pilots,
sensor operators, mission controllers, senior commanders, intelligence
ocers, military lawyers, data analysts, and image technicians as well

as those military personnel in theater (in press). Many of these actors train
their gaze on a collage of video screens whose content is generated by
infrared and daylight color TV cameras, satellite mappings, and laser
rangefinders. This human element, the military emphasizes, is at the
core of the overall system (Eyes of the Army, 2010: 9). As with all racial
geographies, the temporal trails quietly alongside the spatial. Boundaries

between civilization and barbarism, whiteness and non-whiteness, human

and inhuman, are buttressed by asynchronous and even extra-temporal
(out of time) temporalities whose past-tense grammar limns the elsewhere
of racialized difference. Racial naturalism and racial historicism are the most
notable forms here, differentiating populations based upon a highlyconstructed framing of a past-tense relation to present political, cultural,
and ontological norms (Goldberg, 2002). US empires liberal ideologies
of the white mans burden at the turn of the twentieth century, the
development and modernization projects at mid-century, the colorblind arguments at centurys end, and the human rights strains in the war
on terror all hinge on such notions of historys waiting room and its
varied racialized exclusions (McAlister, 2001; Mills, 1997; Murphy, 2010;

Singh, 2006). Under the homeland security state, however, the waiting room
has become infiltrated by threat and risk. To address this, racialization from
above weaves permanently temporary observation into permanently
temporary warfare, with endurance its organizing chronos (Weizman, 2007).
A future anterior grammar of pre-emption provides the temporal frame for
the raciality of the war on terror, whose substantial differentiation from
earlier forms of colonial warfare where accumulation by dispossession
was accomplished through extraterritorial conquest and settlement from
without brings to bear geographic ambiguities made sensible only
through preventing what will have been (Goldberg, 2008; Harvey, 2005;

Pease, 2009). The war on terror seizes on that which appears as imminent,
as probable, as possible. While questions of territorial sovereignty animate
the predictable rhythm of oscillating troop deployments and withdrawals,
they remain irresolvable when the horizon of war-making is always-already
marked by an open-ended and indefinite futurity.

Drone discourse as a moral evil obscures the history of

anti-black targetting for communities of color, denying
their experience and causing complacency
This Week In Blackness 13 ("Drone Policy Is the Most Important
Racism," http://twib.me/syndication/drone-policy-is-the-most-importantracism/)

There are several incidents of privilege-blindness among the mostly white

male drone-obsessed elite. First, their public anger over the drone
program seemed to begin when Eric Holder made statements extending
the legal justication for the program to killing U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
That implies that these critics think that the U.S. government killing U.S.
citizens is new or unusual , when a simple surface-level review of this
countrys history shows that the government has always committed
sustained and fatal violence against brown people, women, gay people,
transpeople, disabled people, and poor people among others . People who
insist on talking about drones as an ultimate evil ignore this history of
violence, which is well-known in communities not their own . And, the
likelihood that white men personally will be targeted by a drone is
absurdly small, compared to the likelihood that a member of a
marginalized community will continue to suffer from the governments
activeand passive violence. So, hearing these critics air their feelings of
being targets for the rst time is offensive to those from communities
that have lived under the gun for generations, especially because these
feelings exclude points of view from those communities. If you are
privileged enough to suddenly feel scared of the government, you are
complicit in denying the violence against marginalized people that has
always existed . The other part of white male critics anxiety comes from

recognition that the world order is changing. Traditionally, the American

president has been a white man who identifies and legitimizes white mens
problems as American Problems. Now, President Obama is the public face of
America, and when he identifies a traditionally invisible Black Peoples
Problem, it becomes, for the first time, an American Problem. By stubbornly

forcing Obamas statements about Trayvon Martin into the framework of

opposition to drone strikes, white male public intellectuals are attempting
to return to white men the power to dene American Problems. White

critics insist that Obama addresses drone strikes above all other expressions
of white supremacy, while claiming that they are the true soldiers against
racism. They apparently believe that they get to decide which policies are
important-racist and which ones are unimportant-racist. It must be a
coincidence that the unimportant-racist policies are the ones that most
directly validate white upper-class male privilege. Also, by arguing that
drones exhibit important racism, these critics reinforce the narrative
that killing Black people is unimportant racism, and not as valuable as
executing white mens philosophical priorities.

Their demand for warrants of drone use doesnt do

anything-at the point where the Black body is
ontologically situated outside of civil society, their reform
just perpetuates more anti-Black violence.
Heitzig 2015 (Nancy, Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race and
Ethnicity at St. Catherine University. On The Occasion Of The 50th
Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy,

Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law. Published in Hamline

University's School of Law's Journal of Public Law and Policy, 2015)
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the
language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly,

we
use our criminal justice system to label people of color criminals and
then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind . Today it is
perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that
it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans . Once youre labeled a
as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we dont. Rather than rely on race,

felon, the old forms of discriminationemployment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to
vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury
serviceare suddenly legal. As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black

We have not ended racial caste in America;

we have merely redesigned it.55 We are still not saved by the 14th Amendment. In the PostCivil
Rights Era, the Supreme Court has followed the color-blind logic of the sole dissenter in
Plessy and solidied the race-neutral implications of Federal Civil Rights
legislation. Color-blindness as the new legal doctrine begins to emerge despite judicial dissent in cases
man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.

involving armative action and other remedied to centuries of racial inequality. The Supreme Court adopts the
color-blind model in The Board of Regents, University of California v. Bakke (1978), where the ruling is in favor of a
white student who claimed racial discrimination in his denial of admission to medical school.56 If the Constitution is
to be color-blind, race can only be considered with strict scrutiny, even as a remedy for past discrimination.
Justices Brennan and Marshall, in separate dissents, point out the aws of this approach. Brennan observes,

Claims that law must be color-blind or that the datum of race is no

longer relevant to public policy must be seen as aspiration rather than as
description of reality. . . for reality rebukes us that race has too often been
used by those who would stigmatize and oppress minorities. Yet we cannot . . . let
color blindness become myopia which masks the reality that many created equal have been treated within our
lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens. 57 Justice Marshalls dissent echoes the warning,
one that has now come to pass; For it must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the
Constitution as interpreted by this Court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination
against the Negro. Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe
that this same Constitution stands as a barrier. 58 McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) is perhaps the most significant case of
the Post-Civil Rights era with respect to the application of the 14th Amendment as to matter of race.59 It is here
that potential for an interpretation that would allow for real remedies for institutionalized discrimination is
presented and denied. The racial disparity that characterizes all criminal justice has been most obvious and
contested in the application of capital punishment, especially in the South, where the killing state stepped to do
what was once the work of extra-legal lynch mobs.60 After a series of death penalty cases where the Court ruled
that racial discrimination in the application of the criminal laws ultimate penalty must be addressed, it is here that
the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision clearly defines discrimination as individual not institutionalized. Citing
statistical evidence from the now famous Baldus study, McCleskey argued that the application of the death penalty
in Georgia was fraught with systemic patterns of racism that transcended but tainted any particular case.
Defendants charged with killing white victims were more likely to receive the death penalty, and, in fact, cases
involving black defendants and white victims were more likely to result in a sentence of death than cases involving
any other racial combination.61 The majority did not dispute the statistical evidence, but feared the consequences.
If the Court accepted McCleskeys claim, then the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment would apply to
patterns of discrimination, to institutionalized racism and sexism, to questions of structured inequality. It could, in
fact, be used to challenge the very foundations of the criminal justice system itself, start to finish: laws with
disproportionate racial impact, racial profiling and racial bias in police use of force, and prosecutorial discretion.
These fears are expressed in Powells opinion for the majority, First, McCleskeys claim, taken to its logical
conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system. The Eighth
Amendment is not limited in application to capital punishment, but applies to all penalties. Thus, if we accepted
McCleskeys claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced
with similar claims as to other types of penalty. Moreover, the claim that his sentence rests on the irrelevant factor
of race easily could be extended to apply to claims based on unexplained discrepancies that correlate to

equal protection of
the laws was for individuals, not oppressed groups, and discrimination must be
membership in other minority groups, and even to gender.62 In the majoritys view,

intentional and similarly individual. McCleskey closed off the last best avenue for remedying structural inequality
with the law itself, and preserved the color-blind veneer at the expense of racial remedy. Justice Brennans
impassioned dissent makes the implications of this decision clear: At some point in this case, Warren McCleskey
doubtless asked his lawyer whether a jury was likely to sentence him to die. A candid reply to this question would
have been disturbing. First, counsel would have to tell McCleskey that few of the details of the crime or of
McCleskeys past criminal conduct were more important than the fact that his victim was white. Furthermore,

counsel would feel bound to tell McCleskey that defendants charged with killing white victims in Georgia are 4.3
times as likely to be sentenced to death as defendants charged with killing blacks. In addition, frankness would
compel the disclosure that it was more likely than not that the race of McCleskeys victim would determine whether
he received a death sentence: 6 of every 11 defendants convicted of killing a white person would not have received
the death penalty if their victims had been black. While, among defendants with aggravating and mitigating factors
comparable to McCleskeys, 20 of every 34 would not have been sentenced to die if their victims had been black.
Finally, the assessment would not be complete without the information that cases involving black defendants and
white victims are more likely to result in a death sentence than cases featuring any other racial combination of
defendant and victim. Ibid. The story could be told in a variety of ways, but McCleskey could not fail to grasp its
essential narrative line: there was a significant chance that race would play a prominent role in determining if he
lived or died. . . At the time our Constitution was framed 200 years ago this year, blacks had for more than 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; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to
respect. Only 130 years ago, this Court relied on these observations to deny American citizenship to blacks. Ibid. A
mere three generations ago, this Court sanctioned racial segregation, stating that [i]f one race be inferior to the
other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163
U.S. 537, 552 (1896). In more recent times, we have sought to free ourselves from the burden of this history. Yet it
has been scarcely a generation since this Courts first decision striking down racial segregation, and barely two
decades since the legislative prohibition of racial discrimination in major domains of national life. These have been

we cannot pretend that, in three decades, we have completely

escaped the grip of a historical legacy spanning centuries Warren McCleskeys
honorable steps, but

evidence confronts us with the subtle and persistent inuence of the past. His message is a disturbing one to a
society that has formally repudiated racism, and a frustrating one to a Nation accustomed to regarding its destiny
as the product of its own will. Nonetheless, we ignore him at our peril, for we remain imprisoned by the past as long
as we deny its inuence in the present. 63 Well into the 21st Century, Supreme Court decisions continue to erode
Federal Civil Rights legal gains and the ability of the Civil War Amendments to provide racial redress. The doctrine of
strict scrutiny itself continues to be eroded further as the current Supreme Court limits its application and as a
series of subsequent cases from Grutter v Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) to Fisher v. University of
Texas at Austin (2014) and Shelby County v. Holder (2012) have shown, the Constitution has indeed erected a legal

the shift even beyond color-blindness

towards claims of postracial pragmatism , This pragmatism jettisons the liberal
ambivalence about race consciousness to embrace a colorblind stance
even as it foregrounds and celebrates the achievement of particular racial
outcomes. In the new post-racial moment, the pragmatist may be agnostic
about the conservative erasure of race as a contemporary phenomenon
but may still march under the same premise that signicant progress can
be made without race consciousness. . .. Colorblindness as doctrine not
only undermines litigation strategies that rely on race-conscious
remediation, but it also soothes social anxiety about whether deeper
levels of social criticism, remediation, and reconstruction might be
warranted. While colorblindness declared racism as a closed chapter in our history, post-racialism now
barrier with claims of colorblindness.64 Worse still, as Crenshaw notes,

provides reassurance to those who werent fully convinced that this history had ceased to cast its long shadow over
contemporary affairs. Post-racialism offers a gentler escape, an appeal to the possibility that racial power can be
side stepped, finessed and ultimately overcome by regarding dominance as merely circumstance that need not get

the material
consequences of racial exploitation and social violence including the persistence of
in the way of social progress. As post-racialism becomes the vehicle for a colorblind agenda,

educational inequity, the disproportionate racial patterns of criminalization and incarceration, and the deepening
patterns of economic stratificationslide

further into obscurity.65 More than a century after the Civil

we are here,
with white supremacy and anti-Blackness intact, but now masked, and
with slavery (unwilling to die) transformed yet again . Still, the law, unwilling
and unable to offer relief, but worse still, at the center of this exclusionary
endeavor, from the outset to the present, remains the dener and
purveyor of Black social, civil and literal death.
War Amendments, 60 years since Brown, 50 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and

Faciality
Faciality is underwritten by schemas of racial difference
that are parasitic on blackness their criticism fails and
fails to disarticulate the human and instead reies racial
indifference
Kroll 2015 (Jonathan, Graduate at University of California, Irvine,
Comparative Literature, Facing the Light: Deleuze and the Critique of
Faciality.
https://www.academia.edu/13262103/Facing_the_Light_Deleuze_and_the_Crit
ique_of_Faciality)
Deleuze and Guattaris description of the abstract machine of
faciality in the seventh chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, which offers up a
description of the process of facial determination as localized around the
figure of the white face, personified in Jesus Christ. I argue that this
description fails to account for the manner in which this white faces
construction is dependent on a prior violence against the gure of
the black face, a gure implicit in, but continually repressed by the
Deleuzean schemata.As Deleuze and Guittari develop their critique
through the model of a black hole/white wall system, before we can
directly address Year Zero, it is worth grounding our discussion with a few
points from Deleuzes earlier, ontological work, Difference and Repetition
(Year Zero 179). Deleuze opens the first chapter of the work, Difference in
Itself, with a description of the way that thoughts of blackness and
whiteness structure indifference: Indifference has two aspects: the
undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate
animal in which everything is dissolvedbut also the white
nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float
unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without
a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows. The indeterminate is
completely indifferent, but such oating determinations are no less
indifferent to each other (Difference and Repetition 28). Blackness, here,
operates by bearing the mark nothingness in the ontological eld,
where it serves to disarticulate the possibility of Beingeverything
is dissolved. Deleuze characterizes this movement as an animalistic
(perhaps not an entirely pejorative term for Deleuze) violence;
indifference is produced in this instance through the dissolution of
the structures of perception as the coordinates of determination
become disjoint and an absolute indeterminacy takes hold.
Whiteness, by contrast, renders the eld indifferent by fracturing
the relations between determinations. Rather than produce the nonBeing of indeterminacy, whiteness arms positive Being by providing
a calm surface for the appearance of determination. Headarm
[and] eyes come into Being dissociated from the neckshoulder[and]
brows which would provide geographic coordination for their appearance

through association, yet still they appear. What the previous description
provides for us, then, is a description of different forms of indifference. By
bringing these indifferences into contact, rendering them finite in a copresence or a relationality, rather than their former infinite solitudes (for
certainly the comparative description does exactly the work of constructing a
relation between the two formerly infinite fields), we construct difference
itself, an operation that Deleuze calls thought. [T]hought is that
moment in which determination makes itself one, by virtue of
maintaining a unilateral and precise relation to the indeterminate.
Thought makes difference (Difference and Repetition 29). Yet here we see
something troubling. The white eld of indifference supports
determinations by providing a surface for them to dissociatively
slide across, yet determination makes itself only through a
relation to the indeterminate, or the ontologically black. Indeed, for
Deleuze [d]ifference is the state in which one can speak of determination as
such (Difference and Repetition 28). The white eld thus depends on
maintaining a relation to black, yet the indeterminate black
nothingness is characterized by no such dependency. The Deleuzean
model is thus capable of thinking blackness as such and in itself, yet
the construction of a pure whiteness, or an innite eld of white
indifference, is possible only by eliminating or (to use the
phenomenological term) reducing blackness. Whiteness is thus
parasitically or unilaterally related to blackness. This relation, which
we call difference or determination as such is also cruelty (Difference and
Repetition 28). What remains most troubling here, is the way in which this
recognition of determination as cruelty follows the prior description
of the nature of the ontological markers. Whiteness attains its
characteristic of calmness in this reduction, which is to say that its calmness,
the peace which renders determinations stable within the field, is
ontologically grounded in the repression or the forgetting of a prior cruelty.
Blackness, by contrast, attains its violent function of dissolution only in the
active recognition of its overtaking determination. That is to say that
blackness is violent not in itself, or in its essential and ontological
character, but rather in its undoing of a determination which it
makes possible a priori. The opening description thus functions to invert
the scales and relations of violence. Whiteness is parasitically dependent on
the violent eradication of blackness, yet it appears as peaceful tranquility.
Blackness is self-stabilizing and prior, yet it appears destructive and
posterior.

The armatives assumption that expressions of difference

are prior to identity assumes a subject with non-identity
and posits difference as part of hiearchization
Rae 2014 [Gavin, associate professor at Kozminski University at Warsaw,
Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze A Comparative Analysis]

Deleuze's valorjsation of difference entails a break from identity.

First, Ellrich maintains that Deleuze's attempt is flawed because it fails
to recognise that difference cannot exclude identity, but is
dependent on, and necessarily points towards, identity. While we
have seen that Deleuze agrees that identity can emanate from difference,
he forcibly rejects the notion that identity precedes difference or
that difference depends on identity. According to Ellrich, however,
difference can exclude identity from itself only if it identies
differentiation as that which it is. This, however, posits differ- ence in
opposition to identity, which, far from eliminating identity, actually leads to
the identity of differential non-identity. In other words, Deleuze fails
to see that, somewhat paradoxically, identity is differential and
difference entails a form of identity. Ellrich's conclusion, on this point,
has, however, been contested by, amongst others, Jeffrey Bell who
associates Deleuze with a dynamic metaphysical system and so concludes
that a dynamic system is never based on nor does it entail identity; it is 'in
between' identity and non- identity. Ellrich's insistence that Deleuze's
differential ontology culminates in an identity is simply wrong
because, for Bell, identity entails a xed, static identity which
Deleuze's dynamic metaphysical system is opposed to and so avoids
(2007: 173). While Bell is correct to main- tain that Deleuze's ontology
recognises that, while identity exists, it emanates from difference, this must
be complemented by pointing out that Deleuze also maintains that any
identity attained is momentary for the simple reason that no sooner has
being 'unified' than it different/ ciates into a new form. As a consequence,
Bell rightly understands that Deleuze holds that difference precedes
identity, but fails to engage with EIIriCh's claim that, because
neither difference nor identity precede one another, identity is
always differential and difference takes on an iden- tity in the form
of the identity of differential non-identity. As such, Bell fails to
recognise that escaping identity cannot simply be achieved by positing
difference in distinction to identity because difference then becomes the
identity of the entity. This charge does not relate to whether difference or
identity is primordial, but to whether it is, in fact, possible to order them
in a hierarchical fashion delineating one as foundational. Bell would, no

doubt, respond that difference is not opposed to identity, but is different to it

and so cannot be collected back up into identity, but it is not entirely clear
that this solves the problem. By claiming that difference is different to
identity, Ellrich would presumably retort that difference continues
to be dened through its relationship to identity. With this, we move
to Ellrich's second charge which states that, by insisting on the selfgeneration of difference, Deleuze fails to recognise that, while the
multiplicities created from being's different/ciation may be different,
the process or act through which they exist being's arma- tive
different/ciation is common to all actualities. This is not to say the
content of the act is the same; after all, as one commentator notes,

'difference is the only recurring feature of being, the only trait of being that
keeps on recurring. It is, if you will, the essence of being. Yet because it is
difference alone that recurs, it recurs always differently' (Beistegui, 2004:
328). It means the form through which each multiplicity becomes
different/Ciated shares common structures. While EllriCh does not spell out
what this act of different/citation entails, if we return to the categories of
Deleuze's differential ontology we can esh it out. For Deleuze, being
becomes through a process of different/citation whereby a
differentiated, but undifferenciated, Virtual Idea is differenci- ated
into actual multiplicities. There are two key components to this
movement that appear to point towards common features linking
the differenciation of the different virtual Ideas: (1) difference; and
(2) the Virtualactual movement. Starting With the first, we must
remember that, for Deleuze, difference is intimately connected to
being's univocity, a relationship that has left more than one
commentator confused. Most famously, it led Alain Badiou to insist that
the univocity of being under- mines the difference of each multiplicity to the
extent that Deleuze's thinking reduces difference to the One of Platonism
(2000: 10, 16, 25). Badiou's interpretation has, however, been forcibly
challenged by, amongst others, Nathan Widder who explains that, by being's
uniVOCity, Deleuze is not 'concerned With establishing a unity among
differences, but with linking differences through their difference' (Widder,
2001: 439). Rather than disclosing unity through difference, Widder insists
that Deleuze's notion of uniVOCity merely means that the only 'thing'
multiplicities have in common is that: (I) they are different; and (2) difference
is constitutive of their ontological structures. In other words, while being is
expressed through the same voice throughout all multiplicities, this voice is
difference, meaning it is 'said' differently across all entities.

XO Links
NSA reforms are unsuccessful- the armatives belief in
the ecacy of legal institutions to curtail surveillance
practices forgets that white institutions will subvert legal
regimes to continue criminalizing black bodies
Saito 2002 (Natsu Taylor, Georgia State University Collge of Law, focuses
on the legal history of race in the United States, the plenary power doctrine
as applied to immigrants, American Indians, and U.S. territorial possessions,
and the human rights implications of U.S. governmental policies, particularly
with regard to the suppression of political dissent. "Whose Liberty-Whose
Security-The USA PATRIOT Act in the Context of COINTELPRO and the
Unlawful Repression of Political Dissent." Or. L. Rev. 81 (2002):
1051.http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
handle=hein.journals/orglr81&id=1061&collection=journals&index=)
It has been well-documented by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as by
hundreds of thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),3 7 that the

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intel- ligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Administration
(NSA),

and dozens of other federal, state, and local agencies have engaged
in illegal and unconstitutional actions against U.S. citizen and noncitizen
residents in an effort to silence political dissent. The FBI's COINTELPRO
operations (1956-1971) are perhaps the best known, but these represent just one dimension
of the ongoing political repression which has involved not just illegal
surveillance and inltration, but tactics designed to "disrupt and destroy"
organizations, ranging from the manufacture of conflict among individuals
and groups to the deliberate framing of people for crimes they did not
commit, and-when all else failed-the outright murder of activists. 38 As the

Denver "spyfiles" indicate, groups that engage in lawful political dissent are still being actively and illegally targeted
by those entrusted with upholding the law and the Constitution. When we look at the 2001 Act in the context of the
federal government's actual use of its law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers, we see that these
expanded powers have long been sought-and frequently used, even when illegal-by the ex- ecutive branch. People

communities of
color generally, have not been made more "secure" in any sense of the
term, but have been subjected to physical attacks on their persons and
property by the very agencies that are now being given expanded powers
under the 2001 Act. As Robert Jus- tin Goldstein says in his seminal work, Political Repression in Modern
America From 1870 to 1976: The holders of certain ideas in the United States have been
systematically and gravely discriminated against and subjected to
extraordinary treatment by governmental authorities, such as physical
assaults, denials of freedom of speech and assembly, political
deportations and rings, dubious and discriminatory arrests, intense
police surveillance, and illegal burglaries, wiretaps and interception of
mail.39 Goldstein goes on to point out that governments can carry out politically repressive activities following
engaged in political dissent that is sup- posed to be protected by the First Amendment, and

"legal" procedures or by utilizing means that are illegal under the country's laws.4 It goes without saying that it is
easier and more convenient for govern- ments to use means that are at least facially lawful. The 2001 Act is most
accurately seen as the latest step in the U.S. government's ongoing effort to legitimize unconstitutional practices by
using the current "war on terror," perceived and promoted as a na- tional security crisis, to obtain their legislative
sanction. Legisla- tion does not, of course, make such practices "lawful" in the deeper sense of the term. Actions
which contravene the Consti- tution and fundamental principles of international human rights law-even if
sanctioned by the executive, the legislature, or the judiciary-violate the rule of law and undermine the legitimacy of
the governing power.4' 39 ROBERT JUSTIN GOLDSTEIN, POLITICAL REPRESSION IN MODERN AMERICA FROM 1870
TO 1976, at xxi (rev. ed. University of Illinois Press 2001) (introduction to 1978 edition). 40 Id. at xxx. 41 To note

only the most glaring example in modern history, we have no trouble OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 81, 2002]

The actual history of federal "law enforcement" and "intelligence"

agencies reveals a deeply disturbing pattern of the use of the armed
might and nancial resources of the state to destroy individuals and
organizations deemed politically undesirable. We must assess the 2001 Act
in light of this history-the concrete use of just such powers by the very
agencies now being given broader prerogative-and in light of the
fundamental principles of constitutional and international law that give
the government the right to act at all. The question is not whether we are
willing to have our shoes x-rayed at the airport to prevent planes from
being hijacked.42 It is whether we are willing to give carte blanche to
agencies which, according to their own records, have used every means
at their disposal to silence us.

Executive Order 1233 is rooted in anti-black state action

that exists to policy and monitor black bodies as a reme of
the COINTELPRO era
Ghosh 2011 (Sumit, chair of the Computer Science Department at The
University of Texas at Tyler, Cybercrimes: a Multidisciplinary Analysis
Cybercrimes: a multidisciplinary analysis. Springer Science & Business
Media, 2010.)
National security laws were developed in the 1970s in the wake of
several incidents that undermined the publics condence in the
governments exercise of its authorities. From 1956 until 1971, the
FBI carried out domestic security investigations under the CounterIntelligence Programs (COINTELPRO), through which the FBI Director, J.
Edgar Hoover, intended to disrupt the US Communist Party, perceived by
many in the 1950s as a rising domestic security threat. COINTELPRO was
expanded in the 1960s to target a range of other subversive
organizations. COINTELPRO-New Left, for example, targeted college campus
groups and those who opposed Americas involvement in the Vietnam
conict, including non-violent, anti-war groups. COINTELPRO-Black
Nationalist targeted Black civil rights groups, including those involved
exclusively in non-violent political expression [53]. The investigations
included the illegal wiretapping of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., illegal
break-ins committed by FBI agents, and disinformation campaigns

intended to discredit organizations and individuals [54]. Following the death

of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, practices in FBIs COINTELPRO investigations
started to surface. NBC and CBS were ultimately responsible for exposing
COINTELPROs activities by forcing the FBI to release documents under the
Freedom of Information Act [55]. The disclosures relative to the
COINTELPRO investigations triggered congressional hearings and a
successful lawsuit against the FBI by groups and individuals who had been
subjected to illegal investigations. In 1974, the Department of Justice
conducted its own investigation of the FBIs conduct in COINTELPRO and
Attorney General William Saxbe released a public report. He characterized
some of the tactics used by the FBI during COINTELPRO as abhorrent in a

free society [56]. The Justice Department promulgated new guidelines

governing criminal and domestic security investigations in response to the
COINTELPRO abuses. In 1976, the FBI changed the character of domestic
security investigations by treating investigation of domestic terrorism as a
criminal law enforcement matter, as opposed to a political intelligence
matter [56]. Accordingly, supervision of domestic terrorism investigations
was shifted from the FBIs Intelligence Division to its Criminal Investigative
Division. International terrorist groups, however, would be investigated by
FBIs Intelligence Division, under the classified foreign counterintelligence
guidelines. The revised Intelligence Division devoted its attention to
investigating hostile foreign intelligence operations, including Soviet efforts
to inuence domestic politics through the Communist Party and other front
organizations [56]. In essence, the criminal law enforcement and
domestic intelligence operations within the FBI were split into two
separate components. Subsequent reforms would further
institutionalize the segregation of these two functions. While
revelations about COINTELPRO were unfolding, the activities of
other components of the US intelligence community also came
under public scrutiny. On December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh published an article in The New York Times bearing the headline, Huge C.I.A.
Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces. According to the article, the CIA was engaged in massive domestic spying activities against subversive interests opposed to the
Vietnam War. Reportedly, the allegation took President Gerald Ford and the White House by surprise and 188 10 Evolutionary History of Critical Infrastructure Protection in the USA
President Ford established a blue-ribbon panel, the Rockefeller Commission, to investigate whether any domestic CIA activities exceeded the Agencys statutory authority and to
make appropriate recommendations [57]. The Rockefeller Commission scrutinized the CIAs activities and found a variety of abuses, including illegal mail openings and unwarranted
collection of information on US citizens [57]. In light of the abusive CIAs activities, the Rockefeller Commission recommended adoption of a new framework for assessing the propriety
of intelligence activities. If an activity was undertaken by the intelligence community and its primary objective was to further the prosecution of crimes or protect against civil
disorders or domestic insurrection, the activity must be transferred over to law enforcement and the intelligence community must consider itself prohibited from any further
engagement. In contrast, where the principal objective of an activity relates to foreign intelligence or protection of the intelligence community, the activity could permissibly be

]. The framework closely resembles the

the one that was ultimately adopted by the US government as
Executive Order No. 12333, which redened the intelligence
communitys goals, directions, duties, conduct and responsibilities.
Today, Executive Order No. 12333 remains the chief authority
regarding the scope and jurisdiction of the intelligence
communitys activities [58]. The COINTELPRO revelations and the
scrutiny of the CIA triggered a wave of government reform that
placed limits on the manner in which criminal law enforcement,
intelligence community, and the Executive Branch utilized their
power to investigate and disseminate information on US citizens.
Ultimately, free-owing information sharing among criminal law
enforcement and national intelligence entities in the government ceased. A
body of national security law was developed and, today, serves as the basis
for apportioning responsibilities and jurisdiction in matters that constitute
both national security and law enforcement matters. Attacks on critical
infrastructures may constitute either a national security or a law
enforcement matter. However, the methods used by law enforcement and
the intelligence community to investigate the same cyberattack differ,
stemming from the authorities such as Executive Order No. 12333. As an
example, the interception of an intruders online electronic communications
during the commission of a cyberattack can provide important information
about the intruders location. However, the legal authorities used by law
undertaken on behalf of the intelligence community, within limits [57

enforcement and the intelligence community to trace and identify the cyber
intruder differ and the authorities dictate how the intercepted information
must be handled and disseminated. Under federal law, the legal authority
to conduct a wiretap can be obtained under two different statutes, namely,
a criminal statute and an intelligence statute. A criminal wiretap may be
obtained from a federal court under Title III of the Omnibus Crime and
Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 [59] upon a showing based on an
adavit submitted by the government that there is probable cause to
believe that a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed, in
violation of one of the predicate felony offenses enumerated in the wiretap
statute [60]. In contrast, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978
(FISA) permits electronic surveillance against a person located within the
United States after the intelligence agency obtains a court order 10.3
Criminal and Intelligence Authorities and CIP 189 from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) located in Washington, D.C. In
general, to obtain a FISA warrant, there must be probable cause that the
target of a FISA intercept is an agent of a foreign power. In addition, the
information sought by the surveillance must be foreign intelligence, as
opposed to criminal investigative information, which cannot be obtained by
any other less intrusive collection techniques. Prior to the USA PATRIOT Act
amendment, the purpose of the FISA intercept had to be intelligence
collection as opposed to the significant purpose. The USA PATRIOT Act
Amendments enabled FISA wiretaps to collect both intelligence and criminal
information

Foucault/Biopower Links
Foucaults universal analysis of power relationships erases
the particular forms of violence that are experienced by
different groups
James 96 [Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities
and a professor in political science, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism,
Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, 1996,
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816687459/9780816687459-9.pdf]
Writing about the "disappearance of torture as a public spectacle"-with no
reference to its continuity in European and American colonies where it was
inicted on indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas-Foucault weaves

a historical perspective that eventually presents the contemporary

("Western") state as a nonpractitioner of torture. His text illustrates how
easy it is to erase the specicity of the body and violence while centering
discourse on them. Losing sight of the violence practiced by and in the
name of the sovereign, who at times was manifested as part of a dominant
race, Foucault universalizes the body of the white, propertied male . Much

of Discipline and Punish depicts the body with no specificity tied to racialized
or sexualized punishment. The resulting veneer of bourgeois respectability

painted over state repression elides racist violence against black and
brown and red bodies. Ignoring disenfranchised ethnic minorities policed
by both the state and dominant castes, Foucault produces his own binary
divisions in Discipline and Punish. He reproduces the split between the
public and private realms and masks this dualism by obscuring the private
realm and the bodies policed there---those of gay men, lesbians,
bisexuals, the poor, women, children, and dark-skinned peoples . Their

disappearance or theoretical erasure allows the representative body, which

Foucault bases on a white male model, to appear as universal. This
(mis)measure of man-naturalized and universalized as masculine and
European-shapes Discipline and Punish's color- and gender-blind
investigations, for instance, Foucault's quintessentially male, military
model that is premised on an inequality marked only by rank achieved
through individual merit. His assumptions of (false) equality preempt
discussions of racial violence.

Anti-blackness is the original template for modern power

Dillon 13 (Stephen, PhD in American Studies at Minnesota, now an
Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College, Fugitive Life:
Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, May 2013,
Pages 24-30,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_1
3833.pdf)
In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes
of the Middle Passage , The door [of no return] signifies the historical
moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora. It accounts for the
ways we observe and are observed as people , whether its through the lens

of social injustice or the laws of human accomplishment. The door exists as

an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not
know. Yet, it exists as the ground we walk...Where one stands in a society
seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be
observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from
this door.32 For Brand, the Middle Passage and chattel-slavery compose
the original template for modern power. The door of no return is t he site
from which all disciplinary and biopolitical regimes emanate. It (and not it
alone) determines the ways people are regulated, visualized, mobilized,
positioned, and organized. Yet, the deathly touch of terror and the warm
embrace of inclusion are not just stained from the original scene. What
began at the door is also transmitted, transformed, renewed, and
repositioned in our present day.33 This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the
afterlife of slavery, where premature death, incarceration, limited access
to healthcare and education, and poverty are structured by the logics and
technologies of chattel-slavery .34 Under this analytic, the past does not
give way to the present, slowly dissolving under the bright shinning light
of progress; slaverys afterlife is the pasts possession of the present . The
past holds the present captive structuring, surrounding, and inhabiting
it. The fabrication of concrete and compartmentalized conceptions of time

and space dissolves under the crushing weight of the blood stained gate. But
this possession does not just take the form of the tactile, visible, and known.
Part of the afterlife of slavery emanates from an absence that cannot be
recovered or repaired. The door of no return is not a place, it is a gap that
founds the nowit is history as the unknown. The present rests upon this
rupture , upon the unknowable, upon the forgotten, and upon the dead. In
this chapter, I use the term possession as a modification of the concept of
haunting. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination,
Avery Gordon argues that haunting describes how that which seems to be
not theresomething that is absent or missingis often a seething
presence...acting on and meddling with taken for granted realities.35 A
ghost is one way something lost, disappeared, or dead makes itself known.
Engaging a haunting means to consider the apparitions lingering outside the
frame of disciplinary knowledge, to make contact with the reality of fictions
and the fictions of reality, to reckon with endings that are not over and
past events that loiter in the present.36 If haunting names the lingering
presence of the dead in the realm of the livingthe present absence of what
is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with
you even when your eyes tell you otherwisethen possession is when the
ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold. Possession is when the ghost
inhabits and controls. To be haunted is to see the ghost that has been
waiting for your field of vision to change. By contrast, a possessive spirit is
not so passive and patient. Unlike a ghost, a spirit does not wait; it grabs
hold of you first, perhaps without your knowledge. What seizes you are not
the murmurs of the oppressed or the whispered demands of those killed by

state violence and terrorpossession is the deathly grip of the dominant.

Possession is a psychological state in which an individual's normal
personality is replaced by another; domination by something (as an evil
spirit, a passion, or an idea); or something owned, occupied, or
controlled.37 To be possessed is to be under the control of something more
powerful than the imagined free will of the liberal individual. We can
witness possession in the relationship between race, gender, and death as
theorized by black feminists in the 1970s. For example, in her 1968 essay
The Black Revolution in America, Grace Lee Boggs argues that American
capitalism was born out of the labor of black slaves and has since used
white workers to defend the system and...keep Blacks in their place at
the bottom of the ladder, scavenging the old jobs, old homes, old
churches, and old schools discarded by whites...thereby contributing to
the overall capital of the country.38 She goes on to outline a regime of
biopolitical management animated by this history : They [black youth] also

recognize that although a particular struggle may be precipitated by an

individual incident, their struggle is not against just one or another
individual but against a whole power structure comprising a complex
network of politicians, university and school administrators, landlords,

merchants, usurers, realtors, insurance personal, contractors, union leaders,

licensing and inspection bureaucrats, racketeers, lawyers, policementhe
overwhelming majority of who are white and absentee, and who exploit the

black ghetto the same way the Western powers exploit the colonies and
neo-colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America .39 Within a theory of
power as possession, slaverys relationship to the present is more than
the haunting of a ghost. Slavery, for Boggs, is not lurking behind
contemporary formations of power. Instead, the complex network of
biopolitical regulation and management outlined by Boggs is given life by
an anti-blackness as old as liberal freedom. Contemporary biopolitics are
possessed by discourses and technologies produced under slavery that
were carried into the future (our present) by race, gender, sexuality, and

anti-blackness. As Omiseeke Tinsley writes, The brown-skinned, uidbodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in
intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the
seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.40 Extending Ruth Wilson
Gilmores definition of racism as state-sanctioned or extralegal production
and exploration of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, we
can understand race and death as a possessive spirit that works as one, born
out of the genocide of conquest and slavery.41 Being placed at the bottom
of the ladder by an expansive network of racialized management and
control is Boggss way of describing the uneven distribution of value and
disposability produced by slaverys ongoing role in the present. Although
death is sometimes a natural biological phenomenon, it is more often
manufactured and distributed by regimes of power far removed from ones
last breath or final heartbeat. Race is one such technology; it is a mechanism
for distributing life and death, and for black people, race and white

supremacy are motivated by a past of subjection, subjugation, torture, terror,

and disposability that has not ended.42 Race possesses life in both the
biological and biopolitical sense, ending or extending biological life for
individuals and populations. While race sometimes haunts, it more often
limits life chances by inhabiting and controlling individuals, institutions,
and populations. In short, we are possessed by race, and death and life
are the outcome . The relationship between race and possession is also
evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the 1970s who
connected the contemporary prison to chattel- slavery. Within this body of

work, the contemporary prison is animated by logics, technologies, and

discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For countless
prisoners and activists, race (and anti-blackness) were instruments that

transcended space and time so that the past could invade and contort the
present in its image. For instance, in his best-selling collection of prison

writing Soledad Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the

ways that the prisons connection to slavery reverses, compresses, and
undoes the progress of time: My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded
nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. Ive lived through the passage, died on
the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions who
fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of
my chest, unto the third and fourth generation, the tenth, the
hundredth.43 Here, Jackson describes the relationship between memory,
time, and possession. His captive body is metaphorically infested with the
cotton and corn grown under the prison of the plantation. Time did not wash
away the horrors of slavery, but rather, modied and intensied them.

Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife. He feels
possessed by the forms of death produced under slavery, and throughout his
writing connects this to his living death in prison. This possession is not
temporally constrained; neither the law nor the state can exorcise black
bodies of this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that the U.S. must
be destroyed and that anything less would be meaningless to the great
majority of the slaves.44 Although an extensive review of Jacksons

discussion of slavery is beyond the scope of this project, his ideas and
declaration that I am a slave to, and of, property were not unique among
the black liberation movement.45 In fact, Jacksons writing was emblematic
of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in the 1960s and
1970s, and paradigmatic of the political thought of the black liberation
movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the lines of ights that
depart from the thought of Jackson and the black liberation movement.
Indeed, Davis dedicates Reections to Jacksons life (cut short by his
violent death) and his struggle against his own misogyny. In addition, Davis
offers a literal embodiment of how the theories, histories, and epistemologies
produced by the black feminist and black liberation movements have
entered the university.

Biopower is not sucient to explain contemporary forms

of subjugation
Mbemebe 2003. (Achilles, African Modes of Self-Writing, Public Culture
14 [winter 2002]: 23973)
Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly as
the right to kill. For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault s notion of bio power to two other concepts: the
state of exception and the state of siege. I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the
relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill. In such instances, power (and not
necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the
enemy. It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy. In other words, the
question is: What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of

bio power appears to function through

dividing into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on
emergency. In Foucaults formulation of it,

the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a
biological field which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution
of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the
establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault
labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. That race(or for that

matter racism) gures so prominently in the calculus of bio power is

entirely justiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the
ideology that de nes history as an economic struggle of classes),
race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought
and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity
of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring To both this ever-presence and the phantomlike
world of race in general, Are ndtlocates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the

in Foucaults terms, racism is

above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of bio power,
that old sovereign right of death. 19In the economy of bio power, the
function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make
possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, the
condition for the acceptability of putting to death.20Foucault states
clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the
mechanisms of bio power are inscribed in the way all modern states
function;21indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state
power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most
complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he
claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life
coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By bio logical extrapolation on
the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its
adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the
Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation
of theright to kill, which culminated in the project of the nal solution. In
politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.18Indeed,

doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the
murderous state, and the suicidal stat

Foucault cannot explain or resolve social death

Sexton 11 (Jared, Univeristy of California Irvine Program on African American Studies. The
Social Life on Social Death. (De) Fatalizing the Present and Creating Racial Alternatives. Vol 5,
11-12. http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php)
To interrogate the racial discourses of life philosophy is to demonstrate
that the question of life cannot be pried apart from that thorniest of

problems: the problem of the Negro as a problem for thought, that dubious and doubtless fact of
blackness, or what I will call, in yet another register, the social life of social death.vi This is as
much an inquiry about the nature of nature as it is about the politics of nature and the nature of politics; in other
words, it is metapolitical no less than it is metaphysical. In charting the intellectual prehistory of the theorization of
biopolitics, Jones also forecastsand reframesthe biotechnological anxiety or euphoria provoked by the prospect
of engineered life in our own time and the way that prospect is powerfully associated with notions of social,

Reading Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault or Agamben cannot

remain the same, nor should it, to the degree that we have engaged the
tragic-comic complexities of existence in black. Moten might follow, at another pace, the
economic, and political possibility.

long qualification of vitalism that Jones accomplishes in her text, just as he might read skeptically the implications

beyond the immediate negotiation

even as it continues to loop back to it, is whether a politics, which is also
to say an aesthetics, that arms (social) life can avoid the thanatological
dead end if it does not will its own (social) death. Marriott might call this, with Fanon,
of an armative biopolitics. The question that remains,

the need to arm armation through negationnot as a moral imperativebut as a psychopolitical necessity
(Marriott 2007: 273 fn. 9) In this article, I am only attempting to preface the exploration of a tension emergent in
the field of black studies, not unrelated to the strife that occupies Motens own writing, regarding the theoretical

It goes without saying that this sort of prefatory

note implicates how we might formulate notions of social life as well and,
in a fundamental way, the tension regards the emphasis on or orientation
toward life or death, or the thought of the relation between the two, as it
plays out within a global history of slavery and freedom. In fact, social
death might be thought of as another name for slavery and an attempt to
think about what it comprises, and social life, then, another name for
freedom and an attempt to think about what it entails. Though slavery is an ancient
status of the concept of social death.

institution with provenance in nearly every major form of human society, we are concerned here with the more
specific emergence of freedomas economic value, political category, legal right, cultural practice, lived
experiencefrom the modern transformation of slavery into what Robin Blackburn terms the Great Captivity of
the New World: the convergence of the private property regime and the invention of racial blackness (which is to
say the invention of antiblackness in the invention of whiteness, which cannot but become immediately a more

The meditation is at once structural and historical and

seeks to displace a binary understanding of structure and history in any
case, asking what the most robust understanding of slavery might consist
in and, on that basis, how the practice of writing history and of inhabiting
or being inhabited by that writing might proceed. We want to think about
what makes New World slavery what it is in order to pursue that future
anteriority which, being both within it and irreducible to it, will have
unmade it, and that anterior futurity which always already unmakes it.
generalized nonblackness).viii

Foucauldian biopolitics ignore the ongoing social death

inflicted upon the black body
Sexton 11(Jared, University of California, Irvine (School of Humanities) The
Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf pg 1516//mm)
To interrogate the

racial discourses of life philosophy is to demonstrate that the question of

life cannot be pried apart from that thorniest of problems: the problem of the Negro as a
problem for thought, that dubious and doubtless fact of blackness, or
what I will call, in yet another register, the social life of social death. vi This is as much an inquiry
about the nature of nature as it is about the politics of nature and the nature of politics; in other words, it is

In charting the intellectual prehistory of the

theorization of biopolitics, Jones also forecastsand reframesthe
biotechnological anxiety or euphoria provoked by the prospect of
engineered life in our own time and the way that prospect is powerfully
metapolitical no less than it is metaphysical.

associated with notions of social, economic, and political possibility . Reading

Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault or Agamben cannot remain the same, nor
should it, to the degree that we have engaged the tragic-comic
complexities of existence in black. Moten might follow, at another pace, the long qualification of
vitalism that Jones accomplishes in her text, just as he might read skeptically the
implications of an armative biopolitics. The question that remains, beyond the immediate
negotiation even as it continues to loop back to it, is whether a politics, which is also to say
an aesthetics, that arms (social) life can avoid the thanatological dead
end if it does not will its own (social) death. Marriott might call this, with Fanon, the need
to arm armation through negationnot as a moral imperativebut as a psychopolitical necessity (Marriott
2007: 273 fn. 9).vii

Foucaults silence is fundamentally eurocentric

Young 95 [Robert J.C. Young, Professor of English and Critical Theory at
Oxford, Foucault on Race and Colonialism, 1995,
http://robertjcyoung.com/Foucault.pdf] l.gong
Foucault had a lot to say about power, but he was curiously circumspect
about the ways in which it has operated in the arenas of race and
colonialism. His virtual silence on these issues is striking. In fact Foucaults
work appears to be so scrupulously eurocentric that you begin to wonder
whether there isnt a deliberate strategy involved: consider, after all, the
context of the Paris of Sartre, Fanon, Althusser, the traumatic defeat of
the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Algerian War of Independence and
the National Liberation Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Foucaults few
explicit writings in these areas are sometimes curious: take his comments

on the revolution in Iran, where he discusses the Iranian revolution in terms

of what he considers to be its expression of an absolutely collective will
which he contrasts to the more mediated forms of European revolutions.1
This distinction is constructed according to very European, indeed
Orientalist, categories: the fantasy of Iran as subject of a collective will , as
pure being, screens the historical relation of the revolution to its colonial
adversaries.

The 1ACs conception of power and ontology as an equal

structure does not account for the structural violence
against the black body
Menzel 14 (Annie, University of Washington, Political Science (Political Theory), Graduate
Student The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality
https://dlib.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/26159/Menzel_washington
_0250E_13773.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y//mm)
explores the antebellum roots of the
racially bifurcated biopolitics of infant mortality: the prehistory of the
genealogy above. It draws on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, and other scholars
who argue that present-day US blacks continue to live the afterlife of slavery,
visible in the post-emancipation continuities of normalized African
American subjection to violencedirect and indirectdispossession, and
exclusion from human norms. I argue that the persistent black-white disparity
in infant mortality represents an important case of this quotidian violence .
Following these scholars in employing Orlando 46 Pattersons concept of social death to grasp the
Chapter 1, Infant Mortality and Social Death,

conditions of what Sexton calls the political ontology of anti-blackness

(2010b, 36-37), I track the new figuration of priceless white infancytrue babyhoodthat emerged in the 19th

The
ontological exclusion of black infants from real infancy persisted after
emancipation, I argue, both in the overt biopolitical exclusions of the race traits
paradigm, and in the failure of later biopolitical interventions to address
the root causes of black infant mortality, from the Sheppard-Towner paradigm to the present
century, and the ways that enslaved black infants were constitutively excluded from this figuration.

day.

The 1ACs misconception of disciplinary powers

universalizes the body as white and leads to an erasure of
racist violence
James 96 ( Joy, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities and a professor in
political science Resisting State Violence Radicalism, Gender, and Race in US. Culture Joy
James Foreword by Angela Y. Davis http://theloon2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/Joy+james++Resisting+State+Violence.pdf//mm)

Foucault's Discipline and Punish offers a body politics of state

punishment and prosecution that is considered by some postmodernists to be a master narrative
competent to critique contemporary state policing. Yet this particular work contributes to the
erasure of racist violence . In respect to U.S. policing and punishment, the metanarrative
of Discipline and Punish vanquishes historical and contemporary racialized
terror, punishments, and control in the United States; it therefore distorts
and obscures violence in America in general. By examining erasure in body
politics, lynching, and policing; penal executions and torture; and terror in U.S. foreign policyissues that Foucault overlooks in his discussion of the history of policing in
the United States-we nd visceral spectacles of state abuse. Writing about the
Michel

"disappearance of torture as a public spectacle"-with no reference to its continuity in European and American
colonies where it was inicted on indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas- Foucault

weaves a
historical perspective that eventually presents the contemporary
("Western") state as a nonpractitioner of torture. l His text illustrates how
easy it is to erase the specicity of the body and violence while centering
discourse on them. Losing sight of the violence practiced by and in the
name of the sovereign, who at times was manifested as part of a dominant
race, Foucault universalizes the body of the white, propertied male. Much
of Discipline and Punish depicts the body with no specicity tied to
racialized or sexualized punishment. The resulting veneer of bourgeois
respectability painted over state repression elides racist violence against
black and brown and red bodies.

Foucaults analysis of the pantopticon ignores the racialization

of biopolitics and therefore cannot explain the structure of
anti-blackness
James 96 (Joy, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities and a
professor in political science Resisting State Violence Radicalism, Gender,
and Race in US. Culture Joy James Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
http://theloon2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/Joy+james++Resisting+State+Violence.pdf//mm)

Foucault writes of social fear and policing that are reflected in "binary
division and branding," which produces the polarized social entitie s of the
"mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal"; this " coercive assignment" of labeling,

categorizing, and identifYing places the individual under "constant

surveillance" (I99). Foucault, however, makes no mention of sexual and
racial binary oppositions to designate social inferiority and deviancy as
biologically inscribed on the bodies of nonmales or nonwhite s. Therefore, when
he reports in Discipline and Punish that "the mechanisms of power" are
organized "around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter
him," racial and sexual issues are evaded (199-200). To write that these
mechanisms of dominance rely on the panopticism produced by the
disciplinary and exclusionary practices for the "arrest of the plague" and
the "exile of the leper" (which for Foucault respectively represent the dreams of a "disciplined society"
and a "pure community") without considering the role of race in the formation of
that disciplined society and pure community is to see the United States
through blinders (198). In racialized societies such as the United States, the
plague of criminality, deviancy, immoraliry, and corruption is embodied in
the black because both sexual and social pathology are branded by skin
color (as well as by gender and sexual orientation). Where the plague and the leper are codified in the black, for
instance, the dreams and desires of a society and state will be centered on
the control of the black body. Binary oppositions and panopticism will
thereby be racialized. In binary opposition, antiblack racism has played a critical,
historical role in rationalizing (and inverting) hierarchies of oppressor and
opptessed: crazy/sane, dangerous/harmless, and normal/deviant. Foucault ignores this
phenomenon , while other theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Sander Gilman explore it.4 Panopticism
and the policing gaze are also informed by racial and sexual bias; the tools
for observation and examination that Foucault delineates are constructed
within worldviews influenced by racial and sexual mythologies and
political ideologies that guide carceral testing. Foucault's carceral refers to a
network of regimentation and discipline, a prison without walls in turn
made up of social networks for surveillance.

Foucaults theories of power are too totalizingthey

preclude anti-black resistancea singular genealogy
suppresses the multiplicities in history
Robinson 7

[Cedric J. Robinson, Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science,
University of California, Santa Barbara, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater and Film Before World War II, 2007] l.gong

race studies is to mass around

Foucault's notion
that "power establishes a particular regime of truth ." In materialist terms
the simplest rendering is that the commercial nexus of the African slave trade and
the political apparatus of colonialism, the economies of securing and
controlling African bodies, the sinews of patriarchy, and the trade in slaveproduced commodities (relations of power) eventuate in the establishment of the
Negro and discourses on race (admissible and possible knowledges). And since the
historical and cultural African subject has been unimagined, there IS no
reason to suspect that some of the "imperfections" of domination might
originate from the enslaved. Or, alternatively, that the manufacture of the slave
might anticipate and absorb the availability of more tractable materials . In its
totality this account of race production is a seductive archaeology, securing
Perhaps

the

most pronounced

tendency in

American

explicit or inferred explanatory models which are derivative of Marx or insinuated from

revelation, elegance, and precision for the obscurity and chaos which are a constant threat in historical research.

However,

with it,

one is obligated to a kind of unitarianism where

all

the

relations of power collaborate in and cohabit a particular discursive or

disciplinary regime. The coexistence of alternative, oppositional or simply different
relations of power are left unexamined or instantiated. The possibility of the
coincidence of different relations of power colliding , interfering, or even generating
resistance remains a fugitive consideration. Edward Said raised the alarm about this last
possibility: ' 'The disturbing circularity of Foucault's theory of power is a form
of rhetorical overtotalization. In human history there is always something
beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they
saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change possible, limits power in
Foucault's sense, and hobbles that theory of power." Placing resistance to the side for
one moment, Said insists that Foucaults "textuality" insulated his inquiry from lived
multiplicities, the several histories extant in even the most modestly
constructed societies, and the resultant matrices of identity. Racial
regimes are subsequently unstable truth systems. Like Ptolemaic astronomy, they
may "collapse" under the weight of their own artices, practices, and
apparatuses; they may fragment, desiccated by new realities, which discard
some fragments wholly while appropriating others into newer regimes. Indeed,
the possibilities are the stuff of history.

Foucaults theories of power naturalize how racist regimes

were put in place
Robinson 7

[Cedric J. Robinson, Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science,
University of California, Santa Barbara, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater and Film Before World War II, 2007] l.gong

there is still the impulse in

Foucault's thought to elect the dialectic as a privileged site of
contestation. Even his treatment of subjugated knowledges possesses that
tinge: "naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required
level of cognition or scienticity is as if systems of power never encounter
the stranger, or that strangers can be seamlessly abducted into a system of
oppression. In our own interrogations this amounts to the presumption that
the exposing of the invention of raced subjects is a sucient method for
recognizing and explaining difference. To the contrary, the production of race is
chaotic. It is an alchemy of the intentional and the unintended, of known
and unimagined fractures of cultural forms, of relations of power and the
power of social and cultural relations.
Foucault, of course, was not quite the dolt Said makes him out to be. But

Racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a

justification for the relations of power. While necessarily articulated with
accruals of power, the covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift
patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable. Nevertheless,
racial regimes do possess history, that is, discernible origins and
mechanisms of assembly. But racial regimes are unrelentingly hostile to
their exhibition. This antipathy exists because a discoverable history is
incompatible with a racial regime and from the realization that,
paradoxically, so are its social relations. One threatens the authority and
the other saps the vitality of racial regimes. Each undermines the founding
myths. The archaeological imprint of human agency radically alienates the
histories of racial regimes from their own claims of naturalism. Employing
mythic discourses, racial regimes are commonly masqueraded as natural
orderings, inevitable creations of collective anxieties prompted by

threatening encounters with difference. Yet they are actually contrivances,

designed and delegated by interested cultural and social powers with the
wherewithal sucient to commission their imaginings, manufacture, and
maintenance. This latter industry is of some singular importance, since racial

regimes tend to wear thin over time.

Necropolitics
Necropolitics are informed and enabled by the historical conditions of the
African diaspora
Sexton 2010 (Jared, University of California Irvine program on African American Studies. People of Color Notes on the Afterlife of
Slavery 2010, Social Text 103, Vol. 28, no. 2)
However, if for Agamben the camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet, its novelty does not escape a
certain conceptual belatedness with respect to those repressed topographies of cruelty that Achille Mbembe has

necropolitics is
enabled by attending to the political and economic conditions of the
African diaspora in the historic instanceboth acknowledging the form
and function of racial slavery for any historical account of the rise of
modern terror and addressing the ways that the political economy of
statehood [particularly in Africa] has dramatically changed over the last
quarter of the twentieth century in connection with the wars of the
globalization era.7 Necropolitics is important for the historicist project of provincializing Agambens
identified in the formulation of necropolitics.6 On my reading, the formulation of

paradig- matic analysis, especially as it articulates the logic of race as something far more global than a conict

Mbembe initially describes racial slavery in

the Atlantic world as one of the rst instances of biopolitical
experimentation and goes on to discuss it, following the work of Saidiya
Hartman, as an exemplary manifestation of the state of exception in the
very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath.8Mbembe
abandons too quickly this meditation on the peculiar insti- tution in
pursuit of the proper focus of his theoretical project: the formation of
colonial sovereignty. In the process, he loses track of the fact, set forth in
the opening pages of Hartmans study, that the crucial aspects of the
peculiar terror formation that Mbembe attributes to the emergence of
colonial rule are already institutionalized, perhaps more fundamentally, in
and as the political-juridical structure of slavery .9 More specifically, it is the legal and
internal to Europe (or even Eurasia). Indeed,

political status of the captive female that is paradigmatic for the (re)production of enslavement, in which the
normativity of sexual violence [i.e., the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially
tolerable and necessary violence] establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and sexual

This is why for Hartman resistance is gured through the black

females sexual self-defense, as exemplied by the 1855 circuit court case
State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, in which the defendant was sentenced
to death by hanging on the charge of murder for responding with deadly
force to the sexual assault and attempted rape by a white male
slaveholder.
subjection.10

Welfare Links
The group of undeserving welfare recipients is
portrayed as colored or black by the media this is a
direct product of anti-blackness
Schram et al. 3 (Sanford Schram, Professor of Political Science Hunter
College, Joe Soss, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the
University of Minnesota, Richard C. Fording, Professor and Chair of the
Department of Political Science at the University of Alabama, Frances F.
Piven, Professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center,
City University of New York, Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform Why
Welfare Is Racist, 2003, Page 324)
Taken as a whole, the evidence of welfare racism in the United States
assembled here seems irrefutable. Robert Lieberman shows how the
distinctive American pattern of racial domination within our national
boundaries, in contrast to the racial domination of imperial colonies
practiced by Britain and France for example, shaped the political coalitions
and policy settlements that characterized our history. Michael Brown

focuses on the important historical relationship between American fiscal

federalism and welfare racism. In How the Poor Became Black, Martin
Gilens directs our attention to the contemporary role of the mass media in
creat ing public images of the poor as dark-skinned and unsympathetic.
James Avery and Mark Peffley amplify the signicance of racial media
portrayals with data from an experimental survey that randomly varied
the race of a (ctitious) welfare mother and child, and found that
respondents were decidedly more negative in their evaluations of both
welfare and welfare recipients when the race of the recipient was black.
Holloway Sparks shows the multiple ways that minorities, women, and the
poor have been excluded from the very discourse of welfare reform , partly
as a consequence of biases rooted in the contractual discourse of
citizenship , helping to account for the slight influence of the people most
affected on the politics of welfare reform. Sanford Schram examines the

complexities of talking about race and welfare in an era where the growing
majority of recipients are nonwhites.

Welfare reform/reducing welfare surveillance is an empty

promise of reform that preserves racial interests and
promotes de facto racism racialization highlighted by the
1AC is a result of anti-blackness that the aff never
resolves
Heitzeg 15(Nancy A., Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race and
Ethnicity at the St. Catherine University, On The Occasion Of The 50th
Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy,
Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law, Volume 36 Issue 1
2015, Pages 14-15)
The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka,

Kansas (1954) is often used as the benchmark for chronicling the start of
the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.39 The Courts
unanimous rejection of Plessys separate but equal provided a new Federal
framework with which to challenge Jim Crow segregation on the state and
local levels. It offered the back drop for the Montgomery bus boycott, the
resistance in Birmingham, Bloody Sunday, the voter registration drives of
Freedom Summer, and ultimately, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
The Voting Right Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the 24th
Amendment to the Constitution.40 While there was hope again that the law
itself could be pressed into the service of racial equality, those victories
now seem bittersweet. Bell argues that the Brown decision and the
ensuing Federal legislation were silent covenants of interestconvergence, where perceived self-interest of whites rather than the
racial injustices suffered by Blacks have been the major motivation in
racial-remediation policies. 41 Judge Robert L. Carter, one of the attorneys
who argued Brown goes further, . . .the fundamental vice was not legally
enforced racial segregation itself; this was a mere by-product, a symptom
of the greater and more pernicious disease - white supremacy. 42 Legally

supported segregation was uprooted without dislodging either white

supremacy or anti-Blackness , now cloaked in race-neutral rhetoric of
color-blindness. The color-blind Constitution and the race-neutral
requirement of Federal Civil Rights legislation now serves as convenient
cover for the persistence of institutionalized racism . Racially coded but
race-neutral rhetoric is widely used in debates over welfare reform ,
armative action, and particularly law and order criminal justice policy;43
in all these cases, the coded racial sub-text reads clearly, and the resultant
policies, while purportedly race neutral, have resulted in
disproportionate harm to people of color, especially African Americans.

While race is now widely the text/subtext of political debate, systemic racism
still remains largely absent from either political discourse or policy debates of
all sorts, including those related to criminal injustice. In the Post-Civil Rights
Era, there has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codied
explicitly into the law and legal systems to a de facto racism where people

of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of

the laws, excessive surveillance, police terror, extreme segregation, a brutal
and biased death penalty, and neo-slave labor via incarceration all in the
name of crime control. 44 Law and order criminal justice policies are all
guided by thinly coded appeals to white fears of high crime neighborhoods,
crack epidemics, gang proliferation, juvenile super predators, urban
unrest, school violence, and more. In all these case, the sub-text reads
clearly fear of brown and especially Black people. As before, law, policing
and punishment are central to the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from civic life.
Post slavery, the criminalizing narrative was a cultural feature of on-going
efforts at oppression; from convict lease/plantain prison farms to the
contemporary prison industrial complex the control of black bodies for
prot has been furthered by the criminal justice system.45 Slave Codes

become Black Codes and now Black Codes become gang legislation, threestrikes and the War on Drugs in the persistent condemnation of Blackness.
46 As before, the criminal legal system is the primary mechanism for
undoing the promised protections of Federal Civil Rights legislation and
constitutes again, the major affront to the fulllment of the 13th, 14th and
25th Amendments.

The Welfare system writ large, despite attempts for

reform, will always be used as an apparatus to regulate
poor Black women. Creating a culture of never-ending
violence and vilication.
Wang 04/22 [Jackie; writer, poet, musician, and academic whose writing has been published by Lies
Journal, Semiotext(e), HTML Giant, BOMBlog, along with numerous zines, such as those by the Moonroot collective;
RAW, http://radicalwashtenaw.org/; Against Innocence Race, Gender, And The Politics Of Safety; 04/22/2015;
http://radicalwashtenaw.org/2015/04/22/jackie-wang-against-innocence/] JCS

Black social (and physical) death is

primarily achieved via a coded discourse of criminality and mediated
forms of state violence carried out by an impersonal carceral apparatus
(the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole
boards, prison guards, probation ocers, etc). In other words incidents where
a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be
identied as racism to conscientious persons , but the racism
underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the
pretense of the War on Drugs is more dicult to locate and generally
remains invisible because it is spatially conned . When it is visible, it fails to arouse
While there are countless examples of overt racism,

public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loc Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, What is
the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its

The abandonment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations

is reflected in the history of these organizations . From 197586, the NAACP and the
back on them?

Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans
was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations
related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men were, as Wacquant

there was a
dramatic shift in the rhetoric and ocial policy of the NAACP and the
Urban League that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence . By the
notes, portrayed inclusively as brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends. Between 198690

early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and

these organizations began to embrace the

rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that
encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their
neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and
recidivists. Black convicts, initially a part of the we articulated by civil
rights groups, became them . Wacquant writes, This reticence [to advocate for Black convicts] is
post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile

further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. Du Bois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie
in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to
offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites
that they have absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a

When the Black leadership and middle-class Blacks differentiate

themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black
exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of
crime.

exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race
society.

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is

perhaps rooted in a fear of arming the conflation of Blackness and

criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these organizations
abandoned Black prisonersthey shore up and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and
decontextualizing the issue of crime and punishment and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized

The dis-identication with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited to Black men,
Black women who are vilied via the gure of the Welfare Queen: a
lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans).
The Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another , as Clintons
1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or
social security reveal : he condemns former prisoners receiving welfare
assistance for deviously committing fraud and abuse against working
families who play by the rules. Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black
women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the Penal
State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on Black
women, who are forced to perform more waged and unwaged (caring)
labor, raise children alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted
state violence.
but also

of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted

The re-conguration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration

(which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensied the backlash
against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the apparatus
used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation,
directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State though it is important to note that the
of a drug felony).

feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to a 400% increase in the female prison

Racialized patterns of incarceration and the

assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence
because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates)
deserve such treatment . The politics of innocence directly fosters this
culture of vilication, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.
population between 1980 and the late 1990s.

Racialization and discrimination in the welfare system is

structured by anti-black ideologies
Cole 14 (Haile Eshe, Member of Mamas of Color Rising and has been
organizing with this grassroots collective since 2009. She is also currently a
graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin and pursuing her PHD
in Cultural Anthropology and African Diaspora Studies, Belly: Blackness and
Reproduction in the Lone Star State, 2014, Pages 51-53)
Useful for understanding this concept is Cathy Cohens concepts of
secondary marginalization (1999). Inherent in this notion are the ways in
which intra group power dynamics result in internal processes of
marginalization. In particular, Cohen references the subscription to politics of
respectability in the black community, criticisms when there is a violation of
social norms and behaviors, as well as the role of Black elites and the Black
church in intra group marginalization. Consequently, these intra group
variances, highly inuenced by the growth of a Black middle class, play out
in interesting ways in regards to policy. In fact, studies have shown that the
population of Black people in the U.S. show varying degrees of support for
race based policies such as armative action and towards welfare reform.
More specifically, surveys have shown that a number of Black people are

just as critical of welfare and its respective recipients as their white

counterparts (Gilens 2000; Tate 2010; Price 2009; Pew Research Center's
Social and Demographic Trends Project 2007) What this speaks to though, is
the deep rootedness and wideranging investment in racialized , gendered,
and sexed ideologies that inform the very structure and fabric of U.S.
politics and society at large. Equally important to understanding the
process of policy making is also examining the foundational ideologies
that underscore the structure and day to day processes of our political
system . Policy does not exist in a vacuum. Specifically, given the absence
of non-white narratives within womens health policy making, the
foundational ideologies and historical underpinnings that govern the
policy making process must be explored. Moreover, Black women have had
a particular historical relationship to the law, policy, and how it related to
their bodies and reproduction. Given the nature and focus of this work, it is

important to pay specific attention to this particular history. Hortense Spillers

in her work Interstices: A Drama of Words (1984) cites the slave ship and
the middle passage as the initial site of subjugation for the Black female
body and Black female sexuality. She states that it is at this point that
social and cultural attributes of enslaved Africans in the middle passage
become suspended, ultimately erased, and then refashioned to t the
needs and culture of colonial society.

The idea of the welfare queen is a result of anti-blackness

Cole 14 (Haile Eshe, Member of Mamas of Color Rising and has been
organizing with this grassroots collective since 2009. She is also currently a
graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin and pursuing her PHD
in Cultural Anthropology and African Diaspora Studies, Belly: Blackness and
Reproduction in the Lone Star State, 2014, Pages 53-56)
Moreover, Spillers maintains that the discursive and ideological depiction of
the enslaved black female situates her existence in a state of non-being
meant to be the measuring stick and foil for white humanity. For instance,
she states that Black women became instead the principal point of
passage between the human and the non-human world. Her issue became
the focus of a cunning difference- visually, psychologically, ontologicallyas a route by which the dominant modes decided the distinction between
humanity and other (Spillers 1984, 155). This understanding of

inhumanity had large ramifications on conceptualizations of Black female

sexuality. For instance, Spillers maintains that the state of non-being then
rendered the Black female as both hyper-sexed and unsexed due to the
supposedly unbounded and boundless nature of her sexuality . She states

the unsexed black female and the super sexed Black female occupy the
same vice, cast the very same shadow since both are an exaggeration of the
uses to which sex might be put (Spillers 1984, 164) leaving Black female
sexuality open to be imagined by and fashioned for the usage of the
dominant culture. This undenable sexuality left the Black woman open to
the physical violence and sexual whims of the slave masters and their
family and served as the measuring stick in the valuation of white female

sexuality and virtue (1984). Spillers argument serves as a starting point in

which to discuss the various ways that this classification of the Black female
set the precedent that would continue in the United States for years to come.
This argument lays the groundwork for understanding how the ideological
serves as the foundation for conceptualization of the law . Saidiya Hartman
asserts that the inhumanity and illegitimacy of Black womanhood and
motherhood not only operate ideologically but more importantly within
the legal context. Ideologically classifying Black women as an entity of
nonbeing laid the necessary foundation to then establish legal precedents
that would secure the status of Black women as property and legally
unrapeable. For example, Hartman states that although the crime of rape

was indeed written into 19th century common law, in actuality rape of an
enslaved black woman was an offense neither recognized nor legislated by
law (Hartman 1997, 79). Imbedded within this practice were not only
ideologies about the lasciviousness of Black women but also the nonexistence of Black humanity and the propertied entitys inability to
participate in social comportments such as giving consent. In other words, if
Black women were neither women, nor mothers, and if they were non-human
and ultimately the white slave owners property, then how can a Black
woman be raped? Furthermore, given the statutes that declared that the
childs status be determined by that of the mother, all children born to
enslaved mothers were in turn enslaved and the property of the white
slave master. Hartman asserts that Motherhood was critical to the

reproduction of property and black subjection, but parental rights were

unknown to the law. The negation was effected in instances that ranged from
the sale and separation of families to the slave owners renaming of black
children as a demonstration of his power and domination. The issue of
motherhood concerned the law only in regard to the disposition and
conveyance of property and the determination and reproduction of
subordinate statusThe laws concern with mothering exclusively involved
questions of property (Hartman, 98). Ultimately, Black women's existence,
centered on her reproductive potentials and sexual autonomy and only
mattered in relation to her status as property (1997). In other words, the
essence of Black womens experience during slavery was the brutal denial
of autonomy over reproduction" (Roberts 1999, 24). This "sanctioning of

sexual violence against slave women by virtue of the laws calculation of

negligible injury, the negation of kinship, and the commercial vitiation of
motherhood as means for the reproduction and conveyance of property and
black subordination" as stated by Hartman speaks not only to the specific
ways in which the law managed the reproduction of Black women but more
importantly its use in maintaining racial hierarchies (84). Numerous

examples of the continued acceptance of the illegitimacy of Black

motherhood and womanhood as it is supported by law can be found even
in more contemporary examples. This is evidenced in the histories of
sterilization and eugenics targeting Black women in the U.S., the
stereotypes of the Black welfare queen , the disparate number of referrals

of black children into the child welfare system, and even into the 1965

Moynihan Report entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action in
which pathological Black mothers were charged with the decline of the
Black community (D. Roberts 1996; 1999; 2003; United States. Department
of Labor 1965). Additionally, Dorothy Roberts works exhibits how the
unacceptance of Black motherhood develops into the criminalization of
Black women. She references the use of legal sanctions to either force
when to have elective abortions, implant the dangerous drug Norplant as a

means of birth control, or be punished for having additional children (1999).

Another striking example that resonates in many ways with the current
womens health debates was/is the unknown drug testing of pregnant Black
women in the hospital and the respective punishment of those mothers
found to have ingested drugs during pregnancy. Similar to the example of
changing abortion policies in Texas and other states, this is done so under
the pretense of protecting the unborn fetus. Nevertheless, Robert gives an
example in which a woman faced up to ten years in prison for ingesting
drugs during pregnancybut can have an illegal abortion and receive only a
two year sentence for killing her viable fetus (Roberts, 171). From this, it
becomes apparent that fetal protection in actuality is not an accurate
depiction of the motive behind the implementation of these punitive laws.
Finally, the Welfare Reform Bill of 1996, which also included The Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, marked policy changes that
not only limited the amount of time that families could receive assistance but
also incorporated welfare-to-work programs where poor mothers were
required to work and participate in trainings without the institutional support
to take care of their children in the process. This, in turn, resulted in the
further economic stratification of poor families and many times poverty and
lack of economic resources was interpreted as neglect and child abuse. All of
these examples allude to the ways in which Black women's reproduction and
ultimately motherhood continues to be a target and point of scrutiny for law
and policy. These examples of the abuses and violence inflicted upon Black
women in the U.S. speak to the ways in which the law has never been a
protective measure for Black female bodies and how Black female
experiences are only useful in both social and ultimately political
narratives when they support established stereotypes that vilify Black
women. This being the case, the erasure of Black women's narratives from

the women's health political agenda, even despite the centrality of numerous
consequences of the policy on Black female experiences, falls directly in line
with historical practices of policy and law that are built upon the racial
structures imbedded in U.S. society. Centering within the dialogue of
women's health the detrimental impacts on Black women or centering them
in the solution directly goes against the traditional role that policy and law
has played in relation to Black women. Interestingly this same context is
useful for explicating the problematic and racialized implications of the
linkages between the conversations about Medicaid expansion manifesting
alongside and within the dialogues about women's health.

Citizenship
Identifying citizenship as synonymous with human rights
glosses over the exclusion forced upon those who are
already considered citizens
Kiwan, 05 (Dina, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media
Studies at the American University of Beirut. Human Rights and Citizenship:
an Unjustifiable Conation? Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No.
1, Pg. 47-48)//ctb
In this section, I will consider the proposition that human rights should be a theoretical underpinning for citizenship
for each of the categories of citizenship as described in the second section of this paper. In each case, I argue that

it is logically incoherent to propose that human rights should be a

theoretical underpinning for citizenship. This is the case regardless of how
citizenship is conceptualisedwhether morally, legally, in terms of identity or
participation or indeed even when more universally as cosmopolitan
citizenship conceptualised. This is because, fundamentally, citizenship is
always dened in terms of membership within a political community , in
contrast to human rights, which are based on membership of common
humanity, or in other words, an ethical community. Furthermore, where citizenship is
constructed as active and participatory, as in the English case, the conflation of
human rights and citizenship may actually obstruct the empowerment and
active participation of individual citizens . This is because human rights stress
legal denitions of the individual in universal terms and do not
substantively address or include issues relating to identity . As such,
neglecting identity is hugely problematic in the context of active
participatory citizenship, given that such forms of citizenship necessarily
depend on its citizens being able to identify with the larger political
community if they are to participate. In the first category of conceptions of citizenship, where
citizenship is constructed primarily in moral terms, it could be argued that a values approach to citizenship could be

a values
approach to citizenship deals nevertheless with shared values within a
political rather than an ethical community. Moreover, reaching shared values
requires the notion of identication with the community, whereas human
rights are based on universal membership of common humanity . With regard to
the second category of conceptions of citizenship, Frances formulation of citizenship would suggest
that human rights derive from the state, or that having human rights are a
characteristic of belonging to a certain political community , in this case, being
French. This notion of human rights deriving from possessing nationality ,
however, is contradictory to the idea that human rights are accorded to all
human beings based on their universal membership of common humanity .
As such, the idea of universal human rights as a theoretical underpinning of
citizenship is incoherent. Citizenship conceptualised as active and
participative requires an identication of individual citizens with their
community. This focus on identity and culture is necessarily particularist as
underpinned by human rights given the shared moral aspect. However, it must be remembered that

opposed to universalist, as in theories of liberalism and legal conceptions of citizenship. Furthermore,

conceptions of citizenship that focus on participation and active

involvement cannot, therefore, be underpinned by human rights, which are
universalist, based on the notion of all human beings belonging to an
ethical rather than a political community. The relationship is a complex one, however, as the
converse could be argued: that active participation within a community may be important in promoting the practice

of human rights. Lastly, with

regard to cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, whilst

there is nevertheless identication with a political

national identification is weakened,

communityas opposed to a universal community of all humanityalthough this political community may not
be at the national level. As such, I would argue that even in the case of more universally
constructed conceptions of citizenship, such as global citizenship,
discourses on human rights and discourses on citizenship should not be
treated as synonymous .

Questions of humanity and human rights ask what it

means to be human status quo denes humanity as that
which exists within the political
Kiwan, 05 (Dina, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media
Studies at the American University of Beirut. Human Rights and Citizenship:
an Unjustifiable Conation? Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No.
1, Pg. 44-45)//ctb
Contemporary conceptions of human rights have their philosophical roots in eighteenth-century Western European

It has been
argued that the source of human rights is the individuals moral nature ,
where human rights are a consequence of the inherent dignity of the
human person (Freeman, 1994, p. 30). Whilst international human rights
instruments clearly have been developed in response to, and indeed
reflect, particular contemporary socio-political concerns and events, they
nevertheless reflect a particular philosophical understanding of what it
means to be a human being . For example, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to
philosophical theory framed in terms of the rights of the individual against the state (Leary, 1990).

the human rights of all human beings, linking it to the idea of the dignity of the human person. Article 1 states that
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, implying that such rights are natural in virtue of
being human. In addition, Article 2 explicitly states that everyone is accorded such rights, regardless of nationality

human rights are conceptualised in terms of a

particular understanding of what it means to be a human being: that is, to
be a human being is essentially a moral experience. The UN Convention on the Rights of
(United Nations, 1948). Hence

the Child (UNCRC) is a stronger document legally than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in that
governments have a duty to ratify the UNCRC. The UNCRC has been ratified by almost all governments, and in
doing so governments are signed-up to implementing in law and practice three categories of rights: provision
rights (for example, to health and education), protection rights (for example, protection from abuse or
discrimination) and participation rights (see Alderson, 2000). Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
childrens rights are accorded to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind, irrespective
of the childs or his or her parents or legal guardians race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion,
national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status (United Nations, 1989, Article 2). This
again supports the notion that childrens human rights are natural, rather than being derived from the state. In

clearly the possession and exercise of

human rights cannot occur outside of a political community . Yet the state is

terms of practice, however, as opposed to theory,

obliged to provide, protect and promote participation for all, regardless of formal citizenship status. Notwithstanding
the thorny issue of whether children are citizens or citizens-in-waiting, as articulately discussed by Alderson (2000),
there is a theoretical confusion regarding whether these UNCRC rights refer only to human rights to be accorded to
all individuals regardless of citizenship status. This confusion arises because of the inclusion of participation or

Participation or civic rights are a theoretically different kind of

right to other rights documented in the UNCRC, such as the right to life (Article 6), the right to
freedom of religion (Article 14) or the right to education (Article 28) (United Nations, 1989). Civic rights, in
contrast to human rights, are based on membership of a political community rather
than membership of common humanity. Given that the CRC includes civic rights, Aldersons
suggestion that the CRC be a basis for citizenship education may coincidentally be
theoretically sound, although she does not actually address the distinction
between human rights, accorded to all because of their membership of the
civic rights.

human species, and citizenship rights, accorded to those who are

members of a political community (that is, who have formal citizenship status).

Civil Liberties
Civil liberties are part of a broader spectrum of
governmentality, which aim to maintain bio-political
control.
Larsen 2013 (Signe, Ph.D in Politics at the New School, Human rights,
state violence and political resistance , http://nome.unak.is/nm-marzo2012/vol-8-no-3-2013/69-conference-paper/441-human-rights-state-violenceand-political-resistance)
Human rights have since their first declaration in 1789 been heavily
criticised. One returning criticism has been that human rights are
abstract or formal and therefore de jure as well as de facto empty; an
understanding that famously led Edmund Burke to declare that he would
rather enjoy the rights of an Englishman than the inalienable Rights of
Man. Following this reading, one would think that it is a brute fact that the

Rights of Man only can be implemented to the extent that they coincide with
the national rights guaranteed by the state. In this way, the only de facto
subject of human rights is the citizen and the only de facto sphere of
implementation of human rights is the state. The line of political exclusion
from society and from the nation-state thus designates the borderline of
the sphere in which human rights can be implemented. Following Jeremy

Bentham, this criticism will conclude that the natural Rights of Man appear
to be nonsense upon stilts. Another more recent criticism ties the
formulation of human rights to the inscription of bare life in the realm of
politics. Following this criticism human rights appear as a part of a
broader tendency of politics as governance of life (biopolitics) which has
its endpoint in the total domination of bare life in the concentration
camp. In light of these criticisms, human rights do not appear in a attering
light: either they are complicit with the political exclusion from the state,
or they are complicit with the repression within the state . Either way

human rights seem to amount to nothing more than a humanitarian mask of

the structural violence of the state. For this reason, the emancipatory
potential of human rights seems bleak. The problems do however not end
here. If a link can be established between the exclusion from the state and
the repression within the state (as it is done, at least tentatively by both
Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben) not only human rights but also
national rights seem to be a futile ground for emancipatory politics. If both
the problem of political exclusion from the state and repression within the
state can be tied to the sovereign power of the nation-state, not even the
rights of an Englishman seem to present a foundation of political resistance.
In that case it becomes crucial to raise the question of how we can think
politics as a form of counter-power to the repression of the sovereign
power of the nation-state. On the backdrop of these discussions, this essay

sets out to discuss the relationship between human rights, political exclusion
and repression, and political agency in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio
Agamben and Jacques Rancire, asking ultimately from where or from whom

political emancipatory politics can be thought.

Criminality Links
Anti-black violence is normalized through the concept of
criminality- the black body is situated in a permanent
state of criminality- legal reforms are insucient to
transform this assumption.
Heitzig in 15

(Nancy, Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity at St. Catherine
University. On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy,
Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law. Published in Hamline University's School of Law's Journal of
Public Law and Policy, 2015)
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the
language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly,

we
use our criminal justice system to label people of color criminals and
then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind . Today it is
perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that
it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans . Once youre labeled a
as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we dont. Rather than rely on race,

felon, the old forms of discriminationemployment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to
vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury
serviceare suddenly legal. As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black

We have not ended racial caste in America;

we have merely redesigned it.55 We are still not saved by the 14th Amendment. In the PostCivil
Rights Era, the Supreme Court has followed the color-blind logic of the sole dissenter in
Plessy and solidied the race-neutral implications of Federal Civil Rights
legislation. Color-blindness as the new legal doctrine begins to emerge despite judicial dissent in cases
man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.

involving armative action and other remedied to centuries of racial inequality. The Supreme Court adopts the
color-blind model in The Board of Regents, University of California v. Bakke (1978), where the ruling is in favor of a
white student who claimed racial discrimination in his denial of admission to medical school.56 If the Constitution is
to be color-blind, race can only be considered with strict scrutiny, even as a remedy for past discrimination.
Justices Brennan and Marshall, in separate dissents, point out the aws of this approach. Brennan observes,

Claims that law must be color-blind or that the datum of race is no

longer relevant to public policy must be seen as aspiration rather than as
description of reality. . . for reality rebukes us that race has too often been
used by those who would stigmatize and oppress minorities. Yet we cannot . . . let
color blindness become myopia which masks the reality that many created equal have been treated within our
lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens. 57 Justice Marshalls dissent echoes the warning,
one that has now come to pass; For it must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the
Constitution as interpreted by this Court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination
against the Negro. Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe
that this same Constitution stands as a barrier. 58 McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) is perhaps the most significant case of
the Post-Civil Rights era with respect to the application of the 14th Amendment as to matter of race.59 It is here
that potential for an interpretation that would allow for real remedies for institutionalized discrimination is
presented and denied. The racial disparity that characterizes all criminal justice has been most obvious and
contested in the application of capital punishment, especially in the South, where the killing state stepped to do
what was once the work of extra-legal lynch mobs.60 After a series of death penalty cases where the Court ruled
that racial discrimination in the application of the criminal laws ultimate penalty must be addressed, it is here that
the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision clearly defines discrimination as individual not institutionalized. Citing
statistical evidence from the now famous Baldus study, McCleskey argued that the application of the death penalty
in Georgia was fraught with systemic patterns of racism that transcended but tainted any particular case.
Defendants charged with killing white victims were more likely to receive the death penalty, and, in fact, cases
involving black defendants and white victims were more likely to result in a sentence of death than cases involving
any other racial combination.61 The majority did not dispute the statistical evidence, but feared the consequences.
If the Court accepted McCleskeys claim, then the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment would apply to
patterns of discrimination, to institutionalized racism and sexism, to questions of structured inequality. It could, in
fact, be used to challenge the very foundations of the criminal justice system itself, start to finish: laws with
disproportionate racial impact, racial profiling and racial bias in police use of force, and prosecutorial discretion.
These fears are expressed in Powells opinion for the majority, First, McCleskeys claim, taken to its logical
conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system. The Eighth
Amendment is not limited in application to capital punishment, but applies to all penalties. Thus, if we accepted
McCleskeys claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced

with similar claims as to other types of penalty. Moreover, the claim that his sentence rests on the irrelevant factor
of race easily could be extended to apply to claims based on unexplained discrepancies that correlate to

equal protection of
the laws was for individuals, not oppressed groups, and discrimination must be
membership in other minority groups, and even to gender.62 In the majoritys view,

intentional and similarly individual. McCleskey closed off the last best avenue for remedying structural inequality
with the law itself, and preserved the color-blind veneer at the expense of racial remedy. Justice Brennans
impassioned dissent makes the implications of this decision clear: At some point in this case, Warren McCleskey
doubtless asked his lawyer whether a jury was likely to sentence him to die. A candid reply to this question would
have been disturbing. First, counsel would have to tell McCleskey that few of the details of the crime or of
McCleskeys past criminal conduct were more important than the fact that his victim was white. Furthermore,
counsel would feel bound to tell McCleskey that defendants charged with killing white victims in Georgia are 4.3
times as likely to be sentenced to death as defendants charged with killing blacks. In addition, frankness would
compel the disclosure that it was more likely than not that the race of McCleskeys victim would determine whether
he received a death sentence: 6 of every 11 defendants convicted of killing a white person would not have received
the death penalty if their victims had been black. While, among defendants with aggravating and mitigating factors
comparable to McCleskeys, 20 of every 34 would not have been sentenced to die if their victims had been black.
Finally, the assessment would not be complete without the information that cases involving black defendants and
white victims are more likely to result in a death sentence than cases featuring any other racial combination of
defendant and victim. Ibid. The story could be told in a variety of ways, but McCleskey could not fail to grasp its
essential narrative line: there was a significant chance that race would play a prominent role in determining if he
lived or died. . . At the time our Constitution was framed 200 years ago this year, blacks had for more than 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; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to
respect. Only 130 years ago, this Court relied on these observations to deny American citizenship to blacks. Ibid. A
mere three generations ago, this Court sanctioned racial segregation, stating that [i]f one race be inferior to the
other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163
U.S. 537, 552 (1896). In more recent times, we have sought to free ourselves from the burden of this history. Yet it
has been scarcely a generation since this Courts first decision striking down racial segregation, and barely two
decades since the legislative prohibition of racial discrimination in major domains of national life. These have been

we cannot pretend that, in three decades, we have completely

escaped the grip of a historical legacy spanning centuries Warren McCleskeys
honorable steps, but

evidence confronts us with the subtle and persistent inuence of the past. His message is a disturbing one to a
society that has formally repudiated racism, and a frustrating one to a Nation accustomed to regarding its destiny
as the product of its own will. Nonetheless, we ignore him at our peril, for we remain imprisoned by the past as long
as we deny its inuence in the present. 63 Well into the 21st Century, Supreme Court decisions continue to erode
Federal Civil Rights legal gains and the ability of the Civil War Amendments to provide racial redress. The doctrine of
strict scrutiny itself continues to be eroded further as the current Supreme Court limits its application and as a
series of subsequent cases from Grutter v Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) to Fisher v. University of
Texas at Austin (2014) and Shelby County v. Holder (2012) have shown, the Constitution has indeed erected a legal

the shift even beyond color-blindness

towards claims of postracial pragmatism , This pragmatism jettisons the liberal
ambivalence about race consciousness to embrace a colorblind stance
even as it foregrounds and celebrates the achievement of particular racial
outcomes. In the new post-racial moment, the pragmatist may be agnostic
about the conservative erasure of race as a contemporary phenomenon
but may still march under the same premise that signicant progress can
be made without race consciousness. . .. Colorblindness as doctrine not
only undermines litigation strategies that rely on race-conscious
remediation, but it also soothes social anxiety about whether deeper
levels of social criticism, remediation, and reconstruction might be
warranted. While colorblindness declared racism as a closed chapter in our history, post-racialism now
barrier with claims of colorblindness.64 Worse still, as Crenshaw notes,

provides reassurance to those who werent fully convinced that this history had ceased to cast its long shadow over
contemporary affairs. Post-racialism offers a gentler escape, an appeal to the possibility that racial power can be
side stepped, finessed and ultimately overcome by regarding dominance as merely circumstance that need not get

the material
consequences of racial exploitation and social violence including the persistence of
in the way of social progress. As post-racialism becomes the vehicle for a colorblind agenda,

educational inequity, the disproportionate racial patterns of criminalization and incarceration, and the deepening
patterns of economic stratificationslide

further into obscurity.65 More than a century after the Civil

we are here,
with white supremacy and anti-Blackness intact, but now masked, and
with slavery (unwilling to die) transformed yet again . Still, the law, unwilling
War Amendments, 60 years since Brown, 50 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and

and unable to offer relief, but worse still, at the center of this exclusionary
endeavor, from the outset to the present, remains the dener and
purveyor of Black social, civil and literal death.

Death Links
Arming the possibility of death is not accessible to the black body.
Blackness is a condition of ontological death a vocabulary to describe
this loss doesnt exist the only way to break out of this structure is a
complete destruction of civil society and the epistemological foundations
it rests on.

Wilderson No Date [Frank, Ass. Prof of African American Studies UC-Irvine Afro Pessimism http://ucipc.com/members/2008/06/23/afro-pessimism/]

Afro-Pessimism theorizes Blackness as a position of accumulation and fungibili ty (Saidiya Hartman);

as conditionor relationof ontological death; rather than celebrate it as an identity of cultural plenitude. One
of the guiding questions of my engagement with Afro-Pessimism is: How are the political stakes of analysis and
aesthetics raised and altered if we theorize the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism
(an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a conict? The following question was asked on a graduate student
exam for a Critical Theory Seminar, entitled Sentient Objects and the Crisis of Critical Theory, that I taught Fall
Quarter 2006. Question: Why are the theorists under consideration [in this seminar] called Afro-Pessimists, and
what characteristics do they have in common? Afro-Pessimists are framed as suchbecause they

there is an
antagonism, rather than a conflicti.e. they perform a kind of work of understanding rather than that of
liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise . [The AfroPessimists argue] that violence toward the black person happens gratuitously , hence
without former transgression, and the even if the means of repression change (plantation
was replaced by prison, etc.), that doesnt change the structure of the repression
itself. Finally (and this is important in terms of the self-definition of the white person), a lot of repression
happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and
the white personSince these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way
of changing this unless the world as we know it comes an end); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist relational-schema]
would be seen as the only true antagonism (while other repressive relations like class and gender would take place
on the level of conictthey can be resolved, hence they are not ontological). [The Afro-Pessimists] work toward
delineating a relation rather than focus on a cultural object. Something that all the Afro-Pessimists seem to agree
upon regarding social death are notions of kinship (or lack there of), the absence of time and space to describe
blacknessThere

is no grammar of suffering to describe their loss because the loss cannot be

named. [The Afro-Pessimists] theorize the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery, and discuss the
following as bearing witness to this contiguity: the inability of the slave (or the being-for-the-captor) to translate
space into place and time into event; the fact that the slave remains subject to gratuitous violence (rather than
violence contingent on transgression); the natal alienation and social death of the slave. [T]he Afro-Pessimists all
seek tostage a metacritique of the current discourse identified as critical theory by excavating an antagonism
that exceeds it; to recognize this antagonism Jared, Frank, Taehyung forces a mode of death that expels
subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks]. For Fanon ,

the solution to the black presence in the

white world is not to retrieve and celebrate our African heritage, as was one of the goals of
the Negritude project. For Fanon, a revolution that would destroy civil society, as we
know it is the only adequate response. I think the Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and Marriott would
argue there is no place for the black, only prosthetics, techniques which give the illusion of a relationality in the
world. Like the work of Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Lewis
Gordon, Joy James, and others, my poetry, creative prose, scholarly work, and film production are predicated on the
notion that slavery did not end in 1865; the United States simply made adjustments to the force of Black resistance
without diminishing the centrality of Black captivity to the stability and coherence of civil society.

Death Link: The orientation of being-towards-death becomes a way of

existence consensuses death to supersede the black body. The black body
moves through a realm of constant social death unable to dene the
nature of what it means to be black. The 1AC shifts the focus away from
the disposability of the object to one of a biological nature that the black
body cant gain access to.

Sexton 11 - (Jared, He is Associate Professor, African American Studies

School of Humanities. Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies School of
Humanities Ph.D., The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and

Black Optimism, book, page 14-25,

http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf, July 17
| Alfredo)
*paragraphs omitted
To interrogate the racial discourses of life philosophy is to demonstrate that the question of life cannot be pried
apart from that thorniest of problems: the

problem of the Negro as a problem for

thought, that dubious and doubtless fact of blackness, or what I will call, in yet
another register, the social life of social death.vi This is as much an inquiry about the nature of
nature as it is about the politics of nature and the nature of politics; in other words, it is metapolitical no
less than it is metaphysical. In charting the intellectual prehistory of the theorization of biopolitics,
also forecastsand reframesthe biotechnological anxiety or euphoria provoked by
the prospect of engineered life in our own time and the way that prospect
is powerfully associated with notions of social, economic, and political
possibility. Reading Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault or Agamben cannot
remain the same, nor should it, to the degree that we have engaged the tragiccomic complexities of existence in black . Moten might follow, at another pace, the long
qualification of vitalism that Jones accomplishes in her text, just as he might read skeptically the implications of an

the immediate negotiation even as it

continues to loop back to it, is whether a politics, which is also to say an aesthetics, that
arms ( social) life can avoid the hematological dead end if it does not will
its own (social) death . Marriott might call this, with Fanon, the need to arm armation through
negationnot as a moral imperativebut as a psychopolitical necessity (Marriott 2007: 273 fn. 9).vii In
recent years, social death has emerged from a period of latency as a
notion useful for the critical theory of racial slavery as a matrix of social,
political, and economic relations surviving the era of abolition in the nineteenth
century, a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago (Hartman 2007: 6). This
afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman terms it, challenges practitioners in the
eld to question the prevailing understanding of a post-emancipation
society and to revisit the most basic questions about the structural
conditions of anti-blackness in the modern world. To ask, in other words, what it means
to speak of the tragic continuity between slavery and freedom or the incomplete nature of
emancipation, indeed to speak of about a type of living on that survives
after a type of death. For Wilderson, the principal implication of slaverys
afterlife is to warrant an intellectual disposition of afro-pessimism, a
armative biopolitics. The question that remains, beyond

qualification and a complication of the assumptive logic of black cultural studies in general and black performance

disposition that posits a political ontology dividing the

Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way. This critical
move has been misconstrued as a negation of the agency of black
performance, or even a denial of black social life, and a number of
scholars have reasserted the earlier assumptive logic in a gesture that
hypostasizes afro-pessimism to that end .
studies in particular, a

Double Conscious/Dubois
The 1AC is a misunderstanding and simplication of
double consciousness. A double consciousness exists in
multiplicities. The real double consciousness is when the
black body ENGAGES in society, not an interaction with
whiteness, and realize that their skin and what they are is
responsible for the historicity that they face and their
criminality becomes internalized as a result of the double
consciousness. Arming ones identity assumes that they
ignore the historicity that the black body has faced. Their
misinterpretation of DuBois turns the aff and reproduces
their impacts since they make DuBois fungible for the sake
of the political.
Fanon 52 (Frantz, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and inuential writer in the field of post-colonial
studies, Black Skin White Masks, 1952, Pages 82-85)

I came into the world imbued with the will to

nd a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and
then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that
"Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look, a Negro!"

crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body
suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me
out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the
attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was
indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together

As long as the black person is among their own, he will have

no occasion, except in minor internal conicts, to experience their being through others. There
is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made
unattainable in a colonized and civilized society . It would seem that this fact has not
again by another self.

been given sucient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized
people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation .
Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic

Ontology-once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside- does not permit us
to understand the being of the black person. For not only must the black person
be black; he must be black in relation to the white person. Some critics will take it on
themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black person
has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white person . Overnight the
Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place herself. Their
metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, their customs and the sources on which they were based, were
wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and
that imposed itself on them. The black person among their own in the twentieth century
does not know at what moment their inferiority comes into being through
the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely, with American
problem.

Negroes. Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all people in the world. In the Antilles there was also
that little gulf that exists among the almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an
intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic. And then And then the occasion arose
when I had to meet the white person's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my
claims. In the white world the person of color encounters diculties in the development of their bodily schema.

Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person

consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain
uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of

cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have
to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow
composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema. It
does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world-definitive because it

laboratories have
been trying to produce a serum for "denegrication"; with all the earnestness in the
world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that
might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten themself and thus
to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction . Below the corporeal schema I had
creates a real dialectic between my body and the world. For several years certain

sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by "residual sensations
and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character;" but by the other, the white

I thought that what I had in

hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and
here I was called on for more. "Look a Negro!" It was an external stimulus that icked over me as I
passed by. I made a tight smile. "Look, a Negro!" It was true. It amused me. "Look, a Negro!" The
circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. 'Mama, see the Negro! Im
frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I
made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. I could no longer
person who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.

laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had

the corporeal schema crumbled, its

place taken by a racial epidermal schema . In the train it was no longer a
question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple
person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not
learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points,

that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other and

I was
responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I
the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. . .

subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was
battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all
else above all "Sho' good eatin' On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white

I took myself far off from my own presence far

indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an
amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with
black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a person among other
person, who unmercifully imprisoned me,

people. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together. At first sight,
Fanon is rather hard on the black man. He is supposed to be a good nigger who even lacks the advantage of
being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. But Fanons anger is directed not towards the black man but

It is
the internalization, or rather as Fanon calls it epidermalization, of this
inferiority that concerns him. When the black man comes into contact with
the white world he goes through an experience of sensitization. His ego
collapses. His self-esteem evaporates. He ceases to be a self-motivated
person. The entire purpose of his behavior is to emulate the white man, to
become like him, and thus hope to be accepted as a man. It is the dynamic
of inferiority that concerns Fanon; and which ultimately he wishes to
eliminate. This is the declared intention of his study: to enable the man of color to understand the
the proposition that he is required not only to be black but he must be black in relation to the white man.

psychological elements that can alienate his fellow Negro.

The 1ACs notion to solve the double consciousness masks

the real problem people of color face. The inability to have
an agency creates a false illusion which perpetuates antiblackness
Rodrigues 13 (Don , Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate
School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English August, 2013 Nashville, TN

Approved: Professor Houston A. Baker, Jr. Professor Dana Nelson, OF THE
MEANING OF PROGRESS: DUBOISIAN DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS,
PROPAGANDA, AND THE RHETORIC OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM)

double consciousness has become perhaps

the most interesting terminological feature of The Souls of Black Folk . ii As I
shall demonstrate, double consciousness provides the ethical language that may
justify the various projects Du Bois undertakes across media in response
to claims of racial superiority by the eugenicists and their supporters.
Moreover, double consciousness foregrounds propagandistic practice as a
potentially necessary means for African Americans to achieve social and
political change in an anti-Black racist culture such as the America in
which Du Bois had been living and writing. To arrive at a useful interpretive stance vis--vis
For philosophers of race, Du Boiss formulation of

double consciousness, I shall excerpt from Souls two important in stantiations of the idea. First, in Of Our Spiritual
Strivings, Du Bois defines the term: After the Egyptian and sIndian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,
a

world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him
see himself through the revelation of the other world . It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through
the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that
looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings ; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from beingtorn asunder. (8-9). In this

Du Bois advances double consciousness as a method of perceiving

and interpreting the world that permits no true self-consciousness, but
only lets [the Negro] see himself through the revelation of the other
world. That is, double consciousness implies inhabitation of a fractured
identity that achieves its sense of self as a direct result of the ways in
which othersnotably, white others, [looking] on in amused contempt
and pityperceive that self. Importantly, the theory posits sensation and
vision at its very center: for double consciousness is achieved by the
somewhat paradoxical sense of always looking at ones self through the
eyes of others. In this way, Du Bois seems to regard double
consciousness as both a curse and a gift, permitting those born with a
veil a second-sight unavailable to those born without such a veil. On
this point, it is worth noting that Du Bois presents double consciousness
as something one may either be born with or without. While it is not clear whether
passage,

Du Bois regards double consciousness to be a feature of perception that one acquires over time or at some discrete
moment in ones development, one can assume that he does not believe individuals are actually born with this
second-sight.iii Finally, it should be noted that Du Boiss seventh son is regarded to be explicitly both Negro
and American; it is in the very schism between these two identity categories that the peculiar sensation of
twoness becomes apparent.

The idea of a double consciousness makes people of color

believe that they are the problem of society, perpetuating
the anti-blackness logic
Radhakrishnan 87 (Anzaldua 1987, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, Race and Double-Consciousness R.
Radhakrishnan, Gloria)
Du Bois formulation, as much cognitive as it is affective, and as much theoretical as it is existential, begins with an
axiomatization: the axiomatization of a certain between-ness and how that between-ness is made operational by
the rationale of a binary world sustained and structured in dominance.

Any ontological

contemplation or introspection that is available to the American Negro is

always already mediated by the immense and brutal power imbalance that
is the immediate and intended result of the self-other structuration. It is
the unasked question of white racism (in other words, white racism is so much in ontological
and political control and so utterly unmarked in its naturalness that it does not even have to ask the question
explicitly)

that interpellates the subjectivity of the American Negro. It is only

by responding to the reprehensible question, How does it feel to be a
problem? that the American Negro can begin to stammer out his ontology
in the symptomatic discourse of criminality and pathology. The all
important question, if the American Negro wants to avoid the chronic
complicity as well as the agony of double-consciousness, is: Why even
answer that question? Of course Du Bois realizes this when he concludes
that paragraph thus: To the real question, How does it feel to be a
problem? I answer seldom a word (44). And yet, despite this refusal to be interpellated by
racism, Du Bois is constrained to acknowledge that being a problem is a
strange experience. There is the crux of the problem. How does it feel
to be a problem? is not a real question, and yet, in actuality, given the
regime of racism, it has historicized itself as a real question with the
power to organize human history. The legitimacy of this question is just
like the authority of race which after all is nothing but the authority of a
lie, a deception, and a corrosive and hateful ideology masquerading as
truth.3 The American Negro is not a problem and his self consciousness
does not and ought not to have anything to do with the condition of
being a problem, and yet, Du Bois has to concede in a schizophrenic
vein that alas being a problem is all too true experientially, historically.
In other words, being black has been brutalized by racism into a
position where it has become a conceptual and an ontological
impossibility: a point that Lindon Barrett makes powerfully in his essay,
Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason: The People and the Conceptual Impossibility of

The perplexity, then, is that the

impossibility of racial blackness seeming to lie within the limits of the
economic fundament of the modern West as well as the limits of modern
psychic rudiments belies the signal importance of the emergent
circumstances of the concept of racial blackness: the rise of the Atlantic
system of trade on which the articulation of the modern depends. (100) Lindon
Racial Blackness. And I quote from Lindon Barrett:

Barretts argument makes the significant diagnosis that the impossibility of racial blackness is not a real
impossibility, but a vicious ideological effect manufactured by white racism in complicity with colonial modernity.
Barretts thesis is that, from a different perspective that takes into account the economic ravages and the
depredations that are euphemized as modernity, racial blackness is indeed conceptually viable

Your attempt to relieve oppressed bodies out of the

double consciousness is a ramication of whiteness
Sexton 11 (Jared, Journal 2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada)The Social Life
of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism In Tensions
Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological
conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several books: Blacks here suffer the phobogenic
reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social

This
conception would seem to support Motens contention that even much
radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness
with a certain sense of decay and thereby forties and extends the
interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it
would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to
pathologiesthey become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology (Gordon 2000: 87).

the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the
value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the denition of himself as
pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that
imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the
(temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago
originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive,
this acceptance or armation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in
other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to
inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of
social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack
world. The armation of blackness, which is to say an armation of
pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a
valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or
to sociality. Fanon writes in the rst chapter of Black Skin, White Masks,
The Black Man and Language: A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass
for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in
judgment (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white
superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black
nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative
above all, dont be black (Gordon 1997: 63)in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the
turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that resides in the idea that I am thought of as less
than human (Nyongo 2002: 389).xiv

In this we might create a transvaluation of

pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.
[24] To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life
against black social death, black social life as black social death, black
social life in black social deathall of this is to nd oneself in the midst of
an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes
shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not
the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social
life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A
living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism
suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not
social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of
citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history
and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with
the colonized, of all that capital has in common with laborthe modern
world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in,
but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say,
what Moten asserts against afropessimism is a point already armed by
afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afropessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that
black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death

Your belief that you have solved the double consciousness

masks the problems that black people face and creates a
self-deceiving image of an all-white America
Gordon 6 (Lewis, African-American Philosophy, Race, and the Geography
of Reason 2006, http://www.lewisrgordon.com/selected-articles/africanaphilosophy/lewis2.pdf)
There is also an epistemological dimension of double consciousness.

The

correlate of normative knowledge is the set of mainstream disciplines and their approaches to the study of black

The standard view is that things white represent universality and

things black are locked in the web of particularity. The problem with this
view from the perspective of double consciousness is that it relies on
denying the contradictions of the system. Thus, only the false, selfdeceiving image of a pristine, all-encompassing (white) America is offered .
Blacks in America exemplify the contradictions of the political and
epistemological system; they are the nations dirty laundry . The exposure
of contradictions means that whereas whiteness relies on a narcissistic
self-deceptive notion of the American social and political systems
completeness, blackness relies on pointing out the incompleteness of the
system, its imperfections and contradictions. This is the insight behind the black folk
adage: One mind for the white man/ to see, / Another that I now is me. This means that the black
world is more linked to truth than the white world because the black world
realizes that the domain over which truth claims can appeal is much larger
than the white world in general is willing to admit. The black world and the white world
folk.

in this formulation does not refer to every individual black or white person but to those who live by the value

Whites, for instance, who study America through the lens

of Black Studies often develop the same outrage that blacks and other
people of color share. Unlike the popular claim that the purpose of Black
Studies is to offer the narcissism of images of the self in the form of
instructor, a view totally compatible with whitecentric studies but in black
face, the more awkward reality is that it offers something suciently
lacking in the (white) dominant disciplines to stimulate such ire on the
part of studentsnamely, truth. It is not that there is no truth in most areas of the humanities and
the social sciences, as well as the life sciences, it is simply that there is limited truth there
precisely because of the imposition of white normativity as a subtextual
mode of legitimation. One could argue that pursuing truth in the way demanded by Black Studies might
systems of these worlds.

be too much to demand of instructors from other disciplines, but such an excuse could hardly be accepted by Black
Studies scholars all of whom have to work through the tenets of a minimum of two disciplinary perspectivesthe
white normative one and the contradictions they see from the standpoint of the world of color. What they take the
time to learn is exactly what students expect scholars and teachers committed to knowledge and learning should
do: Explore the full domain of their subject matter, which includes taking its contradictions seriously. This is not to
say that they will be perfect in such an endeavor but that the spirit of such an approach offers a set of obligations
responding to which would constitute a more rigorous pursuit of truth.

Geneology
The armatives attempt to move through time through a
process of genoelogy obfusicates the accumulation of
black flesh that will overdetermine the future reagrdless
of their process
Dillon 13 (Stephen, PhD in American Studies at Minnesota, now an
Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College, Fugitive Life:
Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.p
df, May 2013, Pages 88-95)
In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History Ian Baucom argues for a conception of history that undoes liberal
notions of progress, change, and time. Baucoms theory of history
centers the massacre of 132 slaves aboard the slave ship The Zong in
1781. Over three days, the slaves were handcuffed and thrown overboard

in order to collect the insurance money that sealed their value even in
death. For Baucom, the massacre is the paradigmatic event of
modernity. It encompasses the racial, nancial, and epistemological
regimes that have not only failed to dissolve with the passage of time,
but instead, have intensied so that our current moment nds itself
anticipated and enveloped by this event. As Baucom argues, Time
does not pass, it accumulates . Time does not wash away what has
happened, dissolving terror and violence into the progress of the
future, nor is the past passively sedimented in the present. Rather, the

past returns to the present in expanded form so that the present finds
stored and accumulated within itself a nonsynchronous array of past
times.171 The present is possessed by the logics and protocols of

racial capitalisms pastby a perfectly routine massacre that was and

is repeated endlessly across space and time in the (post)colony, prison,

frontier, torture room, plantation, reservation, riot zone, and on and on.
Racial terror returns from a past that is not an end to take holdof
bodies, institutions, infrastructure , discourse, and libidinal life and
does not let go . In this way, the past and present are not ontologically

discrete categories, but rather, are complex human constructs. The

present is not a quarantined, autonomous thing.172 What was begun
does not end but instead intensifies so that the past and present become
indistinguishable. Baucoms theory of time as accumulation has
profound implications for how we understand the future. Traditionally,
the future is a space and time we do not know, a place of possibility,
progress, and hope. The emptiness of the future is imagined as a space

of seamless progress: a myth of Marxist teleology, a capitalist dream, a

fantasy of nationalism and colonialism. When we imagine the future as
the outcome of the passage of time, the past falls away and the
present disappears so that the future becomes relief from the
devastating weight of everything that has come before .173 Yet, if time

does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not the triumph of a
tendency inscribed in the present. It is not the dissolution of the past or
the undoing of the present. If time does not pass but accumulates, then

the future is not liberated from the constraints of yesterday, but

rather, is the place where the wreckage of then and now lives on. When

we think of time against the temporal regimes of the state,

heternormativity, the nation, and capital, time drags, reverses,
compresses, and accumulates. Engaging queerness as a force that
distorts and undermines normative logics of sequence is to know that the
conditions of possibility for the atrocities of the past have not faded, but
rather, have intensified.174 It is to deploy what Jasbir Puar calls an
antecedent temporality where one can see, feel, and engage the
ghosts that are not yet here, but will be tomorrow and the next day and
the next.175 If time does not pass but accumulates, then the past is
where the future is anticipated, recollected, and demonstrated.176 If
there is no progress, but instead repetition, modication,

intensication, reversals, and suspensions, then we know what the

future will be. The future will be what was before . Following Baucom,

we can understand the Womens Army as working against a notion of

history as progress, and in its place, engaging the repetitions,
accumulations, and intensifications of time as it circulates, suspends, and
speeds up. For them, the progress of state revolution means cutbacks in
daycare centers, ending of free abortions, forced sterilization of minority
women, discrimination against single women and lesbians in housing,
and firing of single women in favor of men with families.177 The
revolution is a new formation that reproduces and expands past forms of
white supremacist and heteropatriarchial regulation and subjection.
Isabel, from the feminist radio station Radio Regazza, describes the
revolutionary state as such: Angry unemployed people are rioting in the
streets and the city is on fire with their rage. Now what do you think the
government plans to do about this situation besides beating them over
the head with billy clubs? Do they plan to supply them with jobs, with
training programs, or with decent housing? Nah, uh uh. You know what
theyre going to do? The same bloody tactic they pulled before the
revolution, remember, and Im here to warn you, its going to happen
again. Theyre already starting a shuffle board, an act on a grand scale
where all the poor and the unemployed will be shoved economically into
the ghetto. Isabels declaration that its going to happen again deploys
an anticipatory logic that theorizes the past and present as a
preemption of future possibilities.179 The future and the present
compress, collude, and collide because the temporality of state violence
is a time of repetition, intensication, and accumulation. Franz Fanons
concept of historicity is instructive here. For Fanon, the past is
ontologically sutured to race so that when I discovered my
blackness...I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual
deciency, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: Sho good

eatin.180 For Fanon, white supremacy functions as a type of temporal

prison where black liberation is delayed and destroyed by the capacity of
past traumas (rooted in colonization and slavery) to affect, shape, and
possess the present. Fanon looks to the past of European colonization
and sees a mirror of the future, an endless past/present of colonial
domination.181 In other words, white supremacy is not just a spatial
technology that inhabits infrastructure and institutions; it is also a
temporal regime that refuses to abide by the progress of the law,
language, or the passage of time. As Kara Keeling writes, The past
constricts the present so that the present is simply the reappearance of
the past.182 And as Isabel makes clear, the state (whether pre or postrevolutionary) limits the possibilities of the present and future by binding
both in a closed circuit of reverberation, magnification, and accumulation.
When time accumulates it possesses, detains, and immobilizes. This is
time as a form of capture. Isabel knows what is coming because it has
already happenedin the past that is the future that has already arrived.

There is not relief from knowing the past has vanished because the past
is a warning of what is coming. Its going to happen again. Throughout
Born in Flames, countless members of the Womens Army declare, this is
our time. The time of the revolution was not the time to abolish white
supremacy and heteropatriarchy. It was a time that left behind and
captured poor (queer) women of color through the progress of democracy
and equality. In this way, our time (or revolutionary time) and state
time are two competing temporalities of violence in the film. State time
extends and expands the violence of the past, while our timea time of
the underground, a revolutionary timeis a temporal regime that
exceeds and undoes state time. Again, Fanon proves useful for
understanding these differences. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon
describes a time lag, or a difference of rhythm, between the leaders of a
nationalist party and the mass of the people.183 According to Fanon, the
rank and file of anti-colonial rebellions demand the complete and utter
immediate destruction of the forms of power that render them more
dead than alive, while both colonial and nationalist governments
attempt to manage, temper, and restrain the demands of those who have
no more time to give to the promises of a future that is always coming,
but never arrives.184 For example, in the film, the state promises that in
the future there will be jobs, an end to sexual violence, and racial and
gender equality. But for Fanon, the hopeless dregs of humanity (or the
wretched of the earth) are filled with an uncontrollable rage and thus
exist in a temporal regime apart from that of the party or the nation. This
is a time of intensity and immediacy (the slaves of modern times are
impatient), where the future of the present as it is means no future at
all.185 Like the nancial, epistemological, and racialized legacies of
slavery Baucom sees intensifying in our current moment, Fanon
diagnoses the future of colonialism as the accumulation of the social,
biological, and living death of the native. The native lives a death in life

produced by the racism of slavery and colonialism. The futures horizon is

the accumulation of past forms of racial terror and violence. In this way,
Baucom and Fanon draw connections between race and time that are
crucial to questions of time and futurity. The relationship between race,
gender, death, and the future is central to the immediacy and
spontaneity of the Womens Army and is foundational to the films
critique of the state, time, and the future. We can turn to the Fanonianinspired prison writings of George Jackson to further explore the
relationship between death, race, and time. In his 1972 text Blood in My
Eye, published shortly after he was shot and killed by guards at San
Quentin prison, Jackson wrote of racism, death, and revolution: Their line
is: Aint nobody but black folks gonna die in the revolution. This
argument completely overlooks the fact that we have always done most
of the dying, and still do: dying at the stake, through social neglect or in
U.S. foreign wars. The point is now to construct a situation where
someone else will join in the dying. If it fails and we have to do most of

the dying anyway, were certainly no worse off than before.186 Here,
Jackson argues that the social order of the United States is saturated with
an anti- blackness that produces, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature death.187 Jacksons text is
littered with polemical insights that link race and death in a way that
preemptively echoes Michel Foucaults declaration that racism is the
process of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
powers control: the break between what must live and what must
die.188 When Jackson, Gilmore, and Foucault define race as the
production of premature death, they make a connection between race
and the future. Race is the accumulation of premature death and dying.
For Jackson, race fractures the future so that the future looks like
incarceration or the premature death of malnutrition, disease, and
exhaustion . For Jackson, the future was the not the hopefulness of
unknown possibilities. It was the devastating weight of knowing that
death was coming cloaked in abandonment, neglect, incarceration, or
murder. In other words, according to Jackson, death was always already

rushing toward the present of blackness. Within Jacksons analysis, the

state is the primary mechanism for unevenly distributing racialized
regimes of value and disposability.189 Following the writing of Fanon,
Jackson argued that for this relationship to be abolished, The
government of the U.S.A and all that it stands for, all that it represents,
must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end.

Queerness
Queer politics are founded upon the progressive narrative
pioneered by whitenessthe claim that it gets better is
inaccessible to the black body because there is no mobility
when blacks people are structurally positioned below
humanmeans the armative only recreates antiblackness
Bassichis and Spade 2014 [Morgan and Dean, Queer Politics and Antiblackness Chapter 9 from Queer Necropolitcs, Published Feb 3, 2014]//RM
Gay and lesbian claims to imperiled domesticity, privacy, and kinship
illustrate the
capaciousness of white supremacy to mutate these key 'founding gures
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 to
pathology, murder and non-reproductivity (Bersani 1987: 197-222; Delany 1994; Sontag 1989) qualities usually reserved for blackness - with the emergence of HIV /AIDS. A few illustrations of the
Cue the gay remix!

(popular in earlier homophile organizing but renewed with a fervour since the 1990s)

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 Terry 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 ocers and the president of the CS 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 memory 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 12-17-year 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 couldnt 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 see how it is white suffering that this campaign aims to make

Black suffering, as Jared Sexton has articulated in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina
is unspectacular, banal, self-induced, a cause for, if anything,
shame or fascination, not redress. Savages assertion that his departure from high
school protected him from the reach of homophobic violence is certainly indicative
of a white-owning trajectory of matriculation. What guarantees can be given to those who will
legible as worthy of protection.
(Sexton 2006),

remain in the grasp of foster care systems, homeless shelters, psychiatric facilities, jails, prisons, and immigration detention centres,
regardless of their 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 dangerous outsiders

The fantasy of life '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 enforcement, 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 this cultural politics of naturalizing the premature death of black
people produces a benevolent thrall for white 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.
(Hanhardt 2008).

Movements against queerness are a form of coalitional

politics we criticizethe call to build coalitions across
identities causes a crowding out of Blacks in the political
the impact is the prison industrial complex
Bassichis and Spade 2014 [Morgan and Dean, Queer Politics and Antiblackness Chapter 9 from Queer Necropolitcs, Published Feb 3, 2014]//RM

the widespread call to build coalitions between (non-black) gay people

and (straight) black people in the wake of Proposition 8s passage performed what
Wilderson calls a crowding out of black political claims. The assessment
that the strategic error in the anti-Proposition 8 campaign was a lack of black voter
education and mobilization misunderstands the relationship between nonblack gay and lesbian politics and black politics. Dominant gay and lesbian politics over the
Third,

past three decades have either been explicitly or tacitly supported nearly every site of black abjection and abandonmentnamely,

gay and lesbian politics' unwillingness

to oppose policing and prison expansion has been a key fault line
demonstrating its dissonance with the demands of black politics. When black
privatization, militarization and criminalization. In particular,

people's lives and deaths are centred in analysing barriers to reproduction, the centrality of marriage quickly dissipates to reveal
civil society itself-- including but not limited to police, prisons, courts, schools, social sciences, foster care, child protective services,
public benefits and moreas sites of-what Dylan Rodriguez describes as the mass-based immobilization and routinized terror of

we can
understand that it is not merely a coincidence that gay and lesbian rights
politics has, in many ways, championed the existence (including the reform) of the
US prison regime. We can see this only most explicitly in two decades of hate crimes legislation lobbying, police
black people, determining the life chances of current and future black generations (Rodriguez; 2006). From this view

training, increased police presence in 'gayborhoods' (Hanhardt 2008: 61-65) and enmeshment with criminal legal victim advocacy
frameworks, as well as the silent support for endless prison construction, law enforcementimmigration collaboration, and police

The prison regime the decentralized complex of institutions and

practices that permeates all of civil society and works to liquidate black
life is a key way that slavery has been re-inscribed after its purported
'abolition'. How non-black social movements relate to this regime, then, is
an important illustration of the 'contradictions of coalitions between
workers and slaves' (Wilderson 2007), the diverging demands, claims, and strategies among those meant to work
and those meant to die. Most non-black social movements and particularly white
social moverncnts have invariably bolstered, normalized and extended
this regime, either explicitly or by challenging only its 'excesses' instead
of its fundamental existence.
militarization.

We criticize the notion that their evidence is based on

queer politics positons the queer body as the new black
this comparison trades of with an overarching structural
analysis that is critical to challenge anti-blackness.
Bassichis and Spade 2014 [Morgan and Dean, Queer Politics and Antiblackness Chapter 9 from Queer Necropolitcs, Published Feb 3, 2014]//RM
The centrality of legal equality claims to gay and lesbian rights politics
and the specic investment of them in accessing and expanding key
institutions of anti-blackness is often accomplished through the
deployment of a like black civil rights analogy. Sexton observes that this analogy is a
key technology of anti-blackness in non-black social movements. He describes the peculiar, long
standing and cross-racial phenomenon where a range of struggles
allegorize themselves to revolts against slavery, meanwhile the suffering
of black people during slavery and its afterlife is something perpetually

gured as already known and addressed, not needing to be further discussed, and of course, mainly
historical (Sexton 2006:42).12 Sexton writes: The metaphoric transfer that dismisses the legitimacy of black struggles against racial
slavery (andits functional surrogates) white it appropriates black suffering as the template for nonblack grievances remains one

gay and lesbian rights

advocates and the lawyers who lead their charge consistently analogize
the gay and lesbian rights struggle to the black civil rights movement.
of the defining features of contemporary political culture. (Sexton 2006:42) White

Examples abound. Laurence v Texas, the Supreme Court decision finding sodomy statutes unconstitutional, was lauded as 'our
Brown v Board of Education' (Graff 2003). Same-sex marriage advocates consistently analogize their struggle to Loving v Virginia,
the 1967 case in which the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional (American Foundation for Equal Rights

the articulation
of the ght for same-sex marriage or gay and lesbian rights generally as a
'frontier' of civil rights (Beavers 2000: 31 33; Colvin 2011; Marquez 2008: Seltzer 2011; Tolbert and Smith 2006),
or sometimes 'the nal frontier of the civil rights movement' (Marco n.d.; May-Chang
2008). This analogy, of course, heavily relies on the idea that the civil rights
movement successfully freed black people and made them equal , thus gay and
(n.d); Capehart 2011; Farrow 2005; Klarman 2005: 485 86; Pascoe 2004; Rosenfeld 2007). More broadly,

lesbian rights can be frarned as the 'new frontier' since the others have been accomplished. Recall that decisive check mark next to
'African American' on the poster we invoked earlier: the trope maintains that 'other' populations (especially black people) have been
fixed by legal equality and now it is time to complete the project of American freedom by granting legal equality to (apparently non-

The triumphant and well-circulated claim that 'Gay is the

new Black' performs dual labour: rst, it disappears the unspectacular and
enduring conditions of black suffering that persist in the neoliberal era.
Second, it appropriates the apparently satised struggle of black people .
Remember that it does not say 'Gay== Black', but that 'Gay is the new Black' its
suffering exhausted, passe, black is no longer 'black enough' . Black, not needing to
black) lesbian and gay people.

be black anymore, has now objectively passed on its reference point to gay, which is not black, and which apparently needs it more.
What does it mean, then, for queer politics to reckon with the insatiable demands of black liberation? Wilderson articulates black
liberation? Wilderson articulates black liberation as a politics of refusal and a refusal to arm, a program of complete disorder

Todays gay and lesbian rights politics is a critical illustrationof the

ways in which slaverys afterlife is maintained and recuperated, as well as
a painful demonstration of Sextons assertion that any resistance politics
that forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks invests in anti-blackness and
becomes a site of its expansion. It is inside this predicament that we
struggle to advance, already compromised, the unnished project of
abolition.
(2007:32).

Migrants
The trope of the immigrant worker relies on a notion of
productivity that is parasitic on the slave as disposable
alterity and is only articulateble through the paradigm of
anti-blackness
Nopper 2011 (Tamara, Assistant Professor at The University of
Pennsylvania, The Wages of Non-Blackness: Contemporary Immigrant Rights
and Discourses of Character, Productivity, and Value, InTensions Journal
Issue 5 (Fall/Winter)
When articulating the psychological wage of whiteness, Du Bois provided a
lengthier description than that given at the beginning of this article.
Speaking of the white laborer, he posited: They were given public
deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were
admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions , public
parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and
the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency
as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public ocials, and while
this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon
their personal treatment and the deference shown themThe newspapers
specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly
ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (700-1) Du Bois
characterization of a public and psychological wage (700) may read as
incompatible with the lived experiences of most NBPOC immigrants living
and working in the United States, and understandably so given the virulent
racism, white supremacy, structural and interpersonal violence, and
surveillance that immigrants of color experience (Brotherton and

Kretsedemas). Thus, the wage that white laborers accrued in Du Boiss

account may not be easily recognizable for measuring the public and
psychological compensation of post-WWII immigrants of color, particularly
those working as low-wage earners. But one does not have to experience
the exact same treatment as Whites to have access to the psychological
wage of whiteness. One needs simply to have access to the subject category

of worker, access to which requires a particular racial status. As Frank

Wilderson reminds us, work is a white category (238). The worker, while
exploited and demeaned, categorically exists within the logic of civil
society. The slave, embodied in the Black, however, cannot be
incorporated into the logic of civil society but rather exists as an
antagonism and therefore cannot be satised through a transfer of
ownership/organisation of existing rubrics ( 231). Whereas the worker
calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into
question the legitimacy of productivity itself (231). Additionally, the
grievance of the worker, i.e., exploitation, may be addressed through the
mechanisms of civil society but the slave experiences a suffering,
involving accumulation and death, which cannot be relieved through the
same means as the worker (234). Of course, Wilderson notes, this does not

mean that Black people dont work: The fact that millions upon millions of
black people work misses the point. The point is we were never meant to

be workers; in other words, capital/white supremacys dream did not

envision us as being incorporated or incorporative. From the very
beginning, we were meant to be accumulated and die. Work (i.e. the French

shipbuilding industry and bourgeois civil society which finally extended its
progressive hegemony to workers and peasants to topple the aristocracy)
was what grew up all around us20 to 60 million seeds planted at the
bottom of the Atlantic, 5 million seeds planted in DixieToday, at the end of
the twentieth century, we are still not meant to be workers. We are meant to
be warehoused and die. (238) The difference between the worker and the

slave or whiteness/nonBlackness and Blackness is not simply a matter of

distinctive formations. Rather, it is an issue of interrelation; it is the civil
death of Blacks that girds notions of workas well as character,
productivity, and value. Or as Wilderson puts it, where whiteness is
concerned, work registers as a constituent element. And the black body
must be processed through a kind of civil death for this constituent
element of whiteness to gain coherence (238). Whereas poorly paid
immigrant workers of color experience a greater degree of vulnerability ,
exploitation, surveillance, and nativism than that of the white worker , the
formers presumed character, productivity, and value is amplied when
their work or willingness to work is compared to African Americans. In
other words, the recognition of immigrant labor as productive is
articulated through anti-Black rhetoric and practice . As I have shown, such

positive albeit at times condescending and disingenuous characterization of

immigrants unites capitalists, managers, and immigrant rights advocates in
a shared discourse that explicitly or implicitly casts immigrants as more
akin to Whites and in turn, not (like) Black(s). With the addition of liberal

and progressive people of color, such an alliance is reminiscent of what Du

Bois posited as an ideology uniting the planter and the poor white (700).
This is precisely why I consider the moral claims regarding character ,
value, and productivity that are invoked aboutas well as byNBPOC and
immigrants as a wage of non-Blackness. If Asian and Latino immigrants,
particularly those without documentation, have not yet achieved

whiteness, or at least do not have the exact same material, political, and
social experiences as that of the white laborer Du Bois described , they
nevertheless are associated with character, productivity, and value that
becomes amplied in relationship to the non-Black worlds perceptions
and actual treatment of African Americans. Overall, those committed to
social justice have a formidable task: articulating the value and rights of
the immigrant without relying on prowhite, anti-Black, and pro-capitalist
tropes. Such a demand for an ethical discourse of immigrant rights is most
likely impossible within popular frameworks of work, productivity, and
value as detailed here. Indeed, such discourses perhaps need to be totally
taken off of the table as they can, to quote Hartman again, only become
legible to the world through the expression of a racial calculus and a
political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago (Hartman 6)

Their attempt to confront anti-immigration rhetoric fails to

take into account the underlying anti-black sentiment that
causes violence related to immigration in the rst place.
Woods 2008(Tryon, Assistant Prof of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime &
Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. The Plantation
Society, circa 2008: Discussing Immigration through the Lens of Criminology.
The Radical Teacher, No. 84, TEACHING AND IMMIGRATION (Spring 2009), pp.
31-41)
To be a fraudulent person, on the other hand, is to be caught impersonating a human being. There is only one such

blacks are
constructed not as people with problems, but rather as "a problem people."20 Slave codes in the
position in the anti-black world and it belongs to the black. As DuBois once put it,

southern United States demanded that slaves receive clothing, food, and lodging sucient to their basic needs.

Slaves, although dead to civil rights and responsibilities-social death-are reduced to nothing but
the physical body, unprotected against mutilation or torture .21 The
functioning of social death is, again, premised on the context itself as antiblack. The post-Emancipation era of the Black Codes, convict leasing, and lynching ensured that blackness
meant social death not by virtue of enslavement, but instead as a product of criminality
and imprisonment. Blackness remains to this day the essential marker of
criminality and deviance.22 Black existence and its signier "criminal,"
then, serve a central metaphori cal and structural purpose for a white
supremacist bourgeois society. In the con temporary debates on
immigration, it provides the menacing content for the construct "criminal"
that gives the anti immigrant position its purchase in main stream society .
To put it differently, we as educators cannot effectively undo the racism of antiimmigrant discourse with out also challenging the anti-blackness of crime
and punishment . In concrete terms, moreover, we need to recall the destruction of
the black community base, the deindustrialization of the political
economy, dismantling of the welfare state, and the installment of the
prison industrial complex. These processes collectively produced a black
population available on a massive scale for social transfer to the living
death of prison cages. These dislocations and debasements were the
conditions of possibility for the political economy that draws immigrants
to this country, while at the same time, the institutionalization of the
(vanquished) black liberation movement serves as the pre requisite for
the very struggles against the exploitation of immigrant labor that have ,
rightfully, gained momentum today.23 In other words, there would be no immigrant
labor to speak of if the black libera tion movement had not been
systematically destroyed, and, ironically, that very same social movement history would not
otherwise be available to other oppressed groups to learn and benefit from. Needless to say, I have not been at all
successful in realizing this kind of analysis with my students. In much of its practice, criminology is an exercise in

The
criminological discourse on immigration is an expression of bad faith
bad faith in that it encourages students to ee a displeasing truth for a more com forting lie.

as well.
My students live this lie in their own ways. Although they know that "crime" is far more complex and messy than a

the United States has the largest prison

population in the world, both in total numbers and per capita, eighty per cent of whom
are people of color, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) holds some 23,000 people in
simple case of immorality, the fact that

immi gration jails on a given day and about 200,000 annually, does not, in any sincere way, trouble them much.24
At some level in their consciousness, perhaps they know that people (immigrant and non-immi grant alike) do not
have what they need to survive in this society, and that in their capacities as

law enforcers, they are not

making things better for these millions of people . These are tough ethical problems for
young people emerging from a context in which their futures are mortgaged ever more
by the racial state's commitment to the needs of capital.

Heidegger
Being-to-death is white death anti-blackness forecloses
the possibility for blacks to reclaim their death from the
they this card is devastating :D
Trewn 13 (Amrit, Northwestern University, (t)Racing Through Critical
Theory in Pursuit of Opening the Darkest Doors, December 12th 2013,
Pages 6-8)
More than being a Cartesian philosopher in this regard, Heidegger's
negligence of colonialism, slavery, and modernity -- all initiated prior to
the political crises of the twentieth century -- means he gets to join the
ranks of philosophers which constitute a Western tradition of white
thought . To further draw out this argument, I bring in two texts from

whiteness studies, Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Eduardo BonillaSilva's "The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday
Life in Contemporary America," in order to explain my conceptualization of
'whiteness'. To summarize, DiAngelo refers to 'White Fragility' as "a state in
which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable,
triggering a range of defensive moves" (54). Bonilla-Silva, in turn, argues
that racial domination necessitates a racial grammar which normalizes white
supremacy and dominance through sociopolitical regulatory practices (174).1
Then, I refer to 'whiteness' as that which is made visible when the "normal" is
questioned and what DiAngelo calls "[t]he insulated environment of racial
protection" is shocked into White Fragility. For this conceptualization of
'whiteness' to be more comprehensive, though, we must be able to account
for whiteness when it is invisible and silent. In this case, I refer to
'whiteness' as the normalization of white supremacy and white
dominance, while racial grammar makes certain ideas intelligible in
normalized spaces through a rhetoric of universalism which is intimately
bound to power and hegemony. To concretize this theoretical development

of whiteness, I borrow the concept "raceocracy" developed by social scientist

Barnor Hesse. He uses the terms "raceocracy" to refer to the following: [T]he
way in which race orders the political and social lives of people without
being accountable to any spoken or written discourse, simply because its
performed as a shared social and institutional orientation. In other words, its
racially performed in such a way that it sustains a broad range of peoples
relationships by facilitating conventional aspects of life that everybody
appears to agree upon. ("Raceocracy: An Interview with Dr. Barnor Hesse
Part 1.") Through this lens, whiteness as a racial identity is a crucial
technology to the structure of race as it simultaneously marks particular
bodies as white, affords them certain privileges, and uses these bodies to
form and govern racially exclusive white spaces through the largely invisible
and silent white gaze, performance of racial governance, and
presence/absence of white privilege.2 In other words, my conceptualization
of 'whiteness' is constituted by the ordering and governing of bodies in/and
space. As such, we can inquire into whiteness not just as a form of racially

exclusive society, but also as a form of racial identity. More explicitly, we can

consider Heidegger's conceptualization of death as coming from a space of

whiteness because of its representation as non-relational, singularizing,
and its relation to mastery and subjectivity. I will not belabor this point,

because the argument is quite simple and vaguely resembles Lvinas's

critique. Heidegger ignores how Western colonial projects -- whether it be
those which violently threw Sub-Saharan Africans across the Atlantic
Ocean and enslaved them or those which dominated Muslims in French
Algeria under quasi-apartheid rule -- stripped its victims of their social and
political freedoms and at times subjected them to deaths including
lynching, torture, and mass disease. 3 In this context, mastery and
subjectivity must be seen as normalized white capabilities. Western
colonial projects were driven by the desire to master geopolitical space
through (imperial/colonial/violent) exploration and to master the enslaved
African body (by way of racescience and plantation organization, for
example). The reality of colonialism, slavery, and its relation to mastery and
'full' subjectivity reveals an iteration of death foreclosed by Heidegger's
discussion: Death-as-possibility-to-be-killed-socially-and-politically-andbiologically-by-theexperience-of-slavery-and-colonial-violence. Can anyone

wrap their hands around that? To stay within Heidegger's approach, being
white might be seen as a phenomenological experience. I have revealed the
whiteness of Heidegger's death by situating his concept Being-towardsdeath alongside pre-Holocaust Western colonial projects , and unsettled
'death' in Heideggerian philosophy. Through his un/racial grammar of
universality, Heidegger forecloses the possibility of a relational death.
Heidegger's death becomes incredibly fragile when supplemented by one
word: white. Heidegger's (white) death is social, political, historical, and
philosophical violence. While Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi party
may have been convoluted, his whiteness certainly was not.

Heideggers concept of dasein assumes that every body

can be of the world, but the black body is thrown into the
world as an object as something that experiences violence
and oppressionWilderson 10 (Frank, is an Associate Professor in the Drama Doctoral
Program and the African American Studies Program at UC Irvine. He has
taught literature at UC Santa Cruz; and at the University of Witwatersrand
and Vista University in South Africa, where he lived for five years during the
transitional years from apartheid to universal suffrage, Red, White & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Pdf 77-81) KS
But emancipation through some form of discursive or symbolic
intervention is wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a
subject positionwhat Marx calls a speaking implement or what Ronald
Judy calls an interdiction against subjectivity. In other words, the Black
has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and

fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black
is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world; and so is his/her cultural
production. What does it meanwhat are the stakeswhen the world can whimsically transpose ones
cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? Fanon
echoes this question when he writes, I came into the world imbued with
the will to nd a meaning in things, my spirit lled with the desire to
attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in
the midst of other objects (BSWM 109). Fanon claries this assertion and
alerts us to the stakes which the optimistic assumptions of Film Studies
and Cultural Studies, the counter-hegemonic promise of alternative
cinema, and the emancipatory project of coalition politics cannot account
for, when he writes: Ontologyonce it is nally admitted as leaving
existence by the waysidedoes not permit us to understand the being of
the black (110). This presents a challenge to film production and to film studies given their cultivation
and elaboration by the imaginative labor of Cultural Studies, underwritten by the assumptive logic of Humanism;
because if everyone does not possess the DNA of culture, that is, (a) time and space transformative capacity, (b) a
relational status with other Humans through which ones time and space transformative capacity is recognized 77
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms and incorporated, and (c) a relation to violence
that is contingent and not gratuitous, then how do we theorize a sentient being who is positioned not by the DNA
culture but by the structure of gratuitous violence? How do we think outside of the conceptual framework of
subalternitythat is, outside of the explanatory power of Cultural Studiesand think beyond the pale of
emancipatory agency by way of symbolic intervention? I am calling for a different conceptual framework,
predicated not on the subject effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology; one that

The value in this rests not

simply in the way it would help us re-think cinema and performance, but in
the way it can help us theorize what is at present only intuitive and
anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life. To
put a ner point on it, such a framework might enhance the explanatory
power of theory, art, and politics by destroying and perhaps restructuring,
the ethical range of our current ensemble of questions. This has profound
allows us to substitute a politics of culture for a culture of politics.

implications for non-Black film studies, Black film studies, and African American Studies writ large because they are
currently entangled in a multicultural paradigm that takes an interest in an insuciently critical comparative
analysisthat is, a comparative analysis which is in pursuit of a coalition politics (if not in practice then at least as
an theorizing metaphor) which, by its very nature, crowds out and forecloses the Slaves grammar of suffering. The
Dilemmas of Black Film Studies. In the wake of the post-Civil Rights, post-Black Power backlash a small but growing
coterie of Black theorists have returned to Fanons astonishing claim that 78 Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms ontologyonce it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the waysidedoes not

For not only must the black man be

black; but he must be black in relation to the white man [sic] (BSWM 110). Though
permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic].

they do not form anything as ostentatious as a school of thought, and though their attitude toward and
acknowledgment of Fanon does not make for an easy consensus, the moniker Afro-Pessimists neither infringes upon
their individual differences nor exaggerates their fidelity to a shared set of assumptions. It should be noted that of
the Afro-Pessimists Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Frantz
Fanon, Kara Keeling, Jared Sexton, Joy James, Lewis Gordon, George Yancey, and Orlando Pattersononly James and
Patterson are social scientists. The rest come out of the Humanities. Fanon, of course, was a doctor of psychiatry.
Reading them, and connecting the dots at the level of shared assumptions, rather than the content of their work or
their prescriptive gestures (if any) it becomes clear that though their work holds the intellectual protocols of
unconscious identification accountable to structural positionality, it does so in a way that enriches, rather than
impoverishes, how we are able to theorize unconscious identification. That is to say that though meditations on
unconscious identifications and preconscious interests may be their starting point (i.e., how to cure hallucinatory
whitening [Fanon], and how to think about the Black/non Black divide that is rapidly replacing the Black/White
divide [Yancey]) they are, in the first instance, theorists of structural positionality.xxiv The Afro-Pessimists are
theorists of Black positionality who share Fanons insistence that, though Blacks are indeed sentient beings, the
structure of the entire worlds semantic fieldregardless of cultural and national discrepanciesleaving as Fanon

Unlike the solutionoriented, interest-based, or hybridity-dependent scholarship so

fashionable today, Afro-Pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not
in the rst instanceas a variously and unconsciously interpellated
would say, existence by the waysideis sutured by anti-Black solidarity.

identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions; this meaning is noncommunicable because, again, as a position, Blackness is predicated on
modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not exploitation and alienation.
Unfortunately, neither Black nor White Film Theory seems to have made
this shift from exploitation and alienation as that which positions Film
Theorys universal cinematic subject to genocide, accumulation, and
fungibility as modalities of gratuitous violence which positions the Slave.
In this respect, Film Theory mysties structural antagonisms and acts as
an accomplice to social and political stability. Even the bulk of Black Film
Theory is predicated on an assumptive logic of exploitation and alienation,
rather than accumulation and fungibility, when regarding the ontological
status of the Black. Film Theory, as concerns Black American cinema
between 1967 and the present, is marked by several characteristics.
Nearly all of the books and articles are underwritten by a sense of urgency
regarding the tragic history and bleak future of a group of people marked
by slavery in the Western Hemisphere; this, they would all agree, is the
constitutive element of the word Black. To this end, most are concerned with how cinematic
representation hastens that bleak future or intervenes against it. Cinema then, has pedagogic value, or, perhaps
more precisely, pedagogic potential. Broadly speaking, Black film theory hinges on these questions: What does
cinema teach Blacks about 80 Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Blacks? What
does cinema teach Whites (and others) about Blacks? Are those lessons dialogic with Black liberation or with our
further, and rapidly repetitive, demise?

Their ontology may explain why race exists, but it doesnt

explain RACIALIZATION of black bodiesthe only way this
happens is through political ontology
James 12 [Michael Rabinder James, Bucknell University, The Political
Ontology of Race, Northeaster Political Science Association, page 122]//JC//

racial identity is not just imposed upon

individuals either biologically or socially. Racial identity also reflects
political action as people, individually or collectively, consciously bestow
additional signicance to a racial identity that is biologically or socially
imposed on them. As such, political ontology presupposes intentional agency
on the part of racially ascribed individuals. Furthermore, because individuals can grant
various forms of apolitical significance to imposed racial identities, political ontology entails the
decisions by individuals to identify with their racial group for political
purposes (expressed through binding collective decisions enforced by power) and under political
conditions of pluralism and conflict (with respect to both perspectives and interests). As
According to the proposed political ontology of race,

discussed above, intentional agency is a crucial component of Arendts distinction between political action and

political action, precisely because it presupposes intentional

requires that actors justify the goals they pursue. And when political
action is collective, political actors must justify not only their goals but
even the type of solidarity that undergirds their collective action . Some
forms of solidarityexclusivist, hierarchical, organicmay be harder to justify than
others, particularly within a democratic political context .49 Thus political
action places a substantial burden on political actors to justify what they
want to change and how they go about doing so. While intentional agency is necessary
social behavior. Mark Warren emphasizes that
agency,

for political ontology, it is hardly sucient. The notion of political ontology additionally involves plurality, conict,

Political action typically aims at collective decisions that are

binding and enforced by power. But even binding collective decisions are not political if everybody
and power.

is already in agreement. Politics (in Arendts understanding) presupposes a plurality of interests and perspectives

that potentially collide with each other. Moreover, the conflicts must be manifest, not latent. Thus
power must be dispersed (to allow conicts to emerge) without being negated (so that binding collective decisions
can be enforced, even against the will of some of the participants). This is why many political theorists understand
democracy, which disperses power without eliminating it, as the most political of regimes.

Race differs from societythis proves that it is about the

SOCIAL and POLITICAL ontology rather than questions of
being
James 12

[Michael Rabinder James, Bucknell University, The Political Ontology of Race, Northeaster
Political Science Association, page 114-115]//JC//
Charles Mills coined the term the

social ontology of race to reveal the philosophical

import of racial categorization, something not captured by the social
scientic term the social construction of race.27 The term conveys that race is
ontologically real on a social level, regardless of its biological status .28 Mallon
distinguishes between and labels three aspects of the social ontology of race.29 Thin constructivism refers to the
ascription of individuals to racial categories through various criteria, seven of which are proffered by Mills: physical
appearance, ancestry, self-awareness of ancestry, public awareness of ancestry, culture, experience, and selfidentification.30 Interactive kind constructivism denotes that once individuals are categorized according to race,
they are likely to have different experiences (for instance, childhood poverty and police brutality) that render races

institutional
constructivism signies race as a social institution that coordinates
multiple individual actions through convention, not nature, and thus is durable
but limited to the specic societies in which it is embedded . Paul Taylor illuminates
the institutionalization of race by comparing it to money. Like race, money is not natural but
conventional: It is ontologically [inter] subjective and thus depends for
its existence on human agreements. The institutional fact of money is
valid only within specic local contexts. It would be useless among Stone Age people, or a
camp of radical Luddites. But once money is established, its institutional durability
hinders attempts by individuals to reject or alter this convention : I cant just
as probabilistically defined populations with differential life chances.31 Finally,

decide, unilaterally, that my green pieces of paper will be worth a thousand dollars each. So, too, with race: Race
is in these respects like money. Race-thinking varies from society to society, which shows that it depends on local
human conventions for its existence. But once the conventions are established . . . then there are facts that exist
independently of any individuals particular judgments and beliefs. I cant just decide, unilaterally, that my dark skin
and curly hair mark me as white, or as having no race.32

Heideggers theory of power relation subconsciously

creates the 1AC anxiety as the aff tries to construct a
brightline between the good versus bad binary. This type
of mindset consents the black antagonists to be excluded
from society as those bodies can't exist within a space of
double consciousness.
Ziarek 13 (Krzysztof, He teaches 20th-century comparative literature,
especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and
literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inected Language: Toward
a Hermeneutics of Nearness, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the
Avant-Garde, and the Event. His newest work, /The Force of Art/ was
published in 2004 by Stanford
University Press, Art, Power, and Politics: Heidegger on Machenschaft and
Poisis, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/3July2002/ziarek.pdf, book, page 177178, July 17 | Alfredo)

For Heidegger, metaphysics is not just a conceptual system of binary

oppositions: presence and absence, subjectivity and objectivity , activity

and passivity, but signifies a manner of unfolding relations into power, power
that produces and runs through, in short, powers, the oppositional
structuring of experience: The essence of power as manipulative power
annihilates the possibility of the truth of beings. It is itself the end of
metaphysics (Das Wesen der Macht als Machenschaft vernichtet die

Mglichkeit der Wahrheit des Seienden. Sie ist selbst das Ende der
Metaphysik.7) It is the occurring of being into and as power that constitutes
history as metaphysical; or, to put it differently, as long as being occurs in
terms of power, there is metaphysics. Metaphysics means that being
unfolds into makingness (Mache): The essence of this makingness is
manipulative power [Machenschaft]: the preparing for the empowering of
power and the makesomeness [or powersomeness] of all beings readied by
this power and predemanded by the overpowering.8 To recognize the
fluid operations of power as the intrinsic powersomeness of being , that is,
as the power-oriented unfolding of what is, constitutes only the rst
critical step in the direction of initiating the other beginning of being in
the midst of metaphysics: the unfolding of being as a relationally free from

power. In Beginning, Heidegger makes an emphatic statement that being

occurs beyond power and powerlessness: ausserhalb von Macht und
Ohnmacht west das Seyn (being occurs beyond power and
powerlessness).11 Heidegger insists on the possibility of a relationally in

which power does not coursea possibility toward which we need to

question. Equating metaphysics with power, Heidegger introduces a crucial

distinction between Ohnmacht, or powerlessness, and das Machtlose, which I

translate here as the power-free. Although machtlos means literally powerless (macht-los), Heidegger clearly distances it from powerlessness
(Ohnmacht), from having no power. Powerlessness operates as part of the
dynamic of power, and the opposition MachtOhnmacht is a metaphysical
categorization of power in terms of its presence or absence . By contrast,

das Machtlose becomes related to loslassen, to releasing or letting free, and

indicates a relationally that is power free, otherwise than power: Seyndas
Machtlose, jenseits von Macht und Unmacht, besser ausserseits von Macht
und Unmacht, wesenhaft unbezogen auf Solches, Beingthe powerfree,
beyond power and unpower, better yet, outside of power and unpower,
essentially unrelated to them, that is, unrelated to the opposites of power
and its absence (Unmacht).12 The power-free occurs beyond the opposition

between power and absence of power. It is also not a counter-power,

which, like power and powerlessness, still operates within the same
domain of the intensication of power. Heidegger makes it clear that being
as power-free is not powerless. It has the force of letting-be that is

otherwise than power, that is, the force that, as Letter on Humanism and
Heideggers later texts on poetry and language make amply clear, has a
certain ethical resonance. Taking issue with the Hobbesian idea of being as
war and primary violence, Heidegger insists on the possibility of a
transformation in being into a non-violent and power-free relationally. For

Heidegger, power and violence mark the erasure of the originary nonviolent disposition of relations, which produces the formation of
relationally into power. This power-free disposition has a broad ethical
force, not unrelated to though also not identical to what Levinas
articulates in the context of the face of the other as an injunction which
paralyzes and undoes the very power to have power.13 The other

beginning does not denote the start of a new epoch, the dawn of a new
power formation, but, rather, points to the breaking open, in the midst of
power relations, of a power-free relationally, of a kind of a power-free margin
internal to the formation of being into power. This other beginning has to
begin or break open each moment anew; it cannot be formed into a
political orientation or articulated into forms of power . It can only begin
being otherwise than power, to modify the well-known Levinasian phrase. If
being in metaphysics produces/makes itself as makesomeness
(Machsamkeit) and, therefore, as power, then the Levinasian otherwise
than being rings a note of proximity to das Machtlo.
Heidegger is racist

Darcy 15, (Seven Darcy, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Huron University College, in
London, ON, Canada. My published research addresses mainly practical ethics and democratic theory, and I teach
courses in moral and political philosophy. In addition to my book, Languages of the Unheard, I have co-edited the
book, A Line in the Tar Sands, a collection on popular resistance to the tar sands industry
-http://publicautonomy.org/2015/01/22/heidegger/)
One can certainly find even more vociferous outbursts of anti-Semitism among the writings of other famous and
inuential 20th century philosophers, notably Gottlob Frege, the father of analytic philosophy. But to dwell on that

Heidegger was an antiSemite and a racist. There is no justification for trying to rehabilitate him as less racist than some
of his peers and contemporaries. He should be condemned outright for it, without qualification or
hesitation. To that extent, Dr. Figals impulse had a rational basis: like everyone who aspires to function as
an adversary to racists and anti-Semites, he wanted to underline his unwillingness to tolerate or to gloss
over Heideggers egregious complicity and sinister solidarity with some of the most villainous
political projects and social forces of recent centuries . Its undoubtedly right to do so. Nevertheless, there is
something unsatisfying about his gesture. Recall that Martin Heidegger was very, very public about being a
Nazi as early as 1933, and remained a dues-paying member until the party was unceremoniously and involuntarily
thought, or to attach any real significance to it, would be to set ones bar far, far too low.

liquidated at the end of WW2, even if his activist phase lasted only for about a year. In light of this fact known
to anyone even semi-conversant with Heideggers life-history, and certainly well known to someone like Gnther
Figal why on earth would anyone have imagined that Heidegger might have been opposed, in any substantial
way, to anti-Semitism? Does the idea of a Nazi party activist who opposed anti-Semitism make *any* kind of sense?
Isnt that like being an anti-racist Ku Klux Klan activist? And would that not be, as Heidegger said of a Christian
philosophy, a round square and a misunderstanding? Figals manoeuvre seems calculated to convey a message
that few can find even remotely plausible: Yes, I knew he was an activist in the Nazi Party, he seems to be
suggesting, but Im shocked and appalled to learn that he harboured negative opinions about Jews! Really, Dr.

Still, one can give Figal the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that he might have meant only to
record his (longstanding) refusal to affiliate with Heideggers politics, at a moment when the antiSemitic dimension of Heideggers hard-right political stance was at the centre of a public
controversy. He may not have been attempting to pose (unconvincingly) as someone who knew nothing of these
Figal?

matters until recent months. Regardless of Dr. Figals motives, the publicity surrounding his action offers the rest of

What are we to think

about the fact that so many of the most important philosophers of modern times were racists and/or
sexists of the most horrible sort? Or rather, what are we to think about the standing of their books,
in light of the political alignments of so many of these authors with horrifying political projects,
such as white supremacy, extreme misogyny, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, to name only a few ? If
the case of Heideggers anti-Semitism and fascism were an isolated incident, we could dismiss this
one example as the singular bad apple, bearing no real relationship or affinity to the wider
us a helpful opportunity to ponder an important question, raised by the whole affair.

Western-philosophical tradition, and threatening it only with the risk of a flimsy and ultimately
false form of guilt by association. That, indeed, would provide everyone with a motivation to
disassociate themselves from Heidegger, in the Figal style, and perhaps even to stop reading Heidegger
or taking his intellectual achievements seriously (which Figal himself was unwilling, he said, to do). Alas,
however, Heidegger is not an outlier or an anomaly of this type. Instead, he represents yet another case of
something very familiar, even normal, in the history of modern Western philosophy: the racist
Great Philosopher. Consider the company he keeps, in this regard: (a) As an initial example,
recall David Humes pioneering (in a double sense) declaration of white supremacy: I am apt to
suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites.
There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in action
or speculation. (b) Another Great Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, attested to the inuence of Humes sceptical view
of inductive inference on his own project to develop a transcendental idealism, immune to the problems posed by
an empiricist view of knowledge.

Humanization
Their attempt at humanization is inherently problematic
ontological categorizations make it impossible for
blackness to ever be viewed as human, true black
resistance can only be achieved when the task of
reclamation is abandoned
Reeves 2012 (Rodger, Poet and Professor at University of Illinois, Black
Western Thought: Toward a Theory of the Black Citizen-Object Dissertation
for UT-A)
The deformation that I am arguing for in this chapter and in this project in
general is the deformation of the quest for universal humanity for the
black citizen-object; some might argue that this is not new; isnt this what
black studies departments, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts
Movement have petitioned for? And I would say, no. And yes. All of these
movements were interested in a black humanity, one that was allowed to
articulate and possess its particularity, its own standards, traditions, and
notions of beauty that were not merely black-washed versions of the ruins
and monuments of Anglo-European and Anglo-American cultures, histories,
and aesthetics. But they were still arguing for the status of human ,
bartering and trading in the discourses of modernity and universal
humanity which uphold notions of purity through the human/nonhuman
divide. And this quest for humanity, particular or universal, is a Sisyphusian
endeavor because these discourses of the human, of modernity continue
to lack the democracy and non-normativity necessary to properly account
for the subjectivity of the black object . Quite simply, I am arguing for the
complete eradication and dismantling of the notion that black people
are humans at all. I am not interested in the biological narrative and
ction of the human; instead, I am interested in disrupting the narrative
of human that biological ctions cannot attend tothat of the

philosophical, the realm of the vulgar, the popularthe complexity of the

banal. I argue that we, black folks, have always been objects: in the
language of Karl Marxthe subjunctively imagined speaking commodity, in
the language of Bruno Latour the nonhuman , in the language of Eduoard
Glissantthe opaque Citizen14. I am at once embracing the abjection of the
black body and reaching toward describing and theorizing a notion of black
subjectivity that is unapologetic in its enactment of that abjection,
unapologetic in the playing with the dark, playing with the cultural, psychic,
and spiritual deracination of black bodies throughout history. My notion of the
black citizen-object is not merely a recapitulation, a re-tracking in
discourses that glorified black subjugation. When I write or petition for the
black citizen-object, I am not using the term as slave master might; I am
not seeking to hail black bodies, black aesthetic and intellectual
productions into the marketplace of capitalism, the willful objectification of
the human. The black citizen-object is also not a pejorative term meant to

discuss the ways in which black people are othered, hailed as human
objects or oppressed. The black citizen-object is the hybrid of the black
body and the history of black abjection . This project thinks through the

ways in which moans, shrieks, songs, novels, narrators, preachers, and

poems emanating from black citizen-objects resist, obscure, opaquely
participate and contradict notions of the human, notions of market, value,
and economy. This project argues that black bodies and their attendant
artistic productions articulate an ontology and philosophy that seek opacity
and irreducibility. This irreducibility creates a rhizome, a poetics,

ontology, and philosophy of relationality that resist categorization and

transparency. And because of this liminal positionality, black folks and
their artistic productions stultify the modern mind and its attendant
narratives of intellect, beauty, and sound because of their divergent histories
and divergent notions of intelligence and intelligibility. These divergent
notions of intelligence and intelligibilities are not accidental; they are
inhabitations of resistive and transgressive ontology that seek to enact a
future that disrupts the present and the ever-presence of black
subjugation. As Fred Moten states in In the Break, the history of blackness
is testament to the fact that objects [emphasis mine] can and do resist .

And it is with Moten and this very quote that I will begin the investigation of
the black citizen-object. In In the Break, Fred Moten begins his query into the
aesthetics of the black, radical tradition and the convergence of blackness
and the irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of
subjection with this statement: The history of blackness is testament to
the fact that objects can and do resist . Blacknessthe extended moment
of a specic upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every lineis
a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood
and subjectivity

Public-Private Distinctions
The armatives understanding of a public-private
distinction through surveillance -reifes the black body as a
permanent site of abnormalization that informs powers
violent operation through law
John Fiske 1998. (Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the
world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of
WisconsinMadison. His areas of interest include popular culture, mass
culture, media semiotics and television studies. Surveilling the City
Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.Theory, Culture &
Society 1998 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 6788) VR
Without privacy there can be no public dimension to the public sphere ;
and the same is true for public space. Public space is where private citizens
may meet to go about their private business unregarded by the state

provided, of course, they conform to the law and respect the rights of
others to use that public space for their purposes. The homogenization of
the public sphere is continuous with the homogenization of public space. The
laws and rights that govern the use of public space relate in complicated
ways to the unspecied, but very real, social norms that undergird them .

These norms are typically drawn with narrower boundaries than those of
explicit laws and rights, for in a democracy laws and rights have to be
inclusive and non- discriminatory, whereas norms are necessarily exclusive,
for their very existence depends upon the presence of the abnormalized.

This necessary boundary of the normal contradicts the rights of those who
are abnormalized and thus positioned beyond it; but, in a democracy, it
can only do so under the guise of maintaining the law and protecting the
rights of those who draw the boundary of social normality and thus reside
comfortably within it. These norms can, for instance, silently designate
certain areas of our cities as white, and can be made to operate, against
the letter of the law and against constitutional rights, to exclude nonwhites from them, but this exclusion is effective only because it works
beneath the claim that it is maintaining law and order and protecting the
rights of those who have the power to dene themselves as 'normal
citizens. Underneath the laws that uphold a democracy there is space to

operationalize norms that contradict it, which is why a democratic

totalitarianism is a paradox that works well. Norms, of course, are what hold
the social order in place. The power to dene what is in or out of place is

central to the power over the normal. In the contemporary US city the
image of a Black man 'out of place is immediately moved from
information to knowledge, from the seen to the known. In these conditions
being seen is, in itself, oppressive. Surveillance is not applied equally to
all, for it is a way of imposing norms, and those whose norms are imposed
are, therefore, for practical purposes, free from surveillance whereas
those who have been othered into the 'abnormal have it focused more

intensely upon them. To be seen to be Black or Brown, in all but a few places

in the US, is to be known to be out of place, beyond the norm that someone
else has set, and thus to be subject to white power

Affect/Cultural Expression
The armatives isolation of criminalized cultural
expression is symptomatic of uneven hypermasculinzation of black affect that informs macrolevel
policing structures of surveillance
John Fiske 1998. (Fiske is a media scholar who has taught around the
world. He was a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of
WisconsinMadison. His areas of interest include popular culture, mass
culture, media semiotics and television studies. Surveilling the City
Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.Theory, Culture &
Society 1998 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 15(2): 6788) VR
The power to produce the normal may be the ultimate social power , but its
effectiveness depends upon its ability to extend the normal over the
entire social domain. To achieve this, power needs to be able to see what
it has categorized as the abnormal, for the abnormal is where the threat
to the established order originates; it is, therefore, where social change

originates. The abnormal is where power needs to concentrate its disciplinary

mechanisms, and to the extent that the private is where abnormality may
occur, we may expect it to be increasingly disciplined by surveillance . The
eciency of high-tech and widely extensive surveillance depends vitally
upon an active and minutely rened process of normalization . Ubiquitous
surveillance produces such vast quantities of information that any
knowledge system would collapse under overload if most of the gathered
information were not left dormant and inert until needed and activated
into knowledge. The boundary of the normal is the trigger that activates
information and transforms it into knowledge. Behaviors and social groups
who lie on, or over, this arbitrarily inscribed boundary are thus dispropor
tionately the object of surveillance, because inert information about them
is routinely transformed into power-bearing knowledge . The Drug

Enforcement Agency, for instance, has a set of norms whose transgression

allows it to identify a likely drug courier. These norms enable it to stop and
search those who can be seen to be outside them at airports, bus stations
and on the highways. Ehrenreich (1990) has reconstructed from recent trials
some of the video-visible features by which DEA agents can recognize those
who are thus abnormalized: they include: - wearing gold chains - wearing a
black jump suit - carrying a gym bag - being a member of ethnic groups
associated with the drug trade - traveling to or from a source city such as
LA, Miami or Detroit, or in a car bearing license plates from a state
containing source cities, though New York will do The Black activist
intellectual Zears Miles read the full list on Black Liberation Radio and
pointed out that it worked to punish Black expressiveness (in a way that
has a chilling effect upon freedom of expression) and that in order to avoid

being stopped and searched at airports or on the highways Black travelers

must, as far as possible, deny their Black culture and identity, and look

and behave like whites. Surveillance is a technology of normalization that

identies and discourages the cultural expression and behavior of social
formations that differ from those of the dominant, and thus chills any
public display of difference. It does inhibit a free and relaxed citizenry. The
panopticon was a machine of normalization. It was designed to monitor
abnormal behavior, to measure its steady progress toward the normal, and
to identify the point at which the prisoner could be returned to society
and re-enter normality. This early panoptic surveillance was limited,
however, for it could monitor behavior only: its effects could be only
corrective and not preventative, it was necessarily post hoc. To be

preventative, that is, to be proactive rather than reactive, surveillance has to

be able to identify the abnormal by what it looks like rather than by what it
does: it needs to abnormalize, or criminalize, by visible social category, not
by social behavior. Scientists in the 19th century devoted much energy to
this enterprise, and the camera was a vital tool in their efforts. They spent
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on July 27, 2015 84 Theory,
Culture & Society Vol. 15 No. 2 long hours poring over photographs of
criminals and lunatics in their attempt to produce visibly identifiable
categories of the abnormal (the criminal or the insane) that could be subject
to corrective action in advance of any deviant behavior. Black masculinity
may form the rst social category that is both abnormalized and visible .
And the LAPD have not been slow to take advantage of the fact: In
Operation Hammer Chief Darryl Gates instructed his ocers to pick up
anyone Hooking suspicious (Davis, 1990: 268; emphasis added). As a result,
1500 young Black men were taken in for questioning. While most were
charged with minor offenses, such as curfew and trac violations, some
were not charged at all but simply had their names and addresses logged in
the LAPD anti-gang task force database: documentation is a necessary
component of surveillance. In a similar operation, the Gang Related Active
Tracker Suppression program, LAPD ocers were instructed to interrogate
anyone who they suspect is a gang member, basing their assumptions on
their dress or their use of hand signals (Davis, 1990: 272). Kelley (1996:
133) comments on an important sub theme in gangsta rap that protests this
criminalization by appearance as part of an ongoing battle for free
expression and unfettered mobility in public spaces. This criminalization by
visual category is not conned to the ghetto. Michael Eric Dyson
(1993:191-3) tells a searing story of attempting to draw some cash from his
credit card in a bank. He is a Black man, and was wearing a black running
suit (I dont know if he was wearing a gold chain). He is also an academic
and a Baptist preacher, but these characteristics were not visible: his
Blackness, his maleness and his running suit, however, were . The teller

refused to advance any money. Dysons request to see the manager started
an apparently irreversible sequence of events which culminated in the
manager slicing his card in two with a pair of scissors. When Dyson
protested, the manager called the police. Patricia Williams (1991: 44-51), a
professor of law, tells a similar story of being refused entry into, ironically, a
United Colors of Benetton store because she was Black, and of the editorial

censorship she encountered when writing up the incident for a white legal
journal. Racism is the paradigmatic instance of abnormalization by visible
and thus surveillable category. The abnormalization of the racial other
that enables the DEA to identify drug runners by what they look like, the

bank similarly to identify fraudulent credit card users, and the store to
identify shoplifters by their appearance rather than their behavior, is a

process without which surveillance cannot work, whiteness cannot work

and totalitarianism cannot work. At the core of this process is, of course,
the way that whiteness normalizes itself, and excludes itself both from
categorizing and from being categorizable: it thus ensures its invisibility
an invisibility that extends into the widespread white ignorance of such

incidents. Whiteness wants to see everything except its own operations. We

whites, whose norms are used to abnormalize, categorize and identify the
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on July 27, 2015 Fiske Surveilling the City 85 others who are not us, cannot experience directly the
oppressive application of those norms, for they are applied from our position,
not upon it. Indeed, we often do not know that such incidents occur, let
alone how routine they are. Many African-Americans, however, not only
feel the oppressive applications of norms, but also see how whites are
largely free from the constraints of normalization, and the perception of
the difference is part of the experience of discrimination.

Spectactular Violence
Dissecting spectacular violence, like wars, overshadows
quotidian violence like police beatings
James 96 [Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities
and a professor in political science, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism,
Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, 1996,
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816687459/9780816687459-9.pdf]
The deadly spectacle of racist police beatingsdisciplining poor,
feminized, and dark-skinned communitiesis overshadowed by more
spectacular displays of deadly state force . The 1985 police bombing and
incineration of civilians in a black Philadelphia neighborhood provides an
illustration that has generated far less attention and social outrage than
the Branch Davidian confrontation and deaths in Waco, Texas . The bombing of the
headquarters of MOVE, a radical black, back-to-nature organization (with some white members) was supervised by
a black former military ocer and white police ocials and approved by black mayor Wilson Goode, who publicly

In their
confrontation with MOVE, police used explosives similar to those deployed
in Vietnam; a block of rowhouses was burned down. Eleven people including four children
died. Local residents who witnessed the bombing and one of the two survivors give accounts of children who
disappeared while eeing from the back of a burning house surrounded by police. Black residents also
offered unsubstantiated reports of police marksmen stationed in the alley
shooting survivors and throwing their bodies into the burning house .
Conversely, Philadelphia police contend that the parents and caretakers of the
children were responsible for their deaths and that police engaged in no criminal activity.
resolved to end the standoff between police and MOVE members "by any means necessary."

Unlike the Branch Davidians (who were implicated in executing adults and children and starting the fire that
consumed their Waco compound), those

who died in the MOVE bombing did not

become martyrs among the extreme right or mainstream America as
victims of encroaching federalism and police power; nor were their deaths cited as a
motivating factor by extremists in the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and finally, the deaths
provoked no public outcry leading to congressional hearings such as those
in the case of white separatist Randy Weaver and the deaths of his wife and son during a
shootout with Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm agents. No police were ever indicted or
disciplined for the MOVE deaths or destruction of black homes on Osage
Avenue in Philadelphia (although a civil suit was settled in June 1996).

Their focus on surveillance as a public spectacle

naturalizes the violence that happens beyond what is seen
the state isnt looking, its killing
James 96 [Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities
and a professor in political science, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism,
Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, 1996,
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816687459/9780816687459-9.pdf]

Foucault's elision of racial bias in historical lynching and contemporary

policing predicts his silence on the racialization of prisons and the death
penalty in the United States. For Foucault, during the ancien regime "the innite
segmentation of the body of the regicide" manifested "the strongest
power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime
explode into its truth" (227). That dominating, totalizing power, he argues, appears in contemporary society as "an
interrogation without end" or "an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more

analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed,
the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination" (227).

Constant monitoring, bureaucratic documentation and analysis, and

interrogation without end are in fact characteristics of American prisons.
Yet through its police and penal executions, the United States also enacts
violence that is fundamentally different from such ceaseless interrogation .
In the bombing of MOVE members in Philadelphia, for instance,
interrogation was never intended; rather, the policing objective was the
death of the targeted subject(s). In other examples, the FBI-COINTELPRO'S
harassment and assassination of black and indigenous leaders during the
civil-rights, Black Panther, and American Indian movements, including the
1969 shootings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police and the
FBI and the shootings at Wounded Knee,7 as well as police killings of
nonactivist blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos all indicate levels of
violence in U.S. domestic policies (rarely reflected on in academe) that
suggest little interest in interrogation. One may argue, following Foucault, that the "carceral
network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. . . . It saves everything, including

The U.S. carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons,

it kills more blacks than any other ethnic group. American prisons constitute an "outside"
what it punishes"(301).

in U.S. political life. In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from
bourgeois self-policing.

The state routinely polices the unassimilable in the literal

hell of lockdown, deprivation tanks, control units, and holes for political
prisoners. In Discipline and Punish Foucault remains mute about the incarcerated
person's vulnerability to police beatings, rape, shock treatments, and
death row. Penal incarceration and executions are the state's procedures
for discarding the unassimilable into an external inferno of nonexistence .
Not everything, nor everyone, is saved. Foucault's assertion that the end of
public executions represents a diminished focus on spectacle and the
body fails to consider, as exemplied in death-penalty biases, that bodies
matter differently in racialized systems . The value placed on racial, economic, and sexual
differences determines the slackening or tightening of the grip on the body. Citing literature on the
penitentiary congress to argue that the state "no longer touched the body,
or at least as little as possible, and then only to reach something other
than the body itself," Foucault also fails to note how essence has been
constructed as linked to physical appearance (n). If "something" refers to the soul, then
one should consider that in national racist mythology Africans and Native Americans were either presumed to have
no soul or one that was debased and in need of conversion and discipline. Foucault's contention that "physical pain,
the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. . . . [and that] punishment has
become an economy of suspended rights" ignores the fact that not everyone is recognized as a state member with
uniformly enforced and equal rights (n).Superfluous

or expendable bodies, institutional

inequalities, and racism as components of discipline and punishment in
the United States mean that the carceral is customized to t racialized
body politics and that race is a marker for criminality and repression . The
Center for the Study of Psychiatry organized a public outcry against the Federal Violence Initiative, which was
approved by the National Mental Health Advisory Council and federally funded "to identify at least 100,000 inner
city children whose alleged biochemical and genetic defects will make them violent in later life. . . . Treatment will
consist of behavior modification in the family, special 'day camps,' and drugs."8 Currently, legislators are

we need
only to recall Governor Nelson Rockefeller's use of the New York State
militia to suppress the Attica uprising in the early 19705; Federal Judge B.
Parker's ruling in the 19805 that the Lexington Control Unit, which was a
behaviormodication prison center for political revolutionaries, must be
attempting to reinstate funding for this program. To do a critical reading of Foucault's paradigm,

closed given U.S. government practices to change political views and

aliations through torture; or U.S. prisoners' accounts of brutality and
torture in the 19905. Because Foucault's paradigm normalizes and universalizes prison in one particular
form, readers might easily miss or dismiss today's reappearance of other control units, chain gangs for (black)
convicts in Alabama (and other states), and popular support for the death penalty. Behind

prison walls,
state executions take place as a private spectacle. In theory, the death penalty
works to deter potential felons (although no correlation between the
death penalty and criminal deterrence has been established); however, in practice
state executions function as a punitive spectacle, one shielded from the
view of the citizenry but projected into its consciousness . One of the most eloquent
writers on the death penalty today is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Considered by many fair-trial
advocates to be a falsely accused political prisoner, journalist Abu-Jamal,
former Black Panther Party and MOVE member, was sentenced to death for
the killing of a Philadelphia policeman. He begins his memoir, Live from Death Row, by
quoting Albert Camus: " Tor there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish
a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict
a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had conned
him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private
life.'"9 When the General Assembly of the Organization of American States discussed a treaty to ban the death
penalty in 1987 as an addition to the American Convention on Human Rights, it was noted that two years earlier the
European Parliament had adopted a similar treaty and condemned U.S. policy favoring the death penalty. Assembly

States seemed committed to the death penalty at a

time when other countries were abolishing it. In 1995, in the same month that South Africa
members noted that the United

outlawed the death penalty, the governor of Pennsylvania signed the execution warrant for Abu-Jamal.In the United

where state executions are on the rise, in over twenty-six states

persons under age eighteen can be legally executed, according to
Amnesty International. The death penalty has been contested in cases of bias in sentencing. Between
States,

1977 and 1986 nearly 90 percent of prisoners executed had been convicted of killing whites, although the number

In January 1985, in McClesky v.

Kemp, Warren McClesky, on death row for killing a white Atlanta
policeman, argued that his constitutional rights were violated because
statistics demonstrated racism in Georgia sentencing. McClesky had first petitioned the
of black victims was approximately equal to that of white victims.

United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, claiming that the Georgia death penalty was discriminatory.
10 According to Amnesty International, which reported the McClesky case, in the 19705 Georgia courts were eleven
times more likely to sentence to death those convicted of killing whites than those convicted of killing blacks;
overall, those who killed European Americans were 20 percent more likely to receive the death penalty than those
who killed African Americans; in similar cases, black defendants received the death penalty more often than whites.

the Supreme Court acknowledged that Georgia's death

sentencing was racially biased; the majority opinion, however, found the 20 percent disparity to
Ruling against McClesky,

be acceptable, declaring it a "marginal" discrepancy in comparison to past racialized death sentencing. The Court
also rejected the appeal on the basis that the plaintiff could not prove that the judge, jury, or prosecutor personally
and intentionally acted out of racism. In the absence of such admissions of racism on the part of the penal system,

Where one cannot

prove intent, racist violence is merely a theoretical possibility or
improbability on the part of the state. Such improbability was insucient
ground for the court to issue a stay of execution.Penal institutions are on
the outside of U.S. domestic political life, in which the punishing violence
inflicted on the incarcerated is rarely considered by the general populace .
There are other forms of outside or external infernos. In U.S. foreign policy during the 19805,
the punishment inflicted against people in national independence
movements reached a level of terror through U.S. funding of contras in an
effort to police by proxy.
McClesky had no proof that Georgia intended to violate his constitutional rights.

Settler Discourse
The rhetoric of the 1AC articulates one of Settler discourse
causing the savage to be removed from all conversation
and in turn constructs those bodies to be deemed socially
dead. This mindset propagates the white binary allowing
for the antagonism of the savage to exist as an object,
unable to dene under an agency.
Wilderson 10 (Frank B. III, He Is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker
and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the
University of California, Irvine, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, book, page 242 and 248,
file:///C:/Users/Nicole/Downloads/Red%20White%20and%20Black%20-%20FB
%20Wilderson.pdf, July 28 | Alfredo)
Their strategy of analysis differs from dominant trends in scholarship in
that they are concern[ed] with therapeutics as a form of authority. This
means that their analysis focuses on the rhetorical strategies through
which the discourse of psychoanalysis (in an historical milieu of advanced

liberalism) becomes authoritative. Their analysis is not animated by the

question why therapeutics but by the question how therapeutics (31).
Similarly, we have asked ourselves how, rhetorically, the Settler/Masters
grammar of exploitation and alienation functions: in what way is this
grammar authoritative in discourses as disparate as feminism, Marxism, and
Western aesthetics? lxv We asked ourselves why there is no articulation

between the Slaves grammar of suffering and the Settler/Masters

grammar of suffering: what prevents them from being simultaneously
authoritative? Now, we nd ourselves faced with sovereignty as a modality
of the Savages grammar of suffering, with the network through which its
authority functions, and with the possibility or impossibility of its
articulation with the Settler and/or the Slave. In Concerning Violence,
Fanon splits an important hair between structural position and political
discourse when he writes that natives do not lay a claim to the truth;
they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth
(Wretched49). For Fanon, this ontological truth makes morality [i.e.
political action/discourse/aesthetics] very concrete; it is to silence the
settlers deance, to break his flaunting violence in a word, to put him out

of the picture (44). I intend to precede in such a way as to trouble Fanons

assertion of native ontology when the US Savage is the native in question.

For the bifurcation of Savage ontology often works, cinematically and

within the ontological meditations and political common sense under
consideration here, to put the Settler back into the picture (makes her/him
present on screen), and works, however unwittingly, to defer indenitely an
ethical encounter between the Savage and the Slave.

Sociolgical
The 1AC only understands violence on the level of the sociological register, not the
ontological register
Wilderson-2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Blackp.

8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even
sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or

If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a

paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very
antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile
is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology
would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the
emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Here
not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarshipis
where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of
racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed.

Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of
how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged
popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries
on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the metacommentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson,
and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the
semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory,
Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were
during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new
protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our
globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be
foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius structured
by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for
which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the
Black position, some

might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the state by the Civil Rights
Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory
that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why
should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could
answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims
successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality,
mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V
infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life. But
such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves
on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be
forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of stasis and change, all
of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward
spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am
calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the
assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor
power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery
and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once

the "solid"
plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims
against the state"the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even
contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black positiondisintegrates into
thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in
addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer

but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is,
to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations
that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our

analysis cannot be approached through the rubric

of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the
interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the
Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and
Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

Social Relations
Black bodies are able to gain temporarily agency through
sadistic aggression as those bodies self-criminalize in
order to be a subject of society. In this development,
White bodies could not be positioned as Whites without
the acknowledgement of deliration done by the black
body.
Wilderson 10 (Frank B. III, He Is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker
and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the
University of California, Irvine, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, book, page 351,
file:///C:/Users/Nicole/Downloads/Red%20White%20and%20Black%20-%20FB
%20Wilderson.pdf, July 28 | Alfredo)
But theories (i.e., Marxism, feminism, and film theory) which unpack the
hypostasized form which value takes, as it masks both its differential and
social relations, experience the humiliation of their explanatory power when
confronted with the Black. For the Black has no social relation(s) to be
either masked or unmaskednot, that is, in a structural sense . Social
relations depend on various pretenses to the contrary; therefore, what
gets masked is the matrix of violence that makes Black relationality an
oxymoron. To relate, socially, one must enter a social drama with spatial and
temporal coherencein other words, with human capacity. The Slave is not
so much the antithesis of human capacity (that might imply a dialectic
potential in the Slaves encounter with the world) as s/he is the absence of
human capacity. Important as these differences are, however, they maintain
between them an uncanny solidarity in relation to the estate of slavery
(Spillers). That solidarity is evidenced by the fact that the slave remains
un-thought, foreclosed by the inspiration of we. The Slave is assumed to
have been liberated and now is assumed to function like any other
disparate entity in the drama of value. The assumptive logic of this
multifaceted, superficial, and commonsense deployment of we is itself
supported by a more rigorous and ontological pair of assumptions ,

regardless of the fact that its common sense and/or aesthetic adherents
cannot articulate such assumptions. The assumptions can be summed up by
this statement: we are all imbued with spatial and temporal capacity .
Thus, the ground zero of communal inspiration (assumptions shared by the
narrative strategies of Monsters Ball, local film reviews, White film theory,
and Marxist meditations on the grammar of suffering) is a kind of faith in the
subjects ability to, in the first instance, possess spatial and temporal
capacity, and, in the second experiential instance, shape and/or contest
cartographic and historiographical coherence (i.e., to be present
anthropologically and historically; to be a cultural being). But it is bad faith.
For it is this more rigorous and ontological pair of supports that the Black
destroys or, more accurately, that the Black gives his/her flesh to White
lm , in rare moments of narrative exile or neglect, may be the only kind of

White discourse that destroys (unintentionally but nonetheless

empathically) its own pair of ontological supports.

Free Speech
White bodies have always occupied the realm of free
speech and used it to legitimize violence against
populationsthe affs plea for free speech only serves to
benet dominant white culture.
National Center for Human Rights Education 11[opened its doors
and joined 21 other countries which launched human rights education
projects as part of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education,
First Amendment and Racial Terrorism, 2011, University of Dayton,
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/waronterrorism/racial02.htm]//JC
//

Racists in the United States have always been able to cloak their ideas in
the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which governs freedom of
speech. That our legal system not only shields racists but allows farmbelt
Fuhrers like Gary Lauck to export hate around the world like nuclear waste
can be confusing to anti-fascists in other countries . This article will explain some of the
workings of the First Amendment, show how racists manipulate freedom of speech to
commit terrorism in the U.S., and discuss how anti-racists can challenge
fascist propaganda, individuals and organizations by using international
human rights law. Understanding the First Amendment The United States has distinctive political
principles and values that define its national identity. The First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no
law...abridging the freedom of speech." The amendment was designed to insure that the debate on public issues is
"uninhibited, robust and wide open." Those who believe absolutely in the First Amendment believe that racist ideas
deserve as much protection as any other idea in a free democracy -- perhaps even more because of their odious
content. Absolutists often quote Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes who declared that "the best test of
truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." This "marketplace of
ideas" approach is supposed to encourage the free exchange of ideas and a rational process by which listeners can
choose the best ideas and ignore others. Such interpretations are insuciently conscious of the social reality of

Absolutists ignore the persistent

inequality in the power of oppressed groups to communicate their ideas in
the marketplace, just like Bill Gates can keep other companies from selling computer operating systems. In
fact, the dominant group not only has the greater power to communicate
their ideas, but they even have more credibility doing so . inequities in
racial power makes competition in the social marketplace purely
hypothetical. There is no space not already occupied by the dominant
white culture . Manipulating the First Amendment U.S. courts consistently fail to
acknowledge that the purpose of racist speech is to continue the
subordination of one people by another . This leads to a legalistic
distinction between acts that constitute racial terrorism and the words
and ideas that motivate the attackers . In our country, acts assault, battery,
vandalism, arson, murder, lynchings, physical harassment are punishable
under our court system. But words like nigger or symbols such as Nazi swastikas or
burning crosses -- are protected by the courts as acts of individual expression . To
protect the status quo of white domination , our legal justice system rst
formally excluded African Americans from equality , and it now stands
passively aside while private actors do the dirty work of legitimating
social inequality and silencing victims. U.S. courts have not always
privileged white racists to express themselves at the expense of the
safety of African Americans and other people of color . A pertinent Supreme Court case
uneven power relationships between racists and their targets.

was decided in 1952 after two race riots in Illinois in which more than one hundred men, women and children were
killed, forcing another 6,000 African Americans to ee the state. In that case, Beauharnais v. Illinois, the head of the
White Circle League distributed a leaet declaring that African Americans would terrorize white neighborhoods with
"rapes, robberies, knives, guns and marijuana." The pamphleteer was convicted when the court decided that
libelous statements aimed at groups of people, like those aimed at individuals, fall outside First Amendment
protection. While it was certainly a victory for the anti-racist movement, this decision did not go far enough in
banning the activities of racist individuals, largely because the government was not yet ready to outlaw its own
racist policies. The Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision occurred two years later in 1954. On
the other hand, the current Supreme Court is dominated by the right wing. Its interpretations disconnect racial
terrorism from the harm inicted on victims. In 1992, the court decided in R.A.V. vs. St. Paul that a cross burned in
the front yard of an African American family by white teenagers was a form of protected symbolic speech. This

Using the
articial distinction between speech and action , the Court decided that the
act of burning a cross to intimidate a black family was equivalent to
freedom of speech.
decision effectively trumped the familys right to live in their home free from racial terrorism.

The affs reliance on the Constitution upholds antiblackness the constitution was coded in white racial
privilege the very idea of liberty and freedom was only
reserved for whites
Helfand No Date (Judy, Intersectionality, Worldwide and Other Pages,
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white11.htm)
Prior to the establishment of colonial Virginia,

Europeans already had a history of viewing

non-European people as different and inferior, even questioning their
humanity. The institution of slavery for African captives was established in the Caribbean, and Spain
purchased African bond laborers to work alongside or replace the Indians they enslaved in South and Central

The slave trade was an increasingly lucrative business for

European nations during the seventeenth century and became a booming business for
England in the eighteenth. Some researchers argue that European culture produced
people who needed an Other, a class of people who were inferior and
incorporated qualities rejected or even demonized by European culture, in
which case, Europeans would be predisposed to the development and
acceptance of a system of white racial privilege. These are all interesting and important
issues. Most likely, European cultural themes, European thought patterns and
psychological needs, and historical models of slavery all contributed to the
construction of whiteness, a system designed for the specific conditions of colonial Virginia, and
easily adapted by other colonies in the U.S. In fact, the system was so well digested that by
the time of the U.S. Constitution, most of those engaged in drafting and
enacting it saw no internal conflict in adapting a document based on
liberty, equality, and the rights of men that excluded African American
lifetime bond laborers from those inalienable rights. Liberty was, within whiteness, reserved
for white people.
America with conquest.

International Relations
International relations theory strategically omits
discussions of race which creates macrostructures of antiblackness on a global scale
Persaud et al 01 [Randolph B., associate Professor School of International
Service, R.B.J., a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Victoria, Canada. He is the chief editor of the journal
International Political Sociology, Apertura: Race in International Relations,
October-December 2001, https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G182517371/apertura-race-in-international-relations]//JC//

international relations has shown a famous aversion to complex

and multiply contested concepts. It has been especially silent about race, as
about many other practices that cannot be quickly reduced to claims
about the necessities of states in a modern states-system . Like culture, economy, or
gender, it does not t into the prevailing division of the world into "levels"
above (the international) and below (the individual) the state. Unlike culture, economy, and gender,
there has been very little attempt to insist that claims about race do
indeed deserve serious discussion in the context of a changing
international or global order. From time to time, of course, the discipline does open
up to problems hitherto deemed outside its epistemological boundaries .
"Opening up" has historically resulted from sustained wars of position
between the forces that represent a broadening of the proper subjects of
the discipline and those who insist that international relations (IR) is about
"war and peace" among states. It may be time for one more apertura ;
namely, for race to be systematically incorporated into the analysis of
global politics. Consider the following: The first global attempt to speak of equality focused upon race. The
first human rights provisions in the United Nations Charter were placed there because of race. The rst
international challenge to a country's claim of domestic jurisdiction and
exclusive treatment of its own citizens centered upon race . The
international convention with the greatest number of signatories is that
on race. Within the United Nations, more resolutions deal with race than any other
subject. And certainly one of the most long-standing and frustrating problems in the United Nations is that of
The theory of

race. Nearly one hundred eighty governments, for example, recently went as far as to conclude that racial
discrimination and racism still represent the most serious problems for the world today. (1) Extensive as it is, the

The signicance of
race goes much beyond various multilateral and other diplomatic
achievements. Race has been a fundamental force in the very making of
the modern world system and in the representations and explanations of
how that system emerged and how it works. This can only be understood, however, if we
look at race as an interrelated set of material, ideological, and epistemological practices. The articulation
of these latter into full-fledged racialized discourses have produced , over
time, social formations and even world orders that were macrostructural
systems of inclusion and exclusion.
above synopsis provided by Paul G. Lauren must be viewed as very limited indeed.

Their focus on the grisly spectacle of foreign policy

upstages the violence of domestic policing
James 96 [Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities
and a professor in political science, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism,

Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, 1996,

http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816687459/9780816687459-9.pdf]
In the 19805,

domestic policing and police brutality, including the 1985 MOVE

bombing, were upstaged by the grisly spectacle of terrorism in U.S. foreign policy. During
this time the deaths of more than 30,000 Nicaraguans and 10,000 Angolans by contras and more than 100,000

the use of state terrorism and

torture of civilians to destabilize socialist governments and revolutionary
struggles. During the Reagan administrations, the tortured, dismembered body
routinely appeared as a consequence of Salvadoran and Guatemalan death
squads funded by the U.S. Congress or CIA. In El Salvador and Guatemala,
torture and terroristic killings were deployed to derail social, political, and
guerrilla movements by workers and indigenous peoples. In the contra wars in
Mozambicans by South Africans (linked to CIA funding) represented

Nicaragua and Angola, public torture and terrorism were vehicles for challenging the sovereignty of socialist

U.S. president or commander-in-chief could nance

or turn a blind eye to covert support for violence to enforce U.S.
hegemony in a certain region. In the post-World War II era, the United States reigned as a global
governments. We now know that a

military and economic power; with its status as transnational sovereign, the United States (referring to itself as
"America") exerted inuence over the Americas, designating Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean
as "our backyard."According to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Defense Information and American Defense

the United States began language and military schools for

governments in the Americas. Today, International Military Education and
Training (IMET) programs train military leaders and troops, funding the School of
Monitor, in 1946

the Americas (SOA)also known as the "low-intensity conict school"at Fort Benning, Georgia.11 Both IMET and
SOA taught some of the most notorious dictators and militarists in Latin America and the Caribbean. (After the
withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Latin American and Caribbean countries, the most professionalized

Rather than policing national borders for outside

aggression, SOA graduates policed internal borders, suppressing local,
indigenous, or student resistance to state violence and control. Since the 19505,
military was left in control.)

SOA has trained more than five thou sand Salvadoran military personnel, who have been accused of rampant
torture and assassinations of civilians, Farabundo Marti Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) members, as well as the highly
publicized execution of four outspoken Jesuit priests and their housekeeper.

Graduates of SOA include

some of the region's best-known dictators:

Cuba's Fulgencio Batista; the Dominican

Republic's Rafael Trujillo; Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza; its "hall of fame" includes El Salvador's Roberto
D'Aubisson, known as an architect of the death squads, and Panama's Manuel Noriega, considered so notorious a
drug runner that the U.S. military bombed Panama in 1989 allegedly in order to extradite him for trial in Miami .

The school instructed the ocers' corps of the Haitian military, which
carried out a 1991 military coup against democratically elected president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide; in 1994, the United States had to send troops to police
its SO graduates in order to restore Aristide to his presidency (and to stem the
immigration of Haitian boat people eeing torture and execution in their own country).

International policy is structured on exclusion of the Black

body-their scenarios of the global internet are
constructed on racial exclusion.
Kim 15

(Jae Kyun Kim, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Yellow over Black: History of Race in
Korea and the New Study of Race and Empire. Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(2) 205217.)
Though other brief examples will be presented later, let me revisit the quotation from the first page. Who were
considered to be inferior by Koreans in the age of empire? Who should be extinct? In other words, the quotation
from Dongnipsinmun the first private-led Korean newspaper implies more than aspirations for Western

racial others are mostly blacks and natives. This

raises an important question for the study of race. As racial construction of whiteness would
be impossible without racial otherness, if we can reveal that the Korean racial identity
civilization. As we will see later, those

fundamentally requires either racial otherness or blackness, this goes beyond the isolated regional history and

Global white
supremacy a system, a particular kind of polity, so structured as to
requires theoretical adjustment of the concept of global white supremacy (Mills, 1998).

advantage whites (Mills, 1998: 100) is an alternative theoretical framework that aims to supplement
previous theories that overlooked race as a fundamental political philosophy. In order to criticize and deconstruct
global white supremacy, Mills suggests that blackness, which has been overlooked by mainstream Western political
philosophy, must be visible. Since global white supremacy has taken different forms around the world throughout
history, he argues that various approaches are required. From the empirical to theoretical levels, many scholars

how antiblackness has been prevalent in transnational immigration law, policy and
practice not only in the US but also in the UK and Canada. Also, Wilderson (2003) articulates that Gramscis
concept of civil society does not yield any space to overcome white
supremacy because it only concerns a subaltern structured by capital
while capitalism required violence toward black or blacked bodies. Without any
have successfully revealed those hidden structures. For example, Bashi (2004) shows

collective physical racial contacts, the construction of Korean identity still required racial otherness not only

blackness, which signied inferiority. In other words, Korean racial

identity did require symbolic violence toward blackness prior to the era of
whiteness but also

globalization. Yet it has been hardly visible in existing race studies. If we remember the goal of the theories on
global white supremacy, this hidden blackness should not be overlooked. What can this racial history in locations
where blackness is least expected contribute to theories of global white supremacy? Rather than clinging to the
contact hypothesis the idea that contact between races would eventually lead to deracialized, harmonious
relations an answer to the question would expand the horizon of the existing theories on

supremacy.

global white

Internet Link
The internet is a site for racialized violence that enables
hate groups and hate crimes.
Breckheimer 02 [Peter J. Breckheimer II, Class of 2002, University of
Southern California Law School; B.A. University of Southern California, A
HAVEN FOR HATE: THE FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC IMPLICATIONS OF
PROTECTING INTERNET HATE SPEECH UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT, page
1494-1496, ]//JC//
The U.S. Supreme Court has observed that the

content on the Internet is as diverse as

human thought.1 The Internet hosts an assortment of ideas and opinions.
While some embrace this diversity and perceive the Internet as a facilitator for robust debate, others
attempt to stifle this dialogue by using the Internet as a tool for
discrimination and suppression. Indeed, many hate groups have established
Web sites not only encourage intolerance, but also to promote violence. The
result has been clear: Internet technology has spurred a resurgence among hate
groups in the United States. The rise in activity and virulence of these
groups has had deadly consequences. From Web pages that scientifically support the inherent
inferiority of [B]lacks2 to sites that feature animation of blond teen-agers firing ries at a poster of a pig that

bigotry forcefully makes its mark on the

Internet. Moreover, seemingly every type of intolerance is represented: antigay,4
anti-White,5 antifeminism,6 and everything in between.7 Furthermore, because of the capabilities
associated with the Internet, hate groups are no longer limited to text
messages as in print media; rather, their capabilities include hate music,8
interactive hate games,9 and streaming radio broadcasts10 of hate on their
Web sites. The results of this interactive hate have had dire repercussions
for American society. For example, The Turner Diaries, a book available on the Internet that details the
reads, Kill the Jew pigs before its too late,3

successful world revolution of an all-White army, is believed to have inspired several major acts of violence,
including the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.11 Additionally, [i]n Colorado, Internet hateas well as
dangerous information about weapons and bombshas been cited by some as a factor in the Columbine High

hate groups that have seen large increases in their

membership from online recruiting have been closely linked to murder and
bombing attempts aimed at Jews, Blacks, and homosexuals.13 These examples
School shootings.12 Further,

winnow away any credence one may lend to the ageold adage, sticks and stones may break my bones but words

increasingly it seems prudent to take seriously groups

such as the National Alliance, the largest and most active neo-Nazi
organization in the nation, whose propaganda promotes biological
determinism, hierarchical organization, and a long-term eugenics program
involving at least the entire populations of Europe and America .14 As
evidenced above, words from these hateful organizations may in fact have a
deadly result.
will never hurt me. Indeed,

History Links
Modern understandings of history attempt to erase the
history of anti-black violence
Vazquez 2009 (Rolando, Roosevelt Academy/Utrect University. Modernity,
Coloniality, and Visibility: The Politics of Time.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/7.html)
'We are without face, without word, without voice'. A Zapatista said that this is the reason for wearing the balaclava.
The Zapatista balaclava has turned oblivion into a sign of rebellion. Their fight can be seen as a fight for visibility.
With these words we want to enquire how oblivion has been a constitutive part of modernity's politics of time.

The

forms of oppression that characterize modernity or more precisely,

modernity/ coloniality cannot be suciently understood only through its
material process without taking into account oblivion, invisibility. Modern
systems of domination are not just about material exploitation; they are
also about a politics of time that produces the other by rendering it
invisible, relegating the other to oblivion. There is an intimate connection
between oblivion and invisibility. The destruction of memory, as a result of the modern politics of

invisibility is tantamount to de-politicization. In this

context it is possible to say that the struggles for social justice are struggles for
visibility. The oppressed can succeed in their fight against invisibility by bringing the claims for justice into
the light of the public, and thus becoming The use of the term 'visibility' signals the close
relation that there is between the material means of oppression and
epistemic discrimination, violence. I propose to approach the modernity/ coloniality
time produces invisibility. In turn,

compound and its social production of oblivion[3] through the question of time. Through the critique of modern time
we see how modernity and hence coloniality means the imposition of a time that dismisses the past, turns the
future into the teleology of progress and holds the present to be the only site of the real. Under the light of the
critique of time, the modernity/coloniality compound shows its double face. On the one hand we have the

we
have coloniality's strategies of invisibility, which impose oblivion
and silence and erase the past as a site of experience. The condition
of possibility of these strategies over the visible, the monopoly of
the sense of the real, is grounded on the modern notion of time and
constitutes under this perspective the politics of time of the
modernity/ coloniality compound.
hegemony over visibility in the spectacle of modernity, the phantasmagoria of modernity, and on the other,

The south was built upon the backs of slaveseverything

from the political system to the ideologies of southerners
is influenced by the slavery of the past
University of Rochester 13 [s one of the nation's leading private
universities. Located in Rochester, N.Y., the University gives students
exceptional opportunities for interdisciplinary study and close collaboration
with faculty through its unique cluster-based curriculum, Legacy of Slavery
Still Fuels Anti-Black Attitudes in the Deep South, University of Rochester,
September 18, http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=7202]//JC//
Although slavery was abolished 150 years ago, its political legacy is alive and well , according
to researchers who performed a new county-by-county analysis of census data and opinion polls of more than

white Southerners who live

today in the Cotton Belt where slavery and the plantation economy
dominated are much more likely to express more negative attitudes
39,000 southern whites. The team of political scientists found that

toward blacks than their fellow Southerners who live in nearby areas that
had few slaves. Residents of these former slavery strongholds are also
more likely to identify as Republican and to express opposition to racerelated policies such as armative action. Conducted by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell,
and Maya Sen from the University of Rochester, the research is believed to be the first to demonstrate
quantitatively the lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South. The findings
hold even when other dynamics often associated with racial animosity are factored in, such as present day
concentrations of African Americans in an area, or whether an area is urban or rural. " Slavery

does not
explain all forms of current day racism," says Acharya. "But the data clearly demonstrates
that the legacy of the plantation economy and its reliance on the forced
labor of African Americans continues to exacerbate racial bias in the Deep
South." The findings are reported in a working paper that will be presented for the first time at the Politics of

Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium at the University of California at Riverside on Sept. 27. The study
looked at data from 93 percent of the 1,344 Southern counties in the Cotton Beltthe crescent-shaped band where

20
percent increase in the percentage of slaves in a county's pre-Civil War
population is associated with a 3 percent decrease in whites who identify
as Democrats today and a 2.4 percent decrease in the number of whites
who support armative action. The "slavery effect" accounts for an up to 15
percentage point difference in party aliation today; about 30 percent of
whites in former slave plantation regions report being Democrats,
compared to 40 to 45 percent white Democrats in counties that had less
than 3 percent slaves, according to the authors. Despite the region's similarity in culture and its shared
history of legalized slavery and Jim Crow laws, "the South is not monolithic," says Blackwell. Their
analysis shows that without slavery, the South today might look fairly
similar politically to the North. The authors compared counties in the
South in which slaves were rareless than 3 percent of the populationwith counties in
the North that were matched by geography, farm value per capita, and
total county population. The result? There is little difference in political views
today among residents in the two regions. "In political circles, the South's political
plantations ourished from the late 18th century into the 20th century. The researchers found that a

conservatism is often credited to 'Southern exceptionalism,'" says Blackwell. "But the data shows that such modernday political differences primarily rise from the historical presence of many slaves." But how is it possible that an
institution so long outlawed continues to inuence views in the 21st century? The authors point to both economic

the economic incentives to exploit

former slaves persisted well into the 20th century. "Before mechanization,
cotton was not really economically viable without massive amounts of
cheap labor," explains Sen. After the Civil War, southern landowners resorted to racial
violence and Jim Crow laws to coerce black eld hands, depress wages, and
tie tenant farmer to plantations. "Whereas slavery only required a majority of (powerful) whites in
the state to support it, widespread repression and political violence required the
support and involvement of entire communities," the authors write. Again comparing the
and cultural explanations. Although slavery was banned,

county-by-county data, the researchers found evidence of the relationship between racial violence and economics
in the historical record of lynchings. Between 1882 and 1930, lynching rates were not uniform across the South, but
instead were highest where cotton was king; a 10 percent increase in a county's slave population in 1860 was
associated with a rise of 1.86 lynchings per 100,000 blacks. "For the average Southern county, this would represent
a 20 percent increase in the rate of lynchings during this time period," says Blackwell. By the time economic
incentives to coerce black labor subsided with the introduction of machinery to harvest cotton in the 1930s, antiblack sentiment was culturally entrenched among local whites, the authors write. Those views have simply been
passed down, argue the authors, citing extensive research showing that children often inherit the political attitudes
of their parents and peers. The data, says Sen, points to the importance of institutional and historical legacy when
understanding political views. Most quantitative studies of voters rely on contemporary inuences, such as
education, income, or the degree of urbanity. The findings are also in line with research on the lingering economic
effects of slavery. Studies have shown that former slave populations in Africa, South and Central America, and the
United States continue to experience disparity in income, school enrollment, and vaccinations. For the study, the
authors drew on publically available data, including the 1860 census and the Cooperative Congressional Election
Study, a large representative survey of American adults. No external funding was required for the analysis

Advantage Links

Risk Assessment
Their risk assessment is created to uphold power
structures
Saunders 5 (Rebecca Saunders, Professor of Comparative Lit at the Illinois
State University, Risky Business: Edward Said as Literary Critic, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Pages 529-532)
Risk-free ethics, like all protection from risk, are a class privilege . As Deborah
Lupton puts it, The disadvantaged have fewer opportunities to avoid risks because of their lack of resources

peoples social location and their access to material

resources are integral to the ways in which they conceptualize and deal
with risk.22 Or, as Ulrich Beck argues, Poverty attracts an unfortunate abundance of risks. By contrast,
compared with the advantaged;

wealth (in income, power or education) can purchase safety and freedom from risk.23 Thus when we endorse a
risk-free ethics, we should bear in mind that members of social groups with less to lose and more to gain are more
likely to engage in risky behaviors than are members of more secure and privileged social groups. Moreover, as

Mary Douglas has argued at length, risk is a forensic resource and, much like the danger she elaborated in her

functions as a means of social control. Anthropologists would generally agree, she

dangers to nature are available as so
many weapons to use in the struggle for ideological domination. 24 These
weapons are sharpened, she argues, by Western societies association of risk
assessment with scientic neutrality. Along similar lines, Nick Fox contends that risk
analysis is a deeply political activity. The identication of hazards (and the
consequent denition of what is a risk ) can easily lead to the valorization of
certain kinds of living over others.25 The identication of risk groups
deemed to be threatening to the social orderthe unemployed, criminal, insane, poor,
early work,

writes, that dangers to the body, dangers to children,

foreignare a common technology for establishing boundaries between self and other, the normal and the

is, for securing that formidable battery of distinctions Said

and theirs, proper and improper, higher and lower,
colonial and native, Western and Eastern.26 In a fascinating article on debates over native
title in Australia, Eva Mackey demonstrates both the way in which political actors deploy a
rhetoric of risk, danger, and threat and the uses of risk management to
imperial hegemony. Not only have newspaper headlines presented native title as an issue that has
pathological, that

analyzes between ours

brought the nation to the brink of a dangerous abyss, to the point of destruction, but the Howard government
constructs native title as a danger and risk to the national interest, particularly a risk to competitiveness,
opportunities, and progress. The entire anti-native title lobby have all stated . . . that the uncertainty over native
title is dangerous for investment and economic competitiveness.27 As Mackey points out, these notions of danger
imply a normative, non-endangered state, and it is through ideas of the normal and deviant that institutional
power is maintained.28 A related argument articulated by governmentality theorists is that modern societies
normalize risk avoidance and pathologize risk taking, represent the former as rational and mature, the latter as
irrational and childish oppositions that, again, are familiar to any student of colonial discourse.29 These

an elaborate apparatus of expert knowledge produced

by disciplines such as engineering, statistics, actuarialism, psychology,
epidemiology, and economics, which attempt to regulate risk through
calculations of probability and which view the social body as requiring intervention, management
oppositions are buttressed by

and protection so as to maximize wealth, welfare and productivity.30 Knowledge produced about probability is
then deployed as counsel to individuals about how to conduct their lives. As Lupton contends: In late modern
societies, not to engage in risk avoiding behavior is considered a failure of the self to take care of itselfa form of

Risk-avoiding behavior, therefore,

becomes viewed as a moral enterprise relating to issues of self-control,
self-knowledge and self-improvement.31 This is a characteristic of
neoliberal societies that Pat OMalley, Francois Ewald, and others refer to as the new
prudentialism.32 To recognize that risk is a form of social control, and that risk taking is more necessary to
irrationality, or simply a lack of skillfulness (Greco 1993).

certain classes than to others, is also to recognize that risk is not an objective entity or preexisting fact but is

produced by specific cultural, political, and institutional contexts, as well as through competing knowledges. To call
something a risk, argues Douglas, is to recognize its importance to our subjectivity and wellbeing. 33 Anthony
Giddens, similarly, contends that there

is no risk which can be described without

reference to a value.34 In a frequently cited passage, Ewald writes, Nothing is a risk in
itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all
depends on how one analyses the danger, considers the event. 35 Indeed, this is
precisely the unconscious of risk-management technologies, which assume both
that risks are preexistent in nature and that individuals comport
themselves in strict accordance with a hedonic calculus. 5 3 1 Also embedded within
this insurantial unconscious is the fact that, as Fox puts it, The welladvertised risk will turn out to be connected
with legitimating moral principles.36 If postcolonial studies, as I am arguing, should more rigorously interrogate
risk-avoidance strategies (including those that repress or discipline the foreignness in language) on their political,

risk management (no

indulges in a fantasy of mastery

class, and ideological investments, it should also recognize the degree to which
doubt among modernitys most wildly optimistic formulations)

over uncertainty. In risk-management discourses, risk has taken on the technical meaning of a known or
knowable probability estimate, contrasted with uncertainty, which designates conditions where probabilities are

This transformation of the unknown into a numerical

gure, a quantication of nonknowledge that takes itself for knowledge, attempts to
master whatever might be undesirable in the unknown (i.e., the future) by
inestimable or unknown.

indemnifying it in advanceand thereby advertising its own failure. I believe it could be demonstrated, moreover,
were we to trace the genealogy of this fantasy, that it coincides at crucial moments with the history of colonization.
The notion of risk, first used in relation to maritime adventures, arises contemporaneously with modern imperialism,
to describe the hazards of leaving home. With industrial modernity, and particularly the rise of the science of
statistics in the nineteenth century, it took on themien of instrumental reason and the domination of nature,
nuances that bear an unmistakable resemblance to the logics of concurrent colonial enterprises.37 This fantasy of

risk avoidance is an (implicit or explicit)

maintenance of dominant values. Risk taking, by contrast, is the condition
of possibility of possibility that is, of change . It is perhaps no surprise that ones
political position is the strongest predictor of his/her attitude toward risk.
Risk, as we have seen, is regularly formulated as that which threatens the
dominant order (conceived on the level of a society, a colonial regime, or a
global economic order). That threat, of course, is the danger of
transformation, of reorganized social and ideological hierarchies,
redistributed economic and cultural capital, renovated geopolitical
relationsin short, precisely the kinds of transformation called for by much of
mastery is also a suppression of possibility; in most instances,

postcolonial studies. Risk, including the risk of errors in meaning, may be necessary to any social change, that is, to
engaging in the kind of oppositional criticism Said advocates: Criticism
writes, as

must think of itself, he

constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and

abuse.38 The necessity of risk to change (and the craven conformism of risk avoidance) is a principle Friedrich
Nietzsche elaborates in Beyond Good and Evil, where, critiquing the timidity of morality, he calls for a new
species of philosophers, willing to risk untruth, uncertainty, even ignorance, thinkers willing to inhabit the
dangerous maybe.39 Nietzsche was also prescient in recognizing that howmuch or how little is dangerous to the
community . . . now constitutes the moral perspective; here, too, fear is again themother ofmorals.40 More
recently, philosophers such as Derrida and John D. Caputo (explicitly taking up Nietzsches vocation) have argued
that change, indeed social responsibility itself, inevitably demands a wager on uncertain possibilities (or, in
Derridean terms, the aporia). Let us not be blind, writes Derrida, to the aporia that all change must endure. It
is the aporia of the perhaps, its historical and political aporia. W ithout

the opening of an
absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a
perhaps, there would never be either event or decision. . . . no decision (ethical,
juridical, political) is possible without interrupting determination by engaging
oneself in the perhaps.41 On similar grounds, Caputo argues for the suspension of the fine name of
ethics in the name of obligation and contends that to speak of being against ethics and deconstructing ethics is to
own up to the lack of safety by which judging is everywhere beset. . . . to admit that obligation

is not

safe, that ethics cannot make it safe, that it is not nearly as safe as ethics would have us
believe.42

Terrorism
The Armative generalizes the NSAs abuse of power
when in fact surveillance has always tended towards antiblack exploitation
Saito 2002 (Natsu Taylor, Georgia State University Collge of Law, focuses
on the legal history of race in the United States, the plenary power doctrine
as applied to immigrants, American Indians, and U.S. territorial possessions,
and the human rights implications of U.S. governmental policies, particularly
with regard to the suppression of political dissent. "Whose Liberty-Whose
Security-The USA PATRIOT Act in the Context of COINTELPRO and the
Unlawful Repression of Political Dissent." Or. L. Rev. 81 (2002):
1051.http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
handle=hein.journals/orglr81&id=1061&collection=journals&index=)
It has been well-documented by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as by
hundreds of thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),3 7 that the

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intel- ligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Administration
(NSA),

and dozens of other federal, state, and local agencies have engaged
in illegal and unconstitutional actions against U.S. citizen and noncitizen
residents in an effort to silence political dissent. The FBI's COINTELPRO
operations (1956-1971) are perhaps the best known, but these represent just one dimension
of the ongoing political repression which has involved not just illegal
surveillance and inltration, but tactics designed to "disrupt and destroy"
organizations, ranging from the manufacture of conflict among individuals
and groups to the deliberate framing of people for crimes they did not
commit, and-when all else failed-the outright murder of activists. 38 As the

Denver "spyfiles" indicate, groups that engage in lawful political dissent are still being actively and illegally targeted
by those entrusted with upholding the law and the Constitution. When we look at the 2001 Act in the context of the
federal government's actual use of its law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers, we see that these
expanded powers have long been sought-and frequently used, even when illegal-by the ex- ecutive branch. People

communities of
color generally, have not been made more "secure" in any sense of the
term, but have been subjected to physical attacks on their persons and
property by the very agencies that are now being given expanded powers
under the 2001 Act. As Robert Jus- tin Goldstein says in his seminal work, Political Repression in Modern
America From 1870 to 1976: The holders of certain ideas in the United States have been
systematically and gravely discriminated against and subjected to
extraordinary treatment by governmental authorities, such as physical
assaults, denials of freedom of speech and assembly, political
deportations and rings, dubious and discriminatory arrests, intense
police surveillance, and illegal burglaries, wiretaps and interception of
mail.39 Goldstein goes on to point out that governments can carry out politically repressive activities following
engaged in political dissent that is sup- posed to be protected by the First Amendment, and

"legal" procedures or by utilizing means that are illegal under the country's laws.4 It goes without saying that it is
easier and more convenient for govern- ments to use means that are at least facially lawful. The 2001 Act is most
accurately seen as the latest step in the U.S. government's ongoing effort to legitimize unconstitutional practices by
using the current "war on terror," perceived and promoted as a na- tional security crisis, to obtain their legislative
sanction. Legisla- tion does not, of course, make such practices "lawful" in the deeper sense of the term. Actions
which contravene the Consti- tution and fundamental principles of international human rights law-even if
sanctioned by the executive, the legislature, or the judiciary-violate the rule of law and undermine the legitimacy of
the governing power.4' 39 ROBERT JUSTIN GOLDSTEIN, POLITICAL REPRESSION IN MODERN AMERICA FROM 1870
TO 1976, at xxi (rev. ed. University of Illinois Press 2001) (introduction to 1978 edition). 40 Id. at xxx. 41 To note
only the most glaring example in modern history, we have no trouble OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 81, 2002]

The actual history of federal "law enforcement" and "intelligence"

agencies reveals a deeply disturbing pattern of the use of the armed

might and nancial resources of the state to destroy individuals and
organizations deemed politically undesirable. We must assess the 2001 Act in light of this
history-the concrete use of just such powers by the very agencies now being given broader prerogative-and in light
of the fundamental principles of constitutional and international law that give the government the right to act at all.
The question is not whether we are willing to have our shoes x-rayed at the airport to prevent planes from being
hijacked.42 It is whether we are willing to give carte blanche to agencies which, according to their own records,
have used every means at their disposal to silence us.

The war on terror comes from a deeper white ontological

drive to eliminate the Other rather than a geographical
issue
Browne 11 [Simone Browne, ,Ph.D., 2007, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, University of Toronto,
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, American Sociological Associaion, jstor]//JC//
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity is organized into two parts, each a frame from which to examine insecurity
and its attendant practices, ideologies and anxieties. If home land security is the rationality of our time, one way to
approach it is through a critical examination of the form of subjectivity that this very rationality brings into being,
the "insecurity subject." The book's first part, "Security Cultures," does just that by taking up the social construction
of identity theft, the relationship between public perceptions of terrorism and the television series 24, the business
of national security, and the Chris tian fundamentalist fiction series Left Behind. As Torin Monahan explains,

rather than understanding post-9/11 security regimes as a departure from

those of the past, security has simply intensied, giving way to suspension
of law, preemptive action as the means of managing perceived threats , and
privatization of the business of security that sees the citizenry enlisted to
secure the home and the homeland. Monahan rightly notes, "the 'war on terror' is
more ontological than geographical" (p.18). Meaning here that not only is the
insecurity subject made to think and act through missives and alerts from
the National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS), but that the war on terror
must be understood as a pedagogical project where the citizenry is
instructed through rituals and through popular discourse to be perpetually
fearful and at the same time perpetually prepared . Monahan suggests, "the
insecurity subject is afraid but can effectively sublimate these fears by
engaging in preparedness activities" (p.23). Think FEMA's directive to ready a disaster supply kit
that should include duct tape, scissors and pre measured and cut plastic sheeting in case of chemical attack. Hence

the insecurity subject comes to understand herself as vulnerable and is

tasked with securing her own Key to this book is an interrogation of the
cultural practices through which insecurities are cultivated , and a
questioning of the kinds of insecurities that get privileged over others and
why. In this way, Monahan tells us something about the series of anxieties around
difference, class, gender, and racialization in the making of what he terms
"marginalizing surveillance." Through a discussion of the role of
surveillance in boundary reproduction based on the author's own
ethnographic encounters in a gated community, a public housing site and a
transportation control center, the second part of the book, "Surveillance Infra structures," closely
examines how surveil lance systems can create and maintain social inequalities and spatial hierarchies, as well as
how such outcomes are presently being challenged by the likes of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, for example.

Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity is a complex text , grounded in a rich

theoretical engagement with neoliberalism and the ways in which it
structures the insecurities of our present conditions, both the everyday (i.e.,
homelessness, policing the poor and the undocumented) and the
extraordinary (torture in extra-legal black sites and the stock piling of
avian flu vaccine). From this perspective, that "the neoliberal state heightens its
security apparatuses while dismantling its social programs" (p.26), Monahan then
provides the necessary analytic tools to understand this operation of power. For example, in Chapter Four
"Vulnerable Identities" he names identity theft as both myth and socially constructed moral panic, and argues that

as the insecurity subject is counseled to consume in order to ward off fraud (purchase antivirus software and paper
shredders), responsibility for data protection shifts from the state to the citizenry and blame is then focused on the

Underlying this narrative of

moral panic are homeland security concerns around illegal immigration , as
undocumented workers are deemed identity theft criminals and are
subject to increasingly punitive measures. Special attention is paid in this chapter to the
victim of identity theft for not taking the necessary precautions.

trope of the "meth head" in the discourse and economic context surrounding identity theft, where Monahan makes

important links between condemned rural spaces, postindustrialization,

and trans formations in capital accumulation and social policy that see
both the flexible worker and the methamphetamine user as multitasking ,
able to "work long hours on tedious projects" and technologically savvy (p.59).

Their talk of terrorism never addresses the slavethis was

the foundation for the current biopolitical structurethus
we control the root cause
Mbembe 03

[Achille Mbembe, a philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual, Necropolitics,

Duke University Press, pages 20-22, Project Muse]//JC//
The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the
real make these processesthe fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind
almost necessarily violent processes. As shown by Stephen Louw, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no
choice but to try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social relations
must be decommodified forcefully.28 Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor militarization, the
collapse of the distinction between state and society, and revolutionary terror.29 It may be argued that they aimed
at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality. Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering
away of the state, the owering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to
the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is,
fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death.
Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and

Terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known
telos of history. Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs
to address slavery , which could be considered one of the rst instances of
biopolitical experimentation. In many respects, the very structure of the
plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and
paradoxical gure of the state of exception.30 This figure is paradoxical here for two
death.

reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow.

the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a home, loss of
rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is
identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death
(expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the
plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a
community if only because by denition, a community implies the exercise
of the power of speech and thought. As Paul Gilroy says, The extreme patterns of
Indeed,

communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognize the anti-discursive and

There may, after all, be no

reciprocity on the plantation outside of the possibilities of rebellion and
suicide, flight and silent mourning, and there is certainly no grammatical
unity of speech to mediate communicative reason. In many respects, the
plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.31 As an instrument of labor,
the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or her labor
is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of
injury, in a phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity .
extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts.

The violent tenor of the slaves life is manifested through the overseers disposition to behave in a cruel and
intemperate manner and in the spectacle of pain inicted on the slaves body.32

Violence, here, becomes

an element in manners,33 like whipping or taking of the slaves life itself :

an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror .34 Slave life, in
many ways, is a form of death-in-life. As Susan Buck-Morss has suggested, the slave condition produces a

An unequal relationship is
established along with the inequality of the power over life . This power
over the life of another takes the form of commerce: a persons humanity
is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slaves
life is possessed by the master.35 Because the slaves life is like a thing, possessed by another
person, the slave existence appears as a perfect gure of a shadow . In spite
of the terror and the symbolic sealing off of the slave , he or she maintains
alternative perspectives toward time, work, and self. This is the second paradoxical
contradiction between freedom of property and freedom of person.

element of the plantation world as a manifestation of the state of exception. Treated as if he or she no longer
existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any
object, instrument, language, or gesture into a performance and then stylize it. Breaking with uprootedness and the

the slave is able to demonstrate the

protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body
that was supposedly possessed by another
pure world of things of which he or she is but a fragment,

Anti-Blackness undergirds their narrative of a terrorist attackwhile they may have removed racialized rhetoric, their cultural
representation of terror remains racialized.
Bhattacharyya in 08 (Gargi, Professor of Law and Social Sciences at the University of East London.
Dangerous Brown Men and the War on Terror. Published by the Centre for Ethinicity and Racism Studies, 2008).

the emergence of an expansionary militarism from the US

and its allies infects the conduct of civilian life within these and other
nations. This infection builds on previous practices of racialised policing
but with an expansion of targets and an adaptation of the legitimising narrative. Racial myths evolve so
that the demonised gure of the dangerous black man becomes the
dangerous brown man, an adaptation of earlier racist mythologies that
may refer to the same groups of men but that enables the inclusion of
more recent racialised anxieties. This is a process that continues the influence
of US-dened racial politics on other parts of the world the cultural
representation of dangerous blackness in various parts of the world has
been shaped by US culture and politics and similarly the inclusion of dangerous brownness in
I want to argue that

this formulation echoes shifts in US racial politics, both at home and internationally (Winant, 2001). Importantly,
there is a shift to include new communities and develop racial myths for new circumstances. In the process, there is
a concerted campaign to suggest that race is no longer the issue and that those who previously suffered racism

The shift from what I am describing as black to brown myths is

centred around the implied dangers of non-western cultures. There is a
reworking of long-running racist myths so the black rapist becomes the
brown man from a backward and misogynistic culture, anti-feminist, sexually
are now with us (as opposed to against us).

frustrated by traditional culture, addicted to honour killing and viewing women as tradable objects (for a summary
of some of these ideas, see Abbas, 2007). Such a narrative represents a further development of the take-up of anti-

the proposition that identities are based on

cultures and that cultures are separate and absolutely different enables
all kinds of terrible things to be said and, sadly, believed. This is a language of racism
essentialism as a defence of racism

that has learned to disavow the terms of race in order to re-legitimise racist practises (for a discussion of this socalled cultural racism see Taylor and Spencer, 2004). It is this shift that I am characterising as the refocusing on
brown men with brown here signifying a difference that can be depicted as cultural, non-essential, beyond the
horrific histories of violence against Africans and yet enabling a continuance of the link between bodies and social

None of this means that old-fashioned antiblackness has

disappeared (Bashi, 2004). However, I do think the take-up of an active language of anti-racism has altered
meaning.

the public framing of racist activity and that the legitimating narratives of racism, in particular of state racisms,
reach for terms that can at once maintain the effects of racial categorisation while refusing the salience of the term
race.

Heg/Imperialism Links
US globalized hegemony is a process of racialized
manifest destiny that seeks out minority populations in
order to coerce them into a system of white-supremacist
policing. This causes militarized violence in order to
maintain itself.
Rodriguez 07 (Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley

and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, American Globality And
the US Prison regime: State Violence And White Supremacy from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to bagong
diwa, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048- SG)

the notion of American globality I have begun discussing here already exceeds
to the extent that it is a global racial formation, and
more pointedly a global mobilization of a white supremacist social
formation (read: a united States of America formed by the social-economic geographies of racial chattel slavery and their
recodification through the post-13th Amendment innovation of other technologies of criminalization and imprisonment). The US
prison regimes production of human immobilization and death composes
some of the fundamental modalities of American national coherence.
It inscribes two forms of domination that tend to slip from the attention of political theorists, including Negri and
Hardt: first, the prison regime strategically institutionalizes the
biopolitical structures of white racial/nationalist ascendancyit
quite concretely provides a denition for white American
personhood, citizenship, freedom, and racialized patriotism . Second, the
prison regime reflects the moral, spiritual, and cultural inscription
of Manifest Destiny (and its descendant material cultural and statebuilding articulations of racist and white supremacist conquest,
genocide, and population control) across different historical
moments. to invoke and critically rearticulate negri and Hardts formulation, the focal question becomes: How
does the right of the uS-as-global police to kill, detain, obliterate
become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally recoded? the
structure of presumptionand therefore relative political silence
enmeshing the prisons centrality to the logic of American globality
is precisely evidence of the fundamental power of the uS prison
regime within the larger schema of American hegemony. In this sense the uS
In fact,

negri and Hardts formulation

prison regime is ultimately really not an institution. rather it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor
of institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of
human immobilization address (while never fully resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The US prison regime defines a
global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various localities. What would it mean, then, to
consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the self-contained means of
American globality? I am suggesting a conception of the prison regime that focuses on what cultural and political theorist Allen
Feldman calls a formation of violence, which anchors the contemporary articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of
coercion and hegemony. Feldman writes, the growing autonomy of violence as a self-legitimating sphere of social discourse and

Violence itself both

reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete
project, as something to be made. As a formation of violence that
self-perpetuates a peculiar social project through the discursive
structures of warfare, the US prison regime composes an acute
formation of racial and white supremacist violence, and thus houses the capacity
transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to totalize society.

for mobilization of an epochal (and peculiar) white supremacist global logic. This contention should not be confused with the

sometimes parochial (if not politically chauvinistic) proposition that American state and state-sanctioned regimes of bodily violence
and human immobilization are somehow self-contained domestic productions that are exceptional to the united States of America,
and that other global sites simply import, imitate, or reenact these institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the

US prison regime exceeds as it enmeshes the ensemble of

social relations that cohere uS civil society, and is fundamental to
the geographic transformations, institutional vicissitudes, and
militarized/economic mobilizations of globalization generally. to assert
opposite: the

this, however, is to also argue that the constituting violence of the US prison regime has remained somewhat undertheorized and
objectified in the overlapping realms of public discourse, activist mobilization, and (grassroots as well as professional) scholarly

it is not possible to conceptualize and critically

address the emergence and global proliferation of the (uS/global)
prison industrial complex outside a fundamental understanding of
what are literally its technical and technological premises: namely, its
complex organization and creative production of racist and white
supremacist bodily violence. It is only in this context, I would say, that we can examine the problem of how
praxis. Here I am arguing that

the Prison is a modality (and not just a reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment. It is only
a theoretical foregrounding of the white supremacist state and social formation of the united States that will allow us to understand
the uS prison regime as an American globality that materializes as it prototypes state violence and for that matter, state power
itself through a specific institutional site.

Through slavery, the Black was murdered which allowed

for a system of Anti-blackness this system allowed
Western imperialism to flourish

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,]

Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that marks everyone

experientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to mark the Black
ontologically, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity
marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology
movementpolitical discourses predicated on grammars of suffering and
whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation, might not have
developed. Chattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the
African. It also created the Human out of culturally disparate entities from
Europe to the East. I am not suggesting that across the globe Humanism developed in the same way
regardless of region or culture; what I am saying is that the late Middle Ages gave rise to an
ontological categoryan ensemble of common existential concernswhich made and
continues to make possible both war and peace, conflict and resolution,
between the disparate members of the human race, east and west. Senator
Thomas Hart Benton intuited this notion of the existential commons when he wrote that
though the Yellow race and its culture had been torpid and stationary for thousands of years [Whites and
Asians] must talk together, and trade together, and marry together.
Commerce is a great civilizersocial intercourse as greatand marriage
greater (The Congressional Globe. May 28, 1846). David Eltis points out that as late as the
17th century, [p]risoners taken in the course of European military action
could expect death if they were leaders, or banishment if they were deemed
followers, but never enslavementDetention followed by prisoner exchanges or ransoming was
common (1413). By the seventeenth century, enslavement of fellow Europeans
was beyond the limits (1423) of Humanisms existential commons, even in times of war. Slave
status was reserved for non-Christians. Even the latter group howeverhad some prospect of
release in exchange for Christians held by rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and other Mediterranean Muslim powers (emphasis

though the practice of enslaving the vanquished was beyond the

limit of intra-West wars and only practiced provisionally in East-West conicts, the baseness of
the option was not debated when it came to the African. The race of
mine 1413). But

Humanism (White, Asian, South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced
itself without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which
became known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery the
world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its
struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles, the
Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis
between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks.

Economy Links
The economy is inherently racialized the affs
engagement in the racialized economy justies the
destruction of identities and renders exploitation invisible
Gabriel and Todorova 2 (Satyananda and Evgenia, Racism and
Capitalist Accumulation: An Overdetermined Nexus, Journal of Critical
Sociology, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/racismcs.pdf)

The fact that she may see herself as a "black" woman effects the way she
experiences her-self. She must dissociate. She becomes disconnected, at the level of
consciousness, from her complexity and becomes the "black" woman. The racial essence becomes her and she

this racialized consciousness remains problematic precisely

because she remains complexly shaped by the other political, cultural,
economic and natural processes in the social formation. She may, for instance, be
employed as an automobile worker and her activities as an automobile
worker may pull her towards a different self-identity than the racial
notion. It is a requirement of her employment (of her voluntary participation in her own
exploitation) that she become an automobile worker, as this identity is
understood by her employer. At any given moment, social circumstances push her
to subsume all the other selves she has constructed in the identity of
automobile worker. She may have to struggle to be both automobile
worker and "black" woman or, alternatively "black" automobile worker or "black" woman automobile
becomes it. However,

worker. However, if her employer (or, more precisely, the managers who supervise her identity) want her to be a

she must understand the meaning of this racialized

direct producer role and adopt the appropriate behaviors. In this circumstance, a
woman who has not properly adopted the racialized identity required of
her within the social formation in question may be at risk of losing her
position in the capitalist fundamental class process . If the performance of surplus
"black" automobile worker, then

labor is racialized (and cultural factors are always important to specific manifestations of exploitation), it provides a

In this
elaborate act of juggling with appropriate self-identities the agent loses
the sense of what Marx (1994:74-75) called her species being. Perhaps someday this
necessary practice of dissociation will be viewed as pathological.
However, in a capitalist social formation, as in some other exploitative social formations, it
is simply normal. Indeed, as indicated above, identity juggling takes place at the site of capitalist surplus
powerful motivator for agents to adopt a racialized consciousness and the requisite behaviors.

value production, where it inuences the magnitude of the surplus through such factors as worker productivity,
quality of team work, a worker's tendency to help teach other workers how to do their job (training costs) etc. To
return to our example, that

the capitalist industrial enterprise produces

automobiles

becomes, in a racialized economy, a site comprised of racialized subjects who just happen to take part
in the various activities necessary to the production of automobiles and, more importantly, capitalist surplus value.
The racialized nature of these automobile workers may become more important in the consciousness of the
individual agents involved than the concrete activities engaged in. In other words, our "black" woman automobile
worker may be more concerned about the racialized nature of her interactions on the factory oor, or even in
meetings of the UAW, than the fact of her exploitation. Indeed ,

her exploitation may be (or become)

invisible and that invisibility may be dependent , in part, on the racialized
nature of the Racism and Capitalist Accumulation Copyright 2002, S. J. Gabriel and E. O. Todorova
production process and all the other activities that make up the automobile firm. The disappearance of

exploitation, as a conscious aspect of reality, may inuence a wide range of economic and non-economic
processes, including negotiations over wages and benefits, willingness to perform certain activities that might

the existing rate of exploitation

may be dependent, in part, on the existence and nature of a racialized

otherwise be considered unacceptable, and so on. Therefore,

economy . Indeed, in this sense, to the extent racism cloaks exploitation, racism may be an important factor in
minimizing opposition to exploitation (it is dicult to oppose something that is invisible) and therefore to the very
existence of exploitation.

Economics is inltrated with racist politics. A rising tide

doesnt raise all ships economic growth differentially
affects racial populations and leaves marginalized groups
in the dust
Gabriel and Todorova 02 (Satyananda J., Evgenia O., Racism and
Capitalist Accumulation: An Overdetermined Nexus, Journal of Critical
Sociology- SG)
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

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
gaining capitalist freedom that the rationality of wage laboring is formed.

willing and able to sell her labor power would have been inuenced, 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 diculties 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

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.
many bushels of tomatoes.

The capitalist economy has been shaped by anti-blackness

the affs engagement in the capitalist economy without
an analysis of how that economy has been racialized is a
form of commissive violence
Gabriel and Todorova 2 (Satyananda and Evgenia, Racism and

Capitalist Accumulation: An Overdetermined Nexus, Journal of Critical

Sociology, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/racismcs.pdf)
What is the nexus comiecting the social construction of consciousness to capitalist exploitation? More specifically,
what is the effect of determinate cultural processes within which human beings are categorized and then
essentialized on the basis of socially constructed (and, necessarily, supernatural) notions of phenotype and./or

The social construction of such racial

consciousness is dened herein as racism. What is the role of racism in
creating conditions for the existence of capitalist surplus labor? How
should one proceed to answer these questions? Is it simply a matter of
looking at the effects of racism upon those economic processes directly impacting the
genetic origin (producing racial consciousness)?

performance of surplus labor, e.g. processes shaping absolute and relative wage rates, differential rates of

Bonacich (1999) pointed to a wide range of

what she described as "class theories of ethnicity": "theories of labor
migration and immigration, dependency theory, dual labor market, split
labor markets, intemal colonialism, theories of middleman minorities, labor aristocracy
employment, and so on. In a recent article, Edna

theories, world systems theory, and more." We are concerned with two absences in the theoretical frameworks

Bonacich refers to as "class theories of ethnicity": rstly, these theories

share the common characteristic of reducing a cultural phenomenon
(either racism or ethnocentrism) to an epiphenomenon of economic
processes and secondly, these theories, even when focused on economic processes, omit any reference to
the production, appropriation and distribution of capitalist (or any other kind oi) surplus value. Such
analyses take us no closer to understanding the theoretical practice of
creating racialized subjects, particularly when such subjects are involved
in capitalist exploitation. And without such an understanding, it remains
problematic to link the racialized subject to economic processes, in general,
and particularly to link the racialized subject to capitalist exploitation. In other words, before one can
make sense of racialized labor markets , among other such phenomena, then one must
make sense of the racialized subjects comprising such labor markets and before
one can understand racialized subjects one must analyze the process by
which such subjects come into existence, i.e. racism.

Nuclear War
Representations of future nuclear conflict rest on racist
fears of irrational non-whitesthe bomb is the epitome of
the destructive capacity of Whiteness, naturalizing
structural violence through the projection of a spectacular
extinction.
Williams 11 (Paul, lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear
War, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2011, p.1-3- SG)

nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (1) the invention and
use of the first atomic bombs; (2) nuclear weapons testing stockpiling of the Cold War superpowers; and (3) nuclear war
(often referred to as World War Three) and life after such a
cataclysm. Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and
national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its
emergence (and deployment against Japan) was read by some
commentators as an act of genocidal racist violence, and by some as
the apex of Western civilizations scientic achievement. These opposing
In this study,

perspectives are interpretative poles that have been central to nuclear representations. By posing white moral and technological
superiority against the destructive technology it supposedly invented, cultural producers have cited nuclear weapons as evidence
against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism. From this point of view, the scientific achievement of splitting the atom does not reveal

the enormity of nuclear weapons reminds one that the

technology rst created by the white world imperils the whole Earth .
Through a range of media, from novels to poetry, short stories to film, comics to oratory, the terms that modern
European imperialism depended upon civilization, race, and
nation, in particular often recur in nuclear representations . Some of
white superiority; instead,

these representations, emerging when Europes empires were relinquishing direct control of their colonies, share the uncertainty

The historical
congruence of nuclear representations and decolonization intimates
the importance of this context to future visions of World war Three:
tropes of genocide, technological and and scientic modernity, and
the (re)population of the planet are relevant to this apocalyptic subgenre of SF as
well as being recurrent elements in colonial history. Several of the nuclear
representations discussed reproduce the justications of the modern
imperial project. But an alternative tradition makes these justifications visible and demonstrates their corrosive,
that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent decolonizing process.

lingering presence in contemporary culture through the depiction of nuclear technology and its possible consequences. Significantly,

the idea that nuclear weapons are used to buttress a racial order
that privileges whiteness an idea that prohibits non-white peoples
from accessing such technology remains a potent current running
from 1945 until the present day. Having raised this point to emphasize the importance of the themes
in this study, I am mindful to repeat that my focus is literary, cultural and filmic texts. I am not seeking to explain how race and
ethnicity have structured Cold War history. If I may be excused a brief aside, I do think such moments have occurred. Civil rights and

US foreign policy had to negotiate the

American governments response to domestic systems of racial
discrimination, and vice versa. Recently decolonized nations whose populations had been excluded
Cold War historians have long understood that

along similar lines by European imperialism followed the narrrative of American desegregation closely, and the allegiances of these
nations played and important role in the Cold War. When the black student James Meredith was not permitted to join the University
of Mississippi in 1962, President Kennedy ordered federal marshals to force his registration through. This took place on 1 October
1962, after a night of fighting between demonstrators and troops. While not universally praised, Kennedys actions were widely
perceived in the international press as evidence to resolve to oppose racial discrimination. When the Cuban Missile Crisis took place
three weeks later, the presidents of Guinea and Ghaa denied refuelling facilities to Soviet planes ying to the Caribbean. Kennedy

aside Arthur Schlesinger directly attributed the African presidents actions to the intervention in Mississippi. The subject of this book

representations of nuclear
weapons and the world after nuclear war postulate meanings that
are not only fully activated when considered through a lens of race ,
ethnicity, nationhood and civilization. In many of the texts discussed, a primary
consideration is whether the vestigial master narrative of white
supremacy, the narrative of racial superiority that underpinned
modern European colonization, is being resuscitated. I have in mind Fredric
is not the mechanisms of history. The subject of this book is the way that

Jamesons expression, if interpretation in terms of [] allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because
such master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them. For Jameson the interpretative
act runs the risk of being an act of hermeneutic bad faith the risk that the critic finds what they are looking for all along because
they gathered up a series of texts whose selection is far from arbitrary, and consequently the reading of said texts confirms the
ubiquity of the historical essence with which they were initially ascribed. Yet, as Jameson writes, one should not be too cynical about
the act of interpretation. If the critical analysis of a text finds evidence of the historical trends it set out to discover the success of
the interpretation is not in itself a reason to reject the idea that texts allow one to think closely and critically about historical
attitudes. The act of interpretation can sometimes be the imposition of a preconvieved set of ideas onto a series of texts chosen
precisely because they corroborate the hypothesis being tested, but it can also be credible because texts are inscribed by history
and by master naratives. As a way of referring to an explanation of the movement of history and its future direction, Jamesons

the master
narrative of white supremacism that proved so useful to European
colonialism and the settlement of North America. How do texts
come to be inscribed by master narratives? What justification do I have in reading the master
sense of master narratives is worth retaining. My usage here designates the explanation itself, specifically

narrative o white supremacism and related narratives of settlement through the literary, cultural and filmic texts analysed here?

The world has already ended for people of color, the affs
rhetoric of nuclear war/extinction prioritizes hypothetical
impact scenarios while ignoring ongoing structural
violence.
Omolade 84 (1984, Barbara, City College Center for Worker Education in
New York City a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an
organizer in both the womens and civil rights/black power movements;
Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust; WOMENS STUDIES QUARTERLY,
Vol. 12., No. 2, Teaching about Peace, War, and Women in the Military, p. 12,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4004305)

the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a

report on the effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a general
nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, 25 to 100
million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of
African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave
trade to the New World. The same federal report also comments on the destruction of
urban housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as
well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of color
the world over, starvation is already a common problem , when, for example, a
nations crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of
color throughout the worlds urban areas is already blighted and
inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America,
the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we knew
it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are
only now beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to
reclaim that world, struggle for it, and rebuild it in our own image . The
death culture we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with
In April, 1979,

death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for survival at any cost than to struggle for liberty
and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not
linked to the daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which
people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear holocausts,
and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our
schools, our families, and our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We
must ght as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in
peoples wars in China, in Cuba, in Guinea-Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the womens
movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles
are not abstractions, but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of
our people. We wonder who will lead the battle for nuclear disarmament with the vigor and clarity that women of
color have learned from participating in other struggles. Who will make the political links among racism, sexism,
imperialism, cultural integrity, and nuclear arsenals and housing? Who will stand up?

The affs threats of nuclear war come from a position of

privilege-Nuclear weapons are possessed by white elites
and have been systematically used to threaten/manipulate
non-white populations.
Williams 11 (Paul, lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, Race,
Ethnicity, and Nuclear War, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies,
2011, p.1-3)
This study will range across continents and cultural forms and more than six decades, but it is anchored by

nuclear weapons are white

weapons , and that the virtues and vices of white people and nations are
condensed in the gure of nuclear weapons . Roy's proposition is explored from a variety of

Arundhati Roy's assertion, used as this book's Epigraph, that

critical positions in Race, Etlznicity and i'\m-ltw Mir: Rcpresentat:'om' of Nuclear l/Vmpozts and Post-Apoca)'ypl:'c
Worlds, lrom inside and outside the perception of whiteness: how have nuclear weapons been read as
representative of the scientilic achievement, military superiority and responsibility of white Europeans and their

they also been interpreted as manifestations of the

destructivity, racism and recklessness of white civilization ? As part of this process,
Race, Etfzrrieirynmi .tVm;'l'errr War explores the ways nuclear representations in Anglophone literary,
lilmic and other cultural texts since 1945 have been pivotal sites for the articulation of
racial, ethnic national and civilizational identities. These texts are a way of making
descendants? I-low have

these identities coherent and legible, but the fact they must be produced means they cannot be taken for granted.

the nuclear representations studied in this book contest racial, ethnic,

national and civilizational identities as meaningful and decisive ways of
categorizing human life and reveal them as insecure and disabling political
compartments. ln this study, nuclear representations are defined as depictions of the following subjects: (I)
Some of

the invention and use of the first atomic bombs: (2) the nuclear weapon testing and stockpiling of the Cold War
superpowers: and (3) nuclear war {often referred to as World War Three) and life after such a cataclysm.

Nuclear technology has been the subject of narratives of racial and

national belonging and exclusion undoubtedly because its emergence ( and
deployment against Japan] was read by some commentators as an act of genocidal
racist violence , and by some as the apex of Western civilization's scientific achievement. These opposing
perspectives are interpretive poles that have been central to nuclear representations. By posing while
moral and technological superiority against the destructive technology it
supposedly invented, cultural producers have cited nuclear weapons as
evidence against white Anglo-Saxon supremacism. From this point of view, the scientific
achievement of splitting the atom does not reveal white superiority; instead, the enormity oi nuclear weapons
reminds one that the technology first created by the white world imperils the whole Earth. Through a range of
media, from novels to poetry, short stories to film, CUItllCS to oratory, the terms that modern European
imperialism depended upon civilization. race and nation, in particular often recur in nuclear
representations, Some of these representations, emerging when Europes empires were relinquishing direct control

of their colonies, share the uncertainty that beset the colonial powers following the uneven and often violent

The historical congruence of nuclear representations and

decolonization intimates the importance of this context to future visions
of World War Three: tropes of genocide, technological and scientic
modernity, and the (re)population of the planet are relevant to this apocalyptic
subgenre of SF as well as being recurrent elements in colonial history. Several of the nuclear
representations discussed reproduce the justications of the modern
imperial project. But an alternative tradition makes these justifications visible and demonstrates their
decolonizing process.

corrosive, lingering presence in contemporary culture through the depiction of nuclear technology and its possible

that nuclear weapons are used to buttress a racial

order that privileges whiteness an idea that prohibits non-white peoples from accessing such
consequences. Significantly, the idea

technology - remains a potent current running from I945 until the present day.

Democracy Link
Democracy is not benign, but rather an extension of civil
society that is used to legitimize anti-black violence
Sexton and Lee 06 [Jared Sexton, African American Studies Program,
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA, Elizabeth Lee, Department of
Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Figuring
the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Editorial Board of
Antipode, page 1013-1014]//JC//
The rituals of torture exposed at Abu Ghraibstaged events both reckless and deliberate, a whole theatrics of

the necessary
counterpart to the American principles of democracy, dignity, and
freedom; what Zizek calls the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture ...
the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not
to know about, even though they form the background of our public
values (Zizek 2004).11 In this sense, what the notorious images of frivolous brutality
circulating throughout the global media environment evoke, however
obliquely, is the ambient combat, and the attendant culture of
authoritarianism, that operates without direct announcement and
acknowledgment within the United States as an armation of its
birthright in and as a slave society.12 This ancient internal warfare is foundational and
constitutive; the primary division of humanity it enables launches the syntax of
western modernity, the state(s) of democratic citizenship, the promise and
compromise of civil societynot the division between the exploiters and
the exploited or the rich and the poor, but rather the free and the
enslaved, subject and object, person and property (Barrett 2006). The obscene
underside of the popular culture, the repression, torture, and sexual
coercion that constitute the underbelly of a particular version of
democracy, which has achieved dominance in the world (Davis 2004:45), and the
myriad peculiar institutions of social incarceration it has engendered , is
the most intimate possession of black existence in the US from the
political and libidinal economies of chattel slavery (still determinate in current affairs
despite wishful thinking from all quarters) to the ocial endorsements of institutionalized
lynching (practices commandeered in recent generations by the proper authorities) and the
codication of Jim Crow segregation (whose revival cancels apace the detours thrown up by the
modern Civil Rights Movement) to the formation of the urban ghetto (which retains its powers
humiliation, terror, sexual degradationprovide, not contradiction or hypocrisy, but

of quarantine even in the aftermath of the long hot summers and the short ight of a fragile black lumpen
bourgeoisie) to the rise of the modern day
hallmark of the so-called post-civil rights era) (Nast 2000).

prison (whose ghastly presence supplies the

Russia
The construction of Russia as a threat and an irrational
actor is rooted in modern forms of racism
Jger 2k [yvind Jger, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and
the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, Securitizing Russia: Discursive
Practices of the Baltic States, Peace and Conict Studies Volume 7 Section
2, pages 24-25]//JC//

The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in
the Baltic as a ominous sign of what Russia has in store for the Baltic
states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24; cf. Haab 1997). The constitutional ban in all
three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet political structures is indicative of a threat perception that

conflating Russia with the USSR and casting

everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a
discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary opposition is reiterated
confuses Soviet and postSoviet,

in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a Russia/Europe-opposition is also
denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of ethnic minorities", "unpredictability",
"imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The opposite value of these markers ("stability",

When
identity is precarious, this discursive practice intensies by shifting onto a
security mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of
political existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is (re)produced more
effectively when the oppositions are employed in a discourse of in-security
and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and thus
securitised in the Wverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security Concept is
"Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity.

knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish "[t]hat the defence of
Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "[s]hould there be no higher command, self-controlled combat actions
of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal." (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also

[t]he power of civic resistance is constituted of the Nations Will

and self-determination to ght for own freedom, of everyone citizens
resolution to resist to [an] assailant or invader by all possible ways,
despite citizens age and [or] profession, of taking part in Lithuanias
defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4). When this is added to the identifying of the objects
posits that

of national security as "human and citizen rights, fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty;
rights of the nation, prerequisites for a free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state
territory and its integrity, and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other
institutions thereof; the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security

one approaches a conception of security in which

the distinction between state and nation has disappeared in allencompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend everything
with every possible means. And when the list of identied threats to
national security that follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via
"personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national values,"(National Security Concept,
Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2)

Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has become a totalising one taking everything to be a

The chain of equivalence is established when the very

introduction of the National Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of
Lithuanias century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation
and subjugation" (see quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed
as the rst link in the discursive chain that follows . In much the same way the "enemy
within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the independence-memory was ritualised
and added to the sense of insecurity already fed by confusion in state
administration, legislation and government policy grappling not only with
what to do but also how to do it given the inexperience of state
question of national security.

institutions or their absence unity behind the overarching objective of

independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the
enemy within. This is what David Campbell (1992) points out when he sees the practices of security as being
about securing a precarious state identity. One way of going about it is to cast elements
on the state inside resisting the privileged identity as the subversive
errand boys of the prime external enemy.

Africa Advantage Links

African AIDs rhetoric enframes the black body, specically
the black female body, as sexually deviant and therefore
deserving of violence.
Geary 14 [Adam M. Geary, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF GENDER &
WOMEN'S STUDIES. UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, Antiblack Racism and the AIDS
Epidemic: State Intimacies, Representing Global AIDS: Africa,
Heterosexuality, and Violence, page 95-96]//JC//
emerging scholarship and discourses on the global AIDS pandemic
have insisted upon privileging the perspective of sub-Saharan Africa, the socalled global epicenter, in descriptions of it. For instance, medical anthropologist and
Recent and

physician Didier Fassin, in asking whether the epidemic of South Africa is exemplary of the forces structuring the
global pandemic or of a unique form, captures the sense in which "African AIDS" is increasingly being understood as
paradigmatic. He writes, "Uniqueness or exemplar- ity? Such seems also to be the dialectic involved in
understanding the situation of AIDS in South Africa. Once again, the epidemio- logical as well as political evidence

the
is only apparent." 2 South Africa is both exem- plary and
unique, he asserts, as its uniqueness lies fundamentally in the extremity of the
structural forces that are common to the organization of pandemic on a
global scale, an extremity that emerges from what Fassin characterizes as
the uniqueness of the apartheid system in maintaining and deepening the
racist inequal- ity, poverty, and dislocation that exist elsewhere in less
intense, if still catastrophic forms. "It is possible," he writes, "to think simultaneously of the historical exceptionalism of South African AIDS , as the
product of apartheid, and its structural extremism, as a radi- cal
expression of phenomena observed elsewhere." 3 South African apartheid
was a unique, political and economic, racial formation, but it was also but a
"radical expression of phenomena observed elsewhere " in the formation of
the global pandemic. And whereas South Africa is the most radical example, sub-Saharan
Africa at large is itself being (re)constructed as both unique and
exemplary of the global pandemic: the most extreme version of conditions
that organize and structure the global pandemic, per se. I have learned a great deal from
much of this scholarship. The extraordinary "democracy of suffering" found in the
sub-Saharan experience with AIDS has been an important point of
counterarticulation to the exoticizing dismissal of the queer paradigm and
its hold on dominant knowledge in the United States and in ocial global
institutions. Although both historical and current scholar- ship and public
discourses have tried to describe the African pan- demic as emerging from
exotic practices, Africans and Africanists continue to respond that the
depth and breadth of their pandemic indexes less any kind of sexual
deviance than the racist brutality of the postcolony under global capital .4
appears to oscillate between exceptionalism.. .and extremism. "l Fassin answers, however, that
"contradiction

Africanist scholars have taught me, especially, to sec the ecologies of health and disease that underlie epidemic or
prevent it. But as I have come to learn the lessons of Africanist scholars, and as I have brought them to reect upon

I have been struck by the ways that the

scholarship that has oriented itself to the experience of sub-Saharan
Africa falls short when brought to the black American experience . This
discontinuity has prompted me to question the representation of subSaharan Africa that is emerging in the scholarship and public discourses . If,
the US epidemic and its racial burden,

as Fassin suggests, sub-Saharan Africa is exemplary of the forces organizing the global pandemicunique only in its
severitythen what is being put forth as descriptive of sub-Saharan Africa?

Root Cause

Surveillance
The root cause of violent surveillance policies is the
master-slave dialectic that started on the plantation and
extends as a form of discplinary that informs the present
day logics of surveillance
Simone Browne 2012.(Browne is an Assistant Professor, African and
African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas @ Austin, She
researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance, Social Media, Social
Network Sites, and Black Diaspora Studies Cultural Studies Publication
details. EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN.Taylor and
Francis. http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20) VR
According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be
traced to the simple accounts of slave owners (2003: 15). Of course, the
accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the
Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing
human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations
about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example

involved the General Rules recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus,
Texas plantation: 4th In giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to
leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result
of reection. The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of
disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is
exercised through its invisibility, while imposing a compulsory visibility
on its targets (1979: 187). Disciplinary power, then, operated on the

enslaved as a racializing surveillance that individuals were at once

subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslavable,
subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation
security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three
information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols,
and wanted posters for runaways (2003: 15). Here, surveillance and

literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could
read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter
existing ones by replacing dates, names and other unique identifiers, in this
way functioning as antebellum hackers able to crack the code of the
planters security system (20). These forged passes were used for
unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were produced by fugitives
upon demand by slave patrollers, or pattie rollers, who were often nonproperty owning but armed white men who policed slave mobilities.
Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed
text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware that many of these
pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these passes when
apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the racially defined
contours of (white) literacy and (Black) illiteracy, a dichotomy that was not
so readily upheld (18). Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned
out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in

the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for

runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a
white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in
consuming these texts became part of the apparatus of surveillance, the
eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing
physical descriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave
advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as out
of place. For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazette

Race and surveillance 73 offering a Two Dollars reward for a Mulatto, or

Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall,
attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly wanted posters, in
upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: sometimes
says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception. Seths,
or Salls, duplicity is not limited to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us,
but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to selfidentify or pass as white, rather than as a Mulatto (one black parent and
one white parent) or a Quadroon Girl (one black grandparent) as per the
racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classications as a
form of population management were made ocial with the rst US
federal census in 1790. I will return to the census as a technology that
formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for
fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as
now race was a social construct that required constant policing and
oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the

form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An

1851 handbill produced by abolitionist Theodore Parker attests to this as it
cautioned colored people of Boston to steer clear of watchmen and police
ocers and to keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye
open.Top eye here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent
as police ocers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive
slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists
and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at
racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze

and looking relations during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in
the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often
cultivated the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear
uppity. To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality (1992:
168). hooks suggests that the often violent ways in which blacks were denied
the right to look backthink of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-yearold Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman
had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire,
an oppositional gaze (116). Such politicized and oppositional looking were
agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway
slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Sam, who is
described in the notice as five feet high and remarkable in turning up the
whites of his eyes when spoken to. This notice records Sams oppositional
gaze, his looking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in

the simple act of rolling ones eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble
surveillance as a technology of whiteness (Fiske: 1998: 69)

Anti-blackness is the root cause of surveillance

Wilderson 10 (Frank B., Associate Professor of African-American Studies at
UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley Straight up shot racists,
Interviewed by Percy Howard, 2010,
http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/frank-wilderson-wallowing-in-thecontradictions-part-2/)
the question of civil society , not all the questions but the truth of civil society, not the totality
of it, but one of the concerns of civil society is how to contain the Black, and the answer to that question is
Well, I think that

like a hundred different splices of light going out in all directions. The professor uh, Desmond, I cant remember his last name(A UCD
prof that attended the lecture that afternoon), the older Black man who was speaking in the middle you know, he used to teach
Economics here.he, talked about Jamestown and one of the things that I came across in the research for this book was a
dissertation, a pro-slavery dissertation written by a White intellectual in 19-something in Virginia, and he was writing about the grain

the germ, that creates the modern police force. And he locates this germ in the
question of Black mobility. He charts how throughout the colonies all the way
through the Civil War this thing that will become the modern police force,
starts off as small collections of people just coming together to monitor
the movement of Blacks. And that was really fascinating to me, you know. Obviously the police
do a lot of other things today, they do the border patrol, and they do white
collar crime. but what his dissertation is saying is that the constituent element of policing
is the maintenance of surveillance of Black bodies . I see the prison
industrial complex as an extension of a kind of need, based upon what I
would say is a fundamental anxiety concerning where is the Black and
what is he or she doing. PH Theres, a high degree of sensitivity to that. My father and I were just talking about
of sand,

this once, in the context of Rodney King, The LA riots, etc. My father made this beautiful analogy, he says you know, if you train a
horse, if you train a horse, you know, and you tether him to a little peg and he gets used to it, then you can take it away, you can
take the leash off of him and hell stand by the peg and he wont run. FW Yeah. PH He said thats how Blacks have learned to
function in Los Angeles, they would not cross the line. They would come right up to the line, but not cross with violent intent,

There is a guy
talks about the Black life being a life from birth to death of
existing in what he calls a carcereal continuum (Editorial notes: original attribution of the term is to
Foucault) and that different Black people live different modes of incarceration,
but that imprisoning Black bodies is a project of civil society and for some
people from the ghetto, their bodies take in this project full force, and
others like you and I, meet the project when our car is pulled over by the police
for being in the wrong neighborhood.
because were not supposed to be there and we know that deadly force will definitely ensue. FW Yeah, yeah.
named Loc Wacquant who also

Biopower/Necropolitics
Root cause of biopower/necropolics/Agamben modern
structures of control is just an extension of the slave ship
Dillon 13 (Stephen Dillon, Doctor of philosophy from the university of
Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the NeoliberalCarceral State, May 2013, Pages 68-71)
Smallwood, like Shakur and Williams, understands the market as a powerful
extension of various technologies of capture: chains, shackles, bars, prisons,
and ships. Although penal technologies were central to detaining and
immobilizing captive Africans, white supremacy and the market made them
slaves. Whether they burrowed under prison walls, killed a crew and
overtook a ship, or quietly swam away, fugitive esh was easily recognized
as a commodity on the run. An expansive grid of captivity engendered by
race and commodification meant that there was no outside to the prison of
slavery.133 As Smallwood notes, The market was everywhere, always
shining a light on the captives exchangability.134 The (slave) market
fused chattel and blackness together at the level of discourse, skin, and
ontology , ensuring the mark of commodication held stronger than iron
and steel. The market produced a regime of surveillance wherein black
flesh became ontologically inseparable from slaverys chattel logic. Thus,
the terror of social and living death would follow captives into what was
ostensibly the free world. Blackness meant slave , and the market would
follow wherever commodied flesh could hide. This fabrication of
blackness as ontological, as more than political , as more than the
profound uneven distribution of death and dying, meant that the
necropolitics of race would live on well past the non-event of
emancipation weaving slavery and subjection into the very texture of
freedom.135 Race and white supremacy carried slaverys chattel logic into
the future. Accordingly, traces of slaverys necropolitics live on in
discourse, institutionality, and ontology. Chattel slavery is central to the

contemporary politics of the market in addition to the politics of life and

death in general. Indeed, terrors constitutive relationship to the production
and management of race began on the floating dungeon of the slave
ship. As a paradigmatic technology of modernity, the slave shipa
machine that was simultaneously a prison, a factory, a market, and an
instrument of warfareand its social relations inaugurated the economic,
discursive, and institutional life of transnational capitalism .136 The
carceral, the imperial, and the industrial were intertwined in the
biopolitical regulation of black life, the expansion of capital, and the
production of blackness, whiteness, and white supremacy. The slave trade
produced methods for controlling populations ; disciplining, torturing, and
immobilizing the body; regulating health and hygiene; and extending the
market beyond the economic . Additionally, it produced regimes of race and
racism wherein blackness was subjected to open and absolute
vulnerability, making white life dependent upon black (living) death. 137

In short, the slave trade inaugurated methods for ranking life and
measuring value that have yet to be undone.138 We can position slavery
and its various technologies of domination (ship, plantation, sexual
violence, management of birth) as preceding Giorgio Agambens
argument that the concentration camp is the paradigmatic gure of
modernity.139 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben
argues that the juridico-political structure of the camp is a hidden matrix
of the politics in which we are still living. 140 For Agamben, the camp is
the new biopolitical nomos of our planet, and our future resides in our
ability to recognize the ways that the camp inhabits and drives the
architecture of cities, airports, and the distribution of life and death
across the globe. The camp is not a historical anomaly but a temporal and
spatial structure that is continually brought back to life. That is, it may
change name and shape but its function remains the same. As with

Agambens call to see space, time, and power in a new way in order to make
visible the camps possession of our everyday, I am arguing that we must
learn to see the spirit of slavery in spectacles of racialized violence and
death. In addition, we must also learn to recognize it in the operations
that go by the names freedom, humanity, and democracy. Such a project
requires an understanding that the biopolitics and necropolitics of slavery
are not relegated to an amputated past, nor do they reside in time
progress will soon leave behind. Rather, the slave trades logics and
technologies have intensied, expanded, and become more insidious. The
past does more than repeat: it envelops, seduces, and multiplies .141a

Cap
Economic logic cannot explain slavery- anti-blackness is the root cause.
Tibbs Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University College of Law & Woods Assistant
Professor of Criminology, Sonoma State University 2008 Donald F. & Tryon P. Seattle Journal
for Social Justice 7 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 235 lexis
The Atlantic slave trade was a profound historical rupture, fundamentally degrading the
personality of black human beings, all the while obsessing over black flesh.81 In the very
processes employed to produce the body of the African slave for consumption and use in the
global libidinous system of racial capitalism, slavery bestows visibility on the structure and
enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of
the bodies of those who suffer pain. At its base, slavery achieves the conversion of absolute pain
into the fiction of absolute power in an obsessive, self-conscious, fetishistic, and parasitic
display of agency.82 For this reason, the procedures essential to the history of racial slavery and
its pernicious afterlife have not been its brutal regime of labor exploitation nor its utility to
the advent and maturation of Eurocentric capitalism. Rather, slavery is enabled by, and
dependent upon, the most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the
absolute divestment of sovereignty at the site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its
conditions of labor, its physical and emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction,
its political and cultural representation.83 The legacy of slavery that continues to impress itself
upon our social, psychic, and legal structures into the twenty-first century, bears this imprint of
bodily dispossession and aggrandizement. To put it another way, we are working from a
definition of slavery that is grounded in an analysis of what the practice signals about the
symbolic universe and how physical bodies are constructed in relationship to each other. White
supremacys reliance upon black dehumanization means that enslavement of Africans was
never reducible to mere economic logic. White violence against the black body was compelled
by a complex mixture of conscious identification, unconscious fears, and subconscious
longings.84 Loss of ones own body signals capture by direct relations of force. As a captive
entity, fixed in an undynamic state, subject to be mortgaged, according to the rules prescribed
by law,85 the slave did not enter into a transaction of value. In this way, slavery was a social
death; this is what it means to say that slaves did not exist as human beings.86 The ethos
of slavery that we are pointing to is an economy of desire in which value is produced.
However, because value works by mystifying its very processes of determining values, the worth
of white and black bodies appears natural, rather than as the result of violent
encounters.87 The symbolic economy of slavery is more fundamental to its existence than is the
political economy. In other words, the constituent elements of slavery begin with desire for
the symbols of purity, honor, and humanity represented by whiteness and made possible by
blackness and for the pleasure, exoticism, and self-loathing epitomized by blackness as
constructed in opposition to whiteness. In addition to the surplus value produced from their
labor, the accumulation of black bodies generated a symbolic economy in which slaves were
valuable simply for the fact that they existed as things for the satisfaction of the whims of the
captor.88 It is for this reason that the work performed by black slaves is historically significant,
but it was not the primary reason for the slaves (non)being. In the constellation of values
that white supremacy establishes, bourgeois democracy mystifies the value of black bodies.
As Cornel West puts it: [White supremacy] dictates the limits of the operation of
American democracywith 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 Americas metaphor.89 To state it more
pointedly, black death provides the very conditions of possibility for white life.90 This point is
not hyperbole or melodrama; it is drawn from an analysis of the discursive structure of slavery
and the material realities it calls into being. Slave codes in the southern United States demanded
that slaves receive clothing, food, and lodging sufficient to their basic needs. Slaves, although
dead to rights and responsibilitiescivil deathwere reduced to nothing but the physical
bodies, unprotected against capture, mutilation, and torture.

Impacts

Impact Genocide
Racism inevitably leads to Genocide.
Steuter & Wills 08 [Erin and Deborah, Writers at Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., At War With
Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror, pg. 41 to 45, 2008]
[Google Books Starts Here]

every genocide is followed by denial. The mass graves are dug up and hidden. The historical records are burned, or
closed to historians. Even during the genocide, those committing the crimes dismiss reports as propaganda.
Afterwards such deniers arc called "revisionists." Others deny through more subtle means: by characterizing the
reports as "unconfirmed" or "alleged" because they do not come from ocially approved sources; by minimizing the
number killed; by quarreling about whether the killing fits the legal definition of genocide ("definitionalism"); by
claiming that the deaths of the perpetrating group exceeded that of the victim group, or that the deaths were the

there must he a
number of conditions in place to allow genocidal violence to occur. Stanton argues that classification,
the first condition or stage, is fundamental and deeply encoded in human language. All languages
require classification, a "division of the natural and social world into categories."9 All cultures have
categories to distinguish between "us" and "them," between members of our group and others.
While all language may make this distinction, it is when we add symbolization to "name and signify" our
classifications that what Keen calls the "paranoid culture" begins to assert itself, making certain
physical characteristics (such as skin color or facial features) symbols for racial or ethnic classifications. In
result of civil war, not genocide.` Before there can be an act of genocide to deny, however,

the later stage of the genocidal process, these markers may become abstract and externalized, as with the yellow
star forced on the Jews of Nazi Germany or the blue-checked scarf used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to

Classification and symbolization are

widespread human practices that are part of our national identity and cultural self-awareness.
When joined by dehumanization, these qualities move a society significantly further down the grim road
to genocide. Dehumanization relegates the classified group to a category of sub-humanity, making it
easier to overcome an aversion to killing. Instead, killing becomes something to be celebrated; thus, in a
identify, marginalize, and deport people from the Eastern Zone.

notorious tape recording of an interview with members of the elite Canadian Airborne Unit in Somalia, a soldier is
heard telling the interviewer that their "peacekeeping" mission "sucks, man. We ain't killed enough n yet."'' In the
later stages of the genocidal process, polarization intensifies difference, as moderates are silenced or killed. Often,
the first casualties of genocide are moderates within the killing groups, voices raised in objection over the

Extremists target moderates so that only the extremes will be left in conflict, with
no milder middle to slow the cycle of descent into genocide. Once moderate voices have been
suppressed, individual deaths escalate into mass killings, in which the rhetoric of extermination is
escalating violence.

[Continued Later]
trouble, natives were always wild animals that had to be rooted out of their dens, swamps, jungles."24 Until the
conquest of the natives was complete, the message was always the same and almost always voiced through
metaphors of natural animality. The most fitting end for "the animals vulgarly called Indians," as Hugh
Brackenridge, an eighteenth century jurist and novelist wrote, was extermination.-' Within this animal metaphor,
the "injuns inability to be civilized confirmed the idea of their bestiality, which could thus be seen as fundamental,
pernicious, and stubbornly resistant to improvement. In this way, they were blamed for their extermination: by

Because of their
resistance to absorption, acculturation, and conformity to European models of civilization, natives
were constructed as wild, a threat to culture, and an obstacle to western progress. Their removal
therefore was not only necessary, it was also inevitable, natural and morally desirable. The ecacy of
the American Indian genocide garnered some international notice; according to his biographer John Toland, Adolf
Hitler was impressed with its scope. Toland writes that the Nazi leader "Often praised to his inner circle the
eciency of America's exterminationby starvation and uneven combatof red savages who could
not be tamed by captivity."26
being beyond the reach of the civilizing impulse, they brought their end upon themselves.

Impact- Objective Vertigo

Anti-blackness outweighs intersection of subjective and objective vertigo
Wilderson 3 (Frank B., Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has
a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley Straight up shot racists, 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 ones environment is perpetually
unhinged stems from a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life
constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation . This is
structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where
vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence. [4] Elsewhere I have
argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Blacks and the Humans disparate relationship to violence is at the
heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists InTensions
Journal Copyright 2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011) ISSN# 1913-5874 Wilderson The Vengeance of
Vertigo 4 (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black

peoples subsumption
by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be
constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective
and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is radically different
from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and
disciplined by violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes. vi When we begin to
assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays
and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the states disciplinary
violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective
vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the
struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks
and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movements demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.s
desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacin Nacionals (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs.
the U.S.s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But

for the Black , as for the slave, there are no

cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are

analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of
Human subalterns.

Impact Global Violence

White supremacy is a global system of oppression that
normalizes genocidal modalities of violence and domination
Rodriguez 07 [Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and
Associate Proffessor of Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, American Globality And the US Prison
regime: State Violence And White Supremacy from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to bagong diwa, Ateneo de Manila
University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048]

white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social

organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of
hierarchized human difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by
genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of peoples collective capacities to
For the theoretical purposes of this essay ,

socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination ,

white supremacy is simultaneously premised on and consistently innovating universalized

conceptions of the white (european and euroamerican) human vis--vis the rigorous production,
penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub-

to consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation (rather than a

facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this
material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that
compose American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering. While
the US prison industrial complex constitutes a statecraft of perpetual domestic crisis that emerges
from this social logic of white supremacy , the US prison regime is becoming profoundly undomesticated
in a twofold sense: the technologies of carceral racial domination have distended into localities
beyond the US proper (they are extra-domestic), while the focused and mundane (though no
less severe) bodily violence of the prisons operative functions have constituted a microwarfare
apparatus, accessing and penetrating captive bodies with an unprecedented depth and complexity
or non-human.

freakish or extremist deviation from it)

(the regime is in this sense defined by an unhinged, undomesticated violence). In this

context, the (racial) formations of punishment and death inscribed on the various surfaces of the US
prison regimefrom the nearby to the far awayare in fact generally unremarkable. It cannot be
overemphasized that this carceral formation produces a normal and trite violence, a naturalized
facet of American social intercourse across scales and geographies, forming the underside of a civil society that is

it is
precisely as this prison regime rearranges, remobilizes, and redeploys its normalized structure of
white supremacist bodily violence into geographies beyond the American everyday that it
momentarily surfaces as a spectacle of public consumption and even a critical public discourse , in
historically unimaginable outside its modalities of formal exclusion and civil/ social neutralization. Yet ,

such moments as the photographic revelation of the uS militarys torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. While the

US prison industrial complex constitutes a profound social and political crisis of

composes an institutional symbiosis that has yielded an authentic conjunctural
articulation of state violence that is both organic to the domestic US carceral and capable of
rearticulation, appropriation, and mobilization across global geographies. Thus, to understand the
national scope of the
epochal scale, it also

prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module or
mobilized vessel through which the state generates particular practices of legitimated violence and bodily

Prison regime is a conceptual and theoretical (not a discretely institutional)

phrase that refers to a modality through which the state organizes, rationalizes, and deploys specific
technologies of violence, domination, and subjectiontechnologies that are otherwise reserved for
immobilization.

deployment in sites of declared war or martial law: in this usage, prison regime differentiates both the scale and
object of analysis from the more typical macro- scale institutional categories of the prison, the prison system,
and, for that matter, the prison industrial complex. the conceptual scope of this term similarly exceeds the
analytical scope of prison management, prison policy, and the prison (or prisoners) experience, categories that
most often take textual form through discrete case studies, institutional reform initiatives, prison ethnographies,

notion of a prison regime invokes a meso (middle, or

mediating) dimension of processes, structures, and vernaculars that compose the states modalities
and empirical criminological surveys. Rather, the

of self-articulation and self-conceptualization, institutional crafting, and rule across the macro

and micro scales. It is within this meso range of fluctuating articulations of power that the prison is
inscribed as both a localization and constitutive logic of the states production of juridical, spatial,
and militarized dominion. A genealogy of the prison regime foregrounds the essential instability
the unnaturalnessof its object of discussion, suggesting a process of historical analysis and theorization
that methodologically extends beyond 1.) the particular and mystified institutionality of the discrete and narrowly
bounded entity we know as the Prison; and 2.) the juridical and institutional formalities of the states supposed
ownership of and orderly proctorship over the Prison as it is conventionally conceived.

Impact Ableism
Whiteness is the root cause of ableism technologies of
violence and surveillance used against people with disabilities
originated in Eurocentric thought
Smith 4 [Phil, Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council, Whiteness, Normal Theory,
and Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly Spring 2004, Volume 24, No. 2, http://dsqsds.org/article/view/491/668]

that ableism is created by those who define themselves as able-bodied , as normal, and that it
calls out for the need to develop what might be called normal
theory and normal studies, similar to the development of whiteness theory and whiteness studies, that can
This point,

is a master status invisible to themselves,

unpack more fully the ideology of ableism and expose normality as a scopic site for the subjugation of people

It is also likely, given the normative universalization of whiteness in

that the construction of whiteness is at the complex, multiple roots of both
racisms and ableisms. This is especially true given that eugenic science is at the heart of current
special education, psychology, and the system of services and supports for people with disabilities
(Kliewer and Drake 1998). Clearly, whiteness is intimately tied to modernist constructions of science
labeled as having disabilities.
modernist Western culture,

(Kincheloe 1999). It would seem, then, that the projects of developing multiple, postmodern, normal studies may
have as their subjects, at least in part, the complex ways in which whiteness ideology creates ableisms. Kincheloe

This norm has

traditionally involved a rejection of those who did not meet whiteness' notion of reason emerging
from the European Enlightenment. Whiteness deployed reason narrowly defined Eurocentric reason as
a form of disciplinary power that excludes those who do not meet its criteria for inclusion into the
community of the socio-politically enfranchised. Understanding such dynamics, those interested in the
(1999) argues cogently, when discussing the normative landscape of whiteness, that:

reconstruction of white identity can engage in the post formal (a theoretical effort to redefine the Eurocentric
notions of intelligence and reason by examining such concepts in light of socio-psychological insights from a variety
of non-western cultures [see Kincheloe and Steinberg 1993; Kincheloe 1995]) search for diverse expressions of
reason. Such a project empowers white students seeking progressive identities to produce knowledge about the
process of White identity reconstruction, the redefinition of reason, the expansion of what is counted as a
manifestation of intelligence, and the phenomenological experience of challenging the boundaries of whiteness.
(Paragraph 56) This analysis seems critical in understanding the relationship of whiteness studies and disability

The normative disciplinary power of whiteness undergirding the rationality of Eurocentric

culture and thought segregates not only those defined as not-white from the terrains of equality,
equity, and justice, but also those defined as not-Able (body or mind). A project of inclusion that reinvents
studies.

whiteness by calculating freshly an ideology of diverse reasons, intelligences, and experiences will, of necessity,
involve an exploration of the cartography of abled Normality. A broad whiteness studies approach must shake hands
with a broad disability studies approach if either whiteness or ability is to be reconceptualized.

Impact Ethics
The totalizing dominance of whiteness makes ethical
relationality impossible
Yancy 5 [George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical
Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse]
The reader will note that the question regarding how it feels to be a problem does not apply to people who have at
some point in their lives felt themselves to be a problem. In such cases, feeling like a problem is a contingent

When Black people are asked the same question by white

America, the relationship between being Black and being a problem is non-contingent. It is a
necessary relation. Outgrowing this ontological state of being a problem is believed impossible.
Hence, when regarding one's "existence as problematic," temporality is frozen. One is a problem forever.
disposition that is relatively finite and transitory.

However, it is important to note that it is from within the white imaginary that the question "How does it feel to be a
problem?" is given birth. To be human is to be thrown-in-the-world. To be human not only means to be thrown within
a context of facticity, but it also means to be in the mode of the subjunctive. It is interesting to note that the
etymology of the word "problem" suggests the sense of being "thrown forward," as if being thrown in front of

Within the white imaginary, to be Black means to be born an obstacle at the

very core of one's being. To ex-ist as Black is not "to stand out" facing an ontological horizon filled
with future possibilities of being other than what one is. Rather, being Black negates the "ex" of
existence. Being Black is reduced to facticity . For example, it is not as if it is only within the light of my freely
something, as an obstacle.

chosen projects that things are experienced as obstacles, as Sartre might say; as Black, by definition, I am an
obstacle. As Black, I am the very obstacle to my own meta-stability and trans-phenomenal being. As Black, I am not

Hence, within the framework of the white imaginary, to be Black and to be human are
contradictory terms. [End Page 237] Substituting the historical constructivity of whiteness for "manifest
destiny," whites remain imprisoned within a space of white ethical solipsism (only whites possess needs
and desires that are truly worthy of being respected [Sullivan 2001, 100]). It would seem that many whites
would rather remain imprisoned within the ontology of sameness, refusing to reject the ideological
structure of their identities as "superior." The call of the Other qua Other remains unheard within the
space of whiteness's sameness. Locked within their self-enthralled structure of whiteness, whites occlude the
possibility of developing new forms of ethical relationality to themselves and to non-whites. It is
partly through the process of abandoning their hegemonic, monologistic discourse (functioning as the "oracle
voice") that whites might reach across the chasm of (nonhierarchical) difference and embrace the non-white
Other in his or her Otherness. "A true and worthy ideal," as Du Bois writes, "frees and uplifts a people" (1995b,
a project at all.

456). He adds, "But say to a people: 'The one virtue is to be white,' and people rush to the inevitable conclusion,
"Kill the 'nigger'!" Of course, the idea that "the one virtue is white" is a false ideal, for it "imprisons and lowers"

Whiteness is a "particular social and historical [formation] that [is] reproduced through
specific discursive and material processes and circuits of desire and power " (McLaren 1998, 66). On this
score, reproduced through circuits of desire and power, whiteness strives for totalization; it desires to claim
the entire world for itself and has the misanthropic effrontery to territorialize the very meaning of
the "human."
(456).

Impact Global Warming

Only the K solves Global Warming environmental destruction
is a direct result of racial hierarchies that incentivize increased
consumption their use of market mechanisms will inevitably
fail
Mandell 08 [Bekah, * A.B., Vassar College; J.D., Boston College Law School, RACIAL REIFICATION AND GLOBAL WARMING: A TRULY
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, Boston Thrid World Law Journal, Spring 2008, p. 3-5]

unsustainable land-use and consumption that define the American dream--an inherently white ideal--create
cultural and racial hierarchies by setting up two classes of citizens in American society : those who
can consume space and those who cannot. Representative Nydia M. Velazquez, who represents in Congress a predominantly poor
urban district of New York, points out, [*296] the simple fact is that our current unsustainable "more-is-better"
culture undermines any hope of achieving justice--at home or abroad. We often hear about how the United
States consumes a vastly disproportionate amount of resources relative to the rest of the world. Americans are building
The

bigger houses, driving bigger cars, consuming more and more of everything than just about anyone else anywhere. This is certainly true, and the longterm environmental effects of this overconsumption may well prove disastrous . . . . . . . [A]nd one thing is for sure--Americans are not doing all this
overconsuming in congressional districts like the one I represent.... In my district, crime is high, test scores are low, schools are crumbling, and the

Those who currently enjoy the privileges of

consumption fear losing the bigger houses, bigger cars, and the economic power to consume, not
only because they provide material comforts, but because they have become the signifiers of wealth,
power, and whiteness in American society. As Professor Farley stated, "The system of property [and all of its trappings] is white"American Dream"--however you choose to define it--is very, very dicult to attain.

over-black." Those material comforts that identify whiteness do so in dialectic opposition to the high crime, low test scores, and crumbling schools that

Fear of eroding the hierarchies that define race explains why politicians
and other elites have consistently championed ineffectual "market-based approaches" to global
warming. By focusing public and private energy on relatively insignificant individual behavior changes, the Bush administration and other privileged
elites are able to maintain the racial hierarchy that consolidates their economic and social power. Politicians know that "[w]ithout
white-over-black the state withers away." Therefore, they have a profound incentive to maintain the
racial hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, "because these elites accrue social and economic benefits by maintaining the
status quo, they inevitably do." This white consensus to maintain the spatial and mobility hierarchies that
reify race is possible because, "[w]hite privilege thrives in highly racialized societies that espouse
racial equality, but in which whites will not tolerate being either inconvenienced in order to achieve
racial equality . . . or being denied the full benefits of their whiteness . . . ." With so much white privilege to lose, it
becomes clear why even most passionate environmental advocates are far more willing to call for, and make, small non-structural
changes in their behavior to ameliorate [*298] global warming, but are unwilling to embrace significant or meaningful
actions to address the crisis. Even as global warming is starting to become the subject of increasing media coverage and as more
environmental groups call for action to halt the crisis, most activism is limited to changes that maintain the existing
spatial, social, economic and legal framework that defines American society . Despite knowing for decades that
mark blackness in American society. [*297]

we have been living unsustainable lifestyles, and "hav[ing] had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, . . . aside from the easy
things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it." Greenhouse emissions reduction
challenges have cropped up on websites across the country, encouraging Americans to change their light bulbs, inate their tires to the proper tire
pressure to ensure optimal gas mileage, switch to hybrid cars, run dishwashers only when full, telecommute, or buy more ecient washers and dryers.

popular emissions challenge web sites are not suggesting that Americans give up their cars,
move into smaller homes in more densely populated urban neighborhoods near public
transportation, or take other substantive actions to mitigate the global climate crisis . Even Al Gore, [*299]
However,

the most famous voice in the climate change movement, reminds his fellow Americans that "[l]ittle things matter . . . buy a hybrid if you can, buy a exfuel car if you can. Get a higher mileage car that's comfortable for your needs." "[M]any yuppie progressive 'greens' are the [*300] ones who drove their
SUVs to environmental rallies and, even worse, made their homes at the far exurban fringe, requiring massive car dependence in their daily lives," taking

focus on maintaining one's

privileged lifestyle while making minimal changes reflects the power of the underlying structural
impediments blocking a comprehensive response to global climate change in the United States . It is not
residential segregation and racial and spacial hierarchies to previously unimagined dimensions. This

just political inaction that prevents a meaningful response. Millions of Americans do not demand a change in environmental policy because, just as with

Real climate
action would ultimately require relinquishing the spatial, social, and
economic markers that have created and protected whiteness and
the privilege it confers. Although "we too often fail to appreciate how important race remains as a system for amassing and
political elites, it is against the interests of those enjoying white privilege to take genuine steps to combat climate change.

painfully slow reaction of the American public to the growing dangers of

global warming highlights just how important racial privilege remains and how reluctant its
beneficiaries are to give it up. Elite reformists make meaningful change even more remote as they push for behaviors to tweak, but not to
defending wealth and privilege," the

change the existing social, economic, and legal hierarchy in the face of [*301] "problems, [like global warming] that arise to threaten the predominance of
the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class.

Only addressing racial and spatial inequality can solve global

warming the aff leads to serial policy failure
Mandell 08 [Bekah, * A.B., Vassar College; J.D., Boston College Law School, RACIAL REIFICATION AND
GLOBAL WARMING: A TRULY INCONVENIENT TRUTH, Boston Thrid World Law Journal, Spring 2008, p. 3-5]

effectively arresting
climate change will challenge the foundational values of American society . Meaningful action would
require changes in the way we live, which would undermine the foundation of our hierarchical
political and social structure. The behaviors and lifestyles in the United States that emit the lion's
share of CO[2] into the atmosphere are the very same as those that have actualized the idea of race
and maintained the "white-over-black" hierarchy that is the essence of our social, economic, and
legal structure. These environmentally destructive behaviors and lifestyles have created and
protected white privilege in American society . Thus, meaningful action to combat [*294] climate
change will require a dismantling of the systemic policies and norms that have both caused global
warming and protected the racial hierarchy that underlies contemporary America . This reality
explains why meaningful action on the issue of climate change has eluded policy-makers for decades.
Lawmakers and politicians have not taken action to combat climate change because

The structures, practices, and ideologies of the suburban American dream--with its detached single-family homes in
spread-out neighborhoods, far from commercial and urban areas--have been some of the strongest forces in
creating and perpetuating white privilege in American society. Henry Holmes explains the role of the suburbs in that
process: Suburbia, as we know it today, became the preferred middle-class lifestyle. With it came patterns of
economic development, land use, real estate investment, transportation and infrastructure development that
reected race, class and cultural wounds deeply embedded in the psyche and history of the United States. Jim
Crow--institutionalized

segregation and apartheid against African Americans and other nonwhites--was

reflected in urban and suburban zoning codes, restrictive racial covenants in real estate investment
and lending practices, redlining by financial institutions, discriminatory private business practices,
and the distribution of public investments. All these served the interests of the policy-makers, usually the
corporate elite who were typically European-American and middle class or wealthy. In addition to concretizing the
abstract concept of race in American society, the growth of the suburbs has become a major factor in [*295]

Transportation, electricity generation, and deforestation represent the

most harmful human activities because they release large amounts of carbon dioxide, the main
greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Suburbanization and private car-centered transportation policies require
changing the earth's climate.

that more energy be spent on transportation, demand far more electricity, and cause more deforestation than any

Global warming is an unforeseen side effect of the policies and behaviors that have
been used to "race" our society. Therefore, a meaningful response to the global
other lifestyle.

climate crisis requires a dismantling, or at the very least a

reordering, of the spatial systems we have created to construct and
perpetuate the concept of race in the United States.

Alternatives

Fugitivity
The alternative is to reject their curtailment of
surveillance and instead pursue underground fugitive
politics as a way of resisting civil society within civil
society this carves out a space of non-state within the
state that exceeds state power
Dillon 13 (Stephen Dillon, Doctor of philosophy from the university of
Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the NeoliberalCarceral State, May 2013, Pages 112-116)
As law and order, especially in the form of the FBIs Counter Intelligence
Program ( COINTELPRO ), systematically dismantled the radical and
revolutionary left in the United States (through disinformation, murder,
sabotage, incarceration, and exile), a massive network of underground
groups emerged in the early 1970s in the place of the 1960s aboveground
student, civil rights, and anti-war organizations.233 In order to evade
state repression and engage illegal tactics, thousands of activists
disappeared into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table jobs, and
transportation channels that kept them hidden in plain sight . One of the

main arguments of this dissertation is that these groups contested the

emergence of the neoliberal-carceral state. Some of the better-known

groups like the Black Liberation Army splintered off from the Black
Panthers and other black power groups, while the Weather Underground
departed from the student and antiwar movements of the New Left. Still
other groups, like the Seattle-based George Jackson Brigadea group of
multi-racial, queer, working class ex-convictsemerged out of the culture
and politics of the eras anti-prison activism.234 Other underground groups

of the period about which much less is known include: Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberacin Nacional, the Chicano Liberation Front, Red Guerilla Family,
Emiliano Zapata Unit, Iranian Liberation Army, United Freedom Front (or the
Ohio 7), Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, Nat Turner/John Brown
Brigade, and the New World Liberation Front. Many of these groups remain
historically obscure because invisibility was their condition of possibility.
Underground organizations survived by incessantly erasing the subtle

traces every life leaves behind: the detritus of bodiesngerprints, hair,

and skinbut also memories, stories, and documents that could lead to
recognition and capture. In this way, a major aspect of their history is what
will never be known: what they did, who they were, where and how they
lived. In fact, for three years beginning in 1974, the New World Liberation
Front committed over 50 bombings in the San Francisco area (including

banks, power stations, corporate oces, the San Francisco stock brokerage,
and the South African embassy) without injuring one person and a single
member ever being identied or apprehended.235 The underground was a
space structured by a politics of unknowing. Indeed, a controlled lack of
knowledge an endorsement of willful forgettingyou will know what you
need to know when you need to know it, was the condition of possibility for

the continuation of the underground.236 This invisibility and illegibility

contrasted with the regimes of hypersurveillance , regulation, and policing
central to the law and order state. As the next chapter explores more fully,

the underground is not a place, but rather, is an alternative time-space

paradigm, a parallel universe, a shadow world that exists within, but
negates the normative time of the nation, state, and capital . The
underground is a non-place where one hides in the expectations of
others, fashioning survival along different dimensions that mobilized
timing and synchronization, the thoughtful use of light and shadow,
rhythm and pulse.237 The fugitive became a ghost by disappearing into
the openness of the world. New lives and identities were constructed by
piecing together fragments collected while on the run: new styles, clothing,

voices, histories, and names. David Gilbert, a member of the Weather

Underground and later a group associated with the Black Liberation Army,
recounts that fugitives had to even learn to walk differently: gait and carriage
sometimes were more recognizable than hair or clothing.238 However, the
most essential tool for staying underground was ID.239 Bill Ayers, a
founding member of the Weather Underground, recounts how political
fugitives often scoured rural cemeteries for the graves of dead children:
born between 1940 and 1950 and who died ve to ten years later. With a
name and birth date, they would acquire a birth certicate from the local
courthouse and then apply for a social security card that had never been

issued.240 They could then get jobs, buy cars, and get bank accounts. The
newly disappeared resurfaced as the dead resurrected.241 Critically, the
underground existed in a time and space structured by the technologies
of the prison, the police, and the law . Put another way, the underground
was made necessary , and brought into being, by the ways the state
rendered certain forms of resistance illegal, exceptional, violent,
backwards, irrational, and beyond politics. In addition, the underground
emerged as a direct response to the racial politics of law and order,
imperial aggression in Vietnam, and the violence of global capitalism.

Simply, the underground was a space brought into being by legal and extralegal state violence. Following James C. Scotts analysis of state and nonstate spaces, we can position the underground as a non-state space that
is enmeshed with state space. State space is measurable, visible, legible,
and thus open to manipulation, regulation, and control , while non-state
spaces exceed the states systems of knowing and seeing .242 As Scott
puts it, legibility is a condition of manipulation.243 By exceeding the
states epistemological and visual regimes, non-state spaces critique the
norms that make state space possible We can extend Scotts analysis of

state space by noting that state space necessitates state time. In his classic
study of the prison, Michel Foucault describes what he calls the temporal
elaboration of the act.244 For Foucault, when disciplinary power regulates
the micro-movements of individuals in spacehow one raises their hand,
sews a stitch, assembles a gun, or takes a steptime penetrates the
body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.245 Time as a

mechanism of power possesses the body, so that time accumulates within

the body. By inhabiting the body, a building, or a discourse, power uses time
to contort the world in its image. Powers object becomes its double, and
time is one of the mechanisms used in this process. In short, powers
regulation and management of space requires the contortion and control
of time. By escaping this spatial disciplining, non-state spaces exceed
state power, but also transcend state time. The underground was a nonstate space that also produced non-normative experiences of (and
epistemologies concerning) time. Thus, we can understand the fugitive and
the underground as political formations from which technologies of state
power that normally operate in obscurity become hyper-visible. By
unmasking state space and state time, the underground is a rich site from

which to understand the rise of the neoliberalcarceral state.

Opacity
Engaging in acts of informatic opacity resists the
surveillance states ability to make hyper-visible bodies of
color only be embracing aesthic practices of facial
confusion can the black body subvert interpollation by
whiteness
Blas 2014 (Zach, Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose work engages
technology, queerness, and politics. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo.. "Informatic Opacity:
Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement."
(2014). GH)
Both the panopticon and NSA software control through an optical logic of
making visible. While the panopticon employs the threat of continuous
visibility as a disciplinary means to achieve docile conditioning, the NSA
implements technical platforms to produce informatic visibilities on
populations, which is the aggregation of data for identifying, categorizing,
and tracking. Here, visibility is light as information. For instance, take
PRISM: a prism mediates and manages light, and as a transparent device, it
suggests a mediation that is invisible, elided, obscured. Through a seemingly
phantasmagorical process, a prism catches light from the world and refracts
and parses it, and PRISMs logo depicts this, as light rays are intersected by a
prism to exude a single rainbow with demarcated color fields. Thus, a prism
needs light to be functional, and the light that PRISM necessitates is
information stored and in circulation throughout global, digital networks,
severs, and databases. Such light is a particular, material form, based on
standards that have been predetermined by a multifarious conglomerate of
corporate, military, and state interests. To harness this light, digital,
networked surveillance relies upon the production of global technical
standards, or protocols, to account for human life, what media theorists
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker label the universal standards
of identication.(1) Technologies of identification like biometrics, GPS, and
data-mining algorithms require normalizing techniques for indexing human
activity and identity, which then operate as common templates for
regulation, management, and governance. It is through the utilization of
such standards that surveillance is able to rapidly increase at a global
scale. As a result, information theorist Philip Agre claims contemporary
surveillance must be more aptly termed capture, a computational

process that signals to the often automated collection of information that is

analyzed against pre-established models.(2) The construction of these
models--or grammars of action, as Agre describes them--are designed
by humans, and therefore, contain sociopolitical tendencies and
preferences within their very technical architectures. Informatic

standardizations, in turn, produce a conception of the human as that which is

fully measurable, quantifiable, and knowable--that is, informatically visible-an enterprise that undoubtedly accelerates a neoliberal agenda where

private security companies get rich by vehemently surveilling the world

population. Our surveillance state now nds itself preoccupied with big

data, interactive biometric marketing, and the domestication of tracking

and measuring technologies, exemplied in the Quantied Self
movement. Capture technologies and their global standards of identification

insidiously return us to the ableist, classist, homophobic, racist, sexist, and

transphobic scientific endeavors of the 19th century, like anthropometry,
physiognomy, and eugenics, albeit with the speed and ubiquity of 21st
century digital technologies. The reliance of identification standardization in
capture works to eliminate alterity, in which alterity becomes what remains
outside computational possibilities of calculation and categorization. Of
course, the grammars, or standards, of capture are technical forms of
societal normalization, which amount to gross reductions in identification,
where identity is reduced to disembodied aggregates of data. Thus, it is
minoritarian persons that are rendered uncomputable because their
difference, or alterity, cannot be digitally measured. With biometrics, for
example, dark skin is commonly undetectable while other non-normative
displays of age, race, or gender are frequently mis-recognized. It is those
that exist as such anomalies that are informatically invisible, not emitting
light, a precarious position to be sure, under threat of political violence. But,

not emitting light and becoming informatically opaque is also a tactical

practice of evasion, resistance, and autonomy that struggles towards social

change. Today, if control and policing dominantly operate through making

bodies informatically visible, then informatic opacity becomes a prized

means of resistance against the state and its identity politics. Such
opaque actions approach capture technologies as one instantiation of the
vast uses of representation and visibility to control and oppress, and
therefore, refuse the false promises of equality, rights, and inclusion
offered by state representation and, alternately create radical exits that
open pathways to self-determination and autonomy. In fact, a pervasive

desire to ee visibility is casting a shadow across political, intellectual, and

artistic spheres; acts of escape and opacity are everywhere today! For
instance, global masked protest--from Anonymous and black blocs to Pussy
Riot and the Zapatistas--is a carnivalesque refusal of capture and
recognition, an aesthetic tool for collective transformation beyond the
perceptual registers of informatic and state visibility. Furthermore, the
cypherpunk has also grown in popularity, as projects like TOR and HTTPS
Everywhere develop encryption technologies that offer online anonymity.
Opaque practices expand upon critical theories like the whatever singularity,
imperceptibility, illegibility, nonexistence, disappearance, and exodus. Yet, it
is perhaps queer theory that has most decidedly taken an opaque turn in
recent years: concepts like Jos Esteban Muozs queerness as escape, Jack
Halberstams queer darkness, and Nicholas de Villiers queer opacity
understand queerness as both a refusal and utopic re-imagining of
normalizing drives to recognize, categorize, and visualize, while they
continue to engage the power dynamics of class, gender, race, and sexuality

and their impact on the categories of visible and invisible.(3) Informatic

opacity might best be understood as a mutated queerness, brought to a
global, technical scale, that strives to subvert identification standardization.
Ultimately, it is the late Martinique thinker douard Glissants aestheticoethical philosophy of opacity that is paradigmatic: his claim that a person
has the right to be opaque does not concern legislative rights but is rather

an ontological position that lets exist as such that which is immeasurable,

nonidentiable, and unintelligible in things.(4) Glissants opacity is an

ethical mandate to maintain obscurity, to not impose rubrics of

categorization and measurement, which always enact a politics of reduction
and exclusion. While opacity in Glissants writings is not tactical, an opaque
tactics, now more than ever, must be wielded to insist on opacity as a
crucial ethics--because capture annihilates opacity. Between the

antimonies of identification standardization and opacity, a paradox emerges:

as capture technologies are intimately bound to the privileges of citizenship,
mobility, and rights, those who are either computationally illegible or
unaccounted for are excessively vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and
criminalization because, unlike the normatively monitored and identied,
they are always risks, in that their opacity is not fully controllab le. As I
stated previously, it is often non-normative, minoritarian persons that are
forced to occupy such precarious positions; just consider the struggles of
transgender and undocumented persons with identification regulation. Thus,

a paradox of recognition presents itself: political precarity is a result of

informatic opacity, but utopian desires persist nonetheless in escaping the
control of visibility and recognition, a battle that is seemingly more and
more impossible. The implausible proposition of becoming informatically

opaque does appear insurmountable. Indeed, it is the subject of theorist

Irving Gohs essay Prolegomenon to a Right to Disappear, in which he turns
to artistic practice for how one might proceed.(5) Similarly, in their hacktivist
prophecy against capture, Galloway and Thacker claim that future avantgarde practices will be those of nonexistence.(6) Here, opacity is an
aesthetico-political practice that enables revolt and envisions alternatives
through speculative proposition and practical experimentation . A

burgeoning group of contemporary artists have commenced such an opaque

practice, producing variations on how to become informatically opaque. In
support of Wikileaks, Dutch design and research group Metahaven fabricated
a series of scarves to evoke the organizations dual engagement with opacity
and transparency, as tactics of anonymity and encryption are used to protect
whistleblowers in order to make corruption transparent. Like the protest
mask, the scarf is an aesthetic accessory that blocks capture but also
generates visibilities opaque to control. Also working in fashion, artist Adam
Harvey develops DIY looks for evading face detection; in CV Dazzle, he
uses make-up and hair styling to construct eccentric designs that make faces
unrecognizable to computer vision systems. In workshops, Harvey teaches
publics how to use cosmetics and clothing to evade various detection
systems. Similarly, feminist artist Jemima Wyman, whose practice broadly

explores fashion and camouage in protest, recently organized a sew-in and

fundraiser to make masks in solidarity with Pussy Riot. In my own artistic
practice, I lead an on-going series of mask workshops and actions called
Facial Weaponization Suite, in which collective masks are produced from
the aggregated biometric facial data of participants. The masks function as
both a practical evasion of biometric facial recognition and also a more
general refusal of political visibility, which intersects with contemporary
social movements use of masking. My workshops are both site-specific,

designed to engage a particular community in a specific place, and

pedagogical, in that they educate publics on the often technically and
bureaucratically complex deployments of surveillance and capture
technologies. The project also offers people experiences in being together
masked, which is certainly training in opaque ethics. The first mask in the
suite is Fag Face Mask, which is a critical engagement with recent scientific
studies that claim sexual orientation can be determined through rapid facial
recognition techniques. During reclaim:pride, an intervention at the 2013 LA
Pride in West Hollywood with the ONE Archives and RECAPS Magazine, the
mask was used as part of a Face Face Scanning Station to performatively
critique mainstream gay and lesbian politics desire for inclusion and
recognition by the state. The second mask addresses a tripartite conception
of blackness, split between biometric racism (the inability to detect dark
skin), the favoring of black in militant aesthetics, and black as that which
informatically obfuscates. Organized in conjunction with Ricardo
Dominguezs b.a.n.g.lab at UCSD, participants staged tableau vivants to
dramatize these different yet overlapping shades of blackness. Such artistic
practices demonstrate that at their core is an aesthetics that demands a
different approach to looking, recognizing, and identifying, that confounds
a standardized visibility structured by quantication, measurement, and
reduction. These are withdraws from power through collective stylings but
also occupations of zones that lie outside the perceptual registers of
control. Informatic opacity, then, is not about simply being unseen,
disappearing, or invisible, but rather about creating autonomous
visibilities, which are trainings in difference and transformatio n. While
such practices might remain utopic speculations or small-scale
realizations, art makes the impossibility of informatic opacity feasible,
practical, and fantastic, and its aesthetics omit something other than light
that collectivizes and builds solidarity.

Black Celebration
The alternative is to celebrate black expression in the face
of the white gaze- surveillance is inevitable the only
option is to create survival strategies to navigate the
contours of legal spaces and reclaim social-life through
acts of guerilla resistance
Simone Browne 2012.(Browne is an Assistant Professor, African and
African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas @ Austin, She
researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance, Social Media, Social
Network Sites, and Black Diaspora Studies Cultural Studies Publication
details. EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN.Taylor and
Francis. http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20) VR
We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a
technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly
illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained
within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a
simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met
surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded
white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law . Of course,
unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social
networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued
regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things .
Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took
place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population , in markets
and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes
interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative
practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During

celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch

Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a
governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and
collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of
black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory
resistance made this a festival of misrule (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so
that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations
in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up
for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister
2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black
performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a
man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously
close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the
hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from
the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues.
(McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged

by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before
the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much

signicance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine Market breakdown

reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lotts discussion of

black performances he cites Thomas De Voes eyewitness account of the
Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City.
De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large
width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing
on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually
given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the
sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a
cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Browns
Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance,
the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship

and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of

commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls public negro
dances at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where is

quoted as saying that the dancers would bring roots, berries, birds, clams,
oysters, owers, and anything else they could gather and sell in market to
supply themselves with pocket money (28 April 1889). Sylvia Wynters
provision ground ideology in instructive here for an understanding of
solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to
dehumanization of Man and Nature (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision
grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices, including dance,
were, as Wynter tells us, the cultural guerilla resistance against the
Market economy (1970, p. 36). 7 The remains of the Catharine Market

breakdown be found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing

cypher. Then now cultural production and expressive practices offer

moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized

surveillance within a visual surplus. being, they allow for us to think
differently about the predicaments, policies and performances
constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was space of both terror
and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive notices, public whippings
and the discretionary uses of violence by Majestys subjects rendered the
black subject as always already unfree yet like the breakdown, that were
constitutive of black freedom persisted. under this context where certain
humans came to be understood by many unfree and the property of others
while at the same time creating practices maintained their humanity by
challenging the routinization of surveillance, we should read the 1783
Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.

Haunting
The alternative is to engage in a re-reading of law through
a negative dialectics - this rupture in liberal readings
interpretations of the law as race neutral allows for a
confrontation with the spectors of whiteness that plague
state institutions in favor of a hauntological approach that
asserts a black political project of hope within surveillance
Nick J. Sciullo 2015(Sciullo is an Instructor of Communication and
Rhetorical Studies, Director of Debate @ Illinois College. THE GHOSTS OF
WHITE SUPREMACY: TRAYVON MARTIN, MICHAEL BROWN, AND THE
SPECTERS OF BLACK CRIMINALITY. Hein Online. 117 W. Va. L. Rev. 1397) VR
Black letter law should be read as the photographic negative , for it is
black letter law that imposes white supremacy in black script . It is this
oppressive rescripting of white supremacy as neutral that allows white
supremacy to flourish in the neutral arena of black letter law. Careful
students of the law should read the photographic negative though, instead of
assuming the neutrality of law's scripting. What I mean here is that there is a
tendency to read law as it is, under the pressure of bar passage, job
prospects, project deadlines, and eciency-all the logics of late-stage
capitalism. As opposed to this, in opposition to the liberal reading of law as
it is with perhaps a modest critique here and there, students of the law
should radically critique law through the oppositional strategy of reading

the photographic negative. This play with vision harkens back to the
centrality of the photographic image in the Civil Rights Movement. The
negative dialectic 39 of reading the law in reverse demands a realization
that law is constructed by its absolute nonneutrality. Calling on Theodor
Adorno,40 I see the negative dialectic of producing not some arming
synthesis, but some deformed crisis, a necessary step in grasping law's
structural racism. 4' It is, in essence, law's lack of objectivity that makes
law's supposed objectivity the profession's closest-held and best-protected
secret. By opening up the eld of play through negative dialectics, legal

scholars may better understand racism as contingent, ephemeral,

spectral, free-forming, and open to re-writing both by the agents of white
supremacy, and those subject to its spectral influence . One of the dangers

of doing race work, thinking about race, engaging race in one's social justice
activism is the tendency to think about race in relatively rigid ways. This
becomes a traditional dialectical move that assumes a battling of static
forces to produce a static synthesis. Opposed to that, I see a world of

negative dialectics as offering a more nuanced view of race and justice,

one that neither rests on outdated notions of blackness and whiteness nor
totally obscures itself with relativism. The photographic negative
metaphor is another way to think about acknowledging white supremacy
through looking awry. 39 Negative does not mean the opposite of positive.

Instead it means the rejection of the determinism inherent in Hegel's

dialectic, and Marx's study of Hegel. Negative dialectics open up the eld of

play to indeterminacy and contingency, producing a dialectic that does not

drive toward an almost pre-congured synthesis, but instead opens up to
a plethora of possibilities. 40 Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a German

philosopher and sociologist best known as a key member of the Frankfurt

School. In order to better understand the ramifications of this spectral
account of law, one must understand that my political project is hope.

Attempting to see the unseeable, speak the unspeakable, and think the
unthinkable is a logic designed to confront. In desperate times, where

white supremacy slips through our fingers save for a few tugs at the ghost's
tattered rags, what legal scholars must do is engage in politics of hope,
because hope sustains a critical orientation to the world. Even if civil society

is anti-black, and anti-blackness would seem to prevent black political

engagement, the answer is hope and not radical negativity, which can only
reproduce the character of negativity attributed to blacks by whites . This
is to say, the more radical disjuncture is to confront white negativity with
black hope . Keep in mind Ernst Bloch's famous statement, "We must believe

in the Principle of Hope. A Marxist does not have the right to be a pessimist.
'42 But, it is not just a Marxist that cannot be a pessimist, it is also a critical
race theorist, a black radical, a labor organizer, a student protestor. Bloch
wrote at a time when hope might seem preposterous, when hope was in
short supply, yet his vision for hope motivated the Frankfort School to care
deeply about ethics and well-being throughout the World Wars and later.43

While our hauntings may be cause for concern, while they may inspire in
us anything but hope, a consistent critical stance against white supremacy
requires just the hope Bloch described. In order to do that, we must do more
lawyering, more speaking, more writing, more marching, and more
learning. White supremacy's proponents are busy at this work. Challenging
antiblackness requires the same. Negativity or disengagement cannot
sustain struggle. Far from Nietzsche's positive politics of negation, which
have their place, what we need now is an orientation toward hope. Let that
be the strategy, even if we may quibble about tactics. Nat Turner haunts
USGabriel Prosser haunts us. 45 Medgar Evers and Emmett Till haunt us.
Trayvon Martin haunts us. 48 Michael Brown haunt sus. 4 9 Eric Garner
haunts us. 5 0 What haunts us more is the specter of white supremacy that
enabled these tragic events. In order to engage a world structured by antiblackness, to engage a legal system that seems determined through many
of its most important actors to attack, disempower, and disenfranchise
people of color, to engage a political system built on a foundation of dead
black bodies, we must, with nary a bat of the eye, ask what are we to do
with the ghosts of white supremacy ? 51 We must ask this question not
because there is one answer, not because the solution is easy, not because
the end is near, but instead precisely because the end is far. We are a
long way from justice. We are a long way from peace. We are a long way
from recognizing our connections to each other, to our role in the struggle
for equality and the ways in which we hinder that struggle's success .52
The ghostsof white supremacy must be addressed, must be confronted,

no matter how fleeting and ineffectual such psychic engagement may

be.53 Trying is the redress to pessimism's affront to an ethic of hope.

Counter Gaze
Counter surveillance solvesthe act of refusing the gaze of whiteness in itself
is a way to trouble the racialization of surveillance
Browne 12 [Simone Browne, PhD in 2007. She began her faculty position in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, d. Race and surveillance, Routledge Handbook
of Surveillance Studies, Routledge, page 73-74]//JC//
The compulsory

visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper

advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants . These texts were primarily aimed
at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts became part of the apparatus of surveillance, the eyes
and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical descriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive

slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as out of place. For instance, a
March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazette offering a Two Dollars reward for a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age,
named Seth, but calls herself Sall, attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization.
This notice went on to state: sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception. Seths, or Salls, duplicity is not
limited to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as
white, rather than as a Mulatto (one black parent and one white parent) or a Quadroon Girl (one black grandparent) as per the racial
nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal
census in 1790. I will return to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for

fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social
construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was
repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance . An 1851 handbill
produced by abolitionist Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned colored people of Boston to steer clear of
watchmen and police officers and to keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open.
Top eye here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officers were
empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws . Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of
white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing
surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relations during slavery and the
racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States , bell hooks tells us that black people
often cultivated the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear uppity . To look directly
was an assertion of subjectivity, equality (1992: 168). hooks suggests that the often violent ways in which
blacks were denied the right to look backthink of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old
Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white womanhad produced in us an
overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze (116). Such politicized and
oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave
notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Sam, who is described in the notice as five feet
high and remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to. This notice records
Sams oppositional gaze, his looking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the
simple act of rolling ones eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a technology
of whiteness (Fiske: 1998: 69).

Reclaiming Flesh
In contrast to their lines of flight away from bodily coding,
we reclaim the atrocity of the flesh as a means of agency
within capture through the remapping of whiteness.
Weheliye 14 (Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American
Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, Habeas Viscus: Racializing
Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Pages
2-3)

I use the
phrase habeas viscus You shall have the fleshon the one hand, to
signal how violent political domination activates a fleshly surplus that
simultaneously sustains and disgures said brutality, and, on the other
hand, to reclaim the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal arena for the politics
emanating from different traditions of the oppressed . The flesh, rather
than displacing bare life or civil death, excavates the social (after)life of
these categories : it represents racializing assemblages of subjection that
can never annihilate the lines of flight , freedom dreams , practices of
liberation , and possibilities of other worlds . Nonetheless, genres of the human
I discuss in Habeas Viscus ought not to be understood within the lexicons
of resistance and agency , because, as explanatory tools, these concepts
have a tendency to blind [ mislead] us , whether through strenuous denials or
exalted celebrations of their existence, to the manifold occurrences of
freedom in zones of indistinction. As modes of analyzing and imagining
the practices of the oppressed in the face of extreme violence although this is
also applicable more broadly resistance and agency assume full, self- present, and
coherent subjects working against something or someone. Which is not to say that
Building on Hortense Spillerss distinction between body and esh and the writ of habeas corpus,

agency and resistance are completely irrelevant in this context, just that we might come to a more layered and
improvisatory understanding of extreme subjection if we do not decide in advance what forms its disfigurations

When I initially began thinking about this book I wondered

about the very basic possibility of agency and/or resistance in extreme
circumstances such as slave plantations or concentration camps. The initial
inquiry, then, led me to broader methodological questions facing minority discourse: Why are formations
of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/or
exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom
become possible in the absence of resistance and agency? I dont intend for
should take on.

Habeas Viscus to provide final answers to these questions as much as to ask them in novel ways and leave the
resulting fragments reverberating around the room of collective scholarly inquiry with the hope that we will be able

How
might we go about thinking and living enfleshment otherwise so as to
usher in different genres of the human and how might we accomplish this task through the
to pose the problem of subjection qua agency and resistance in different, heretofore nonexistent ways.

critical project of black studies?

Alt Solvency- Conciousness Raising

Consciousness amongst the black community about
unequal surveillance practices is neccesary to create
resistance to dominant surveillance culture by creating
more democractic pedagogy
Malkia Amala Cyril 2015 ( Cyril is a 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. Progressive
News. http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americasstate-surveillance) AG
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 mothers visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the
slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim
Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with

surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. Its time for

journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged
classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that
data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor
perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished
underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and

secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law

enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of
indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up
to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance
as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance
is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the
privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The
trouble is , targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate
collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved
in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of
privacy from government or corporate surveillance . Instead, we are
watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to
protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culture from jazz

to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T

and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as
much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a
recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear:
2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this
organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give
to every member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard
of even a few years ago. Predictive policing, also known as Total
Information Awareness, is described as using advanced technological
tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns,

sequences, and anities found in data to make determinations about

when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however,

because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In a racially

discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce
injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face
of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de facto
system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices,
conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that

operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime

prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach
in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus
on quality of life crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for
which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability,

transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial proling

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 specic conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of

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

Verify and Prism. As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows,
its almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the
data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesnt just
lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop and frisk
legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of
color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime,
suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers
target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los
Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the
future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies
me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk
than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in
the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying
aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it
disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law
enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on
Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials
uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat mainstream
Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims
as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death
Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York
City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded
unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not
suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all
Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention
facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum
seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant
communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal
policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the
Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the
United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by
far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone
represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated
than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some
misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study
confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be
imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is
a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA

could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying
on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are
increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today,
racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that
has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural
racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier

read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the
newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections

catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too.
Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not
the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr.
once said, Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not
see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from
view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked
deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when
women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center.
The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the
Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to
drive structural racism in the twenty-rst century. We can help black lives
matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial
hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our
communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the
cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter
inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police
departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on
surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are
no voiceless people, only those that aint been heard yet. Lets birth a new
norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-rst century create
equity and justice for allso all bodies enjoy full and equal protection , and

the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more.

Alt Solvency- Opacity

An opaque pedagogy resists colonization
Linder* and Stetson** 2009 (*Keith, Research Fellow at State University
of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, **George A.,
post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy at the
United States Coast Guard Academy. "For opacity: nature, difference and
indigeneity in Amazonia." TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 21
(2009): 41.)

indigenous
intellectuals have articulated critiques of the objectifying and colonizing
effects of Western epistemology and what might be called the ethnocolonial gaze (Deloria 1988; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Vizenor 1999; Vizenor and Lee 2003). The
oppression produced by the gaze of the colonizer or master is repeated
in that of historically later types of discoverer, such as the ethnologist
for whom the colonized people are merely visible objects of knowledge
(Britton 1999: 23). Glissant critiques such a gaze in his discussion of transparency: [i]f we examine
the process of understanding people and ideas from the perspective of
Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for
transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you ... I have to
reduce. (Glissant 1997: 189-90) Understanding, by striving to render all things
transparent, aims at grasping, where the verb to grasp contains the
movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to
themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation (191-92). The
seemingly innocuous exercise of understanding, for Glissant, represents
an act of violence laid bare under the gaze of Western science and other
knowledge-producing practices as the Other is rendered perfectly
transparent, knowable and therefore controllablecreated afresh within the conceptual
In addition to the complex terrain of indigeneity and nature described above, numerous

schema of the observer. Certainly, Perus National Museum functions in this way. Many ethnographers have taken
steps to address these issues (Dove 1999; Jackson 1999; Katz 1996; Nast 1994; Pratt 2000; Sparke 1996), and
feminist and postcolonial scholars have provided helpful critiques of transparency (Yeglenoglu 1998; Young
1990).

Glissant echoes these scholars in making a critical point:

understanding can be a disempowering act for the object of
ethnographic scrutiny. Glissant does not argue against all forms of
understanding or knowledge about the Other. Rather, he stridently
opposes knowledge that reduces, generalizes or subsumes to a universal.

The overarching concept of Glissants work is what he calls the poetics of relation, in which all identities are
extended through a relationship with the Other (Glissant 1997: 11). Relationlatent, open, multilingual in
intention, directly in contact with everything possible (32)is made up of shared knowledge rather than
unknowns (8). But it resists any monolingual intent, colonizing root or totalitarian universal, and proceeds from no

We nd in Glissant the beginnings of a non-colonizing

knowledge, one that enables difference to remain different without
reduction to the same. In relation, one must strive to know what
Glissant calls the totality of the world, yet also know simultaneously that
this is impossible: one approaches totality, but can never fully describe or
generalize it. The open multiplicity that results from contact among cultures can never be defined, but it
absolute (28).

can be imagined. Such an imaginary encounters new spaces and does not transform them into either depths or
conquests (199). Unlike Perus National Museum, it rejects any final underlying transparency (62) and discards
the universalthis generalizing edict that summarized the world as something obvious and transparent, claiming

Perceiving the multiplicitous totality of

the world, this knowledge renounces any claim to sum it up or possess
it (21). TOPIA 21 47 The violence of transparency can be averted once one knows it is impossible to reduce
for it one presupposed sense and one destiny(20).

the multiplicities and opacities of the world to ones own universal; such generalization brings all identities and
peoples into equivalency and hierarchical order (62).

It is against the reduction of

generalization and transparency that Glissant calls for a right to opacity:
[w]e clamor for a right to opacity for everyone (194). The opaque,
Glissant writes, is not the obscure, but is that which cannot be
reduced (191). It is that which always escapes. Glissant describes opacity
as an irreducible density that evades comprehension and controlof both
Self and Other. Opacity produces movements that open new and
unforeseen congurations of difference (30). It is a warning from Glissant
that there are limits to Truth: opacity disrupts universalist and
totalitarian presumptions. Glissant writes, The thought of opacity
distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself
to be [and] saves me from unequivocal courses and irreversible
choices (192). Foregrounding opacity forces an ethical mode of relation
between Self and Other. The understanding brought about by opacity,
upon which relation is built, rejects the reduction of the generalizing
universal. In her introduction to Poetics of Relation, translator Betsy Wing describes this as the generosity of

perception implied by the verb to give, in the sense of yielding, as a tree might give in a storm in order to
remain standing (xiv). This process of yielding becomes necessary after the acknowledgement of the impossibility
of perfectly delineating the Other within ones own universal. But we want to think of yielding less as a universal
ethical code that privileges the ability of the Self to benevolently encounter and somehow accept difference, and
more as a set of concrete responses to the productive effects of opacity (Nealon 1998). Opacity can be one way of
conceptualizing difference as not simply a fully transparent essence, on the one hand, or an effect or articulation,
on the other, but as something that produces effects in ways that are not predetermined or always easily

The productiveness of opacity evades complete comprehension

and control; we must continuously reconsider what we thought we had
pinned down. We suggest that both the essentializations of nature-arguments and accounts of identities as
understandable.

effects or articulations enact a sort of violence by circumscribing alterity. Perus National Museum, through its
ethno-colonial gaze, recognizes difference, but within its own realm of intelligibility. Deconstructionist readings
achieve a similar result by reducing identity to an empty signifier. Treating indigeneity as an articulation or effect
can still serve to render alterity transparent, fully explainable and understandable. Saying that articulations or
positionings have material effects is insucient, because the articulation itself remains transparently rendered
and unproblematic. The productiveness of opacity, by contrast, forces a yielding; a privileging of opacity that
allows one to encounter difference ethically because it TOPIA 21 48 necessitates a recognition, in concrete
contexts, that one can never pin the Other down. One can never quite get to the bottom of natures, or reduce
someone to a singular truthones own. Identities are surely produced, yet opacity produces new effects and
unforeseen convergences. One is forced to change course, to admit ones truths are partial and incomplete, to
yield. Cultivating opacitygiving-on-and-withwhile relenting from the effort to get to the bottom of natures,
offers a way for scholars to produce more ethical engagements with difference. Such an ethical-political move
permits an explicit politicization of knowledge production, coupled with an ethics of encounter. We call this mode
of relation opaque alliance: it enables one to write with an Other rather than simply writing about, while also
suffusing this relation with the ethical sensibilities of yielding. These two features allow us to work towards
Glissants two suggestionsto relent from the search to discover what lies at the bottom of natures, and to
instead let our understanding prefer to give-on-and-with, to yield.

Turning to opacity enables us

to think about how Otherness remains both irreducible and productive in
concrete contexts, as much for non-human nature as for indigenous identity, and links between
indigeneity and nature. In the next section, we highlight the productiveness of opacity by describing our recent
experiences with Village Earth (VE), a development NGO based in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Shipibo communities
in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon, as an opaque alliance. We then return to the multiple meanings of
nature invoked above to underscore the productiveness of opacity and the ways in which Glissant helps us to
negotiate ethical responses.

Alt. Pre-requisite- Historical

The alternative is a prerequisitebefore attempting to
breakdown the surveillance state, we must interrogate the
racialization of surveillancethe armatives method
simply reinstates the boundaries that it attempt to
destroy
Browne 12 [Simone Browne, PhD in 2007. She began her faculty position in
the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, d. Race
and surveillance, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Routledge,
page 72-73]//JC//

a discussion of race and surveillance that begins in the past , as

our past reveals a great deal about contemporary practices . For example, the
zoning of black mobilities in city spaces is not limited to the contemporary
era. Consider the eighteenth-century lantern laws passed by the Common Council of New York
City that stipulated that no Negro or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years
do presume to be or appear in any of the streets of New York City one hour
after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle. As Fiske tells us, power needs to
be able to see what it has categorized as the abnormal (82). In New York City and
other spaces that zoned black and Indian mobilities in the early 1700s, it was the lantern that aided
in this surveillant seeing. Candlelight was used to Other some into the
abnormal and to uphold racial categories. To say that racializing
surveillance is a technology of social control is not to take this form of
surveillance as involving a very specic set of social practices that
maintain a xed racial order of things. Rather it suggests that how things
get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space , time and is
subject to change, but most often upholds Othering practices that rst
accompanied European colonial expansion and that sought to structure
social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness .
Racializing surveillance is not static or applied only to particular human groupings. It relies on
techniques, some of which are discussed below, to reify boundaries along racial lines ,
and in so doing, it reies race. While the focus here is on race and surveillance and how they are
What follows is

race must be understood as operating in an interlocking fashion with

class, gender, sexuality, location and other markers of identity. Although the
examples cited are mainly from the United States, the techniques and
coupled,

technologies discussed have been and are applied to other spaces and at
other times to order things racially, for instance census taking as a means

of racial classification, or identification documents with biometric identifiers

used for negatively discriminatory practices (Lyon 2003).

Answers to Answers

AT: Speaking for others

The political ontology of the black body is rooted in
slavery - the slave is inherently black. Means blackness is
a prior question in anti-whiteness resistance
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor, African American Studies School of
Humanities, People-of-Color-Blindness Social Text 103 Vol. 28, No. 2, PG
36-37) AT

Not all free persons are white (nor are they equal or equally free), but
slaves are paradigmatically black. And because blackness serves as the
basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal
culture, it permanently destabilizes the position of any nominally free
black population. Stuart Hall might call this the articulation of elements of

a discourse, the production of a non-necessary correspondence between

the signifiers of racial blackness and slavery.27 But it is the historical
materialization of the logic of a transnational political and legal culture such
that the contingency of its articulation is generally lost to the infrastructure
of the Atlantic world that provides Frank Wilderson a basis for the concept of
a political ontology of race.28 The United States provides the point of
focus here, but the dynamics under examination are not restricted to its
bounds. Political ontology is not a metaphysical notion, because it is the

explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historic challenge

through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political
status either, even an oppressed political status, because it functions as
if it were a metaphysical property across the longue dure of the
premodern, modern, and now postmodern eras. That is to say, the

application of the law of racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or

permutation in its operation across the better part of a millennium.29 In
Wildersons terms, the libidinal economy of antiblackness is pervasive,

regardless of variance or permutation in its political economy. In fact, the

application of slave law among the free (that is, the disposition that with

respect to the African shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of

turning human bodies into sentient esh) has outlived in the
postemancipation world a certain form of its prior operationthe
property relations specic to the institution of chattel and the
plantationbased agrarian economy in which it was sustained. Hartman

describes this in her 2007 memoir, Lose Your Mother, as the afterlife of
slavery: a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be
undone . . . a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched
centuries ago.30 On that note, it is not inappropriate to say that the
continuing application of slave law facilitated the reconguration of its
operation with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, rather than its abolition (in the conventional reading) or

even its circumscription as punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted (on the progressive reading of contemporary
critics of the prison-industrial complex). It is the paramount value of Loc
Wacquants historical sociology, especially in Wildersons hands, that it

provides a schema for tracking such reconfigurations of anti-blackness from

slavery to mass imprisonment without losing track of its structural
dimensions, its political ontology.

Any revolution that doesnt account for the black

existence is doomed to failure and co-option by whiteness.
Only a revolution centered on blackness and the narrative
of the slave can be successful
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor, African American Studies School of
Humanities, People-of-Color-Blindness Social Text 103 Vol. 28, No. 2, PG
48-49) AT
The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of
the category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition
building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the
question of black liberation back to the center of discussion. Every
analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and
the machinations of the racial state without accounting for black
existence within its frameworkwhich does not mean simply listing it
among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought is
doomed to miss what is essential about the situation. Black existence does

not represent the total reality of the racial formationit is not the beginning
and the end of the storybut it does relate to the totality; it indicates the
(repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the
whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully
understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range

of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative

regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and
queer.75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for
a decentered, postblack paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale
and nature of black suffering and of the strugglespolitical, aesthetic,
intellectual, and so onthat have sought to transform and undo it. What is
lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of
the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power relative to
the category of blackness.76 This is why every attempt to defend the
rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to
make substantial gains insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of
blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the
juridical infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on board, the

only viable political option and the only effective defense against the
intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil
society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the
apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles
Hamilton wrote in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation,
that black freedom entails the necessarily total revamping of the
society.77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African
diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is
more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I

knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able
to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind
of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and
a history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was captivity
without the possibility of flight, inescapable violence, precarious life.
There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going
beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet
another revolution.

AT: Black/White Binaries bad

Anti-blackness is a global phenomenon that is mapped
onto bodies through structural positionality
Copeland and Sexton 3 (2003, Huey Copeland Ph.D., Director of
Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Art History with aliations in
the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, Jared Sexton Director of African American
Studies, School of Humanities Associate Professor, African American Studies
School of Humanities Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, Raw
Life: An Introduction, Volume 13, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2003, published
University of Nebraska Press)
It is at this impasse and with such questions that the essays collected here begin: with the notion derived from
Fanon, of the impossibility of representing race, either for the slave or the master, outside of an entrenched
visual schema predicated on the fungibility of the black slave that this reckoning comes to the fore at this
moment and that it connects cultural practitioners working across a range of disciplines art, history, literature,
film, critical theory not only suggests the longevity of Fanons insight, but also underlines the pressing need to
think the structural and structuring function of racial difference for our symbolic economies. For it is that very
function which contemporary racial theory more often than not seeks to leap over, in the process revealing its
own ineffectuality, a kind of willful blindness that cannot be overstated. In its single-minded capacity to
concentrate on everything except that which matters most in the restructuring of white supremacy, such theory
is undoubtedly more egregious than intellectual faux pas or public disservice. It is a modality of complicity, or
better, fraud. But the fraudulence of this diverse intellectual project is not only analytic; it is also ethical.
Besieged by the conservative restoration, the Left finds itself today enamored of political pragmatism and in
thrall to the lures of counter-hegemonic populism. From the emergent networks of anti-globalization to the
reinvigorated peace movement, from the embattled environmentalist campaigns to the desperate efforts at
urban police reform, the ocial rhetoric is multiracial and the organizational logic is coalition. Yet, for whatever
energies are dispensed in elaborating the new complexity of race in the age of globality, the radical imagination
inexorably comes to rest on the assumption of horizontality, that is ot say, a progressive community-in-struggle,
even if only a possible one. Indeed, it has become commonplace in the U.S. to call for a paradigm shift with
respect to racial theory and the politics of anti-racism. This clarion call resonates in the ivory towers of
academe, in the pages of the most useless print media outlets, certainly in the alternative press, and in the
policy papers and strategic deliberations of progressive non-profit institutes and community-based

What we are told, in a variety of tones and tenors, is that race

matters are no longer if they ever were simply black and white at the
least, the focus of such a Manichean lens is deemed inadequate to
apprehend the current and historical relatity of U.S. racial formation (to
say nothing of the Americas more generally or other regions of the world) At its worst, this
dichotomous view is rendered as politically stunting and, moreover, as
effectively excluding discussion of the colors in the middle, now
inexorable parts of the Black/White spectrum. We now enjoy a vast
literature in the social sciences and humanities detailing the vexed
position (or positions), between the black and the white. Neither black nor
white thus indicates not only the articulation of multiracial (or Mixed race)
identity claims in the post-civil rights era, but also the contemporary
reformulations of critique and political mobilization among Asian
Americans, Pacific Islanders, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Native American peoples. Of course, racial
discourse in what would become the U.S., from the colonial era onward,
has always been multi-polar, so to speak, and the psychodynamics of race
have always been quite complex; the lines of force and the relations of
racial power have been recongured regularly across a multiplicity of
times and spaces. In fact, the notion of a black/white paradigm is something of a theoretical fiction,
organizations.

deployed for a wide range of purposes. In our attempts to displace it, then, we do well to recognize it as a recent
emergence, involved in an imaginary lure that says more about the historical preoccupations of white
supremacy than it does about, say, the blind insistence of black scholars, activists, or communities.

When

perusing the critical literature on the explanatory diculty of

present-day racial politics, one frequently wonders exactly to whom the
demand to go beyond black and white is being addressed. Also puzzling is
the singularly incoherent nature of the reasoning demonstrated in current race talk, a failure, that is, to offer
cogent accounts of the implications of this newfound (or, more precisely, rediscovered) complexity. Taken
together, these twin ambiguities beg a key question: what economies of enunciation are involved in this broadly

Legal scholar Mari Matsuda offers

in
1997 she claimed: We when say we need to move beyond Black and
white, this is what a whole lot of people say or feel or think: thank
goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those black people
made me feel so uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really
dont know anything about Asians , and while were deconstructing that
Black-white paradigm, we also need to reconsider the category of race
altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and
thank god I dont have to take those angry black people seriously
anymore. Importantly, the comment is drawn from an otherwise sympathetic
mediation on a particular danger attendant to the desire for new analyses, and the often anxious
drive for multiracial coalition, namely, the persistent risk of forgetting
the centrality of anti-blackness to global white supremacy . Fanon, again, is
prescient: Wherever he goes, the negro remains a Negro (B, 173).
Wherever; there is no outside. Too often we forget , here in the U.S.
especially, that there are blacks everywhere . When so many speak of
the peculiarity of race as a North American obsession (one hears of the odd rigidity
of the Anglo-Saxon racial formation), it is important to think about black people as
situated in those myriad locales supposedly outside of or alternate to
the black-white binary. Lewis Gordon, philosopher and leading contemporary commentator on
Fanon, writes: Although there are people who function as the blacks of
particular contexts, there is a group of people who function as the
blacks everywhere. They are called, in now-archaic language Negroes. Negroes
are the blacks of everywhere, the black of blacks, the blackest blacks .
Blackness functions as the prime racial signier . It is the element that
enters a room and frightens Reason out The historical specicity of
blackness as a point from which the greatest distance must be forged
entails its status as metaphor.
atterned discursive gesture to put an end to biracial theorizing?

a provocative thought on this score. During a symposium on critical race theory at the Yale Law School

AT: Policy Focus

This debate is a question of whose voice is heard
prioritize the narratives of those who currently dont have
political agencyby bringing the narratives of prisoners
into an academic space, we create discourse and generate
the radical desire necessary to [insert objective here]
James 7

[Joy James, F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor of the Humanities and a professor in political science,
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Duke University Press, 2007] l.gong

There is a question of voice or voices here, perhaps this contestation

over literary legitimacy is an issue of familiarity and validation, of comfort

and recognition. Most readers will not recognize themselves or kin in these
voices; over time, those numbers will likely diminish. The voices most
necessary for this intellectual and political projectconsider this anthology
a manifesto, or something more lofty, or more debasedare not those best
amplied in or by academe or government or corporate life , but those that
occupy landscapes where practically no one wishes to walk, those only the
most denigrated call home. These voices register here as desperately
needed for clarification. Of what? Our demise as a quasi-democratic state
predicated on slavery and subjugation. Why this desperation? This is not
an easy death. Containment, police powers, state violence, global and
imperial wars, and radiating rings of terror and counterterror foster the
disappearance of bodies and rights. They render the concepts of home or
homeland as coherent spaces of safety worth occupying an irony. When
warfare is present and pervasive, and political, intellectual, emotional,
and spiritual survival seem fairly precarious , to read those possessing
neither authoritative voice nor roosts among academic, government, or
corporate elites (even if their words appear in elite academic presses)
constitutes an investment in voice as a political project . The very
project of elevating dismissed voices redenes the political functions of
voice, writing and speaking. The political powers of narratives shared by
prisoners and professors create a potential for either a mangled
discourse of political performance and storytelling or a convergence of
radical desire and will that crosses boundaries in a search for home a
democratic enclave, communities of resistance, a maroon camp. The
request to explain the role of voices here (as made by one reader [and the
press]) suggests a search for justication for the stories of the displaced,
the fleeing, and the besieged, and the revolutionary slave, as having
significance that warrants our attention or, at least, equal attention or
distracted or agitated attentiveness given to press, pentagon, or publicrelations briengs . The United States of Americas democratic homeland
diminishes (at least more noticeably for its more privileged occupants) as its
police and prison archipelago grows. The voices that critically witness
democratic delusions, demise, and change with perhaps the least romantic
desires (or illusions) about the American homeland are found in narratives

offered through the Voices of Katrina project organized by former Black

Panther Party members in response to governmental devastation and

abandonment in New Orleans. Or they are found in the voices in the Black
Genocide project, which revisits the Civil Rights Congresss 1951 appeal
to the United Nations in a book-length manuscript documenting crimes
against black peoples in the United States. To charge and resist racial
genocide or penal slavery (in this anthology, the voices that will define
these terms emanate from bodies situated in conditions of caged existence)
require narratives that depart from conventions. Such narratives offer
new forms of instruction if one plans to be a survivor or even a
resistor. For instance, the shoot-to-kill edicts issued by the president
and the governor of Louisiana for black Hurricane Katrina survivors overly
determined as looters dictate that desperate, responsible, but not lawabiding mothers acquire bulletproof vests prior to taking bottled water,
baby formula, and Pampers. Yet what instruction is to be taken from
marginal voices if one plans to be a liberator in resistance to warfare and
to survive uncaged as such? Perhaps instruction from political prisoners
valued by conservatives would be useful.

AT: Lacan
Lacans psychoanalysis is insufficient to address anti-black violence-our
particular strategy is best.

FrankB.WildersonIII 2010 Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. (pp.
3-4) Wilderson is an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. Dr. Wilderson spent five years in South Africa as
an elected official in the African National Congress during the countrys transition from apartheid and was a member of the ANCs armed
wing Umkhonto We Sizwe. He has taught Rhetoric/Film Studies University of California, Berkeley. And is an Assoc. Prof. of African
American Studies and Film UC Irvine and a Winner of Hurston/Wright legacy Award and the American Book Award.

The remainder of this chapter interrogates the efficacy of aesthetic gestures in their role
as accompaniments to notions of emancipation within the libidinal economy (as opposed to
Gramscian emphasis on political economy). This is a high-stakes interrogation because so
much film theory (White, or, non-BlackHumanfilm theory) is in fee to Lacan and his
underlying thesis on subjectivity and psychic liberation. It does not seek to disprove Lacans
underlying theory of how the subject comes into subjectivity via alienation within the
Imaginary and the Symbolic; nor does it seek to disprove his understanding of psychic
stagnation (described as egoic monumentalization) as that condition from which the subject
(and by extension, the socius) must be liberated. Rather than attempt to disprove Lacans
(and, by extension non-Black film theorys) evidence and assumptive logic I seek to show
how, in aspiring to a paradigmatic explanation of relations, his assumptive logic mystifies
rather than clarifies a paradigmatic explanation of relations, for it has a vivid account of the
conflicts between genders, or, more broadly, between narcissistic contemporaries and
contemporaries who have learned to live in a deconstructive relation to the egothat is to
say, it offers a reliable toolbox for rigorously examining intra-Human conflicts (and for
proposing the aesthetic gestures, i.e., types of filmic practices, which either exacerbate
[Hollywood films] or redress [counter-cinema] these conflicts) but it has no capacity to give
a paradigmatic explanation of the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans. I
argue that the claims and conclusions which Lacanian psychoanalysis (and by extension nonBlack film theory) makes regarding dispossession and suffering are (a) insufficient to the task
of delineating Black dispossession and suffering, and (b) parasitic on that very Black
dispossession and suffering for which it has no words.

Perm Answers

AT: Reformism=Revolution
Reform/permutation is a compromise with civil society
Woan 11 (Tansy Woan, 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, Pages 15-19)

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 dicult 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
Notable

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 AsianAmericans 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 identication requirements have effectively served to
disenfranchise Asian Pacic Islanders (APIs) from voting.24 In the 2004 election,
researchers found APIs in states where voters were required to present
proper identication at the polls were 8.5% less likely to vote. 25 This study
conrmed 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 brieng paper by Demos, a
national public policy center, an estimated 50 Asian Americans were selectively
challenged at the polls in Alabama during August of 20 04 , as being
ineligible to vote due to insucient 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 ratication of the Fifteenth Amendment
becomes apparent when people interpret this ratication 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 ratication 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 armative 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
"armative 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 rst work to gain the right to vote, and then move on to combat
discriminatory identication 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

However, simply eliminating discriminatory

policies is insucient for an overhaul of a racial institution. / Understanding the
result in a transformation of the institution itself.

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

the government often seeks out ways to

normalize society through eliminating disruptions to preserve order. When
those being denied certain rights grow signicantly discontent, they rebel
and become disruptions to the functioning of white, civil society. This can take the
government and its ability to run smoothly. Thus,

form of civil disobedience, such as protests, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, letters to the government, etc., or more
revolutionary measures, such as damaging government oces or violently harassing ocials 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

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 denition of race will emerge triggering another racial
disruption, continuing this cycle of racial politics.
fire.

AT: Multiracialism perm/coalition perm

Coalitions are antiblack- oppresion olympics becomes the
innite deferral strateg yot obfusicate questions of black
life within civil society
Sexton 10 (Jared Sexton, Associate professor of African American studies
and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, 2010,
People-of-Color-Blindness; Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, Pages 47-49)

If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond,

the United States seems conditional to the historic instance and functions at a
more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which
does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and

the sort of comparative analysis outlined

above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and
modify the demeanor of our political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative
instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task. Yet all of this is
obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in Left political and
intellectual circles today: Dont play Oppression Olympics! The Oppression
Olympics dogma levels a charge amounting to little more than a leftist version of
playing the race card. To fuss with details of comparative (or relational) analysis is to play into
unchanging). If pursued with some consistency,

the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a callous immorality. 72 However, as in its conservative

one notes in this catchphrase the unwarranted translation of

an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture of
competition, the translation of ethical critique into unethical attack . This
complement,

point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship between the censure of black inquiry and the

they bear a common refusal to

admit to signicant dif ferences of structural position born of discrepant
histories between blacks and their political allies , actual or potential. We might,
nally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of
colorblindness inherent to the concept of people of color to the
precise extent that it misunderstands the specicity of antiblackness and
recurrent analogizing to black suffering mentioned above:

presumes or insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy 73 thinking (the
afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression among others. The

obscuring the structural position of the category

of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a
politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black
liberation back to the center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts to
understand the complexities of racial rule and the machinations of the
racial state without accounting for black existence within its framework
which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought is
doomed to miss what is- essential about the situation . Black existence
does not represent the total reality of the racial formation it is not the
beginning and the end of the story but it does relate to the totality ; it indicates the
(repressed) truth of the political and economic system . That is to say, the
whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully
understood from this vantage point , not unlike the way in which the range of gender and
upshot of this predicament is that

sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are

What is lost for the study of black existence in the

proposal for a decentered, postblack paradigm is a proper analysis of
the true scale and nature of black suffering and of the struggles political,
feminist and queer. 75

aesthetic, intellectual, and so on that have sought to transform and undo it . What is
lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material

every attempt to defend

the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail
to make substantial gains inso - far as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of
blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and
the juridical infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on
board , the only viable political option and the only effective defense against the
intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil society
and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of the midcentury
social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 clas sic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation , that black freedom entails the
necessarily total revamping of the society. 77 For Hartman, thinking of
the entanglements of the African diaspora in this context , the
necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately
envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world : I knew that no matter
how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past
behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who
had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had
produced that identity. Terror was captivity without the possibility of flight,
inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time
or place before slavery , and going beyond it no doubt would entail
nothing less momentous than yet another revolution.
and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness. 76 This is why

AT: Liberation Theology

Faciality blending/hybridity is bad
Deloria 77 (Vine Deloria, American Indian author, theologian, historian,
and activist, On Liberation, For This Land, 1977, Pages 100-101)

Liberation theology assumes that the common experience of oppression

is sucient to create the desire for a new coalition of dissident
minorities. Adherents of this movement indiscriminately classify all
minorities-racial, ethnic, and sexual-in a single category of people
seeking liberation. Such classication is an easy way to eliminate
specic complaints of specic groups and a clever way to turn aside
efforts of dissenting groups to get their particular goals fullled. For instead
of listening to their complaints, observersand particularly liberal observers who pose as sympathetic fellowtravelers-can tie up the conversation endlessly by eliciting questions, framed within the liberation ideology, that

Liberation theology, then, was an absolute

necessity if the establishment was going to continue to control the
minds of minorities. If a person of a minority group had not invented it,
the liberal establishment most certainly would have created it. The
immediate response to such an accusation is one of horried refusal to
believe that there could be any racial or sexual minority that does not
consider itself to be under oppression. This is followed by the perennial
suggestion that if dissident minorities "got organized" instead of
remaining separate they would be able to get things done. Those who
reject that concept of oppression merely prove that they are so
completely the victims of oppression that they do not even recognize it.
The circular logic closes neatly in upon them, making them victims
indeed. Liberation theology is simply the latest gimmick to keep
minority groups circling the wagons with the vain hope that they can
eliminate the oppression that surrounds them. It does not seek to
destroy the roots of oppression, but merely to change the manner in
which oppression manifests itself. No winner, no matter how sincere, willingly surrenders his
power over others. He may devise clever ways to appear to share such power,
but he always keeps a couple of aces up his sleeve in case things get
out of control.
require standard and nonsensical answers.

AT: State Reform

Policy affs we refuse the state they endorse the state
Martinot 5 (Steve Martinot, Adjunct Professor at the San Francisco State
University, Pro-Democracy and the Ethics of Refusal, Socialism and
Democracy, Vol. 19, No. 2)

In a system in which humans have been rendered secondary or irrelevant, a

different ethics, which refuses the system of corruption as a system, a
social structure, rather than simply point out the empirical appearance of
corruption in government or political events, must ground our thinking. Neither political
program nor organizational strategies, to the extent they continue to
address themselves to this system as valid, are relevant to such a
necessity. The terms of the two-party system, the corporate media, the system of representationism, and the congressional
culture of "horsetrading" must be refused. That means that realigning the Democratic Party, trying to use the corporate media to get
a democratic message out, organizing third parties as alternates to the two major parties in electoral processes, using electoral
campaigns themselves, writing to Congress, demonstrating to make demands on the government, are all modes of simply
addressing the government, and telling it and the corporate structure that we are firmly in place within their political culture of

A counter-ethics can only be an ethics of refusal. An ethic of refusal

can be exemplied thus: suppose someone lies to you every day, and he
says something today; if you believe what he says today, then you are a
total and utter fool. Insofar as the corporate media, the government, and
all ocials in the two-party system lie to us daily, while suppressing
necessary information, there is nothing they say that should be believed
corruption.

(unless proven beyond all doubt, to the satisfaction of every skeptical question, in open public discussion, however long that takes).

Insofar as these structures and institutions have shown themselves to be

corrupt, there is nothing that they do that should not be considered
corrupt, and rejected as invalid or illegitimate. Nothing the government does, domestically
or in foreign policy, should be supported unless its reasons are submitted
to open discussion and binding referendum. The ethics of refusal (the refusal, in
advance, of everything the government, the corporations, or the media say or do) is square one. It is the rst step
toward liberation from the assumptions that these corrupt institutions can
be realigned. It is the first step toward voiding support for what has impoverished us and rendered us irrelevant. It is the
first step toward bringing those institutions to a halt. The time is long past when we can go to the government or the political parties

We have to satisfy those demands for ourselves by

creating an alternate political structure with which to do so . This means to
replace the ethics of going to the government, and thus granting it
credence, with the establishment of a citizenship in autonomy whose job is
to pull more and more people away from support for the government. The
with demands for information or policy.

greatest betrayal of the ABB movement in the last election, in acceding to the meta-corruption of the two-party system, and

Democracy is now
the name for an alternate political structure; and a pro-democracy
movement is the name for enacting the ethic of refusal. If democracy is
based on information, participation, and transparent honesty of political operations,
policymaking, and elections, then alternate sources for these must be
constructed and supported: alternate media and alternate sources of
information; alternate networking of ideas; the construction of local
political spaces in which to speak to ourselves, and not to a corrupt
system; the use of political space to construct alternate organizations that make policy democratically, and are directed by the
assisting in shutting down the political space, lay in giving up its independence and autonomy.

people who make it; the construction of health services, education and schooling, and community policing; an ethic of local
community attention to crime and trouble that is restorative and not revenge-oriented; the organization of elections that the people

Such an alternate political structure can

only ground itself on an ethics of refusal, refusing all attempts of the
government to control it. An alternate political culture must refuse to
sanction, though the corrupt power structure does not.

grant recognition or credence to the two-party system, to the structures of

governance and information, and to the mythology of meta-corruption that
still says those structures have legitimacy. This does not mean that actions
should not be organized to directly confront the government , or the elite, and
try to stop their fraud, their crimes and injustices. The ethic of refusal
should not be construed as contradicting or obstructing direct action , nor
those for whom direct action is desirable and feasible. But the relation (or non-relation) of direct action to alternate political
structures needs to be understood; the relation of complicity between direct action's focus on power and the terms of institutional

To contest governance in its own terms will only rearm

the existence and operation of its power, and embed itself in its
institutionity. The ethics of refusal makes its rst principle standing
outside the corruption of those social institutions; it is the principle of
building outside the structures of corruption, and building and building, until the alternative
power needs to be understood.

becomes the inside, and the corrupt institutions are the outside. A pro-democracy movement, in its autonomy, can still insist on
existing governments (city and state) fulfilling their responsibility to maintain the infrastructure: roads, buildings, utilities, water,
garbage collection, etc. It is a separation between the source of policymaking and the administration of the infrastructure that prodemocracy makes feasible. For centuries, taxes have been paid, while government has focused on meeting corporate and military
interests in the name of profitability (remember the public transportation boondoggle). If policy is relocated to the people,
democratically, at the level of neighborhoods, cities, agrarian areas, in economic production and for local services, then that is

It will require
dialogue rather than blueprint, between people, between neighborhoods, between towns,
where direction and control of the infrastructure must come from. This will take a long time to build.

building itself through popular discussions and councils. But now is the time to start, when the profundity of the corruption has
become so overt that there is nowhere else to turn.

AFF Answers

Perms

Perm do both
Permutation do both Reformism and Revolution are co-constitutive against
whiteness
Winant 1997 (Howard, Director, UC Center for New Racial Studies. Institute for Social, Behavioral, and
Economic. Research. University of California Santa Barbara, CA, Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary White Racial
Politics, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/winant/whitness.html)

the social historians who have provided

the core insights of the abolitionist project stress the "invention of whiteness" as a pivotal
development in the rise of US capitalism. They have begun a process of historical reinterpretation
which aims to set race -- or more properly, the gestation and evolution of white supremacy
-- at the center of US politics and culture. Thus far, they have focused attention on a series of formative
Drawing their inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin,

events and processes: the precedent of British colonial treatment of the Irish (Allen 1994, Ignatiev 1995); the early,
multiracial resistance to indentured servitude and quasi-slavery, which culminated in the defeat of Bacon's Rebellion in
late 17th century Virginia; the self-identification of "free" workers as white in the antebellum North (Roediger 1991); and
the construction of a "white republic" in the late 19th century (Saxton 1990). These studies, in some cases quite
prodigious intellectual efforts, have had a significant impact on how we understand not only racial formation, but also
class formation and the developing forms of popular culture in US history. What they reveal above all is how crucial the
construction of whiteness was, and remains, for the development and maintenance of capitalist class rule in the US.

the meaning of whiteness, like that of race in general, has

time and again proved flexible enough to adapt to shifts in the capitalist division of labor, to
reform initiatives which extended democratic rights, and to changes in ideology and
cultural representation. The core message of the abolitionist project is the imperative of
repudiation of white identity and white privilege, the requirement that "the lie of
whiteness" be exposed. This rejection of whiteness on the part of those who benefit from it,
this "new abolitionism," it is argued, is a precondition for the establishment of substantive
racial equality and social justice -- or more properly, socialism -- in the US. Whites must
become "race traitors," as the new journal of the abolitionist project calls itself. Its motto: "Treason to whiteness is
Furthermore, these studies also show how

loyalty to humanity." How is this rejection of whiteness to be accomplished? Both analytical and practical measures are
envisioned. On the intellectual level, the abolitionist project invites us to contemplate the emptiness, indeed vacuity, of
the white category: It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive
and false.... It is the empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold
back (Roediger 1994, 13; emphasis original).

In short, there is no white culture, no white politics, no

whiteness, except in the sense of distancing and rejection of racially-defined "otherness." On the
practical level, the argument goes, whites can become "race traitors" by rejecting their privilege, by refusing to collude
with white supremacy. When you hear that racist joke, confront its teller. When you see the police harassing a nonwhite
youth, try to intervene or at least bear witness. In short, recognize that white supremacy depends on the thousands of
minute acts that reproduce it from moment to moment; it must "deliver" to whites a sense of their own security and
superiority; it must make them feel that "I am different from those "others." Single gestures of this sort, Race Traitor's
editors say, ...would [not] in all likelihood be of much consequence. But if enough of those who looked white broke the
rules of the club to make the cops doubt their ability to recognize a white person merely by looking at him or her, how
would it affect the cops' behavior (Editorial 1993, 4-5)? Thus the point is not that all whites recognize the lie of their
privilege, but that enough whites do so, and act out their rejection of that lie, to disrupt the "white club's" ability to
enforce its supremacy. It is easy to sympathize with this analysis, at least up to a point. The postwar black movement,
which in the US context at least served as the point of origin for all the "new social movements" and the much-reviled
"politics of identity," taught the valuable lesson that politics went "all the way down." That is, meaningful efforts to
achieve greater social justice could not tolerate a public/private, or a collective/individual distinction. Trying to change
society meant trying to change one's own life. The formula "the personal is political," commonly associated with feminism,

problems come when

deeper theoretical and practical problems are raised. Despite their explicit adherence to a "social
had its early origins among the militants of the civil rights movement (Evans 1980). The

construction" model of race (one which bears a significant resemblance to my own work), theorists of the abolitionist
project do not take that insight as seriously as they should. They employ it chiey to argue against biologistic conceptions
of race, which is fine; but they fail to consider the complexities and rootedness of social construction, or as we would term
it, racial formation.

Is the social construction of whiteness so flimsy that it can be repudiated by a

mere act of political will, or even by widespread and repeated acts aimed at rejecting white
privilege? I think not; whiteness may not be a legitimate cultural identity in the sense of
having a discrete, "positive" content, but it is certainly an overdetermined political and
cultural category, having to do with socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, ideologies of
individualism, opportunity, and citizenship, nationalism, etc. Like any other complex of beliefs and
practices, "whiteness" is imbedded in a highly articulated social structure and system of significations; rather than trying
to repudiate it, we shall have to rearticulate it. That sounds like a daunting task, and of course it is, but it is not nearly as
impossible as erasing whiteness altogether, as the abolitionist project seeks to do. Furthermore, because whiteness is a

relational concept, unintelligible without reference to nonwhiteness -- note how this is true even of Roediger's formulation
about "build[ing] an identity based on what one isn't" -- that rearticulation (or reinterpretation, or deconstruction) of
whiteness can begin relatively easily, in the messy present, with the recognition that whiteness already contains
substantial nonwhite elements. Of course, that recognition is only the beginning of a large and arduous process of political
labor, which I shall address in the concluding section of this paper. Notwithstanding these criticisms of the abolitionist
project, we consider many of its insights to be vital components in the process of reformulating, or synthesizing, a
progressive approach to whiteness. Its attention is directed toward prescisely the place where the neo-liberal racial project
is weak: the point at which white identity constitutes a crucial support to white supremacy, and a central obstacle to the
achievement of substantive social equality and racial justice. CONCLUDING NOTES: WHITENESS AND CONTEMPORARY

In a situation of racial dualism, as Du Bois observed more than 90 years ago, race operates both
to assign us and to deny us our identity. It both makes the social world intelligible, and
simultaneously renders it opaque and mysterious. Not only does it allocate resources, power,
and privilege; it also provides means for challenging that allocation. The contradictory
character of race provides the context in which racial dualism -or the "color-line," as Du
Bois designated it, has developed as "the problem of the 20th century." So what's new? Only that, as
a result of incalculable human effort, suffering, and sacrifice, we now realize that these
truths apply across the board. Whites and whiteness can no longer be exempted from the
comprehensive racialization process that is the hallmark of US history and social structure.
POLITICS

This is the present-day context for racial conict and thus for US politics in general, since race continues to play its
designated role of crystallizing all the fundamental issues in US society. As always, we articulate our anxieties in racial
terms: wealth and poverty, crime and punishment, gender and sexuality, nationality and citizenship, culture and power,
are all articulated in the US primarily through race. So what's new? It's the problematic of whiteness that has emerged as
the principal source of anxiety and conict in the postwar US. Although this situation was anticipated or prefigured at
earlier moments in the nation's past -- for example, in the "hour of eugenics" (Stepan 1991, Kevles 1985, Gould 1981) -- it
is far more complicated now than ever before, largely due to the present unavailability of biologistic forms of racism as a

Whiteness -- visible whiteness, resurgent whiteness,

whiteness as a color, whiteness as difference -- this is what's new, and newly problematic, in
contemporary US politics. The reasons for this have already emerged in my discussion of the spectrum of racial
projects and the particular representations these projects assign to whiteness. Most centrally, the problem of
the meaning of whiteness appears as a direct consequence of the movement challenge posed
in the 1960s to white supremacy. The battles of that period have not been resolved; they
have not been won or lost; however battered and bruised, the demand for substantive racial
equality and general social justice still lives. And while it lives, the strength of white
supremacy is in doubt. The racial projects of the right are clear efforts to resist the challenge to white supremacy
convenient rationale for white supremacy.[7]

posed by the movements of the 1960s and their contemporary inheritors. Each of these projects has a particular
relationship to the white supremacist legacy, ranging from the far right's efforts to justify and solidify white entitlements,
through the new right's attempts to utilize the white supremacist tradition for more immediate and expedient political
ends, to the neoconservative project's quixotic quest to surgically separate the liberal democratic tradition from the
racism that traditionally underwrote it. The biologistic racism of the far right, the expedient and subtextual racism of the
new right, and the bad-faith anti-racism of the neoconservatives have many differences from each other, but they have at
least one thing in common. They all seek to maintain the long-standing association between whiteness and US political
traditions, between whiteness and US nationalism, between whiteness and universalism. They all seek in different ways to
preserve white identity from the particularity, the difference, which the 1960s movement challenge assigned to it. The

Both
the neoliberal racial project and the abolitionist project seek to fulfill the movement's
thwarted dreams of a genuinely (i.e., substantively) egalitarian society, one in which
significant redistribution of wealth and power has taken place, and race no longer serves as
the most significant marker between winners and losers, haves and have nots, powerful and
powerless. Although they diverge significantly -- since the neoliberals seek to accomplish their ends through a
racial projects of the left are the movements' successors (as is neoconservatism, in a somewhat perverse sense).

conscious diminution of the significance of race, and the abolitionists hope to achieve similar ends through a conscious
reemphasizing of the importance of race -- they also have one very important thing in common. They both seek to rupture
the barrier between whites and racially-defined minorities, the obstacle which prevents joint political action. They both
seek to associate whites and nonwhites, to reinterpret the meaning of whiteness in such a way that it no longer has the

Although the differences and indeed the hostility -- between the

neoliberal and abolitionist projects, between the reform-oriented and radical conceptions of
whiteness -- are quite severe, we consider it vital that adherents of each project recognize
that they hold part of the key to challenging white supremacy in the contemporary US, and
that their counterpart project holds the other part of the key . Neoliberals rightfully argue that a
pragmatic approach to transracial politics is vital if the momentum of racial reaction is to be
halted or reversed. Abolitionists properly emphasize challenging the ongoing commitment to white supremacy on
the part of many whites. Both of these positions need to draw on each other, not only in strategic
power to impede class alliances.

terms, but in theoretical ones as well. The recognition that racial identities -- all racial
identities, including whiteness -- have become implacably dualistic, could be far more
liberating on the left than it has thus far been. For neoliberals, it could permit and indeed justify an
acceptance of race-consciousness and even nationalism among racially-defined minorities as a necessary but partial

There is no inherent reason why

such a political position could not coexist with a strategic awareness of the need for strong,
class-conscious, transracial coalitions. We have seen many such examples in the past: in the anti-slavery
response to disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and superexploitation.

movement, the communist movement of the 1930s (Kelley 1994), and in the 1988 presidential bid of Jesse Jackson, to
name but a few. This is not to say that all would be peace and harmony if such alliances could come more permanently
into being. But there is no excuse for not attempting to find the pragmatic "common ground" necessary to create them.
Abolitionists could also benefit from a recognition that on a pragmatic basis, whites can ally with racially-defined
minorities without renouncing their whiteness. If they truly agree that race is a socially constructed concept, as they

abolitionists should also be able to recognize that racial identities are not either-or
matters, not closed concepts that must be upheld in a reactionary fashion or disavowed in a
comprehensive act of renunciation. To use a postmodern language I dislike: racial identities are deeply
claim,

"hybridized"; they are not "sutured," but remain open to rearticulation. "To be white in America is to be very black. If you
don't know how black you are, you don't know how American you are" (Thompson 1995, 429).

The permutations strategy of inclusion is a better than the alternatives

exclusionary tactic.
Brand-Jacobsen 5 (Kai Frithjof, is founder and Director of the Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR)
and Co-Director of TRANSCEND, and is on the Executive Board of the TRANSCEND Peace University (TPU) where he is Course Director for
the courses Peacebuilding and Empowerment and War to Peace Transitions. He has worked in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Russia, South
Eastern Europe, North America, Colombia, Somalia, Cambodia, Aceh-Indonesia and the Middle East at the invitation of governments, intergovernmental organisations, UN agencies, and local organisations and communities. He has written and published widely, and is author of The
Struggle Continues: The Political Economy of Globalisation and People's Struggles for Peace (Pluto, forthcoming), co-author, together with
Johan Galtung and Carl Jacobsen, of Searching for Peace: The Road to TRANSCEND (Pluto, 2000 & 2002) and Editor of the TRANSCEND
book series published together with Pluto Press, Constructive Peace Studies: Peace by Peaceful Means. He is a member of the Executive Board of
the Journal of Peace and Development and the Executive Board of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution. In 1999 he was founder and
Director of the Coalition for Global Solidarity and Social Development, and in 2000, together with Johan Galtung, he was founder of the Nordic
Institute for Peace Research (NIFF). Since 1996 he has provided more than 250 training programmes in peacebuilding, development, and
constructive conflict transformation to more than 4000 participants in 30 countries.
http://www.globalsolidarity.org/articles/peace_means_kai.html)
Peace by Peaceful Means Dear Friends, The discussions which have taken place over e-mail over the past few days have been extremely interesting. I have just returned from Oslo where the
100th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize was being celebrated. The obvious contrast between the rather elite 'suit' dominated celebrations in Oslo and the realities of what is occurring in the

Questions of strategy, tactics and visions for how we work to bring about change , to transform
and to empower, mobilise, and involve people in a mass, broadbased movement for peace and to build the alternatives we are looking for, are vital . In Norway alone, to take one example, perhaps 80% of people think what is
world today was stark.

all forms of violent conflict -- direct, structural, and cultural --

happening now in and over Afghanistan is wrong, either completely or at least in part, and yet all they hear from the media, academics and politicians is constant support and acclaim for the
'justness' of this war (or indeed, any war in which it is 'we' against 'them').

Small groups of people and 'NGOs', in Norway as in every single country, are trying to

bring forward alternatives, to raise their voices, and to protest/oppose what they think is wrong. While these organisations are in every case much smaller than our
governments and militaries going to war, they often represent the social majority. A major challenge they face, however, is how to reach out to
people, how to involve people, and how to develop alternatives which make sense to people tired of war and violence (whether of the
kind we are seeing in Afghanistan, or of a global economic system killing 100,000 a day). Negative slogans and opposition to what
is wrong is not enough however. It is not enough, but it is necessary. 'Basta!', 'Enough!' was perhaps the most
'revolutionary' cry of the last decade, and still is in many parts of the world. The simple, courageous act, of standing up when we see
that something is wrong, and stating that it is wrong, not cooperating with it, can be a powerful and evocative symbol. When we are
having our conferences, discussions and meetings in whichever city, town or village of the world we may be found, we should always remember that the vast majority of people in our own city,

The vision, hope and ideas which bring

people to these conferences are, in the vast majority of cases, kept marginalised, on the periphery. Yet that is
also part of our own responsibility, technique and methods. Basta! became a cry to inspire millions, because those who said it lived it,
refusing to cooperate any longer with what they know to be wrong. While Basta! may be the most revolutionary cry or word today,
transforming all forms of direct, structural, and cultural violence is the greatest challenge . The
two are inclusive and complementary, not exclusive. We need to state clearly our
opposition to violence, war, injustice and exploitation (the 'peace movement' has often been willing to do the first two, not always as willing on the last two), and we need
also to build a constructive, positive programme . It is not only a question of what we are
town or village, as well as the entire rest of the world, have no idea that we are there, meeting.

against, but what we are for. When we criticize what we think is wrong, people will also want to know what we think
could be done instead. In these cases, our answers must seem real and viable to people.

The

'anti-globalisation' movement is therefore also a social justice movement; 'non-governmental organisations' should also be people's organisations or people's movements; and one of our
challenges today will be to build upon the growing 'anti-war' movement, transforming it also into a peace movement. A step further, as many social and peace activists have recognised, will be to
link the peace and social justice movements. Slogans and messages are important, as are practice and vision. It will not be possible today to unite broad numbers of people around issues which
they feel are too abstract and divorced from them. The 'abolish the debt' campaign/movement was successful because people were able to see the clear linkages between debt and the effective
colonisation and enslavement of countries and people across the south, as well as the incredible suffering and destruction it brought. The Jubilee 2000 'campaign' however, unlike the Jubilee
South movement which continues today, did not reach its objective of having the debt cancelled. Instead, while many people around the world believe the problem has been solved, the debt-

it is not a
question of 'either/or' but 'both/and' with individual campaigns extremely useful and effective at times
for involving people, raising awareness and mobilising around specific issues, strengthening further
the broader movements of which they may be a part. Today, a movement for demos kratos is
necessary , and vital for any movement or work towards peace. To speak about the United States or any government in the world today as a 'democracy' is a ridiculous farce.
system and the burden it places upon countries has become even more extreme. Going from 'campaigns' to movements will also be important, though even here

They are highly elite dominated systems built upon massive structures and cultures of violence, and willing to use overwhelming (Powel Doctrine) violence when necessary to enforce their needs
and/or interests. At best they may be demagogia's, where elites maintain power by promising the people what they will do for them (we call this 'elections'), but they are not system's or societies
built upon people's power, demos kratos. Decisions to go to war are made by tiny numbers of people. Our economic and political policies are constructed for us, often to the detriment of the
social majorities who are told to 'leave well enough alone' and trust in the experts. This is sometimes as true of politicians as it is of non-governmental organisations who themselves frequently
prefer the conference halls and well-funded projects to actually working democratically with people as part of the people themselves. An alternative today, what Johan Galtung has called for, with

discussions at every level, focussing not only on what is wrong, but also on what we
want therapy, ideas, alternatives. In one form or another many of these dialogues are taking place. In a way they are therapy for the massive amounts of violence
10,000 dialogues, meetings,

we are all being exposed to today, in our cultures, in our world, on our television sets or in the speeches of our 'democratically elected' rulers (the question, for those who do not support their

are also empowering, if we

take the step beyond saying what is wrong to what could be done _, what should be done_, and then go further to
policies, should not be 'who put them in power' -- though this is also important -- but why haven't we removed them from power yet_). They

discussing what I/we can do about it. Mobilising people for peace today is not simply about a slogan (though coming up with clearly expressed messages in a few words will of course help us to

What is necessary, beyond any single issue or top-level strategy for how to
change the world, is the process . The way is the goal. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the social justice/anti-globalisation movement is that it has
link people together and raise awareness).

mobilised, involved, and empowered millions of people around the world in discussing, thinking about, and acting upon the realities around them. On the streets of Seattle, Praha, Okinawa,
Melbourne, Gotheburg, Washington, Quebec, Genoa, Ottawa, people, many of whom refuse to vote, have been discussing foreign policy, domestic politics, people to people movements, and all

We have our 'manifestos', our policies and plans

often addressing them to 'politicians' and 'elites' believing, in a fundamentally undemocratic way, that
they will be the ones to bring about and implement change for us. This is not to say that that is not an important level which we also need to work at. The broader
vision here is both/and, not either or, in terms of strategy as well often of vision. We also need,
however, to be willing to take part in the much slower, more timely, and more empowering process, of tens
of thousands of dialogues together with people, communities, and organisations at every level. Solidarity today is being
built upon and carried further into alliances not just supporting people in their struggles for social justice , peace and freedom,
but carrying forward those struggles ourselves in our own communities, our own towns, cities and villages. If we wish to change
the injustices taking place in the world today we must of course work on a global level, but we must
also work, just as importantly, within our communities. Again, both / and rather than either or. We
should also be wary when we say 'we must begin here', or 'this must be
done rst !', even when the message is very positive and constructive. 'We must begin with the individual!'. 'We must begin
by changing society!'. 'We must begin with a culture of peace!'. 'We must begin by ending the
debt!'. All of these , and the many others put forward, are extremely important issues. They are
also all linked together . Again, both/and. Exclusive and elitist visions will only serve to further
fragment our efforts, creating division and separation where what is needed is dialogue,
solidarity, cooperation and alliances between movements/organisations which often take diverse strategies
and approaches to addressing deeply interlinking injustices and structures and cultures of violence. Conscientisation (raising
awareness, often political awareness -- but also social, cultural, economic), organisation (we can do more together than we can apart, and it is necessary to organise -the issues which politicians and well-established NGOs are not able and often not willing to discuss with people.
which we wish to put forward in the name of people,

though in many different ways -- to be able to bring about changes, both against what we think is wrong and for what we think is right), mobilisation (bringing in more and more people,

involving people in dialogues, discussion, action, and work for change/transformation), and empowerment (I/we can, rather than 'I/we can't'; also
important recognising the power we have to bring about change, rather than simply accepting existing, often extremely violent, power structures and believing that change can/should/must be
implemented by those 'in power', whether slave owners, men, politicians, or fuhrers)

are all necessary .

Permutation-XO/Bitcoin
Internet reform with a focus on racial dynamics addresses the way race is
ignored online
Daniels 2012 (Jessie, Jessie Daniels, PhD is Professor of Public Health, Sociology and Critical Psychology.
"Race and racism in Internet studies: A review and critique." New Media & Society 15.5 (2013): 695-719.)
The dynamic Jenkins describes is one that has played out in the field of Internet studies with regard to race.

For the most part, the

burden of noticing race on the Internet has been left to minority participants, that is, to
researchers who are people of color. The spectacle of the Other has had profound implications on the field of race and Internet
studies in two ways: (1) race as a variable and (2) race as identity. Zuberi (2001) deconstructs the logic behind the use of race as a variable in
quantitative social science. He argues that race has been misused as a causal variable. Separated from social context, race as a discrete cause of
some social phenomenon is problematic because it conflates correlation with causality (Zuberi, 2001: 97). Race used as a causal variable
without reference to context somewhat inevitably leads to a deficit model in which those with race (those who are not white) are perpetually
found lacking (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Within Internet studies, this is most evident in research on the digital divide, in which most
digital divide rhetoric depicts a world where undereducated, undermotivated and underemployed minorities are competing against
technologically sophisticated whites (Jenkins, 2002).7 This view is what Everett refers to a master narrative that positions black people in
general, and black women especially, as casualties of the information economy (Everett, 2004: 1282).8 This is not merely the disabling rhetoric
of those outside the field, but it inheres in the very definition of the digital divide. As Gunkel (2003) points out, the fact that this research takes
as its premise a dichotomous variable replays a broader binary opposition within Western culture, such as literate and illiterate. He goes on to
note that not only is this binary unable to represent something that essentially resists division into a simple either/or dichotomy, but also
institutes an asymmetrical hierarchy (2003: 516). The dichotomous variable of technology haves versus have-nots is said to be caused by the
variable race. Once these variable terms and putative causal relationships are set in place, it becomes difficult to see beyond these to envision
race in a social context. Nakamura is able to bring social context back in to the discussion of the digital divide in her examination of studies that
habitually characterize Asian and Asian-American Internet users as the most wired group in America. Yet, such descriptors obfuscate the rather
glaring methodological flaw that routinely excludes the 69% of Asian-Americans who speak little or no English and are thus not included in the
random-sample surveys that purport to measure the digital divide. Language that dubs Asian-Americans the most wired group in America
deceptively represents them as honorary or approximate whites in a way that obscures their actual oppression and position as material labor
base rather than as privileged consumers of Internet- and IT-based services and media (Nakamura, 2008: 179). Thus, both the disabling rhetoric
of blacks and Latinos as on the wrong side of a dichotomous divide and the obscuring language of Asian Americans as most wired,
conceptualize race as a causal variable in Internet studies in ways that replay the spectacle of the Other while reaffirming whiteness as
normative. Racial identity online was a discovery within a supposedly race-free setting. The early

focus in the literature on race and the Internet (Burkhalter, 1999) evoked the language of
exploration and discovery (e.g., discovering racial identity in a Usenet group). This rhetoric was
consistent with then-current descriptions of the Internet as an electronic frontier and suggests the
gaze of the colonizer. Today, studies that purport to discover race have mostly been eclipsed by
research on racial identity online that is tied more closely to traditions of resilience and resistance.
As Kvasny and Igwe point out, for African-Americans, racial identity is part of a longstanding
struggle against white domination marked by slavery, segregation, the great migration, the civil
rights movement and the black power movement (Kvasny and Igwe, 2008: 570). Scholarship has shown that people seek
out online spaces premised upon valences of racial identity, whether at Blackplanet.com or AsianAmerican.net (Byrne, 2008). Yet,
when the scholarship on racial identity is viewed in the broader context of the field of Internet
studies, a field that is silent on that longstanding struggle and generally unaware of white
domination, it takes on a different valance. Viewed from that vantage point, the excellent work on
racial identity is marked as outside the central theoretical concerns of the field, and it is left to
minority participants to give voice to their experience of racial identity in cyberspace . In other words,
they are asked to perform the spectacle of the Other about the experience of people of color online and off. Conceptualizations of
race as a causal variable contributing to dichotomous divides, or as identity discovered in
otherwise raceless frontiers by minority participants, perform a kind of slight of hand. Together,
these suggest difference inheres in the racialized Other, and in Halls words, sends Them into symbolic exile
beyond the pale (Hall, 1997: 258). What remains unmarked here is whiteness and the way that white people, too, have race.

Simultaneously, racism on the Internet is largely ignored within Internet studies and sorely
undertheorized

Permutation do bothrecognizing how blackness

functions in public spheres, i.e., the internet, is good
their focus on state power and economic paradigm shift is
doomed to failure
Giroux 10

[Henry Giroux, an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the
founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in
public pedagogy, Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy Under the
Reign of Neoliberalism, page 208-209, Routledge]//JC//

power does not just inhabit the

realm of economics or state power, but is also intellectual, residing in the
educational force of the culture and its enormous powers of persuasion . This
means that any viable antiracist pedagogy must make the political more
pedagogical by recognizing how public pedagogy works to determine and
secure how racial identity, issues, and relations are produced in a wide
variety of sites including schools, cable and television networks, newspapers and magazines, the
Internet , advertising, churches, trade unions, and a host of other public spheres in which
ideas are produced and distributed. This means becoming mindful of how racial
meanings and practices are created, mediated, reproduced, and challenged
through a wide variety of discourses, institutions, audiences, markets, and
constituencies which help determine the forms and meaning of publicness
in American society (Brenkman, 1995, p. 8). The crucial role that pedagogy plays in
shaping racial issues rearms the centrality of a cultural politics that
recognizes the relationship between issues of representation and the
operations of power, the important role that intellectuals might play as
engaged, public intellectuals, and the importance of critical knowledge in
challenging neoliberalisms illusion of unanimity . But an antiracist cultural pedagogy also
suggests the need to develop a language of critique and possibility , and to
wage individual and collective struggles in a wide variety of dominant
public spheres and alternative counterpublics. Public pedagogy as a tool of
antiracist struggles understands racial politics not only as a signifying activity
through which subject positions are produced, identities inhabited, and
desires mobilized but also as the mobilization of material relations of
power as a way of securing, enforcing, and challenging racial injustices. While
cultural politics offers an opportunity to understand how race matters and
racist practices take hold in everyday life, such a pedagogical and cultural
politics must avoid collapsing into a romanticization of the symbolic ,
popular, or discursive. Culture matters as a rhetorical tool and mode of persuasion, especially in the realm of visual
culture, which has to be taken seriously as a pedagogical force, but changing consciousness is only a
precondition to changing society and should not be confused with what it
means to actually transform institutional relations of power. In part, this means
contesting the control of the media by a handful of transnational
corporations (on this subject, see McChesney & Nichols, 2002). The social gravity of racism as it
works through the modalities of everyday language , relations, and cultural
expressions has to be taken seriously in any antiracist politics , but such a
concern and mode of theorizing must also be accompanied by an equally
serious interest in the rise of corporate power and the role of state
institutions and agencies in shaping contemporary forms of racial
subjugation and inequality (Goldberg & Solomos, 2002, p. 231). Racist ideologies, practices, state formations,
Third, it is crucial for any antiracist pedagogy and politics to recognize that

and institutional relations can be exposed pedagogically and linguistically, but they cannot be resolved merely in the realm of the

any viable antiracist pedagogy needs to draw attention

between critique and social transformation, critical modes of analysis and
the responsibility of acting individually and collectively on ones beliefs .
discursive. Hence,

Permutation do bothinternet freedom on the internet

spurs grassroots movements that are key to the
alternativesurveillance is violence, the armative
curtails this
Paschel 14

[Tianna Paschel, , The Making of a Grassroots Movement Against Anti-black Racism,

Insurgency: The Black Matter(s) Issue, December 13,
http://www.thediasporablackmattersissue.com/paschel/2014/12/23/what-kind]//JC//

the internet is black youth-led

social movement organizations and networks such as Black Lives Matter ,
We Charge Genocide and Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), to name a few. All
of them have emerged in recent years around the question of racialized police violence as
well as other issues facing black people. In so doing, they have not only
mobilized and raised visibility around these issues , but have also produced
important written analyses of the situation. They have insisted that we
understand these murders as systemic rather than episodic, as endemic
rather than aberrations to an otherwise post-racial society and state
apparatus. These organizations have also been emphatic about
contextualizing these horric events along a spectrum of state violence
that black people, and particularly poor black people experience everyday
in the form of surveillance , hyper criminalization and mass incarceration.
The second root of such organizing both on the streets and on

We Charge Genocide a grassroots Chicago-based organization that emerged in the wake of the killing of
Dominique Damo Franklin and that works to equip individuals and communities to police the police took its
name from a 1951 Petition with the same name. Originally submitted to the UN General Assembly submitted by the
Civil Rights Congress, the petition documented 153 racial killings and was signed by W.E.B. Dubois and Paul
Robeson, among many others. Its authors held that the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated,
discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent,

the youth organizing

with We Charge Genocide, along with the parents of Mike Brown made similar
statements on state violence against black communities in front of the UN
Committee on Torture in Geneva in November of this year . The parallels
between these two moments of black resistance in both domestic and
international space are many. These similarities caution us to resist the
temptation to demarcate the current moment as constituting a new kind
of racial violence.
conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. In a similar vein,

Perm- Biopower
Perm do both- biopolitics is the root cause of the social death they critique
Nielsen 10 (University of Dallas, Philosophy Foucault on Modern Biopower and Its
Attendant http://percaritatem.com/2010/12/11/foucault-on-modern-biopower-and-its-attendantnarratives/#sthash.c5zrdtW8.dpbs//mm)
With biopower and the asymmetrical knowledge-power relations of secularized pastoral power, we
are dealing with an altogether different paradigm of self-knowledgea paradigm in which ancient
and medieval narratives of living well, care of the self, and eternal life have been translated into narratives of
living healthily and as long as possible in order to be a productive, contributing worker-consumer
of the globalized order. A second translation centers on purification. Whereas the Christian confessional technologies pursued ascetical
practices in order to wage war on sin, modern confessional technologies are employed for the purpose of purifying and
enhancing the species and thus can and do feed easily into modern noble lies about superior
races which must be free of contaminating influences. In my current research, I show how narratives along these lines
combined with Enlightenment and religious elements were very much at work in Americas chattel
slavery systema system aimed at producing docile disciplined bodies mainly for economic
purposes, black bodies scripted as unworthy and subhuman and culminating in a new subjectivity
the American slave.

Link Turns

Random Foucault Link Turn

Biopower explains how slavery and anti-Blackness are
developed
Agathangeluo 13

[ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU, Department of Political Science. Associate

Professor, Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value, International Feminist Journal of Politics Volume
15 No. 4, page 465]//JC//

In order to trace how slavery and anti-blackness are deployed and

leveraged in world politics by dominant states like the US and
corporations all in the name of radicalness (i.e., read capitals moves to generate more
value and infi- nitely and with no constraints) and productions of venture power, I draw on
Foucaults critique of the logics of bio-power as service (Foucault 2004: 16), that is,
ways different institutional powers decide who may live or die , including
the ways people can be brought into the market sexually : rst, by asserting
their right to capacity as working subjects and second , through the
intermediary of health (Foucault 2004: 16) as queer value (Wesling 2012: 107). While the
marketing of sexuality has previously been analyzed as concerns of human
tracking, prostitution, pornography and other illicit economies, I suggest that
the neoliberal imperiums deployment of gay rights is marketizing sexuality as a human right rather than positing
it as radical erotic connections and relations. I also engage Roses idea of biosocialities as collectivities formed
around a biological conception of a shared identity (Rose 2007: 134) that make an emergent sexual vitality central
to power.

Biopower is the root cause of racism

Nielsen 10(Cynthia R., University of Texas at Dallas, Philosophy, Foucault
on Modern Biopower and Its Attendant Narratives
http://percaritatem.com/2010/12/11/foucault-on-modern-biopower-and-itsattendant-narratives/#sthash.c5zrdtW8.qOteogSk.dpbs)
With biopower and the asymmetrical knowledge-power relations of
secularized pastoral power, we are dealing with an altogether different
paradigm of self-knowledgea paradigm in which ancient and medieval
narratives of living well, care of the self, and eternal life have been translated into
narratives of living healthily and as long as possible in order to be a
productive, contributing worker-consumer of the globalized order. A second

translation centers on purification. Whereas the Christian confessional technologies pursued ascetical practices in

employed for the purpose of

purifying and enhancing the species and thus can and do feed easily into
modern noble lies about superior races which must be free of contaminating inuences.
In my current research, I show how narratives along these lines combined with
Enlightenment and religious elements were very much at work in
Americas chattel slavery systema system aimed at producing docile
disciplined bodies mainly for economic purposes, black bodies scripted as
unworthy and subhuman and culminating in a new subjectivitythe
American slave.
order to wage war on sin, modern confessional technologies are

Bitcoin Link Turn

Link TurnBitcoin is not in itself anti-blackit is inclusive of all peoples
this provides the best and most real world strategy for equality
Trabex 14 [Winter Trabex, transgender Author, Anarchist, Agorist, Blogger , Bitcoin Is A
Currency of Equality, The Art of Not Being Governed, October 20,
http://www.notbeinggoverned.com/bitcoin-currency-equality/]//JC//
Today on facebook, I stumbled across a post which read something like Trans-inclusive bank. The post was a link to an article describing a
bank that was friendly to transgender people. For a moment, I had trouble seeing the point of it all. Why does anyone actually need to say that a
bank is trans friendly? Any bank who turns a customer away with money in hand is a bank that is probably on the take from Uncle Sam, or ready
to be bought up. Then I remembered: not everyone uses or knows about bitcoin. What I had intuitively

understood about the currency (for bitcoin is a currency) seems to be mentioned nowhere else. So I will
mention here that bitcoin is the must inclusive, pro-equality currency that has ever existed. There are a handful of
reasons- I suspect Im only scratching the surface here. -Bitcoin does not care if you are gay. -Bitcoin does not care what country you are from.
-Bitcoin does not care if you have had an abortion. -Bitcoin does not care if you have breasts and a penis, or if you are a man with a vagina.
-Bitcoin does not care if you twerk at nightclubs or travel the world as an exotic dancer. -Bitcoin does not care if you are a drug dealer. -Bitcoin
does not care if you are a convicted felon. -Bitcoin does not care how you worship, or if you worship. -Bitcoin does not care if you are
unemployed. -Bitcoin does not care if you are on food stamps, or have been declared incompetent by any of the worlds governments. -Bitcoin
does not care if you are homeless or have five mansions. -Bitcoin does not care if you are black, Asian, an Inuit, a

Mexican, or someone from the Isle of Fiji. In other words, bitcoin is the only currency in existence that
treats everyone absolutely the same. In having no regard for people at all, it shows what governments (and some banks) all across
the world have failed to show: that one person who has money is not much different from another person who has money. Indeed, anyone who
wishes to realize the dream of utopian equality must cast off the traditional systems of governance and currency while moving towards a system
that is anonymous, and therefore capable of being used by anyone. One of bitcoins virtues lays in the fact that, quite often, no government

ID is required to use it. An internet connection and a password are usually good enough. This means that
anyone can use it. Or, put another way, no one is restricted from using it upon any basis whatsoever. Bitcoin
is not racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic or elitist. It has no personal preferences whatsoever. While Martin
Luther King Jr. wanted a world in which his children could be judged by the content of their character, bitcoin has gone one step further: if his
children decide to use the cryptocurrency, they wont be judged at all.

Welfare Link Turn

Link turn welfare surveillance is a unique aspect of state paternalism the
affs shift away from surveillance is a necessary decrease in state paternalism
Dee 13 (Mike, Queensland University of Technology, Welfare Surveillance, Income
Management and New Paternalism in Australia, Surveillance and Society,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org)
An older paternalism can be identified in Foucaults (1981: 37) concept of pastoral power in the
sense of governing, punishing and helping the poor along prescribed behavioural pathways, connecting
with contemporary new paternalist concerns about entitlements to welfare benefits, dependency and
behaviour (Henman and Adler 2003). A new paternalism in social policy, and social welfare in particular, builds on the lineage of pastoral
power, allowing the powerful in society to take a tough line in respect of alleged welfare dependency (Tomlinson 2013). The exercise of

surveillant authority over the domain of public welfare demonstrates the new paternalism of government as
by a benign parent and the notion that those in positions of power have, just as in the relationship between parents and
children, the right and the obligation to overrule the preferences of those deemed incapable of
knowing their true interests (Thomas and Buckmaster 2010: 2). The hallmarks of this form of new
paternalism are the (over) promotion of personal responsibility and self reliance, the enforcement
of desired social values and compliant behaviour and the harnessing of surveillance technologies with
enhanced functionality, to monitor public welfare programs (Mead 1997; Yeatman 2000; Mendes 2012). In demarcating the rise of new
paternalism, it is acknowledged that this development coexists alongside a number of contested understandings of good and bad paternalism.
Arguably, another kind of orthodox rights based paternalism informed the very construction of the post war welfare state, particularly in the
areas of education and provision of a range of social services and benefits (Kennedy 1982; Thomas and Buckmaster 2010; Cunningham and
Cunningham 2012). Nonetheless, I argue that the key differences between old and new paternalism lie in the

move to secure behavioural change through the conditional provision of benefits and substantial
and ongoing investment in intrusive surveillance infrastructure such as the BasicsCard by successive Australian
Governments (Thomas and Buckmaster 2010; Billings 2011; Carney 2011). Thus surveillance mechanisms of the kinds discussed in
this article act as a conduit through which the preventative surveillance state becomes not only broader,
more interventive and more regulatory (Parton 2008: 166), but also deeply embedded in the daily
minutia of life for people attempting to survive on welfare.

No link the aff is not an increase in paternalism rather the alternative

justifies conservative logic of self-reliance that continues the stigmatization of
welfare recipients
Dee 13 (Mike, Queensland University of Technology, Welfare Surveillance, Income
Management and New Paternalism in Australia, Surveillance and Society,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org)
The former Labor government1 stated in its 2011-12 Federal Budget that it sought, in the words of then Prime Minister Gillard, to
end the corrosive effects of perceived welfare dependency through requiring responsibility, noting the importance of the dignity
and purpose of work (Gillard 2011: 5). The Labor policy paradigm, following closely in the footsteps of previous
Conservative administrations, requires individual responsibility and progress towards selfreliance, enacting punitive responses to control those perceived as failing to contribute economically. In an inversion of the much feared
nanny state, a new paternalism emerges through income management in targeted areas of
substantial economic and social disadvantage, underpinned by a costly, distrustful and authoritarian surveillance, reporting
and sanctioning apparatus (Mead 1997; Buckmaster 2011; Buckmaster and Ey 2012). The absence of trust, particularly of Indigenous
communities and claimants, is central to the operation of a paternalist welfare state . This is despite a strong measure of
social trust (Stolle 2001: 13) between government and governed being a precondition for civic engagement and the kinds of active
citizenship often required and promoted for Indigenous Australians, particularly those living in geographically remote communities (Job 2005:
5). Instead, a central strategy has been to support or induce the adoption of more responsible

behaviours in particular communities by, for example, placing conditions on eligibility for welfare
payments or on how welfare payments may be spent (Buckmaster 2011: 1). These measures are an indication of
successive Labor and Conservative governments ideological commitment to the role of personal behavioural change, rather than increasing
income support rates, in overcoming disadvantage. It is notable that several of the measures involve interventions in

identified disadvantaged communities. This reflects heightened interest on the part of the former Labor government in location
based initiatives or programs targeting cluster groups in particular geographical locations (Buckmaster 2011: 3), in an attempt to end the
spectre of welfare dependency (for which no conclusive definition exists) through surveillance and other strategies of enforcement on
disengaged youth and also long-term welfare recipients (Chouinard and Crooks 2005; Engels 2006; Australian National Audit Office 2011:
47; 2013). The turn to a new paternalism in Australia follows a similar recasting of social welfare from a

matter of rights to a justification of the close supervision of the poor (Mead 1997: 1) in a number of countries.
Underway since the fall of the Whitlam Labor Government of 1972-75, through the years of successive economically rationalist attempts to
reduce social welfare expenditure (Pusey 1991) in the Fraser Liberal Government (1975-1983) and the Hawke, then Keating Labor Governments
(1983-1996), it can be discerned in Australian policy enactments around mutual obligation and self reliance for example, in the McClure
Report (2000). In arguing that the success of welfare reform be judged by reductions in the number of

jobless families and the proportion of the working age population reliant on various forms of
income support, the report allowed the (Conservative) Howard Liberal National coalition government (19962007) to validate an increasingly revanchist regime of welfare reform wherein self reliance at the
individual and community level was the required outcome (McClure 2000; Carney 2011). Public policy maxims
extolled the virtues of self reliance and the creation of partnerships between government and non-government agencies and certain
communities, with the state as broker and occasional friend, rather than the provider of services (Rose 2000; Tomlinson 2003). In such a harsh
policy context those experiencing poverty are conceived as culpable actors at risk of moral hazard
(Mead 1997: 19). The

increasing stigmatisation and criminalisation of welfare claimants, invokes the

exclusionary process of adiaphorisation. This stripping away of moral criteria proceeds to such an extent that the concept of
welfare becomes loaded, not with compassion, but with fear and loathing of a criminally indolent 1 Led by
Rudd, 2007-10, Gillard, 2010-13 and Rudd again in 2013, until the September Federal election when a Conservative, Abbott-led government
came to power. Dee: Welfare Surveillance, Income Management and New Paternalism in Australia Surveillance & Society 11(3) 275 welfare
dependent class, for whom punishment and the withdrawal of benefits becomes a firm but fair course of policy action, to protect the goodly
virtues of the deserving poor (Bauman 1998: 80).

The aff is fundamentally distinct from what they critique the 1996 reforms
failed because they put minority demands on the backburner
Dee 13 (Mike, Queensland University of Technology, Welfare Surveillance, Income
Management and New Paternalism in Australia, Surveillance and Society,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org)
An example of the potentially oppressive effects of data gathering lies in the administration of the food stamps scheme in the United States,
illustrating the capacity of welfare systems to increase the surveillance and consequent marginalisation of welfare claimants. Like so many so
called welfare reforms, the Welfare Reform Act (1996) started life with the stated intention of combating

fraud and secondary aims of reducing the stigma associated with the receipt of food stamps , as well as
making life simpler and more convenient for financially poor women, the overwhelming recipients of food stamps in the US (Monahan
2009). The vehicle for delivering this welfare reform was the electronic benefit transfer or EBT

system, with an electronic card much like an ATM card taking the place of the actual food stamps. The EBT
system for which the card acts as a virtual informant, tracks spending data such as times, locations and items
purchased, rendering this data available for examination by case workers and other officials as
desired, often resulting in hostile interviews for claimants (Monahan 2009). While welfare surveillance may pose as an objective and
rational practice, it is instead (in this example) objectifying in a very restricted and disciplinary sense . Even if women
were not the primary targets of such surveillance systems, by filtering out social context and objectifying others, these systems enforce
masculinized representations of social experience and value (Monahan 2009: 294). It can be argued that
key neoliberal and gender based assumptions and discourses are embedded in such surveillance
systems, solidifying relations of power and domination, aided by a technological determinism serving in the main, male
Dee: Welfare Surveillance, Income Management and New Paternalism in Australia Surveillance & Society 11(3) 282 dominated corporate
interests raking over the daily transactions of the poor (Rule 1973; Boyd 2004; Monahan 2009; Maki 2011).

Alt Answers

AT: Opacity
Opacity is an inherently priveleged projects that reasserts
a power relaitonship between the opaque and power
which is inaccessible to all subjects
Bettivia no date (Rhiannon, doctoral student in Social Informatics @
University of Illinois. Seeing the unseen: The politics and privileges of
invisibility and opacity in the digital archive https://www.interdisciplinary.net/critical-issues/wpcontent/uploads/2014/08/bettiviadgpaper.pdf)

Glissant puts forth the notion of opacity, which bears a resemblance

to the idea of invisibility, and it is the relationship between these terms
that I explore in a number of contemporary archival projects. While
invisibility cuts both ways in terms of its ability to privilege and
marginalize, the notion of opacity necessarily implies a position of
relative power for those who are able to both maintain or assert their own
opacity, for those who control the ability of others to remain opaque or
be compelled to transparency, and for those who do not need to engage
in such negotiations because their position of power exempts them from
these struggles. Opacity is a narrative practice that requires a surface
reading and challenges requirements of transparency in subjects.
Transparency in this instance stands for comprehension or understanding
of an othered subject from the perspective of those in power: it renders
the other into an object of understanding for the dominant population
(Britton, 1999). The ght to maintain opacity, to resist the loss of ones
subjectivity is constant for marginalized populations seeking visibility via
archives. Opacity is a discursive strategy that acts as a space for resistance or the right to actively engage in constructions of self on the part of subjects being
interviewed, transcribed, and ultimately archived. In thinking about power struggles in archives, one has to
consider who is able to claim opacity and who is forced into
transparency. The tendency towards transparency in Western archives can
be seen as part of the compulsion towards confessional discourses. The
ability to opt out of such discourses in many ways mirrors the ability to
maintain opacity: such a privilege is granted to some and denied
others. A number of factors compel those who are marginalized towards
Edouard

involuntary transparency. In archival projects, the price of visibility is often

the need to give up any claim to opacity. For queer subjects, closet
discourses force a coming out; one is assumed, or even accused of,
being stuck in if the confession does not take place . Techniques of

interpretive reading give power to those doing the interpretation. This

language is often employed in realms of literary criticism but can also be
used in understand an approach to archival materials. Foucault says,
What Im looking for are not the relations that are secret, hidden, more
silent or deeper than the consciousness of men. I try on the contrary to
define the relations on the very surface of discourse; I attempt to make

visible what is invisible only because its too much on the surface of
things. The question to ask is how such techniques are applied
differently to different subjects. Whose words are taken at surface
value, and whose are not? And what complication might digital media in

particular pose for this space?

Opacity Is Strategic Colorblindnessthe strategy of white supremacy is to

sideline discussions of race and make sure it never happensthis makes
combatting whiteness impossible
Applebaum, Sommers and Norton 2008 (Evan, Samuel, and Michael, Race & Seeming
Racist Evaluating Strategic Colorblindness in Social Interaction, JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY
AND SOCIAL PYSCHOLOGY Vol. 95, No. 4)
As this anecdote and a developing research literature illustrate, individuals

often struggle with how best to manage

interactions in which race is a potentially relevant topic. From media ambivalence about whether
race is relevant to a news story (e.g., Sommers, Apfelbaum, Dukes, Toosi, & Wang, 2006) to confusion among
laypeople regarding how to refer to particular ethnic groups (e.g.,Sigelman, Tuch, & Martin, 2005),
efforts to talk about race, like race-relevant interactions more generally, are fraught with the risks
of misunderstanding and social sanction. We propose that when placed in the ambiguous and often
threatening context of race relevant social interaction, one approach many Whites adopt is strategic
colorblindness: avoidance of talking about raceor even acknowledging racial differencein an
effort to avoid the appearance of bias. Colorblindness has emerged as a norm endorsed by many
Whites and evident across a wide range of domains: as a general set of ideological beliefs (Firebaugh & Davis, 1998;
Plaut, 2002), in the form of educational initiatives to manage diversity (Pollock, 2004; Sue, 2004), as the focus of legal debate (Duncan, 2000;
Norton, Sommers, Vandello, & Darley, 2006). However, one of the most important aspects of colorblindness

remains unaddressed empirically, namely, its use as a strategy employed in the effort to appear
unbiased during social interaction. In the present studies we explore the nature of this tendency by examining its situational and
personal antecedents as well as its impact on interpersonal outcomes including the appearance of prejudice. The recent movement in psychology
toward a multidimensional, relational approach to studying race and social interaction (see Hebl & Dovidio, 2005; Shelton & Richeson, 2006) has
reaffirmed the notion that powerful norms guide behavior in race-related contextsin particular, Whites

motivations to avoid the appearance of prejudice(Dunton & Fazio, 1997; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; Plant & Devine,
1998). This research has also been instrumental in linking Whites efforts to regulate their appearance during race-relevant social interactions with
a range of interpersonal outcomes.

AT: Optimism/Haunting
Optimism is insufficent at challenging the grammars of antiblackness while
pessimism remains a strategy that doesnt devolve into pure instances of
resistance that distract from larger structures
Sexton 11 (Jared, Journal 2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada)The Social Life
of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism In Tensions

As a way of stepping into it, again, and of concluding with anticipation, Ill ask directly: Are the
epigraphs in contradiction? Do we have here two incommensurable approaches to black studies,
or perhaps some other relation? Let us assume, with Wilderson, it is the case that every gesture,
every performance of blackness, every act or action, critical or creative, rhetorical or aesthetic, is
haunted by this sense of grammar and ghosts, of a structure and a memory of its (still) coming
into being through and as violence. Does this haunting imply, much less ensure, that there is not
and can be no fugitive movement of escape, as Moten has it? Does afropessimism fail to hear the
resonance of black optimism? Or might something else be at work. Of course, when Wilderson
writes that performance meets ontology, he is saying quite a bit more than that. Though he is
attempting to think the two registers togetherthe performative and the ontologicalhe is
indicating not so much that ontology is not performative, but rather more so that performativity
does not, in fact, have disruptive power at the level or in the way that it has been theorized to date.
More radically still, he is suggesting that this theorization remains insufficiently elaborated. That,

at least, is how I read the animating gesture of the intervention and interlocution. [30]
Adjudicating the question may require that this sense of permanent violence, if not the violence
itself, become intelligible. But can it be rendered available to thought or even become
knowledge? This is Wildersons intervention: to illuminate the ways in which we do not, cannot, or
will not know anything about this violence, the ways in which our analyses miss the paradigm for
the instance, the example, the incident, the anecdote. Is this knowledge, or sense, something that
operates at the point where thought breaks down, at its limit? Some may chafe at the notion of

permanence here, because it seems not to admit of historicity or, more radically, of a certain
impossibility of permanence. But we are talking about permanence in the pedestrian sense that
something lasts or remains without essential change. It is the logic of change as permutation. The
contention arises, then, over what it means to inhabit this permanence and, in related fashion, how
it is to be inhabited. Can there be knowledge of a grammar (of suffering), of a structure (of
vulnerability)? If so, is it available to articulation, can it be said, or is it an unbearable, unspeakable
knowledge? Can it even be experienced as such, expressed, accounted for practically or
theoretically? Or is there only knowledge of the experience of freedom [from grammar, structure,
or ghosts], even when that knowledge precedes experience (Moten 2004: 303)?

Demands for presencing of those marked as abject reinscribes the Hegelian

dialectic of life and death that makes social death possible in the first place.
Peterson 6 Christopher, The Return of the Body: Judith Butler's Dialectical Corporealism,
Discourse, 28.2&3, Spring & Fall 2006, pp. 153-177 (Article)
In contemporary cultural studies, the body is laden with intense desires and expectations. Emerging with the eclipse of
poststructuralism in the late 1980s, the body promised to weigh in on contemporary political debates, to
give material substance to a discipline supposedly evacuated by what some felt to be the
excessively linguistic or textual focus of contemporary theory. But what if the very turn to the body
occasioned a certain return of the metaphysics of presence, only now bearing the name, or rather, the
spirit of the body ? Indeed, scholars in race, gender, and sexuality studies have often invoked the

body as a marker of both identity and self-presence. Given the violence of erasure, invisibility,
and death (both social and material) to which minority bodies have historically been subjected, it has
also seemed to many that the ontology of these bodies must be insisted upon in the face of this
nihilistic threat. As Sharon Holland announces in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, bringing back the dead
(or saving the living from the shadow of death) is the ultimate queer act.1 And in the introduction to her seminal, 1991 collection of essays on
queer theory, Inside/Out, Diana Fuss notes how a striking feature of many of the essays collected in this volume is a fascination with the specter
of abjection, a certain preoccupation with the figure of the homosexual as specter and phantom, as spirit and revenant, abject and undead.2 Yet,
queer scholarship for the most part has addressed the problem of the spectral only by way of contesting its pervasiveness in dominant
representations of homosexuality. If saving us from the shadow of death names the ultimate queer act, such so-called raising

of the
dead relieves us of any sustained engagement with what Jacques Derrida calls spectrality, understood, in part,
as an originary process of mourning that is the condition of all life, indeed, of any body. For Derrida,
spectrality does not originate with ones social or biological death. As he argues in a brief reading of Poes The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar, our future absence divides our present/presence from the very beginning. Derrida takes
Valdemars catachrestic utterance-I have been sleeping-and now-now-I am dead3-to make a point about the function of language:

My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I. . . . The utterance I am living is

accompanied by my being-dead and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead; and
conversely. This is not an extraordinary story by Poe here, but the ordinary story of language. . . . I am thus originally means I am mortal.4
While Derridas point is that the iterability of a speech act requires the possibility of ones absence
from future scenes of utterance (and thus already implies ones absence in the present), this living death also names
the experience of being more generally. As Heidegger puts it, being is always already dying in
its beingtowardits-end.5 For Heidegger, death is not a punctual event that one might mark on a calendar; rather, death always already belongs to
our being. The

conventional reduction of death to a calculable moment is precisely what Poes story

parodies. While his doctors assert that his disease [is] of that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its
termina- tion in death, Valdemar (aided by the magic of mesmerism) continues to live beyond the estimated moment of decease, a prolongation
of dying that allegorizes how life stretches along a path marked at every step by death (51). Valdemars

protracted dying also

echoes Emily Dickinsons poem Because I could not stop for death, in which death kindly
stops for the speaker and bears her forward through each stage of life. If, as in Dickinsons poem, death
haunts our being from the very beginning, then the spectral condition of sexual minorities is not reducible
to a problem of representation, or rather, mis-representation, as queer scholarship tends to suppose. When Holland caricatures
postmodernism as the attractive zombie theory of the academy, a place where the living travel through death and are reborn to utter the truths
of such a journey, she suggests that postmodernism articulates a dialectical relation between life and death, a sublation of being and nonbeing
that ultimately triumphs over finitude (166). Such

a dialectical view of the relation between life and death,

to the spectral, which is neither present nor absent. But perhaps Hollands caricature
is to be expected, for as Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, the traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts
nor in all that one would call the virtual space of spectrality. 6 If the traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts, that is because there
however, opposes itself

has never been a scholar who, as such, did not believe in the clear-cut distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the
living and the non-living, being and non-being (34). For Derrida, a capacity to speak to ghosts would be the mark of a scholar.7 Although it
might seem odd to yoke queer critics to the figure of the traditional scholar, so ingrained is the anti-spectral character of queer scholarship that

Holland can declare the ultimate queerness of raising the dead as a fact, and support this claim
only by referring us to ACT UPs famous political slogan: silence = death. To insist on this
fact, however, is to sidestep the problem of finitude altogether. When scholars in race, gender, and
sexuality studies write about the body, what is typically invoked is the living body, the body that is
present to itself, untainted by mortality. For cultural studies, spectrality is merely an effect of
racism, sexism, homophobia, and other social injustices. Subtracted from such external violence,
the body can be made present, its ontology no longer in question. But spectrality, as Derrida uses the term (and as I
propose to track it here in the context of racial and sexual politics) does not have its origin in social inequality. Naming a
process of originary mourning that animates corporeal life, spectrality has no proper beginning or end. The abjection
that sexual and racial minorities endure might be better understood as a mode of redoubled
ghostliness that harnesses the spectrality inherent to all life and attaches it to those on the margins
of sociality: the figure of the gay man dying of AIDS functions as the proof of the homophobic white males ontological security; the
representation of AfricanAmericans as spooks (to cite a somewhat antiquated yet illustrative racist epithet) works to

ward off the death that always already haunts the ontology of the white body.8 No doubt the
emergence of gay and lesbian studies in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the cruelty of those
discourses that sought to invoke AIDS as further proof of the death style of (male)
homosexuality inspired many queer critics and theorists to resist the equation of homosexuality and death. Yet, the
contestation of this equation, I would argue, has also had the consequence of disavowing finitude. My
claim is that the specific, historical effects of homophobia, racism, and sexism must also be thought in
relation to the generalizable principle of spectrality. Certainly there are good reasons to be wary of entertaining general
principles, given the risk that they might come to saturate the social and political field, to erase differences altogether. Indeed, the turn to
the body has been occasioned by a renewed faith in particularity that often eschews the large
claims of theory. Yet rejecting general principles altogether risks a certain
overparticularization that fails to imagine how the general and the particular might be held
in perpetual tension without either finally coming to absorb the other. If social death names an ontological
deprivation that attends the lives of racial and sexual minorities, there is no reason why these
specificities cannot and should not be brought to bear on the generalizable condition of spectrality, and vice
versa. Not to negotiate this tension between general and particular, between spectrality and social death, is to
miss the opportunity to interrogate how the social death of racial and sexual others is produced
in and through the disavowal of the spectral. The insistence on the ontology of the socially dead,
in other words, merely reverses and reinscribes the division between life and death, presence
and absence, that conditions the abjection of queer lives. In a passage from The Psychic Life of Power, for instance, Judith Butler addresses
how we might counter the abjection of those bodies deemed expendable, gay people, prostitutes, drug users, among others . . . [who] are dying
or already dead.9 While she asks us to consider if social existence for the majority is purchased through the production and maintenance of
the socially dead, she does

not pursue the question of how the construction of the socially dead is
predicated on the fiction of social being, of being as presence (PLP 27). Dedicating her work toward expanding
a field of possibilities for bodily life, she theorizes against the insidious means by which the abjection of
minority bodies produces them as shadowy contentless figure[s] for something not yet made real.10 But
this invocation of ontologyintoned in the suggestion that these ghostly shadows might
someday be embodied would appear to conflate social death or abjection with what we are calling
spectrality. This conflation denies the possibility of the specter, of that which is neither spirit
nor body. As Derrida notes in Specters of Marx: For there is no ghost, there is never any becoming specter of the spirit without at least an
appearance of flesh. . . . For there to be a ghost, there must be a return to a body, but to a body that is
more abstract than ever (202). Although the possibility of the specter requires a certain return to the body, that body never fully
returns to itself. Indeed, the return of the body to itself is forever deferred by its hauntological
condition. Following Derrida, we might consider that all bodies live in the shadowy regions of ontology, all bodies
are hauntological, not ontological. Only by virtue of the ction of ontology do certain bodies
appear to be more present than others. The social existence of the majority, of those white, male
bodies that supposedly matter, is conditioned by a certain disavowal and projection of the bodys
finitude. The socially dead are thus made to stand in for the death that haunts each and every life.
While the interrogation of the body as a stable marker of identity would appear to have received its
most well-known and persistent challenge in Butlers anti-epistemological accounts of corporeality, the
equation of the body with presence remains very much intact. Indeed, I would suggest that, despite the
frequent characterization of her theorizations of corporeality as deconstructive by both her supporters
and her most virulent critics (Nussbaum or Zizek for instance), they remain squarely within a metaphysical
tradition of presence that disavows finitude, that is, within that very tradition that deconstruction
has made it its mission to displace.11

AT: Fugitivity
Your radical approach to fugitivity results in no structural change - means the
alternative fails every time
Klausen 14 (Jimmy, B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and M.A. and Ph.D.
degrees in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, Fugitive Rousseau:
Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom.)mm
For Wolin, democratic constitutionalism and then fugitive democracy
refuse the routinization and professionalization, the killing of
spontaneity and improvisation, that massive constitutional
democracies institute over vast territorial spaces. Against this managerial and
bureaucratic trend fugitive democracy instigates "the idea and practice of rational
disorganization," which riddles large-scale state-administered spaces so that dynamic and
developing political cultures can take back popular powers in rebellious moments .29 In Wolin's
conception the rebellious impulses of fugitive democracy do not signal a revocation of
legitimacy from state regimes but rather an altogether antigovernmental, aconstitutional 30.
any conception of democracy grounded in predisposition the citizen-as-actor and politicsas-episodic is incompatible with the modern choice of the state as the fixed center of
political life and the corollary conception of politics as continuous activity organized
around a single dominating 31 objective, control of or influence over the state apparatus.
Neither Wolin's Rousseau nor fugitive Rousseauism's Wolin shy away from a strongly political anarchy and a strongly political community.32

Fugitive democracy and fugitive freedom share these broad parameters of a simultaneous
inclination to anarchism yet a pursuit of communal action in an infrastatal arena: both of them
upsurge from within the very heart of the state against statecentric orderings of modern politics. At the same time, there are substantive
differences between them along the axes of time and space. First,

Wolin's radical democratic vision of the political

is fugitive because it is fleeting, evanescent. Its upsurges are temporary and bring together active citizens only
momentarily to address objects of immediate common concern: so fugitive democracy flees in both time and object.33 By contrast, what I have

the forms of domination that would

cramp, annihilate, or enervate freedom are constant, so must the cultivation of fugitive
practices never relent, never remit, never repose. In this respect my fugitive Rousseauian freedom finds itself closer
tried to articulate is a necessarily enduring fugitive practice of freedom: because

to Stephen Best's and Saidiya Hartman's representation of "fugitive justice": even after a slave's flight to freedom, even after the abolition of
American chattel slavery, fugitive justice, like fugitive freedom, exists in a temporal present that stretches continuously, endlessly, because both
inhabit "the interval between the no longer and the not yet," between repose in slavery and repose in freedom.34 Because Canaan conterminates
with Egypt, the wilderness lasts forever.

Fugitivity is a bad strategy- ONLY visibility and pressure on the government

can improve black lives
Blow 15 (Charles M. Blow, Beyond Black Lives Matter, New York Times Online FEB. 9,
2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/charles-blow-beyond-black-livesmatter.html?_r=0)
The Black Lives Matter protesters took some criticism for what others viewed as a lack of clear focus and detailed agenda. But in truth ,
raising an issue to the point where it can no longer be ignored is the grist
for the policy mill. Visibility and vocalization have value. In the same way that Occupy Wall

the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the

idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities. Protests following the
grand jury decisions in the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric
Garner on Staten Island have largely died down. Those stories no longer command front page placement or lead the
Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality,

news. The news machine, hungry for newness, as is its wont, has moved on to measles and back to the Islamic States medieval murder tactics.
But, as is often the case, there was no full resolution or reconciliation. The issue of police-community relations was raised but not solved. The

memory of mistrust still wafts through the air like the smell of rot being carried by the breeze. What was it all for? What came of it? Where do we
go from here? First,

the encouraging news. In December, President Obama signed an executive

order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which in part aims to foster strong, collaborative
relationships between local law enforcement and the communities they protect. The White House has promoted the use of body cameras, and
police departments across the country are considering their purchase and use. The

task force has held listening sessions

around the country, and Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is holding round-table
discussions. The Ferguson Police Department last week began testing a less lethal device
that attaches to an officers gun.According to The Washington Post, When a bullet fired, it
melded with an attached projectile the size of a Ping-Pong ball that flew with enough force to
knock a person down, maybe break some ribs, but not kill him, the products makers said even at close
range. The Huffington Post reported in November that in 2013, 27 law enforcement officers were killed as a result of felonious acts the
lowest such figure in more than 50 years of F.B.I. reporting. That month, The Chicago Tribune reported that U.S. violent crimes including
murders fell 4.4 percent in 2013 to their lowest number since the 1970s, continuing a decades-long downturn, the F.B.I. said. Now the
discouraging news. According to a November USA Today report, The number of felony suspects fatally shot by police last year 461 was
the most in two decades, according to a new F.B.I. report. Something about these numbers doesnt add up, and it will be interesting to see
whether the protests and the heightened sensibilities they brought to the surface will affect these numbers in next years reporting. In New York,
after Mayor Bill de Blasio and the police union came to loggerheads, the mayor skipped an opportunity to address the issue of the police and
minorities communities, and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton seems to be going out of his way to reassure the department at the expense of
future protests. The worry is that rapprochement may come to resemble appeasement. In this months State of the City speech, as The Village
Voice put it, de Blasio hardly mentioned policing, offering anodyne praise for the citys officers. This raised the hackles of many reform
advocates, even among his supporters. Bratton has announced the creation of a separate police unit of roughly 500 patrol officers to handle
temporary issues like large protests. He has resisted Gov. Andrew Cuomos proposal for an independent monitor in cases where grand juries fail
to indict officers in the death of a civilian. And he proposed raising resisting arrest from a misdemeanor a charge that carries a maximum
penalty of one year in prison and is often tossed out to a felony. According to BuzzFeed,

the president of the Patrolmens

Benevolent Association, Pat Lynch, also called for enhanced penalties against protesters,
asking the Legislature to make assaulting a police officer at a public assembly a Class B felony, which would carry a penalty of up to 25 years in
prison. Few

people support resisting arrest or assaulting officers, but in the scrum of protests,
such severe penalties for sometimes subjective or even dubious charges seem
disproportionate and an attempt to chill dissent. This is what happens when a story fades
from the headlines, the heat is dialed down and the eyes avert: In the silence, amid
the stillness, there is movement . The immediacy of protests gives way to the glacial
pace of policy. The burden is to remain vigilant, so that movement is in the right direction .

AT: Counter Surveillance

Counter surveillance fails to be intersectional lack of accessibility means
empowerment of one body disempowers another
Monahan et al, 2010 Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on institutional transformations with new
technologies, with a particular emphasis on surveillance and security programs. He has published
over forty articles or book chapters and five books, director of the international Surveillance
Studies Network and an associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance,
Surveillance & Society. Phillips is from Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Wood is
from Surveillance Studies Centre, Queens University. (Torin, David, and David. Surveillance
and Empowerment. pages 107-8. PDF. 7.7.15)//ctb
In an oblique way the field of Surveillance

Studies has been grappling with these issues for a while, in part by
focusing on counter-surveillance in which actors with fewer institutional or symbolic resources
seek to vitiate the surveillance to which they and others are subjected (Monahan 2010b). Studies of
countersurveillance have followed two paths. The first addresses attempts to thwart, disrupt, or
avoid surveillance. John Gillioms Overseers of the Poor, for instance, shows how women welfare recipients evade bureaucratic surveillance by, among
other things, refusing to disclose secondary forms of income they receive in order to make ends meet (Gilliom 2001). The Institute for Applied Autonomys iSee
project provides maps of paths of least surveillance routes through urban regions that avoid CCTV cameras (Monahan 2010b). At

its best, this type

of counter-surveillance can be empowering, but usually in a reactive way, by contesting and trying
to reduce the forms of surveillance to which people are exposed. This also describes the important
legal work done by civil-society organizations (Bennett 2008). Another strand of counter-surveillance
action seeks to embrace and use surveillance practices to counter dominant power. Examples of this
include CopWatch programs (Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006) or the Institute for Applied Autonomys (2006)
defensive surveillance tactics of monitoring police at mass public protests in order to better avoid
confrontation (see also Fernandez 2008). As is clear from the articles in this issue, this embrace is problematic. At their worst, countersurveillance tactics can be willfully ignorant of and insensitive to intersectional forms of oppression,
as can be witnessed, for instance, in videos of Steve Manns shooting back project1, where he (a
relatively affluent white man) confronts African American women and others working low-income,
service sector jobs and questions them about store video surveillance systems, to which the workers
are more likely to be the targets than the customers (Monahan 2010b)2. At best, they require a subtle and
nimble engagement with volatile forms of power. For example, in this issue, Wilson and Serisier examine the ways that new
techniques for producing and disseminating video images alter the possibilities for successful activism in complex ways, providing safety and visibility for street
protesters, but also provoking greater police violence, and sometimes providing evidence for legal action against the protesters themselves .

If
surveillance is to be effectively used to counter power, then the tools of
surveillance data gathering, analytics, and response mechanisms must
be accessible . These tools are embedded in infrastructure in interlocking and mutually
supportive networks of laws, machines, and cultural practices . One of the aims of this special issue is to probe those relations
and suggest pathways toward the ethical design of surveillance infrastructures (see Phillips 2005). 3 This approach recognizes that because surveillance is socially
constructed, the design of surveillance infrastructures is a contingent and underdetermined process, which means that alternativeand more power-equalizing

infrastructures
establish contexts for practice (Bowker and Star 1999). This brings us to the difficult task of identifying
possible criteria for evaluating ethical and/or empowering surveillance . In her article in this volume, Shilton suggests
designs are possible. The focus on infrastructures is intentional. Whereas technologies function as tools that enable certain practices,

that the design criteria for ethical tools for participatory sensing pay attention to values of local control, participation, transparency, and social justice. Of course, each
of these foci provide plenty of opportunity for debate. Where is local? Who is to participate? What is to be transparent to whom? What is justice? Nevertheless, they

is but one locus of intervention. We

must also evaluate use, outcomes, and consequences . Perhaps, as a starting point, criteria
for the evaluation of empowering outcomes could be based on demonstrable improvement in the
economic, juridical, social or symbolic status of an individual or group that has traditionally been
marginalized or oppressed. 4 But these outcomes are never simple; they are always polyvalent . For example,
as Mark Andrejevic (2007) argues in his discussion of interactive media, people can eagerly involve themselves with surveillance
helpfully structure the debate to attend to normative principles of equality and autonomy. Design

systems that meet some of their needs and desires but are ultimately disempowering because they
enable only ersatz freedom to make consumer choices, not actualize any deep form of political or
social empowerment. Two articles in this issue address complex and nuanced notions of use and outcome. Regan and Steeves explore how four different
models of empowerment protest/resistance, social capital, identity/self-presentation, and performance suggest different normative values in youths interaction
with social networking sites (SNS). Ellerbrok reveals the dynamics of different kinds of visibility (peer-to-peer, marketing surveillance, regulatory surveillance, and
data legacies) on SNS. Each

suggests that positive outcomes along one axis, or in the light of one model, may
be negative outcomes on another.

Counter surveillance methods fail to foster accountability

Wilson and Serisier 10 (Dean is associate professor at Plymouth University and has published widely on surveillance
including biometrics and border technologies, Tonya is a lecturer at the school of sociology, social policy, and social work at Queens University
Belfast, Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance, The Authors, JP)
However, there was a consensus amongst all participants that, at least in the current regulatory system, complaints

against
police behaviour at protests were highly unlikely to succeed irrespective of the presence of video
footage. It was suggested that there is a lack of accountability 'because the police investigate
themselves, and the Ombudsman's Office endorse whatever the police do' (Mills interview). The possibility of seeking official redress is
limited in a number of ways. 'Masking moves' (Marx 2003) may foreclose the usefulness of footage for official exposure of police misconduct.
Complaints to the New South Wales Ombudsman, for example, have been returned on the basis that without a name or number it is impossible to
ascertain the police involved. As

police frequently refuse to give their name on request and just as

frequently fail to wear identifying badges in protest situations they are capable of neutralizing the
official visibility of the activist's camera.4 Moreover, such images are inserted
and recontextualized in official contexts within which police interpretations occupy a
privileged, though not unassailable, position. Surveillance images are always subject to interpretation, and
in the domain of official inquiry and legal proceedings police are positioned to supply the 'official definition of the situation' (Doyle 2006, 211).
The structural space of those undertaking surveillance is therefore of considerable consequence, as it is not inevitably coupled with the power of
interpretation. This perhaps explains the pervasive cynicism based on experience expressed by all participants regarding the capacity of countersurveillance to render police officially accountable. If the capacity of video footage to bring about official accountability is constrained, images
nevertheless constitute an important tactical device in defending against accusations by police and in 'backstage' negotiations. Several participants
noted the value of video for defence, particularly if footage captured police misconduct. John Jacobs for instance, was charged with 'assault

of video evidence which exposed Jacobs himself had been 'put in a

headlock and bashed in the face' the case was dismissed, although no further action was taken
against police (Jacobs interview). Moreover, the mere existence of images can be deployed to negotiate with
police. One community lawyer with extensive involvement in logging protests noted the utility of footage in negotiations and 'situations where
police' at a protest. However on the basis

we have kind of ruffled some feathers through telling the sergeant of the relevant police station of the existence of our footage, that having the
impact of having that person at least informally reprimanded' (Bleyer interview).

Counter surveillance methods are counterproductive, incriminating those it is

intended to empower

Wilson and Serisier 10 (Dean is associate professor at Plymouth University and has published widely on surveillance
including biometrics and border technologies, Tonya is a lecturer at the school of sociology, social policy, and social work at Queens University
Belfast, Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance, The Authors, JP)

One of the key ironies is that in monitoring and documenting protest actions video
activists may inadvertently assemble a database that incriminates those it is intended to
protect. Andrew Lowenthal, a video activist at numerous protest events, suggests 'the downside is that, yeah, you do the surveillance work of
the police, and you can help them do dossiers, or background or convict people' (Lowenthal interview). Another videographer noted,
'sometimes...your footage might be counter-productive, so you might actually catch somebody committing an offence so that material could be
used against your aims' (Puckett interview). There

is consequently the danger of footage being subpoenaed, or

even police raids, as occurred in 2001 at one community television station, Channel 31, which was raided by police searching for footage
of protests outside a Nam store in Melbourne (Davi interview). Even footage not directly incriminating can prove
ambiguous and counterproductive. For instance, following the protests at the Beverley Uranium mine, footage was subpoenaed
in court of 'a greenie meeting where the greenies are saying...` we're outnumbering the cops. Let's go anyway". The cops one of their arguments is
"we didn't use excessive force, we were outnumbered and we had to do this" so that video comes to support their argument' (Davi interview).
Some community groups have offered specific training in video activism that includes advice to avoid filming protestors performing illegal
activities (Davi interview). Nevertheless, just as police

may become visible under public CCTV systems (Goold 2004,

178-186), so

too might video activists become subjects of their own surveillance. Potentially
empowering images might also be reinterpreted in different contexts, co-opted into official
archives where their meaning is perversely inverted.

Counter surveillance fails the state will inevitably find new counterneutralization tactics resulting in a surveillance gridlock that fails to remedy
violence

Wilson and Serisier 10 (Dean is associate professor at Plymouth University and has published widely on surveillance
including biometrics and border technologies, Tonya is a lecturer at the school of sociology, social policy, and social work at Queens University
Belfast, Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance, The Authors, JP)
Hardt and Negri (2004) have suggested that innovative

tactics of resistance spur state agents to implement new

modes of control to neutralize challenges to state power. This is evident in the ironic situation of video
activists, whose efforts to secure safety through imaging renders them exceptionally visible to
police. The monitoring of police in turn kindles counter-neutralization tactics, in particular 'strategic
incapacitation' (Gffiham & Noakes 2007) that aims to neutralize visual monitoring either through direct
physical force or through spatial strategies of containment. Getting 'beaten up' was one of the foremost hazards of
video activism, and those interviewed reported that individuals armed with video and digital cameras were
commonly targeted by police at protest actions. One activist suggested 'police do target people like that at protests, I've
seen it. People with megaphones, people with cameras they get taken down pretty quickly' (Jacobs interview), while another recollected that
'quite a few people have ended up with a black eye and a bruised head' (Morris interview).
Yes we saw this during APEC in particular, it wasn't again just not Copwatchers but members of the commercial media, there was that infamous
video Paula Bronstein for example who was thrown to the ground during APEC, but again other members of the commercial media who either
had police officers block their filming, or told to turn around and not to film, several of us were threatened with arrest, there was one undercover
police officer who tried to snatch a camera from my hand, and so it definitely brings attention to yourself yeah (Mills interview).
Spatial strategies of isolation and containment are an additional counter-neutralization move engaged by police. Fernandez, drawing upon
Foucault's notion of disciplinary diagrams, argues that police deploy two disciplinary diagrams: the leprosy model and the plague model (2009,
170). In the plague model, space is divided into a grid and subjected to surveillance and regular inspection. In

the leprosy model,

lepers are expelled from communal space so that sickness is excluded (Elden 2003, 242). Video
activists are clearly perceived as lepers, and are subject to processes of containment and ejection
from spaces of protest. Moths identifies a definite strategy of 'make sure you've identified who the camera people in the protest group
are, sideline them, don't give them any good footage and don't give them anything that will turn up in court' (Moths interview). While another
video activist suggested 'some police will act against you for being the teller of the truth so you can get targeted, camera can get trashed and your
tapes ripped out or personally removed from a protest because you are documenting it' (Jacobs interview).

Becoming a target of police attention also meshes with a wider range of police counter-moves at
protests that seek to neutralize the impact of counter-surveillance. In many aspects, the neutralization techniques
mobilized against counter-surveillance initiatives mirror the moves outlined by Marx (2003). The most common move, discussed above, is to

For police in protest situations this involves

simply mobilizing the significant asymmetry power to neutralize monitoring either through
physical force, the confiscation of equipment or both. Several participants discussed having their
cameras and film confiscated and then damaged or reported difficulty in reobtaining the
equipment. Isabelle Brown, a frequent videographer of protests, described her experience of equipment confiscation in the following way:
engage a 'breaking move' that renders counter-surveillance inoperable.

I've had all my tapes taken and not given back. I've had one camera smashed beyond repair, I'm still seeking compensation. I had my computer
and video camera taken in house raids and my hard drives. It took me a year of calling them every second day for a year to get my gear back, plus
when I got my computer back it was broken (Brown interview).
Such counter-neturalization moves stimulate innovative tactics on the part of video activists that utilize space and evasion to elude agents of
control. The Sydney Copwatch website contains advice for video activists on how to best avoid arrest and confrontation while undertaking video
monitoring, advising video activists to only take photos when there are others present, or others with cameras who could film any potential
assault, and during protests to remain in the middle of a group. It also cautions video activists that they may be assaulted at the conclusion of a
protest, and should consider handing footage on to someone else so as to avoid it being destroyed by police3. These self-protective tactics were
frequently discussed by participants, particularly in the context of forest blockades where police violence can occur unmonitored by the presence
of commercial media.
It's mostly direct, the threat that the person will be roughed up, that their equipment will be destroyed and so obviously you develop protocols
around that, where you might have one person coming and film for a while, they leave, they put the footage somewhere safe, another person

comes, so in effect, the football analogy, you have one person on the field at a time. (Cam Walkei. interview).
These tactics are therefore a form of rotation (Marx 2003) to avoid surveillance, but with the added twist that such an avoidance move is

police also continue to participate in such a cat and

mouse game, and another frequently engaged tactic in protest situations has been the 'masking
move' whereby police remove identification badges in order to remain anonymous. Dale Mills, founder
calculated to facilitate the continuation of monitoring. Nevertheless,

of Sydney Copwatch, suggests that police generally react negatively to videoing and filming at protests as 'they don't want individual
accountability, I think that's why they don't wear their badges' (Mills interview).
The constant interplay of move and counter-move between police and video activists activates ascending spirals of surveillance and countersurveillance, what Marx has termed a 'surveillance arms race' (2007b, 299). Thus while the safety of protestors and the witnessing and
documenting of misconduct remain powerful drivers of video activism, an increasingly frequent rationale of video activism is to counter the
escalating visual surveillance of protest events undertaken by police. One video activist remarked: I think it is [video] important as well to
counter the incredible levels of surveillance that police put on protests. They have really sophisticated surveillance on protests, like camera
positioned in key strategic areas and telephoto lenses with small digital cameras right on hot spots. So we need to have our cameras there as well
because you see in cases which have happened in the past evidence the police collect, somehow all of the footage of events which incriminate the
police go missing while all the evidence that might incriminate protestors of certain things comes to light (McEwan interview).
This transformation also appears to accompany a diminishing of the power of the image in relation to protests. As one video activist with
fifteen years experience videoing protests remarked 'at one point it was very powerful to have even just a portable camera there, that was the new
thing...eventually they realised it was better to just have their own cameras there, so I gradually saw the collaboration of more and more police
cameras' (Jacobs interview). Situations where police are armed with cameras facing protestors armed with cameras can reach heights of absurdity,
as the same videographer suggested 'so you video them videoing you and it just gets sillier and sillier. We know you're looking at us and it's that

Such counter moves on the

part of police potentially lead to a Kafkaesque situation where 'counter counter-surveillance'
promotes a spiral of surveillance enmeshed within layers of neutralization. The surveillance
spiral ends in a cancelling out, a form of surveillance gridlock, where the act of monitoring has
eclipsed both action and control.
sort of projection of power through the process of surveillance and sort of static' (Jacobs interview).

AT: Unflinching Paradigmatic Analysis

Absolute pessimism results in hopelessness and fatalism, optimism is a better
strategy of resistance.
hooks 96 (bell, Killing Rage: Ending Racism,1996, Google Books, 269-272)
black Americans are succumbing to and internalizing the racist assumption
that there can be no meaningful bonds of intimacy between blacks and whites. It is fascinating to explore why it is that
269More than ever before in our history,

black people trapped in the worst situation of racial oppres sionenslavementhad the foresight to see that it would be disempowering for them to lose sight of the capacity of white people to
transform themselves and divest of white supremacy, even as many black folks today who in no way suffer such extreme racist oppression and exploitation are convinced that white people will

black folks, like their white counterparts, have passively accepted the
internalization of white supremacist assumptions. Organized white supremacists have always taught
that there can never be trust and intimacy between the superior white race and the inferior black
race. When black people internalize these sentiments, no resistance to
white supremacy is taking place; rather we become complicit in spreading
racist notions . It does not matter that so many black people feel white people will never repudiate racism because of being daily assaulted by white denial and refusal of
not repudiate racism. Con temporary

accountability. We must not allow the actions of white folks who blindly endorse racism to determine the direction of our resistance. Like our white allies in struggle we must consistently keep

Of course many white

people are comfortable with a rhetoric of race that suggests racism cannot be changed , that all white people
are inherently racist simply because they are born and raised in this society. Such misguided thinking socializes white people both
to remain ignorant of the way in which white supremacist attitudes are learned and to assume a posture of learned helplessness as though they have no
the faith, by always sharing the truth that 270white people can be anti-racist, that racism is not some immutable character flaw.

agencyno capacity to resist this thinking. Luckily we have many autobiographies by white folks committed to anti-racist struggle that provide documentary
testimony that many of these individuals repudiated racism when they were children. Far from passively accepting It as inherent, they instinctively felt it was wrong.
Many of them witnessed bizarre acts of white racist aggression towards black folks in everyday life and responded to the injustice of the situation. Sadly, in our times
so many white folks are easily convinced by racist whites and bLack folks who have internalized racism that they can never be really free of racism.These feelings
aiso then obsc]re the reality of white privi lege. As long as white folks are taught to accept racism as natura] then they do not have to see themselves as con sciously
creating a racist society by their actions, by their political choices. This means as well that they do not have to face the way in which acting in a racist manner ensures
the maintenance of white privilege. Indeed, denying their agency allows them to believe white privilege does not exist even as they daily exercise it. If the young
white woman who had been raped had chosen to hold all black males account able for what happened, she would have been exercising white privilege and reinforcing
the structure of racist thought which teaches that all black people are alike. Unfortunately, 271so many white people are eager to believe racism cannot be changed
because internalizing that assumption downplays the issue of accountability. No responsibility need be taken for not changing something fit is perceived as
immutable. To accept racism as a system of domination that can be changed would demand that everyone who sees him- or herself as embracing a vision of radai
social equality would be required to assert anti-racist habits of being. We know from histories both present and past that white people (and everyone else) who commit

Whites, people of
color, and black folks are reluctant to commit themselves fully and deeply to an anti-racist struggle that is
ongoing because there is such a pervasive feeling of hopelessnessa conviction that
nothing will ever change . How any of us can continue to hold those
feelings when we study the history of racism in this society and see how
much has changed makes no logical sense. Clearly we have not gone far enough. In the
late sixties, Martin Luther King posed the question Where do we go from here. To live in anti-racist society we must collectively renew
our commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice and equality . Pursuing that vision we create
a culture where beloved community flourishes and is sustained. Those of us who know the joy of being with folks from all
themselves to living in anti-racist ways need to make sacrifices, to courageously endure the uncomfortable to challenge and change.

walks of life, all races, who are fundamentalls anti-racist in their habits of being. need to give public testimony. Ve need to share not only what we have experienced
but the conditions of change that make such an experience possible. The interracial circle of love that I know can happen because each individual present in it has
made his or her own commitment to living an anti- racist life and to furthering the struggle to end white supremacy 272 will become a reality for everyone only if
those of us who have created these communities share how they emerge in our lives and the strategies we use to sustain them. Our devout commitment to building
diverse communities is cen tral. These commitments to anti-racist living are just one expression of who we are and what we share with one an other but they form the

all beloved communities we affirm our differences. It is this generous spirit of affirmation that
a beloved
community solidarity and trust are grounded in profound commitment to a shared vision. Those of us who
foundation of that sharing. Like

gives us the courage to challenge one another, to work through misunderstandings, especially those that have to do with race and racism. In

are always anti-racist long for a world in which evezyone can form a beloved community where borders can be crossed and cultural hybridity celebrated. Anyone can
begin to make such a community by truly seeking to live in an anti-racist world. If

that longing guides our vision and our actions,

the new culture will be born and anti-racist communities of resis tance will emerge everywhere.
That is where we must go from here.

Totalizing Alts/Utopianism Bad

The alternative fails- their totalizing claims about the state prevent short-term
solutions that are key to long-term success
Smucker 14 (John Smucker, The danger of fetishizing revolution. July 1, 2014.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/danger-fetishizing-revolution/. KLB)
If we project a totalizing imaginary-future moment onto our own situation,
we may also fixate on present-day moments that seem to carry the essence of our ideas about such an imagined revolution. We may
elevate ritualistic signiers of revolutionary zeal above winning real-world
victories and above the patient construction of social bases of collective
power that could win bigger, more systemic we might even say
revolutionary changes. Revolution as apocalypse or as a totalizing
moment is highly related to utopianism . The practical implications of the two concepts are equivalent. With
both orientations a post-revolutionary, utopian vision of the future can become the distorted lens through which
to view the messy present. Nothing in present society, including stepping-stone victories, can
measure up to utopian standards. It is as if the revolutionary or utopian dreamer is afraid of contaminating the purity of his or
her vision with the grit of real life. In reality, the seeds of societys redemption the fits and starts of social justice struggles are always
manifest in the fabric of what already exists in society. The job of effective change agents is to identify and encourage

these fits and starts; to awaken and empower the better angels that we find in our histories and
our contemporary cultures; to claim and contest both history and culture, rather than try to build
from scratch in the ashes of an imaginary-future apocalypse. This is not at all to suggest that we give up on big
structural changes even including ultimately ending capitalism. To the extent that revolutionary means big structural changes I am all for
being revolutionary. The problem here is not the radicalness of our end goal; the problem is all-or-nothing

apocalyptic thinking about political change in the meantime. If the structures of society were to collapse tomorrow,
why would society reconstruct itself in a way that substantially differs from its present structure? A revolutionary social justice movement will
not magically ascend in the wake of catastrophe. A movement gains strength by organizing over time, by showing

more and more people that it can succeed. By winning small victories, it begins to overcome
popular resignation, awakening hope in people that it is possible to fight for something and win
that collective action gets the goods. If a movement is incapable of winning even small things,
why should anyone believe it capable of winning a revolution of accelerating from zero to sixty
in a mere moment? Most people are not going to join our movement because they want to ride with us into the apocalypse; they join
when they have enough reason to believe that the movement can act effectively as a vehicle to bring about changes that matter to them. Its on us
to show that this is indeed possible.

Other Things

State Good
The alts rejection of the states makes it seem stronger than it actually is. This
dooms the alt to reproduce the hierarchal structures we critique.
Guattari and Rolnik, schitzoanalysts, revolutionaries, 1986 [Felix and Suely, Molecular
Revolution in Brazil, p. 120-121]
Comment: It's good that you mentioned those homosexuals who worked within the system as lawyers and succeeded in shaking it up. Here,
everyone looks down on the institutional part. Guattari: That's silly. Comment: They think that dealing with the

institutional side is reformism, that it doesn't change anything. As far as they're concerned, the institutions should be
ignored because only one kind of thing is worthwhile, anarchismwhich I question deeply. I think it's very naive, as you yourself say,
to ignore the state on the basis that "it's useless," or "it oppresses us," and therefore to leave it
aside and try to do something totally from outside, as though it might be possible for us to destroy it
like that. Suely Rolnik: This malaise in relation to institutions is nothing new; on the contrary, the feeling is particularly
strong in our generation which, since the 1960s, has taken institutions as one of its main targets . But
it's true that the malaise has been especially pronounced in Brazil over the last few years, and in my view this must have to do with an absolutely
objective (and obvious) fact, which is the hardness of the dictatorship to which we were subjected for so long. The rigidity of that regime is
embodied in all the country's institutions, in one way or another; in fact, that constituted an important factor for the permanence of the
dictatorship in power over so many years. But I think that this antiinstitutional malaise, whatever its cause,

doesn't end there: the feeling that the institutions are contaminated territories, and the conclusion
that nothing should be invested in them, is often the expression of a defensive role. This kind of
sensation is, in my view, the flip side of the fascination with the institution that characterizes the
"bureaucratic libido." These two attitudes really satisfy the same need, which is to use the prevailing forms, the instituted, as the sole,
exclusive parameter in the organization of oneself and of relations with the other, and thus avoid succumbing to the danger of collapse that might
be brought about by any kind of change. Those are two styles of symbiosis with the institution: either "gluey"

adhesion and identification (those who adopt this style base their identity on the "instituted"), or else repulsion and
counteridentification (those who adopt this style base their identity on negation of the "instituted," as if there
were something "outside" the institutions, a supposed "alternative" space to this world). Seen in this
light, both "alternativism" and "bureaucratism" restrict themselves to approaching the world from
the viewpoint of its forms and representations, from a molar viewpoint; they protect themselves
against accessing the molecular plane, where new sensations are being produced and composed and
ultimately force the creation of new forms of reality ,. They both reflect a blockage of instituting power, an impossibility of
surrender to the processes of singularization, a need for conservation of the prevailing forms, a difficulty in gaining access to the molecular plane,
where the new is engendered. It's more difficult, to perceive this in the case of "alternativism," because it

involves the hallucination of a supposedly parallel world that emanates the illusion of unfettered
autonomy and freedom of creation; and just when we think we've got away from "squareness" we risk succumbing to it again, in
a more disguised form. In this respect, I agree with you: the institutions aren't going to be changed by pretending that they don't exist.
Nonetheless, it's necessary to add two reserves. In the first place, it's obvious that not every social experimentation

qualified by the name of "alternative" is marked by this defensive hallucination of a parallel world .
And secondly, x it's self-evident that in order to bear the harshness of an authoritarian regime there is a tendency to make believe that itdoesn't
exist, so as not to have to enter into contact with sensations of frustration and powerlessness that go beyond the limit of tolerability (indeed, this is
a general reaction before any traumatic experience). And in order to survive, people try in so far as possible to create other territories of life,
which are often clandestine.

Institutions are inevitable- strategies that address institutions are preferable.

Butler, 03 (**Paul Butler, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law School,
researches and teaches in criminal and race relations law and critical theory, former Research
Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, George Washington
University Law School, former federal prosecutor, U.S. Department of Justice, J.D. Harvard Law
School, B.A. Yale University, By Any Means Necessary: Using Violence and Subversion to
Change Unjust Law, 50 UCLA L. Rev. 721, 2003,
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Lorenz/DeathPenalty/Butler.doc)
must be acknowledged that, if the object of violence is to take
control of the government, no attempted American revolution has ever

5. The Utility of Violence It

been successful . The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, with the mightiest
military force. It is reasonable to expect that any minority group that sought
to overthrow it would be summarily crushed . Our race rebels, however, have objectives more modest than a
wholesale overthrow of the government. The end they seek is "only" the abolition of certain discriminatory laws. If H. Rap Brown's famous description of violence
[*754] as "as American as apple pie" n146 is correct, the rebels might be speaking a language that lawmakers understand. Some historians have attributed President
Richard Nixon's progressive urban policies, and his embrace of affirmative action, to his fear of racial violence, based on the urban riots of the late 1960s. n147 More
recently, in Cincinnati, African Americans successfully used civil disturbances to focus attention on their concerns. n148 Professor Alan Dershowitz predicts that
"terrorism will persist because it often works, and success breeds repetition." n149 To know whether terrorism is successful, one must know what its goals are. Neither
terrorists nor scholars speak with one voice on this issue. Professor

Loren E. Lamasky has written about two possible goals

of terrorism: First, one can hypothesize that terrorists typically act with the intention of bringing
about those political ends to which they declare allegiance; they are, however, in the grip of
mistaken beliefs about political causation ... . Second, one can maintain that terrorists generally aim
at expressing support for political outcomes without, however, intending thereby to bring about
those outcomes. It is the second of these hypotheses that seems better to fit the data . n150 [*755]
Professor Lamasky's second thesis seems applicable to race rebels. It would be impractical to think
that a legislature or court would act in favor of the rebels in response to a violent attack. To the extent that
their violence was part of a larger campaign that included the old ways of lobbying and litigation, perhaps the violence would encourage the power brokers to act more
quickly. n151 We would have to surmise, because no lawmaker is likely to admit that he was motivated by the threat of violence to reach a certain result.

Violence is certainly, for the cause of the race rebels, a high-risk undertaking . Even if they
have the limited goal of supporting more traditional methods, the specter of a powerful political
backlash seems likely. Does the fact that race rebels might fail make their cause
less morally justiable? If, by contrast, the crit jurors are likely to succeed, is their cause more morally justifiable? In the next part I
consider a construct of morality, based upon international human rights law, that suggests answers to these difficult questions. IV. Moral Limitations on Changing
Unjust Law A. Heroic Black Outlaws Imagine that some racial critics are considering either subversion or violence to accomplish abolition of the death penalty and
the end of the sentencing disparities in cocaine offenses. Should their exclusive concerns be utilitarian, or does morality matter? If morality does matter, how can it be
determined? It seems clear that the most formal expression of American social morality - the criminal law - is an insufficient guide, at least for minorities. After all,
some of the most revered figures in African American history were outlaws, in the service of their vision of racial justice. Aboard the Amistad, Cinque and other
Africans killed their kidnappers. n152 Harriet Tubman [*756] helped slaves escape. n153 Rosa Parks violated the peace ordinances of Montgomery, Alabama. n154
Martin Luther King, Jr. led marches without legal permits. n155 Muhammad Ali refused to be conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War. n156 Some critical race
theorists, the "racial realists," have urged minorities not to respect the values held by the majority, or its law. Racism, they argue, is deeply and inevitably embedded in
every aspect of American culture, including law. n157 Racial realists believe that minorities, cognizant of their subordinate status, should have limited expectations of
the law and of the majority. Racial realists would be suspicious of any shared precepts of morality between the majority and the minority. The tactics they recommend
for minorities are absolutely instrumentalist. n158 Racial realism would empower racial critics to break the law by committing perjury or sedition because the only
question realists ask about a law is whether it serves the interests of minorities. A criminal sanction has no independent moral force when it undermines minority
interests, as it does when it prevents lying to thwart the racist application of a law. [*757] The problem, though, with such an instrumentalist approach is similar to its
utility: Anything goes. n159 There are no moral limits. I think this concedes too much. All of the important, and successful, struggles for racial justice for African
Americans have been inspired by strong moral claims. These claims were an important element in garnering the political support that was necessary to convert
discriminatory laws. n160 So, what should an advocate for racist justice do, when instrumentalism provides the most diverse arsenal, but when morality also matters
(for its own sake, and for utilitarian reasons)? The next part recommends that, to choose her weapons, the advocate consult the doctrine of just war. This theory, a
construct from Judeo-Christian theology and international human rights law, allows governments to use extreme methods, but within moral limits. As I explain below,
the doctrine is undertheorized with regard to the use of force by nongovernmental actors. I recommend a construct of the doctrine for insurgents, generally, and our
crit jurors and race rebels, specifically. B. The Doctrine of "Just War" A moral theory exists to guide "citizens who must decide what is worth fighting for and how to
fight for it - whatever others may think." n161 It is the doctrine of "just war." Its "principle intention ... is to serve as a source for guidelines in making relative moral
decisions." n162 One reason that the doctrine may serve as a useful moral guide for race critics is that it is rooted in the same Judeo-Christian theology that inspired
earlier race reformers, including abolitionists and twentieth-century civil rights protestors. n163 [*758] Just war doctrine was the product of efforts by early Christians
to reconcile their religion with their perceived need to go to war. n164 St. Augustine's theory was that "once the cause was just, any means to achieve the end was
permissible." n165 This construct is identical to Malcolm X's formula of "any means necessary." The doctrine has evolved, however, so that, in addition to justifying
war, it limits the ways it can be waged. The morality of war is judged in two ways: first by the reasons for fighting (jus ad bellum) and then by how the war is fought
(jus in bello). The war is either just or unjust, and it is fought either justly or unjustly. n166 To determine whether the reasons for fighting the war are just, five criteria
are employed: (1) whether war is the last resort; (2) whether the cause is just; (3) whether war is waged with the right intention; (4) whether success is reasonably
likely; and (5) whether war is waged by a legitimate authority. For a war to be fought in a just manner, two conditions must be satisfied: The means must be
proportionate, and the targets must be military, and not civilian. Just war doctrine has been incorporated into international human rights law. n167 It provides a
framework for analysis of the permissible use of force in international conflicts, including the need for humanitarian intervention when citizens within a country are
being oppressed by their own government. The doctrine also serves as an analogy to evaluate conflicts outside of traditional warfare. Legal scholars have used the
doctrine to analyze the morality of such disparate subjects as the "war" on drugs, n168 the death penalty, n169 and military intervention designed to avert an
environmental disaster. n170 In this part I use the doctrine to evaluate the morally permissible range of tactics of racial critics in changing unjust criminal law. The two
principal issues are these: Is the racial critics' cause - reforming the death penalty and [*759] cocaine sentencing laws - just? Are their tactics - subversion and violence
- just? Each question must be answered in the affirmative before we can say that the crits' extremism is morally justifiable. First, however, we must confront the
central problem of applying just war doctrine to the racial critics: They are not soldiers in the traditional sense; indeed, the war they would wage is against their own
country. In the next part I recommend an application of just war doctrine to nonmilitary actors. C. Just War and Insurgents In the United States, the most notorious
contemporary examples of insurgents are the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. To think of terrorists as moral
agents may be difficult for anyone affected by the events of that day. The problem, though, is that our moral analysis of terrorism now seems inconsistent. We play
favorites: We approve of anti-slavery rebels but not Palestinian suicide bombers. A coherent way of thinking about the morality of private actors who use violence to
achieve political objectives seems key to understanding, and perhaps preventing, that violence. It may be naive to think that terrorists are concerned about the morality
of their work, but it is morality - strong religious, spiritual, or political convictions - that inspires terrorism in the first place. Traditionally just war doctrine applies to
state and not private actors. This aspect of the doctrine seems undertheorized and likely to lead to anomalies. For example, if a state practices genocide against a
minority group of its citizens, some just war theorists would allow "humanitarian intervention" by foreign nations. n171 The minority group itself, however, would not
be permitted to use force on its own behalf, because it is not a state actor. This is a flaw in the doctrine, and in this part, I propose a corrective. n172 St. Thomas
Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher, "expanded the 'defensive' just-war theory between states to include defensive action within the state. He
allowed that, under some circumstances, action against the state was not sinful." n173 According to Aquinas, action against the state is not sinful where the

government is tyrannical and not directed at the common good; in this case, action against the state is not [*760] sedition unless it results in less common good than
existed under the tyrannical government. n174 As one scholar has noted, however, in this context "tyranny" is hard to define. n175 Almost none of the legal
scholarship on just war doctrine explores in detail the question of how the doctrine applies to insurgents. Michael Walzer, the leading scholarly expert on the doctrine,
notes that "guerilla fighters" can occasionally be justified in using force, but with certain limits - for example, if they kill civilians, "they are able to make distinctions:
they aim at well-known officials, notorious collaborators, and so on." n176 Walzer also notes that "to be eligible for the war rights of soldiers, guerrilla fighters must
wear 'a fixed distinctive sign visible at a distance' and must 'carry their arms openly.'" n177 Professor Walzer's description of insurgents focuses more on the way they
should fight than on how they should determine the justice of their cause. When is a state so oppressive that a minority of its citizens is entitled to go to war against it?
If we accept Aquinas's thesis that it is morally justifiable to use violence to remove a tyrannical government, we must face the difficulty of defining tyranny. In Part
III, we looked to American criminal law doctrine for instruction on justifications of private violence. It permits an individual actor to use violence in some situations,
including to defend herself or others from unlawful force. Private violence is also sometimes allowed to protect property or to prevent crimes. If we apply this view of
morality to insurgents, they would be justified in acting whenever the state threatens the lives of its citizens on the basis of some impermissible criterion, including
race, gender, or religion. The concept of humanitarian intervention offers a more expansive approach to the issue of insurgents and just war, at least by analogy.
Humanitarian intervention is "the threat or use of force by a state, group of states, or international organization primarily for the purpose of protecting the nationals of
the target state from widespread deprivations of internationally recognized human rights." n178 Its supporters emphasize that such intervention is justified in limited
contexts - for example, when a state threatens its own citizens with genocide or deprivations of basic human rights. n179 [*761] By its very terms, the doctrine
contemplates intervention only by state actors. If applied to insurgents, however, the standard for intervention could remain the same. In other words, insurgents would
be permitted to use force to combat their "deprivation[] of internationally recognized human rights." The other conditions of just war would remain, including that the
insurgents are legitimate representatives of the minority group and that they have a reasonable chance of success. n180 Just war doctrine, applied to insurgents, would
limit violence more than it would authorize it. Jus in bello requires that there be no injury to civilians. If the usual definitions of "terrorism" and "civilians" are
invoked, this requirement seems to rule out virtually all terrorism, for terrorism is commonly thought of as politically motivated violence against civilians.

Sometimes terrorists argue that, in their particular conflict, there are no "noncombatants." An
example of this argument is the claim that even nonmilitary citizens of Israel are permissible
targets for Palestinian protestors because all Israelis benefit from and help maintain the
subordination of Palestinians. n181 The problem with this argument is the same as the problem with
most terrorism: It is indiscriminate . It grants insufficient weight to the value of human life
when it does not acknowledge that there are degrees of culpability . Surely, for example,
children are not as responsible as adults, and surely a poor laborer is not as responsible as a high
government official. On the other hand, it is possible to defend a construct of "combatants," that is,
permissible targets of violence, that includes nonmilitary actors. The objective of just war is to
change the regime, or the way that it operates. To attack the foot soldiers, but to ignore the authorities
responsible for creating and implementing the oppressive policies, seems inefficient . The suggestion that
insurgents should distinguish among civilians and limit their targets to "well-known officials, notorious collaborators, and so on," seems reasonable. n182 Thus, just
war applied to insurgents would not eliminate the "combatant" restriction but would broaden the concept, in the manner described by Professor Walzer. "Combatant"
could be defined as any person directly responsible for creating, administering, or defending the human rights violations, including genocide or race discrimination,
that are the subject of the conflict. As discussed below, in

the context of the "war" against race-based capital punishment,

combatants would include those directly responsible for [*762] creating and implementing it. These
people are culpable in a way that the ordinary civilian is not. Even then, violence against them is
not necessarily moral : The other conditions of just war must also be satisfied. I want to emphasize the purpose of applying just war doctrine to
insurgents, because I understand that any moral construct that tolerates political violence by nongovernmental entities is controversial. Just war doctrine accepts that
violence - killing people - can be morally justified, if certain conditions are satisfied. One of the necessary conditions is that the targets must be military. This

The
heroic status that many now accord those who led slave revolts is evidence of that view of morality.
Yet definitions of combatants proffered by terrorists are overly broad when they include
those who are not directly responsible for the oppression of others (even
if they benet from that oppression) . This view of combatants discounts the sanctity of
human life that must underlie any construct of morality (even if that construct allows for
the taking of life in certain cases). The proposed application of just war doctrine to "terrorists" assumes that they, like nation-states, are open to
condition seems inconsistent with other common constructs of morality, including those found in criminal and international law, and in popular culture.

persuasion about their methods. Their embrace of violence does not mean they have abandoned their claim to morality. If just war doctrine is to remain relevant in the
twenty-first century, it should be applied to every actor - not just governments - that uses violence to accomplish political objectives. D. The Death Penalty and
Cocaine Laws: Just Cause? The first component of just war analysis - jus ad bellum - requires analysis of whether there is a moral reason for war. In this part I analyze
whether, under the five criteria of jus ad bellum, the racial critic's causes - ending discriminatory administration of the death penalty and cocaine laws - justify extreme
methods. 1. Last Resort The first requirement is that extreme tactics be the last resort. In the case of changing the death penalty and cocaine laws, the critical tactics
come "last" in the sense that the old ways of changing the law have been tried and they have not (yet) worked. How much time should one give them, especially when
the cost of that time is race-based incarceration and death? A requirement that "legal" methods be invoked first seems reasonable, but morality cannot require infinite
patience (otherwise no war would ever be just, because there might always be a possibility that nonlethal [*763] means would achieve the same objective). In the
cases of both the death penalty and the cocaine sentencing disparity, both the courts and the legislatures have been petitioned for relief, and those bodies of
government have failed to grant it. The critical tactics, then, are ones of last resort. 2. Just Cause The next factor requires consideration of the war's goal. What is the
goal of the crits? The answer is simple, for unlike the wars on drugs or terrorism, this war has clear and attainable goals. The crit tactics will be halted - peace will be
declared - when the discriminatory provisions in the complained-of laws are corrected, by equalizing the punishment for powder and crack cocaine offenses and by
abolishing the death penalty (based on the presumption that it cannot be made nondiscriminatory). The racial critics act not out of personal aggrandizement, or
anarchist sympathies, but rather from the good faith intention to repair the criminal justice system. If, in a democracy, dissent is an act of faith, the racial critics are
true patriots. There is no reason to believe that their extremist tactics would persist when their complained-of racial inequities are repaired. Although the analogy is not
perfect, the crit tactics are more like self-defense than acts of aggression. 3. Right Intention A just war can be fought only to redress a substantial injury. This should be
an easy requirement for the race rebels to meet. The whole point of their battle is redress of discrimination. They are not waging "war" with grandiose goals of
acquisition; they merely want African Americans to be free of certain official kinds of oppression from the government. "Self-defense" is the paradigmatic example of
an injury that war can morally redress. Civil rights advocates, both moderate and radical, have often invoked this concept as a metaphor to justify the use of radical

tactics in the struggle for racial justice. Their argument is that discrimination is a malign evil that is analogous to an attack by the discriminator. Just war doctrine
allows a proportionate response. 4. Reasonable Success The next factor requires consideration of whether there is a realistic chance of success for the crit jurors and
the race rebels. How optimistic should advocates for racial justice be about achieving their goals? Whether optimism for racial justice - no matter what the tactics - is
justified is an issue that has perplexed students of race in America for centuries. [*764] Martin Luther King, Jr. was optimistic, but only in the long run, and mainly,
apparently, for spiritual reasons. "The arm of the moral universe is long," he explained, "but it bends towards justice." n183 Derrick Bell, on the other hand, believes
that racism is a permanent affliction of life in the United States, and that the law therefore is of limited efficacy in improving the lives of minorities. n184 Civil rights
advocates have achieved the end of some kinds of de jure discrimination, most notably the Jim Crow laws that required "separate but equal" public accommodations
for whites and Negroes. Professor Kimberle Crenshaw has observed that African Americans have successfully used the law "to their benefit against symbolic
oppression through formal inequality and, to some extent, against material deprivation." n185 Crenshaw predicts, however, that civil rights discourse "will do little to
alter the hierarchical relationship between Blacks and whites." n186 In this view, the law is more likely to require the removal of "White Only" signs than, say, to
redistribute wealth. The discrimination that our racial critics are concerned about, however, is more akin to symbolic than material subordination. They are not so
ambitious as to seek the end of racism in the United States. Rather the crits seek the conversion of two laws that they perceive as discriminatory. The main legal hurdle
the racial critics face is that their measure of discrimination is effects-based, as opposed to the intent-based standard endorsed by current Supreme Court jurisprudence.
n187 Can the racial critics reform the law at least to the extent of eliminating the current death penalty and cocaine sentencing laws? There is, the evidence suggests, a
reasonable chance that the answer is "yes." An effects-based concept of discrimination is already contained in international law. n188 Thus, civil rights advocates have
argued that the United States is in violation of international human rights law because of the death penalty and drug sentencing disparities. n189 Racial critics have
had limited success in marketing an effects-based construct of discrimination even to [*765] conservatives. President George W. Bush has described the cocaine
sentencing disparity as "discrimination." n190 Illinois's former governor, a Republican, commuted the death sentence of every inmate on the state's death row, in part
because of concerns about race discrimination in these cases. n191 These advances have not translated into systemic legal reform. They evidence, however, that the
racial critics' goals, including their advocacy of a progressive construct of discrimination, are not so radical as to be unattainable, or even unlikely. n192 5. Legitimate
Authority The final issue is whether crit jurors and race rebels are "legitimate authorities." The formal answer is "no." As usually interpreted, just war doctrine limits
fighting to state actors, not insurgents. In Part IV.C, supra, I critiqued this aspect of the doctrine as undertheorized. If just war doctrine is to apply to insurgent soldiers,
one of the first tasks is to define what "legitimate" means in this context. At minimum, there should be a consensus, among members of the affected group, that the
law is unjust. Such a consensus seems to exist among African Americans with regard to racial bias in the death penalty and the crack laws. Regarding the latter, every
major civil rights organization that has spoken on the disparity opposes it; the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the "expert" on federal punishment issues, has also
advised against it. n193 While public opinion polls indicate significant support for capital punishment among African Americans, it is doubtful that they are in favor of
its discriminatory administration; the Racial Justice Act, for example, was supported by every member of the Congressional Black Caucus. n194 In summary, our
racial critics probably have selected a just cause. n195 This is hardly a surprise, for few Americans would now suggest that race discrimination is just (the issue of
how "discrimination" is defined is obviously more controversial, including in the cases of the death penalty and crack sentencing laws). The more difficult
determination is whether the [*766] tactics employed by the racial critics are just. The next part examines that issue. E. The Rules of Engagement The second
component of just war doctrine - jus in bello - has two requirements: (1) proportionality and (2) noncombatant immunity. 1. Proportionality The first requirement is
that the violence used in the war be proportionate to the injury suffered. Proportionality means that "even if the intended object of an attack is legitimate, the attack
still may be unjust if its overall costs outweigh the benefits achieved by the attack." n196 Will radical tactics do more harm than good? The "good" each tactic seeks to
achieve is the end of the discriminatory cocaine and death penalty laws. Are subversion and violence permissible, if they will lead to the abolition of race
discrimination in the death penalty and cocaine sentencing laws? 2. The Costs and Benefits of Subversion The crit jurors risk two harms in lying to get on juries: (1)
punishment for breaking the law and (2) white backlash. The harm of breaking the law, in turn, has both a private and a public component. The private harm is that the
crit jurors may be punished (indeed, they may even invite punishment, as do other practitioners of civil disobedience). Because no one would be forced to be a crit
juror, anyone who engaged in this form of protest must have decided that for her the benefit of the protest is worth the risk of punishment. The public harm of the
critical jurors is that their willful violations of the law may breed disrespect for it. I do not think that this harm outweighs the good, because it is too vague (most
theories of criminal law assume, for example, that people obey it not out of respect, but to avoid punishment). Moreover, crit jurors could take care to emphasize the
justice of their cause, and their willingness to suffer punishment for violating the law. n197 They would demonstrate that they reject only a part of the law, not the rule
of law wholesale. This may lessen the net effect of public disapproval [*767] for breaking specific laws (one does not hear credible arguments, for example, that the
tactics employed by civil rights protestors of the 1950s and 1960s encouraged disrespect for the law). The harm of white backlash is much less speculative; indeed, it
is likely that crit jurors would provoke some kind of negative reaction. The problem of white backlash is a persistent one in African American history. n198 There is
backlash to virtually every minority demand for rights. In this context, the backlash could range from prosecutors attempting to exclude African Americans from
juries, to other actors in the trial process, including witnesses and judges, also using subversion to achieve outcomes in criminal trials that they desire. The prospect of
crit jurors probably would encourage prosecutors to strike African Americans from jury pools (the prosecutors would use blackness as a proxy for being a crit juror,
although nonblacks could be crit jurors as well). There is, however, considerable evidence that many prosecutors already attempt to remove blacks from juries. n199 It
is impossible to know whether crit jurors would encourage more of other kinds of false testimony than already exists in criminal trials. While the harm of backlash is
real, Professor Randall Kennedy has noted that "given the apparent inevitability of white resistance and the uncertain efficacy of containment, proponents of racial
justice should be wary of allowing fear of white backlash to limit the range of reforms pursued." n200 3. The Costs and Benefits of Violence Whether

violence is a proportionate response to discrimination depends on the kind of discrimination . Just war
doctrine, as codified in international human rights law, allows the use of violence to end or to deter greater violence. The use of military force to prevent the carnage in
the Nazi concentration camps is a prototypical example of a just war. According to the Baldus study, the state of Georgia kills some of its citizens on the basis of their
race. Is violence an appropriate response to this race-based discrimination if the violence would help end the discrimination? Under

cost-benefit
analysis, the answer might be "yes," if the killing takes the same or fewer lives than it saves. As a
practical matter, this requirement would rule out indiscriminate terrorist attacks by
race rebels, because they could not limit their destruction . If the race rebels
can carefully calibrate [*768] their violence in such a way that it did not exceed the number of racebased executions, and if the violence reasonably could facilitate the end of capital punishment, then
the race rebels' violence would be moral. What about violence to end the disparate punishment for cocaine offenses? It cannot be
persuasively argued that the taking of life, even the lives of those responsible for the discriminatory law, is proportionate to the injury. Race-based
incarceration is horrible, but it is not a horror that warrants the death
penalty for its perpetrators . Just war doctrine would not allow the use of violence to end the crack sentencing regime. In summary,
lying is a proportionate response to race discrimination. Violence can be either a proportionate or a
disproportionate response, depending on the discrimination. If the discrimination is "only" racebased incarceration, violence is disproportionate. If the discrimination is race-based killing, limited
violence is a proportionate response. 4. Noncombatants The second rule of engagement is that an attack cannot
intentionally target noncombatants. n201 Those waging war must try to distinguish between

combatants and noncombatants. Civilian deaths are justified only if they are the unavoidable consequence of destroying an offensive military
target, not a means to an end. Who are the combatants in the metaphorical war on discrimination? The people
who discriminate seems the obvious answer. This group could include legislators and law
enforcement officials. The criminal justice system writ large is a combatant in a different sense. To
the extent that extreme tactics are viewed as an attack on the legitimacy of the criminal justice
system, the system itself is an appropriate enemy . The tactic of lying to get on a jury may injure the system in some sense, but war is,
after all, hell. As long as it is only a combatant who is intentionally injured, the war may still be
considered just. Is it possible for race rebels to employ forms of violence that limit intended injuries to the "soldiers" on the other side? For this analysis, reconsider the hypothetical introduced earlier in this Article. Some racial critics "read" the Baldus study to mean that the government, through its use of capital
punishment, kills some criminals because they are black (these criminals are not killed because they committed crimes, because white criminals guilty of the same
crimes are not sentenced to death). Imagine that, in response, race rebels announce that for every two black people who are executed when a nonblack would not have
been executed, they will kill [*769] one responsible government actor, for example an executioner or a lawmaker who supports the death penalty, in the same state.
The race rebels will continue their campaign of violence until the death penalty is abolished in that state. Under the theory of just war explained in this Article, this crit
tactic is morally justified. The cause, the end of race-based killing by the government, is just. The violence is proportionate and directed exclusively at combatants. It
is an ugly prospect, but it is not as ugly as race-based killing by the state. F. Summary The crit jurors and the race rebels have selected just causes - ending the racebased punishment regimes inherent in the crack cocaine and death penalty laws. The radical tactics of the crit jurors - subversive jury service - is morally justified as
well. Violence

is an immoral response to discrimination if it harms those who are not directly

responsible. Violence is also outside the rules of engagement if its objective is to change the cocaine sentencing laws; it is a disproportionate
remedy. Violence directed against the people who implement race-based capital punishment is
justified under the just war construct, if the violence does not take more lives than it saves, and if it is
reasonably likely to help end discriminatory killing by the government . V. Radical Tactics Versus the "Politics of
Respectability" In Race, Crime, and the Law, n202 Professor Randall Kennedy advises African Americans who wish to reform the criminal justice system to practice
"the politics of respectability." n203 The basic tenet of this politics is that it is important for blacks to prove that they "are capable of meeting the established moral
standards of white middle-class Americans." n204 Kennedy notes that "for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be
accompanied at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the
derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment." n205 Race, Crime, and the Law recounts how the politics of respectability have been practiced by a
number of mainstream civil rights organizations, [*770] and credits the politics with the political successes of those organizations. A practitioner of the politics of
respectability would counsel a minority group against radical methods, based on the fear that these methods would harm the racial reputation of the group and
encourage white backlash. As a descriptive matter, this counsel is entirely accurate. Racial reputation exists, and African Americans, among others, have a bad one.
n206 White backlash exists, and minorities, especially blacks, have experienced its full brunt. The prescriptive part of Kennedy's scholarship - the proposal that
concern about their racial reputation and white backlash should constrain the political activities of minorities - is less persuasive. Do racial reputation and white
backlash matter enough that people of color should avoid radical tactics based on concern for how whites will react? The answer, based on African American history,
must be "no." The reason is that the reputation of blacks has seldom been based on reality, as opposed to stereotypes and racism. Because the actual conduct of
Negroes has only tangentially been related to their reputation, it is naive to think that different conduct could improve their reputation. Indeed, if racial reputation were
based on facts, African Americans, given their history and triumphs in the United States of America, would presumably have one of the best of any group. White
backlash, similarly, has shown little relationship to reason. It ignites in response to almost every effort by blacks to make progress, whether the progress be
desegregation of the public schools, or the quest for affirmative action in employment. In a review of Kennedy's book, I noted that "if African Americans adapted their
political and self-help strategies in order to avert white backlash, they would scarcely achieve any progress at all." n207 Likewise, in an earlier writing, Professor
Kennedy himself observed that "given the apparent inevitability of white resistance and the uncertain efficacy of containment, proponents of racial justice should be
wary of allowing fear of white backlash to limit the range of reforms pursued." n208 The radical tactics that this Article describes do not court the sympathy of the
white majority and are not likely to inspire it. They are designed to move the majority, but probably more through inspiring fear (for self and for country) than
sympathy. [*771] Conclusion The issue is not whether people will suffer and die. African Americans suffer and die now, because of race-based punishment. The
issues, then, are whether and how that discrimination should end, and whether it matters if others suffer and die, in the service of ending the discrimination. If
subversion and violence can alleviate "legal" race discrimination, are those tactics worth engaging, if the injury they cause is less than the injury they defeat? In this
Article I have considered two radical tactics that could help change discriminatory laws in the United States. My conclusion is that the

politics of
respectability should not limit the tactics that minorities choose in their quest for racial justice, but
morality should. Because morality matters, people of color, in seeking reform of the law, should not
deploy all of the weapons in their arsenal. Malcolm X's famous proposal of justice "by any means necessary" is immoral. Thus, under the
"just war" construct, people who believe that some criminals in the U nited States are executed on the basis of
their race should not attempt to overthrow the government. They would
almost certainly lose, and this makes their radical method immoral . They
should not commit random acts of terrorism, even if these acts might be
successful at persuading legislators to end the death penalty. The fact that innocent people
would be harmed means that this kind of indiscriminate violence is immoral . For the same
reasons, racial critics of the federal cocaine sentencing laws must not engage in rebellion against the government or commit terrorist acts that risk injury to innocent
civilians. Critics of the cocaine laws must observe the additional limitation that they may not use any tactic that would cause physical harm or death. Just war doctrine
allows the use of some radical tactics that minorities now do not commonly employ. In death penalty and crack cocaine cases, racial critics may lie to get on juries so
that they can thwart the discriminatory application of those laws. In death cases exclusively, just war doctrine would allow racial critics to use targeted violence
against officials who implement race-based capital punishment. Although any construct of morality that allows violence may strike some as odd, the objective of just
war doctrine is to identify those cases in which violence is permissible to accomplish an important end. n209 [*772] The application of just war doctrine to the
problem of race discrimination in the United States results in a construct of morality that is apt to trouble both moderates and extremists. Moderates will be concerned
about the radical tactics that the just war doctrine allows, and extremists

will protest the restraints imposed on "any means

necessary." Moderates will claim that I am exaggerating the injury to people of color because it is black criminals, and not law-abiding African Americans, who
are benefited most directly by the critical tactics I endorse. To extremists, on the other hand, I may seem a victim of white hegemony

because I accept that some blacks are punished and killed for racial reasons, but even so I impose
limits on what can be done to remedy this discrimination. Here is the imperfect
compromise I have drawn. Every life matters , including the life of every African
American who has been convicted of a crime. Every life, and especially every African American life,
is diminished when some blacks - even the "least" among us - are incarcerated or killed because
they are black. The situation is desperate. It has not, however, reached the state that Michael Walzer describes as
"the supreme emergency," in which any means necessary is morally justied to defeat extreme
subordination. n210 I believe that slavery was a supreme emergency. The incarceration of the majority of
African Americans would be another. We have not gone back to the former, and we have not yet
reached the latter. In either of these events, Malcolm X's formula would be morally justified. I hope that it never is. The result of pursuing
justice in a moral way is that minorities must tolerate some race-based discrimination. Even when
their cause is just, they are not allowed to achieve it by any means necessary. They must be patient,
even when impatience might win them quicker relief. This is a high cost . One wonders whether any construct of
morality that counsels minorities to tolerate discrimination is too majoritarian. Would whites ever adhere to a philosophy that required, even in the short term, their
subordination to people of color? Perhaps not. The

moral aspirations of people of color, however, can be higher than

the standard set by the majority. Why their aspirations should be higher is a difficult question.
Perhaps virtue is its own reward. Perhaps the obligation to act morally is based more on spiritual
than on human-made laws. At any rate, morality does not require that minorities tolerate
discrimination with infinite patience. It does not even require that people of color respond to
discrimination with moderation. [*773] Race-based discrimination is evil. There is no overestimating the hardship it causes. As long as racial
subordination exists, its victims will be tempted to seek relief in any way they can. In this sense, the protestor's familiar chant "no justice, no peace" is not a threat. It is
just a description of the world. Understanding

this should inspire us to end all race-based discrimination

quickly, and through the simplest means. War, even when it is just, is hell.

The alternatives criticism of structures does not translate into material

change.
Mwajeh 5 ( Z Al, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and
Research Department of English, CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY
VERSUS EMBODIED (MUSLIM) OTHERS,
https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20Al-Mwajeh.pdf?sequence=1)
alterity-oriented postmodernism can be described as idealistic in a Platonic sense . Platos Myth of the
Platos world of matter is preceded and to some extent
controlled by the world of ideas, or by the Logos. Postmodern alterity seems to submit to the Platonic idea-matter dialectics. Thus, the postmodernists
critique metaphysical, linguistic, or symbolic superstructural systems as if xing the idea
translates into xing praxis . One implicit assumption is that knowledge translates into
ethics. In other words, it seems that postmodernists do not only consider man good, but also assume that the moment one is
enlightened about the good, he/she will automatically choose it by virtue of its being good. I am not
particularly opposed to such idealism. On the contrary, the problem with such idealism is that it underestimates
political and economic contexts , pressures, motivations, and even the desire for power
regardless of the consequences , sometimes. Postmodern thought does not problematize the
passage from metaphysics or the moment of knowledge into action. It seems that the moment we
know that our metaphysical or epistemological foundations are other-unfriendly automatically
translates into abandoning those ways in favor of more just arrangements such as alterity ethics .
Thus, postmodernists retain Platonic residues whenever they assume that self-other
enduring conflicts are primarily caused by ideational or metaphysical systems. They, too, become
idealists whenever they do not problematize the assumption that the world of ideas precedes the
world of matteralmost in a causal manneror whenever they assume their automatic
translatability as if xing the philosophical or epistemological system
would automatically x the institutions and practices that stem from
However,

Cave enacts a dialectical ascension or progress toward an ideal republic governed by reason.

them . 3

Absolute legal pessimism is unproductive- legal change is still possible and

desirable
Kennedy 12 (Randall, Harvard Law Professor, Race, Crime, and the Law, 2012, Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, pp. 388-389)
True, it

is sometimes genuinely difficult to determine an appropriate remedial response. The proper

way to address that difficulty, however, is to acknowledge and grapple with it, not bury it beneath unbelievable
assertions that, in fact, no real problem exists. Whitewashing racial wrongs (especially while simultaneously proclaiming that
courts are doing everything reasonably possible to combat racially invidious government action) corrupts officials and jades onlookers, nourishing
simplistic, despairing, and defeatist critiques of the law that are profoundly
destructive . The second impression that I want to leave with readers should serve as an antidote to these overwrought, defeatist critiques by
acknowledging that the administration of criminal law has changed substantially for the better
over the past half century and that there is reason to believe that, properly guided, it can be
improved even more . Today there are more formal and informal protections
against racial bias than ever before , both in terms of the protections accorded to blacks
against criminality and the treatment accorded to black suspects , defendants, and convicts. That deficiencies,
large deciencies, remain is clear. But comparing racial policies today to those that
prevailed in 1940 or 1960 or even 1980 should expose the fallacy of asserting that
nothing substantial has been changed for the better . This point is worth stressing
because of the prevalence and prominence of pessimistic thinking about the race question in America n life.
Some commentators maintain, in all seriousness, that there has been no significant improvement in the overall
fortunes of black Americans during the past half century, that advances that appear to have been made are
merely cosmetic, and that the United States is doomed to remain a pigmentocracy. This pessimistic
strain often turns paranoid and apocalyptic in commentary about the administration of criminal
law. It is profoundly misleading , however, to focus exclusively on the ugliest
aspects of the American legal order . Doing so conceals real achievements: the
Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments, the Reconstruction civil rights laws, Strauder v. Alabama,
Dempsey v. Moore, Brown v. Mississippi, Powell v. Alabama, Norris v. Alabama, Batson v.
Kentucky, the resuscitation of Reconstruction by the civil rights movement, the changing demographics of the
bench, bar, and police departmentsin sum, the stigmatization (albeit incomplete) of invidious racial bias.
Neglecting these achievements robs them of support . Recent sharp attacks upon basic
guarantees bequeathed by the New Deal ought to put everyone on notice of the perils of permitting
social accomplishments to lose their rightful stature in the public's estimation . Moreover, one-dimensional
condemnations of the racial situation in America renders attractive certain subversive
proposals that are, given actual conditions , foolish, counterproductive , and
immoral. I think here in particular of the call for racially selective jury nullification. Such proposals should be openly challenged
on the grounds that they fundamentally misperceive the racial realities of American life.

Making demands on the state does not mean we defend that the state is good
in all instances or that we are reaffirming its legitimacy.
Saul Newman 10, Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Theory & Event
Volume 13, Issue 2
There are two aspects that I would like o address here. Firstly, the notion of demand: making certain demands on the states- say for higher wages, equal rights for
excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing-is one of the basic strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making

such
demands does not necessarily mean working within the state or rearming

its legitimacy . On the contrary, demands are made from a position outside the olitical order,
and they often exceed the question of the implementation of this or that specic
measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even the
sovereighnty of the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies
between, for instance, a formal constitutional order which guarantees certain

rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate and deny them.

Engaging institutions is the only way to accomplish legal change.

Crenshaw 88 (Kimberle, Law @ UCLA, RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, 1988, 101
Harv. L. Rev. 1331, lexis)
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks
of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology
seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore ,

trashing offers
no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in
reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the
wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a
present world where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental
problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional
arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law receptive to certain
demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the
conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the
discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their focus
on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that , once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more
productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately,
no such strategy has yet been articulated , and it is difficult to imagine that racial
minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the
civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge
to that logic. 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic
of the institutions that they are challenging . 138 Demands for change that do not
reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the
dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective . 139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very
process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging
an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when
powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their
reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things
appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary
to close the apparent contradiction. This

approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil

rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that
reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a
series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather

than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false,
civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the
rights that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology,
Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by
granting formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the
dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by
legitimation.

Revolutionary reforms are a better strategy of resistance- outright rejection or

revolution
Wray 14 (Ben, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms, 2014,
http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/)
We need revolutionary change. Theres no two ways about it if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to be the central dynamic driving
economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe. But as Ive discussed in the previous five parts of this series, getting
from where we are to a revolutionary transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations of the
capitalist economy and replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the worlds resources is not as simple as
declaring our desire for it to be so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing the
overthrow of capitalism. If one million people signed that petition and one million people signed a
further petition to introduce full collective bargaining rights for trade-unions in the UK, which one would
move us closer to the overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter. Whilst having an end goal in sight
is important, most people dont change their thinking about the world based on bold visions of what
could be done at some point in the future: they change their ideas based on evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of
the status quo. In other words, we need to have ideas that build upon peoples lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a
representative democracy system, we

need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms have
to help rather than hinder a move to more revolutionary transformation that challenges the very
core of the capitalist system. The dialectic of reform and revolution What we need, therefore, is a strategy of
revolutionary reforms. Such a notion would appear as a contradiction in terms to many who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see
the two as dichotomous, but there is no reason why this should be the case. Indeed, history has shown that
revolutionary transformations have always happened as a dialectical interaction between rapid,
revolutionary movements and more institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the
revolutionary part of that dialectic has always been motivated by the immediate needs of the participants involved land, bread and peace being the first half of the
slogan of the Russian Revolution. What does a strategy of revolutionary

reforms entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a political

strategy that builds towards revolutionary change by using reforms to push up against the limits
of the logic of capitalism in practice: At first these feasible objectives will be limited to reforms
within capitalismor at least to measures which, from the standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness,
appear to be legitimate and achievable within the system, but which may actually run counter to the
logic of capitalism and start to push up against its limits. As the working class engages in struggle,
however, the anti-capitalist implications of its needs and aspirations are gradually revealed . At the same
time, through its experience of struggle for reform, the working class learns about its capacity for selfmanagement, initiative and collective decision and can have a foretaste of what emancipation means.
In this way struggle for reform helps prepare the class psychologically, ideologically
and materially for revolution . The late Daniel Bensaid expressed this argument through the lens of the history of the
socialist movement: In reality all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenins pamphlet
of the summer of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by Trotsky in 1937): the need for transitional
demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on the dialectic (not antinomy)
between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the idea of separating an (anti-neoliberal) minimum programme and an (anticapitalist) maximum programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that the two are interlinked by the dynamic of

reforms means a policy agenda that, as Alberto Toscano has put it, at one and the
same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits further movement against
capitalism. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a war of positon.
struggle. So revolutionary

Policy focus key to combat racism, the alternative does not dismantle racist
policies.
Bouie 13 (Jamelle, staff writer at The American Prospect, Making and Dismantling Racism,
http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a

focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led
him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit
policy choicesthe decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to
do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using
public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she
makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgans work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the
country changing as a result. If

we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be

destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to
creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately
destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I dont believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust
or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or
Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to
them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNCs utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making,
but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an
overly aggressive form of group loyaltybasically just prejudicethen Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it

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 antiblack racism . It took particular choices made by particular peoplein 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
enslavementblacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect
racism as much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further
entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced
can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That

to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under
the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition preventing a
marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behaviorowning a home, getting
marriedand then blame them for the adverse consequences . Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to
conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay
men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men.
(Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the
stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their
relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They
may be a minority at the moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life
linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that society

can create stigmas by

using law to force particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had
something to do with the fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and

If the prohibition
against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting itas we've seen over the last
decadehas helped destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way.
desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution."

AT: Suffering Reps

Their Narrative of Suffering Leads to a Permanent
Identication of Suffering Turns The case
Brown 96 (Wendy is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is
Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable)
If, taken together, the two passages from Foucault we have been consider- ing call feminists to account in our compulsion to put everything about women into discourse, they do not yet
exhaust the phenomenon of being ensnared 'in the folds of our own discourses.' For if the problem I have been discussing is easy enough to see--indeed, largely familiar to those who
track techniques of co-optation--at the level of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it is altogether more disquieting when it takes the form of regulatory discourse in our own

confessing injury becomes that which attaches us to the injury,

paralyzes us within it, and prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than
injured. In an age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally
significant--gender, race, sexuality, and so forth-- confessional discourse, with its truthbearing status in a post-epistemological universe, not only regulates the confessor in the
name of freeing her as Foucault described that logic, but extends beyond the confessing individual to constitute a regulatory truth about the identity group. Confessed truths are assembled and
sub- and counter-cultures of resistance . . . when

deployed as "knowledge" about the group. This phenomenon would seem to undergird a range of recurring troubles in feminism, from the "real woman" rejoinder to poststructuralist deconstructions of her, to totalizing descriptions of women's experience that are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of survivor stories. Thus, for example, the porn star
who feels miserably exploited, violated and humiliated in her work invariably monopolizes the truth about sex work; as the girl with math anxieties constitutes the truth about women
and math; as eating disor- ders have become the truth about women and food; as sexual abuse and viola- tion occupy the knowledge terrain of women and sexuality. In other words,
even as feminism aims to arm diversity among women and women's ex- periences, confession as the site of production of truth and its convergence with feminist suspicion and
deauthorization of truth from other sources tends to reinstate a unified discourse in which the story of greatest suffering becomes the true story of woman. (I think this constitutes part of
the rhetorical power of MacKinnon's work; analytically, the epistemological superiority of confes- sion substitutes for the older, largely discredited charge of false consciousness). Thus,
the adult who does not suffer from her or his childhood sexual experi- ence, the lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily or "correctly" identify with
her marking as such--these figures are excluded as bonafide members of the categories which also claim them. Their status within these discourses is that of being "in denial," "passing"
or being a "race traitor." This is the norm-making process in feminist traditions of "breaking silence" which, ironically, silence and exclude the very women these
traditions mean to empower. (Is it surprising, when we think in this vein, that there is so little feminist writing on heterosexual pleasure?) But if these practices tacitly silence

they also condemn

those whose sufferings they record to a permanent identication with that suffering. Here,
we experience a temporal ensnaring in 'the folds of our own discourses' insofar as we
identify ourselves in speech in a manner that condemns us to live in a present dominated
by the past. But what if speech and silence aren't really opposites? Indeed, what if to
speak incessantly of one's suffering is to silence the possibilities of overcoming it, of living beyond
those whose experiences do not parallel those whose suffering is most marked (or whom the discourse produces as suffering markedly),

it, of identifying as something other than it? What if this incessant speech not only overwhelms the experiences of others, but alternative (unutterable? traumatized?
fragmentary? inassimilable?) zones of one's own experience? Conversely, what if a certain modality of silence about one's suffering--and I am suggesting that we must consider
modalities of silence as varied as modalities of speech and discourse--is to articulate a variety of possibilities not otherwise available to the sufferer?

The armative fetishizes the narrative prevents true

change
Brown 96 (Wendy is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is
Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable)
But if the silences in discourses of domination are a site for insurrectionary noise , if they
are the corridors we must fill with explosive counter-tales, it is also possible to make a
fetish of breaking silence. Even more than a fetish, it is possible that this ostensible tool
of emancipation carries its own techniques of subjugation--that it converges with nonemancipatory tendencies in contem- porary culture (for example, the ubiquity of
confessional discourse and rampant personalization of political life), that it
establishes regulatory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of confession,

in short, feeds
the powers we meant to starve. While attempting to avoid a simple reversal of feminist valorizations of breaking silence, it is this dimension of silence and its putative opposite with
which this Article is concerned. In the course of this work, I want to make the case for silence not simply as an aesthetic but a political value, a means of preserving certain practices and
dimensions of existence from regulatory power, from normative violence, as well as from the scorching rays of public exposure. I also want to suggest a link between, on the one hand, a
certain contemporary tendency concerning the lives of public figures--the confession or extraction of every detail of private and personal life (sexual, familial, therapeutic, financial) and,
on the other, a certain practice in feminist culture: the compulsive putting into public discourse of heretofore hidden or private experiences--from catalogues of sexual pleasures to
litanies of sexual abuses, from chronicles of eating disorders to diaries of homebirths, lesbian mothering, and Gloria Steinam's inner revolution. In linking these two phenomena--the
privatization of public life via the mechanism of public exposure of private life on the one hand, and the compulsive/compulsory cataloguing of the details of women's lives on the other--I

and thereby
also usurps public space with the relatively trivial, rendering the political personal in a
fashion that leaves injurious social, political and economic powers unremarked and
untouched. In short, while intended as a practice of freedom (premised on the
modernist conceit that the truth shall make us free), these productions of truth not
want to highlight a modality of regulation and depoliticization specific to our age that is not simply confessional but empties private life into the public domain,

only bear the capacity to chain us to our injurious histories as well as the stations of our
small lives but also to instigate the further regulation of those lives, all the while depoliticizing their conditions.

This turns the case- it writes oppression into the law

Brown 96 (Wendy is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies, and is
Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable)
These questions suggest that in legally codifying a fragment of an insurrec- tionary
discourse as a timeless truth, interpellating women as unified in their victimization, and
casting the "free speech" of men as that which "silences" and thus
subordinates women, MacKinnon not only opposes bourgeois liberty to substantive
equality, but potentially intensies the regulation of gender and sexuality in the law, abetting rather

as a regulatory ction of a
particular identity is deployed to displace the hegemonic ction of
universal personhood, the discourse of rights converges insidiously with the discourse of
disciplinarity to produce a spectacularly potent mode of juridical-regulatory domination. Again, let
me emphasize that the problem I am seeking to delineate is not
specic to MacKinnon or even feminist legal reform. Rather,
MacKinnon's and kindred efforts at bringing subjugated discourses
into the law merely constitute examples of what Foucault identied
as the risk of re-codication and re- colonisation of "disinterred knowledges" by those
than contesting the production of gender identity as sexual. In short,

"unitary discourses, which rst disqualied and then ignored them when they made their appearance."
n23 They exemplify how the work of breaking silence can metamorphose into new techniques of
domination, how our truths can become our rulers rather than our emancipators, how our confessions
become the norms by which we are regulated.

AT: Hartman
Hartman is too pessimistic and pursuing institutional change can be a survival
strategy Hartmans narrative overlooks the history of Black-led institutional
change
Patterson 99 (Saidiya, professor of English at Boston University (Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman Review by: Anita Patterson, African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 683686, JSTOR)
Having ascertained that rhetorical appeals to affection and reciprocity between masters and slaves were often used to deny sexually exploitative
practices, Hartman then proceeds to ask whether or not seduction ever served as a viable mode of

resistance. To answer this question she turns to an extended analysis of Harriet A. Jacobs's
fictionalized slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , as Written by Herself, focusing on the
scenario of seduction that occurs in Incidents when Linda Brent (Jacobs's pseudonymous identity) explains
her decision to "give herself" to a white man named Mr. Sands, partly as a means of avoiding the
compulsory sexual advances of her master. Hartman explains that, as a slave, Linda is a non-contractual subject-that is, she
has no legally recognized freedom to choose the object of her affection, and specifically cannot exercise her right to voluntary consent to a
marriage contract. Under such conditions of legal invisibility, Linda's act of giving herself actually constitutes a form of subjection, since she did
not have any real freedom of choice in the matter. "After all," Hartman reasons, "if desperation, recklessness, and hopelessness determine
'choosing one's lover,' absolute distinctions between compulsion and assent cannot be sustained." Even though Linda's act is guided by the
yearning to refashion and transform the given, Hartman concludes that, since marriage and freedom of choice are

legal entitlements beyond the scope of the enslaved, Linda's small act of resistance leaves her with
something akin to freedom that is not freedom. Although Linda's practice of giving herself does to a limited extent express
agency, resistance, and self-making, Hartman points out that, by calling on civil rights and the abstract notion of freedom,
Linda embraces the same principles of property and contract that were used to justify and
perpetuate the institution of slavery. The entire second half of Scenes of Subjection describes the elaborate burdens of freedom
imposed on ex-slaves, and the reign of terror that followed in the wake of slavery. Hartman's main argument is that emancipation did not do away
with racial subjection; instead, the nominal extension of civil rights to freedmen was simply a point of transition between different manifestations
or modes of subjection. As numerous accounts of the Reconstruction era have already shown, the vast majority of land confiscated during the war
years was returned to the previous owners; freedmen were faced with the terrible problem of finding employment on land owned by racist whites
during a time when the South was still reeling from the economic and social devastation of Civil War and a declining demand for U.S. cotton;
sharecropping, with its constant economic insecurity, became the only means of survival left to many people; and Southern planters opposed and
subjugated free labor through various contractual and extralegal means. Hartman adds to this bleak picture of the Reconstruction era by detailing
the replacement of the whip with the other forms of racial subjugation, such as lynching, indebted servitude, Black Codes, the contract system,
vagrancy statutes, and anti-enticement laws. She argues that the legalization of marriage among ex-slaves, and the resulting privatization of
sexuality, did nothing to secure freedom, since black families were still vulnerable to the incursions of capital. Policymakers, Freedmen's Bureau
officials, Northern entrepreneurs, and other reformers developed a "discourse of idleness" that was directly aimed at laborers who refused to enter
into contracts with former slaveholders and was used to deny the brutality and coercive measures taken against the newly emancipated slaves.
Like popular journals that were read by the embittered Southern planters, freedmen's primers effectively recast the history of slavery as
dependency rather than captivity, and promoted "responsibility" and a rational work ethic among the ex-slaves-stressing the importance of duty,
conscience, selfreliance, industriousness, willingness to endure hardship, and respect for former masters. As the records of Congressional debates
on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment show-as do a handful of late-nineteenth-century legal cases that effectively
dismantled the civil rights agenda legislatively enacted during the decade 1865-1875-the so-called "equality" of emancipated slaves was tenuous
and vastly compromised within a violent, racist, and fiercely exclusive society. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, including a number of
WPA testimonies, Hartman reveals the bitter disappointments experienced by African Americans in the wake of emancipation. As one former
slave recalled, "The reconstruction of the negro was real hard on us." Scenes of Subjection is a cogent reminder of the

terror and stark limits of American emancipation that will undoubtedly inspire and guide further research in
this area. But I remain unpersuaded by Hartman's suggestion that we dispense with notions of
individuality, freedom, and civil rights just because the discourse of democracy has at times been
put to bad use. Harriet Jacobs's invocation of rights is part of a protest tradition that includes
figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and other leaders who were firmly convinced
that African Americans needed to use the word freedom and wield the language of
civilrights on their own behalf. We should always remember the extent to which the legacy of
slavery and the failures of Reconstruction live on. But in doing so, we cannot forget that,
without the discourse of rights, the Civil Rights Movement would never have happened .

A2: Sexton
Sexton over-determines blackness and ignores the varying racialization of
bodies.
Spickard 9(Paul, University of California, Santa Barbara, Amalgamation Schemes:
Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review) American Studies - Volume 50,
Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127
One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical
perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around
the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge
mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as
eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis
Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great
deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to
wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan
Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension
between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black.
If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is
trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that
the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the
grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing

is abstract, referential, and at key points

vague. For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly,
for there are other racialized relationships . In the U.S., native peoples were racialized
by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take
just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways
(including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the United States. So there is a
problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and
the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that
it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience,
and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged . Sexton does
point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second paragraph above. But
he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of study, and that is not a fair
assessment . The main problem is that Sexton argues from conclusion to evidence, rather
than the other way around . That is, he begins with the conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted.
And then he cherry-picks his evidence to fit his conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as
Gregory Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature. When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy,
he carefully selects his quotes to fit his argument, and misrepresents their positions by doing so. Sexton also makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact
that people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with
homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of
multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And sometimes

Sexton simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on

the motives and personal lives of the writers themselves . It is a pretty tawdry exercise. That is unfortunate, because Sexton
appears bright and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations about some tendencies in the multiracial movement. He might even have opened up
a new direction for productive study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several observations that are worth thinking about, [End Page 126] and
surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly, this is not that book.

Social Death Indites

Refuse the characterization of blackness as ontological death by asserting
life in the face of structures of domination, blackness exceeds its own
objectification their framework is totalizing and historically incorrect.
Brar 12 (2012, Dhanveer Singh, PhD candidate, communications, "Blackness, radicalism,
sound: Black Consciousness and Black Popular Music in the U.S.A (1955-1971)," A thesis
submitted for the degree of PhD in Media and Communications 2012, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/7806/1/MED_thesis_Brar_2012.pdf)
Paying attention to phonic materiality allowed the enquiry into the blackness of the Black
Consciousness movement and Black popular music between 1955 and 1971 to remain open. It
allowed for an attentiveness to the ways in which blackness and radicalism were always under
contestation, and always being produced, even if that meant radically breaking up black
production. There seemed to be an internalised resistance at work within the phonic materiality of
the movement and the music which never let them settle. The refusal to settle acted as a persistent

questioning of the phonic materiality produced as the blackness and radicalism of the movement
and the music. It is for this reason that; James Brown and Amiri Baraka's respective black
communal programs were defined but also taken apart by a rhythmic psycho-sexuality; Sam
Cooke and Martin Luther King's attempts to generalise the intense spirituality of black freedom
began to sound like atemporality and death; and neither Motown or the League could engender
the discipline they felt a revolutionary project or mass black music required because that
discipline was about gendered labour. This thesis has not been about identifying the apparent
failures of the Black Consciousness movement or Black popular music. Instead it has been an
attempt to amplify the sound of the blackness that instigated those events, sustained them, but
which could not be called to a halt. It is by privileging the phonic materiality of the archive that I
have been able to attend to both the formation of and the strain against the blackness of black
radicalism and black music. Phonic substance was necessary to the modalities of the music and
the 2 radicalism but it was never simply the basis for opposition to racial oppression. The phonic
substance which was blackness was constantly used to work out radically different ways blackness
could be. The phonic substance structures the relationship between black music and black
radicalism as blackness, but it is also a blackness which strains against them. This is the
paraontological relation; blackness in constant escape, pressurising its own ontological ground, its
own phenomenological features, its own basis as an epistemology. Each time the music and the

radicalism do this, they do it as a black sonic operation. Returning to the wider field of Black
studies, in this thesis I assembled an archive of sound recordings, television footage,
documentaries, interviews, personal testimonies, criticism, cultural analysis and a range of other
materials to constitute the historical juncture of Black Consciousness and Black popular music in
the U.S. The phonic materiality marked across all of these materials is a realisation of the ways in
which blackness is testament to the fact objects can and do resist . The black object resists by
rendering itself audible and black radicalism is a tradition in which objects have made themselves
heard. It is a tradition of objects which have recorded their strain against their designation as
objects. In this instance blackness does not operate as a total outside, it is not non-ontological, it is
not without analog and is not social death. No matter how much intellectual, psychic and material
energy is invested in rendering these claims true. Instead blackness is the immanent critique
which lives in the life of the object, which may not be recognised as life, even when it strains to do
so, but cannot be denied as life. Neither can it be denied the strain against its own affirmation of
life. It is a life, and a strain against it, which lives in the phonic substance the black object produces.

The life of the black object lives in the sound it makes and that sound stands as a common project
of blackness, which may be dismissed as inchoate noise, as excessive feeling, as lacking in
revolutionary discipline, but this dismissal occurs because when the object resists, it rubs up

against the divide between noise and music, excessive and proper feeling, discipline and
unruliness. The blackness of black radicalism, like the blackness of black music, lives in that break,
and constantly breaks, away. The debate within Black studies over what blackness is and what
blackness does is still being contested. With new work on the way from Fred Moten, Nahum
Chandler and Jared Sexton, this only offers possibilities for continued speculation. To repeat, the
discussion over what blackness means within Black studies is not a minor dispute within a
relative sub-discipline of Cultural studies and Critical theory. It is, as Chandler has pointed out,
necessary to thought, because blackness is a necessary problem for what is deemed to be thought.
But Chandler is very careful to remind us that this means blackness is also, paraontologically, a
possibility for thought. In light of this coming work, I believe it is necessary to continue thinking
about how this debate is informed by the phonic substance which is blackness, and which
blackness escapes from, even whilst that phonic substance escapes from it. In short, it remains
vital for me to continue to be a student of Black studies.

Understanding of blackness as absolute dereliction is only made possible by

White ideological hegemony the fantasy of the socially dead slave is the
foundation of colonialism
Walker 12 [Tracey, Masters in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck University, The
Future of Slavery: From Cultural Trauma to Ethical Remembrance, Graduate Journal of Social Science July 2012, Vol. 9, Issue 2]
To argue that there is more to the

popular conception of slaves as victims who experienced social death within

the abusive regime of transatlantic slavery is not to say that these subjectivities did not exist. When considering the institution of slavery we can
quite confidently rely on the assumption that it did indeed destroy the self-hood and the lives of millions of Africans. Scholar Vincent Brown
(2009) however, has criticised Orlando Pattersons (1982) seminal book Slavery and Social Death for positioning the slave as a

subject without agency and maintains that those who managed to dislocate from the nightmare of
plantation life were not in fact the living dead, but the mothers of gasping new societies (Brown 2009,
1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such disparate group of Africans who managed to band together and flee the
Jamaican plantations in order to create a new mode of living under their own rule . These runaways were
in fact ferocious fighters and master strategists, building towns and military bases which enabled them to fight and
successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle (Gotlieb 2000,16). In addition, the story of the
Windward Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism inherent within the story of the slave
hero by the very revelation that their leader, Queen Nanny was a woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she
was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as an old hagg or obeah woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb
2000, xvi). Yet, despite these negative descriptors, Nanny presents an interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who
cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological as well as military force against the English despite not owning sophisticated weapons
(Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story speaks to post-slavery generations through its representation of a figure whose gender defying acts
challenged the patriarchal fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such the study of her experiences might change the lives of people living
under paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression (Gotlieb 2000, 84). The label of social death is rejected here on the
grounds that it is a narrative which is positioned from the vantage point of a European hegemonic ideology.
Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves were indeed regarded as non-humans since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed
less valuable in comparison to the Europeans. However, Fanons (1967) assertion that not only must the black man be black; he must be black in
relation to the white man (Fanon 1967, 110) helps us to understand that this classification can only have meaning relative to the symbolic which
represents the alive ness of whiteness against the backdrop of the dead black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005) makes it clear that the death

one suffers relative to the social symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the
Other and interpellated her into life, one now holds the sovereignty of determining the subjects
right to live or die: this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that
was never possible to begin with, the death of the fantasy of impossible mastery , and so a loss of what one
never had, in other words it is a necessary grief (Butler 2005, 65). The point to make here is that although the concept of social death

is
colonial narrative within which the slaves are confined to a one dimensional story of
terror. In keeping with Gilroys (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be constructed
from the slaves point of view, we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are
figured within the European social imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about
self and identity. We might therefore find some value in studying a group like the Maroons who not
has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical experience of those who live antagonistically in relation to the social symbolic, it
nevertheless a

only managed to create an autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse which negated them, but also, due to their unique
circumstances, were forced to create new modes of communication which would include a myriad of African cultures, languages and creeds
(Gottlieb 2000). This creative and resistive energy of slave subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial

paradigm of socially dead slaves, but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and mutual
recognition. In contrast, the passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007 bicentenary commemorations causing journalist Toyin
Agbetu to interrupt the official speeches and exclaim that it had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered mostly by whites with stories of
black agency excluded8. Youngs argument that one of the damaging side effects of the focus on white peoples role in abolition is that Africans
are represented as being passive in the face of oppression, appears to echo the behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research poll reveals
that the black vote turnout is significantly lower than for the white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation immigrants
believe that voting doesnt matter.9 Yet, Gilroy (1993a) argues that this political passivity may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but
might allude to the lived contradiction of being black and English which affects ones confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a
society that, at its core, still holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a). Without considering the slaves

capacity for survival and their fundamental role in overthrowing the European regime of slavery,
we limit the usevalue of the memory and risk becoming overly attached to singular slave
subjectivities seeped in death and passivity. The Maroons story however, enables slave consciousness to rise above the mire
of slaverys abject victims and establishes an ethical relation with our ancestors who lived and survived in the time of slavery.

Over-particularizing symbolic death within Blackness disavows all living

entities ACTUAL being-towards-death that grants excessive power to
whiteness by assuming the Master is OUTSIDE death
Peterson 7
(Christopher, Lecturer @ University of Western Sidney, Kindred Specters:
Death, Mourning, and American Affinity, pgs. 12-14)
What I am calling redoubled

ghostliness situates racial and sexual minorities in intimate contact with

death. This heightened proximity to mortality is not only social, moreover, but material. As Karla Holloway observes in
Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories, black Americans historically have had a "particular vulnerability
to an untimely death," from lynching to suicides, from police violence to disease." Echoing Holloway, Abdul JanMohamed
argues that African Americans are "death-bound-subject[s] ... formed, from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death." Tracing
the emergence of this subject in Richard Wright's fiction, JanMohamed argues that slaves, and by extension, "emancipated"

black Americans, live under a constantly commuted death sentence. Drawing from Heidegger's account of death in
Being and Time, JanMohamed notes that, "if natural death marks the termination of life and, thereby, retroactively defines the entirety of life, then
this is even more so the case for the slave because he faces the imminent presence of death on a mundane basis" (284). Jan Mohamed is certainly
right that Heidegger's account of death does not provide a detailed account of death's unequal social and
historical distribution. Yet, in "correcting" this elision, JanMohamed

reduces death to its political deployment.

existential description of death tends to be radically agnostic about the source or agency of
death .... For the slave, death is not an eventuality that somehow "comes" or "arrives" in the natural course of events ... but
rather something deliberately brought and imposed on him by another, by the master. (15) The problem with this
formulation, however, is that it figures death as originally exterior to the slave, coming to inhabit him
only via the master's monopolistic violence. As Bauman astutely observes with regard to the modern interdiction of mortality,
"we do not hear of people dying of mortality. They die only of individual causes, they die because
there was an individual cause (138, his emphasis). Hence, we ought to say that the slave's availability to
death is first conditioned by his "having" a body, which means that death is both what "comes" or
"arrives" and is what the master wields as a form of coercive control." If finitude were "always
embodied in the agency of the master," then death would name a condition unique to the slave as
He writes: The

such (294). Indeed, by insisting on a radical disjunction between the death that haunts all life and the
historical particularity of the immanent death to which African Americans are uniquely bound,
JanMohamed reinscribes the exceptionalist logic through which the master evades death by projecting it
onto the slave. In short, JanMohamed's analysis overparticularizes death, thereby reproducing the "state of
exception" that he seeks to avoid. According to this logic, the master presides over the slave's life and death
all the while exempting himself from the death that he deploys." While JanMohamed contends that the slave, unlike
the master, "has always already been condemned to death ill the present," this presumes that the master's ontology is not also always already put
into question by the spectrality that disturbs each and every present (282). Death is not a "final punctuation mark that retroactively defines" the
"syntax" of one's life (298). On the contrary, death stretches along the syntax of each and every life according to

incommensurate social and political grammars. To speak of the redoubled ghostliness of racial and
sexual minorities, then, is not to subsume the particularity of social death under a universal beingtoward-death that effaces political and social distinctions. Unlike what has often been said of death, spectrality is
not the great equalizer. However, one 'cannot fully separate the particularity of social death from
the generality of each subject's being-toward-death, as if finitude were reducible to its political
distribution, or for that matter, to its external imposition. This does not mean that we should turn our attention
away from the particular political and material losses exacted by the history of racism and
heterosexism in America. Indeed, the readings of literary texts by Chesnutt, Morrison, and Faulkner offered in subsequent chapters bear
witness to this violence while working to rethink the law's erasure of minority kinship in relation to the absence that founds all social relations.
Before turning to those literary readings, however, the remainder of this chapter aims to elaborate further how kinship is implicated in a
dialectical negation that "precedes" any legal effacement of particular kinship relations.

Anti-blackness is not ontological but historically contingent

Hudson 13 (Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
, South Africa, has been on the editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The South African
Journal of Sociology and Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory and Transformation,
and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, The state and the
colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013)
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There

always has to exist an outside, which

the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence
of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isnt excluded
insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be
considered ontological), its content (what fills it) as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction
are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for
all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for
deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in
ontological stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the curvature of
intersubjective space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the othering of otherness are nowhere
decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). |||start
footnote 2||| 2. My foil here is the ontological fatalism of Frank Wildersons argument . See Wilderson (2008),
according to which the only way Humanity can maintain both its corporeal and libidinal integrity
is through the various strategies through which Blackness is the abyss into which humanness can
never fall (105). And were there to be a place and time for blacks cartography and temporality
would be impossible (111). Here then, the closure of colonialism is absolute. |||end footnote 2||| 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,
is also inside, to

the white man doesnt exist, the black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most

intimate structuring relations division

is constitutive of the social, not the colonial division. Whiteness may

well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the ontological difference (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts
2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to
identify the very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this
it does not follow that the void of black being functions as the ultimate substance , the
transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest . What
gets lost here, then, is the specicity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its ontological differential. A
crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the
colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately

inscribed in the lived experience (vcu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is traversing the fantasy (Zizek
2006a, 4060) all the time; the void of the verb to be is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the
subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very
interpellation.4 Fixed into non-fixity, he is eternally suspended between element and 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, whiteness and blackness are (sustained by)
determinate and contingent practices of signification; the structuring relation of colonialism
thus itself comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can always be undone. Anticolonial 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, chapter 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 All symbolisation produces an

ineradicable excess over itself, something it cant totalise or make sense of, where its production of meaning
falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant object that has no place of its own, isnt recognised in the
categories of the system but is produced by it its part of no part or object small a. 10 Correlative to
this object a is the subject stricto sensu i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the
subject of antagonism in confrontation with the real of the social, as distinct from subject position
based on a determinate identity.

AT: Blackness Ontological

Wildersons theory of absolutism is fatalistic and a reifies a static notion of
blackness.
David Marriott 12, Black Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 3766
However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (The Structure of
Antagonisms), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the
being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also

refigures the whole of being: the essence of being for the White and non-Black position is non-niggerness, consequently, [b]eing
can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness (p. 37). It is not hard when
reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be
peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic : throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and
emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst , and the
politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim
that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form means merely that the black has to
embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logicand the denial of any kind of
ontological integrity to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to
reduce ontology to logic , namely, a logic of non-recuperability moves through the following points:
(1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a
subject, which Wilderson persists in calling death, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion
which remains ever present: White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity
(p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses involving violence, antagonisms and parasitism, Wilderson

describes White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the
suffering of the Blackthe Slave (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the
psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a
corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one centrally concerned with
exposing the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here, at a
critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacans notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded
to relationality as implied by the contrast between empty and full speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of absolute Otherness
that is the Blacks relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the structural, or absolute, violence of Black life (pp. 74; 75).
Whereas Lacan was aware of how language precedes and exceeds us, he did not have Fanons awareness of how violence also precedes and
exceeds Blacks (p. 76). The violence of such abjectionor incapacityis therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always
already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving
aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacans notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious cannot be confined
to parole), it is clear that, according to Wildersons own logic, his description of the Black is working, via

analogy, to Lacans notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside
Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart of universality . The Black is
beyond the limit of contingencybut it is worth saying immediately that this beyond is indeed a foreclosure
that defines a violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose
nonbeing returns as the theme for Wildersons political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection.
The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake,
this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between
Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be
Black).

Theyll say ontological blackness interrupts our politics, but that theory
enforces a rigid identity crushing black experience, culminating in political
paralysis and re-entrenching white power.
Pinn 2004 (Anthony, Anthony B. Pinn is an American professor and writer whose work focuses on liberation
theology, Black religion, and Black humanism. Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor
of Religious Studies at Rice University, Black Is, Black Aint: Victor Anderson, African American Theological

Thought, and Identity, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, Volume 43, Number 1 . Spring 2004)
This connection between ontological blackness and religion is natural because: ontological

blackness

signifies the totality of black existence, a binding together of black life and experience. In its root,
religio, religion denotes tying together, fastening behind, and binding together. Ontological blackness
renders black life and experience a totality.13 According to Anderson, Black theological discussions are

discussions of black life revolve around a

theological understanding of Black experience limited to suffering and survival in a racist
system. The goal of this theology is to find the meaning of black faith in the merger of black cultural
entangled in ontological blackness. And accordingly,

consciousness, icons of genius, and post-World War II Black defiance. An admirable goal to be sure, but
here is the rub: Black theologians speak, according to Anderson, in opposition to ontological whiteness
when they are actually dependent upon whiteness for the legitimacy of their agenda. Furthermore,

ontological blacknesss strong ties to suffering and survival result in blackness being
dependent on suffering, and as a result social transformation brings into question what it means to be
black and religious. Liberative outcomes ultimately force an identity crisis, a crisis of legitimation and

Talk about liberation becomes hard to justify where freedom

appears as nothing more than defiant self-assertion of a revolutionary racial consciousness
that requires for its legitimacy the opposition of white racism. Where there exists no possibility of
utility. In Andersons words:

transcending the blackness that whiteness created, African American theologies of liberation must be seen
not only as crisis theologies; they remain theologies in a crisis of legitimation.14 This conversation
becomes more refined as new cultural resources are unpacked and various religious alternatives

Falsehood
is perpetuated through the hermeneutic of return, by which ontological blackness is the
paradigm of Black existence and thereby sets the agenda of Black liberation within the
postrevolutionary context of present day USA. One ever finds the traces of the Black
aesthetic which pushes for a dwarfed understanding of Black life and a sacrifice of
individuality for the sake of a unified Black faith. Yet differing experiences of racial
oppression (the stuff of ontological blackness) combined with varying experiences of class,
gender and sexual oppression call into question the value of their racialized formulations .
Implicit in all of this is a crisis of faith, an unwillingness to address both the glory and guts of
Black existencenihilistic tendencies that, unless held in tension with claims of transcendence,
have the potential to overwhelm and to suffocate. At the heart of this dilemma is friction
between ontological blackness and contemporary postmodern black lifeissues, for
acknowledged. Yet the bottom line remains racialization of issues and agendas, life and love.

example related to selecting marriage partners, exercising freedom of movement, acting on gay and
lesbian preferences, or choosing political parties.15

How does one foster balance while embracing

difference as positive? Anderson looks to Nietzsche. European genius, complete with its heroic epic,
met its match in the aesthetic categories of tragedy and the grotesque genius revived and espoused by
Friedreich Nietzsche. The grotesque genius served as an effective counter-discourse by embracing both the
light and dark aspects of life, and holding in tension oppositional sensationspleasure and pain,
freedom and oppression.16 Utilizing Nietzsches work, Anderson ask: what should African American
cultural and religious criticism look like when they are no longer romantic in inspiration and the cult of
heroic genius is displaced by the grotesqueryfull range of expression, actions, attitudes, behaviors
everything found in African American lifeof contemporary black expressive culture and public life?17

Applied to African Americans, the grotesque embodies the full range of African American
lifeall expressions, actions, attitudes, and behavior. With a hermeneutic of the grotesque
as the foci, religio-cultural criticism is free from the totalizing nature of racial apologetics
and the classical Black aesthetic. By extension, Black theology is able to address both issues of
survival (Anderson sees their importance.) and the larger goal of cultural fulfillment, Andersons version of

placing blackness along side other indicators of identity allows

African Americans to define themselves in a plethora of ways while maintaining their
community status. This encourages African Americans to see themselves as they are
complex and diversifiedno longer needing to surrender personal interests for the sake of
monolithic collective status.
liberation. That is to say,

AT: Ballot K2 Movement

Assigning political value to the ballot makes debate a site
for exclusion
Scott Harris, Director of Debate, Kansas University, 2013, This Ballot, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?
topic=4762.0
This ballot has concerns about the messages this debate sends about what it means to be welcomed into the home of debate.

This
debate seemed to suggest that the sign that debate can be your home is
entirely wrapped up in winning debates . The message seems to be that
the winner is accepted and the loser is rejected. I believe that the arguments Northwestern
Northwestern made an argument that spoke to this concern that could have been more developed in the debate itself.

advanced in the debate that being voted against is not a sign of personal rejection and that voting against an argument should not

To me one of the most

important lessons that debate teaches is that there is a difference
between our arguments and our personhood. One of the problems in out contemporary society is
that people have trouble differentiating between arguments and the identity of the person making the argument. If you
hate the argument you must hate the person making the argument
because we have trouble differentiating people from their arguments . The
be perceived as an act of psychic violence are important arguments to reect on.

reason many arguments end up in violent fights in society is the inability to separate people from their arguments. People outside of
debate (or the law) are often confused by how debaters (or lawyers) can argue passionately with one another and then be friends
after the argument. It is because we generally separate our disagreements over arguments from our opinions about each other as
people. There are two concerns this ballot has about the implications of where this debate has positioned us as a community. First,

the explosion of arguments centered in identity makes it dicult to

separate arguments from people. If I argue that a vote for me is a vote for
my ability to express my Quare identity it by denition constructs a reality
that a vote against me is a rejection of my identity . The nature of
arguments centered in identity puts the other team in a fairly precarious
position in debates and places the judges in uncomfortable positions as well. While discomfort may not necessarily be a bad
thing it has signicant implications for what debating and deciding debates
means or is perceived to mean in socially constructed realities. I hope we can get
beyond a point where the only perceived route to victory for some minority debaters is to rail against exclusion in debate.

The reality is that

many debaters do not win the majority of their debates. The majority of debaters will
never win the NDT. The majority of debaters will never attend the NDT . Every
debate has a loser. Losing should not be a sign of expulsion from the home. Years ago
The second concern is the emphasis on winning as the sign evidence of debate being a home.

on van trips we used to play a game which we called the green weenie award. We would take the results packet and have everyone
in the van guess who was the team that was the bottom seed of the tournament. The game may have had a certain amount of
arrogant cruelty in it. I would sometimes wonder what it was that made the teams who didnt win debates, who didnt ever clear,

As a community we get so caught up sometimes in dening

our wins as successes and our losses as failures that we have lost sight of
what it is that makes debate a special home in the rst place . Debate
cannot only be a home for the winner or it would by denition have
become not a home for the majority of its participants. This ballot hopes that we can learn
to recognize that the experience of losing debates is part of being welcomed in debate as well. Getting the
opportunity to debate itself has tremendous value. The value is not
contained in the win but is contained in the experience itself. As a coach I have to
come back the next week.

remember sometimes that my failures are only failures if I view them as failures. I need to make sure that I value all of my debaters
equally whether they win their debates or lose them. When my teams lose I need to not view them as losers or the judges who
voted against them as villains. Debate is an educational process. We often learn more when we lose than when we win. Debate

Losing is an
inevitable part of life. Debate needs to feel like a home for both the
winners and the losers because all of us experience losing in debate . Learning
tends to attract hyper-competitive people who hate to lose. I hate to lose. I do not want to lose at anything.

how to win with class and lose with dignity is an important life lesson that I need to constantly work on myself. Learning to value the
losses as much as the wins is the hardest part for me but I believe it is vital if debate is really going to be a home for all of its
participants.