1AC

Shift in U.S. doctrine to mass incarceration is merely a descendent of Jim Crow anti-blackness
and maintains white supremacy
Michelle Alexander, civil rights litigator and legal scholar, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. Intro 2010
New York: The New Press.
Imagine if civil rights organizations and African American leaders in the 1940s had not placed Jim Crow
segregation at the forefront of their racial justice agenda. It would have seemed absurd, given that racial segregation was the primary vehicle of racialized social control in the
United States during that period. This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who
care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system.
Mass incarcerationnot attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcementis the most damaging manifestation of the backlash
against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and JimCrow and celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously
misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America todayi.e., the widespread belief that race no longer mattershas blinded
us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system. Clearly much has changed
in my thinking about the criminal justice systemsince I passed that bright orange poster stapled to a telephone pole ten years ago. For me, the new caste systemis now as obvious as my own face in the mirror. Like an optical il lusionone in which the embedded
image is impossible to see until its outline is identifiedthe new caste system lurks invisibly within the maze of rationalizations we have
developed for persistent racial inequality. It is possiblequite easy, in factnever to see the embedded reality. Only after years of working on criminal justice reformdid my own focus finally shift, and
then the rigid caste systemslowly came into view. Eventually it became obvious. Now it seems odd that I could not see it before. Knowing as I do the difficulty of seeing what most everyone insists does not exist, I anticipate that this book will be met with skepticism
or something worse. For some, the characterization of mass incarceration as a "racial caste system" may seemlike a gross exaggeration, if not hyperbole. Yes, we may have "classes" in the United Statesvaguely defined upper, middle, and lower classesand we
may even have an "underclass" (a group so estranged from mainstreamsociety that it is no longer in reach of the mythical ladder of opportunity), but we do not, many will insist, have anything in this country that resembles a "caste." The aim of this book is not to
venture into the long-running, vigorous debate in the scholarly literature regarding what does and does not constitute a caste system. I use the term racial caste in this book the way it is
used in common parlance to denote a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law
and custom. Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration. It
may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new caste system, to think of the criminal justice systemthe entire collection of institutions and practices that comprise itnot
as an independent system but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization
and permanent marginalization. This larger system, referred to here as mass incarceration, is a system
that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual
wallswalls that are invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as effectively as Jim Crow laws once
did at locking people of color into a permanent second-class citizenship. The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice systembut
also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent s ocial exclusion. They are
members of America's new undercaste. The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some. Public discussions about racial caste in America are relatively rare. We avoid
talking about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our racial history. We also avoid talking
about race. We even avoid talking about class. Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one's class reflects upon one's character. What
is key to America's un-derstanding of class is the persistent beliefdespite all evidence to the
contrarythat anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher
class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's
character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole. What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them
are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law fromdoing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put
the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American
community out of the mainstream society and economy. The systemoperates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a systemof
crime control. Viewed fromthis perspective, the so-called underclass is better understood as an undercastea lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and customfrom mainstreamsociety. Although this new
system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy
much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked
system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate
status of a group defined largely by race. This argument may be particularly hard to swallow given the election of Barack Obama. Many will wonder how a nation that just elected its first black president
could possibly have a racial caste system. It's a fair question. But as discussed in chapter 6, there is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of
Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the existence of a racial caste system in the era of
colorblindness. The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it. Others may wonder
how a racial caste system could exist when most Americansof all colorsoppose race discrimination and endorse colorblindness. Yet as we shall see in the pages that follow, racial caste systems do not require
racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.

Legalization inevitable, its only a question of how and when
Washington Times, 4/2/14, George Soros real crusade: Legalizing marijuana in the U.S.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/2/billionaire-george-soros-turns-cash-into-legalized/?page=all
From a constitutional and legal perspective, states can legalize marijuana if they want, and theres
nothing the federal government can do, he said. State after state decided to end the prohibition of
alcohol and forced the federal government to change federal law. What were going to see over next
decade is states repel marijuana prohibition and then the federal government following suit. Its not a
question of whether its going to happen; its a question of when.

Despite increased mobilization for the legalization of marijuana, without recognition of the
massive violence done to communities of color through the War on Drugs we will just re-
create the same system in new formsrefusing to deal with the root cause leads to serial
policy failure
Short 14 (April, staff writer, interviewing Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, 3-14-14, "Legal weeds race problem: White
men get rich, black men stay in prison" Salon)
www.salon.com/2014/03/14/legal_weeds_race_problem_white_men_get_rich_black_men_stay_in_prison_partner/
Ever since Colorado and Washington made the unprecedented move to legalize recreational pot last year,
excitement and stories of unfettered success have billowed into the air. Colorados marijuana tax revenue far exceeded
expectations, bringing a whopping $185 million to the state and tourists are lining up to taste the budding culture (pun intended). Several other states
are now looking to follow suit and legalize. But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When
you flick on the TV to a segment about the flowering pot market in Colorado, youll find that the faces
of the movement are primarily white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people
who were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the
Marijuana Arrest Research Project, remain behind bars . Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for
possession of the very plant thats making those white guys on TV rich. In many ways the imagery doesnt
sit right, said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in a public conversation on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy
Alliance. Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in bigbig money,
big businesses selling weedafter 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and
their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the
same thing? Alexander said she is thrilled that Colorado and Washington have legalized pot and that Washington D.C. decriminalized
possession of small amounts earlier this month. But she said shes noticed warning signs of a troubling trend emerging in
the pot legalization movement: Whitesmen in particularare the face of the movement, and the
emerging pot industry. (A recent In These Times article titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Marijuana Legalization, summarize this trend.)
Alexander said for 40 years poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war on drugs. Black men and boys have
been the target of the war on drugs racist policiesstopped, frisked and disturbedoften before
theyre old enough to vote, she said. Those youths are arrested most often for nonviolent first offenses
that would go ignored in middle-class white neighborhoods. We arrest these kids at young ages,
saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages, and then release them into a parallel social
universe in which the very civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement no
longer apply to them for the rest of their lives, she said. They can be discriminated against [when it
comes to] employment, housing, access to education, public benefits. Theyre locked into a permanent
second-class status for life. And weve done this in precisely the communities that were most in need of
our support. As Asha Bandele of DPA pointed out during the conversation, the U.S. has 5% of the worlds population and
25% of the worlds prisoners. Today, 2.2 million people are in prison or jail and 7.7 million are under the
control of the criminal justice system, with African American boys and menand now womenmaking
up a disproportionate number of those imprisoned. Alexanders book was published four years ago and spent 75 weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list, helping to bring mass incarceration to the forefront of the national discussion. Alexander said over the last four years, as
shes been traveling from state to state speaking to audiences from prisons to universities about her book, shes witnessed an awakening. More and
more people are talking about mass incarceration, racism and the war on drugs. Often when people talk about the reasons certain communities are
impoverished or lack education they blame the personal choices or moral shortcomings of the people in those communities, but that way of looking at
things has got it backwards, she said. That these communities are poor and have failing schools and have broken rules is not because of their personal
failings but because weve declared war on them, she said. Weve spent billions of dollars building prisons and allowing schools to fail. Weve
decimated these communities by shuttling young people from their underfunded schools to these brand new, high tech prisons. Weve begun targeting
children in these communities at young ages. Alexander cautioned that drug policy activists need to keep this
disparity in mind and cultivate a conversation about repairing the damages done by the systemic racism
of the war on drugs, before cashing in on legalization. After waging a brutal war on poor communities
of color, a drug war that has decimated families, spread despair and hopelessness through entire
communities, and a war that has fanned the flames of the very violence it was supposedly intended to
address and control; after pouring billions of dollars into prisons and allowing schools to fail; were
gonna simply say, were done now? Alexander said. I think we have to be willing, as were talking about
legalization, to also start talking about reparations for the war on drugs, how to repair the harm
caused. Alexander used the example of post-apartheid reparations in South Africa to point out the
way a society can and should own up to its past mistakes. After apartheid ended, the nation passed a law called the
Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995. Under the new law, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was
formed to elicit truth about the human rights violations that had occurred. The commission recorded the
statements of witnesses who endured gross human rights violations and facilitated public hearings. Those who had committed
violence could request amnesty from civil and criminal prosecution in order to share testimony about
what theyd done with the commission. At the end of apartheid in South Africa there was an
understanding that there could be no healing, no progress, no reconciliation without truth, she said.
You cant just destroy a people and then say Its over, were stopping now. You have to be willing to
deal with the truth, deal with the history openly and honestly. Alexander pointed to Americas
tendency to shove its racist legacies under the rug rather than own up to them. When the civil war
ended, slaves were free on paper but they were left with nothingno 40 acres and a mule, nothing,
Alexander said. The only option was to work low-paying contract jobs for the same slave owners who
had previously brutalized them. And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was
imposedJim Crowand another extraordinary movement arose and brought the old Jim Crow to its
knees, she said. Americans said, OK, well stop now. Well take down the whites-only signs, well stop
doing that. But there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an
acknowledgement of the harm done except for Martin Luther King Day, one day out of the year. And I
feel like, here we go again. Last week, Obama pushed out an initiative called My Brothers Keeper, focused on helping black boys who
have fallen down the social ladder. Alexander said shes glad Obama is shining a spotlight on the crisis facing black communities. However, she said
Obama has perpetuated the backward way of framing the situation when he talks about the issues facing those communities. I am worried that much
of the initiative is more based in rhetoric than in meaningful commitment to address the structures and institutions that have created the conditions in
these communities, she said. Asked about the unlikely relationship forming between U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Kentuckys Tea Party
senator Rand Paul, both of whom are standing together to end mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, Alexander responded she is
wary of whether these politicians are making the right decisions for the wrong reasons. She cautioned that
politicians across the political spectrum are highly motivated to downsize prisons because the U.S. can no
longer afford to maintain a massive prison state without raising taxes on the predominantly white
middle class. That shortsighted way of thinking fails to recognize the larger societal patterns that keep
the U.S. cycling through various caste-like systems. If were going to downsize these prisons and
change marijuana laws and all that, in order to save some cash, but in that process to change these laws,
we havent woken up to the magnitude of the harm that we have done, she said. Ultimately, at least from my
perspective, this movement to end mass incarceration and this movement to end the drug war is about
breaking our nations habit of creating caste-like systems in America, she said. She added that regardless of whether
theyre struggling with addiction and drug abuse or have a felony on their record, people deserve to be treated with basic human
rights. How were we able to permanently lock out of mainstream society tens of millions of people,
destroy families? she said. If were not going to have a real conversation about that and ultimately be
willing to care for them, the others, those ghetto dwellers whove been demonized in this rush to
declare war, were going to find ourselves years from now either still having a slightly downsized
system of mass incarceration that continues to hum along very well, or we will have managed to
downsize our prisons but some new system of racial and social control will have emerged again
because we have not yet learned the core lesson that our racial history has been trying to teach us.
Historical continuity is keyignoring the continuity slavery and the war on drugs by
describing events as independent rather in their correct historical contexts fails
Michelle Alexander, civil rights litigator and legal scholar, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. 2010 New
York: The New Press.
The Death of Slavery The history of racial caste in the United States would end with the Civil War if the idea
of race and racial difference had died when the institution of slavery was put to rest. But during the four
centuries in which slavery flourished, the idea of race flourished as well. Indeed, the notion of racial difference
specifically the notion of white supremacyproved far more durable than the institution that gave
birth to it. White supremacy, over time, became a religion of sorts. Faith in the idea that people of the
African race were bestial, that whites were inherently superior, and that slavery was, in fact, for blacks'
own good, served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the
democratic ideals espoused by whites in. the so-called New World. There was no contradiction in the bold claim made by
Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal" if Africans were not really people. Racism
operated as a deeply held belief system based on "truths" beyond question or doubt. This deep faith in
white supremacy not only justified an economic and political system in which plantation owners
acquired land and great wealth through the brutality, torture, and coercion of other human beings; it
also endured, like most articles of faith, long after the historical circumstances that gave rise to the
religion passed away. In Wacquant's words: "Racial division was a consequence, not a precondition of slavery, but once it was
instituted it became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency all its own."

Marijuana Reparations are a unique opportunity to spur growth for African Americans,
marginalize the war on drugs and solves underbelly of legalization
Art Way Colorado office manager at Drug Policy Alliance, Will African-Americans benefit from the emerging marijuana industry? April 24,
2014 http://thegrio.com/2014/04/24/will-african-americans-benefit-for-the-emerging-marijuana-industry/ Accessed: 8/27/14
"Medical marijuana user Ezekiel Muses checks out a jar of medical marijuana, that he uses for back pain, at the CANNA CARE
medical marijuana dispensory, in Sacramento, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010. Earlier in the day a coalition of medical marijuana
rights advocates held a news conference to discuss their opposition to Proposition 19, the November ballot initiative that would
legalize the drug for recreational use claiming the measure contains inadaquate protections for medical marijuana patients.(AP
Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) The historic shift in marijuana policy happening around the United States and the
world begs a couple of questions concerning African-Americans. First, will this change in policy benefit or
somehow hurt our community? Second, is no longer having the underground marijuana economy that has, like it or not, been a
supplemental source for income for our young adults and the unemployed or underemployed good in the long run? The drug
war is more effective at continuing the disenfranchisement of the poor and people of color than it is at
preventing drug use, and we argue about whether this was the intended goal in the first place: to
reinforce racism. The results have been undeniably tragic for the African-American community no matter the intent. Thanks to
Michelle Alexander and her book The New Jim Crow, it is common knowledge that drug law enforcement has taken a
disproportionate toll on poor communities of color. No community has borne the brunt of the drug war as much as African-
Americans. This is true despite overwhelming data (and common sense) revealing that we dont use or sell drugs at higher rates than
white people. The drug war fuels mass incarceration, and marijuana prohibition has fueled the drug war.
Nearly half of all arrests nationally involve minor marijuana possession. I knew legalizing marijuana would
change the game as currently played. I was not nave enough to think ending marijuana prohibition or even the drug war as a whole
was a panacea to various root causes that create challenges for African-Americans. However, I knew this was an opportunity to
discuss the racist enforcement of marijuana prohibition, the drug war as a whole, and the negative impact on our communities.
Collateral consequences of even a minor marijuana arrest are barriers to employment, housing, and education for a community that
already faces an uphill battle when it comes to opportunity. Colorado and Washington are in the process of replacing the illicit
marijuana market with a legal one. By the end of the year, these states will likely not be alone. These states will no longer spend
millions to criminalize thousands but will spend millions from recreational marijuana tax revenues to better address the needs of
their citizens. The Latin American nation of Uruguay has already joined them as the first country to legalize marijuana. With the
dramatic move towards legalization, African-Americans should ensure we are not locked out of the
emerging industry. It is unjust for the group that bore the brunt of marijuana enforcement for decades
to benefit by no longer getting arrested but to lack access to the economic gains of the marijuana
industry. Unfortunately, the collateral consequences of drug charges could prevent many of us from
engaging in the legal market due to strict licensing requirements that prevent drug offenders or felons
from taking part. The drug war was fought in our communities, and many of us carry scars that hamper our ability to gain
access. Meanwhile, the already rich will just get richer, and the existing harm to our communities will continue. We urge black
entrepreneurs to research and consider the emerging marijuana industry. Drug Policy Alliance is committed to
starting this conversation with entrepreneurs along with racial and economic justice advocates across the country. Michelle
Alexander joined us recently for a teleconference and spoke to this very issue: I think we have to be willing, as were talking about
legalization, to also start talking about reparations for the war on drugs, how to repair the harm caused. Its time we take
these questions on directly with those who craft policy, business leaders, criminal justice reformers,
and the emerging marijuana industry.

Marijuana should be legalized for adults in the United States, allowing exclusively black
people to produce, distribute, and sell.

Reparations are good, we need to explore a historically accurate discussion of racism in
domestic policy, even if it theyre hard the conversation alone solves
Ta-Nehisi Coates The Case For Reparations The Atlantic May 21, 2014 Accessed 8/14/14
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting Americas origins in a slavery economy is patriotism la carte. Perhaps no
statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our countrys shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-
Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the
wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same. Perhaps after a serious
discussion and debatethe kind that HR 40 proposeswe may find that the country can never fully repay
African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussionand that is perhaps what scares
us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens
something much deeperAmericas heritage, history, and standing in the world. The early American economy was built on slave
labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The
laments about black pathology, the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country
whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An
honest assessment of Americas relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And
this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its
bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal governmentthrough housing policies
engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs,
but we should picture pirate flags. On some level, we have always grasped this. Negro poverty is not white poverty, President
Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences
deep, corrosive, obstinate differencesradiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the
individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past
injustice, and present prejudice. We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and
our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the pastat least when they flatter us. But black history does not
flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed
lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived
something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledgethat white supremacy is not merely the work
of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine
the country without it. And so we must imagine a new country. Reparationsby which I mean the full acceptance
of our collective biography and its consequencesis the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.
The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie.
Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it isthe work of fallible humans. Wont
reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but
cannot saythat American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of
family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the
banishment of white guilt. What Im talking about is more than recompense for past injusticesmore
than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What Im talking about is a national reckoning that
would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts
of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling patriotism while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would
mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great
democratizer with the facts of our history.

Now is key, obligation to end Mass Incarceration
Michelle Alexander, civil rights litigator and legal scholar, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. 2010 New
York: The New Press.
Chapter 6 reflects on what acknowledging the presence of the New Jim Crow means for the future of civil rights advocacy. I argue
that nothing short of a major social movement can successfully dismantle the new caste system.
Meaningful reforms can be achieved without such a movement, but unless the public consensus supporting the
current system is completely overturned, the basic structure of the new caste system will remain intact.
Building a broad-based social movement, however, is not enough. It is not nearly enough to persuade mainstream
voters that we have relied too heavily on incarceration or that drug abuse is a public health problem,
not a crime. If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely
the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care,
compassion, and concern for every human beingof every class, race, and nationalitywithin our nation's borders (including poor
whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the
death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emergeone that
we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is
more urgent for racial justice advocates today than ensuring that America's current racial caste system
is its last.
Marijuana prohibition is distinct, it has been used as a mechanism for social control,
Reparations are key to discussing the historical continuity between prohibition and slavery
anything less means no racial justice
Jelani Hayes media intern at the Drug Policy Alliance, Ending Marijuana Prohibition Must Take a Historical Perspective August 21, 2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jelani-hayes/marijuana-prohibition-history_b_5697152.html Accessed: 8/27/14
When the New York Times called for the federal government to repeal its prohibition of marijuana and let the states decide its fate --
for medicinal or recreational use, production, and sale -- it did not rely solely on issues of the here and now, such as economics,
science, public safety, and current levels of racial disparities in arrests and incarceration rates (all of which are important
considerations). Instead, through the publication of seven pieces, the editorial board provided a more comprehensive argument in
support of their stance, connecting today's legalization movement to the past's criminalization crusade. For the New York Times,
history matters -- as it should for the legalization campaign nationwide. Underlying marijuana prohibition
is a familiar philosophy: to preserve social order and white supremacy and secure profits for an influential few, it
is permissible, even advisable, to construct profit-bearing institutions of social control. Historically, this
philosophy has been advanced by governmental action, guided by special interests. The traditional tactics:
manufacturing mass fear, criminalizing the target or demoting them to a sub-citizen status, and
profiting from their subjugation. Cannabis prohibition did all three. The Times editorial board dedicated an entire
article to explaining this phenomenon. Part 3 of the series begins, "The federal law that makes possession of
marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of hysteria in the
1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, who were
associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted history lives on in current federal
policy, which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is almost impervious to reason." This limited
analysis refers to the refer madness hysteria and xenophobia that infiltrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration.
Additionally, business interests play a part in keeping cannabis illegal. Some pharmaceutical companies, drug-prevention nonprofits,
law enforcement agencies, and the private prison industry have an economic interest in criminalization, what is known as the drug
control industrial complex. It pays big to help fight the war on drugs, and marijuana prohibition is a crucial
facet of that effort. The Nation has recently called these interests "The Real Reason Pot is Still Illegal." The United States
should legalize marijuana. It should also end the drug war, which would be a tremendous and beautiful accomplishment, but
it would not be enough. The war on drugs is a mechanism of social control -- not unlike African slavery, Jim
Crow, alcohol Prohibition, or the systematic relegation of immigrants to an illegal status or substandard existence. Different in their
nature and severity, all of these institutions were tools used to control and profit from the criminalization,
regulation, and dehumanization of minority communities. Legalizing marijuana will not alone rid society
of the tendency to turn fear into hatred, hatred into regulation, and regulation into profit. To address
this cycle, we must put cannabis prohibition (and the drug war) in its historical context and connect the
dots where appropriate. Already we have seen that the reality of legalization does not alone ensure justice
or equality. As law professor and best selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander points out, thousands of black men remain in jail or prison in Colorado (where licit weed
has been on the market since January) while white men make money from the now legal marijuana
market -- selling the drug just as the incarcerated men had done. She warns that legalization without
reparation is not sufficient , drawing the parallel to what happened to black Americans post-
Reconstruction. "And after a brief period of reconstruction a new caste system was imposed -- Jim Crow
-- and another extraordinary movement arose and brought the old Jim Crow to its knees...Americans
said, OK, we'll stop now. We'll take down the whites-only signs, we'll stop doing that," she said. "But there
were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done
except for Martin Luther King Day, one day out of the year. And I feel like, here we go again." Alexander's historical perspective
is warranted because despite the size and intensity of marijuana prohibition, of the drug war in its entirety, its
purpose is not unlike that of Jim Crow or other structural forms of social control and oppression. The
drug war was never about drugs. Therefore, our solution to it can't be either. We must frame the
campaigns for cannabis legalization across the states as civil rights movements -- as institutional
reform efforts -- so that the public might demand justice oriented outcomes from the campaigns . We
must also make the public aware of the dangerous relationship between profit and criminalization so that they can identity the
potential dangerous within the relationship between profit and legalization. We must make legalization about more
than raising tax revenue, increasing civil liberties, and lowering arrests rates for possession (all of which are important and
positive outcomes of legalization, nonetheless). In order to undue the damage -- to the extent that that is possible --
that the criminalization of marijuana specifically and the war on drugs more broadly have caused, we must pay reparations and
retroactively apply reformed drug laws. More importantly, we must undermine the philosophies that allow for the
construction of institutional harm, and we must be able to identify them when they creep up again and be
ready to take action against them, to arm our minds and our bodies against the next wave of social
oppression -- whatever and wherever it may be and to whomever it may be applied. This is my plea to make history matter
so that it doesn't repeat itself -- again, and again, and again.
The aff is not just about financial assistance and an apology we view the debate round as a
space in which we can explore the history of racism and participate in the process of truth
recovery the discussion we begin is an important outlet for letting survivors speak. (also a
solvency deficit to counterplans because they dont do the same discussion)
Maiese 03
(Michelle Maiese, Ph.D. in philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Emmanuel College and Coordinator of the Gender +
Women Studies Program, September 2003, "Compensation and Reparations." Beyond Intractability.,
http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/compensation)
Indeed, financial assistance is inadequate to address the psychological and social justice needs of the
individuals involved. In addition to suffering physical injury, victims of human rights violations typically
suffer psychological injury and emotional distress. Compensation programs that simply pay out financial
grants are not sufficient to help individuals overcome this psychological trauma. This is because the
amount of distress, injustice, and anger that survivors typically struggle with is immeasurable. It is
impossible to compensate for years of sexual abuse or for the loss of a child. Substantial material assistance cannot bring back the
dead or fully ameliorate all of the pain that victims have suffered.[45] To fully address the needs of survivors, states
must go beyond symbolic acknowledgement and monetary compensation and combine these
reparations with the ongoing needs of truth and justice. Victims often feel that the only thing that will
enable them to put the past behind them is the disclosure of truth. Without such disclosure, survivors
may view compensation programs as a governmental strategy to leave the secrets of the past
hidden.[46] And investigations into past crimes are important if victims are to truly come to terms with
the past. For example, state-sponsored truth commissions can conduct hearings for victims and
perpetrators, and provide detailed reports about past events.[47] Similarly, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) can sponsor projects to document past atrocities. Where appropriate, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators
may also contribute to the psychological healing and sense of closure of their victims.[48] Such
procedures break the silence about past human rights abuses, expose past atrocities from victims'
perspectives, and identify victims' needs for rehabilitation.[49] This aids the healing process and restores
their dignity and reputation. In addition, ongoing space must be provided for survivors to deal with the
psychological and emotional impact of the losses they have suffered. Counseling, story-telling, public
exhibitions, theatre, and the media are all important outlets for the feelings and complaints of former
victims.[50] Likewise, community-based self-help groups and advice centers help family members of victims to deal with their loss.
Thus, to truly make amends for past violations, reparation and truth recovery must be linked. Any
compensation programs that do not also encompass such efforts to expose the truth and carry out
restorative justice will be insufficient.

The plan is more than its tangible benefits its symbolic acknowledgment of centuries of
systemic discrimination and the education it provides about American racial history are key
for self-repair, which is the most important part of reparations policy.
Feagin 04
(Joe R. Feagin, Ph.D. in sociology (social relations) from Harvard and was Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and currently
is the Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University where he conducts research on the development of racial prejudice
and discrimination, 2004, Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation, and Contemporary Racism: Why Reparations Are in Order for
African Americans Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal Vol. 20, http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/blj/vol20/feagin.pdf)
Given the long history of generalized racial oppression and economic theft from African Americans by white Americans, and the
trillions of dollars in costs, the idea of reparations need not be seen as radical, but rather as necessarily flowing
from an expandedand morally collective- legal doctrine of redressing conditions of unjust
impoverishment and enrichment. Of course, whites with power and wealth must be made to see this
connection between just compensation and past and present dam ageswhich is essential if a program
of reparations is to become public policy. Once again, aggressive education of the white public about
the truths of American racial history is very important. That is perhaps the first task to be
undertaken in regard to a successful, long-term reparations strategy. One important benefit of
reparations is the psychological and symbolic impact. The provision of reparations would have
significance be yond the tangible compensation, for it would constitute a symbolic recognition of
centuries of systemic racism. At a 1993 Pan-African Confer ence on Reparations in Nigeria, Chinweizu argued that
More important than any monies to be received; more fundamental than any lands to be recovered, is
the opportunity the reparations campaign offers us for the rehabilitation of black people, by black
people, for black people ; opportunities for the rehabilitation of our minds, our material condition,
our collective reputation, our cultures, our memories, our self-respect, our religions, our po litical
traditions and our family institutions; but first and foremost for the rehabilitation of our minds . . .
the most important part of reparation is our self-repair.158

Cannot have discussions about race without acknowledging history, token
acknowledgements are not sufficient to solve
Ogletree 03
(Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Professor at Harvard Law School and is co-chair of the Reparations Movement Coordinating Committee and is lead
attorney in a reparations lawsuit filed in Oklahoma, 2003, Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America Harvard
Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/crcl/vol38_2/ogletree.pdf)
At its most basic level, reparations seeks something more than token acknowledgment of the centuries of
suffering of African Americans at the hands of the state and federal governments, corporations, and
individuals during the three centuries of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. As Randall Robinson notes in his book The Debt: What
America Owes to Blacks, many of our greatest public monuments, including the White House, the Capitol,
and the Jefferson Memorial, were built by slaves. Sadly and re markably, the nations Capitol offers no
tribute to those who constructed our nations most venerable monuments.18 The sacrices of the
African American community for the American nation during slavery, Recon struction, and Jim Crow are too
often forgotten. This is not a casual oversight . Randall Robinson argues persuasively that it is more
insidious.19 The national consciousness of the terrible history of slavery and Jim Crow has been
deliberately repressed into a national subconscious as an ugly part of our national history that we
choose to ignore. The failure to acknowledge this history greatly influences the national debate
about race. If we refuse to consciously confront the nations complicity in enslaving millions of its
subjects and brutalizing millions of its citizens during Jim Crow, then we cannot engage in a
conscientious discussion of race. To invoke our nations responsibility for discrimination is not to play the
victim card21 but to demand the same treatment that other races and ethnicities receive. Accordingly, the
first goal of reparations is to remember and celebrate these forgotten African Americans and insist
that our nation fully acknowledge their many contributions to our countrys economic and political
well-being.

Racial oppression has led to loss of large-scale institutional building among black
communities aff is key to provide the resources necessary for institutional building, which is
key to change the structural realities of the US.
Feagin 04
(Joe R. Feagin, Ph.D. in sociology (social relations) from Harvard and was Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and currently
is the Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University where he conducts research on the development of racial prejudice
and discrimination, 2004, Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation, and Contemporary Racism: Why Reparations Are in Order for
African Americans Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal Vol. 20, http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/blj/vol20/feagin.pdf)

As these focus group quotes suggest, there is much more to the costs of four centuries of racial oppression
than just individual and family costs. Indeed, one of the major costs of this oppression is the loss of
much large-scale institutional development within black communities. Until the desegregation of the
late 1960s, it was almost exclusively whites who had access to key types of resources for institution
building. For example, after World War I, the Air Commerce Act gave air routes to exclusively white-run
companies.58 Access to many other government-controlled, wealth generating resources, such as
mineral deposits and the radio and televi sion airwaves, were kept from black taxpayers by means of blatant
and overt racial discrimination and legal segregation.59 Today, African Americans lack of
socioeconomic resources and accumulated wealth links closely to the continuing lack of access to key
organizations with powerful influence over the structural realities of United States society. To take one
major example, note the mass media. African Americans have no control over any of the major television
or newspaper networks, which means that they do not have significant control over the
stereotypical images and information on African Americans often circulated nationally by these media.
Nor can they circulate the positive information necessary for socializing their children and building their
communities as effectively as they could if they had the power of the white-controlled corporations
that regularly push their own agendas and interests through the media. Research shows that whites
have controlled the often negative images of key government programs, such as affirmative action,
that are of great concern to African Americans.60 African Americans do not even have the power to get the issue of
affirmative action or reparations fully into the mass media for a full positive discussion of the implications of such programs.
Thus, most of the discussion in the mainstream media of such issues has had a decidedly white,
usually conservative, orientation. Contemporary African Americans would have much more control
over the mass media images and discussions if their ancestorswho were in fact in the United States in large
numbers at the time the media were ini tially established (and unlike recent immigrants, who often do better in institutional
building and control)had possessed anything close to equal access to resources for institution building in
their communities.61
Structural violence is the root cause of all conflict
Sulak Sivaraksa (Lecture delivered at India International Centre) 2001 Buddhist Solutions to Global Conflict, http://www.sulak-
sivaraksa.org/docs/speeches/Buddhist-Solutions-to-Global-Conflict.doc
It is very important to understand that nonviolence is an effective and very powerful response to conflict.
Peace is not merely the absence of war. Peace is a proactive, comprehensive process of finding ground through open
communication and putting into practice a philosophy of nonharming and the sharing of resources. [7] Creating a culture of
peace is an active process. When large-scale conflicts erupt, there is no question that they demand a response. The problem
is that many people believe that a nonviolent response means doing nothing, and responding with force or violence means doing
something. The Middle Way of Buddhism defines very well how one should respond to violence. It is about avoiding extremes
neither doing nothing, on the one hand, nor responding with similar violence, on the other. [8] We should not think of violence as
limited to acts of war or terrorism. It is also important to examine structural violence, violence inherent in the very
structures of our cultures and societies. Every day forty thousand people starve to death in a world where there is an
abundance of food. The global economic system enriches a few while every day more and more people are pushed into poverty.
Twenty percent of the worlds population has over eighty percent of the worlds wealth. In order for a few to enjoy wealth, others
must be deprived of a decent livelihood. This is really one of the worlds greatest injustices, the greatest act of
violence. The problem with structural violence is that it is difficult to see. Many people dismiss it, saying thats just the
way things are, or its somehow unavoidable that things be this way. Similarly, many people dismiss nonviolence because they
personally do not see how it can be effective. It does not attract as much attention as violence. Many people do not see how it can
be a solution. The roots of many global conflicts lie in structural violence. The economic forces of globalization,
forced upon much of the world by the countries of the North, transnational corporations, and institutions such as the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), not only condemn many to
poverty but provide a breeding ground for hatred and greed, which in turn gives rise to violence. The
demonic religion of consumerism is based on promoting greed, and in the name of this greed all sorts of
violence is committed. The mass media, which are controlled by the transnational corporations (TNCs), are part of the
problem of structural violence. They distort peoples worldviews and preach the religion of consumerism. They
work hand in hand with TNCs to promote a lifestyle of consumerism and create a global monoculture. Television effectively
brainwashes people and acts as a propaganda machine for TNCs. It deludes people into thinking that the more goods
they accumulate the happier they will be, even though such a consumer lifestyle is unattainable by the majority of the worlds
people and is an ecological impossibility, and to try to attain this unattainable goal inevitably leads to the perpetuation of this
structural violence. Nonviolence can provide a very effective response in situations of global conflict. We can define three types of
response to global conflict: peacemaking, peace building, and peacekeeping. Peacemaking means keeping people from attacking
each other. It is the process of forging a settlement between belligerent sides.




2AC
Positive political strategies are important
Wilderson 10
Frank b. Wilderson III, Prof at UC Irvine, speaking on a panel on literary activism at the National Black Writers Conference, March 26, 2010,
"Panel on Literary Activism", transcribed from the video available at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/222448, begins at roughly 49:10

Typically what I mean when I ask myself whether or not people will like or accept my reading, what I'm really trying to say to myself whether or
not people will like or accept me and this is a difficult thing to overcome especially for a black writer because we are not just black writers, we
are black people and as black people we live every day of our lives in an anti-black world. A world that defines itself in a very fundamental ways
in constant distinction from us, we live everyday of our lives in a context of daily rejection so its understandable that we as black writers might
strive for acceptance and appreciation through our writing, as I said this gets us tangled up in the result. The lessons we have to learn as writers
resonate with what I want to say about literature and political struggle. I am a political writer which is to say my writing is self consciously about
radical change but when I have worked as an activist in political movements, my labor has been intentional and goal oriented. For example, I
organized, with a purpose to say free Mumia Abu Jamal, to free all political prisoners, or to abolish the prison industrial complex here in the
United States or in South Africa, I have worked to abolish apartheid and unsuccessfully set up a socialist state whereas I want my poetry and my
fiction, my creative non fiction and my theoretical writing to resonate with and to impact and impacted by those tangible identifiable
results , I think that something really debilitating will happen to the writing, that it the writing will be hobbled if and when I become clear in
the ways that which I want my writing to have an impact on political struggle what I am trying to say when I say that I want to be unclear is I
don't want to clarify, I do not want to clarify the impact that my work will have or should have on political struggle, is that the relationship
of literature to struggle is not one of causality but one of accompaniment , when I write I want to hold my political beliefs
and my political agenda loosely. I want to look at my political life the way I might look at a solar eclipse which is to say look indirectly, look arie,
in this way I might be able to liberate my imagination and go to places in the writing that I and other black people go to all the time the places
that are too dangerous to go to and too dangerous to speak about when one is trying to organize people to take risk or when a political
organization is presetting a list of demands, I said at the beginning this is an anti-black world. Its anti black in places I hate like apartheid South
Africa and apartheid America and its anti-black in the places I don't hate such as Cuba, I've been involved with some really radical political
movements but none of them have called for an end of the world but if I can get away from the result of my writing, if I can think
of my writing as something that accompanies political struggle as opposed to something that will cause political struggle then
maybe just maybe I will be able to explore forbidden territory, the unspoken demands that the world come to an end, the thing that I cant say
when I am trying to organize maybe I can harness the energy of the political movement to make breakthroughs in the imagination that the
movement can't always accommodate, if its to maintain its organizational capacity.

Minority Participation Adopting a view of power based on philosophical abstraction turns
their attempts to engage politics because minorities need to have political analysis that
relates to the material conditions they face. They make debate less relevant for people of
color
bell hooks 1990, black feminist and author, postmodern blackness
It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the
decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its
critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in
the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a
transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over"
must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of
writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who
passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their
jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will
challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of
constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar critique in the
global issue of _Art in America_ when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has
centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical plane
the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of
any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up
to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about the latent
imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from
investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing. Without adequate
concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in
discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that
critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle.

Blacks do it
Feagin 04
(Joe R. Feagin, Ph.D. in sociology (social relations) from Harvard and was Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and currently
is the Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University where he conducts research on the development of racial prejudice
and discrimination, 2004, Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation, and Contemporary Racism: Why Reparations Are in Order for
African Americans Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal Vol. 20, http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/blj/vol20/feagin.pdf)

Several scholars have suggested that a widely accepted black-led organization would need to be chosen to represent
African Americans in the process of developing and distributing reparations, a step with a number of practical difculties
such as choosing which organizations to include.149 Still, major African American organizations, especially civil rights organi
zations, would likely be involved. Potential black beneciaries could elect their group representatives. A private
trust organization might be set up, which would be administered by elected trustees and nanced by United
States government funds, perhaps for a specically limited period. The trust funds would then be distributed to projects for the
educational, eco nomic, and political empowerment of African Americans.150 Pugh sug gests that a national trust fund administered
by representatives of African Americans might be structured similar to the governments Small Busi ness
Administration, with a board of governors responsible to Con gress.151

Japanese reparations prove theyre feasible
BILAL QURESHI From Wrong To Right: A U.S. Apology For Japanese Internment Code Switch August 09, 2013
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278/japanese-internment-redress Accessed 8/28/14
But decades later and inspired by the civil rights movement, the Japanese American Citizens League
launched a contentious campaign for redress. It divided the community along generational lines. Tateishi became a
leader of the movement. "You have to sometimes bring your community dragging and screaming behind you, but you better have
strong convictions that what you're doing is right," he says. In 1980, Congress responded by establishing a
commission to investigate the legacy of the camps. After extensive interviews and personal testimonies
from victims, the commission issued its final report, calling the incarceration a "grave injustice"
motivated by "racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership." Japanese-Americans
then serving in Congress, including Robert Matsui and Norm Mineta, helped turn that report into legislative
language, providing for tax-free compensation and a formal apology. Mineta has served in two presidential
Cabinets, but he says that bipartisan effort remains one of his proudest achievements. "Today I just feel that Congress is so polarized
that I'm not sure a grassroots movement like this would have the kind of impact that we see resulting in the signing of the bill by
President Reagan in 1988," he says. Tateishi says the redress campaign was less about the compensation for
those who had already suffered and more about the next generation of Americans. "There is a saying in
Japanese culture, 'kodomo no tame ni,' which means, 'for the sake of the children.' And for us running this
campaign, that had much to do with it," he saysi. "It's the legacy we're handing down to them and to the nation to say that, 'You can
make this mistake, but you also have to correct it and by correcting it, hopefully not repeat it again.' "



Link TurnBlack capitalism is a class struggle
Moten 3
Fred Moten; Prof. English @ Duke; In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 14
The value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language,
is only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech its essential materiality is
rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the
commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have
intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not from the outside, and would,
therefore, contradict the thesis on valuethat it is not intrinsicthat Marx assigns it. The speaking commodity thus cuts Marx;
but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by way of an irruption of phonic
substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks
down the distinction between what is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is
that which is out-from-the-outside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such speech
is degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is degraded by a
deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that the [scarred] spoken imposes on the slave its
particular syntax. These material degradationsfissures or invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic
but bounded eroticismare black performances. There occurs in such performances a revaluation or
reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter. It moves by way of the
(phono-photo-porno-)graphic disruption the shriek carries out. This movement cuts and augments the primal. If we return again and again to a
certain passion, a passionate response to passionate utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, an objection, it is because it
is more than another violent scene of subjection too terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the
prefigurative scene of a (re)appropriationthe deconstruction and reconstruction, the improvisational
recording and revaluationof value, of the theory of value, of the theories of value.13 Its the ongoing event of
an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of the birth
and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in
and as (the) reproduction of black performance(s). Its the offset and rewrite, the phonic irruption and rewind, of
my last letter, my last record date, my first winter, casting of effect and affect in the widest possible angle of
dispersion.

Class focus fails, reparations are distinctly key,
Ta-Nehisi Coates The Case For Reparations The Atlantic May 21, 2014 Accessed 8/14/14
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the
long tradition of this country actively punishing black successand the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to
federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that Negro poverty is
not white poverty. But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the
difference. After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to
address the ancient brutality. In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form
of American poverty. But when it came to specifically addressing the particularly destructive, Rustins group demurred, preferring to
advance programs that addressed all the poor, black and white. The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to
address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative
actions precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not
according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected societal discrimination
as an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past. Is affirmative action meant to increase
diversity? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black peoplethe problem of what America has taken from them
over several centuries. This confusion about affirmative actions aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-
imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policys origins. There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action, an appointee in
Johnsons Department of Labor declared. Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include
preferential treatment. Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a
cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this. Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for
anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The
Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class
struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject. The politics of racial
evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude
blacksyet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not
keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the acts expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning
that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually
expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured. All that it would take to sink a new WPA program
would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes, the sociologist Douglas S. Massey
writes. Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.
To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white
supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated
capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact
that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact
that closing the achievement gap will do nothing to close the injury gap, in which black college
graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants
without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.

Pragmatic steps are necessary to solve
Erik Olin Wright, Professor, Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias, SOUNDSINGS, 407,
www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Guidelines-soundings.pdf

5. Waystations The final guideline for discussions of envisioning real utopias concerns the importance of waystations. The central problem of
envisioning real utopias concerns the viability of institutional alternatives that embody emancipatory values, but
the practical achievability of such institutional designs often depends upon the existence of smaller steps, intermediate
institutional innovations that move us in the right direction but only partially embody these values.Institutional
proposals which have an all-or-nothing quality to them are both less likely to be adopted in the first place, and may pose
more difficult transition-cost problems if implemented. The catastrophic experience of Russia in the shock therapy approach to
market reform is historical testimony to this problem.Waystations are a difficult theoretical and practical problem because there are many
instances in which partial reforms may have very different consequences than full- bodied changes. Consider the example of unconditional
basic income. Suppose that a very limited, below-subsistence basic income was instituted: not enough to survive on, but a grant of income
unconditionally given to everyone. One possibility is that this kind of basic income would act mainly as a subsidy to employers who pay very low
wages, since now they could attract more workers even if they offered below poverty level earnings. There may be good reasons to institute
such wage subsidies, but they would not generate the positive effects of a UBI, and therefore might not function as a stepping stone.What
we ideally want, therefore, are intermediate reforms that have two main properties: first, they concretely demonstrate the
virtues of the fuller program of transformation, so they contribute to the ideological battle of convincing people that
the alternative is credible and desirable; and second, they enhance the capacity for action of people, increasing
their ability to push further in the future. Waystations that increase popular participation and bring people together in
problem-solving deliberations for collective purposes are particularly salient in this regard. This is what in the 1970s was called
nonreformist reforms: reforms that are possible within existing institutions and that pragmatically solve real
problems while at the same time empowering people in ways which enlarge their scope of action in the future.

The alt fails, can never succeed without the aff
John Bellamy Foster, Professor, Sociology, University of Oregon, "The Renewing of Socialism: An Introduction," MONTHLY REVIEW v. 57 n.
3, July/August 2005

Socialism cannot survive unless it transcends not only class divisions that divide off those who run the society from those that are
compelled to work mainly on their behalf, but also all other major forms of oppression that cripple human potential and prevent
democratic, social alliances. If any lesson was learned from the experiences of twentieth-century attempts to create socialism it is
that class struggle must be inseparable from the struggles against gender, race, and national oppressionsand against other
forms of domination such as those directed against gays or against those politically designated as the disabled. Socialism also
cannot make any real headway unless it is ecological in the sense of promoting a sustainable relation to the environment, since any
other approach threatens the well-being and even survival of the human species, along with all other species with which we share
the earth. The various forms of non-class domination are so endemic to capitalist society, so much a part of its strategy of divide
and conquer, that no progress can be made in overcoming class oppression without also fightingsometimes even in advance of
the class strugglethese other social divisions. If the political emancipation of bourgeois society constituted one of the bases upon
which a wider human emancipation could be built, a major obstacle to the latter has been the fact that political emancipationthe
realm of so-called inalienable human rightshas remained incomplete under capitalism. That obstacle must in all cases be
overcome as a necessary part of the struggle for a socialist society.

Leftist use class as a tool to divorce themselves from race - means our struggle is a key
starting point to oppose capital
DSRB 08, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, PHD, University of Georgia, 2008
As the 21st Century begins, the image of poverty and welfare has consistently been portrayed by black faces, although the rising
Hispanic population is becoming a representative image of poverty as well.43 Geography and media scholars Myrna Breitbart and Ellen Pader observe: "Interestingly, media
commentaries rarely, if ever, mention racial differences as a 35 barrier to success. Socioeconomic class, a code for race in the national
discourse, provides a way for the reporters to avoid talking about racism."44 Conversations about social ills that are characterized in terms of race or racismare fraught with difficulties.
The general white American society opposes racism, but dislikes taking action to address systemic racism. Thus, Americans are more responsive to
arguments that economic class provides a barrier to achievement and success. Class shields race in our national imagination. It supplements structural and social
racism.45 Low income, poor, urban, and inner city are code words for racial minorities.46 Race becomes argumentatively neutral
as socioeconomic class becomes the explanation of choice for characterizing the issues UDL students face.

Perm solves we must first understand race and class as intertwined
DSRB 08, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION
THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, PHD, University of Georgia, 2008
Reporters do not all neglect race or ethnicity. Considering the connection between socio-economic class and race, that news reporters refer to them
together, affects a certain tangibility to the connection. In other words, class status and race are necessarily associated, such that lower
economic class status often implies a racial character. Low income and Black become synonymous. Thus, low class status marks one
as a racial other and vice versa. While the poverty frame often seems to represent a stand in for race, some journalists do refer to the racial representation of the UDL population. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle notes,
The majority of the students are minorities from lower-income households.54 The Associated Press State and Local Wire describes UDL member schools as places "Where all the
students are minorities and half qualify for free or reduced-price lunches."55 Teacher Magazine observes that "The goal is to offer UDL kids - mostly minorities, 78% of whomlive at or below the poverty level - a shot at improving their verbal, research, and critical-
thinking skills."56 And, the Denver Post argues that since the beginning of the UDL movement, about 12,000 inner-city teenagers 39 mostly Latino and African-American - have flocked to debate.57
In each of the examples, the authors are upfront about the racial representation of the UDL. And, yet their characterization still remains ambivalent. First, mentioning race, instead of allowing class status to
stand in, seemingly disconnects class status from an assumption of race. By mentioning both, the reporters achieve a certain level
of dissociation from the practice I critique above. And yet, simultaneously, the reporters signify minority populations as the
largest proportion of the poor, solidifying the traditional image of poverty as black and brown, not white. While poverty functions as a critical theme in the
representations of the UDL, it is the surrounding frames that provide the poverty frame with its racialized context. It is within this context that we can
map the intersecting networks of both race and gender as critical to decoding the visual and verbal frames in the news stories.
The similar sign value of stereotypes around race, gender, and poverty indicates the similarity of classificatory schemes across
varying ideological networks. Such stereotypes include laziness, licentiousness, criminality, drug abuse, violence and other anti-social behavior.58 Poverty frames are often constructed
through a rhetorical clustering of verbal stereotypes aimed to suggest or imply lower economic status.59 Entman and Rojecki note that these
clusters occur in news representations of poverty and result in an association between poverty and a multitude of other social ills.60 They offer drug abuse, violence, crime, and mental illness as examples of such associations. This study of the news media found
some examples of direct statements referencing class in the UDLs press coverage; yet, my findings are consistent with Entman and Rojeckis findings that the news media rarely refers to poverty directly, but instead uses other stereotypes to imply class status.