WHITENESS K INDEX

STRATEGY SHEET....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
1NC FRAMEWORK..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
FRAMEWORK: AT: POLICYMAKING.......................................................................................................................................................................... 3
TOPICALITY: SOCIAL SERVICES................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
1NC: WHITENESS K.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
LINK: USFG.................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
LINK: PLANS THAT CLAIM TO REFORM WELFARE.................................................................................................................................................3
LINK: SOCIAL SERVICE DISTRIBUTION............................................................................................................................................................3
LINK: WELFARE........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
LINK: CENSUS............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
LINK: QUEER AFF/MARRIAGE PROMOTION.............................................................................................................................................................3
LINK: FAMILY PLANNING.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
LINK: INNOCULATION / MORAL OBLIGATION...............................................................................................................................................3
LINK: WE SOLVE RACISM........................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
LINK: CRITICAL THEORY...................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
LINK: CENSUS............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
LINK: HOUSING......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
LINK: LOANS............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
LINK: POVERTY......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
LINK: OMISSION OF VOICES..................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
IMPACT: NO AFF SOLVO............................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
IMPACT: WAR AND GENOCIDE.................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
IMPACT: SPIRIT MURDER.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
IMPACT: COLONIZATION............................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
IMPACT: DOMINATION............................................................................................................................................................................................3
ALT SOLVES AFF: FRAMING THE DEBATE........................................................................................................................................................3
ALT SOLVES THE AFF MUST EXAMINE RACE...............................................................................................................................................3
ALT SOLVES: PUBLIC DEBATE..............................................................................................................................................................................3
ALTERNATIVE: CHALLENGE WHITENESS KEY TO SOCIAL JUSTICE..........................................................................................................................3
ALTERNATIVE CRITIQUE OF WHITENESS AS PEDAGOGY........................................................................................................................................3
ALT SOLVES: SPURS DISCUSSION........................................................................................................................................................................ 3
ALT SOLVES: DECENTERS THE SUBJECT.........................................................................................................................................................3
ALT SOLVES: PERFORMANCE............................................................................................................................................................................... 3
ALT: RESISTANCE...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
2NC AT: CONSERVATIVE COOPTION / ALT SOLVES................................................................................................................................................3
2NC DEBATE AND SEQUENCING IS KEY...........................................................................................................................................................3
A/T: NO LINK............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
A/T: THIS IS JUST A LINK OF OMISSION.............................................................................................................................................................3
A/T: WHITEWASHING............................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
A/T: CLASS MUST COME BEFORE RACE............................................................................................................................................................3
2NC A/T WHITE SUPREMACY.............................................................................................................................................................................3
2NC AT: PERMUTATION........................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
A/T: STRUCTURAL RACISM DOES NOT EXIST............................................................................................................................................................ 3
2NC A/T: WE ARE POST-RACIAL.............................................................................................................................................................................. 3
AT: YOU TOTALIZE................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
A/T: YOU DONT SOLVE OUR AFFIRMATIVE....................................................................................................................................................3
2NC AT: YOU ARE JUST PLAYING THE RACE CARD..................................................................................................................................................3
2NC: A/T VICTIMIZATION......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
A/T: AFF SOLVES WE GIVE MORE MONEY.....................................................................................................................................................3
A/T: BUT WE SOLVE RACISM.................................................................................................................................................................................3
IMPACT RACISM IS REAL BAD................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
2AC FRAMEWORK..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
AFF: PERMUTATION................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
AFF: WHITE PRIVILEGE FOCUS BAD........................................................................................................................................................................3
AFF TURN: REDEPLOYMENT.................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
NO ALT SOLVENCY..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
AFF: RACISM INEVTIABLE........................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
TURN: WELFARE GOOD............................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
TURN: HIGHLIGHTING RACISM BAD......................................................................................................................................................................... 3
AFF: RACE NEUTRALITY GOOD............................................................................................................................................................................... 3
AFF AT: FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS RACIST............................................................................................................................................................ 3
AFF: TURN WHITE GUILT......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

STRATEGY SHEET
This file includes a ready-to-use 1NC. It includes:
a topicality argument that defines social services as programs designed to reduce dependency. This sets up another link for the
critique.
a framework argument that suggests the purpose of educational policy debate is to support argumentative postures that
promote social justice and challenge systems of oppressions
a critique of the imbedded racial politics in this years topic.
This critique can be run with other arguments and does not require the above strategy to be operable. However, it is our belief that
it will be most successful when run with consistent arguments.
Word to the wise
Discussions of race can be difficult especially in a competitive framework. The purpose of this argument is not to shut down
discussion but create the conditions for a complex and important discussion about racial politics in the united states. We have
selected a way of telling this story that focuses on the importance of focusing debates about poverty that foreground race as both a
cause and a starting point for this discussion. There are many ways of telling and we hope that you will invoke your own stories and
perspectives.
Notes on this file
The 1nc is long please read, highlight, and cut as you see fit. The primary arguments most relevant from our perspective:

1.

when we speak of poverty, we are always already speaking about race. It makes (white) people feel more comfortable to substitute
poverty so they do not have to confront their participation in systems of privilege

2.

this is especially true of policy makers, who not only use race to support their own political aspirations but do not allow poor people
of color to participate in the debates

3.

this reflects a concept of implicit racism or white privilege the ability to control discussion, decide important issues, and access
levers of power all without having to say it aloud

4.

this creates conditions of poverty and racism which have been responsible for the worst injustices in this countrys history and with
dire consequences for the future

5.

the alternative sequence or prioritizes a critique of whiteness above the mythic passage of the plan. this performs a few acts:

a.
b.
c.
d.

it requires that policy debates be attentive to the people they discuss and make policies for
it calls out racism
it creates new communities that are forged around anti-racist struggle
commitment to this type of politics absent the total overhaul of racist privilege is the only value to life.

We would like to thank our amazing lab:

Katie Ray, Paul, Itzel, Kathryn, Michael, Danger, Chelsea, Troy, Helen, Hutch, Aleks, Charlotte, Ian-Conway, Serena, Wyllene,
Christine
Xoxo
the teddy and claire experience

BRICK BY BRICK!
JOSEPH BARNDT, PARISH
RACISM P. 155-56)

PASTOR AND AN ANTIRACISM TRAINER AND ORGANIZER,

1991 (DISMANTLING

To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison
of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep
people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human potential that God
intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman,

and unjust; the effects of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison will inevitably
destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an
inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of
individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time
to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near. The results of centuries of
national and worldwide conquest and colonization, of military buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and
environmental destruction may be reaching the point of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of global
population derives its power and privilege from sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the world
and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.

1NC FRAMEWORK
OUR

INTERPRETATION OF DEBATE IS THAT THE ACTIVITY SHOULD BE ONE WHERE THE OPPRESSION IN
SOCIETY IS ACTIVELY DISCUSSED AND CONTESTED. THE JUDGE SHOULDNT HAVE TO COMPARE
IMPLAUSIBLE IMPACT SCENARIOS THAT IGNORE REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES.

FIRST, FAIRNESS:
A. DEBATE AS CURRENTLY PRACTICED IS UNFAIR. PEOPLE OF MINORITY BACKGROUNDS DO NOT HAVE THE
CHANCE TO EXCEL IN DEBATE BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO ENJOY WHITE
PRIVILEGE. DEBATE IS TOO HIGHLY SPECIALIZED AN ACTIVITY THAT REQUIRES A CERTAIN STANDARD THAT
MUST BE MET BEFORE PARTICIPANTS CAN ENGAGE IN THE ACTIVITY.
B. THE

AFFIRMATIVE TEAM HAS UNLIMITED PREP TIME TO STUDY THEIR CASE FOR ALL OF ITS
IMPLICATIONS. THEYRE BLINDNESS TO WHITE PRIVILEGE DOES NOT MAKE THIS DEBATE UNFAIR. RATHER,
THEIR REFUSAL TO ENGAGE ALL LEVELS OF THEIR 1AC DISCOURSE IS A SERIOUS VIOLATION. IT ALSO
HIGHLIGHTS THE AFFIRMATIVES HUBRIS IN BELIEVING THAT THEIR ACTIONS COULD NOT HAVE POSSIBLY
HAD ANY NEGATIVE REPERCUSSIONS.

SECOND, EDUCATION:
A. POLICY DEBATE SHOULD BE AN OPEN FORUM WHERE DEBATERS CONTEST OPPRESSION IN SOCIETY.
HAVING SUCH OPEN FORUMS WOULD ALLOW FOR REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS TO BE PROPOSED AND
DISCUSSED. POLICY DEBATE IS AN IMPORTANT PLACE FOR STUDENTS TO LEARN ABOUT ACTIVIST POSITIONS
AND HOW WE CAN CONTEST THE STATUS QUO.
B. WELFARE REFORM IS AN INSTITUTION THAT WAS CREATED WITHOUT ACCOUNTING FOR THE VOICES AND
EXPERIENCES OF THOSE WHO LIVE WITHIN THE SYSTEM OF WELFARE. LEARNING ABOUT THE INHERENT
RACISM WITHIN THE WELFARE SYSTEM AND THE RACIAL UNDERTONES OF RACE IN WELFARE REFORM
WILL HELP TO PREVENT THE SYSTEMIC RACISM FROM OCCURING AGAIN.
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY 2003 (RACE AND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE DEVELOPMENT IN
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD
F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
But this is a crucial task if students of American welfare policy (and of American politics and public policy more generally) are to understand some of the profound
paradoxes and dilemmas of our time. Although America is much less segregated and much less outwardly racist than it was a half century

ago, race remains one of the deepest and most intractable dividing lines of contemporary American politics. Despite dramatic
advances in civil and political rights for American minorities, they remain, in many ways, poorly integrated into the welfare state and
into American national life (Schuman et al. Bobo and Smith Gilens i; Lieberman 1998, 1999). In order to understand these curious patterns of our
own day, it is essential that we begin to explore not simply how America's peculiar and distinctive racial culture affects our politics but
how patterns of historical embeddedness have shaped the possibilities of politics how race is "built into" American political
institutions and practices in both visible and invisible ways.
In the 1990s, as Americans turned once again to welfare reform, the place of African Americans in the political system was once again of critical importance in shaping
social policy. While they remained overwhelmingly Democratic voters, African Americans were no longer at the center of the Democratic party's national agenda.
Touting his credentials as a "new Democrat," Bill Clinton promised to move his party away from its focus on issues of civil rights and poverty and toward issues that
would woo back the white working and middle class constituencies that had abandoned the party in the wake of the 196os. At the same time, Republicans

"mastered a politics permeated by race coded messages that played on the anxieties of white Americans" in order to retain the loyalty
of those same constituencies (Williams 1998). With African Americans increasingly marginal to the political strategies of both parties,
increasingly isolated from the center of American politics, and increasingly linked in the public mind with the pathologies associated
with welfare, the conditions were bleak for African American participation in a broad, solidaristic welfare policy coalition . It was these
structural conditions that set the stage for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Armed with a historical and comparative
account of the limited roles of race and welfare in American politics, we can better understand how this reform came to pass and what it might mean for the fate of
minorities under the new welfare regime and for the future of race politics.

1NC FRAMEWORK
C. IT

IS IMPORTANT TO HEAR THE STORIES OF THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN MARGINALIZED. TOO OFTEN THE
POLITICAL PROCESS IGNORE THOSE WHO THE POLICIES AFFECTS. MINORITIES FIND THEMSELVSE WITHOUT
AN OPEN FORUM TO CONTEST THE OPPRESSION AND SYSTEMIC RACISM THEY FEEL. DEBATE SHOULD
CREATE SUCH SPACES FOR PEOPLE TO HAVE OPEN DISCCUSIONS AND VOICE THEIR OPINIONS AND IDEAS. IT
IS NECESSARY TO ACCOUNT FOR ALL VIEWPOINTS WITHOUT PATRONIZING OTHERS.
Holloway Sparks, asst prof of political science, Penn State, 2003 (Queens, Teens, and Model Mothers Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Paperback) by
Sanford F. Schram (Editor), Joe Soss (Editor), Richard C. Fording (Editor))
In spite of the participatory principles embodied in these theories, some deliberative democrats have given inadequate attention to the barriers to public sphere
participation confronted by marginalized citizens. Activists, dissidents,, racial and ethnic minorities, and particularly poor citizens are regularly

excluded from both decision making and deliberative venues, but this problem is often sidestepped in the mainstream theoretical
literature by theorists who downplay the effects of social and economic inequality on public participation (see, e.g., Barber 1984; Cohen
1989; Dryzek '99). The claim that we can effectively bracket inequality in the public sphere, however, has been strongly criticized
recently by a group of theorists explicitly concerned with problems of democratic inclusion . These scholars, including James Bohman ('996),
Nancy Fraser (r7), Jane Mansbridge (i5ir, 1999), and his Young (1993, 1996, woo), have emphasized the fact that formal political equality does not guarantee equal
authority in or even access to the public realm.

Iris Young, for example, has identified two forms of exclusion that prevent citizens from fully participating in democracies. What she
calls external exclusion "names the many ways that individuals and groups that ought to be included are purposely or inadvertently
left out of fora for discussion and decision making " (zooo, 53 54). External exclusion can be as blatant as deliberately failing to invite
certain groups to important meetings, or can take more subtle forms such as the way economic inequalities affect access to political
institutions. As Nancy Fraser has noted, in societies like the United States in which the publication and circulation of political views depends on media organizations
that are privately owned and operated for profit, those citizens who lack wealth will also generally "lack access to the material means of equal participation". This
criticism has obvious salience for families living on welfare budgets. On a more basic level, money and time are also necessary for
participation in putatively "free" political institutions. Poor parents with young children, for example, might not have the resources to
purchase child care in order to attend a town council meeting at which important political decisions are made .3
Internal exclusions, in contrast, "concern ways that people lack effective opportunity to influence the thinking of others even when
they have access to fora and procedures of decision making " (Young 2000, 55; emphasis added). Citizens may find that "others ignore or
dismiss or patronize their statements and expressions. Though formally included in forum or process, people may find that their claims
are not taken seriously and may believe that they are not treated with equal respect" (fl).
Internal exclusion can take the form of public ridicule or face to face inattention (Bickford 5996), but it can also stem from less obvious
sources, such as the norms of articulateness, dispassionateness, and orderliness that are often privileged in political discussions (Young
2ooo, 6). As Young observes,
In many formal situations the better educated white middle class people often act as though they have a right to speak and that their
words carry authority, whereas those of other groups often feel intimidated by the argument requirements and the formality and rules
of parliamentary procedure, so they do not speak, or speak only in a way that those in charge find "disruptive." . . . The dominant
groups, moreover, often fail entirely to notice this devaluation and silencing, while the less privileged often feel put down or
frustrated, either losing confidence in themselves or becoming angry. (5996, 114)
Since "unruly" forms of speech tend to be used primarily by women, racial minorities, and working class people, large groups of
citizens face the devaluation of their political participation.

D. OUR

FRAMEWORK IS KEY TO DEBATE AS STUDENTS ARE FORCED TO RECKON WITH WHITE PRIVILEGE
AND ALL OF ITS COMPONENTS. IN RECOGNIZING THESE IMPLICIT PRIVILEGES WE ARE ABLE TO FACE
OPPRESSION AND COMBAT ITS CONSEQUENCES. IN MAKING THIS DEBATE ABOUT THE SYSTEMIC RACISM
PRESENT IN DEBATE AND IN THIS ROUND, WE HAVE INCREASED EDUCATION LEVELS ON THE ISSUES THAT
ARE IMPORTANT AND NECESSARY FOR DISCUSSION. THEREFORE THE ROLE OF THE BALLOT IS TO EVALUATE
WHICH TEAM HAS INTRODUCED REAL WORLD EDUCATION INTO THIS ROUND.

FRAMEWORK: AT: POLICYMAKING

THE AFFIRMATIVES INTERPRETATION OF DEBATE IS A CONSTRUCT A STORY WITH A HISTORY WE
SHOULD NOT ACCEPT POLICY MAKING AS A NATRUAL GIVEN, BUT PART OF AN INHERETED SET OF
BELIEFS INDEBTED TO WHITE PRIVILEGE.
CHARLES W. MILLS, PROFESSOR OF MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY AT JOHN EVANS, 2007
[RACE AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF IGNORANCE, STATE UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK PRESS, 28-30]
Tenth, and finally, the point of trying to understand white ignorance is, of course, normative and not merely sociological -hence the
emphasis on the continuity with classic epistemology-the goal of trying to reduce or eliminate it. In classic individualist epistemology, one seeks not merely to

eliminate false belief but to develop an understanding, wariness, and avoidance of the cognitive processes that typically produce false
belief. For a social epistemology, where the focus is on supra-individual processes, and the individual's interaction with them, the aim is to understand how certain
social structures tend to promote these crucially flawed processes, how to personally extricate oneself from them (insofar as that is possible), and to do one's part in
undermining them in the broader cognitive sphere. So the idea is that there are typical ways of going wrong that need to be adverted to in light of the social structure
and specific groupcharacteristics, and one has a better chance of getting things right through a self -conscious recognition of their existence,

and corresponding self distancing from them.

Let us turn now to the processes of cognition, individual and social, and the examination of the ways in which race may affect some of their crucial components. As
examples, I will look at perception, conception, memory, testimony, and motivational group interest (in a longer treatment, differential group experience should also be
included). Separating these various components is difficult because they are all constantly in interaction with one another. For example, when the individual cog nizing
agent is perceiving, he is doing so with eyes and ears that have been socialized. Perception is also in part conception, the viewing of the world through a particular
conceptual grid. Inference from perception involves the overt or tacit appeal to memory, which will be not merely individual but social. As such, it will be founded on
testimony and ultimately on the perceptions and conceptions of others. The background knowledge that will guide inference and judgment, eliminating
(putatively) absurd alternatives and narrowing down a set of plausible contenders, will also be shaped by testimony, or the lack thereof, and will itself be
embedded in various conceptual frameworks and require perception and memory to access. Testimony will have been recorded, requiring again perception,
conception, and memory; it will have been integrated into a framework and narrative and from the start will have in volved the selection of certain voices as against
others, selection in and selection out (if these others have been allowed to speak in the first place). At all levels, interests may shape cognition,

influencing what and how we see, what we and society choose to remember, whose testimony is solicited and whose is not, and
which facts and frameworks are sought out and accepted . Thus at any given stage it is obvious that an interaction of great complexity is involved, in
which multiple factors will be affecting one another in intricate feedback loops of various kinds. So an analytic separation of elements for conceptual isolation and
clarification will necessarily be artificial, and in a sense each element so extracted bears a ghostly trail of all the others in its wake.
Start with perception. A central theme of the epistemology of the past few decades has been the discrediting of the idea of a raw perceptual "given," completely
unmediated by concepts. Perceptions are in general simultaneously conceptions, if only at a very low level. Moreover, the so cial dimension of epistemology is
obviously most salient here, since individuals do not in general make up these categories themselves but inherit them from their cultural milieu. "The influence of social
factors begins at birth, for language is not reinvented by each individual in social isolation, nor could it be. Because language acquisition is socially medi ated, the concepts we acquire are themselves socially mediated from the very beginning " (Kornblith 1994a, 97). But this means that the conceptual array with which the cognizer approaches the world needs itself to be scrutinized for its adequacy to the world, for how well it maps the re ality it claims to be
describing. In addition, it is not a matter of monadic predicates, reciprocally isolated from one another, but concepts linked by interlocking assumptions and
background belief sets into certain complexes of ideation that by their very nature tend to put a certain inter pretation on the world. So in
most cases the concepts will not be neutral but oriented toward a certain understanding, embedded in subtheories and larger theories about how things work.

TOPICALITY: SOCIAL SERVICES

A) INTERPRETATION: SOCIAL SERVICES MUST BE TARGETED TOWARDS
GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS.
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 2008
(HTTP://WWW.ACF.HHS.GOV/PROGRAMS/OCS/SSBG/PROCEDURES/OVERV.HTML)

ELIMINATING DEPENDENCY ON

Services funded by the SSBG must be directed at one or more of five broad statutory goals:
* Achieving or maintaining economic self-support to prevent, reduce, or eliminate dependency
* Achieving or maintaining self-sufficiency, including reduction or prevention of dependency
* Preventing or remedying neglect, abuse, or exploitations of children and adults unable to protect their own interest or preserving, rehabilitating, or reuniting
families
* Preventing or reducing inappropriate institutional care by providing for community-based care, home-based care, or other forms of less intensive care
* Securing referral or admission for institutional care when other forms of care are not appropriate or providing services to individuals in institutions

B) VIOLATION: THE
UNCONDITIONALLY.

AFFIRMATIVE INCREASES DEPENDENCY ON WELFARE BY EXTENDING BENEFITS

C) STANDARDS
1) LIMITS: THERE ARE AN UNLIMITED NUMBER OF COMBINATIONS OF CONDITIONS THAT CAN BE REMOVED
FROM SOCIAL SERVICES, PLUS ANY EXPANSION OF CURRENT PROGRAMS. THIS MAKES AN IMPOSSIBLE
RESEARCH BURDEN AND ALLOWS THE AFF TO CLAIM UNPREDICTABLE ADVANTAGES.
2) GROUND: ALLOWING

THE AFFIRMATIVE TO CREATE PERMANENT INCLUSION ON SOCIAL SERVICES

DESTROYS NEGATIVE KRITIK LINK AND COUNTERPLAN GROUND.

3) MAKES

THE TOPIC BIDIRECTIONAL: ALLOWING THE AFFIRMATIVE BOTH WELFARE GOOD AND BAD
GROUND MEANS THERES NO STABLE POSITION FOR THE NEG.

D) VOTING ISSUE FOR FAIRNESS AND EDUCATION.

1NC: WHITENESS K
FOR MANY, THE ELECTION OF THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT USHERED IN A NEW ERA OF RACIAL
CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES. BUT CONTRARY TO THE AFFIRMATIONS OF A POST-RACIAL
SOCIETY WHERE DIFFERENCE IS RESPECTED - IT TURNS OUT THAT THE POLITICS OF RACE ARE STILL
WREAKING INVISIBLE HAVOC ON MEMBERS OF OUR COMMUNITY
GIROUX, GLOBAL TV NETWORK CHAIR IN ENGLISH AND CULTURAL STUDIES AT MCMASTER UNIVERSITY, 2009
(H.A. YOUTH AND THE MYTH OF POST-RACIAL SOCIETY UNDER BARACK OBAMA, P.
HTTP://WWW.ZMAG.ORG/ZNET/VIEWARTICLE/21304)
With the election of Barack Obama, it has been argued that not only will the social state be renewed in the spirit and legacy of the
New Deal, but that the punishing racial state and its vast complex of disciplinary institutions will, if not come to an end, at least be
significantly reformed.[1] From this perspective, Obama's presidency not only represents a post-racial victory, but also signals a new space of post-racial
harmony. In assessing the Obama victory, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote, "It is a place where the primacy of racial identity - and this includes the old Jesse
Jackson version of black racial identity - has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy."[2] Obama won the 2008 election because he was
able to mobilize 95 percent of African-Americans, two-thirds of all Latinos and a large proportion of young people under the age of 30. At the same time, what is
generally forgotten in the exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket. While "post-racial" may
mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely premature - it is an act of willful denial and ignorance.
Paul Ortiz puts it well in his comments on the myth of post-racialism:
The idea that we've moved to a post-racial period in American social history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events . Hurricane
Katrina. The US Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of Civilizations
thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex. [Moreover] ...
[w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News
and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[3]

Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative
revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare "Queens"; Bill Clinton's cheerful
compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's "willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social
problems."[4] In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the emergence of policies that have amplified the power of the racial state and

expanded its mechanisms of punishment and mass incarceration, the consequences of which are deeply racist - even as the state and its
legal apparatuses insist on their own race neutrality.
The politics of racism has hardly disappeared from the landscape of American culture and the institutions that support it . Poor minority kids now find themselves
on a fast tack extending from school to juvenile courts to prison. And the number of poor and minority kids, now aptly called the "recession generation" by Dr. Irwin
Redlener, president of New York City's Children's Health fund, has increased from 13 million before the economic meltdown to an expected 17 million by the end of the
year. And who are these kids? These are the kids marginalized by race and class, who are largely seen either as a drain on the economy or stand
in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism and the whitewashed fantasies of a cleansed, Disneyfied social order . These are
kids who, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society.
Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of
socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in colorblind America. Most of them, if not homeless, live in dilapidated housing, attend schools that are underfunded
and literally falling apart, receive food stamps and eat mostly junk food when they can get it. They are the major targets of gun violence, lack decent health care and
they often find themselves in hospital emergency rooms. These are the kids who experience daily, whether on the street or in school, draconian discipline policies that
endlessly criminalize every aspect of their behavior and increasingly banish them from the very institutions such as schools that remain their last chance for getting a
fair shake in life. It gets worse. For instance, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts, by the time they reach their mid-thirties, will be prisoners or ex-cons and
the drop out rate is as high as 65 percent in some cities.[5] This apartheid-based system of incarceration bodes especially ill for young black males. According to Paul
Street:
It is worth noting that half of the nation's black male high-school dropouts will be incarcerated - moving, often enough, from quasi-carceral lock-down high schools to
the real "lock down" thing - at some point in their lives. These dropouts are over represented among the one in three African American males aged sixteen- to twentyyears old who are under one form of supervision by the US criminal justice system: parole, probation, jail, or prison.[6]
As the toll in human suffering increases daily, Obama and his Wall Street advisers bail out the banks and the rich just as crucial social services for children are being cut
back, unemployment is soaring into record numbers and more and more youth of color are disappearing into an abysmal pit of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Raised
in a blood-drenched culture of violence mediated by an economic Darwinism that harbors a rabid disdain for the common good, poor minority kids appear to be
completely off the radar of public concern and government compassion. And Obama, for all of his soaring poetic imagery of unity and justice, falls flat on his face by
allowing his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan to offer up reform policies that amount to nothing more than another version of Bush's No Child Left Behind with its
anti-union ideology and obsessive investment in measurement and accountability schemes that strips any talk of educational reform of any viability while turning
schools into nothing more than testing factories - policies that disproportionately punish brown and black youth. These racially exclusionary set of policies and
institutions have become especially cruel since the beginning of the neoconservative revolution in the 1980s, and are not poised to disappear soon under the presidency
of Barack Obama - in fact, given the current economic crisis, they may even get worse.
In short, the discourse of the post-racial state ignores how political and economic institutions, with their circuits of repression and
disposability and their technologies of punishment, connect and condemn the fate of many impoverished youth of color in the inner cities to persisting structures of
racism that "serve to keep [them] in a state of inferiority and oppression."[7] Not surprisingly, under such circumstances, individual suffering no longer registers a social

[GIROUX CONTINUES, NO TEXT DELETED]

1NC: WHITENESS K
[GIROUX CONTINUES, NO TEXT DELETED]
concern as all notions of injustice are assumed to be the outcome of personal failings or deficits. Signs of the pathologizing of both marginalized youth and the crucial
safety nets that have provided them some hope of justice in the past can be found everywhere from the racist screeds coming out of right-wing talk radio to the
mainstream media that seems to believe that the culture of black and brown youth is synonymous with the culture of crime. Poverty is now imagined to be a

problem of individual character. Racism is now understood as merely an act of individual discrimination (if not discretion), and
homelessness is reduced to a choice made by lazy people.
Unfortunately, missing from the discourse of those who are arguing for the kind of progressive change the Obama administration should
deliver is any mention of the race-based crises facing youth and the terrible toll it has taken on generations of poor black and brown kids. Bringing this
crisis to the forefront of the political and social agenda is crucial, particularly since Obama, in a number of speeches prior to assuming the presidency, refused to adopt
the demonizing rhetoric often used by politicians when talking about youth. Instead, he pointedly called upon the American people to reclaim young people as an
important symbol of the future and democracy itself:
[C]ome together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and
Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who
don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids.[8]
But if Barack Obama's call to address the crucial problems facing young people in this country is to be taken seriously, the political, economic and

institutional conditions that both legitimate and sustain a shameful attack on poor minority youth have to be made visible, open to
challenge and transformed. This can only happen by refusing the race-based somnambulism and social amnesia that coincide with the
pretense of post-racial politics and society, especially when the matter concerns young people of color . To reclaim poor minority youth as part
of a democratic vision and a crucial symbol of the future requires more than hope and a civics lesson: It necessitates transforming the workings of racist
power arrangements both in and out of the government along with the market-driven institutions and values that have enabled the rise
of a predatory corporate state and a punishing state that have produced a polity that governs through the logic of finance capital,
consumerism, crime, disposability and a growing imprisonment binge.
The marriage of economic Darwinism and the racialized punishing state is on full display not merely in the rising rate of incarceration for black and brown people in the
United States, but also in places like East Carroll Parish in Louisiana where inmates provide cheap or free labor at barbecues, funerals, service stations, and a host of
other sites. According to Adam Nossiter, "the men of orange are everywhere" and people living in this Louisiana county "say they could not get by without their
inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and
disposable....You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. 'They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning,' said Grady Brown,
owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. 'They do anything you ask them to do....' 'You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the afternoon,' said
Paul Chapple, owner of a service station."[9] Nossiter claims that the system is jokingly referred to by many people who use it as "rent a convict" and is, to say the least,
an "odd vestige of the abusive-convict-lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction."[10] This is not merely an eccentric snapshot of small town racism,
it is also an image of what kind of future poor minority youth might inhabit.
Treating prisoners as commodities to be bought and sold like expendable goods suggests the degree to which the punishing state has divested itself of any moral
responsibility with regard to those human beings who, in the logic of free-market fundamentalism, are considered either as commodities or as waste products, and this is
true especially of young people. At the same time, as racism has been relegated to an anachronistic vestige of the past, especially in light of

Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the workings of the punishing state are whitewashed and removed from the racialized
violence that deeply influences and constrains the lives of so many young people . Consequently, the American public becomes
increasingly indifferent to the ways in which the practices of a market-driven society - market deregulation, privatization, the hollowing out of the
social state and the disparaging of the public good - wage a devastating assault on African-American and Latino communities, young people and, increasingly,
immigrants and other people of color, who are relegated to the borders of American normalcy. Alarmingly, the punishing state, when coupled with the growing
disappearance of newspapers and other crucial public spheres, not only produces vast amounts of inequality, suffering and racism, but also
propagates collective amnesia, cynicism and moral indifference.

1NC: WHITENESS K
IT IS AT THE POVERTY LINE THAT THIS TYPE OF RACIAL POLITICS APPEARS IN THE MOST VIVID FORM.
WHILE PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT RACES CERTAINLY EXPERIENCE POVERTY, IT CERTAINLY PAYS TO BE
WHITE
WISE, OLIVER L. BROWN DISTINGUISHED VISITING SCHOLAR FOR DIVERSITY ISSUES AT WASHBURN UNIVERSITY,
2009 (TIM, WHEN EXCEPTIONS PROVE THE RULE, POVERTY, WHITENESS AND PRIVILEGE,
HTTP://WWW.ZMAG.ORG/ZNET/VIEWARTICLE/20912)
the claim of white privilege as a social phenomenon is merely one that argues this: the lives white
people lead are substantively enhanced, materially and psychologically, vis-a-vis people of color, due to whiteness . The key words here are
As a second consideration, remember that

the lives white people lead. In other words, the real, on-the-ground lives of real white people, not lives and people in the abstract. This is critical to understand, because
the lives we lead are mediated by other social truths. So, in the U.S., for instance, we live lives that take place within a class system. Thus, in the real world
competitions for "stuff," white poor folks are not up against rich black people. Mostly, they are competing for jobs, educations and housing against poor folks of color.
Likewise, rich competes against rich, middle class against middle class and so-on. The claim of white privilege presupposes that that privilege plays

out in an intra-class manner. And can anyone really deny that when poor whites and poor folks of color vie for opportunities, that it
pays to be white? Or that when middle class whites compete against similarly situated blacks and Latinos, that whites have the edge? Bottom line: to test a social
science hypothesis it goes without saying that you need to control for other factors that could influence outcomes, like, in this case, class.
So, in the case of Appalachians, the proper test of their racial privilege (or lack thereof) would be to compare whites in the region with blacks in the same region and to
then ask, do whites have an advantage or privileges relative to their regional counterparts of color? That most people aren't even aware of the existence of blacks in
Appalachia (though they comprise about 6 percent of the region's population, and are among some of the poorest) seems a pretty good answer to that question. That

whites are the ones we instantly think of when we think of Appalachian poverty, and the ones for whom we typically then express such
great sympathy, seems to indicate a very substantial kind of privileging; a kind that erases from our consciousness altogether, the
problem of rural black poverty as though it were a non-factor.
And indeed there is far more sympathy expressed for the white poor, historically and today, than for the black and brown poor: another
form of implicit preference for, and privileging of, whiteness. Now that the economy is imploding, one can hear concern expressed
about the poor (especially the once middle-class poor, mostly constructed as white), and how terrible it is that they are now facing
such hardships. Yet when those same hardships were being experienced by the urban black and brown (whose communities have been
in a recession or even depression state for entire generations in some cases) little sympathy attached . Indeed, as Martin Gilens explained in his
book Why Americans Hate Welfare, as the media imagery of the poor began to shift in the early 1970s, from mostly white and rural to mostly black and urban, public
animosity towards the impoverished rose in lockstep. As contrasted with the mostly sympathy-filled portrayals of the Dust Bowl poor in the 30s, or the white families
that were losing their farms in the 80s, black families suffering under the combined forces of the decline in city-based manufacturing employment, as well as racism,
redlining by banks and neglect of urban school infrastructure, were viewed as responsible for their own plight.
The simple truth is, working people are not all in the same boat, and white working class folks have real advantages. Black and Latino

workers are typically the first fired in an economic downturn, and remain twice as likely to be unemployed and 3-4 times as likely to
be poor, in good times or bad; and white high school dropouts are twice as likely to find work as similarly uneducated African Americans.
Furthermore, according to Thomas Shapiro's groundbreaking work on the racial wealth divide, whites in the bottom fifth of all white households (in
terms of income) have, on average seven times the net worth of similar black s. In large part this is due to a major advantage in home ownership and
thus equity, due to passed down property from parents. Indeed, as Shapiro and his colleague Melvin Oliver have found (and chronicled in their book, Black
Wealth/White Wealth), whites with incomes below $13,000 are more likely to own their own homes than blacks with incomes that are three times higher, largely due to
these intergenerational transfers of wealth.
None of this takes away from the real economic struggles faced by millions of white families. But it does suggest that people of color face those struggles and

then explicitly racial ones too. To acknowledge this truism does not mean that racism is more important than classism, or that issues of
poverty should take a back seat . But to avoid the conversation about racism and white privilege is to evade a fundamental truth .
What's more, finessing the topic will likely make it hard for people of color to trust white liberals and leftists, the latter of whom seem to
prefer a color-blind class unity, not realizing that the unity they claim to seek can never be built on a foundation of half-truths and
convenient fictions.

1NC: WHITENESS K
THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT ONE SOLUTION COULD BE THE EXPANSION OF SOCIAL SERVICE PROGRAMS.
BUT, BEFORE POLICY MAKERS RUSH TO PAT OURSELVES ON THE BACK FOR A MORAL JOB WELL DONE,
WE SHOULD NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKE OF FORGETTING RACIAL POLITICS. RACE IS PRESENT AT EVER
SINGLE MOMENT OF POLICY MAKING IN CONCEPTION, CONSTRUCTION, DEBATE, AND
IMPLEMENTATION. TO WISH AWAY THE INSIDIOUS OPERATION OF WHITE PRIVILEGE IS AN APOLOGY
FOR DISCRIMINATION
FRANCES FOX PIVEN, PROF OF SOCIOLOGY, CUNY GRADUATE CENTER, 2003(WHY WELFARE IS RACIST, THE
POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM, JOE SOSS , RICHARD C. FORDING)
In a racist society, it is inevitable that policies to assist the poor will be designed to shore up racial hierarchy . Thus, where the
labor system is organized around racial distinctions, so will assistance programs reflect and reiterate those distinctions. Otherwise the
too generous provision of assistance to racially subordinate groups would create an alternative to the low wage labor to which they are
consigned, thus undermining the racial basis for allocating work and its rewards. And so will political institutions tend to discriminate,
privileging those at the top of the racial hierarchy, and muffling the prospects for influence by those at the bottom. Were it otherwise,
the disadvantaged would mobilize to pressure government to improve their prospects by intervening in labor arrangements and other
social institutions. Thus, the political institutions of the American racial order have always privileged sectional and employer interest
groups, while the electoral representative arrangements that partially offset interest group influence nevertheless systematically
underrepresent racial minorities. It follows that American social programs, created and shaped over time in large part by interest group
influence and electoral pressure, reflect those institutionalized political inequalities . The broad result in social policy is often commented upon.
Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in the more generous social insurance programs, and overrepresented in the residual and
more niggardly[stingy] programs we call "welfare." And these residual programs tend to treat minorities more harshly than others of the
poor, as the essays in this book demonstrate. 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 statements that
characterized our history. Michael Brown focuses on the important historical relationship between American fiscal federalism and welfare racism.

10

1NC: WHITENESS K
IT ONLY TAKES A QUICK HISTORICAL GLANCE TO RECOGNIZE THAT THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE
INCLUDED IN POLICY REGARDING SOCIAL SERVICES, POOR PEOPLE OF COLOR, ARE NOT INVOLVED IN
ANY PORTION OF THE DEBATE. THIS IS NOT A SIN OF OMISSION BUT PART OF A CONSTELLATION OF
RACISM THAT PROMOTES THE INTEREST OF WHITE ELITES.
KOHLER-HAUSMAN, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS- URBANA-CHAMPAIGN,
2007 (JULILLY, THE CRIME OF SURVIVAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY, )
The state's anti-fraud campaign framed welfare recipients, who were already burdened in the public discourse by the intersecting
stigma of race, class, and gender, as deceptive criminals . This obscured families' material conditions and discursively constructed an isolated, suspect
population. Cultural assumptions evident in this rhetoric were translated into policies that scrutinized and punished recipients while
simultaneously constricting the availability of material support to low-income people . Additionally, these policies converged with other
state initiatives, such as punitive criminal sentencing procedures, to help solidify the public perception of a racialized, criminal
"culture of poverty." Historical work about welfare has traced the evolution of discourse, changes in policy, and the campaigns of activists and reformers.
Scholars have revealed the profound influence of racial exclusion in the development of social programs .5 Others have shown how
gendered assumptions and the wide acceptance of the male breadwinner model caused Aid to Families with Dependent Children (or AFDC) to be more stigmatized and
paltry than programs assumed to serve men.6 Researchers such as Michael Katz and Herbert Gans have studied how elite discourse about welfare, "the
underclass," and the "ghetto poor" reworked the centuries-old traditional distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor .7

Taken together, this scholarship establishes the profound ways that welfare programs have always been intertwined with the politics of
maintaining racial, class, and gender hierarchies .8 These works are primarily national in scope and trace the actions and rhetoric of politicians, policy
makers and social reformers. Poor people are rarely the main focus of these studies and are often depicted as being arbitrarily acted
upon by a punitive and stingy welfare system.9 To build on these important works, I use a state level study to juxtapose the perspectives of poor parents
and elite policy makers. In addition to highlighting the gulf between their understandings of social phenomena, this approach emphasizes the constrained agency of
recipients and illuminates how they worked within and around the program's regulations in order to make ends meet. I conceptualize welfare as one in a collection of
strategies families used for economic survival and not necessarily a significant part of recipients' core identity. Since welfare recipients floated between wage work and
welfare or care-giving work, I do not think of them as distinct from the working class or the working poor. Scholars' tendency to address people on welfare only so far
as they are connected to this particular state program can inadvertently reinforce the depiction of recipients as an isolated type of poor person and a "non-worker." This
can distract from how most recipients floated between welfare and low wage work, often using both simultaneously to support their families. It can also lead historians
to ignore how other state initiatives, employers and communities might influence and complicate welfare recipients' lives and identities. My research therefore [End
Page 330] seeks to problematize the separation of welfare recipients from the working class or working poor and investigate how this distinction was maintained.10
The escalation in negative attitudes toward welfare and social programs has often been understood as part of a "backlash" against the social reforms and movements of
the 1960s that attempted to address the racial inequality in American society.11 By stressing the role of policy in exacerbating racially charged

anti-welfare beliefs as opposed to simply reflecting them , I argue against conceptualizing hostility to welfare as a mechanical
reaction to African American activism and political gains . As Neubeck and Cazenave's Welfare Racism points out, "Typically, racial state actors are
portrayed as mere puppets of public opinion. This portrayal ignores the active role of racial state actors and other political elites in
helping to generate and inflame these white racial sentiments and the periodic white racial backlashes they in turn fue l."12 Since hostility
toward recipients intensified during the highly publicized efforts to shrink welfare rolls through fraud persecutions, this study stresses the powerful role of
punitive state policy in directing public antagonism toward specific targets .13

11

1NC: WHITENESS K
IMPLICATIONS

WE HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY DURING THIS YEARS TOPIC TO NOT REPEAT HISTORY REFUSAL TO
FOREGROUND RACE IN DISCUSSIONS OF POVERTY WILL PRODUCE SIMILAR DISMAL RESULTS. IN THE
LANGUAGE OF POLICY DEBATE ELITES YOU DO NOT SOLVE YOUR AFF.
HOLLOWAY SPARKS ASST PROF OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, PENN STATE, 2003 (QUEENS, TEENS, AND MODEL
MOTHERS RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM, JOE SOSS ,
RICHARD C. FORDING )
For democratic theorists and other scholars interested in theorizing the promise and pitfalls of citizen participation in the contemporary public sphere, the welfare
reform debate surrounding the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) provides an emblematic case study. In the

period preceding the passage of the PRWORA, a lively public discussion on the shortcomings of the welfare system and Congress's
proposed solutions filled the airwaves and other venues of public communication. Strikingly absent from this debate, however, were the voices
of welfare recipients themselves. Congress and the media showcased the arguments of welfare administrators, politicians, business
lobbyists, academics, and pundits, but welfare activists and other critics of "the end of welfare as we know it" often had a difficult
time getting their views heard. Marginalized at congressional hearings and mostly ignored or discounted by the press, welfare
recipients ended up primarily on the sidelines of this critical dialogue.
In their absence, commentators regularly invoked racist and gender biased images of "welfare queens" out to cheat taxpayers and of
irresponsible teenage girls bearing children out of wedlock as the quintessential justifications for punitive welfare reform. The only
seemingly positive public role for recipients during this debate was as a "welfare to work ' success story Politicians and journalists
delighted in telling rags to riches morality tales about "model mothers" whose compliance with the new welfare regime meant they
could leave the welfare rolls, provide better lives for their children, and become "respectable" citizens. Welfare recipients who
opposed any part of the reforms, in contrast, were portrayed as troublemakers, not as citizens who might have important insights into
public policy.
The exclusion and stereotyping of welfare recipients during the PRWORA debate reveals a serious distortion in the contemporary
American public sphere. In spite of widespread assertions that the United States enjoys one of the most open democratic societies in
the world, it nonetheless remains extraordinarily difficult for poor people to participate in democratic decision making . The
fact that the absence of the poor was not widely questioned during the PRWORA debate only confirms the pervasiveness of the
problem. The result of this distortion is that some citizens' voices are consistently amplified in the context of democratic
discussions, while others are muffled or silenced altogether .
This distortion, moreover, has racist and sexist contours. Although the discourses of personal responsibility and citizenship used to
frame the reform debate appeared neutral on the surface, these discourses in fact masked the racially specific content of the
stereotypes about welfare recipients that so influenced this debate. The stereotypes, furthermore, were not simply negative images of
people of color, but were primarily negative images of women of color. The portrayal of poor women of color and particularly African
American women as abusers of the system, immoral, and badly in need of discipline essentially destroyed their ability to appear as
legitimate and authoritative participants in democratic deliberations about welfare. Since nearly one third of all African American
women are poor, and women of color and their children account for half of all welfare recipients (Albeda and Tilly 1997, z4 z8), such
stereotyping meant that the citizens with the most at stake in this policy discussion were the least likely to have input. For democratic
theorists and others concerned about the legitimacy of our political institutions, such exclusions should raise fundamental questions
about the quality of democratic life in the United States.

12

1NC: WHITENESS K
UNFORTUNATELY, THIS SYSTEM OF AMERICAN RACISM IS THE BACKBONE OF A VARIETY OF INJUSTICES.
SLAVERY, GENOCIDE, SEGREGATION, INTERNMENT, AND IMPERIALISM ARE ALL THE DIRECT RESULT OF
THE INSULATION OF RACE FROM SERIOUS PUBLIC DEBATE AND CONCERN. IT BEHOOVES US TO
REMEMBER THAT THE POLICY OPTIONS AVAILABLE ARE A DIRECT RESULT OF THIS POLITICAL
INHERITANCE
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY 2003 (RACE AND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE DEVELOPMENT IN
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD
F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
An alternative approach is to compare the United States to other countries that share certain political and social characteristics in order to see how countries with
differently organized racial politics confronted similar problems of welfare state development and whether particular racial configurations are associated with particular
social policy coalitions. In the United States, the centrality of race, usually taken as an exceptional feature of American politics, arises from

the history of African slavery in North America that reaches back almost as far as permanent European settlement of the continent
(Berlin 1998; see also Tannenbaum 1946; Elkins 1959). But slavery was only one form of rule based on racial distinctions. More generally, the
processes by which racially defined rule shapes political institutions and strategic political circumstances may apply in a variety of
contexts (Davis 1966). Other systems in which rule is based on racial categories include apartheid (including Jim Crow in the American
South), certain brands of nationalism (including nationalism's totalitarian variants), and, most relevant for the present comparison,
imperialism and colonialism.
"Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism,"
wrote Hannah Arendt (1968, r8). "One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other was bureaucracy as a principle of foreign
domination." Like slavery and segregation, imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted rule by "whites" of
European descent over "blacks," conducted through a set of formal institutions and social arrangements supported by an ideology of
racial superiority. All of these forms of rule were also justified and explained by other means economic, political, diplomatic and a
complete explanation of slavery, segregation, or imperialism would surely involve all of these (see Baumgart 1982). But underlying these
explanations, or at least deeply intertwined with them, is what W. E. B. Du Bois (1986, 16) called the color line, "the relation of the
darker to the lighter races of men in Africa and Asia, in America and the islands of the sea." Similarly, imperialism and colonialism, no
matter how extensively they involved other factors, constituted irreducible structures of racial rule.

WE SHOULD BE CONSTANTLY VIGILIANT AGAINST THIS TYPE OF RACIAL ERASURE. REFUSAL TO

CONFRONT THIS POLITICS OF RACIAL DISPOASIBILITY IS THE ULTIMATE FORM OF DESTRUCTION.
HENRY A. GIROUX GLOBAL TV NETWORK CHAIR IN ENGLISH AND CULTURAL STUDIES AT MCMASTER
UNIVERSITY 2006 (COLLEGE LITERATURE 33.3 (2006) 171-196 READING HURRICANE KATRINA)
The Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no
responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engendering the
financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market
state with the racial state under George W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action, model urban public schools after
prisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is now
organized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the

This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only
have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society.
Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of
socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in color-blind America. How else to explain the cruel jokes and insults either implied or made explicit by Bush
neoconservative dream of an American empire.

and his ideological allies in the aftermath of such massive [End Page 175] destruction and suffering? When it became obvious in the week following Katrina that thousands of the elderly, poor,
and sick could not get out of New Orleans because they had no cars or money to take a taxi or any other form of transportation, or were sick and infirmed, the third-highest-ranking politician in
Washington, Rick Santorum, stated in an interview "that people who did not heed evacuation warnings in the future may need to be penalized" (Hamill 2005). For Santorum, those who were
trapped in the flood because of poverty, sickness, and lack of transportation had become an unwelcome reminder of the state of poverty and racism in the United States, and for that they should
be punished. Their crime, it seems, was that a natural disaster made a social and politically embarrassing disaster visible to the world, and they just happened to be its victims. Commenting on
facilities that had been set up for the poor in the Houston Astrodome in Texas, Bush's mother and the wife of former President George H.W. Bush said in a National Public Radio interview, "So
many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them" ("Barbara Bush" 2005). Other right-wing ideologues seeking to deflect criticism from
the obscene incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration used a barely concealed racism to frame the events of Katrina. For example, Neil Boortz, a syndicated host on WFTLAM in Florida stated that "a huge percentage" of those forced to leave New Orleans were "parasites, like ticks on a dog. They are coming to a community near you" (Norman 2005). On the
September 13 broadcast of The Radio Factor, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly overtly indulged his own racism before millions of his viewers in claiming that poor black

[GIROUX CONTINUES, NO TEXT DELETED]

13

1NC: WHITENESS K
[GIROUX CONTINUES, NO TEXT DELETED]
In one of the most blatant displays of
racism underscoring the biopolitical "live free or die" agenda in Bush's America, the dominant media increasingly framed the events that
unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on acts of crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by
the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion, politicians such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort to
people in New Orleans were basically drug addicts who failed to evacuate the city because they would not have access to their fix (2005).

restore calm. Later inquiries revealed that almost all of these crimes did not take place. The philosopher, Slavoj iek, argued that "what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist

It must be noted
that there is more at stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the power to
protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and [End Page 176] for those who do notespecially poor blacksracist
myths have a way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the public's preoccupation with violence and safety,
crime and terror merge in the all-too-familiar equation of black culture with the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are
made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence. Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to solve
social problems do more than legitimate a biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority of an expanding national security state under
George W. Bush. They also legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed doors, take on public
functions that are not subject to public scrutiny (Bleifuss 2005, 22).3 This becomes particularly dangerous in a democracy when
paramilitary or military organisations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror, prompted largely by the
presence of those racialized and class-specific groups considered both dangerous and disposable.
prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: 'You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!'" (2005).

AND THEREFORE WE OFFER THE FOLLOWING ALTERNATIVE STRATEGY:

WE SHOULD REJECT THE AFFIRMATIVES POLICY PROPOSAL AS A METHOD OF PRIORITIZING THE
CRITIQUE OF WHITENESS IN POLICY DEBATE
WE OUTLINE FOUR REASONS TO PREFER THIS POSITION
FIRST, THIS CALL IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ACT WE AS HIGH SCHOOL DEBATERS CAN TAKE TO PUSH
FOR RACIAL JUSTICE
Sanford F. Schram, Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College, 03, Putting a Black Face on Welfare, Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform
I undertake this line of inquiry to suggest that understanding the racial dimensions of welfare can promote racial justice. To get

more racial
justice, we need to ask hard questions and break with conventional wisdom. Because racial connotations are encoded in welfare
discourse, we need to call them out. Because welfare reform has disproportionately affected persons of color, the need to highlight the
racial dimensions of welfare has intensified. Taking race into account is more necessary now than before.

14

1NC: WHITENESS K
SECOND, WHITENESS ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE OF OUR REFUSAL TO CONFRONT IT. THE 1NC PERFORMANCE
ALLOWS US TO TELL A DIFFERENT STORY OF RACE AND POVERTY THAT CAN CREATE ALTERNATE
DISCUSSIONS AND SOLUTIONS
ANNE GREEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT SAINT JOSEPHS UNIVERSITY, DIRECTOR OF THE WRITING CENTER, 2003
[DIFFICULT STORIES: SERVICE-LEARNING, RACE, CLASS, AND WHITENESS, JSTOR, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS]
Most of the academy is still white and middle class .3 Whiteness, as Peggy McIntosh theorizes, works because whiteness can remain
a largely unmarked and invisible category to white people. In the writing about service-learning, whiteness and middle class privilege are
often unspoken categories that define those who perform service and those who write about service-learning. As a white teacher of service-learning
with a complex relationship to social class, I've found this silence around subject position troubling. If servicelearning takes place, as it often does, when
mostly white students at predominantly white institutions serve mostly poor people of color in urban settings, then teachers of service-learning need to reflect on how
whiteness and class privilege function in the service-learning paradigm . By telling If service-learning takes place, as it often does, when mostly white students at
predominantly white institutions serve mostly poor people of color in urban settings, then teachers of service-learning need to reflect on how whiteness and class
privilege function in the service-learning paradigm . By telling more explicit stories about race and class, it is possible to open a door for

more complex theorizing about the relationship between those who serve and those who are served . If we change some of the
ways that we tell stories about service-learning to include reflections about race and social class, we can create a different kind of space for
discussions about the social change work that service ideally create s. Rather than encouraging students to tell the familiar story of how servicelearning feels good, teachers of service-learning can work with students to tell difficult stories. Telling the difficult story requires a willingness to break
our silences around race, class, and service . For those of us who are white, this means beginning the work of dismantling racism by
unpacking white privilege. For those of us who are middle class, this means acknowledging differences of class, caste, and culture and not
assuming that those who are working class or poor want middle class culture or aspire to middle class materialism. Stories become a way to
understand race and class differently and with more complexity. I hope that by teaching students to tell stories about race and class, they will learn
(and I will learn with them, again and again) that all stories about race and class are both partial and contradictory, and that these partial and
contradictory stories are absolutely necessary if service-learning will lead to social change. Including stories in the classroom helps
students learn to reflect on their multiple and contradictory positions-all of their voices in all of the stories that they tell. The stories that
follow are based on two courses that I taught to the same group of first-year service-learning students. The fall course was a writing course and the spring course was a
literature course. Both courses are required. When students enroll in the first service-learning course, they are strongly encouraged to continue their service-learning
experience with the second course in the sequence.

THIS STRATEGY CAN ALSO CREATE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS AS WELL THERE IS ONLY A RISK THAT
WE CAN BUILD BETTER COMMUNITIES THROUGH THE CONVERSATIONS SPURRED BY THIS DEBATE.
john a. Powell, 2007, Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University; Executive Director, Kirwan Institute for the
Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University. ) 2007 Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice.

This Article challenges the assumption that race is necessarily divisive and disturbs the project of building a coalition with a socially
inclusive agenda. By most accounts, the greatest improvement in racial attitudes for Whites occurred during the heart of the Civil Rights
Movement, despite the heightened and forthright focus on race. While race can be, and has been used divisively, n23 it can also be used
in a transformative manner which helps to bring people together. Indeed, it is extremely doubtful that an inclusive and just society can
be built without deeply engaging race. I will also show how skillful politicians have used colorblind racism through symbolic appeals
and coded meanings to undermine efforts to build an inclusive agenda in the United States . n24 Racialized systems, and the resistance to
change they inspire, obstruct the advancement of a socially-inclusive agenda with negative consequences for Whites and non-Whites
alike. n25 The answer is not, therefore, to avoid discussions of race. It is already in the discourse, albeit in a subterranean manner. The question is not whether race will
be used, but how. Silence is concession to a use of race that will continue to blunt reform and stymie efforts to build a new
movement for a fairer society. The response must be to make race explicit, but in a transformative manner.

15

1NC: WHITENESS K
WE ARE ALSO NOT UNDER THE ILLUSION THAT RACISM WILL SUDDENLY VANISH OR THAT WHITE
PRIVILEGE OR POVERTY WILL EVAPORATE INTO THIN AIR. RATHER, WE BELIEVE THAT THE KIND OF
RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION EMBODIED IN THIS ALTERNATIVE REALLY IS THE ONLY VALUE TO LIFE
FRANOISE PROUST (1947-1998). FALL 2000. AGREGE IN PHILOSOPHY, WAS A PROGRAM DIRECTOR AT THE COLLGE
INTERNATIONALE DE PHILOSOPHIE, IN ADDITION TO HER POST AT THE UNIVERSIT DE PARIS I. (THE LINE OF RESISTANCE
HYPATIA - VOLUME 15, NUMBER 4, FALL 2000, PP. 23-37)
We are indebted to Michel Foucault for having generalized, while also displacing, the physical law of resistance: every force, while it is affected by another
force, provokes a resistance which thwarts the action of the first force , while falling short of stopping it. Necessarily, forces enter into relations not of
opposition or contradiction (which are rare and precarious cases) but of dissymmetric contrariety. Each and every force doubles and is doubled by another force. While
it continually accompanies the exercizing of that force, it also counters it, and so destabilizes and deregulates it. Foucault concentrated his discovery on relations of
power. In a remarkable way he established that relations of power develop and deploy around, about, and between themselves like a map, or a diagram of points, a
complex and reversible battlefield of intensive forces which "play the role of . . . target, support, or handle" (Foucault 1980, 95). Relations of power are subject to a
resistance and a counter-resistance which are more heterogeneous than homogeneous, more unstable and multiple than stable and delimited, more aleatory and singular
than regulated and regular. Relations of power delineate variable configurations, where aggregations and agglomerations of forces decompose under the effect of a
force, or of forces which are subtle and entwined. They graft onto others, contaminate them, and find themselves in turn affected. Elsewhere and otherwise they
recompose [End Page 18] other blocks of relations (Deleuze 1988). Resistance is the name of this simultaneously dense and fissured arrangement, this strategic
apparatus where powers play, obscurely, freely, at once with and against other powers. As an "a priorist positivist," Foucault established a cartography of power. As
"transcendentalists" we might want to elaborate an analytic of resistance. This would be the transcendental of every resistance, whatever kind it be: resistance to power,
to the state of things, to history; resistance to destruction, to death, to war; resistance to stupidity, to peace, to bare life. Resistance is not a task or a necessity.
It is a law of being. It is internal and immanent to its object. From the moment that being is given, takes form and figure, consists of and insists in, from the
moment there is being or a state, it incurs and bumps up against a resistance which irresistibly twists it and irreversibly fissures it. Say that a rule is a fragile
stabilization and a heteroclite conglomeration of relations of force, law, compromise, and justice. Accordingly, it is always on its way to being deregulated and altered.

In the same way, life is not a substance, a given, or a value. It is a subtle disposition, plotting in a fragile way with the power of
destruction which constantly accompanies it and which forms a life-death complex that is precarious and reversible. Similarly, in a general
way, every state is flanked by its double, which limits it and pressures it from the interior. Resistance is internal and coextensive with the instance. Every
being strikes against its counter-being. That counter-being is neither non-being, nor nothingness, nor another kind of being, nor a power of annihilation, nor the
least of beings. 2 It is being itself, which, in its deployment and its extension, turns against itself, and affects its "inside" with an "outside" that it has itself activated and
incurred. One can calculate several essential features of resistance from this logic of the double, this law of "countering." Immanent to its object, resistance is not
created "in the name of" principles, values, ideals (truth, good, law, honor, dignity, etc). We are not presupposing some heaven of ideas, nor confusing the transcendental
with transcendence, nor contenting ourselves with tautology (resistance is good where it resists that which is bad, resistance is bad where it resists the good). So every
principle is deduced, every ideal is posed, and every value is valorized before being valorizing. Resistance is a fact, not an obligation. It is included within
being, it is not the "should-be." It is indeed that which signifies history. From the moment that power appears, resistance immediately
accompanies it. Principles evoked might have been variable, its modalities changeable, and its occasions multiple. While resistance against power and stupidity,
against death and time has never ceased, neither has it ever been explicitly manifest, except in eclipses and brief flashes. In this regard, resistance is no more (and
evidently no less) in question today than yesterday or tomorrow. It is simply that the forms invented, at the same time as induced, by the apparatus of the era and of the
contemporary situation are partially new. Perhaps, faced with the appearance [End Page 19] of capital and manufacture which devalues working tools and knowledge,
one responds with sabotage and luddism. But faced with globalization and the extension over the whole planet of the laws of capital which render work and working
conditions precarious, we respond by agitating for the "thirty hour week, and an equal salary for all." Perhaps, confronted with expulsions to the country, inspections in
the cities and neighborhoods, and the drive to put everybody to work, one resists with calls for "less work!" and for our "right to leisure." But at the time when lawful
states give themselves the mission of controlling population flows and singling out those with rights, one responds with calls for the "civil legalization of everybody!"
etc. In a general way, there is no just resistance, except as adjusted-to, and justice is not that which "in the name of" one resists. It is an idea (and an
affect) which wakens and awakens because one resists. And it disappears if, or to the extent that, nobody resists. Eras vary and if one must evaluate and
hierarchize them (one need not), it is in terms of their possible maneuvering margins for resistance and so of the possibilities they allow for turning around a situation.
Every resistance is a mixture of reactivity and activity, of conservation and invention, of negation and affirmation . If it is archaic, it is so
necessarily. It responds to a situation, it reacts to an event, it is therefore posterior, secondary, and subordinated to that which it resists. However, one cannot deduce
from this, contrary to what is sometimes supposed, that it is passive or backwards looking, or that it constitutes an obstacle to be removed or a regression to be
overcome for the responsible agent who might accept and assume this. Still less should we say that to speak of resistance is to adopt the point of view of the "victim"
(see Badiou 1993, 13), as if evil, misfortune, and universal suffering ruled over the world without exception and as if the sufferers must sacrifice themselves on the
battlefield if not consenting or being resigned to misfortune. True, in speaking of resistance we have to suppose that history turns always and "naturally" towards the
bad and only wins on the backs of the losers. But it is not a matter of idealizing the victors nor of deeming defeats heroic. For if the losers resist, it is to gain space and
time, to turn around and reroute the present look of things. History inevitably takes bad turns, but good turns have inevitably responded to these, as
played by certain vigilant, watchful minoritarians, who are always ready to leap in, to intervene and to cry: "Enough! Something else now! Some air! Some breathing
space!" Such stances are declarative, affirmative. More precisely, resistance imperceptibly modifies its reactive position . The response can turn into the
active stance of reply, riposte, and retort. It can invent new game rules while occupying a place on the chess-board or playing the adversary's game.
This kind of invention requires strategy: the art of borrowing, of miming, and of understudying. To make a rejoinder is to steal and to fit out anew the adversary's arms,
turn them inside out like a glove and offer them up in return. [End Page 20] In this way their impasses and dangers, concealed until now, are made clear--as are chances
and new possibilities which might previously have been unthinkable and impossible. This is the immanent criteria of judgment and evaluation of resistance. There are

[PROUST CONTINUES, NO TEXT DELETED]

16

1NC: WHITENESS K
[PROUST CONTINUES, NO TEXT DELETED]
There are reactive
resistances which deny, conserve, and restore the state of things and active resistances which activate reactivity and draw from this
diversion the joy of invention and the affirmation of the something different . If it is true that resistance is born from the thwarted affecting of one
force by another, then resistance is a matter of affect, passion, and heart. It issues neither from free choice nor from reasoning. At once wild and strategic,
resistance does not require a theory of the will--rather (to speak classically), some kind of "Treatise of the Passions," in other words, of liberty . Why does one
resist? Because lived life is not livable, because the state of things is not tolerabl e. A resistance is always punctual and local, always precise and
no good resistances to badness (ethics) or to regression (individual or collective history), nor bad resistances to the good, or to progress.

limited. Here, some forces respond, in that particular locale, and at that particular moment, to those particular forces in a complex and duplicit play where each resists
the resistance of the other. The forces of resistance are blind and obstinate, deaf and stubborn, and seem devoid of the least intelligence: the same forces are at
work in death and life, in resistance and counter-resistance . However, as attested by the fact that one resists as much with and for others as alone and for
oneself, these same forces search for air and the outside. They experiment with the new, they are subject to aleatory variations and to contingent encounters; they make
use of turns and deviations about which it is risky to decide if it is a matter of a ruse of the same or a complicated strategy to elude the same. This is why resistance is
an experience of subjectivization: it is the experimentation of freedom. Freedom is not the faculty requisite to an explanation of why some resist and
not others. It takes courage to draw on one's anger at the unacceptable in order to glean the energy necessary to combat it. It takes

courage to reroute the power of existing which is unleashed by one's combative indignation in order to cultivate and multiply powers
worthy of existence. All this takes a sense of risk and perseverance . 3 And resistance, like ethics, is nothing other than the courage of
freedom. Resistance is a particular combat. It doesn't confront the enemy in order to impose defeat . It struggles with adversity, of which the adversary is
only a stand-in to weaken it and make it weaken its hold. Resistance does not seek victory, it does not engage in battle, still less war. But,
through a lateral and duplicit strategy it disarms the enemy with the enemy's own arms. Deregulating the rules of war that it had imposed, resistance
constrains it to displace its domain and its method of play. [End Page 21] Combative, strategic, duplicit resistance is neither the naked power of triumphant life, be it in
failure or death, nor this "unnamable" "thing" 4 which would form like a bedrock, a residue, or an abyssal remainder on which any enterprise of life, of any kind, would
founder. If the same forces are at work in the resistance of death and in the resistance to death, it is because death and life are complex
and precarious combinations of identical elements which only differ in intensity, ingeniosity, complexity, and inventivity. There is, in today's era, a
multiplication of examples of these life-death compositions where the living, thought of as a tactician, defies the death which constantly doubles it: grafts, long
survivals, etc. Where death perseveres indefectibly in being, whether conserving or destroying, life simultaneously rebounds, patiently
and impatiently, on those obstacles it encounter s, ties with them new knots of which one will only ever know after the fact whether they confine or release
new possibilities. The being of life is nourished by counter-being . What is to be done? How to divert from it the noxious and reactive force? The resistance
of life is nothing other than its capacity to play on and thwart irresistible resistances.

17

LINK: USFG
HISTORY PROVES ANY EFFORTS TO REDISTRIBUTE FUNDS THROUGH FEDERAL SOCIAL SERVICE
PROGRAMS WILL INEVITABLY COOPTED BY WHITE INTERESTS
Contemporary racism has been created anew in many ways over the past five decades, but
most dramatically by the putatively race-neutral, liberal, social democratic reforms of the New
Deal Era and by the more overtly raceconscious neoconservative reactions against liberalism since the Nixon years. It is a mistake to
posit a gradual and inevitable trajectory of evolutionary progress in race relations; on the
contrary, our history shows that baffles won at one moment can later be lost. Despite
hard-fought baffles for change that secured important concessions during the 1960s in the form
of civil rights legislation, the racialized nature of social policy in the United States since the
Great Depression has actually increased the possessive investment in whiteness among
European Americans over the past half century.

During the New Deal Era of the 1930s and 1940s, both the Wagner Act and the Social
SecurityAct excluded farm workers and domestics from coverage, effectively denying those
disproportionately minority sectors of the work force protections and benefits routinely afforded
whites. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 brought home ownership within reach of millions of
citizens by placing the credit of the federal government behind private lending to home buyers,
but overtly racist categories in the Federal Housing Agency's (FHA) "confidential" city surveys
and appraisers' manuals channeled almost all of the loan money toward whites and away from
communities of color.'3 In the post-World War II era, trade unions negotiated contract
provisions giving private medical insurance, pensions, and job security largely to the white
workers who formed the overwhelming majority of the unionized work force in mass production
industries, rather than fighting for full employment, medical care, and old-age pensions for all,
or even for an end to discriminatory hiring and promotion

practices by employers in those industries. 14

Each of these policies widened the gap between the resources available to whites and those
available to aggrieved racial communities. Federal housing policy offers an important
illustration of the broader principles at work in the possessive investment in whiteness. By
channeling loans away from older innercity neighborhoods and toward white home buyers
moving into segregated

GEORGE LIPSITZ, DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT (PAGE 6)

AT THE

UNIVERSITY

OF

CALIFORNIA, 1999,

Contemporary racism has been created anew in many ways over the past five decades, but most dramatically by the putatively race -neutral, liberal, social democratic
reforms of the New Deal Era and by the more overtly race- conscious neoconservative reactions against liberalism since the Nixon years. It is a mistake to posit a
gradual and inevitable trajectory of evolutionary progress in race relations; on the contrary, our history shows that battles won at one moment can later be lost.

Despite hard-fought battles for change that secured important concessions during the 1960s in the form of civil rights legislation, the
racialized nature of social policy in the United States since the Great Depression has actually increased the possessive investment in
whiteness among European Americans over the past half century.
During the New Deal Era of the 1930s and 1940s, both the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act excluded farm workers and domestics from
coverage, effectively denying those disproportionately minority sectors of the work force protections and benefits routinely afforded
whites. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 brought home ownership within reach of millions of citizens by placing the credit of the federal government behind private
lending to home buyers, but overtly racist categories in the Federal Housing Agency's (FHA) "confidential" city surveys and appraisers' manuals channeled almost all of
the loan money toward whites and away from communities of color.'3 In the post-World War II era, trade unions negotiated contract provisions giving

private medical insurance, pensions, and job security largely to the white workers who formed the overwhelming majority of the
unionized work force in mass production industries, rather than fighting for full employment, medical care, and old -age pensions for
all, or even for an end to discriminatory hiring and promotion practices by employers in those industries. 14

18

The federal government has played a major role in augmenting the posses sive investment in whiteness. For years, the General Services
Administration routinely channeled the government's own rental and leasing business to realtors who engaged in racial discrimination, while federally subsidized urban
renewal plans reduced the already limited supply of housing for communities of color 'through "slum clearance" programs. In concert with FHA support for

segregation in the suburbs, federal and state tax monies routinely funded the construction of water supplies and sewage facilities for
racially exclusive suburban communities in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, these areas often incorporated themselves as independent municipalities in
order to gain greater access to federal funds allocated for "urban aid."'

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DIVORCE THE STATE FROM ITS RACIST PAST ALL ELMENTS OF SOCIAL SERVICE
PROGRAMS ARE PART OF A LEGACY OF WHITENESS THAT MUST BE INTERROGATED
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY, 03, RACE AND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY, RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM
As Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder (1993) have shown, the South was the pivotal player in the formation of policy coalitions in Congress in the
middle of the century. Southern Democrats generally voted with other Democrats, except on civil rights and labor issues, when they
routinely combined with Republicans to form a conservative coalition . This voting pattern, combined with southern control of key congressional
committees through the ironclad seniority rule in Congress and the perpetual reelection of Democrats from the one-party South, gave white Southerners extensive
power to shape policy. At the very least, southern representatives were able to block legislative initiatives that threatened their regional

political economy that linked white supremacy and labor-repressive agriculture with lock control of the apparatus of the state, or to
modify policy initiatives to make them safe for the South. In this way, race was central to the development of many of the core
domestic policies of the twentieth century.
More broadly, Anthony Marx compares the process of state building and racial formation in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil, countries that share histories of
colonization and slavery. He argues that the creation of legal structures of racial subordination in the United States and South Africa resulted from whites need to
overcome divisions of class, region, and the like in order to consolidate their hold on developing state power in the wake of emancipation and decolonization. In Brazil,
where such imperatives were absent from the state-building process, the same sort of legally imposed apartheid did not result. These studies suggest that race might,
under certain conditions and over certain issues, be central to the political dynamics of state and nation building, the construction of essential

political institutions that define patterns of governance and political inclusion over the long run. In particular, they highlight the role
that race might have played in either creating or inhibiting the cross-class coalitions that have historically been necessary for the formation of national
welfare states, developments that have both state- and nation-building implications. Finally, they suggest the value of examining American
political development in comparative perspective, the better to isolate the ways in which race shapes formation of welfare state coalitions.

19

LINK: PLANS THAT CLAIM TO REFORM WELFARE

WELFARE REFORMS WILL BE IRRELEVANT UNLESS RACE IS THE FOCAL POINT OF THE DISCUSSION IT
ALTERS IMPLEMENTATION AND FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGES THE STRATEGY OF REFORMATION
NAOMI R. CAHN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LAW, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL, 1997,
(SYMPOSIUM: REPRESENTING RACE: REPRESENTING RACE OUTSIDE OF EXPLICITLY RACIALIZED CONTEXTS
SYMPOSIUM: REPRESENTING RACE: REPRESENTING RACE OUTSIDE OF EXPLICITLY RACIALIZED CONTEXTS
MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW)
Race is certainly relevant to advocacy efforts writ large - that is, race affects how welfare is reformed . If only divorced or widowed
white women received welfare, we might expect welfare to look quite different. n129 The very term "welfare" has now become
associated with race, notwithstanding the many forms of welfare other than AFDC sponsored by the government. It is, consequently,
important to use race in advocacy efforts to show how legislation affects blacks disproportionately, and how it reinforces negative
images of blacks while using those same negative images to justify new and punitive requirements. There is a need to acknowledge the
impact of these negative stereotypes so that they can be confronted in the hope of changing policy.

20

LINK: SOCIAL SERVICE DISTRIBUTION

WE SHOULD NOT SIMPLY FOCUS ON THE AMOUNT OF FUNDS AVAILABLE, BUT ALSO HOW THEY ARE
USED WHITENESS EFFECTS THE DISTRIBUTION OF THOSE SERVICES
JO ANNE SCHNEIDER DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, NEW SERIES, VOL. 101, NO. 4 (DEC., 1999), PP. 761-782

Experience with the public assistance system did not yield firm support from recipients. Much of the conversation in the AWEP program seminar
about welfare focused on the inadequacies of the system and humiliations that people had to suffer in order to get benefits. Their reports echo the
findings of ethnographies of public assistance (Kingfisher 1996; Susser 1982; Susser and Kreniske 1987). For example, Maria talked about losing a full day sitting
in the welfare office because she had been called in to justify why she was not participating in a community service requirement when she had been
enrolled in the program for over a year. When she finally spoke to her caseworker, she quickly realized that the caseworker did not know the public
assistance categories as well as she did. "They make you feel like dirt, and they're so stupid ," she commented. However, recipients did not put all the blame
for the system's failure on caseworkers or welfare department regulations. Participants in the AWEP program readily acknowledged that some people were abusing the
system. They described firsthand frustrations with neighbors who hung out at home all day doing nothing or using drugs. For example, Sharon was an African American
woman in her late twenties with several children who had been on welfare for over five years. She lived in a public housing complex known for violence and drug use.
She talked about having to struggle every day not only to get her school work done and protect her children in that environment but to deal with problematic neighbors.
"They don't get dressed all day and they want to borrow things all the time. Then they start talking you down for trying to better yourself. It's like they resent you for
trying to get ahead." Like James, the white middle-class caller to the Susan Bray show, these welfare recipients were fed up with people who laze around all day with a
bottle of liquor. Participants in the AWEP program were almost unanimous in believing that something had to be done about "those people." As Rank (1994:130-144)
notes, welfare recipients share the general population's stigmatization of welfare use, distinguishing between themselves, the deserving poor, and undeserving welfare
abusers. Like the talk show callers who were working for wages, they expected welfare recipients to behave responsibly and work toward bettering themselves. Many
wanted public assistance recipients tested for drugs and denied benefits if they didn't get help. But unlike the people not on welfare, welfare recipients' solutions to these
kinds of problems were to provide programs to help people with substance abuse problems and enforce their participation, not "throw the bums off."

WELFARE IS IMPLICTY RACED A QUICK REFLECTION ON SOCIAL SERVICES ARTICULATES MULTILE

WAYS THAT PRIVILEGE CONTROLS POLICY IMPLEMENTATION AND RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION
NAOMI R. CAHN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LAW, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL, 1997,
(SYMPOSIUM: REPRESENTING RACE: REPRESENTING RACE OUTSIDE OF EXPLICITLY RACIALIZED CONTEXTS
SYMPOSIUM: REPRESENTING RACE: REPRESENTING RACE OUTSIDE OF EXPLICITLY RACIALIZED CONTEXTS
MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW)
How, then, is representing welfare recipients "raced"? n4 There are several different levels of response that interweave substantive law and lawyering concerns. First,
notwithstanding the numbers, the public perception of welfare is raced black. n5 Thus, regardless of the actual impact of Aid to Families

with Dependent Children ("AFDC") regulations, their implementation is perceived as affecting blacks, even though this perception
does not reflect reality. Indeed, welfare reform can be seen as an attempt to control poor black women. n6 Thus, although welfare is
not explicitly raced, it is implicitly a raced issue. [*967]
Second, African Americans are disproportionately recipients of welfare; they are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately in
single-parent households. n7 Thus, even though blacks do not constitute the majority of public welfare n8 recipients, welfare has a
disproportionate effect on the African-American community. n9 It follows, then, that African Americans will constitute a significant
number of legal-services clients, and that welfare reform will have a significant impact on them .
Third, the legal system is overwhelmingly white. Over 85% of the legal profession is white; only 3.3% is African American. n10 The
legal services lawyers who do much of the welfare representation are white; given the race of low-income people, there will be
interrace (as well as intrarace) representation. n11 In addition, judges are overwhelmingly white, meaning that a black plaintiff will,
most [*968] likely, face a white judge. And, as studies of race discrimination in the courts show, racial biases infect the American
judicial process. n12
Fourth, all representation can be raced. n13 Each of us has a race, even though whites tend to think that everyone except them has a
race, n14 or else they find it difficult to confront the role that race plays in their own lives, a role that is very different from the role
that race plays in the lives of people of color. n15 Thus, the mere fact of representation implicates race, regardless of the race of the
client or the actors in the legal system. Race will inevitably affect how the representation is conducted. n16 The interaction between
the lawyer and the client, and the decision whether to make race an explicit issue in a complaint, are "infected" by race consciousness.
Finally, welfare reform lawyering shows how race might appear in lawyering, when the actual legal problem is not explicitly about
race. Although the legal issues in welfare reform do not appear to involve particularly racialized issues because there is no interracial
conflict - unlike, for example, with affirmative action - the "race question" still needs to be asked . How then should race be represented in this
lawyering? Is it appropriate not to mention race? When advocates describe their clients, or when judges write opin- [*969] ions, where is race? n18 It is this issue - the
tension between making race explicit, and not mentioning it at all - that is at the core of this article. It could be that discussing race, even when it, for example, invokes
existing stereotypes of blacks, will be beneficial to black plaintiffs, and therefore justifiable; n19 or it may be that the stereotypes are too destructive. n20 Thinking
about race in the context of welfare lawyering may focus too much attention on the negative images of black recipients. On the other hand, and especially in light of all
of the reasons that this representation process is "raced," why not make it explicit? Yet, given that legal issues in welfare reform affect all races, does race really matter?

21

LINK: WELFARE

RACISM IS IMPLICITLY TIED TO WELFARE, THE HARMFUL POLITICS OF THE LANGUAGE USED IN
REGARDS TO WELFARE NEEDS TO BE DEALT WITH IN ORDER TO INSURE THAT FURTHER HARMS ARE
AVOIDED.
NAOMI R. CAHN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LAW, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL, 1997, (SYMPOSIUM: REPRESENTING RACE:
REPRESENTING RACE OUTSIDE OF EXPLICITLY RACIALIZED CONTEXTS SYMPOSIUM: REPRESENTING RACE: REPRESENTING RACE
OUTSIDE OF EXPLICITLY RACIALIZED CONTEXTS MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW)

Welfare "as we know it" ended in 1996, n1 a victim of a conservatism that views welfare recipients as lazy and immoral.

One aspect of
welfare that is, however, unlikely to experience radical change is child support. n2 More vigorous child support enforcement has become an increasingly important
component of federal welfare reform bills over the past two decades because of the twin hopes of fiscal and parental responsibility: first, that child support will
reimburse welfare costs, and second, that fathers will take more responsibility for their children. n3
Child support programs within the welfare system perpetuate a negative perception of poor people. Many individuals assume that poor men and
women are uncooperative - that women would rather stay home on the government dole than collect child support or find work, and that men have left their homes and
are unwilling to support their children. These images of poor people are not just class based; they also rely on stereotypes of gendered and

raced behavior.
we must challenge the gendered and raced images in welfare reform cases by making explicit the stereotypes that
inform public welfare regulations. Even though such advocacy may not change the actual outcomes of the cases, it can begin to change the rhetoric,
raising public awareness of the effect of such [*966] programs. Ultimately, advocates can take apart the raced and gendered spaces in
which poor people live, allowing them both to stay at home and to leave the home. Representation in welfare reform litigation, then,
allows advocates to point out the racialized aspects of their cases. It shows the relevance of race to litigation claims and the litigation
process.
This essay argues that

THE ASSOCIATION OF BLACKS WITH WELFARE SERVES TO REINFORCE THE BELIEF OF BLACKS AS LAZY.
MARTIN GILENS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY OF POLITICS, 03, HOW THE POOR BECAME BLACK, RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM
The association of African Americans with the undeserving poor is evident not only in the changing media coverage of poverty during the
mid-1960s, but throughout the period studied. From the early 1990s, images of poor blacks increased when the tone of poverty stories became more
critical of the poor and decreased when coverage became more sympathetic. Similarly, images of African Americans were most numerous
in news stories about the least sympathetic subgroups of the poor. As I discuss below, these differences in the racial portrayal of the poor cannot be
accounted for by true changes in the racial composition of the poverty population or by racial differences across subgroups of the poor. Rather, the medias
tendency to associate African Americans with the undeserving poor reflects-and reinforces-the centuries-old stereotype of lazy blacks.

22

LINK: CENSUS
USING THE CENSUS TO INCREASE SOCIAL SERVICES ONLY EXTERNALIZES RACISM ABROAD.
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY 2003 (RACE AND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE DEVELOPMENT IN
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD
F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
The welfare state is a particularly useful focus for the comparative study of race relations. It is, among other things, a mechanism of social solidarity, a means of linking
citizens to the state through a set of social rights and to each other by ties of interdependence (Marshall 1964; Baldwin 1990). Of course, welfare states are at

once inclusive and exclusive mechanisms. On the one hand, they embody these solidaristic ties among a community of citizens. On
the other hand, they define a boundary between the community and outsiders, depending on who is eligible for assistance on what
terms, and in so doing they can also construct and reconstruct lines of inequality and social division within societies along lines not
only of class but also of gender, citizenship, and race (Esping-Andersen 1990; Freeman 1986; Orloff 1993; Lieberman 1998). Thus the welfare state
is one of the key defining structures of social and political inclusion and exclusion in the modern nation state. But welfare states differ in the
balance they strike between their inclusive and exclusive imperatives, and so the welfare state is critical to understanding the capacities of states to incorporate racial
minorities.
Thus variations in the nature of imperialism and colonialism (or pat terns of racial rule more generally) were potentially of critical

importance in shaping welfare state formation. In particular, the domestic politics of imperial rule the extent to which clear racial
boundaries between home citizens and colonial subjects underlay the power and democratic legitimacy of metropolitan political elites
in imperial powers had important effects on the politics of social solidarity. To the extent that imperial politics demanded a hard and
fast racial line between citizens at home and subjects abroad, social welfare policies were more free to insist on a high level of social
solidarity among their beneficiaries. In other words, the presumption of racial homogeneity at home allowed for the construction of
welfare systems with more forceful and authoritative means of connecting individual citizens to the state . There were both positive and
negative reasons for this outcome, On the positive side, the challenge of imperial rule demanded an "imperial race," which placed a burden on the state to ensure the
health and welfare of its own citizens. On the negative side, the hermetic racial division between home and abroad meant that a strong, centralized,

and deeply penetrating welfare state did not pose an unacceptable challenge to a racial hierarchy that ordered political life within the
home country. But where the boundaries of imperial and racial citizenship were more permeable, the possibilities for social policy
were restricted by the possibility of racial inclusion. The presence of racial diversity within rather than across national boundaries changed the solidaristic
imperatives of social politics, making the creation of centralized national welfare states rather more politically dangerous. In such countries, the problem of
distinguishing between those who were and were not entitled to consideration as members of the solidaristic national community was
a more complicated political and administrative enterprise, since one could not simply presume that social and national boundaries
coincided. Rather, welfare states in these countries were more likely to take complex institutional forms, involving decentralized
decision making and administration rather then constructing direct links between citizens and the state . This argument about the connection
between forms and patterns of racial rule allows for a comparison of the role of race in welfare state formation in the United States, Britain, and France. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all three countries ruled over far flung territories with racially diverse populations with states that institutionalized racial rule in
some form. Although the United States, among these three countries, would conventionally be considered the most multiracial, many more people of non European
descent were ruled from London or Paris than Washington. In the early twentieth century, both the British and French empires had majority nonwhite populations by a
wide margin, while the nonwhite population of the United States hovered at around 10 percent (Lieberman 1997). The principal difference in the form of racial rule was
whether racial minorities were located inside or outside national boundaries. In the United States, the racial minority population was located entirely within the
country's home borders, and the immediate proximity of African Americans posed a particular set of political challenges for American whites, especially in the post
Civil War South (Key 1949). In Britain and France, by contrast, almost all nonwhites lived in the colonies and not in the home country (although in France, as we shall
see, national and racial boundaries remained more politically porous than in Britain), producing a very different set of political challenges for white elites at home.

23

LINK: CENSUS
THE CENSUS

DESTROYS THE ABILITY FOR RACIAL GROUPS TO COALESCE TO FIGHT RACIAL OPPRESSION
AND TO RECEIVE STATE SERVICES.

REBECCA CHIYOKO KING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
2000 (JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES 3.2 (2000) 191-217 RACIALIZATION, RECOGNITION, AND
RIGHTS: LUMPING AND SPLITTING MULTIRACIAL ASIAN AMERICANS IN THE 2000 CENSUS)
Problematizing the assumptions of a monolithic community and recognizing difference in the Asian American community is an important task that has been taken on by
the Census. I argue that it is because the Census attempts to recognize both individual racial/ethnic identities and collective racial identities simultaneously that the
change in the Census has been so controversial. By trying to respect the self-esteem of mixed race people (politics of recognition) and allowing

them to check more than one racial box on the Census, the Census may be undermining the collective racial goals (politics of rights)
that it is supposed to resolve such as equal opportunity employment and the like . 12 Therefore, it may be fundamentally a conflict
between the politics of recognition and the politics of rights that the check more than one policy reveals or even creates . It is the tension
between these two goals in the Census that has created a unique opportunity to see how recognition and rights are each [End Page 194] linked to unique understandings
of racialization. It is their conceptualizations of race that has led some social actors to understand rights to be fundamentally about individual recognition and others to
see rights as a collective political recognition. Examining different strategies to get the Census to recognize multiracial people reveals the different racialized thinking
and assumptions behind each type of racial category proposal. By seeking recognition across racial categories, multiracial activists were

fundamentally undermining the racial basis of the categories themselves. These groups used their politics of recognition and rights to
challenge institutional modes of racialization in the Census.
The check one or more strategy, while it may satisfy individual multiracial goals, may leave many monoracial groups unable to gain
the reparations that they need because check one or more undermines the foundation of current monoracial understandings by
allowing people to be more than one race. Lisa Lowe discusses a similar tension between the politics of recognition and rights when she describes the social
construction of the category and culture "Asian American."
To the extent that Asian American culture dynamically expands to include both internal critical dialogues about difference and the interrogation of dominant
interpellations, however, Asian American culture can likewise be a site in which the "horizontal" affiliations with other groups can be imagined and realized. In this
respect, a politics based exclusively on racial or ethnic identity willingly accepts the terms of the dominant logic that organizes the heterogeneous picture of differences
into a binary schema of "the one" and "the other." 13
The changes in the census might be seen as an example of how APAs have challenged dominant racial meanings by insisting that the Census Bureau recognize the
difference within the category Asian American particularly by including those who are of mixed descent and want to check multiple boxes . However, that

recognition of difference, if done solely along racial (i.e. Asian American) lines may in fact be reinforcing dominant racial norms.
Therefore, because the Census seems contradictory in that it is trying to meet individual and collective goals, it may be that
recognition of the multiplicity/diversity within the category "Asian Pacific American" may come at the cost of losing the political
connectivity between Asian Americans that has historically been so important. [End Page 195]
Allowing people to check more than one box on the Census, I argue, is a direct challenge to the political clout that lumping gave Asian
Americans initially. This change in census format could stand to decrease the number of people, who identify as and thus check Asian
American. If this loss of numbers plays out empirically, it will mean fewer dollars for funding Asian American causes. Indeed, when the
Census Bureau ran a Racial and Ethnic Target Test (RAETT) in the summer of 1996, Asian and Pacific Islanders were hit hard by the results. Using a multiracial
category did in fact decrease the API community in the target sample from sixty-five percent to sixty percent, and using instructions that told people to mark all that
apply decreased it even more to fifty-eight percent. Ironically, the mark one or more instruction did not affect the total percentage of responses to the API category. 14
This loss of numbers is a testament to the fact that Asian Americans may have indeed outgrown the API label and that our identities as Asian American may be more
racially diverse than we had previously recognized. Particularly, it may mean that multiracial Asian Americans are having a disproportionate effect on the category
"Asian American" as APIs lost more of their population than any other group when multiple responses were allowed.

24

LINK: CENSUS
THE MULTI-RACIAL OPTION ON THE CENSUS DESTROYS RECOGNITION OF RACIAL GROUPS.
REBECCA CHIYOKO KING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
2000 (JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES 3.2 (2000) 191-217 RACIALIZATION, RECOGNITION, AND
RIGHTS: LUMPING AND SPLITTING MULTIRACIAL ASIAN AMERICANS IN THE 2000 CENSUS)
Perhaps the most interesting development came when the issue of how these boxes would be tabulated was being discussed. Both the
NAACP and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) urged those who were part white to identify
themselves as simply black or Asian on the Census. Other civil rights organizations are pressuring the government to reassign
multiracial Americans back into the traditional racial categories to resist dilution of any individual non-white racial group . 31 Clearly,
AALDEF was resisting the separation of the racial category Asian American from the recognition of civil rights. It is because the
concept of race is so closely tied with the concept of recognition that the AALDEF could not envision recognizing multiracial Asian
Americans without possibly undoing the race and rights nexus. They therefore advocated compliance and control of mixed-race Asian
Americans to tow the racial line by checking only Asian only on the Census.
The JACL in contrast, had a more flexible view of what race will look like in the year 2000 and were less concerned about losing numbers. This may be in part because
the Japanese American community, which the JACL sees as its main constituency, is shrinking relative to other Asian ethnic groups and therefore has fewer numbers to
lose than larger Asian ethnic groups such as South Asians who could withstand some numerical loss. Instead, the Japanese American community is so quickly becoming
the largest out-married Asian ethnic group that the JACL might have thought it could score points and get membership from mixed-race Japanese Americans and this
would only increase their numbers. However, the JACL statement is clear and framed within the tone that recognizing mixed-race Japanese Americans is just the right
thing to do.
While the change in the way race is enumerated in the 2000 census may not seem that radical of a change, the implications are far-reaching. To recognize the
multiraciality and hybridity present in the Asian American community may mean the categories have to change to allow for multiplicity. This seems a humane thing to
do, but causes difficulties in the context of the Census because as it is currently envisioned and [End Page 206] used it is fundamentally about collecting racial/ethnic
data to make sure that there are civil rights compliance, equal opportunities, and fair voting practices. In this logic, AMEA may be right, that it is not only how we see
ourselves as mixed-race people, but also in cases of discrimination how others see us as well. If that seeing is the basis for discrimination in hiring or housing, there
may be a need to know how many mixed-race people there are in order to insure compliance to equal housing and hiring laws. In this vein, if people were to perceive
mixed-race people as the same and lump them together in their treatment racially, then there might be a call for mixed-race data. The Census has long been seen, and
clearly still is seen by some mixed-race activists, particularly AMEA, as a place to lobby for collective racial identities, representation, and rights. At the same time, the
Census has increasingly tried to recognize both group racial identities and individual racial identities. Some believe that the goal of the Census is to track discrimination
against certain racial/ethnic groups. Others believe that the goal of the Census is fundamentally to represent individual racial identities. Because the mechanism

for recognizing racial groups is racial group membership which is mutually exclusive to other racial groups and it is this membership
that leads to recognition (as the basis as a claim for rights), and because the Census has been formulated along mutually exclusive
racial lines and is tied directly to recognition, traditional civil rights groups see unlinking race and recognition as the end of rights .
Ultimately, the state, represented here by the Census, likes to construct fixed categories of citizens under the law, and this conflicts
fundamentally with the nature of the proposed changes to the Census where race will be tabulated multiply for different uses in
different contexts. The racial rigidity that the state needs to enforce civil right laws competes with the flexibility proposed by
multiracial activists.

25

LINK: QUEER AFF/MARRIAGE PROMOTION

THE HOMOGENIZING OF BLACK AND QUEER POLITICS MARGINALIZES RACIAL OPPRESSION.
CATHERINE SMITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF DENVER COPYRIGHT 2007
(WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW 2007 WIS. L. REV. 379 ARTICLE: QUEER AS BLACK FOLK?)
At a macro level, I view antigay bigotry, racism, and sexism as the same in that they relegate entire classes of citizens to second-class status in order to uphold the
power and privilege of heterosexuals, white [*382] people, and men. n9 Yet, even arguments at the macro level are often unsuccessful in convincing

blacks that antigay bigotry parallels racism, due in large part to the different ways these forms of oppression manifest themselves.
Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's ban on interracial marriages in Loving, however, the same-as analysis
has taken root in the debates surrounding gay marriage and LGBT equality more generally. n10 Just as my father wanted to make me a
black man, white LGBT rights advocates often attempt to portray all LGBT people as "black-equivalents," at the micro and macro
level, and freely borrow imagery from, and make comparisons to, the black civil rights struggle.
I want to be clear: I believe that LGBT people should possess the same rights as heterosexuals, but this Article is not a normative analysis, nor is it a critique of framing
LGBT rights around gay marriage . I am critiquing the same-as mantra as a potential organizing strategy used by white mainstream LGBT

organizations in their attempt to build meaningful coalitions with black people and sway public opinion. While sameness arguments
may be effective and necessary in some instances - such as in courtrooms or legal briefs in which LGBT advocates are bound by legal
precedent n11 - they are not the optimal approach to an interracial dialogue on LGBT issues. n12
[*383] I understand why white LGBT individuals make sameness arguments: being discriminated against, assaulted, or outcast because of some characteristic invokes
many emotions, including anger, frustration, and isolation. n13 As a result, the LGBT individual seeks empathy from people who have experienced such treatment - namely, black people. And
in certain circumstances, such analogies may be persuasive, especially when the parties to the discussion have preexisting relationships. But often, the sameness approach is rife with pitfalls
that prevent any real progress in a discussion between an LGBT person and a black heterosexual person. These pitfalls become vast chasms when sameness arguments are invoked by
predominantly white LGBT mainstream organizations seeking to make allies in black communities or to convince U.S. citizens of all races that LGBT people should have legal protections.
Sameness arguments reinforce antigay bigotry, racism, and sexism; create rifts between LGBT communities and black communities; and further marginalize LGBT people of color. n14 Such
comparisons also serve as a convenient target for those who oppose gay rights. n15
[*384] While I am not alone in criticizing sameness arguments, this Article uses social-psychology literature to explain why they fail and offers another model for building LGBT-black
coalitions. Over the last thirty years, social psychologists have developed Social Identity Theory (SIT) to explain how individuals, as self-identified members of groups, engage in group
behaviors that lead to in-group favoritism and out-group derision. n16 I argue that LGBT sameness arguments trigger these in-group-out-group dynamics, creating significant barriers to crossgroup coalitions and impeding potential alliances. In order to unify subordinated groups, LGBT advocates of all races must reframe the discussion around what social psychologists call
superordinate goals - objectives that are important to members of both marginalized groups and difficult for those groups to attain separately. While it may be difficult, framing the discussion
around superordinate goals offers LGBT and black communities unifying theories to combat racism, homophobia, and sexism.

We must now delve deeper into how homophobia is a

weapon of racism and how racism is a weapon of homophobia in order to reveal how these forms of discrimination overlap and
reinforce one another. n18
LGBT advocates and feminists have explored how homophobia is a weapon of sexism and vice versa. n17

Part I of this Article briefly discusses the Supreme Court opinion in Loving and how, forty years later, its underlying premise has permeated the rights debate in the LGBT movement's quest for
same-sex marriage. Part II summarizes the public discourse on gay marriage and discusses why framing the discourse as one of sameness often fails to persuade black people, the LGBT
community's most crucial potential allies. Part III suggests an alternate way to frame the debate by turning to social psychology's explanation of how individuals engage in in-group favoritism
and out-group derision to bolster their own self-image.
II. Forty Years of Loving
In 1958, Virginia residents Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving married in the District of Columbia. n19 Mildred, a black woman, and Richard, a white man, returned to Virginia as husband and
wife in violation of the state's ban on interracial marriage. n20 In January 1959, a Virginia trial judge accepted the Lovings' guilty plea and suspended their one-year sentence on the condition
that they leave the state of Virginia and not return for twenty-five years. n21 The Lovings challenged Virginia's ban on interracial marriages as a violation of the Equal Protection and Due
Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. n22
A year shy of the Lovings' tenth wedding anniversary, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's antimiscegenation law as unconstitutional, stating that "the fact that Virginia prohibits only
interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy." n23
The Court rejected the subjugation of black people to maintain white supremacy. n24 This Loving principle should apply to marriage for LGBT people. As Randall Kennedy explains, "the bar
to same-sex marriage stigmatizes gays and lesbians on behalf of heterosexualist caste assumptions in a fashion comparable to the way in which antimiscegenation laws wrongfully stigmatized
blacks on behalf of white supremacist caste assumptions." n25 But the current antigay social and [*386] political climate continues to block the pathway to gay marriage and LGBT equality in
the United States. n26

In an attempt to counter the denial of marriage and other basic rights, LGBT mainstream organizations and advocates often advance
sameness arguments, comparing sexual orientation and sexual identity to race in an attempt to sway public opinion. n27 While some
citizens are convinced by these sameness arguments, many - including a majority of black Americans n28 - are not.
LGBT people should not have to be the same as black people to be afforded citizenship equal to that exercised by heterosexuals. n29
But advocates have turned to sameness arguments that are problematic when it comes to building LGBT-black alliances. n30
Proponents of these arguments become ensnared in a web of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misconceptions, and missed
opportunities.
III. The Pitfalls of LGBT Sameness Arguments I have heard the sameness comments repeatedly from white gays and lesbians and each time, I bristle. n31 I understand
what they mean, because I too have experienced the pains of homophobia. And yet I bristle. As a black lesbian who believes that gays and lesbians should have the right
to marry, I bristle. If the sameness arguments do not sit [*387] well with me, it is unlikely that these arguments will be compelling to my mother, my three brothers,
my cousins, or other black people. So, why are such comparisons unsettling for me as someone who would clearly benefit from true LGBT equality?

Many legal scholars and social-justice activists have criticized the comparisons of racism with other forms of prejudice. n32 In a
thoughtful critique of comparisons between racism and sexism, Professors Trina Grillo and Stephanie Wildman explain that "any
analogy to race must be used ethically and with care" n33 because they often perpetuate racism by "marginalizing and obscuring the
different role that race plays in the lives of people of color and whites." n34 Others have explained how such comparisons also render all LGBT
people as white and all black people as heterosexual, thus marginalizing black LGBT people. n35 My critiques focus explicitly on why such comparisons fail to
persuade blacks - particularly black heterosexuals - that gay rights are civil rights. While I concede that such analogies can be useful in certain contexts, n36 they
usually fail - no matter how well-intentioned or well-articulated. n37 First, these arguments invariably trigger counterarguments of difference,

shifting the discussion from why LGBT people should have rights into a sameness-difference debate. Second, they disregard the

26

racism and white privilege of white LGBT people as members of the white majority. Third, such arguments ignore the privilege that
heterosexuals - including black heterosexuals - enjoy as members of the majority.

27

LINK: FAMILY PLANNING

FAMILY PLANNING

ORGANIZATIONS TARGET WOMEN OF COLOR WITH STERILIZATION BECAUSE OF RACIST

STEREOTYPES OF UNFIT, OVER-PRODUCING MINORITIES.

ANDREA SMITH, CO-FOUNDER OF INCITE! WOMEN OF COLOR AGAINST VIOLENCE AND ASST PROF OF
AMERICAN CULTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 2005 (NWSA JOURNAL 17.1 (2005) 119-140,
BEYOND PRO-CHOICE VERSUS PRO-LIFE: WOMEN OF COLOR AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE)
Another example is the difficulty pro-choice groups have in maintaining a critical perspective on dangerous or potentially dangerous contraceptives, arguing that
women should have the "choice" of contraceptives. Many scholars and activists have documented the dubious safety record of Norplant and
Depo-Provera, two long-acting hormonal contraceptives (Krust and Assetoyer 1993; Masterson and Guthrie 1986; Roberts 1997; Smith 2001). In fact,
lawsuits against Norplant have forced an end to its distribution (although Norplant that remains on the shelves can be sold to women). In 1978, the FDA denied

approval for Depo-Provera on the grounds that: (1) dog studies confirmed an elevated rate of breast cancer; (2) there appeared to be an
increased risk of birth defects in human fetuses exposed to the drug; and (3) there was no pressing need shown for use of the drug as a
contraceptive (Masterson and Guthrie). In 1987, the FDA changed its regulations and began to require cancer testing in rats and mice instead of dogs and monkeys;
Depo-Provera did not cause cancer in these animals, but major concerns regarding its safety persist (Feminist Women's Health Centers 1997 ). Also problematic is
the manner in which these contraceptives are frequently promoted in communities of color and often without informed consent (Krust
and Assetoyer 1993; Masterson and Guthrie 1986; Smith 2001).7 Yet none of the mainstream pro-choice organizations have ever seriously taken a position on the issue
of informed consent as part of their agenda.8 Indeed, Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood, equates opposition to Norplant and Depo-Provera as opposition to
"choice" in her book The War on Choice (Feldt 2004, 34, 37). Planned Parenthood and NARAL opposed restrictions against sterilization abuse,
despite the thousands of women of color who were being sterilized without their consent, because they saw such policies as interfering with a
woman's "right to choose" (Nelson 2003, 144; Patchesky 1990, 8).
Particularly disturbing has been some of the support given by these organizations to the Center for Research on Population and Security, headed by Stephen Mumford
and Elton Kessel, which distributes globally a form of sterilization, Quinacrine. Quinacrine is a drug that is used to treat malaria. It is inserted into the uterus
where it dissolves, causing the fallopian tubes to scar, rendering the woman irreversibly sterile . Family Health International conducted four in
vitro studies and found [End Page 130] Quinacrine to be mutagenic in three of them (Controversy Over Sterilization Pellet 1994; Norsigian 1996). It, as well as the
World Health Organization, recommended against further trials for female sterilization, and no regulatory body supports Quinacrine. However, the North Carolinabased Center for Research on Population and Security has circumvented these bodies through private funding from such organizations as the Turner Foundation and
Leland Fykes organization (which incidentally funds pro-choice and anti-immigrant groups). The Center for Research on Population and Security has been distributing
Quinacrine for free to researchers and government health agencies. There are field trials in eleven countries, with more than 70,000 women sterilized. In Vietnam, a
hundred female rubber plant workers were given routine pelvic exams during which the doctor inserted the Quinacrine without their consent. Thus far, the side effects
linked to Quinacrine include ectopic pregnancy, puncturing of the uterus during insertion, pelvic inflammatory disease, and severe abdominal pains. Other possible
concerns include heart and liver damage and exacerbation of pre-existing viral conditions. In one of the trials in Vietnam, a large number of cases that had serious side
effects were excluded from the data (Controversy Over Sterilization Pellet 1994; Norsigian 1996).
Despite the threat to reproductive justice that this group represents, Feminist Majority Foundation featured the Center for Research on Population and Security at its
1996 Feminist Expo because, I was informed by the organizers, they promoted choice for women. Then in 1999 , Planned Parenthood almost agreed to
sponsor a Quinacrine trial in the United States until outside pressure forced it to change its position (Committee on Women, Population and the
Environment 1999). A prevalent ideology within the mainstream pro-choice movement is that women should have the choice to use whatever

contraception they want. This position does not consider: (1) that a choice among dangerous contraceptives is not much of a choice;
(2) the millions of dollars pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry have to promote certain contraceptives, compared to the few
resources women's advocacy groups have to provide alternative information on these same contraceptives ; and (3) the social, political, and economic
conditions in which women may find themselves are such that using dangerous contraceptives may be the best of even worse options.
One reason that such groups have not taken a position on informed consent in the case of potentially dangerous contraceptives is due to their investment in population
control. As Betsy Hartmann (1995) has argued, while contraceptives are often articulated as an issue of choice for white women in the first
world, they are articulated as an instrument of population control for women of color and women in the third world (Hartmann 1995). The
historical origins of Planned Parenthood are inextricably tied to the eugenics movement . Its founder, Margaret Sanger, increasingly [End Page
131] collaborated with eugenics organizations during her career and framed the need for birth control in terms of the need to reduce the number of those in the "lower
classes" (Roberts 1997, 73). In a study commissioned in 1960, Planned Parenthood concluded that poor people "have too many children"
(Rainwater 1960, 2); yet something must be done to stop this trend in order to "disarm the population bomb" (Rainwater 1960, 178). Today,
Planned Parenthood is particularly implicated in this movement as can be seen clearly by the groups it lists as allies on its website (www.plannedparenthood.org):
Population Action International, the Population Institute, Zero Population Growth, and the Population Council. A central campaign of Planned Parenthood is to restore
U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund. In addition it asserts its commitment to addressing rapid population growth on this same website. I will not repeat
the problematic analysis, critiqued elsewhere, of this population paradigm that essentially blames third-world women for poverty, war, environmental damage, and
social unrest, without looking at the root causes of all these phenomena (including population growth)colonialism, corporate policies, militarism, and economic
disparities between poor and rich countries (Bandarage 1997; Hartmann 1995: Silliman and King 1999).

28

LINK: FAMILY PLANNING

RACIST BIRTH CONTROL POLITICS REINFORCE WHITE SUPREMACY.
DOROTHY ROBERTS, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 1997 (KILLING THE BLACK BODY PG 102-103)

STUDIES

AND

SOCIOLOGY,

Although some Blacks believe that white-controlled family planning literally threatens Black survival, I take the position that racist birth control policies serve
primarily an ideological function. The chief danger of these programs is not the physical annihilation of a race or social class. Family planning policies never
reduced the Black birthrate enough to accomplish this result. Rather, the chief danger of these policies is the legitimation of an oppressive social

structure. Proposals to solve social problems by curbing Black reproduction make racial inequality appear to be the product of nature
rather than power. By identifying procreation as the cause of Black peoples condition, they divert attention away from the political,
social, and economic forces that maintain Americas racial order. This harm to the entire group compounds the harm to individual
members who are denied the freedom to have children. Donald MacKenzie observed that eugenic social theory is a way of reading the
structure of social class onto nature In the same way, the primary threat to the Black community posed by coercive birth control
schemes is not the actual elimination of the Black race; it is the biological justification of white supremacy. Claims that current government
policies that penalize Black reproduction share this legitimating feature of eugenic rationale are sometimes misinterpreted as an unwarranted fear of racial genocide.
John Kramer, dean of Tulane Law School, criticized my argument that reproductive punishments for crime are similar to eugenic laws on the grounds that Black
women need not fear that their right to bear children is under seirous attacknor do black birthrates suggest that they do. Dean Kramer failed to understand my point
about the dangerous message sent by both eugenic laws and policies that penalize Black childbearing. It could as easily be argued that mandatory sterilization laws
enforced during the first half of the twentieth century posed no serious danger since that resulted in the sterilization of only 70,000 people. But the impact of these

laws went far beyond their reduction of victims birthrates. They affected the way Americans valued each other and thought about
social problems. Eugenic ideology may also facilitate truly genocidal actions. The Nazi compulsory sterilization law of 1933
forshadowed the Holocaust.

STERILIZATION IS A FORM OF GENOCIDE: NATIVE AMERICANS PROVE.

D. MARIE RALSTIN-LEWIS DOCTORAL STUDENT IN SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON 2005 (THE
CONTINUING STRUGGLE AGAINST GENOCIDE: INDIGENOUS WOMEN'S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS SOURCE: WICAZO SA
REVIEW, VOL. 20, NO. 1, COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION, II (SPRING, 2005), PP. 71- 95)
From 1970 to 1980, the birthrate for Indian women fell at a rate seven times greater than that of white women. This dramatic statistic
indicates that the sterilization and birth control campaign was significantly more than an attack on women in general: it was a
systematic program aimed at reducing the Native population, or genocide. The United Nations recognizes prevention of births in a target group as a
form of genocide. Attacks on the reproductive capacities to indigenous women in the United States continue today through the use of
chemical contraceptives such as Norplant and DepoProvera. The latest threat is a new form of nonsurgical permanent sterilization
known as quinacrine sterilization.5 Was the IHS sterilization abuse prompted by individual racism among doctors? Were their actions a dying gasp of
government-sanctioned eugenics in the United States? Or was it a reprisal for gains in indigenous sovereignty? Violations against the reproductive rights of
indigenous women did not occur because of the efforts of any one individual or agency, nor can a single explanation or theory account
for them. Rather, these violations resulted from sexism and racism, remnants of eugenics, population-control measures, and familyplanning programs that drew large subsidies from the federal government . Complicating this situation are the unique political and social realities of
indigenous peoples, who were often dependent on the federal government for health care while also demanding federal recognition of their rights to land and
sovereignty.

29

LINK: FAMILY PLANNING

NORPLANT, DEPO-PROVERA

AND QUINACRINE ARE ALL CURRENT STERILIZATION TECHNIQUES DEPLOYED

AGAINST PEOPLE OF COLOR AS ABUSES OF REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM.

D. MARIE RALSTIN-LEWIS DOCTORAL STUDENT IN SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON 2005 (THE
CONTINUING STRUGGLE AGAINST GENOCIDE: INDIGENOUS WOMEN'S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS SOURCE: WICAZO SA
REVIEW, VOL. 20, NO. 1, COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION, II (SPRING, 2005), PP. 71- 95)
It is ironic, but not surprising, that soon after Native American women and other women of color had brought sterilization scandals to
light, they seemed powerless in preventing the next abuse of reproductive freedom: DepoProvera and Norplant. In the years before 1973,
while DepoProvera46 was still pending approval from the FDA for use in birth control, hundreds of Native American women (the majority of them mentally retarded)
were injected with DepoProvera.47 DepoProvera gained clearance from the FDA, however, only in 1992, and its -longer-lasting counterpart, Norplant,48

won acceptance in 1990. The Population Control Council developed Norplant, which was also heavily promoted by Indian Health
Services both in the past and present. Many side effects plague women using DepoProvera and Norplant. These problems have
prompted more than 400 lawsuits representing about 500,000 women nationwide . The makers of Norplant settled many of these cases for a meager
amount: 36,000 women were offered $1,500 each.49 Unfortunately, DepoProvera and Norplant, while seemingly perfect solutions to the
perceived "Indian problem," can only be seen as abuses against Native women's reproductive rights. Most women were not given
information about the drugs' possible side effects, one of which is the cessation of the menstrual cycle. Menstruation, deeply important to the religious lives
of both men and women in traditional Native cultures, allows women to go through a process of spiritual transformation and cleansing. Native men must undergo rituals
to enable them to participate in this process. Removing this natural process, in effect, places Native women on the same level as men spiritually. Some women,

after discontinuing their use of DepoProvera, wait up to two years before returning to a normal menstrual cycle. Some are rendered
totally infertile.50 Another significant problem associated with the use of Norplant and DepoProvera is excessive bleeding. Some studies cite continuous bleeding
episodes of eighty days or more. Another study revealed bleeding episodes ranging from eleven to thirty days per month. Such bleeding, when attributed solely to
DepoProvera or Norplant, can mask serious conditions such as cervical or endometrial cancer (which occur among women of color at a higher rate than among white
women). Culturally, excessive menstrual bleeding is just as traumatic as the loss of menses altogether. Participation in traditional religious activities is limited for a
Native woman who is [End Page 86] menstruating (and sometimes her husband). Women who are bleeding cannot attend sweat lodge ceremonies, Sundances, or other
spiritual ceremonies such as Native American Church meetings. They cannot go anywhere a sacred pipe is being used. And, they must often refrain from sexual
activity.51

The Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center in South Dakota uncovered serious problems in the distribution of
DepoProvera and Norplant to Native women. The center's director, Charon Asetoyer, has fought for a uniform protocol for
DepoProvera since 1993, after uncovering numerous abuses through personal interviews .52 One major abuse, inadequate screening, is very
problematic to the physical health of Native women especially. Norplant is contraindicated in cases of diabetes, high blood pressure, liver disease, and smoking, which
occur at higher-than-normal levels on most reservations and in Indian communities.53

While Norplant can be seen as an empowering advance in reproductive technology, it is also highly susceptible to governmental
abuse. Compared to other contraceptive devices, it is easily monitored by government or population-control officials. The rods can be
located readily in the upper arms, and removal by a patient would be obvious to a medical worker. Since the decision to utilize Norplant is a one-time affair (the devices
are inserted only once every five years) the doctor-patient relationship is critically important. Also, both insertion and removal must be done by a trained medical
professional, so some personal control is relinquished in using this method of contraception.54 The challenge comes in balancing access to Norplant for those who
authentically choose it while not coercing others, by intimidation or incentives, to use the device. A woman cannot start and stop using Norplant whenever she chooses;
she must depend on her doctor to abide by her reproductive decisions. If her doctor refuses to remove the Norplant inserts, a scenario that occurs with alarming
frequency on many reservations today, a woman effectively has no control over her fertility.55 Perhaps the most alarming new form of nonsurgical

sterilization to date is quinacrine sterilization (QS). Quinacrine, a medication historically used for the treatment of malaria, is a known
mutagen. When these capsules are inserted into the uterus they dissolve and spread to the fallopian tubes. The medication then
destroys a portion of the tubes' lining. The resulting scar tissue blocks the tubes and prevents future pregnancy. More than 104,000
quinacrine sterilizations have occurred in twenty countries. This new procedure is distressing in many ways. First, nurses, midwives, and even untrained
personnel can perform a QS. Next, the dose of quinacrine can be inserted without a woman's knowledge, even during a gynecological exam. Finally, quinacrine costs
only pennies a capsule. The dangers of quinacrine are a [End Page 87] central controversy in the medical and reproductive fields. Proponents of quinacrine claim the
drug has no major side effects. However, opponents are concerned about long-term effects of the drug and its links to cancer of the uterus. There is an increased risk of
ectopic (or tubal) pregnancya life threatening conditionwith the use of quinacrine. Moreover, a risk of birth defects exists if quinacrine is inadvertently
administered to a pregnant woman.56

30

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

QUINACRINE STERILIZATIONS HAVE BEEN USED FOR MORE THAN A DECADE IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES, WITHOUT ANIMAL TESTING. IN THE LATE 1990S, THE
USE OF QUINACRINE FOR STERILIZATIONS WAS BANNED IN INDIA AND VIETNAM DUE TO UNETHICAL MEDICAL PRACTICES. NEVERTHELESS, THE FDA
RECENTLY APPROVED TESTING OF QUINACRINE IN THE UNITED STATES. FAMILY HEALTH INTERNATIONAL IN NORTH CAROLINA
HAS RECEIVED FUNDING FROM PRIVATE POPULATION-CONTROL PROGRAMS TO BEGIN THE LABORATORY TESTS NECESSARY TO
GO AHEAD WITH FDA APPROVAL FOR HUMAN TESTING AND USE OF QUINACRINE FOR STERILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES.
PENDING THE RESULTS OF THIS TESTING, THE FDA HAS NOT YET APPROVED QUINACRINE STERILIZATIONS. CLINICAL TRIALS OF
QS BEGAN IN THE UNITED STATES IN 2002. HOWEVER, ITS DISTRIBUTORS HOPE TO ENCOURAGE MORE AMERICAN DOCTORS TO OFFER IT TO THEIR
PATIENTS. EVEN NOW A DOCTOR CAN LEGALLY PRESCRIBE QUINACRINE IN THE UNITED STATES FOR OFF-LABEL USE (I.E., STERILIZATION).57 CONSIDERING
THE LOW COST, EASY ADMINISTRATION AND CONCEALMENT, AND THE HISTORY OF BOTH THE DRUG'S USE AND ITS MAKERS'
CONNECTIONS WITH RACIST AND POPULATION CONTROL GROUPS,58 REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS GROUPS ARE LEGITIMATELY
CONCERNED. WILL THE NEXT QUINACRINE STERILIZATIONS OCCUR IN MARGINAL COMMUNITIES OF THE UNITED STATES THAT
HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY SUBJECT TO OTHER POPULATION-CONTROL METHODS? WILL LOW-COST QUINACRINE BE THE NEXT

LINK:
INNOCULATION / MORAL OBLIGATION

STERILIZATION OPTION OF CHOICE FOR THE PERPETUALLY UNDERFUNDED

IHS.

THE AFFIRMATIVES GOOD INTENTIONS ARE DEMONSTRATIVE OF A PARTICULAR POSITION OF PRIVILEGE

WHILE THE PLAN MAY SATISFY SOME ABSTRACT MORAL OBLIGATION, ITS THIS VERY ACT OF
MEAGER GIVING AND CONVENIENT FORGETTING THAT REPRODUCES FORMATIONS OF SOCIAL
DOMINANCE
STEVEN D. FAROUGH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY ASSUMPTION COLLEGE 2004 (CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY
THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF WHITE MASCULINITIES)
The achievement of sovereign individuality comes through a particular standpoint in liberal humanist discourses . In this section, I use the
concept the good citizen/subject from postcolonial theory (Sandoval 1997) and the poststructuralist critique of liberal humanist discourse on individualism to
demonstrate the epistemological foundations of the identity of sovereign individuality (Foucault 1979; Weedon 1997; Herman 1999). In Chela Sandovals (1997)
theorization of white consciousness, she uses Roland Barthes concept good citizen/subject to explore a new form of awareness among whites in the emerging
postcolonial world. The good citizen/subject to Barthes refers to individuals who espouse a liberal standpoint characterized by anti-

racist and individualistic rhetoric to signify how racism is bad and that race no longer matters in society. However, despite the good
citizen/subjects use of more progressive rhetoric on race, Barthes argues that the individual in this standpoint is incapable of seeing
the persistence of exploitative relations between the colonizer and the colonized . The good citizen/subject is inoculated from such
unpleasant realities. This inoculation occurs through the investment in liberal humanist discourse that shields the subject from the
exploitative social relations. Thus, the good citizen/subject takes on a position that appears liberal or open minded while still being
complicit in reproducing the structures of racial inequality (Sandoval 1997).
Liberal humanist discourse emerged during the rise of modernity (Fou- cault 1979). This discourse has enormous breadth and many epistemologi- cal underpinnings.
Although it is beyond the scope of this article to provide an extensive genealogy of the liberal humanist discourse, the following sets of assumptions operate within this
discursive eld. First, liberal humanist discourse constitutes the self as inherent, meaning that it exists ontologi- cally prior to society
(Herman 1999). Second, liberal humanist discourse interprets language as reecting the intentions, thoughts, and feeling of the inner self,
not producing them (Weedon 1997). Therefore, this discourse positions the individual as primary in producing both themselves and

acting in the social world.

Those that employ liberal humanist discourse often take on the subject position of the good citizen/subject when discussing race and
gender. Through the use of liberal humanist discourse, the good citizen/subject views him or her self as separate from the social world
and not participating in racial or gender inequalities (unless they consciously act against people of color or women). Thus, liberal humanist discourse
allows the good citizen/subject to take on a standpoint that is accepting of diversity but unable to comprehend how he or she could be
privileged by race and gender. According to this subject position, unless white men consciously act against women or people of color
then they cannot be interpreted as privileged . In fact, Omi and Winant (1994), Feagin (2001), Frankenberg (1993) and Gallagher (forthcoming) have argued
that this more seemingly egalitarian standpoint has resulted in a color-blind view to the world, one where race does not exist unless it is explicitly stated. The standpoint
of the good citizen/subject has become the dominant way of interpreting race in the post-Civil Rights era within the discursive eld of liberal humanism (Feagin 2001).

Therefore, the good citizen/subject should be understood as the standpoint or subject position in liberal humanist discourse that allows
white men to take on a perceived identity of sovereign individuality. The good citizen/subject position and sovereign individuality were pervasive
throughout the majority of the interviews. However, as previously mentioned, the standpoint of feeling nonracial is not a constant experience. I found that in certain
social contexts white mens sense of sovereign individuality is challenged, particularly in mostly black urban areas.

31

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: WE SOLVE RACISM

THE PORTRAYAL OF THE RACIAL DISPARITY IN POVERTY RELIES ON A MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS
SEEPED IN WHITENESS.
JO ANNE SCHNEIDER DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 1999
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, NEW SERIES, VOL. 101, NO. 4 (DEC., 1999), PP. 761-782

The many reforms of the 1960s shifted public assistance from a program that excluded people of color to a system epitomized by the
stereotypical African American welfare mom (Gordon 1994; Mead 1992; Piven and Cloward 1977; Rose 1995). To conservatives, welfare continues to be a
problem because African Americans lack the appropriate "cultural values" to get themselves out of poverty (Mead 1992, 1993). For many social activists
and liberal academics, high welfare rates and the middle-class (read white) backlash against welfare are the direct result of racism (Katz 1989; Massey and Denton
1993). The anthropological literature on poverty and race echoes this concern that politicians use white racism in their efforts to cut public assistance (Gregory
1994a:26; Harrison 1995; Susser 1982:206; Williams 1994:348-351). This section briefly outlines some of the demographic patterns regarding race and poverty, as
well as the major theoretical interpretations of these trends. As Rueschmeyer and Skocpol (1996) illustrate, scholars play a role in framing the way that politicians and
the general public understand these issues. Effectively portraying poverty is not easy. As Susser (1996:423) reminds us: It is difficult to document the misery

of the poor in the contemporary United States without falling into the problem of either romanticizing or minimizing the devastation or of painting
such distress, victimization and brutalization that the description becomes fuel for political assaults upon the poor themselves. The demographics of
race and poverty illustrate racial disparities created by historic white privilege. Contrary to images of welfare recipients as all African American
women with low skills, until recently the largest percentage of welfare recipients were white . The national public assistance population in 1993 was 38%
white, 36.6% African American, 18.5% Latino, 2.9% Asian, and 1.3% Native American." However, a disproportionate percentage of people of color are on
public assistance. According to the 1990 census, 80% of the U.S. population was white, 12% African American, 2.9% Asian, .8% Native American, and 4% other; 9%
of the population listed themselves as "of Hispanic origin."12 Whites are significantly underrepresented on the welfare roles. African Americans are three times the
expected proportion of their population on public assistance. Latinos are double the expected number. Only Asians have poverty levels in proportion to their
percentage of the population.

32

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: CRITICAL THEORY

CRITICAL THEORY IS DIVORCED FROM MATERIAL REALITY THIS WILL ONLY MAINTAIN WHITENESS. ONLY
A CRITIQUE THAT IS ATTENTIVE TO IDENTITY CAN TRANSFORM SOCIAL REALITY

I.M YOUNG PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (POLITY AND GROUP
DIFFERENCES) AUGUST 17, 1990 .
Rejecting a theory of justice does not entail eschewing rational discourse about justice. Some modes of reflection, analysis, and argument aim not at
building a systematic theory, but at clarifying the meaning of concepts and issues, describing and explaining social relations, and
articulating and defending ideals and principles. Reflective discourse about jus tice makes arguments, but these are not intended as
definitive demonstrations. They are addressed to others and await their response, in a situated political dialogue. In this book I engage in such situated analysis

and argument in the mode of critical theory.

As I understand it, critical theory is a normative reflection that is histor ically and socially contextualized. Critical theory rejects as illusory the
effort to construct a universal normative system insulated from a particular society. Normative reflection must begin from historically specific circumstances because
there is nothing but what is, the given, the situated interest in justice, from which to start. Reflecting from within a particular social context, good

normative theorizing cannot avoid social and political description and explanation. Without social theory, normative reflection is
abstract, empty, and unable to guide criticism with a practical interest in emancipation . Unlike positivist social theory, however, which separates
social facts from values, and claims to be value neutral, critical theory denies that social theory must accede to the given. Social description and explanation
must be critical, that is, aim to evaluate the given in normative terms. Without such a critical stance, many questions about what occurs in a
society and why, who benefits and who is harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify the given social
reality.
Critical theory presumes that the normative ideals used to criticize a society are rooted in experience of and reflection on that very
society, and that norms can come from nowhere else. But what does this mean, and how is it possible for norms to be both socially based and measures of society?
Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of suffering or distress, or feeling distress oneself. The philosopher
is always socially situated, and if the society is divided by oppressions, she either reinforces or struggles against them .

33

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: CENSUS
THE CENSUS IS SEEPED IN HISTORICAL RACISM - THE AFFIRMATIVES NAVE BELIEF THAT WE CAN
WISH AWAY THIS HISTORY IS AN EXMPLE OF WHITENESS
BOB CURTIS, THE MULTIRACIAL ACTIVIST, 2000 HTTP://WWW.SODABOB.COM/CONSTITUTION/CENSUS.ASP
Thus, the very beginnings of the race question on the Census were extremely racist in nature. However, the racist usage of the Census
ended with neither slavery nor women's suffrage. The Census Bureau claims on their FAQ page that, The numbers we publish are combined with
thousands of answers from people in your neighborhood and across the country. No one, except sworn Census Bureau employees, can see your
questionnaire or link your name with your responses. In fact, the law provides severe penalties for any census employee that makes your answers
known. This may give you a warm, fuzzy feeling about your data being protected from prying eyes - but it shouldn't. Consider what Colleen Monahan
goes on to explain on her Evolution of the Census web page, Though standards exist to maintain the privacy of those being enumerated,

data from the census can be and has been misused. Most notably, census data was used during the Civil War to identify the
number of free and slave African-Americans prior to General Sherman's March to the Sea campaign and during World War II
to identify the location of Japanese-Americans in the United States.

34

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: HOUSING
PLANS TO HELP THE MINORITY HOUSING CRISES ARE ONLY EXCUSES TO EXPAND WHITE INDUSTRY.
GEORGE LIPSITZ, DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1999,
POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT (PAGE 11)
Minority disadvantages craft advantages for others. Urban renewal failed to provide new housing for the poor, but it played an
important role in transforming the U.S. urban economy from one that relied on factory production to one driven by producer services.
Urban renewal projects subsidized the devel opment of downtown office centers on previously residential land, and they fre quently
created buffer zones of empty blocks dividing poor neighborhoods from new shopping centers designed for affluent commuters. To help
cities compete for corporate investment by making them appealing to high-level executives, federal urban aid favored construction of luxury housing units
and cultural centers like symphony halls and art museums over affordable housing for workers. Tax abatements granted to these
producer services centers further aggravated the fiscal crisis that cities faced, leading to tax increases on existing industries,
businesses, and residences.

INCREASED ACCESS TO SPACE IS ONLY A RUSE WHITENESS WILL STILL HINDER THE MOVEMENT OF
BODIES THROUGH SPACE AND INCREASE SURVEILLANCE
STEVEN D. FAROUGH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY ASSUMPTION COLLEGE 2004 (CRITICAL
SOCIOLOGY THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF WHITE MASCULINITIES)
At a more immediate, context specic level, this sense of privilege and fear comes from the possibility of being looked at by people of
color. Indeed, the link between social geography, race and the transformation in identity is so powerful that it is not necessary for the
respondents to be literally looked at by African Americans in urban environments. Simply by entering mostly black social
geographies, some of the white men noted that they literally felt white or as Frank says, sticking out like a sore thumb. Clearly,
this experience of feeling racialized and gendered is produced through sight. Yet this fear is not evoked through face-to-face contact
alone. Although African Americans are clearly not in the same positions of power as whites in general, the fear is in a sense panoptic
white people regulate themselves to avoid direct forms of contact with the predominately black urban space (Foucault 1980).
These feelings appeared to be so powerful that they even overwhelmed some of the respondents good/citizen subject positions that are key to achieving sovereign
individuality. For instance William notes,
Well, I think I had an intellectual opinion and an emotional opinion. My intellectual opinion was very supportive of, at that time, Martin Luther King and civil rights
and all that, and started participating in demonstrations and things in the middle-late sixties. So, on that level, I though of myself as very liberal. Emotionally, I was
terried of black males, because I had had some bad experiences growing up, Id been robbed and beaten up a couple of times. Of course, I also knew that white kids
[did] the same things to black kids, and because it was a racially mixed neighborhood there was that kind of warfare going on, and I just happened to be the victim of it
a couple of times. And because of that, I think, at an emotional level my emotions around it were different than my intellect around it. And at that time, I never really
resolved it it was like two separate lives. On the one hand, I could be passionately supportive of civil rights, but if I saw three black kids walking down the street, Id
cross the street, out of fear. So I had both of those things going on in parallel with one another.
Williams narrative highlights an intellectual and emotional split, where to this day he feels a disjuncture between being supportive of civil rights and yet still nds him
self, in certain urban contexts, fearful of black men. Such a transformation in ones sense of self, no matter how brief or context specic, is a signicant sociological
event that addresses the movement between geographical, historical, discursive, and structural space. By entering into such spaces it was as though some of my
respondents experienced what Avery Gordon (1997) would call a haunting experiencing a force normally rendered invisible by the discourses and practices in ones
everyday life that becomes inexplicably present. The movement between different social geographies proves to be a difcult and often

unresolved experience for my respondents, as such movement also forces them to confront uncomfortable situations about being
privileged by racialized and gendered social power.

35

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: LOANS

BANKS

REJECT LOANS TO MINORITIES WHILE APPROVING THOSE OF WHITES WHO ARE IN THE SAME
FINANCIAL SITUATION.

GEORGE LIPSITZ, DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1999, POSSESSIVE
INVESTMENT (PAGE 11)
A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study revealed that Boston bankers made 2.9 times as many mortgage loans per 1,000 housing units in
neighborhoods inhabited by low-income whites than in neighborhoods populated by low-income blacks.49 In addition, loan officers were far more
likely to overlook flaws in the credit records of white applicants or to arrange creative fi nancing for them than they were with black applicants. 50 A
Los Angeles study found that loan officers more frequently used dividend income and underlying assets as criteria for judging black applicants than for whites.5' In
Houston, the NCNB Bank of Texas disqualified 13 percent of middle -income white loan applicants but 36 percent of middle-income black
applicants.52 Atlanta's home loan institutions gave five times as many home loans to whites as to blacks in the late 1980s. An analysis of sixteen Atlanta
neighborhoods found that home buyers in white neighborhoods received conventional financing four times as often as those in black sections of the city.53 Nationwide,
financial institutions receive more money in deposits from black neighborhoods than they invest in them in the form of home mortgage loans , making
home lending a vehicle for the transfer of capital away from black savers toward white investors.54 In many locations, high-income blacks were denied loans
more often than low-income whites.55

When confronted with evidence of systematic racial bias in home lending, defenders of the possessive investment in whiteness argue that the
disproportionate share of loan denials to members of minority groups stems not from discrimination, but from the low net worth of minority
applicants, even those who have high incomes. This might seem a reasonable position, but net worth is almost totally determined by past opportunities for asset
accumulation, and therefore is the one figure most likely to reflect the history of discrimination. Minorities are told, in essence, "We can't give you a loan today
because we've discriminated against members of your race so effectively in the past that you have not been able to accumulate any equity from
housing and to pass it down through the generations."

36

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: POVERTY
POVERTY CANNOT BE ISOLATED FROM RACE WHITENESS STRUCTURES THE SPACES IMPOVERISHED
PEOPLE CAN LIVE AND ENCOURAGES FUTURE EXCLUSIONS
ALEX M. JOHNSON, JR. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW, MAY, 1995 PUBLISHED BY: THE
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW STABLE URL: HTTP://WWW.JSTOR.ORG/STABLE/3312487
In a world in which the poor have fewer choices because of their necessitous economic situation, one would expect that the socioeconomic status of the poor, both white
and black, would consign them to live in relatively integrated, "poor" communities in which the only defining characteristic of the inhabitants is poverty. As Part III
details, however, an examination of the data reveals that the poor are more likely to live in segregated communities than those who are
economically advantaged. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that Blacks will encounter less discrimination and racism as they achieve higher degrees of economic
status.'8 In this context, money or socioeconomic status has an impact on the degree of segregation experienced by Blacks . Poverty, then, serves a dual role

in the maintenance of Black segregated communities . First, poverty and all that it entails'9 reinforces negative racial stereotypes
of Blacks by whites and leads to efforts to exclude and separate . Second, the poverty experienced by whites causes them to value the only
significant attribute they possess-the property right in their are well-known for the selectivity that they apply in approving or rejecting prospective tenants .

THE AFFIRMATIVES CONSTRUCTION OF POVERTY AS A BLACK PROBLEM REINFORCES A SENSE OF THE

UNDESERVING POOR, CREATING A SUBTLE AND INSIDIOUS RACISM.

ROSALEE A. CLAWSON, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY: 2002 [POOR
PEOPLE, BLACK FACES: THE PORTRAYAL OF POVERTY IN ECONOMICS TEXTBOOKS] [JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES,
VOL. 32, NO. 3 (JAN., 2002), PP. 352-361 ]
Black images are often associated with poor people, resulting in the construction of poverty as a Black problem . Clawson and Kegler's
(2000) research on the portrayal of poverty in introductory American government college textbooks demonstrated that Blacks were
disproportionately depicted among the poor. In reality, Blacks make up less than one third of the poor; yet, these textbooks would lead
students to believe that 50% of the poor are African American. In contrast, only 23% of the textbook poor were White, when the true
proportion is twice that number. Thus, Clawson and Kegler's research provides strong evidence that introductory American government
textbooks "race code" the issue of poverty. A distinction is often made between the deserving and the undeserving poor (Cook & Barrett,
1992; Katz, 1989). Elderly people are considered particularly sympathetic, for example, whereas adult males are not seen in a favorable
light. Clawson and Kegler (2000) found that American government textbooks included an even greater overrepresentation of unsympathetic
Black images by including many adult male Black faces among the poor. Also, Whites dominate the people in photographs illustrating poverty during
the Great Depression, a period of time when poor people were considered particularly sympathetic. This racialized construction of poverty is particularly
troubling given the nature and importance of college textbooks. Textbooks are the most visible part of the curriculum, and texts play a
central role in almost every classroom (Apple, 1988; Sleeter & Grant, 1991). Further, information from textbooks is presented to students as
objective, impartial, and factual. Most likely, students view college textbooks with a fairly uncritical eye; they approach textbooks as
neutral purveyors of accurate, factual information, not socially constructed, ideologically driven materials. In textbooks, "Socially created
versions of socially created human activity are projected as truth, as natural" (Sleeter & Grant, 1991, p. 79). Although most college
textbooks no longer include overtly racist statements, it is certainly possible that the visual images in these texts promote a more subtle
form of racism. Quite notably, visual images are a significant component of college textbooks. "The visual is now much more prominent as a form of
communication than it has been for several centuries" (Kress, Leite-Garcia, & van Leeuwen, 1997, p. 257). Moreover, the visual representation of a political
issue is an integral part of the definition of that issue (Gamson & Lasch, 1983; Nelson & Kinder, 1996).

37

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: POVERTY
WE

MUST INTERROGATE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RACE AND WELFARE DISTRIBUTION ACROSS THE
BOARD, PEOPLE OF COLOR RECEIVED FEWER RESOURCES AND EXPIENCED MORE SEVERE SANCTIONING BY
STATE OFFICERS

GORDON HURD 2002

(ISSUE #17, SUMMER 2002 SAFETY NET SINKING HTTP://WWW.COLORLINES.COM/ARTICLE.PHP?ID=365)
People of color not only found themselves being punitively sanctioned off the welfare rolls, but also were subjected to rampant
discrimination within welfare offices and workplacesworkplaces that were on average low-wage, dead-end jobs, that could not help
people get themselves out of poverty. And, ultimately, this safety net continues to catapult recipients away from proven methods of
economic improvement: higher education and training.
\"Every year I have to go to an interview to get re-certified,\" says In Hui Lee, a Korean immigrant who has been a welfare recipient in Northern California since
1995. \"The same social worker has seen me for four years, since Ive lived in Marin City. Ive shown her the same ID card all four years. My social worker asks me
every time, Is this really you? Maybe because Im Asian, and we all look alike to her, I dont know.\"

Its one thing to be demeaned because youre a person of color, as Lee describes, but systemic racism is denying essential services
and benefits to an inordinate amount of welfare recipients. For people whose every effort is about escaping poverty, these
discriminatory measures are deeply damaging. People on welfare rolls often need childcare or transportation assistance to comply with
work requirements or pursue education. Denial of these services is common practice at many welfare offices, especially those that
serve mostly people of color.
Leilani Luia of San Leandro, California, was fired from her job because she was unable to arrive to work on time because of time conflicts with her childcare
facilities. \"My job started at 7 a.m. and my daughters childcare started at 7 a.m. It was impossible for me to cover the 35 blocks between childcare and work quickly
enough.\"
Luia was unable to find a job that paid enough to support herself and her child, so she sought help from welfare. She decided her best option would be to complete her
degree in social work at California State University, Hayward. \"The whole time I was going to school, they were never giving me the transportation and childcare
services that I need,\" said Luia. \"Every three months, they threatened to cut off my childcare because my class schedule would change.\"

A report by Professor Susan T. Gooden, published in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, substantiates experiences
like Leilani Luias. The study revealed that African American welfare recipients received far less discretionary support, e.g.,
transportation and childcare assistance, than white recipients. Research also found that, in the Atlanta metro area, childcare
spending per TANF recipient in counties with high proportions of white recipients was significantly higher than in counties with larger
percentages of African Americans or Latinos. Goodens study discovered that predominantly African American localities received only
33 percent of the amount of childcare support that predominantly white counties received. This stark difference in access to childcare
and transportation erects a major barrier to employment or education.
Even if they do gain access to transportation or childcare, people of color on the welfare rolls still find their efforts to attain adequate
employment and beneficial training met with endemic resistance . Imani Walker, an African American woman from Washington, D.C., describes her
experiences: \"I already had some computer and office skills, and I made it clear that what I really wanted was some additional training courses.\" After filling out piles
of so-called assessment forms to specify the types of training she was interested in, Walker received no follow-up to her requests, merely vague explanations that her
requested courses would not start for several weeks. She was informed that she would be required to show up to the offices on a daily basis to conduct a job
search. \"First they sent me to a dress for success program, and then I kept being referred to job interviews for things like hotel domestic work and zoo maintenance.\"
After some weeks, Walker inquired about her training requests and was informed that the courses had already begun and that she was too late. \"They had a custodial
mentality,\" says Walker, \"and [they] were receiving a $7,500 tax credit for each placement that they made.\" It seems the only lucrative arrangement Walkers welfare
office wanted to foster was the one between themselves and their preferred vendors.
As cases like Imani Walkers bear witness, welfares success over the past few years has amounted to recipients being pushed off benefits into
low-wage work that rarely leads out of poverty. The median wage of former welfare recipients with jobs is $7.15 an hour. Most of these low-wage jobs offer
no benefits: no paid sick leave, health insurance, or other crucial avenues for employee subsistence. Studies have shown that even with some post-secondary education
and more than five years of work experience, most women who leave welfare for employment earn wages below the federal poverty line. Even during the good times of
the mid-to-late 90s, most people of color were trapped in sub-par employment. According to the National Survey of American Families, the employment rate of
African American families rose, but there was no corresponding decrease in poverty rates, and the number of food and housing hardship cases actually increased.

38

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: POVERTY
THERE IS NO DOUBT - POVERTY HAS BEEN MANUFACTURED INTO AN ISSUE OF RACE.
MARTIN GILENS ASSOC PROF OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UCLA, 2003 (HOW THE POOR BECAME BLACK, RACE AND
THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM, JOE SOSS, RICHARD C. FORDING)
Race and poverty are now so closely entwined that it is hard to believe there was a time when discussions of American poverty
neglected blacks altogether. African Americans have always been disproportionately poor, but black poverty was ignored by white
society throughout most our history. In the following pages, 1 analyze over 40 years of news media coverage of poverty in order to trace changes in racial
images of the poor. I find that until the mid 1960s, poverty appeared overwhelmingly as a "white problem" in the national news media. But in a very brief period
beginning in 1965, the media's portrayal of American poverty shifted dramatically. Although the true racial composition of the
American poor remained stable, the face of poverty in the news media became markedly darker between 1965 and 1967. The most
obvious explanations for the news media's changing racial portrayal of the poor the civil rights movement and the urban riots of the mid i96os played a role, but cannot
account for the nature or timing of the shifts in media images. Nor is this change in the media's portrayal of poverty merely a reflection of the increasing visibility of
African Americans in the news more broadly. Instead, the changing racial images of the poor in the mass media are best understood as reflecting

two very different processes that converged in the mid 196os. First, the stage was set by a series of historical changes and events that
made black poverty a less remote concern for white Americans. These included the migration of African Americans from the rural
South to the urban North, the increasing representation of blacks among AFDC beneficiaries, the civil rights movement, and the riots
of the mid 196os. But these changes only created the environment in which racial portrayals of poverty were transformed. The proximate cause of that
transformation was the shift in the moral tone of poverty coverage in the news. As news stories about the poor became less
sympathetic, the images of poor blacks in the news swelled. The association of African Americans with the "undeserving poor" is
evident not only in the changing media coverage of poverty during the mid 196os, but throughout the period studied . From the early
1950s through the early 1990s, images of poor blacks increased when the tone of poverty stories became more critical of the poor and
decreased when coverage became more sympathetic. Similarly, images of African Americans were most numerous in news stories
about the least sympathetic subgroups of the poor. As I discuss below, these differences in the racial portrayal of the poor cannot be
accounted for by true changes in the racial composition of the poverty population or by racial differences across subgroups of the poor.
Rather, the media's tendency to associate African Americans with the undeserving poor reflects and reinforces the centuries old
stereotype of blacks as lazy. Real world changes in social, economic, and political conditions combined with existing racial stereotypes to shape the media's
coverage of welfare and poverty over the past decades. But this coverage has in turn shaped social, economic, and political conditions as states have dismantled and
reformulated their welfare policies in response to the 1996 PRWORA reforms. American democracy is far from perfect. But public policies do reflect if inconsistently
and incompletely the public's preferences (Monroe 1979; Page and Shapiro 1983; Wright, Erikson, and Mclver 1987; Monroe and Gardner 1987; Shapiro and Jacobs
1989; Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995). In the case of welfare, however, citizens' preferences have been shaped by media portrayals that

exaggerate the extent to which poverty is a "black problem" and that systematically associate African Americans with the least
sympathetic subgroups of the poor . Other chapters in this volume ably document the many ways in which welfare reform has been infused with racial
considerations and reflective of racial biases. In this chapter, I show how distorted news coverage of poverty has helped to generate a citizenry that
views welfare and poverty through a racial lens.
TEXTBOOKS THAT RACIALIZE THE CONSTRUCTION OF POVERTY MAKE BLACKS FEEL ALIENATED BY THE
CURRICULUM OF WHITE UNIVERSITIES

ROSALEE A. CLAWSON, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY: 2002 [POOR PEOPLE,
BLACK FACES [JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, VOL. 32, NO. 3 (JAN., 2002), PP. 352-361 ]
In sum, I found that several

introductory economics textbooks perpetuate the race coding of poverty. These results closely mirror the
portrayal of poverty in American government college textbooks (Clawson & Kegler, 2000). In addition, our research is consistent with other
studies that demonstrated how introductory economics textbooks reinforce stereotypes and marginalize the experiences of minorities
(and women) and downplay the impact of discrimination in our society (Cherry & Feiner, 1992; Feiner, 1993; Feiner & Morgan, 1987). However, it
is not just American government and economics textbooks that are racially biased. Whatley's (1988) analysis of human sexuality
textbooks documented the presence of stereotypical images of Blacks, and Wasburn's (1997) research on the presentation of slavery in
secondary history textbooks demonstrated the ideological construction of that issue. Similarly, Sleeter and Grant (1991) argued that "regardless
of time period or event, Whites, especially males, dominate the story line and are celebrated for their achievements " (p. 85) in
secondary social studies texts. Unfortunately, the race coding of poverty in college textbooks is also indicative of mass media coverage of
poverty. Gilens's (1999) research on the portrayal of poverty in news magazines and net- work television news between 1988 and 1992 demonstrated that Blacks
are disproportionately depicted among the poor, and in a comparable study of news magazines between 1993 and 1998, Clawson and Trice (2000) provided
evidence that the media continue to produce racialized images of the poor. This study should raise awareness regarding the subtle ways in which racial
bias can creep into textbooks. Visual images are important conveyors of information, and we should pay close attention to what messages emanate from textbook
photographs. Racialized constructions of poverty (and other issues) often go unnoticed by White professors and White students, however

39

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

these images do not escape the attention of Black students. Thus, it is not surprising that many Black students feel alienated by the
curriculum at traditionally White universities (Allen, Epps, & Haniff, 1991; Feagin, Vera, & Imani, 1996).

40

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: POVERTY
DISCUSSIONS

OF POVERTY DIVORCED FROM RACE IS A STRATEGY TO MAINTAIN WHITENESS

ACTIVE DECISION TO REMAIN SILENT AS A WAY OF PRESERVING PRIVILEGE

IT IS AN

ANNE GREEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT SAINT JOSEPHS UNIVERSITY, DIRECTOR OF THE WRITING
CENTER, 2003 [DIFFICULT STORIES: SERVICE-LEARNING, RACE, CLASS, AND WHITENESS; COLLEGE COMPOSITION
AND COMMUNICATION 55: 276 - 301]
Silence and withdrawal are two of the strategies that white people often use when creating "white talk," talk that excuses white people
from confronting racism (McIntyre, Making Meaning 45). Throughout the year of teaching service-learning, what most amazed me were the lengths
that white students would go in both their writing and their speech to avoid mentioning race and racial difference. Descriptions of their
sites and the learners there would often include references to the poverty of the neighborhood, but almost never would a student mention
the race of a learner or a site coordinator or what the neighborhood looked like . So the problem becomes twofold: finding ways for white students to
talk about race and then finding ways for white students to analyze race. Subsequently, one of the ways that I tried to directly address
race was by switching some of the informal writing that students did about service . Often in service-learning courses students are asked to do
journals about their service-learning experience. What I've found to be more effective are "field notes" because I can initially push students to focus not on a personal
response to service but, rather, on a descriptive account. Changing the title and structure of the assignment has made students more successful at observing the
neighborhoods that they go into for service. By focusing first on observation and then on analysis and by linking some of the observations that students do in their field
notes to course readings on race and class, more stories about whiteness are told, and this facilitates discussions of systemic inequalities . Rather than asking students to
write for some purpose defined by their service-learning sites, I've found that asking students to take their field notes and write ethnographies about their service sites
has produced better results and more explicit stories about race and class.

WELFARE

CANNOT BE DIVORCED FROM WHITENESS THE EFFECT OF 1996 REFORMS PERMANENTLY

TRANSFORMED POVERTY INTO A PROBLEM WITH LAZY BLACKS AND THE SOLUTION INTO FORCED WORK.
EVEN IF THESE ARE NOT SUPPORTED BY THE AFFIRMATIVE, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ENVISION THEIR PLAN
OUTSIDE OF THESE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTS.

GARY DELGADO EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND FOUNDER OF THE APPLIED RESEARCH CENTER 2000 (RACING THE
WELFARE DEBATE ISSUE #10, FALL 2000 COLORLINES HTTP://WWW.COLORLINES.COM/ARTICLE.PHP?ID=71)
It used to be that we didn't have to do much to smash the racist stereotype about welfare. After listening to some know-it-all drone on
about Cadillacs and welfare queens, all we had to do was point out that --uh, incidently, most people on welfare were white, and that
would usually shut them up. These days, that dog don't hunt. Bill Clinton's welfare "reform" of 1996 converted one of the great lies
about welfare into a true fact: that most recipients are people of color. But ever since Clinton ended "welfare as we know it," whites
have been leaving the welfare rolls (by 1998 they were less than one-third of participants), while people of color remain stuck in the
TANF ("Temporary Assistance to Needy Families") doldrums, the successor to the six-decade-old AFDC program The Racializing of Welfare How
did this change in the racial composition of the welfare population come about? The answer, my friends, is not blowin' in the wind but
is right here in front of us, in the new, crass emphasis on work. The unremitting emphasis on paid employment as the heart and soul of
"welfare reform"--and let's be clear that those being "reformed" are parents, almost exclusively mothers, and their children--is a peculiar end point for a program that began in the 1930s
to allow mothers not to work. Conceived of primarily as a program to provide support for widows with minor children, AFDC was supposed to allow these women to fulfill their "proper role"
and stay home with their children, safe from the harshness of the wage labor market. In fact, some thought the need for the program would disappear once the Social Security system kicked in
and survivors' benefits became available In the 1930s, of course, it didn't occur to anyone that women of color might claim a right to welfare benefits. AFDC was intended to support the
deserving poor (read: white and married) mothers and their children, albeit at a benefit level ensuring that they remained in dire, if genteel, poverty. But that was then and this is now. In the

since the 1960s, welfare and poverty have become associated in the public mind almost exclusively with
people of color, especially African Americans. Although most people, somewhat surprisingly, support most aspects of the welfare
state, the racial connection makes welfare an exception. Martin Gilens, in Why Americans Hate Welfare, examines in great detail both the race-welfare
connection and the racialization of images of welfare and poverty that took hold in the popular media between the 1950s and 1990s. He finds that " the belief that
blacks are lazy is the strongest predictor of the perception that welfare recipients are undeserving." Race-baiting in the context of
welfare was helped along tremendously in the 1980s, of course, by Ronald Reagan, who took every opportunity to talk about "welfare
queens." The right then turned that blatantly racist image into a semi-respectable concern by creating the notion of "dependence. " They
intervening decades, and particularly

managed to convince many people that, for poor women and children, depending on one source of money (welfare) was pathological, while depending on benefit-less,
low-wage labor was ennobling. By the time Clinton was elected the social psychologists spouting an anti-dependency line had made a pact

with the right-wing political wonks and come up with a magic bullet solution to the "welfare problem": work. Any kind, at any wage,
under any conditions. Even sweeping the streets and parks in exchange for a welfare check. Never mind the downward pull on wages
overall if people working off welfare checks displace unionized municipal employees. Ignore the potential exploitation inherent in
forcing a woman into a job, without welfare as a backup, that is her only means to feed her children . Work, after all, is good for everyone.
Some just need mild encouragement, some need varying degrees of pressure, and some need out-and-out coercion, in the form of sanctions and time limits. In the view

41

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

of the architects of welfare reform, forcing poor mothers to work for pay is not only in their best interests; it has the added benefit of isolating the "undeserving"--those
who don't really want a job.

42

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: POVERTY

POVERTY IS RACIALZED MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS HAVE CONSOLIDATED A MYTH INTO A REALITY

MARTIN GILENS ASSOC PROF OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UCLA, 2003 (HOW THE POOR BECAME BLACK,
RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE
SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
It would be naive to expect a "sociologically accurate" depiction of poverty in news stories. Some aspects of poverty and some subgroups of the poor may be more
"newsworthy" than others. And news departments, after all, are in the business of selling news. If news photographers seek out the most sensational images of poverty
in order to attract readers or viewers, we should hardly be surprised. For most Americans, the

most powerful images of poverty are undoubtedly the black urban ghettos. These concentrations of poverty represent the worst
failures of our economic, educational, and social welfare systems. Yet they also represent a minuscule portion of all the American
poor. Only l percent of all poor Americans are blacks living in urban ghettos (Jargowsky and Bane 1991)
Furthermore, racial distortions in the portrayal of poverty are not limited to stories on the urban underclass. The overrepresentation of blacks among the
poor is found in coverage of most poverty topics and appears during most of the past three decades. Yet just as importantly, black faces
are comparatively unlikely to be found in media stories on the most sympathetic subgroups of the poor, just as they are comparatively
absent from media coverage of poverty during times of heightened sympathy for the least well off.
Journalists are professional observers and chroniclers of our social world. But they are also residents of that world and are exposed to the same stereotypes and
misperceptions that characterize society at large! 2 A self reinforcing cycle exists in which negative images of the black poor feed media

coverage of poverty that then strengthens these images in the culture at large. Society's stereotypes are reflected back and thereby
reinforced by the mass media.
The events of the 196os played a role in bringing the black poor to the attention of the American public. But the riots of the mid i96os, the shift in focus of the civil
rights movement, and the growing concern over burgeoning welfare rolls did not change the color of poverty in the news in a simple or uniform way. As we saw above ,

the increased number of black faces in news stories about the poor reflected the growth of negative coverage of poverty. Only when
stories about the War on Poverty turned negative did large numbers of poor African Americans begin to appear in the news. And as we
saw, shifts over time in the tone of poverty coverage have been accompanied by shifts in the racial complexion of poverty images in
the news. The overwhelmingly negative coverage of welfare from the early 1970S coincided with extremely high numbers of African Americans in poverty stories,
while the decidedly more sympathetic poverty stories from the early 198os were illustrated primarily with whites.
News coverage of poverty now reflects the close link between blacks and the poor that informs public thinking about poverty and welfare. The poor have indeed
"become black" in the national news media. But as the fluctuations in the racial complexion of poverty images over time and the differences across different subgroups
of the poor both attest, it is the "undeserving poor" who have become most black.

It may well be that media attention to black poverty was important in mobilizing resources to redress racial inequality. Affirmative
action, urban enterprise zones, minority scholarships, and other explicitly or implicitly race targeted programs have all reflected
concern with black poverty that was absent before the mid r96os.
Were the media to ignore or downplay black poverty, the public might be led to think that racial inequality was a problem of the past.
But the news media's overrepresentation of blacks among the poor and in particular the association of African Americans with the
least sympathetic aspects of poverty serve to perpetuate negative racial stereotypes that serve to lessen public support for efforts to
fight poverty in general, and black poverty in particular.

43

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

LINK: OMISSION OF VOICES

REFUSAL TO INCLUDE THE VOICES OF THOSE IN POVERTY IN POLICY CONSTRUCTION BOTH REFLECT
AND EXPAND THE PRIVILEGE OF WHITENESS
HOLLOWAY SPARKS ASST PROF OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, PENN STATE, 2003 (QUEENS, TEENS, AND
MODEL MOTHERS RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM
(EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
Hearings on welfare reform were held by more than a dozen committees and subcommittees across the House and Senate and gave
hundreds of people an opportunity to talk to legislators about welfare reform. Committee members heard from Health and Human Services Secretary
Donna Shalala, more than r6o members of Congress, a dozen governors, a half dozen mayors, two dozen welfare administrators, at least 6o academic experts, more than
75 representatives from nonprofits, ioo business representatives, and a host of other interested groups. Of the nearly 6oo witnesses, however, only 17 were

welfare recipients.' Even this figure overstates the participation of welfare recipients because just four of these witnesses were actually
still receiving AFDC at the time of their testimony. Four more were receiving transitional benefits such as child care assistance, and the remaining nine
were former recipients. This latter group included one member of Congress, Representative Lynn C. Woolsey from California.

The fact that so few welfare recipients participated in congressional hearings would not have mattered as much if the testimony these
women provided had been attended to more seriously. The counterdiscourse that they offered was unique. It expanded the list of
reasons women needed welfare, argued for the continued necessity of a "safety net" for poor women and their children in distress, and
challenged the stereotypes about welfare recipients so common in mainstream discussions about welfare reform. Their analysis of the
welfare system, however, was mostly dismissed or simply ignored by defenders of the dominant discourse, perpetuating the patterns of
external and internal exclusion apparent in the broader public sphere debate.

44

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

IMPACT: NO AFF SOLVO

AFF

CANT SOLVE: THE MEDIA WILL IMPORT FAMILIAR STEREOTYPES OF DEPENDENCE AND LAZINESS
EVEN IF THE PLAN HAD GOOD INTENTIONS, THESE ELEMENTS OF PRIVILEGE WILL CONTROL THE
PERCEPTION OF THE PLAN.

JAMES M. AVERY AND MARK PEFFLEY PHD STUDENT AND PROFESSOR OF POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF
KENTUCKY, 2003 (THE IMPACT OF NEWS COVERAGE OF WELFARE REFORM ON PUBLIC OPINION, RACE AND THE
POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C.
FORDING (EDITOR))
Since the passage of national welfare reform legislation in 1996, media coverage of welfare has been remarkable in at least two respects. First, given the usual tendency
for the media to give short shrift to public policy, news coverage of welfare reform policy has been comparatively intense (e.g., Clawson and Trice zooo). Second, and
more important, the tone of coverage has been much more positive.' In contrast with the negative focus on welfare "problems" in past
decades, many news accounts of welfare reform have already declared it a success , with President Clinton and Republican congressional leaders
competing to claim credit for "ending welfare as we know it." Notably, the emphasis in these stories has been on the decline in welfare rolls and the number of women
moving from welfare to work, with very little attention to the problems of the newly working poor who continue to struggle to make ends meet.

With more positive news coverage, one might optimistically expect more favorable public attitudes toward welfare and welfare
recipients. New evidence of a poverty program that actually puts people to work could revamp traditional public views of welfare as a
government "handout" that undercuts the work ethic. Any such optimism would be premature, however, for news coverage of welfare
reform is similar to that of an earlier era in one very important respect: news stories about welfare continue to be illustrated with
African Americans images and exemplars (Clawson and Trice zooo). And if past research is any guide, such a pattern of media coverage is
likely to reinforce public cynicism about welfare rather than reverse it.
In this paper, we examine the various ways that whites' political attitudes are influenced by news coverage of welfare reform. Based on content analyses of news
coverage of welfare, several scholars have made the forceful argument that the news media tends to "racialize" welfare policy by disproportionately using images of
African Americans to accompany news stories on poverty (e.g., Entman and Rojecki 2000; Gilens 1999; Clawson and Trice zooo). Not only are welfare

recipients more likely to be depicted as being African American, but negative coverage of poverty tends to be illustrated with pictures
of blacks, while the faces of the poor in more positive stories are predominantly white. As suggested by prior research, the
consequences of such coverage are potentially severe: by creating the inaccurate impression that a majority of welfare recipients are
black, public support for welfare is likely diminished and negative stereotypes of African Americans as the "undeserving poor" are
doubtless reinforced.

45

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

IMPACT: WAR AND GENOCIDE

RACISM

IS THE LOGIC OF GENOCIDE AND ENDLESS WARFARE:

ON DESTROYING IMPURE ELEMENTS.

A RACIST

STATE IS A SUICIDAL STATE, BENT

ELDEN, LECTURER IN POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK, ENGLAND, 2002

(STUART, BOUNDARY 2 - VOLUME 29, NUMBER 1, PAGE PROJECT MUSE)
The reverse side is the power to allow death. State racism is a recoding of the old mechanisms of blood through the new procedures of regulation. Racism, as
biologizing, as tied to a state, takes shape where the procedures of intervention "at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their
justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race" (VS, 197; WK, 149). 37 For example, the old antiSemitism based on religion is reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and purity of the race is threatened, and the state apparatuses
are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and introduced noxious elements into the body. The Jews are characterized as the race present
in the middle of all races (FDS, 76). 38 The use of medical language is important. Because certain groups in society are conceived of in medical terms, society is no
longer in need of being defended from the outsider but from the insider: the abnormal in behavior, species, or race. What is novel is not the mentality of power but the
technology of power (FDS, 230). The recoding of old problems is made possible through new techniques.
A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division or incision between those who must live and those who must die. The
"biological continuum of the human species" is fragmented by the apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so
forth. The species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes, 39 the
human continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism
has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that "the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all
in claims to divinity among rulers and to blue' or white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: " A
discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races." 41 But it is a more subtle distinction than [End Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is
that discourses of class have their roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put
on the concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one must be prepared to
massacre one's enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so
much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways.
Bio-power is able to establish, between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but biological: "The more inferior

species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals can be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more Inot
as an individual but as a specieswill live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the other does
not just make me safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life in
general healthier and purer (FDS, 22728). "The existence in question is no longer of sovereignty, juridical; but that of the population, biological . If genocide
is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at
the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization wishes to
exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is to say a power with the right of life and death,
wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect deaththe
exposure to deathas much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial
relations, the necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This form of
modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of
the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 22830). As Foucault puts
it in La volont de savoir: [End Page 148]
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the
purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitauxunderstood in a dual sense, both as essential and biological]. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK,
136)
The shift Foucault thinks is interesting is what might be called a shift from sanguinity to sexuality: sanguinity, in that it had an instrumental role (the shedding of blood)
and a symbolic role (purity of blood, differences of blood); sexuality, when mechanisms of power are directed to the body, to life. The theme of race is present in both,
but in a different form (VS, 194; WK, 147). We have moved from "a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law,
death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines and regulations"
(VS, 195; WK, 148). In Nazism, the two are combined. Eugenics and medical/mathematical techniques are coupled with the fantasy of blood and the ideal of the purity
of the race. Foucault notes that there was immediate control of procreation and genetics in the Nazi regime, and that regulation, security, and assurance were imposed
over the disciplined, ordered society; but at the same time, the old sovereign power of killing traversed the entire society. This was not simply confined to the state, nor
simply to the SA or the SS, but ultimately to everyone, as, through denunciation, everyone could have this power over their neighbor (FDS, 231).

While destruction of other races was central to Nazism, the other side of it was the exposure of the German race itself to death, an
absolute and universal risk of death. The entire German population was exposed to death, and Foucault suggests that this was one of the fundamental duties of
Nazi obedience. Only this exposure of the entire population to the universal risk of death could constitute the Germans as the superior race, regenerated in the face of
those races either totally exterminated or completely subjugated. We have, therefore, in Nazism, both the absolute generalization of bio-power and the generalization of
the sovereign right of death. Two mechanismsone classical, archaic; one newcoincide exactly. A racist state, a murdering state, a suicidal state.
Accompanying the final solution was the order of April 1945 that called for the destruction of the conditions of life of the German [End Page 149] people themselves. A
final solution for other races, an absolute suicide for the German race (FDS, 23132).

46

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

IMPACT: SPIRIT MURDER

THE IMPACT OF RACISM IS SPIRIT MURDER: IT DESTROYS WHAT MAKES US HUMAN.
PATRICIA WILLIAMS PROFESSOR OF LAW AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 1991 (ALCHEMY
RIGHTS PP 73-78)

OF

RACE

AND

For these reasons I think that we

need to elevate spirit murder to the conceptualif not punitivelevel of a capital moral offense. We need
to see it for the cultural cancer it is, for the spiritual genocide it is wreaking on blacks, in whites, and to the abandoned and abused of
all races and ages. We need to eradicate its numbing pathology before it wipes out what precious little humanity we have left. As
Timothy Mitchell, pastor of Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, observed in 1986: What happened to Michael Griffith [who was killed in the Howard Beach
incident] can happen to any of usThe issue is whether we are free to walk around in our city and be seen and accepted and protected as Gods children.

RACISM IS UNETHICAL AND WILL END IN EXTINCTION.

MEMMI, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY
P. 165]

OF

PARIS, 1997 [ALBERT, RACISM,

Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of
remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably
smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. "Recall," says the Bible, "that you were once a stranger in Egypt," which means both that you
ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal --

indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical
morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this
contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope
someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.

47

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

IMPACT: COLONIZATION
WHITENESS IS THE STICKING POINT BETWEEN TWO FORMS OF OPPRESSION IT ENCOURAGES INTERNAL
COLONIZATION IN THE FORM OF GHETTOS, URBAN SPACES, AND SEGREGATION WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY
PROMOTING EXTERNAL IMPERIALISM
JULIE ANN WHITE, OHIO UNIVERSITY, 07, THE HOLLOW AND THE GHETTO: SPACE, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF POVERTY
I begin with a piece from Charles Millss The Racial Contract (1997,4142): The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racingof space, the depiction of
space as dominated by individuals of a certain race. At the same time , the norming of an individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is,
representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space. He continues, Morally vice and virtue are spatialized (p. 46). Mills
and, more recently, Uday Mehta (1999) have noted that, historically , the contrast between civilized, white, European spaces and wild, savage spaces

is used to justify imperial expansion and to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: the humanist universalism of liberalism and liberal
states, and the colonizing practices of empire. Such practices often involved forced conversion, segregation, enslavement, genocide,
the dismantling of indigenous traditions, particularly family and religious institutions, and the creation and state enforcement of new
or previously meaningless ethnic dividesfrequently by states expressly committed to human rights and equality.
academic and activist circles who turned to internal
colonialism to describe the black experience in the United States. Some focused on understanding the American ghetto as a colony
chiefly in the economic sensethat is, a geographically isolated and exploited labor market. Others placed greater emphasis on
colonization as the practice of shaping the consciousness and reshaping the culture of the colonized. But both approaches found sympathizers.
In the 1960s, as former colonies were gaining their independence, there were those within both

Similar arguments were made, though almost exclusively by academics, in the Appalachian context. Certainly ,

where colonialism is understood spatially

chiefly as a practice of exploiting natural resources and labor from one region or territory for profits to be reaped by a distantly located
class of owners, the colonial model applies well. It has always been the case and it remains so that despite the tremendous market value of natural resources,
particularly of coal, few in the region who mine it see the profits. Appalachia remains by virtually every measure one of the poorest regions in the country.

48

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

IMPACT: DOMINATION
LEFT

UNCHECKED, WHITENESS WILL TAKE OVER EVERY ASPECT OF THE LIFEWORLD.

HISTORY IS ON OUR SIDE.

UNFORTUNATELY,

SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE

PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE.)
whiteness has a long history of oppressing through exclusive
World War I to divide up and exploit darker nations, for
example, Du Bois declares that whiteness is nothing less than ownership of the earth.26 White people have appropriated the gifts
of African Americans, ignoring the economic, military, political, spiritual, and other contributions that black people made to the building of the
United States. They also have usurped the land of Native Americans because of Native Americans allegedly inappropriate use of (read:
failure to appropriate) it.27 Even more to the point, whiteness has defined itself through exclusive ownership of values such as
goodness, cleanliness, and beauty. Other races, by comparison, tend to be characterized as the opposite: bad, dirty, and unattractive.
Whitenesss definition through opposition to a non-white other means that if whiteness possesses a particular value, then other races
cannot.
This advice is especially appropriate for the development of a wise form of whiteness since
possession. Analyzing the attempts of white nations [End Page 249] in

49

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES AFF: FRAMING THE DEBATE

HOW WE CHOOSE TO FRAME THE DEBATE OVER SOCIAL SERVICES IS THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION
CHANGING THE CONTOURS OF THE DEBATE IS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ACT WE CAN TAKE
SANFORD F. SCHRAM TEACHES SOCIAL THEORY AT BRYN MAWR 2003 (PUTTING A BLACK FACE
ON WELFARE THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR),
JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
Therefore, it

is important to emphasize how the prejudices operating society prime people to read racialized images of welfare recipients
in particular ways. I also want to highlight how the prejudices of the culture not only reinforce negative views of welfare taking by
persons of color but also necessitate the greater frequency with which persons of color are forced to rely on public assistance. I feel it
is necessary to put a black face on welfare and to make more visible how those biases are operating and to what effect.
Such pictures appropriately framed and placed may have several redeeming features. They can highlight in politically constructive
ways how race and welfare are often connected. They can also if done in a sufficiently self reflective fashion remind us that the act of
viewing demonizes welfare recipients at least as much as the picture itself. If such photos even when they show women of color in
uncritical ways are frequently read as telling the same old tendentious tale of black insufficiency, then we need to ask how and why
these photos are read in such a demonized way. The answer, one suspects, will be found more in our hearts and in our heads than on
the page or in the photo. And until we are willing to interrogate the rich cultural reservoir that funds such prejudice, the manufacturing
and demonizing of black welfare queens will surely continue.

PRIORITIZING

PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN DEBATES ABOUT POVERTY DISRUPTS DOMINANT POLITICAL

ARGUMENT AND STEALS LEGITIMACY FROM CONSERVATIVE EFFORTS TO PROMOTE RACISM

RINKU SEN 2000 (ISSUE #10, FALL 2000 THE FIRST TIME WAS TRAGEDY, WILL THE SECOND
FIGHTING WELFARE "REFORM" HTTP://WWW.COLORLINES.COM/ARTICLE.PHP?ID=347)

BE

FARCE?:

In hindsight,

it is obvious that efforts to prevent passage of welfare reform in 1996 were far too little and far too late. Proposals to
"reform" welfare had been popping up once a decade or so, suggested by Republicans and Democrats alike, only to get bogged down
by the complexity of the issue and a grudging, if unspoken, realization that welfare might actually be necessary. But this time, to the
astonishment of many, a draconian bill passed and the president signed it.
What happened? What was different about the political landscape in the mid-1990s that opened the door to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities
Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) becoming law? And, most important, what is the likelihood that progressive forces will regroup, change their ineffectual ways, and
actually apply some muscle to the reauthorization fight that's on the horizon in 2001?
Too Little, Too Late

The lessons of 1996 hover over the current debate. With few exceptions, national civil rights, feminist, and immigrant rights
organizations--the very entities that claim to represent constituencies now being harmed by this law and that have the most capacity to
influence the debate--failed to throw their full weight into the fight. And labor largely sat out the 1996 struggle, despite concern about
how the influx into the labor market of people working off welfare checks would affect the wages and employment status of union members, especially in the lowwage service sector. The major liberal organizations failed to make welfare a priority on their public policy agendas. They left
unchallenged one of the most egregious betrayals by a Democratic president in decades.
Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Regulating the Poor, notes that by 1996, the rightwing had been spouting anti-welfare rhetoric,
virtually unchallenged, for 30 years. "The public opinion battle was lost because the right had been working on this issue for a long
time, and nobody countered with another view. They had a clear field to define welfare as the cause of poverty, as well as a whole
variety of pathologies, teenage pregnancy, dependence, and so on."
The right successfully portrayed welfare as a tremendous tax burden that simultaneously kept people within its web poor by creating a
humiliating dependency. Legitimate dissatisfaction with AFDC and related programs fed the public disenchantment and immobilized liberals and progressives,
who found themselves unable to articulate an alternative to the right's illusion of ending poverty through privatization and the free market

50

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES THE AFF MUST EXAMINE RACE

RACIAL

POLITICS DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY: MAKING A MORE INCLUSIVE
SOCIAL SERVICE REGIME WITHOUT TACKLING RACISM FIRST MERELY RESULT IN RESENTMENT AND RACIST
BACKLASH.

ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY 2003 (RACE AND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE DEVELOPMENT IN
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD
F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
The 1990s was not the first era of American welfare reform in the twentieth century. Three times before during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society
Americans dramatically reshaped welfare policies, creating the familiar complex of programs that was reformed yet again in 1996. Perhaps the dominant theme

of this history has been the deepening and increasingly troubling link between race and the politics of American social policy. The
relationship between African Americans and the American welfare state has been a varied and changing one . Largely excluded from
Progressive and New Deal policies of social provision, African Americans increasingly claimed rights to social benefits, culminating in the War
on Poverty and the expansion of welfare rights in the I96o. Far from excluding African Americans and other minorities, these
developments explicitly targeted attention and resources on problems of minority poverty and exclusion.
In each of these episodes of reform, the status of African Americans in national politics has been crucial in shaping policy outcomes
(Skocpol 1995a). In the Progressive Era, most African Americans lived in the South, where they were denied civil and political rights under the violent repression of
Jim Crow segregation. Thus they were almost universally excluded from state level Progressive social policies such as mothers' pensions. The New Deal represented a
major breakthrough both for national social policy and for the political status of African Americans. The Social Security Act of 1935 created the first permanent national
welfare policies and northern African American's began to switch their political allegiance to the newly dominant Democratic party. But the major partner in the New
Deal coalition was the white South, whose disproportionate power limited the New Deal's capacity to include African Americans in social provision on equal terms. In
the generation after the New Deal, however, African Americans both moved north in large numbers and mobilized a national social movement to demand the civil and
political rights long promised but not yet fulfilled. As that movement bore fruit in the 196os, African Americans were able to use their newfound

political status to demand greater access to existing welfare benefits and new policies to promote equal opportunity. But the cruel
irony of the Great Society is that these very policies fueled growing racial resentment and widened a burgeoning split in American
welfare politics that divided white from black, middle and working class Americans from the poor, and cities from suburbs, leaving
African Americans increasingly isolated politically, socially, economically, and geographically from the main currents of the American
political economy. The pattern of twentieth century reform suggests that a crucial question in understanding the fate of African Americans in the
American welfare state is whether they have been part of the broad national political coalitions that are always necessary to achieve
lasting policy reform. The terms on which African Americans participate in these coalitions have shaped welfare policies, particularly
by shaping the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that those policies embody. These boundaries, in turn, affect the prospects for
minority incorporation into social provision, whether as honorable beneficiaries or as marginal clients. These considerations,
moreover, are not mere remnants of the past. The racial divide was at the very center of the politics of welfare reform in the 1990s,
because of racialized perceptions and misperceptions of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and other policies, racially
divided opinions about the proper direction of the welfare system and the federal government's role in social provision, and the
shifting place of African Americans in electoral and party politics (Gilens 1999; Bobo and Smith 1994; Williams 1998). Thus in order to understand the
politics of welfare reform in American politics in the 1990s and the prospects for minorities in the new American welfare regime , it is essential to understand the
historical dynamics of race and the politics of welfare policy coalitions.

51

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES: PUBLIC DEBATE

THE CRITIQUE IS AN IMPORTANT POLITICAL ACT THAT MAKES OPPRESSION PUBLICALYY INDEFENSIBLE
AND CHALLENGES THE SILENCE OF RACISM SURROUNDING POVERTY
HOLLOWAY SPARKS ASST PROF OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, PENN STATE, 2003 (QUEENS, TEENS, AND
MODEL MOTHERS RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM
(EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
In an age when
direct appeals to racism have lost their acceptability in most public venues, analysis of the seemingly neutral discourses used in public
sphere debates remains a critical tactic for unmasking the indirect appeals to racism that still influence public policy. Although the
discourses of citizenship and responsibility clearly resonated with many Americans during the welfare reform debate, they were
buttressed by racist and sexist stereotypes. By portraying welfare recipients as drugaddicted, immoral, inner city welfare queens and
unwed teenage mothers, the dominant discourse reduced the complexity of American poverty to a simplistic, racist caricature.
Practitioners of discourse analysis can reveal the continued salience of racism and sexism in the public discourse about welfare, and
can aid in the effort to usefully complicate public understanding of the welfare system and its participants.
Democratic theorists, in turn, sensitize us to the patterns of political exclusion that such caricatures reinforce, and encourage us to
keep a watchful eye on who actually participates in decision making in established democracies. Welfare recipients ultimately had
little effect on the dialogue about reform in spite of their firsthand experience with AFDC and their immediate interest in the outcome
of the reform process. The hostility toward welfare mothers generated by the dominant discourse and its attendant stereotypes
certainly might have encouraged some recipients to remain silent, but even when recipients like Tandi Graff challenged legislators to
"listen to people like me," those demands were easily (if arbitrarily) dismissed. Democratic theorists remind us that the passage of a
policy like the PRWORA without the meaningful participation or consent of the poor represents a failure of democracy.
The barriers to poor people's authoritative participation analyzed here should raise distressing questions for a society that claims to be
democratic, and suggest at least one potential goal welfare recipients and their allies might pursue in future efforts to revamp the U.S.
welfare system. Although the provision of an adequate income and the protection of individual civil rights are critical measures of the success of any welfare
How do the insights of discourse analysis and democratic theory help us better understand the politics of race and welfare in the United States?

program,13 democratic theory suggests a third criterion: the meaningful 2olitical participation of the poor in democratic deliberation and decision making, particularly
regarding the welfare system. We should not submit to the argument that poor people lack the moral standing or competence to participate in

political life, nor should the joys and burdens of participation in democratic life become the exclusive privilege of the wealthy.

52

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALTERNATIVE: CHALLENGE WHITENESS KEY TO SOCIAL

JUSTICE
REJECT

THE AFFIRMATIVES CALL TO A RACELSS SOCIETY AND IDENTIFY WHITENESS AS THE

STRUCTURING RACIAL CATEGORY. IDENTIFYING WHITENESS AS A RACIAL CATEGORY HELPS TO HIGHLIGHT
THE SPECIFIC PRIVILEGES ENJOYED BY WHITE CULTURE AND CREATES NEW TYPES OF TRANSFORMATIVE
COMMUNITIES

SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE

PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE.)
It is useful to anti-racist struggle to think of a similar relationship holding between particular races, including the white race, and
humanity at large. While it might initially seem paradoxical, the larger entity of humanity can best be served by peoples ties to smaller, more
local entities such as their racial groups . A persons racial group is not the only smaller entity that provides the rich existential ties of
which Royce speakshe rightly mentions family, and we could add entities such as ones neighborhood, ones church, mosque or synagogue,
and even [End Page 243] groups based on ones gender or sexual orientation. But race also belongs in this list of sites of intimate
connection that can and often do sustain individual lives and that can support rather than undermine the well being of humanity.
Forgetting ones duty to ones particular race in the name of working for racial justice, for example, tends to turn that goal into a
remote abstraction. You cannot be loyal to merely an impersonal abstraction, Royce reminds us.13 Effectively serving the goal of racial justice is more likely to
occur if one concretely explores how racial justice could emerge out of loyalty to ones particular race.

This claim might not seem objectionable when considering racial groups that are not white. Loyalty to other members of their race has
been an important way for African Americans, for example, to further the larger cause of racial justice. Black slaves who helped each other
escape their white masters fought against slavery and thus helped humanity as a whole. But the history of whiteness suggests that white peoples loyalty to their race not
only would not help, but in fact would undermine struggles for racial justice. How could white people serve the larger interests of the human race by being loyal to a
race that has oppressed, colonized, and brutalized other races? What possible duties or obligations to their race could white people have,

responsibilities that must be remembered if racial justice is to be a concrete, lived goal for white people to work toward?
On the one hand, these questions can seem outrageous, even dangerous. Talk of duty to the white race smacks of militarist white
supremacist movements, and indeed the first of the Creativity Movements sixteen commandments in their White Mans Bible is that it is the avowed duty and
holy responsibility of each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race upon the face of this planet, and the sixth is that your first
loyalty belongs to the White Race.14 Noel Ignatievs concern about the scholarly validation of white supremacy through the critical conservation of whiteness could
not be better placed than here. Temporarily setting aside the dangerous aspect of these questions, they also can seem nonsensical if they do not refer to the goals of
white supremacist movements. What anti-racist duties, we might ask with some sarcasm, do white people have that must not be forgotten? African Americans and other
non-white people might be able to combine loyalty to their racial group with loyalty to humanity, but white people cannot. Their situations are too different to treat their
relationships to their races as similar. Those relationships are asymmetrical, which means that white peoples loyalty to the human race, including racial justice for all its
members, conflicts with loyalty to whiteness. Loyalty to humanity would seem to require white people to be race traitors.

On the other hand, these questions present a needed challenge to white people who care about racial justice. Rather than rhetorically or
[End Page 244] sarcastically, the questions can be asked in the spirit of Royces call for each community [to] live its own life, and not
the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general (67). For white people to fight white
supremacy and white privilege does not mean for them to attempt to shed their whiteness and become members of the human species
at large. Attempting to become raceless by living the life of an abstraction called humanity merely cultivates a white persons
ignorance of how race, including whiteness, and racism inform her habits, beliefs, desires, antipathies, and other aspects of her life. It
does not magically eliminate her white privilege for even if she succeeds in thinking of herself as a raceless member of humanity, she
likely will continue to be identified and treated as white, even if unreflectively or unconsciously, by others. By allowing her white
privilege to go unchecked in this way, a white persons living the life of abstract humanity actually tends to increase, not reduce her
racial privilege. To increase the chances of reducing her racial privilege, she must resist the temptation to see herself as raceless and
instead figure out what it could mean for her to live her own life as a racialized person.
Living as a racialized, rather than abstract person does not mean attempting to take on a different race. Attempting to take on a
different race implicitly acknowledges that whiteness is problematic, and it can seem to be an expression of respect for non-white
people. But it often is no better a response to white privilege than attempting to shed ones whiteness. This is because a white persons
taking on the habits, culture, and other aspects of another race often is an expression of ontological expansiveness, which is a habit of
white privileged people to treat all spaceswhether geographical, existential, linguistic, cultural, or otheras available for them to
inhabit at their choosing.15 Appropriating another race in this way thus is closer to imperialist colonialism than a gesture of respect.
For this reason, white people need to stop trying to flee the responsibilities and duties that come with being white and figure out how
to live their own racialized life, not the life of another race. Once they no longer ignore or attempt to flee their whiteness, they can

53

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

then ask how work for racial justice fits with their duties and responsibilities as a white person and how they might live their own antiracist white life.

54

WHITENESS K

ALTERNATIVE

UTNIF 2009

CRITIQUE OF WHITENESS AS PEDAGOGY

EDUCATION

ABOUT WHITENESS AND WHITE PRIVILEGE IS THE ONLY WAY TO CHALLENGE THE SOCIAL
NORMS THAT SOCIETY ACCEPTS ABOUT RACE AND RACISM. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO ACTIVELY
CHALLENGE THE SYSTEM AND TO CREATE A ANTI-RACIST CULTLURE.

DAVID NYLUND, MSW, PHD, IS AFFILIATED WITH THE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2006, (CRITICAL
MULTICULTURALISM, WHITENESS, AND SOCIAL WORK: TOWARDS A MORE RADICAL VIEW OF CULTURAL
COMPETENCE, JOURNAL OF PROGRESSIVE HUMAN SERVICES, HTTP://WWW.HAWORTHPRESS.COM)
Henry Giroux (2002) has discussed pedagogical strategies to assist white students to gain an understanding of the power of whiteness, white supremacy, and the
historical legacy of racism. In order for whites to become antiracist activists, Giroux argues that whiteness needs to be reinvented (once

whites have begun to notice and take responsibility for their racial privilege). Otherwise, according to Giroux (2002), whiteness as a
marker of identity is confined within a notion of domination and racism that leaves white youth no social imaginary through which
they can see themselves as actors in creating an oppositional space to fight for equality and social justice (p. 144). This re-articulation
of whiteness begins with the simple question: What does it mean to be white? Giroux follows up with this inquiry: How can we
answer this question in such a way that allows for a critique and rejection of the oppression inflicted in the name of whiteness but
simultaneously opens space for an oppositional, progressive white identity (p. 145)? Giroux (and others such as me) is not comfortable with the
concept of a new oppositional white identity as a race traitor who renounces whiteness (Ware & Back, 2002). It is unlikely that a mass movement will
grow around the race traitor concept, as oppositional whites would have little to rally around or affirm. The reinvention of whiteness
operates outside any notion of racial superiority or inferiority, while confronting white hegemony directly. As it confronts the tyranny
of white supremacy, oppositional whiteness avoids the projection of guilt onto individual white students. In the process, it generates a
sense of hope in the possibility that white people can help transform the reality of racial injustice and re-articulate themselves around
notions of justice, coalition building, community, and critical democracy. Giroux (2002) sums up his notion of oppositional whiteness:
By re-articulating whiteness as more than a form of domination, white students can construct narratives of whiteness that both
challenge, and, hopefully provide a basis for transforming the dominant relationship between racial identity and citizenship, one
informed by oppositional politics. Such a political practice suggests new subject positions, alliances, commitments, and forms of
solidarity between white students and others engaged in a struggle over expanding the possibilities of democratic life, especially as it
affirms both a politics of difference and a redistribution of power and material resources. (p. 164) Following Girouxs call for the re-articulation
of whiteness, what possibilities are there for oppositional whiteness among white social workers who are interested in an anti-racist practice? The next section will
illustrate pedagogical strategies used to interrogate whiteness in social work diversity classes. Following the section on classroom strategies, is an example of
oppositional whiteness through a case transcript by my colleague, Stephen Madigan. This case example exemplifies a performance of whiteness that is situated within a
discourse of resistance and antiracism.

55

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES: SPURS DISCUSSION

DEVELOPING WAYS OF HAVING CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE IS THE MORT IMPORTANT POLITICAL ACT
WE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING WHETHER THIS WILL CREATE LONG TERM CHANGE. BUT THAT IS
IRRELEVANT.
ANNE GREEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT SAINT JOSEPHS UNIVERSITY, DIRECTOR OF THE WRITING CENTER, 2003

[DIFFICULT STORIES: SERVICE-LEARNING, RACE, CLASS, AND WHITENESS, JSTOR, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF
TEACHERS]
The tendency among middle class, white students seems to be that it is impolite to acknowledge race or class directly. White
students that I teach express the fear that mentioning race at all will make them racists; they are trained to not acknowledge race.
Middle class and white privilege both work because of this kind of blindness, the ability to ignore race and class because your race and
class are the norm. "Interlocking oppressions ... take both active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as members of
the dominant group one is taught not to see,' and the embedded forms are the hardest to unpack and to get students to recognize as
oppressions (McIntosh 59). While undoing racism is a long process, one that may take longer than a year or a semester, sometimes, even
in the most problematic of classes, there is evidence of change. During the first part of the second semester, we read Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar
Wideman's novel that is an account of the 1985 MOVE bombing that destroyed the Osage Avenue neighborhood of Philadelphia. MOVE is a radical group of African
Americans who believed in eating raw food and who critiqued capitalism. The police bombed the MOVE house, and the subsequent fire destroyed a city block.
Students found this postmodern novel particularly difficult. Because there was such resistance to Philadelphia Fire, I was surprised when Dina and Andrea took an
unscheduled field trip to Osage Avenue after their regular service so they "could see what it was like:' It's moments like these when students take initiative
and step outside of their traditional roles where I hope that lasting change may be possible. Whether it is this kind of impact that has lasting
change, I don't know.

56

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES: DECENTERS THE SUBJECT

ALTERNATIVE: WE
CREATED. ONLY BY
RACISM.

MUST DECENTER THE SUBJECT IN ORDER TO RECOGNIZE HOW WE ARE SOCIALLY

TRANSFORMING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE CAN WE CHALLENGE

STEVEN D. FAROUGH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY ASSUMPTION COLLEGE 2004 (CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY
THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF WHITE MASCULINITIES)
//I argue that if institutionalized racism, sexism and classism are to be overcome both liberal humanist discourses and the standpoint of
sovereign individuality need to be challenged. Although the production of the sovereign individual through liberal humanist discourse
has the utopian qualities of individuals who are self-governing and free, it also denies the co-constructed character of human existence
and the structural aspects of privilege and oppression. To deny the co-constructed qualities of human existence can lead to massive
structural inequalities. In the twenty-rst century, I believe it is essential for white men to move beyond the verbal acknowledgement that they
have been privileged by the institutions of race and gender. It is also vital for white men as group to engage in social action that alters
the structures of racism and sexism.Thus, if the investment in sovereign individualism can create barriers to understanding how race and gender power operate
in the post-Civil Rights era, I argue that there must be a movement to both deconstruct sovereign individuality and reconstruct an identity that is capable of
acknowledging how identities are always produced out of power and knowledge . Obviously such a project is daunting but by paying attention to how

power operates at the level of consciousness and identity, I believe that new forms of identity can emerge. This process must work
both at the level of the individual and at the level of social structure, for it is the consistent relationship between the two that produces
both regimes of power and forms of consciousness.\\

57

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES: PERFORMANCE

ALT: THE

ALTERNATIVE OF PERFORMANCE ALLOWS FOR A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF RACE AMONGST THE YOUTH THAT
POPULATION THE UNITED STATES, LET ALONE THE WORLD.

JOHN T. WARREN AND DEANNA L. FASSETT, ASSISTANT PROFESSORS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT SAN
JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY, 2004
[SUBVERTING WHITENESS: PEDAGOGY AT THE CROSSROADS OF PERFORMANCE, CULTURE, AND POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF
CHICIAGO LIBRARIES, THEATRE TOPICS, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS]
The notion that performance allows an embodied understanding of theory is not new. It is as old as the disciplinary investigation of literature
through interpretative performance, as common as the introductory performance and interpretation courses in communication and theatre
departments across the country. However, where these workshops, as performative investigations, further our disciplinary conversations about whiteness and
racial inequality is through the enfleshment of that which is so taken for granted that one often fails to recognize her own work in creating such assumptions. Many
times students or participants come up to us after the workshop to tell us that they never realized that they were involved in racism
until they broke down and rebuilt the thematic elements of racism. The opportunity to engage this discourse through their bodies made
the absent present, made the theory visceral, made them consider how they were implicated in the production and sustenance of
whiteness's cultural centrality.
Further, this engagement engenders less defensiveness for white subjects because it begins with their experiential interaction with this
material, giving acknowledgment to their voices and their experiences. And while their understandings of power and racial inequality are being
challenged, they are not individually identified as evil racists who are inflicting intentional harm onto others. Rather, these workshops
attempt to move them to reflect on their own everyday behaviors by helping them to see that they too are caught up in systems of
cultural power. As Foucault made clear, power is not a zero-sum game, an item that some may possess and so others may not. Rather, power is fluid, flowing
through everyone but not fixed anywhere in particular. When we remove the white subject from the site of direct critique, we avoid the defensive mechanisms that white
privilege breeds. It is here that we might just move toward subverting their notions of how racism functions. And if we do that, whiteness
loses its naturalness and is seen as the construct it is.

But one should never lose sight of the fact that this pedagogy asks white students/participants to question themselves and their relation
to whiteness. It destabilizes the comfort with which they live their lives. Often, we learn from white students who participate in these
workshops that they can't imagine living their lives in the same way after this experience. Indeed, some say that they now are obsessed with their
own social position and can't watch television, listen to politicians, interact with other members of their family, or teach in the same way that they used to because they
are so uncomfortable with their awareness of their cultural privilege that they must search out some kind of change. Thus, they move from comfort to discomfort, from
safety to risk. While we want to acknowledge their feelings of discomfort and vulnerability, we also want to embrace and celebrate that repositioning.
PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY POINTS TO THE STRUCTURE AND MACHINERY OF WHITENESS

IT POINTS TO ITS PERCIVED ABSENCE

JOHN T. WARREN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT BOWLING GREEN STATE
UNIVERSITY, AND DEANNA L. FASSETT, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT SAN JOS
STATE UNIVERSITY. 2004 [PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY: A PEDAGOGY OF SUBVERSION]
Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask questions in a way that points to the structure and machinery of
whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It can point to whiteness's perceived absence. It can name the norm.
Performative pedagogy, in this way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressorit can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race,
class, or sexuality) to question their own embodied experiences by demanding that they encounter the other through the mode of
performance. For if whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of cultural power, then a performative pedagogy
can and must ask how we can create a ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings theory to
the body, can question the normal, stable, inevitable actualization of race, nurturing subversive possibility.

58

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT SOLVES: PERFORMANCE

PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY MAKES IDENTITY VISIBLE AND MAKES SUBVERSION OF WHITENESS POSSIBLE.
JOHN T. WARREN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT BOWLING GREEN STATE
UNIVERSITY, AND DEANNA L. FASSETT, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT SAN JOS
STATE UNIVERSITY. 2004 [PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY: A PEDAGOGY OF SUBVERSION]
performative pedagogy has created a rich context for (re)considering whiteness literature . Performative pedagogy is an
approach to education that moves meaning to the body, asking students to engage in meaning-making through their own living and
experiencing bodies:
Recent work in

A critical, performative pedagogy asks students and teachers to be embodied researchersto take learning to the body in order to come to know in a more full and
powerful way. It is to liberate the body from the shackles of a dualism that privileges the mind over the visceral. It is to ask students to be more fully present,
to be more fully engaged, to take more responsibility and agency in their own learning.
Performative pedagogy demands that students think about identity as performative to place the question of identity in the space of performance.
Performative pedagogy, while still an undertheorized site of investigation (and pedagogical practice), has groundings in various fields ranging from
dance and theatre to English and communication studies. Our commitment to performative pedagogy emerges from traditions of oral interpretationa
field of study where researchers and teachers feel one can develop a thoughtful and complex understanding of a literary or popular text, such as a poem, by performing
that text, by reading that text through the body. Wallace A. Bacon's work on the potential of performance is indeed persuasive: "The performing act comes as close,
perhaps, as we shall ever get to the transcendence of self into other. It is a form of knowingnot just a skill for knowing, but a knowing. [. . .] If the engagement is real,
not simply pretended, the self grows" (73). While Bacon here discusses the transcendence of self into the other, his work is a possible way of thinking through
whitenesswhere whiteness is so invisible to the perceiving white subject that his own racial identity is effectively othered. Thus, the

engagement with whiteness is an engagement with the other, a reconceptualization of the self as other.
Certainly the work of Boal is key in this process of engagement. His work on forum theatre alone can be imagined as a productive and engaging site of understanding
how power is situated in our lives, in our bodies. His work has been framed by several scholars as performativemost clearly by Elyse Lamm [End Page 414] Pineau,
who, aligning her work with Boal's, argues that performative pedagogy is a trickster (that is, subversive) pedagogy. Pineau offers four ways of framing and defining
performative pedagogy, noting that through this pedagogical method one might assist in challenging and subverting systems of power such as
whiteness. She frames this redefinition as educational poetics, play, process, and power (15). In "Educational Poetics," the banking mode of
education characterized by traditional information dispensing into waiting students is reframed into an "educational enterprise [that is] a mutable and ongoing ensemble
of narratives and performances" (10). "Educational Play" resituates pedagogy in the body, asking students and teachers to engage in corporeal playa mode of
"experimentation, innovation, critique, and subversion" (15). "Educational Process," on the other hand,acknowledges that identities are always multiple, overlapping,
ensembles of real and possible selves who enact themselves in direct relation to the context and communities in which they perform.
Here, Pineau locates identity as a performative process, noting how selves are accomplishments of reiterative performative practices. "Educational Power," the last of
Pineau's definitional categories, solidly situates performances as "always politically and historically situated, such that they may be viewed as ongoing ideological
enactments" (18).

Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask questions in a way that points to the structure and machinery of
whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It can point to whiteness's perceived absence. It can name the norm .
Performative pedagogy, in this way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressorit can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race,
class, or sexuality) to question their own embodied experiences by demanding that they encounter the other through the mode of
performance. For if whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of cultural power, then a performative pedagogy can and must ask
how we can create a ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings theory to the body, can question the normal,
stable, inevitable actualization of race, nurturing subversive possibility.
SUBVERTING WHITENESS IS AN ATTEMPT TO UNMASK IT

JOHN T. WARREN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT BOWLING GREEN STATE
UNIVERSITY, AND DEANNA L. FASSETT, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES
AT SAN JOS STATE UNIVERSITY. 2004 [PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY: A PEDAGOGY OF SUBVERSION]
performances, we designed a series of workshops that serve to create space for students to take
up and take apart whiteness in their bodies, to make discernable what is already physical by adding heightened critical reflection to
that embodiment. These workshops are a means for participants to consider whiteness, to consider the role they play in the making and
unmaking of cultural oppression, and to begin subverting the invisibility of whiteness.
But subversion is not as simple as it seems. One might easily misread "subverting," imagining we endorse a view of whiteness research
that suggests one can simply undo racism by undermining whiteness to such an extent that it ceases to be the cultural center (see Ignatiev
and Garvey; McLaren). While such a vision of the world is well intentioned, it is an enabling fiction at best and a dangerous myth at worst;
in effect, such a rhetorical move allows white identified/appearing people an easy out, an easy dismissal of the power of whiteness in
our lives and in our actions. Rather than embrace this easy sense of subversion , we take "subverting" as an active verb, in which we grapple with
Thus, in order to foreground and engage such constitutive

59

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

whiteness [End Page 415]in an attempt to unmask it. This is to say, these workshops are a way for participants to see and think about
whiteness in ways they have not done before. By pointing out whiteness's power and discursive machinery, we hope to subvert its
naturalness, or rather, participate in the process of racial subversion. While we do not think a single two-hour workshop will transform these
participants into antiracists, we hope to create spaces for us all to re-envision how race matters (as well as how race comes to matter) in our lives..

60

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT: RESISTANCE
RESISTANCE ETHICS EMBODIED BY THE ALTERNATIVE AND FORGED IN THE CLASSROOOM ARE
NECESSARY TO GALVANIZE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AGAINST INJUSTICE
RICH GIBSON AND WAYNE E. ROSS 2009 (THE EDUCATION AGENDA IS A WAR AGENDA CONNECTING
REASON TO POWER AND POWER TO RESISTANCE MARCH 23, 2009)
Ruling classes have plenty of experience with suppressing rebellion. They know uprisings are often initiated by disgruntled, angry,
educated, members of the middle or upper middle classes, who are cut off from opportunities during hard times. Keeping those people
inside the evanescence of very limited privilege is important. It's not possible to out-bribe the bribers with material rewards. It is an
ethic that pops the bubble, says, "No;" and leads to action.
The ethics that drove the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement were wiped away by decades of mendacious pluralist
postmodernism (religion with an angry cloak), years of consumerism (70 percent of the US economy until the bottom fell out), by the
absence of example from turncoat leaders in the trade unions and professional ranks; by the elimination of history in classrooms as
Johnson forewarned; the upshot being that inside a nation teetering on the brink of the collapse of its ruling classes, the resistance
must resurrect its memory of what it is to be in a truly moral fight-right against wrong, equality against inequality, justice against
tyranny.
Here are four resistance ethics worth restoring to life:
* We are responsible for our own histories, if not our birthrights.
* Solidarity and equality; an injury to one only goes before an injury to all.
* It is wrong to exploit other people.
* Justice demands organization and action where it counts. It's right to rebel.

ETHICAL COMMITMENT TO ANTI-RACIST POLITICS CAN CREATE COMMUNITIES THAT

COUNTER MILITARISM AND IMPERIALISM
RACHEL SLOCUM, 2009, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, ST. CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY
(THE EMBODIED POLITICS OF PAIN IN U.S. ANTI-RACISM, ACME, WWW.ACMEJOURNAL.ORG/VOL8/SLOCUM09.PDF)
In white struggles against racism, Alcoff notes that a sense of self-love is important. Yet the new abolitionism, which asks white people to become traitors to
whiteness, toward its eventual abolition (see Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996), requires a portrait of white racism that reveals how white self love has been derived
through killing people, taking their resources and obliterating their knowledge systems . To present this as the complete picture of whiteness
threatens [whites] very ability to be moral today, because it threatens their ability to imagine themselves as having a socially coherent relation to a past and a future
toward which anyone could feel an attachment (1998, 18-19). In exploring this abolitionist sentiment, Alcoff wonders, [i]s it possible to feel o.k. about being
white? (1998, 8). Rejecting the suggestion that to be anti-racist whites must discard or disdain white identity, she answers that it is possible . Whiteness takes

many dangerous forms (that are not only the purview of whiteness)imperialism, militarism, colonialism, racism, cultural and
economic exploitationand also takes forms emboldened by curiosity, love or a sense of responsibility . Whiteness, moreover, also
encompasses an interest in other non-supremacist ways of being white. It comes in the form of appreciation, anti-oppression work and desiring proximity to difference.
These explorations potentially open doors to critical knowledge about all racialized difference. The wish to be nonwhite in order to be part of a group expressed by the
young white man in the section on training might be acknowledged neither as white betrayal, nor as white insensitivity to privilege, neither with adulation nor with
tears. Instead it could be simply interesting or an opening for discussion.
The subjective investment of white youth (and others) in anti-racist

politics is desirable, but the means to encourage such investment is to connect local histories and lived culture to the anti-oppression
agenda (Nayak, 2003). The breadth of histories and geographies of race and racisms is important to continue researching. This does not mean an emphasis on ethnic
whiteness that dissolves the power of whiteness into national diasporic identities that practice discrete, intact forms of white culture. In England, white subject
positions are tenuously held and cannot be exhaustively explained by their embeddness in an imperialist past (2003, 156). After all, people of color have been known
to work in racist alliance with whites against other groups of color suggesting the need for a plural concept of racisms (Nayak, 2003). Nayak writes, I would

suggest that making slippery the frozen status of white- Anglo ethnicity may allow for new points of connection to emerge for white
youth. Moreover, if these emergent ethnicities can be encouraged to flourish outside the ideological nexus that merges whiteness,
racism and nationhood, there remains cause for hope.

61

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

ALT: RESISTANCE
RESISTANCE ETHICS SPUR AFFECTIVE COMMUNITIES
RACHEL SLOCUM, 2009, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, ST. CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY (THE
EMBODIED POLITICS OF PAIN IN U.S. ANTI-RACISM, ACME, WWW.ACME-JOURNAL.ORG/VOL8/SLOCUM09.PDF)
Feminist scholarship on the body has laid part of the groundwork for the current interest in the geography of emotion. Embodiment, a conceptual opening,
has helped me to think through not only pain and sadness, but also race and anti- racism. Shame, an emotional and affective interest that is not yet returned, is an ethical
engagement with who we are becoming. All bodies become through connections and actions, not through stable identities that are white or are of color or that fit
neatly into positions of victim and oppressor within the dynamic matrix of racism. Emotion is not a distortion of reason. Gatens and Lloyd (1999) refer to
reason as an embodied capacity that arises out of a collective process. The development of reason and reasonable citizens depends on our ability to become
something other than what we were through the collective endeavour to understand something we did not understand before (1999, 127). Other embodiments of
anti-racism could work from these positions.

An anti-racist ethics seems an important start and one which has greater potential as a basis for social change than the antiracist politics described in this paper. Ethics is a relation with the self and an obligation to others or, responsibility to what there is
and what debts we owe it (Grosz, 2001, no page). As such, it is a critical basis of social change efforts. A person is a body, both sexed
and raced, who has to relate to other bodies. Ethics, then, is an embodied relation in the sense that reflexivity, reason and emotion
emerge in encounter with the self and others. This sense of embodied ethics would be part of a different anti-racism that includes greater humor and fewer
tears, more laughter and less anger. Generosity, moreover, is an alternative bodily extension toward others who are angry, uncertain, or who deny racism. An
embodied anti-racist ethics would draw on reflexivity and reason to produce analyses of race that enable the many emotions associated
with its fuzziness love, sorrow, boredom, wonder.

62

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC AT: CONSERVATIVE COOPTION / ALT SOLVES

OUR ALTERNATIVE OFFERS A WAY FOR PROGRESSIVES TO CONTROL THE DEBATE HISTORY PROVES THAT
IF ANTI-RACIST POSITIONS DO NOT AGGRESSIVELY FRAME THE ISSUE, CONSERVATIVE VOIES WILL FILL IN
THE GAP

SANFORD F. SCHRAM TEACHES SOCIAL THEORY AT BRYN MAWR 2003 (PUTTING A BLACK FACE ON
WELFARE THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS
(EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
The unwillingness to address more forthrightly the racial composition of the welfare
population springs in part from a fear that conservatives will use such information to reinforce their arguments that welfare recipients are
'While this gentility is understandable, it is also harmful.

"different." This reticence extends to discussing the "differences" associated with all single mothers on welfare, black or white, thereby often leaving the field open to
conservatives to decide how differences are interpreted
There are many parallels for this sort of reticence . For years liberals were reluctant to examine seriously what was alleged to be
"welfare fraud" when recipients were not reporting all of their other small sources of incom e. For years, the topic was dominated by conservative viewpoints that
led to the development of obsessive practices by states to hunt down and punish violators who failed to report all of their income even if it was minimal. "Welfare
fraud" became another way to harass economically distressed welfare recipients and depict them as undeserving. Finally , after decades of a crackdown on

these alleged abuses of welfare studies such as the one by Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein ('997) offered an alternative perspective,
showing that low benefits left recipients no choice to supplement their welfare checks with unreported income. Unfortunately, by the
time that Edin and Lein published their findings in 1997, the campaign to combat fraud and withhold aid from "cheaters" had held
down welfare benefits for over two decades so that they had on average declined in real value by over 40 percent by the early 1970s
(Moffitt 92.). The prior failure to join the discussion about the issue of "welfare aid" was therefore at best unhelpful. At worst, this lapse in
political courage provided an opening for conservatives to frame the issue of unreported income in the worst possible light as "welfare fraud." This in turn enabled
states to tighten access and reduce benefits, in effect punishing people in most cases for trying to survive by combining inadequate
welfare benefits with small amounts of unreported income.
Reluctance to discuss particular issues about welfare and poverty can have its negative effects. But the whole point of getting involved
and dissscussing potentially difficult issues about welfare and poverty is to prevent serious issues from being framed in tendentious
ways. Talking about the proportionate numbers of nonwhites receiving welfare does not have involve Moynihan's "tangle of
pathology" perspective. Yet, if only the Moynihans of the world get involved in highlighting the racial composition of the welfare
population, that is just what may happen. Others need engage these issues, not just to check the facts about the racial composition of
the welfare population, but more importantly to address how facts are being framed and how assumptions of otherness inform the
interpretation of those facts.

63

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC DEBATE AND SEQUENCING IS KEY

THE SEQUENCING OF PRIORITIES IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF THE DEBATE DERACIALIZING
POVERTY TRADES OFF WITH EFFORTS TO CONFRONT WHITENESS AND RISKS ALIGNING LIBERAL AND
CONSERVATIVE FORCES UNDER A BANNER THAT WILL ADVANCE THE INTERESTS OF WHITES
RINKU SEN 2000 (ISSUE #10, FALL 2000 THE FIRST TIME WAS TRAGEDY, WILL THE SECOND BE FARCE?:
FIGHTING WELFARE "REFORM" HTTP://WWW.COLORLINES.COM/ARTICLE.PHP?ID=347)
Activists, however, are torn about how much to focus on race.
Gary Flowers of Rainbow/Push says the organization plans to push for state legislatures to produce "a disparate impact analysis. How did the legislation in '96 impact
people of color and women? Because states now control much of the application of welfare reform, state legislatures need to enact anti-discrimination clauses and
increase the comprehensive training of those entities delivering assistance."
Debbie Weinstein of the Children's Defense Fund thinks that "people are open to the issue of fairness, and when we can demonstrate that people are not getting access
in a way that appears to be race-based, that should be of tremendous concern to policy makers." The Committee of 100 developed an "Immodest Proposal" explicitly
acknowledging the importance of racial analysis in the debate, stating that "the debate preceding the 1996 welfare law made the color of poverty the fault of the poor.
We insist that the color of poverty is the consequence of racism and related forms of discrimination."
According to Rini Chakraborty of the California Immigrant Welfare Coalition, how to fight for policies that address the "particular vulnerabilities of the poorest
caregivers, especially women of color," or undocumented immigrants, who "are shut out of everything anyway," are issues that confuse progressive strategists, even
those who acknowledge the devastating effect of the right's racial attack.
Karen Johnson, a national vice president of NOW, says that the disparate racial impact of welfare reform should, but probably won't, be of much concern to a white,
male Congress, where "there's no sympathy or empathy for people of color or for women." And while activists understand the importance of highlighting

racial stratification, there is also a strong desire to deracialize poverty, both to destigmatize people of color and to encourage whites to
join the anti-poverty coalition. But activists can't have it both ways, and are in grave danger of becoming trapped in a political
framework that has liberals and conservatives alike seeing race as a narrow and illegitimate "special interest."

OUR STRUGGLE MUST PRIORITIZE A CRITIQUE OF WHITENESS ABOVE ALL OTHER INTERESTS IT IS
ESSENTIAL TO SUCCESSFUL POLICY CONSTRUCTION
LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT HUNTER COLLEGE/CUNY GRADUATE CENTER, 2005,
THE WHITENESS QUESTION
One of the most difficult aspects of these white anti-racist projects is what I have called the whiteness question, meaning the question of white
identity. Many race theorists have argued that antiracist struggles require whites' acknowledgment that they are white ; that is, that their
experience, perceptions, and economic position have been profoundly affected by being constituted as white (Frankenberg 1993). Race may
be a social construction without biological validity, yet it is real and powerful enough to alter the fundamental shape of all our lives (Gooding-Williams 1995; Taylor
2003). Part of white privilege has been precisely whites' ability to ignore the ways white racial identity has benefited them.
A liberal approach to answering this question is developed in Judith Katz's now-classic White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-racism Training (1978). This book is
representative of the popularized psychological approach to antiracism, an approach often generated in, and aiming to be suited for, the kinds of in-house workshops
and encounter groups that have developed from corporate America since the 1960s, though Katz's own context was closer to universities. Many corporations have
discovered that racism (sometimes) impedes productivity, and therefore they have hired consultants to retrain and sensitize white management personnel. This is, of
course, only part of the audience for antiracism training; some universities and movement organizations have also tried approaches such as Katz's. But the specific
social location and source of funding needs to be kept in mind when analyzing the reeducation approaches used in antiracism workshops.
White Awareness attributes widespread responsibility for racism to whites. However, Katz is highly critical of white guilt fixations on the grounds that these are selfindulgent. She explains that such criticisms led her to move from black-white group encounters to all-white groups. She also avoided using people of color to reeducate
whites, she says, because she found that this led whites to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness from their nonwhite trainers.
Katz describes facing the enormity and depth of racism as painful and demoralizing, since one loses one's sense of self-trust and even selflove; but she nonetheless holds out the hope that whites can become antiracist and that we may ultimately find comfort in our move to
liberation (vii). She holds that racism causes whites to suffer; it cripples their intellectual and psychological development and locks them
in a psychological prison that victimizes and oppresses them every day of their lives (14). Such claims do not, of course, entail that whites'
victimization by racism is worse than or equal to that of other groups, but Katz's wording is striking. Throughout the book, racism is portrayed as a kind of

macro-agent with its own agenda, operating separately from white people.
This problem takes on added significance given that antiracism and sensitivity training occur within the context of a corporate
culture that continues to use racism and cultural chauvinism as an excuse to pay people of color far lower wages by undervaluing
comparably challenging or even more difficult work. Katz makes no reference to exploitation or the need for a redistribution of resources, and instead
treats racism as a psychological pathology that can be solved through behavior modification. Although racism no doubt is debilitating for whites in a number of ways,

unless we analyze who benefits from and promotes racism, both objectively and subjectively, we cannot see clearly what needs to be
done to counter it.

64

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC DEBATE AND SEQUENCING IS KEY

THE AFFIRMATIVE IS THE WRONG PRIORITY WE SHOULD STOP PASSING THE BUCK ONTO THE POOR
AND PEOPLE OF COLOR. INSTEAD, ADOPT A CHALLENGE TO PRIVILEGE THAT CAN REORIENT AND
REFRAME WHAT IT MEANS TO SOLVE FOR HARMS
TIM WISE 2009 (HEY DUDE, WHERE'S MY PRIVILEGE? RACE AND LAWBREAKING IN BLACK AND WHITE
MAY 19, 2009 HTTP://WWW.ZMAG.ORG/ZNET/VIEWARTICLE/21490)
This is perhaps the most blatant example of white privilege imaginable: the ability to do what you want, when you want, without fear
of consequence, and then to have that behavior deemed largely harmless, even when, for others, it would be viewed as dysfunctional,
destructive, and evidence of a profound cultural flaw.
Well it's time to flip the script on all that; time to note that it isn't the culture of black and brown youth, or working class youth (of
whatever color), that needs changing. They aren't the problem. They aren't the ones with inverted value systems. They aren't the ones
whose presence on campus is the problem. It's some among the ones with money and insufficient melanin who are the problem. And
it's time we treated them like one, especially when, by their behavior, they literally beg us to do so.

65

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: NO LINK
APPROACH THEIR NO LINK ARGUMENTS WITH THE HIGHEST DEGREE OF SKEPTICISM WHITENESS
ASSURES THAT THE CRITIQUE OF RACE IS ALWAYS SIDELINED. HISTORY PROVES THAT THIS DENIAL
WORKS IN SERVICE OF WHITE SUPREMACY
TIM WISE 2009 (COLOR-BLIND, POWER-OBLIVIOUS: ERIC HOLDER AND THE WHITEWASHING OF RACISM
ZMAG.ORG)
Sadly, whites

are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment.
And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better
opportunities as the flipside of discrimination. After all, there is no down without an up, no matter how much we'd like to believe
otherwise.
It is white denial, as much as anything, which has allowed racial inequity to persist for so long, and it's nothing new. In the early
1960s, even before the passage of modern civil rights laws, two out of three whites said blacks were treated equally, and nearly 90
percent said black kids had equal educational opportunity. Matter of fact, white denial has a longer pedigree than that, reaching back at least as far as the
1860s, when southern slave-owners were literally stunned to see their human property abandon them after the Emancipation Proclamation. After all, to the semidelusional white mind of the time, they had always treated their slaves "like family."

Until we address our nation's long history of white supremacy, come to terms with the legacy of that history, and confront the reality
of ongoing discrimination (even in the "Age of Obama"), whatever dialogue we engage around the subject will only further confuse
us, and stifle our efforts to one day emerge from the thick and oppressive fog of racism. For however much audacity may be tethered
to the concept of hope, let us be mindful that truth is more audacious still. May we find the courage, some day soon, to tell it.

66

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: THIS IS JUST A LINK OF OMISSION

OUR ARGUMENT IS MORE THAN A LINK OF OMISSION WHITENESS IS ALWAYS PRESENT AND EXPANDS
ITS DESCRIPTIVE GAZE BECAUSE OF ITS OMNIPRESENCE.
GEORGE LIPSITZ, DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1999, POSSESSIVE
INVESTMENT (PAGE 1-2)
Shortly after World War II, a French reporter asked expatriate Richard Wright for his 'views about the "Negro problem" in America. The au thor replied, "There isn't
any Negro problem; there is only a white problem."' By inverting the reporter's question, Wright called attention to its hidden assumptions- that

racial polarization comes from the existence of blacks rather than from the behavior of whites, that black people are a "prob lem" for
whites rather than fellow citizens entitled to justice, and that, unless otherwise specified, "Americans" means "whites."2 But Wright's
formulation also placed political mobilization by African Americans during the civil rights era in context, connecting black disadvantages to white
advantages and finding the roots of black consciousness in the systemic practices of aversion, exploita tion, denigration, and
discrimination practiced by people who think of themselves as "white."
Whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see.
Richard Dyer suggests, "[W]hite power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular. "3 As the unmarked category
against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to ac knowledge its role as an organizing principle in
social and cultural relations.4 To identify, analyze, and oppose the destructive consequences of whiteness, we need what Walter Benjamin
called "presence of mind." Benjamin wrote that people visit fortune-tellers less out of a desire to know the future than out of a fear of not noticing some important
aspect of the present. " Presence of mind," he suggested, "is an abstract of the future, and precise awareness of the present moment more
decisive than foreknowledge of the most distant events ."5 In U.S. society at this time, precise awareness of the present moment requires an
understanding of the existence and the destructive consequences of the possessive investment in whiteness that surreptitiously
shapes so much of our public and private lives."
Race is a cultural construct, but one with sinister structural causes and consequences. Conscious and deliberate actions have
institutionalized group identity in the United States, not just through the dissemination of cultural stories, but also through systematic efforts
from colonial times to the present to create economic advantages through a possessive investment in whiteness for European
Americans. Studies of culture too far removed from studies of social structure leave us with inadequate explanations for understanding
racism and inadequate remedies for combating it.

OMITTING RACE IS THE LINK: THE 1AC MADE A CHOICE TO MAKE PRESENT CERTAIN ISSUES, RELEGATING
RACE TO AN UNIMPORTANT PART OF THE DEBATE.
SONJA K. FOSS, KAREN A. FOSS, AND ROBERT TRAPP 1990 (CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON
RHETORIC)
Because Perelman's perspective includes a variety of starting points and a focus on the audience, choice is an important factor in his
conception of argumentation. Unlike the mathematician or the computer engaging in analytical reasoning, the speaker engaging in
argumentation must choose from among the available starting points to decide how to create presence and communion.
An important element in Perelman's perspective on rhetoric is the concept of presence. When a speaker has a variety of elements of
argumentation from which to choose, "the orator must select certain elements on which he focuses attention by endowing them, as it
were, with a 'presence. " Certain elements in our perception, depending upon the situation, can seem more important or special than
other elements. The elements that are present in our mind are the most important, of course, while those that are absent are less
important. Presence, then, is "the displaying of certain elements on which the speaker wishes to center attention in order that they may
occupy the foreground of the hearer's consciousness." 43
One way to explain the notion of presence is by using the metaphor of figure and ground. A person standing on a mountain top looking into a valley may see trees, a
lake, and a stream, along with other objects. When that person focuses on, for instance, a tree, the tree becomes the figure and the rest of the objects become the ground.
Perelman might say that, in this case, the tree has achieved "presence" in that person's perception.
One role of argumentation is to create presence and thus importance. To
illustrate this concept, Perelman tells a Chinese story in which a "king sees an ox on its way to sacrifice. He is moved to pity for it and orders that a sheep be used in its
place. He confesses he did so because he could see the ox, but not the sheep."44 Other examples of the function of presence can be seen in real objects, such as
"Caesar's bloody tunic as brandished by Antony, . . . [or]... the children of the victim of the accused. 1145 These objects can be presented to an audience to establish
presence. In these cases, the speaker is acting on the senses of the audience in order to move that audience.

Establishing the presence of what is absent, however, is a more difficult but often more important task. Through the use of
argumentation, a lawyer can cause a jury to "live" a situation that occurred in the past, a legislator can assist an audience in imagining
how much better the world would be if a bill were enacted, and a minister can bring audience members to distant places and times that
existed before their birth or will exist after their death. The concept of presence implies that a speaker has the ability "to make present,
by verbal magic alone, what is actually absent but what he considers important to his argument.46

67

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: WHITEWASHING
WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE THE POLITICAL RISK THAT A FOCUS ON WHITENESS CARRIES. HOWEVER OUR
EVIDENCE IS COMPARATIVE AND CONCLUDES THAT WE SHOULD STILL INVEST IN EXPOSURES OF RACISM
TO DO SO ONLY FUELS THE ADVANCE OF WHITE INTERESTS AT THE EXPENSE OF PEOPLE OF COLOR
SANFORD F. SCHRAM TEACHES SOCIAL THEORY AT BRYN MAWR 2003 (PUTTING A BLACK FACE
ON WELFARE THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR),
JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
Yet this statement increasingly is factually questionable; and under welfare reform, it is politically problematic. In what follows, I argue that in debates about welfare
reform, failure to acknowledge the racial composition of the welfare population compounds the problems social policies pose for
people of color, African Americans in particular. I argue that such reticence will only "whitewash" the racial disparities in the U.S. economy that in recent years
have increased the extent to which low income persons of color rely on public assistance, frank discussion is needed because welfare discourse in recent years has come
to be increasingly encoded with racial connotations (Schram woo). It is important to recognize that, contrary to the conventional understanding,

there are both good and bad ways to highlight the color issue in welfare.
Emphasizing
the disproportionate numbers of persons of color on public assistance can reinforce attempts to denigrate welfare as a "black program"
for those "other" people who are too irresponsible to conform to the standards of white, middle class society . Yet going along with depictions of welfare that
do not account for race leaves unchallenged the racial disparities reinforced by welfare policy. White or black, the face of welfare that
we project poses political risks.
I will note recent scholarship that shows how racial representations of welfare undermine support for public assistance, but I also suggest that
such scholarship can overlook the political complexities of race and welfare. In particular, it does not sufficiently examine the
artificiality of racial categories, the political uses of different constructions of race, and the ways in which "race talk" about welfare or
the lack thereof can be self defeating. These problems spill over into questions of advocacy . I conclude that racial representations of
welfare involve layers of political consideration and pose strategic problems for political activism . More stress should be given, not to the
In other words, analysis suggests that putting a "black face" on welfare is not as clear cut an issue as it is often depicted. There are pitfalls either way.

frequency of racialized depictions of welfare in the mass media, but to how prevailing modes of perception prime people to rely on tendentious racial categorizations to
interpret issues of race and welfare (see Mendelberg r997). My recommendation is not to avoid racial categories in discussions of welfare but to deploy such
constructions in politically sensitive ways. Putting a black face on welfare risks reinforcing racial stereotypes, but only by acknowledging the

disproportionate numbers of persons of color relying on welfare can we challenge racial inequality in the economy .
I undertake this line of inquiry to suggest that understanding the racial dimensions of welfare can promote racial justice. To get more racial
justice, we need to ask hard questions and break with conventional wisdom. Because racial connotations are encoded in welfare
discourse, we need to call them out . Because welfare reform has disproportionately affected persons of color, the need to highlight
the racial dimensions of welfare has intensified. Taking race into account is more necessary now than before.

68

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: CLASS MUST COME BEFORE RACE

RACE IS AN IMPORTANT NEXUS POINT FOR COALITION BUILDING DURING THE 30S STRUGGLES FOR
INCREASED SOCIAL SERVICES WERE MORE SUCCESSFUL WHEN RACE WAS THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2003 (RACE AND THE LIMITS OF SOLIDARITY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE IN RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE
REFORM BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM, JOE SOSS, RICHARD C. FORDING )
But the geographical and political proximity of blacks and whites did not alone determine the impact of racial rule on the welfare
state. Equally important was the centrality of race to the process of building political coalitions around social reform, particularly
whether or not race emerged as a significant or even dominant line of political cleavage that altered or even trumped other potential
cleavages primarily class (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Internal racial distinctions were not a necessary condition for the formation of race based social reform
coalitions. In both the United States and Britain race helped overcome class based political conflict and was one of the central axes
around which the politics of welfare revolved; the political construction of racial distinctions was critical in the creation of cross class
coalitions for welfare policy in each country . But the difference between internal racial conflict in the United States and the appearance of internal racial
homogeneity in Britain proved critical in pushing the two countries toward different approaches to constructing welfare institutions. In Britain in the years before World
War I, social reform and imperial fervor were the twin pillars behind a political coalition that created inclusive national welfare policies as a means of unifying Britons
across class and against a racially defined threat from outside. In the United States the coalition behind the welfare state in the 193oS also depended on the protection of
racial rule, but there the imperative of uniting whites against blacks produced an approach to welfare policy that was necessarily exclusionary and decentralizing rather
than inclusionary and national.

ASSERTING CLASS BEFORE RACE IS AN EASY WAY FOR WHITE PEOPLE TO AVOID DISCUSSING RACE.
FOCUSING OUR CRITICAL ENERGY ON WHITE PRIVILEGE GENERATES AN INTERSECTIONAL CRITIQUE
THAT EXPOSES A NETWORK OF OPPRESSIONS.
ANNE GREEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT SAINT JOSEPHS UNIVERSITY, DIRECTOR OF THE WRITING CENTER, 2003
[DIFFICULT STORIES: SERVICE-LEARNING, RACE, CLASS, AND WHITENESS, JSTOR, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS]
I think a lot about my mother's story when I think about how my white students talk about race and racism. [with] The stories that white students tell
about learning about race are ones of denial, and they often express "color blind" ideas about race. It's impolite, As a white child in the
North, what I they feel, to acknowledge race because "people are learned about race was very similar to people." As Robert T. Carter describes
color blindwhat my white students have learned ness, "one first recognizes a person's color and then about race-that race should be claims to ignore it" (201). The
messages that studentunacknowledged and avoided. dents describe receiving about race generally come from their parents who tell them "what matters is on the inside."

As a white child in the North, what I learned about race was very similar to what my white students have learned about race-that race
should be unacknowledged and avoided. Hephzibah Roskelly writes, "[T]he primary way that white students and their teachers ignore what
they know about how racism works is by claiming class instead of race as the real discriminator in society and culture." While I agree with
Roskelly, I also think that white privilege and middle class privilege work in similar ways, erasing the specifics of race and class and the ways that race and class
intersect, reinforcing the American myths of individual success ("Rising" 198). White people "do not talk about White racism " (Sleeter 5) and "Whites,
while socialized in a racially constructed world, are taught not to be aware of themselves in racial terms" (Carter 199). Most of my white
students have almost as difficult a time naming themselves as middle class as they do as white, and it's this intersection of white privilege and middle class privilege that
becomes particularly difficult to unpack. Teaching white, middle class students about white privilege and white racism "challenges the
legitimacy of White peoples' very lives" and also highlights the ways in which oppressions intersect and collide (Sleeter 7). It can make it
possible to discuss and unpack the assumption that "for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal" (Allison 35). It is
extremely difficult for white students to talk and write about systemic racial inequalities and white privilege .8 As Roskelly describes it,
"race and racism continue to be matters that white university professors and the students in their literature and writing courses avoid,
except in the most abstract, and therefore safe, ways " ("Rising" 198). In my service-learning class we had problems addressing race,

whiteness, and white racism other than abstractly, although the service experience provided concrete opportunities to consider
systemic racism and how that has affected inner-city environments . This two-semester required English course provided a yearlong service-learning
experience for first-year students. In addition to the regular work of a composition course (fall semester) and a writing-about-literature course (spring semester),
students tutored children or adults three hours per week. To help While the most obvious difference was race (we were all white, and the learners were
largely African American), the service-learning students sat in silence. They refused to name racism as a possible cause of the difficulties
that brought people to their service-learning sites, and they could not name their whiteness as a source of privilege. with the affective goals
of our service-learning program, some time is organized for reflection and discussion outside of class. During our final "reflection dinner," we asked students to
articulate the systemic reasons that defined the differences between those at their service sites and themselves. One of the upper-level students who mentored my
service-learning students questioned them about the differences they might notice if the learners from their sites were standing together on the other side of the room.
While the most obvious difference was race (we were all white, and the learners were largely African American), the service-learning students sat in silence. They

refused to name racism as a possible cause of the difficulties that brought people to their service-learning sites, and they could not

69

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

name their whiteness as a source of privilege. This was only one of many times when the servicelearning students avoided talking
about race.

70

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: CLASS MUST COME BEFORE RACE

THE ALTERNATIVE IS A PREREQUISITE OF CLASS STRUGGLE BECAUSE WHITE PRIVILEGE RACIALIZES CLASS.
JOEL OLSEN, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY,
JUL 31, 2008 (WHITENESS AND THE POLARIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS, POLITICAL RESEARCH
QUARTERLY, HTTP://PRQ.SAGEPUB.COM/CGI/CONTENT/ABSTRACT/61/4/704)
One of the key functions of official policies and unofficial practices of racial oppression is to reduce class conflict among the
dominant group. Under segregation, for example, dominant class actors insisted on control over racially subordinate groups and
demanded that the state regulate their role in labor markets (Greenberg 1980). In particular, capitalists in primary industries such as mining and
agriculture insisted on a repressive labor system structured by race, while white workers (especially unskilled ones) demanded that the state reserve certain areas of
employment for them. Thus, despite conflicts between these class actors,each call[ed] on the state to take control of the subordinate worker, to draw racial lines
somewhere in the society and economy (pp. 26-27). As W. E. B. Du Bois ([1935] 1992) showed in his classic Black Reconstruction in America 18601880, this
implicit alliance between capitalists and white workers reduced class conflict . White labor repressed black labor in the workplace and the community

and excluded the latter from full participation in the labor movement. In turn, elites granted white workers higher wages and sundry
public and psychological wages,such as the right to vote, to enjoy public accommodations, to live wherever one could afford, and
the full benefits of American citizenship.

71

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC A/T WHITE SUPREMACY

TURN: THE ALTERNATIVE RECTIFIES THIS FEAR A CRITIQUE FUELD BY COMMITMENTS TO SOCIAL
JUSTICE AND A COMMUNITY BUILT ON ANTI-RACIST POSITIONS CHALLENGES THE LOGIC OF WHITE
SUPREMACY MOVEMENTS
SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE
PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE. [LIBRARY NAME], [CITY], [STATE ABBREVIATION].
12 JUN. 2009 <HTTP://MUSE.JHU.EDU/>.)
Royce lists three specific problems in modern American life that cannot be solved without wise provincialism. His discussion of these evils, as Royce calls them, also
illuminates evils that a wise form of whiteness could help meliorate. The first evil is the neglect of and disruption to a community when people are
only loosely associated with it and do not invest in, care about, or have a significant history with it. Royce argues [End Page 245] that this
problem is growing in frequency and significance as people are increasingly mobile, changing their residency multiple times over their lifetime and often moving great
distances from where they were born and raised. This means that communities are increasingly dealing with a large number of newcomers who do not (yet) have an
intimate, caring connection to the new place they inhabit. This is a source of social danger, because the community needs well-knit organization (73). Provincialism
helps these newcomers care for their new home, and a wise provincialism does so without generating any hostility toward either other provincial communities or larger
social bodies such as the nation.
In a similar fashion, when white people who care about racial justice have virtually no conscious or deliberate affiliation with their
whiteness, the meaning and effect of whiteness is left to happenstance or, more likely, is determined by white supremacist groups .
Royces primary concern is the dissolution of communities through neglect, and if well-intentioned white people do not care about, invest in, or
acknowledge a significant history with their whiteness, then whiteness will be neglected. But unlike provincial communities, whiteness does not
necessarily unravel or wither away because of simple neglect by anti-racist white people . Its neglect by anti-racists whites instead leaves it wide open

for racist white groups to develop. Like a garden, whiteness can easily grow tough weeds of white supremacy if it is not wisely
cultivated. The evil of abandoning whiteness, allowing white supremacists to make of it whatever they will, can be mitigated by a wise
form of whiteness.
In practice, this means that white people who care about racial justice need to educate newcomers to whitenessnamely, white
childrento be loyal to and care about their race . While Royces comments about the problem of newcomers due to increased geographical mobility do not
apply directly to whiteness,16 white children can be thought of as newcomers to the community of whiteness who do not (yet) have an intimate connection to their race
or know how to cultivate and care for it. Here again is an instance in which white supremacists have been allowed to corner the market on whiteness: almost all explicit
reflection and writing on how to raise white children as white has been undertaken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, World Church of the Creator, and
Stormfront.17 The association is so tight that the mere suggestion of educating white children in their whiteness is alarming to many

people. But educating white children about their whiteness need and should not mean educating them to be white supremacists. A wise
form of whiteness would help train the developing racial habits of white children in anti-racist ways.18

WE

ARE NOT UNDER THE ILLUSION THAT WHITENESS WILL VANISH OR THAT WHITE SUPREMACY GROUPS
WILL DISAPPEAR. HOWEVER, ONLY THE ALTERNATIVE INSPIRES COMMUNITIES OF RESISTANCE TO
CHALLENGE THE INVESTMENT IN WHITE PRIVLIGE

SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE

PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE.)
While much more can and needs to be said about how to develop a wise form of whiteness, the answer to the main question with which I began this essay is yes: the
racial category of whiteness can be concretely transformed into wise whiteness, which means that efforts to critically conserve whiteness need not inadvertently fuel
white domination. Efforts to rehabilitate the racial category of whiteness admittedly will be politically and existentially dangerous. When

words such as loyalty are used in the context of whiteness, for example, there is an inevitable and significant risk that they will be
heard and/or used as endorsements of white supremacy. But I think this risk should be takenindeed, that it must be takenbecause
even though there is nothing ahistorically essential about whiteness, it is not likely to disappear any time soon.53 Rejecting racial
essentialism, as Royce did and most contemporary philosophers do, does not mean that problems associated with whiteness simply
evaporate. White people do not have sole control over their whiteness; other racial groups have contributed and will continue to
contribute to the meaning of whiteness.54 But white people are uniquely responsible for their whiteness. The question for them thus is
how will they take up that responsibility. And Royces essay on provincialism can help them begin to figure out an answer.

72

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC AT: PERMUTATION

SAMPLING THE PERMUTATION ONLY OFFERS MULTICULTURAL LIPSERVICE TO
THIS MUTED SUPPORT CONCEALS A MORE INSIDIOUS FORM OF WHITE PRIVILEGE.

ANTI-RACIST STRUGGLE.

SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE

PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE.)
A wise whiteness also would caution, however, that white peoples appreciation for racial diversity and variety also can be an
insidious form of whiteness in disguise. Too often, celebrations of multiculturalism and racial diversity function as a smorgasbord of
racial difference offered up for (middle-to-upper class) white peoples consumption and enjoyment. They do this by acknowledging
some differences while simultaneously concealing others. It is very easy for white people to recognize and even celebrate racial
difference in the form of different food, dress, and cultural customs. It tends to be much more difficult for them to recognize racial
difference in the form of economic, educational, and political inequalities . Royces criticism of the leveling tendencies of modern culture does not
explicitly depoliticize the issue, and he does mention that variety is needed particularly to counter the purely mechanical carrying-power of certain ruling social
influences, an example of which is the hegemony of white culture (76) . But given the [End Page 247] tendency of white (middle-to-upper class, in

particular) people to see whiteness as cultureless and boring and thus want to spice it up by dabbling in other, exotic cultures, care
must be taken that appreciation of diversity is not sanitized through an avoidance of the history and present of white privilege. When
that happens, appreciation of plurality and diversity tend to become a covert vehicle for white ontological expansiveness. In contrast, a
wise whiteness values and thus transactionally conserves different races, as Outlaw does, without depoliticizing the meaning of those differences.

THE

CHOICE TO SEE THE PERMUTATION REPRESENTS THE CROWING ACHIEVMENT OF WHITENESS - THE
ABILITY TO MOVE BACK AND FORTH IS ONLY AFFORD THOSE WITH THE PRIVILEGE TO DO SO. PREFER THE
ALTERNATIVE ALONE AS A DEMONSTRATION OF COMMITMENT.

PAUL R. CROLL, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AT MINNESOTA UNIVERSITY, 2007 (MODELING DETERMINANTS OF

WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY: RESULTS FROM A NEW NATIONAL SURVEY, SOCIAL FORCES, LN)
Understandings of whiteness have the potential to take our public discussion of race in America in new, productive directions and shift
the focus of racial inequality in America. Whiteness is something that is hard to sweep back under the rug once it is uncovered.
However, it is important to note that attention to whiteness alone does not mean that the possessive investment in whiteness (Lipsitz
1998) will go away. Whites can be simultaneously aware of their white racial identity, and at the same time, take advantage of the
privileges afforded them based on their white status. This raises important questions about our traditional American ideals. What are the
implications when Americans still adhere to ideals of hard work, effort and opportunity for all, yet also are conscious and aware of systems of privilege afforded to
some, but not others, based on the color of their skin? The "culture of poverty" argument and other explanations for low socioeconomic status

and achievement have historically relied upon the assumption that it is possible for all Americans to succeed, provided they work hard
enough and persevere. What happens to these traditional explanations for inequality when attention to whiteness increases? Despite
the growing visibility of whiteness, these explanations have not gone away. Therefore, the power of whiteness may be shifting to one
of choice. Decades ago, the power of whiteness was believed to be its invisibility. Now that the veil of invisibility is being slowly
removed, the power of whiteness remains. Whiteness may be the luxury to choose when to see it and when to ignore it, an important
shift from presumed unconsciousness. Future research should examine the choices afforded whites to further our understandings of race relations in America.
[End Page 635]

73

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC AT: PERMUTATION

WHITE DENIAL A REFUSAL TO UNEQUIVOCALLY CRITIQUE WHITENESS IS AN APOLOGY FOR RACISM.
TIM WISE 2006 (WHAT KIND OF CARD IS RACE? ZMAG.ORG)
Occasionally, white denial gets creative, and this it does by pretending to come wrapped in sympathy for those who allege racism in
the modern era. In other words, while steadfastly rejecting what people of color say they experience--in effect suggesting that they
lack the intelligence and/or sanity to accurately interpret their own lives--such commentators seek to assure others that whites really
do care about racism, but simply refuse to pin the label on incidents where it doesn't apply . In fact, they'll argue, one of the reasons that whites
have developed compassion fatigue on this issue is precisely because of the overuse of the concept, combined with what we view as unfair reactions to racism (such as
affirmative action efforts which have, ostensibly, turned us into the victims of racial bias). If blacks would just stop playing the card where it doesn't belong, and stop
pushing for so-called preferential treatment, whites would revert back to our prior commitment to equal opportunity, and our heartfelt concern about the issue of racism.
Don't laugh. This is actually the position put forward recently by James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal, who in January suggested that white reluctance to embrace
black claims of racism was really the fault of blacks themselves, and the larger civil rights establishment (11). As Taranto put it: "Why do blacks and whites have such
divergent views on racial matters? We would argue that it is because of the course that racial policies have taken over the past forty years." He then argues that by trying
to bring about racial equality--but failing to do so because of "aggregate differences in motivation, inclination and aptitude" between different racial groups--policies
like affirmative action have bred "frustration and resentment" among blacks, and "indifference" among whites, who decide not to think about race at all, rather than
engage an issue that seems so toxic to them. In other words, whites think blacks use racism as a crutch for their own inadequacies, and then

demand programs and policies that fail to make things much better, all the while discriminating against them as whites. In such an
atmosphere, is it any wonder that the two groups view the subject matter differently?
But the fundamental flaw in Taranto's argument is its suggestion--implicit though it may be--that prior to the creation of affirmative action, white folks were mostly on
board the racial justice and equal opportunity train, and were open to hearing about claims of racism from persons of color. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

White denial is not a form of backlash to the past forty years of civil rights legislation, and white indifference to claims of racism did
not only recently emerge, as if from a previous place where whites and blacks had once seen the world similarly. Simply put: whites in
every generation have thought there was no real problem with racism, irrespective of the evidence, and in every generation we have
been wrong.

COLLECTIVE AMNESIA THE PERMUTATION ENCOURAGES A SOCIAL FORGETTING OF THE HISTORY OF

INJUSTICES. IN ORDER FOR PROGRESSIVE POLITICS TO BE SUCCESSFUL, THE HISTORY OF INJUSTICE MUST
BE CONSTANTLY FOREGROUNDED, NOT SIMPLY INCLUDED, IN POLICY MAKING
CHARLES

W. MILLS, PROFESSOR OF MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY AT JOHN EVANS,

IGNORANCE, STATE UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK PRESS, 33-34]

2007 [RACE

AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF

At the level of symbolism and national self -representation,

then, the denial of the extent of Native American and black victimization buttresses the
airbrushed white narrative of discovery, settlement, and building of a shining city on the hill. But the editing of white memory has more concrete and

practical consequences also: as earlier emphasized it enables a self-representation in which differential white privilege , and the need to
correct for it, does not exist. In other words, the mystification of the past underwrites a mystification of the present. The erasure of the history of Jim Crow makes it
possible to represent the playing field as historically level, so that current black poverty just proves blacks' unwillingness to work. As individual memory is assisted
through a larger social memory, so individual amnesia is then assisted by a larger collective amnesia. In his re - search on the continuing, indeed deepening, gap

between white and black Americans, Thomas Shapiro (2004, 75-76) remarks on how often white in- terviewees seemed to "forget"

what
they had just told him about the ex- tensive parental assistance they received, claiming instead that they had worked for it: "[X's] memory seems accurate as she
catalogues all sorts of parental wealthfare with matching dollar figures .... However, as soon as the conversation turns to how she and her husband acquired assets like
their home, cars, and savings account, her attitude changes dramatically ... .The [Xs] describe themselves as self-made, conveniently forgetting that they inherited much
of what they own." Thus the "taken- for-granted sense of [white] entitlement" erases the fact that "transformative assets," "inherited wealth lifting a family

beyond their own achievements," have been crucial to their white success (76, 10, emphasis in original) and that blacks do not in general
have such advantages because of the history of discrimination against them. Thomas McCarthy (2002,2004) points out the importance of a politics
of memory for closing the "peculiar gap be- tween academic historical scholarship and public historical consciousness that marks our own situation" (2002, 641) and

the even- tual achievement of racial justice can only be accomplished through a systematic national re -education on the
historic extent of black racial sub- ordination in the United States and how it continues to shape our racial fates differentially today.
emphasizes that

74

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: STRUCTURAL RACISM DOES NOT EXIST

DENIALS OF STRUCTURAL RACISM REFLECT WHITE PRIVILEGE TO SEE ONLY INDIVIDUAL ACTS
OF RACISM REINFORCES VICTIMIZATION AND OBSCURES MORE COMPLEX FORMS OF RACIAL
POLITICS IMBEDDED IN SOCIETY. PREFER OUR SPECIFIC LINK EVIDENCE
JOHN A. POWELL, 2007, WILLIAMS CHAIR IN CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES, MORITZ COLLEGE OF LAW,
STATE UNIVERSITY; EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, KIRWAN INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF RACE AND ETHNICITY,
STATE UNIVERSITY. ) 2007 LAW AND INEQUALITY: A JOURNAL OF THEORY AND PRACTICE.

OHIO
OHIO

While they might appear quite different, both of these views rest on similar faulty assumptions. They understand racism as a psycho-social event that occurs between
discrete individuals with a focus on the psychological motivation of the prejudicial actor. While liberals would include unconscious prejudice and discrimination within
individual internal motivation, conservatives would focus on more overt and intentional discrimination and be skeptical of unconscious explanations . Conservatives
are more likely to explain persistent racial disparities as bad choices of the racial other caused by a culture of poverty . For both groups
then, racial disparities only require redress when there are identifiable, bad, discriminatory actors and particular victims and the remedy
will likely require transferring resources between Whites and non-Whites. n18 This limited [*358] understanding of race assumes that

racism is primarily about discrimination and the needs of non-Whites. This model of victim/perpetrator, disparity, and either
unconscious racism or bad culture does not sufficiently explain current inequalities nor does it grapple with the complex work that
racial and ethnic identity do within the larger society.

75

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC A/T: WE ARE POST-RACIAL

OBAMAS ELECTION PROVES RACE IS STILL THE MOST SALIENT FACTOR IN AMERICAN POLITICS
WISE, COMMUNITY ORGANIZER AND EDITOR OF COLORLINES AND WAR TIMES MAGAZINE, 2009 (BOB,
OBAMA, RACE, AND THE FUTURE OF US POLITICS 2/12,
HTTP://WWW.ZMAG.ORG/ZNET/VIEWARTICLE/20545)
The magnitude of Obama's victory has led to much hyperbole about the end of racism and the advent of a colorblind society. This
notion deserves closer examination lest Obama's victory become an obstacle, rather than an opening, to future racial progres s.
Much of the press has focused on celebrating the willingness of many whites to elect a black president. But just how colorblind is the U.S. electorate?
Despite the fact that the Republicans had failed miserably, even on their own terms, and run the country virtually into the ground, whites still voted for McCain by 55 to
43. In stark contrast, blacks voted for Obama by 95 to 4, Latinos went for Obama by 66 to 32 and Asians backed Obama by 61 to 35. (1)
In 2008, the white vote was virtually identical to election 2000 and continued to exert a strong conservative pull on the electorate while
the votes of peoples of color and young people of all races headed powerfully in a more progressive direction.
The color lines, in life and politics, are alive and well.

76

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AT: YOU TOTALIZE

THERE IS NO LINK TO TOTALIZATION - IT IS POSSIBLE TO CRITIQUE THE SOCIAL PRIVILEGE ASSOCIATED
WITH WHITENESS AND RECOGNIZE THAT NOT ALL WHITE BODIES HAVE ACCESS TO THAT PRIVILEGE.
SALLY HASLANGER, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT MIT, 04, OPPRESSIONS, RACISM IN MIND
If we consider only agent oppression, then if some are oppressed we should look for the oppressor. But in cases of structural oppression, there may not be an oppressor,
in the sense of an agent responsible for the oppression. Practices and institutions oppress, and some individuals or groups are privileged within

those practices and institutions. But it would be wrong to count all those who are privileged as oppressors. Members of the privileged
group, for example, Larry in the case above, may in fact be working to undermine the unjust practices and institutions. Nevertheless, in the context
of structural oppression, there may be some who are more blameworthy than others for perpetuation the injustice; they may be more responsible for creating,
maintaining, expanding, and exploiting the unjust social relationships. I such cases an individual counts as an oppressor if their moral wrongdoing compounds the
structural injustice, that is, if they are agents of oppression within an oppressive structure. But not all those who are privileged by an oppressive structure

are oppressive agents.

77

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: YOU DONT SOLVE OUR AFFIRMATIVE

CONTINUAL COMMITMENT TO ENDING RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES IS THE ONLY MEASURE OF
SUCCESS.
GORDON HURD 2002 (ISSUE #17, SUMMER 2002 SAFETY NET SINKING
HTTP://WWW.COLORLINES.COM/ARTICLE.PHP?ID=365)
The rising proportion of people of color living under welfare during the recession underscores the failure of the system. Welfare
reform defines success as reducing caseloads and maintaining a class of service workers by tracking recipients into low-wage jobs
with no means of growth or progress.
So, what can be done about all of this? Most importantly, states and welfare agencies must be held accountable for their racial
inequities. The federal governments advocacy of states rights to illegally discriminate in the welfare system is equivalent to the
century-long laissez-faire attitude Washington, D.C., took to segregation. With proper measures taken against violators of equal
opportunity and civil rights laws, welfare recipients may have a better chance at access to benefits, services, and education.
Reauthorization of the current welfare reforms is being debated throughout 2002. As the year progresses, pay careful attention to the spin on welfare reform and its socalled success. The vicious cycle of demonization, discrimination, and veritable indentured servitude cannot continue. Every welfare

recipient deserves the right to be treated fairly and equally and given every available opportunity to gain livable employment.
Anything less is no success. \"fin\"

78

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC AT: YOU ARE JUST PLAYING THE RACE CARD

NEW LINK: THE NOTION THAT RACISM IS PART OF A GRAND GAME IS THE ULTIMATE REFLECTION OF
WHITE PRIVILEGE
TIM WISE 2006 (WHAT KIND OF CARD IS RACE? ZMAG.ORG)
Although the matter is open to debate in any or all of these cases, white folks have been quick to accuse blacks who answer in the
affirmative of playing the race card, as if their conclusions have been reached not because of careful consideration of the facts as they
see them, but rather, because of some irrational (even borderline paranoid) tendency to see racism everywhere. So too, discussions
over immigration, "terrorist" profiling, and Katrina and its aftermath often turn on issues of race, and so give rise to the charge that as
regards these subjects, people of color are "overreacting" when they allege racism in one or another circumstance.
Asked about the tendency for people of color to play the "race card," I responded as I always do: First, by noting that the regularity
with which whites respond to charges of racism by calling said charges a ploy, suggests that the race card is, at best, equivalent to the
two of diamonds. In other words, it's not much of a card to play, calling into question why anyone would play it (as if it were really
going to get them somewhere). Secondly, I pointed out that white reluctance to acknowledge racism isn't new, and it isn't something
that manifests only in situations where the racial aspect of an incident is arguable. Fact is, whites have always doubted claims of
racism at the time they were being made, no matter how strong the evidence, as will be seen below. Finally, I concluded by suggesting
that whatever "card" claims of racism may prove to be for the black and brown, the denial card is far and away the trump, and whites
play it regularly: a subject to which we will return.

79

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2NC: A/T VICTIMIZATION

NEW

LINK: CLAIMS OF VICITIMIZATION DENY THE VERY REAL AND MATERIAL EFFECTS OF RACISM THE
CHALLENGE TO WHITE DOMINANCE MUST INCLUDE A COMPLEX UNDERSTANDING OF OPPRESSION, NOT A
CONVENIENT DISMISSAL

TIM WISE 2006 (WHAT KIND OF CARD IS RACE? ZMAG.ORG)

In other words, even

when racism was, by virtually all accounts (looking backward in time), institutionalized, white folks were convinced
there was no real problem. Indeed, even forty years ago, whites were more likely to think that blacks had better opportunities, than to
believe the opposite (and obviously accurate) thing: namely, that whites were advantaged in every realm of American life.
Truthfully, this tendency for whites to deny the extent of racism and racial injustice likely extends back far before the 1960s. Although public opinion polls in previous
decades rarely if ever asked questions about the extent of racial bias or discrimination, anecdotal surveys of white opinion suggest that at no time have whites in the
U.S. ever thought blacks or other people of color were getting a bad shake. White Southerners were all but convinced that their black slaves, for example, had it good,
and had no reason to complain about their living conditions or lack of freedoms. After emancipation, but during the introduction of Jim Crow laws and strict Black
Codes that limited where African Americans could live and work, white newspapers would regularly editorialize about the "warm relations" between whites and blacks,
even as thousands of blacks were being lynched by their white compatriots.
From Drapetomania to Victim Syndrome -- Viewing Resistance as Mental Illness
Indeed, what better evidence of white denial (even dementia) could one need than that provided by "Doctor" Samuel Cartwright, a well-respected physician of the 19th
century, who was so convinced of slavery's benign nature, that he concocted and named a disease to explain the tendency for many slaves to run away from their loving
masters. Drapetomania, he called it: a malady that could be cured by keeping the slave in a "child-like state," and taking care not to treat them as equals, while yet
striving not to be too cruel. Mild whipping was, to Cartwright, the best cure of all. So there you have it: not only is racial oppression not a problem; even worse, those
blacks who resist it, or refuse to bend to it, or complain about it in any fashion, are to be viewed not only as exaggerating their condition, but indeed, as mentally ill
(17).

And lest one believe that the tendency for whites to psychologically pathologize blacks who complain of racism is only a relic of
ancient history, consider a much more recent example, which demonstrates the continuity of this tendency among members of the
dominant racial group in America.
A few years ago, I served as an expert witness and consultant in a discrimination lawsuit against a school district in Washington State. Therein, numerous examples of
individual and institutional racism abounded: from death threats made against black students to which the school district's response was pitifully inadequate, to racially
disparate "ability tracking" and disciplinary action. In preparation for trial (which ultimately never took place as the district finally agreed to settle the case for several
million dollars and a commitment to policy change), the school system's "psychological experts" evaluated dozens of the plaintiffs (mostly students as well as some of
their parents) so as to determine the extent of damage done to them as a result of the racist mistreatment. As one of the plaintiff's experts, I reviewed the reports of said
psychologists, and while I was not surprised to see them downplay the damage done to the black folks in this case, I was somewhat startled by how quickly they went
beyond the call of duty to actually suggest that several of the plaintiffs exhibited "paranoid" tendencies and symptoms of borderline personality disorder. That having

one's life threatened might make one a bit paranoid apparently never entered the minds of the white doctors. That facing racism on a
regular basis might lead one to act out, in a way these "experts" would then see as a personality disorder, also seems to have escaped
them. In this way, whites have continued to see mental illness behind black claims of victimization, even when that victimization is
blatant.
In fact, we've even created a name for it: "victimization syndrome." Although not yet part of the DSM-IV (the diagnostic manual used by the American
Psychiatric Association so as to evaluate patients), it is nonetheless a malady from which blacks suffer, to hear a lot of whites tell it. Whenever racism is brought
up, such whites insist that blacks are being encouraged (usually by the civil rights establishment) to adopt a victim mentality, and to
view themselves as perpetual targets of oppression. By couching their rejection of the claims of racism in these terms, conservatives
are able to parade as friends to black folks, only concerned about them and hoping to free them from the debilitating mindset of
victimization that liberals wish to see them adopt.

80

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: AFF SOLVES WE GIVE MORE MONEY

AN

EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON DISTRIBUTION OF FUNDING WILL NOT LEAD TO SOCIAL JUSTICE ONLY A
POSITION THAT PAYS ATTENTION TO IDENTITY AND WORKS TOWARD ALLEVIATING OPPRESSION CAN
CREATE FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE

I.M YOUNG PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (JUSTICE AND THE POLITICS OF
DIFFERENCE) AUGUST 17, 1990.
I argue that instead of focusing on distribution, a conception of justice should begin with the concepts of domination and
oppression. Such a shift brings out issues of decision-making, division of labor, and culture that bear on social justice but are often ignored in philosophical
discussions. It also exhibits the importance of social group differences in structuring so cial relations and oppression; typically, philosophical
theories of justice have operated with a social ontology that has no room for a concept of social groups. I argue that where social group differences exist and
some groups are privileged while others are oppressed, social justice requires explicitly acknowledging and attending to those
group differences in order to undermine oppression.
Although I discuss and argue about justice, I do not construct a theory of justice. A theory of justice typically derives fundamental principles of justice
that apply to all or most societies, whatever their concrete configu ration and social relations, from a few general premises about the
nature of human beings, the nature of societies, and the nature of reason.

THIS ARGUMENT IS AN APOLOGY FOR THE STATUS QUO - WE MUST EXPAND THE DEBATE TO INCLUDE
QUESTIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE, NOT JUST DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.
I.M YOUNG PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (JUSTICE AND THE POLITICS OF
DIFFERENCE) AUGUST 17, 1990.
Some distributive theories of justice explicitly seek to take into account issues of justice beyond the distribution of material goods.
They extend the distributive paradigm to cover such goods as self -respect, opportunity, power, and honor. Serious conceptual confusion
results, however, from attempting to extend the concept of distribution beyond material goods to phenomena such as power and opportunity. The logic of distribution treats nonmaterial goods as identifiable things or bundles distributed in a static pattern among identifiable, separate individuals .
The reification, individualism, and pattern orientation assumed in the distributive paradigm, moreover, often obscure issues of domination and oppression, which
require a more process-oriented and relational conceptualization.
Distributive issues are certainly important, but the scope of justice ex tends beyond them to include the political as such, that is, all aspects of
institutional organization insofar as they are potentially subject to collec tive decision. Rather than attempting to stretch distribution to cover these,
I argue that the concept of distribution should be limited to material goods.

81

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

A/T: BUT WE SOLVE RACISM

EVEN IF

THE AFFIRMATIVE WINS THAT THEY CHANGE THE MATERIAL LIVES OF PEOPLE OF COLOR
LEAVE WHITENESS FIRMLY INTACT. STRUCTURAL ADVANTAGES AND PRIVILEGES WILL CONTINUE.

THEY

JOEL OLSEN, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY,
JUL 31, 2008 (WHITENESS AND THE POLARIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS, POLITICAL RESEARCH
QUARTERLY, HTTP://PRQ.SAGEPUB.COM/CGI/CONTENT/ABSTRACT/61/4/704)
Yet racial orders tend to breed their own gravediggers . The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s emerged in opposition to segregation and white
standing. By and large, it succeeded in destroying both. It was unable to entirely eliminate whiteness as a form of social power, however. Rather, the value and meaning
of whiteness transformed from standing to normalization. That is, in the wake of the civil rights movement, whiteness went from a publicly

recognized form of social status to a form of power that reproduces white advantage despite legal equality via norms that implicitly
define white interests, assets, and aspirations as archetypal. Whiteness as norm is a system of tacit and concealed racial privileges that is reproduced less
through overt forms of discrimination than through market forces, cultural habits, and other everyday practices that presume that white interests and expectations are the
norm and that white advantage is the natural outcome of market forces and individual choices.6 In one sense, the distinction between standing and normalization is
analytical, for whiteness was the norm of the precivil rights era as well. As Du Bois ([1940] 1995] noted, the basis of white power in the 1930s was not so much its
official backing by the state as it was the fact that the white worlds domination appeared as the normal condition of society to whites. Furthermore, residues of white
standing persist after the civil rights era, including racial profiling, redlining, and driving while black. Nevertheless, the distinction is significant because it captures

a change in the role of the state in reproducing the racial order. White standing was reproduced through the explicit or tacit consent of
local, state, and federal governments.7 White normalization is reproduced largely without state sanction, because the law now
prohibits racial discrimination. This changed role of the state (and by extension the parties that compete to control it) produces a new contradiction in white
identity. As normalization, whiteness continues to be a position of racial privilege in a democratic society. It remains an interest in and an
expectation of favored treatment in a polity whose fundamental principle is that all men are created equal. Yet whites can no longer expect the state to ensure
their personal standing. Racial privilege is no longer experienced as it was prior to the civil rights movement, when every white person personally
enjoyed standing over every not- white. Rather, it is now enjoyed primarily at the group rather than individual level. Yet group advantages often
do not seem like advantages at all. There is no guarantee, for example, that any individual white will personally benefit from the fact that
whites as a group are statistically much less likely to go to prison or to be victims of crime than other groups or that whites are statistically much more likely to go to
college, buy a house, and be gainfully employed . As a result, white advantages do not seem as such even though whites continue to enjoy

them.

82

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

IMPACT RACISM IS REAL BAD

WHITE EXPLOITATION OF PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT IS THE CAUSE AND JUSTIFICATION OF EVERY
IMPERIAL PROJECT SINCE 1492. THE HISTORICAL INJUSTICES CAUSE BY RACIST DOMINATION SHOULD
BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT
SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE
PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE.)
White people have a long history of using what they
find in other cultures to advance their own. A brief sketch of that history regarding the United States and Western Europe might begin
with the encubrimiento (covering over, of Amerindians and the violence used against them) of 1492 and extend through white
appropriation of slave labor in the 18th and 19th centuries to World War Is operation on the theory that it is the duty of white Europe
to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europes good.42 More recent forms of possible white exploitation and even theft
of non-white cultures include the Human Genome Diversity Project, a consortium of North American and European scientists and
institutions who are gathering DNA (blood, hair, saliva) samples from members of endangered indigenous communities around the
world so that scientifically precious genetic information is not lost when those communities become extinct, an event that tends to be
seen as a foregone conclusion.43 Somewhat ironically given the white desire for purity, white communities tend to have no problem
mixing with non-white communities as long as such mixing takes the form of exploiting them for the primary benefit of white
people or institutions. In these cases, the purity to which whiteness aspires is not disrupted by co-mingling with non-white communities since it not co-mingling
It is at this point that Royces advice becomes deeply problematic, at least if not heavily qualified.

after all, but spying and theft.44

WHITENESS

IS NOT A BENIGN SOCIAL SYSTEM IT IS THE PRETEXT FOR NATIVE AMERICAN GENOCIDE,
AFRICAN SLAVERY, MEXICAN PROPERTY SEIZURE, IDENTIFICATION CARD ISSUANCES, AND JAPANESE
INTERNMENT

GEORGE LIPSITZ, DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1999, POSSESSIVE
INVESTMENT IN WHITENESS (PAGE 3)
Desire for slave labor encouraged European settlers in North America to view, first, Native Americans and, later, African Americans as
racially inferior people suited "by nature" for the humiliating subordination of involuntary servitude. The long history of the possessive
investment in whiteness stems in no small measure from the fact that all subsequent immigrants to North America have come to an already racialized society. From
the start, European settlers in North America established structures encouraging a possessive investment in whitenes s. The colonial and
early national legal systems authorized attacks on Native Americans and encouraged the appropriation of their lands. They legitimated racialized chattel
slavery, limited naturalized citizenship to "white" immigrants, identified Asian immigrants as expressly unwelcome (through legislation
aimed at immigrants from China in 1882, from India in 1917, from Japan in 1924, and from the Philippines in 1934), and provided pretexts for restricting the
voting, exploiting the labor, and seizing the property of Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African
Americans. 6
The possessive investment in whiteness is not a simple matter of black and white; all racialized minority groups have suffered from it, albeit to different degrees and in different ways. The African slave trade began in earnest only after large-scale Native American slavery proved impractical in North America. The

abolition of slavery led to the importation of low -wage labor from Asia. Legis lation banning immigration from Asia set the stage for
the recruitment of low- wage labor from Mexico. The new racial categories that emerged in each of these eras all revolved around applying racial labels to
"nonwhite" groups in order to stigmatize and exploit them while at the same time preserving the value of whiteness.
Although reproduced in new form in every era, the possessive investment in whiteness has always been influenced by its origins in the racialized
history of the United States-by its legacy of slavery and segregation, of "Indian" ex termination and immigrant restriction, of conquest and
colonialism. Although slavery has existed in many countries without any particular racial dimensions to it, the slave system that emerged in North America soon
took on distinctly racial forms. Africans enslaved in North America faced a racialized system of power that reserved permanent, hereditary, chattel slavery for black
people. 'White settlers institutionalized a possessive investment in whiteness by making blackness synonymous with slavery and
whiteness synonymous with freedom, but also by pitting people of color against one another . Fearful of affiances between Native Americans and
African Americans that might challenge the prerogatives of whiteness, white settlers prohibited slaves and free blacks from traveling in "Indian country." European
Americans used diplomacy and force to compel Native Americans to return runaway slaves to their white masters. During the Stono Rebellion of 1739, colonial
authorities offered Native Americans a bounty for every rebellious slave they captured or killed. At the same time, British settlers recruited black slaves to fight against
Native Americans within colonial militias.7 The power of whiteness depended not only on white hegemony over separate racialized groups , but
also on manipulating racial outsiders to fight against one another, to compete with each other for white approval, and to seek the rewards and privileges of
whiteness for themselves at the expense of other racialized populations.

83

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

84

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2AC FRAMEWORK
OUR INTERPRETATION OF DEBATE IS THAT THE JUDGE SHOULD EVALUATE COMPETING POLICY OPTIONS.
WE AS DEBATERS ENTER THE DEBATE ROUND EXPECTING TO LEARN ABOUT POLICIES AND HOW THEY
OPERATE IN THE REAL WORLD. SIMPLY KRITIKING DEBATE DOES NOT ACHIEVE PROGRESS RATHER
HINDERS ADVOCACY.
2) PREFER OUR INTERPRETATION:
FIRST, FAIRNESS:
A. LIMITS: THERE IS AN INFINITE NUMBER OF FRAMEWORKS AND ADVOCACIES. ALLOWING THE NEGATIVE
TEAM TO DO AWAY WITH OUR 1AC AND CHOOSE THEIR OWN FRAMEWORK HURTS FAIRNESS AND
PREDICABILITY. HAVING UNPREDICTABLE DEBATES MEANS THAT THE AFFIRMATIVE WILL NEVER BE
PREPARED FOR THE ROUNDS MAKING FOR UNEDUCATIONAL DEBATES.
B. GROUND: NEGATIVE

FRAMEWORKS DESTROY AFF GROUND, MOOTING THE AFF ADVANTAGES. NON-FIAT

FRAMEWORKS DESTROY COUNTERPLAN AND DISADVANTAGE GROUND, WHICH ARE KEY TO NEGATIVE
FLEXIBILITY WHICH IS NECESSARY TO OVERCOME THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING AFF.

SECOND, EDUCATION:
A. THE ONLY WAY TO

RESOLVE THE CONSTANT IGNORING OF MARGINALIZED VOICES IS TO LEARN ABOUT

THE POLITICAL PROCESS BY WHICH THESE DECISIONS ARE MADE IN THE REAL WORLD. ONLY THIS WAY
WILL CITIZEN UNDERSTANDING AND ACTIVISM BE SPARKED. WITHOUT ANY KNOWLEDGE OF THE SYSTEM,
ANY CHANGES WILL BE MINOR, INSIGNFICANT, AND WITHOUT INFLUENCE.

B. POLICY DEBATE UNDER THE AFFIRMATIVES FRAMEWORK IS THE ONLY WAY TO EVALUATE REAL
WORLD POLICIES AND IMPACTS. WITHOUT EXAMINGING POLICIES AND THEIR POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES,
WE WILL NEVER LEARN HOW POLICIES CAN AFFECT THE REAL WORLD.
C. ACTING THROUGH THE USFG IS INEVITABLE TO AVOID. IT IS A NECESSARY ORGANIZATION OF CHANGE.
WITHOUT ACTING THROUGH THE USFG, ALL ADVOCACY EFFORTS FAIL.
3) AND OUR DEFENSE:
A. FIAT IS MOST PREDICTABLE: ITS THE ONLY WAY TO BE TOPICAL
RESOLVED MEANS TO EXPRESS BY FORMAL VOTETHIS IS THE ONLY DEFINITION THATS IN THE CONTEXT
OF THE RESOLUTION

WEBSTERS REVISED UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY, 1998 (DICTIONARY.COM)

Resolved:
5. To express, as an opinion or determination, by resolution and vote; to declare or decide by a formal vote; -followed by a clause; as, the house resolved (or, it was resolved by the house) that no money should be apropriated (or, to appropriate no money).
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS 3 BRANCHES
Blacks Law Dictionary, 90 (6 Edition, p. 695)
In the United States, government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in addition to
administrative agencies. In a broader sense, includes the federal government and all its agencies and bureaus, state and county governments, and city and
th

township governments.

85

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

2AC FRAMEWORK
B. YOU

CAN STILL RUN YOUR KRITIK, BUT YOU HAVE TO HAVE A COMPETITIVE POLICY OPTION OR THE
STATUS QUO AS YOUR ALTERNATIVE: MEANS WE SOLVE YOUR EDUCATION CLAIMS.

C. FOCUSING ON OPPRESSION IN DEBATE FAILS.

WEILER PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TUFTS UNIVERSITY 1994, (KATHLEEN NOVEMBER, FREIRE
FEMINIST PEDAGOGY OF DIFFERENCE IN POLITICS OF LIBERATION BY PETER MCLAREN AND COLIN LANKSHEAR)

AND A

in action, the goals of liberation or opposition to oppression have not always been easy to understand or achieve . As universal
goals, these ideals do not address the specificity of peoples lives; they do not directly analyze the contradictions between conflicting
oppressed groups or the ways in which a single individual can experience oppression in one sphere while being privileged or
oppressive in another. Feminist and Freirean teachers are in many ways engaged in what Teresa deLauretis has called shifting the ground of signs, challenging
But

accepted meanings and relationships that occur at what she calls political or more often micro political levels, groupings that produce no texts as such, but by
shifting the ground of a given sign . . . effectively intervene upon codes of perception as well as ideological codes. But in attempting to challenge dominant values
and to shift the ground of signs, feminist and Freirean teachers raise conflicts for themselves and for their students, who also are historically

situated and whose own subjectivities are often contradictory and in process. These conflicts have become increasingly clear as both
Freirean and feminist pedagogies are put into practice. Attempting to implement these pedagogies without acknowledging the
conflict not only of divided consciousness what Audre Lorde calls the oppressor within us but also the conflicts among groups
trying to work together to name the struggle against oppression among teachers and students in classrooms, or among political
groups working for change in very specific areas can lead to anger, frustration, and a retreat to safer or more traditional approaches .
The numerous accounts of the tensions of trying to put liberatory pedagogies into practice demonstrate the need to reexamine the assumptions of the classic text of
liberatory pedagogy and to consider the various issues that have arisen in attempts at critical and liberatory classroom practice.

86

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: PERMUTATION
NEGATIVE

CRITIQUES OF WHITENESS DO NOT GO FAR ENOUGH

TO MOVE BEYOND OPPOSITIONAL DEBATES.

GIROUX, 1997 (H.A. WHITE SQUALL: RESISTANCE

STUDIES, 11(3) P 376-378)

THE

AND THE

AFFIRMATIVE OFFERS A STRATEGY

PEDAGOGY

OF

WHITENESS, CULTURAL

While it is imperative that a critical analysis of 'whiteness' address its historical legacy and existing complicity with racist exclusion and oppression, it is equally crucial
that such work distinguish between 'whiteness' as a racial politics that is anti racist and those that are racist. 12 Where 'whiteness' has been dealt with in

pedagogical terms the emphasis is almost exclusively on revealing 'whiteness' as an ideology of privilege mediated largely through the
dynamics of racism.13 While such interventions are crucial in developing an anti racist pedagogy, they do not go far enough. I am con cerned about
what it means pedagogically for those of us who engage in an anti racist pedagogy and politics to suggest to students that 'whiteness' can only be understood in terms of
the common experience of white domination and racism. What subjectivities or points of identification become available to white students who can only imagine white
experience as monolithic, self contained and deeply racist? What are the pedagogical and political stakes in rearticulating 'whiteness' in anti essentialist terms so that
white youth can understand and struggle against the long legacy of white racism while using the particularities of 'their own culture as a resource for resistance,
reflection, and empowerment?' (Hall, 1991: 57)14

There are too few attempts to develop a pedagogy of 'whiteness' that enables white students to move beyond positions of guilt or
resentment. There is a curious absence in the work on 'whiteness' regarding how students might examine critically the construction of their own identities in order to
rethink 'whiteness' as both a discourse of critique and possibility." Cultural critics need to connect 'whiteness' with a language of possibility that
provides a space for white students to imagine how 'whiteness' as an ideology and social location can be progressively appropriated as
part of a broader politics of social reform. 'Whiteness' needs to be theorized carefully in terms of its potential to provide students with a
racial identity that can play a crucial role in refashioning an anti racist politics that informs broader, radical, democratic projects and
coalitions.
Opening up a pedagogical space for addressing 'whiteness' more dialec tically may be possible by addressing the importance of 'whiteness' within a broader claim to
cultural citizenship and a democratic, anti racist, pan ethnic movement while still being critical of forms of 'whiteness' structured in dominance and aligned with
exploitative interests and oppressive social relations. By rearticulating 'whiteness' as more than a form of domination, white students can

construct narratives of 'whiteness' that both challenge and, hopefully, provide a basis for transforming the dominant relationship
between racial identity and citizenship, one informed by an oppositional politics . Such a political practice suggests new subject
positions, alliances, commitments and forms of solidarity between white students and others engaged in a struggle over expanding the
possibilities of democratic life, especially as it affirms both a politics of difference and a redistribution of power and material
resources. George Vudice argues that, as part of a broader project for articulating 'whiteness' in oppositional terms, white youth must feel that they have a
stake in racial politics that connects them to the struggles being waged by other groups . At the centre of such struggles is both the battle over
citizenship redefined through the discourse of rights and the problem of resource distribution. He writes:
This is where identity politics segues into other issues, such as tax deficits, budget cuts, lack of educational opportunities, lack of jobs, immigration policies,
international trade agreements, environmental blight, lack of health care insurance, and so on. These are the areas in which middle and working class whites historically
have had an advantage over people of color. However, today that advantage has eroded in certain respects. (Vudice, 1995: 276)
Calling for a politics that engages the relationship between difference and the broader imperatives of public life, Vudice suggests that white youth can form alliances
with other social and racial groups who recognize the need for solidarity in addressing issues of public culture that undermine the quality of democracy for all groups.
As white youths struggle to find a cultural and political space from which to speak and act as transformative citizens, it is imperative that educators address what it
means pedagogically and politically to help students rearticu late 'whiteness' as part of a demo cratic cultural politics. Central to such a task is the need to challenge the
conventional left analysis of 'whiteness' as a space between guilt and denial, a space that offers limited forms of resistance and engagement. In order for teachers,
students and others to come to terms with 'whiteness' existentially and intellectually, we need to take up the challenge in our classrooms and across a wide variety of
public sites of confronting racism in all its com plexity and ideological and material formations. But most importantly, 'whiteness' must provide a diverse but critical
space from which to wage a wider struggle against the myriad forces that undermine what it means to live in a society founded on the principles of freedom, racial
justice and economic equality.16 Rewriting 'whiteness' within a discourse of resistance and possibility represents more than a challenge to dominant and progres sive
notions of racial politics; it provides an important pedagogical project for educating cultural workers, teachers and students to engage and live with and through
difference and diverse racial formations as a crossroads for articulating different cultural landscapes, identities, languages and his tories. By shifting the
conceptual weight of whiteness away from racial hatred and the legacy of domination (less as an act of historical inquiry than as a social practice),

it becomes possible to envisage and bear witness to whiteness in its diversity, temporary attachments and orders of belonging as a
performative practice always open to negotiation which attempts to expand rather than restrict the possibilities of a multicultural
and mul tiracial democracy.

87

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: PERMUTATION
WE

MUST COMBINE PROGRESSIVE STRUGGLES FOR GREATER ECONOMIC AND RACIAL EQUALITY TO
OVERCOME OPPOSITION.

DEEPAK BHARGAVA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR COMMUNITY CHANGE FRIDAY 2008 (NOV
7
HTTP://WWW.COMMUNITYCHANGE.ORG/BLOG/REALIZING-THE-PROMISE-THE-MEANING-OF-THISMOMENT/VIEW)
This narrative is obviously different from the toxic stew of free-market fundamentalism and culture war politics that have been the staple of conservatism since
Goldwater and Nixon. But it is also refreshingly different language from the triangulating centrism of the 1990s that tried to defang the appeal of conservative ideas by
accommodating them. And although it has clear affinity with the economic populist and identity politics strains that have played such a strong role in progressive
movements historically, it embraces the principles in a new way that stresses our common destiny. This new story could turn out to be a warm and fuzzy rhetorical
gloss for conventional, small-bore policy proposals that fail to capture the public imagination and avoid confronting entrenched interests. Or the new narrative

could create the ground and rationale for more sweeping, transformative changes. One of the key challenges for the progressive
movement in this era will be to develop and tell a coherent story about whats wrong with the country, how we got here and how we
can move forwardnot just at the level of specific policies, but raising up larger principles. This fledgling, emergent progressive
story has real promise if it is coupled with movement and with big policy proposals that reinforce the story.
A New Progressive Coalition
The election results reflect the emergence of a new majority coalition, based above all in a strategy to expand the electorate. Massive turnout by African Americans,
Latinos, new immigrants, young people and women provide a foundation for progressive politics and policy making for a generation. Voter mobilization efforts clearly
played an important role in driving up turnout in all these demographics. This coalition is breaking some old orthodoxiesshowing great potential for progressives in
what was long viewed as the flyover country of the south and the southwest, and demonstrating that progressives can win a mandate by expanding the electorate and
the playing field. Demographics are not destiny, however, and it is important to underscore that the durability of the coalition will likely depend on whether these
constituencies feel they have been heard and heeded in governance.
The Twin Challenges for Progressives in This New Era
Progressives face two major strategic questions as we enter this new era. First, will we articulate a bold new vision for the economy and the country, and push for
transformative policy changes? Or will we play small ball? Second, how will we reckon with the realities of race that have always been the shoals on which progressive
movements have foundered, notwithstanding this historic victory for an African American candidate for President for the first time in our history?
A growing number of commentators are cautioning against over-reaching by a newly empowered President and Congress, despite abundant evidence that the public
mood has shifted and that our countrys predicament requires bold, imaginative action. This cautious impulse, which has its strongest appeal inside the Beltway,
stretches across partisan lines, with former Bush aide Matthew Dowd cautioning Obama to govern from the center, where the vast majority of the country is, while
Clinton adviser Mark Penn writes an op-ed for The Financial Times titled Political Lesson for America: Stick to Centrism. The problem with these pronouncements
is that the conservative consensus it reflects is breaking down and the center of American politics is moving: away from a youre on your own conception of the
role of individuals, markets and society, toward community valuesthe idea that we are in it together, and that our fates are linked.
We have a chance to deliver meaningful changes in peoples lives, and in so doing show people that their participation in politics actually translates into change they can
see, touch and feel. A more robust role for the government through greater regulation, public investment and universal health care are examples of policies that can
restore confidence in governmentthe essential condition for progressive governance. We can also fight for and win structural changes that fundamentally alter the
ways power operates in our societysuch as the Employee Free Choice Act and immigration reform that would provide a path to citizenship for 12 million
undocumented immigrants. These kinds of changes would not only make the lives of workers and immigrants better, but would strengthen the voice of these
constituencies, which would in turn strengthen the progressive movement. Given the nature of the moment were in, a transformative agenda would
necessarily begin with and center on the economy, and tie these various issues and others into a coherent story . The narrative would

start from the principle of interdependence or shared fate, the idea that, as King put it, we are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. When President-elect Obama said in his
acceptance speech that Wall Street cannot ultimately do well when Main Street is hurting, he was making exactly this point. The second core idea, foundational to a
stronger role for government, is that individual gain is not by itself a sound basis for economic policy . The youre on your own ideology has obviously

failed to deliver, and the great lesson of this crisis is that we risk economic insecurity for everyone when we allow the individual drive
for private wealth to trump our collective quality of life. Solutions from universal health care to mortgage relief, stronger corporate
accountability and public job creation all make sense in a framework grounded in these principles. We should all be moved by the historic
significance of this election but be wary about the narrative that Obamas election is the harbinger of a colorblind society, because this conception of race will be used
to undercut a progressive, transformative agenda. In its extraordinary endorsement of Barack Obama, The Economist made the remarkable claim that one of the
benefits of an Obama victory is that it would lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism. Breathtaking. Nearly every issue

that will come up in 2009 will have a strong racial dimension. Sometimes the question will be explicit, as in the case of how
progressives handle demands for immigration reform, or when conservatives try to undermine support for universal health insurance
by raising the specter that undocumented immigrants will be principal beneficiaries. The first test for progressives on this score may
come early, when Congress must decide whether or not to include legal immigrant children in the reauthorization of the Childrens Health Insurance Program.
In other cases, race will be the subtextas when we debate how a new jobs program is structured and who will be hired, or when we
consider how to rebuild a safety net for the unemployed and who is and is not covered. A genuinely progressive movement will insist
that race does matterand therefore that we have to be race conscious in how we construct policies. If we do not take race seriously,
we will leave people out and leave people behind, de-energize the emerging progressive coalition, and leave ourselves vulnerable to
conservative wedge attacks.

88

WHITENESS K
[BHARGAVA CONTINUED, NO TEXT DELETED]

UTNIF 2009

89

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: PERMUTATION
[BHARGAVA CONTINUED, NO TEXT DELETED]
The Need for Movement
One of the great themes of American history is the role of outside agitation in achieving transformative policy changes. FDR campaigned on (of all things!) a balanced
budget as the central plank of his first campaign effort, but swiftly abandoned this crazy idea in favor of a radical economic program in response both to the
deterioration of the economy and to pressure from below. Lincoln famously switched his position on the abolition of slavery, and the role of abolitionists (in particular,
Frederick Douglas) in shaping the debate was critical. Women won the right to vote only after decades of bold activism by suffragists. It was the Selma march that
finally pressured LBJ to embrace and push for the Voting Rights Act.
No one should harbor any illusions that a Democratic President and large Democratic majorities in Congress will translate automatically into transformative policy
change (see: Jimmy Carter 1977-1978; Bill Clinton 1993-1994).
It will take broad and deep organizing at scale to create public will and political appetite for major policy changes. This principle applies at the micro levelthe need
to win public support district by district and state by state in order to generate the 218 House votes and (typically) 60 Senate votes required to pass most significant
legislation. It also applies at the macro levela sense of movement must be created to shape the public debate and create demand, using mass mobilizations, rallies,
sophisticated media work and door to door and church by church outreach to enlist people in the fight.

At the same time, for those of us who have spent our careers working largely in opposition to bad ideas, the task in these times is
different and we are called to change our ways of thinking and acting accordingly. We will need to engage constructively on the
inside even as we push on the outside. We have to push for big progressive solutions, and break the habits of technocratic policy
incrementalism. We will need to articulate new ideas, plans and framing that speak to the times and deliver solutions on a scale that
reinforces the progressive coalition that is emerging. Perhaps most importantly, we will need to work tirelessly to create the public
will to see those policies enacted in the face of significant opposition and establishment caution. The methods and values of community
organizing that were brought to bear in the elections to such great effect will now need to be applied on a massive and unprecedented scale in grassroots advocacy. And

well need to work together across issue, constituency, organization and function, so that our organizing, ideas and communications
work drive towards common goals.

90

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: WHITE PRIVILEGE FOCUS BAD

THE

FOCUS ON WHITE PRIVILEGE IS HISTORICALLY INACCURATE AND DEMOBILIZING.

ON RACISM INSTEAD OF PRIVILEGE.

NAOMI ZACH, PROFESSOR

PRIVILEGE, WHITENESS

OF

PHILOSOPHY

AT THE

UNIVERSITY

OF

WE

SHOULD FOCUS

OREGON, 1999, THE IDEA

OF

WHITE

there is no legal tradition that grants special rights to whites so much as there is a present social practice and past legal
history of excluding nonwhites from the privileges assumed to belong to all citizens , in the second sense of the dictionary meaning of privilege.
The idea of white privilege, then, must be an elliptical reference to the result of discrimination and exclusion of nonwhites. To call the
result a privilege, which means a positive, specifically granted absolute advantage, rather than a relative one, clouds the issue of
disparities between whites and nonwhites. It makes it seem as though the situation is both worse and better than it is: worse, as though at some time benefits
for whites only were explicitly conferred upon by law; better, because the emphasis on white privilege ignores the discrimination against and
exclusion of nonwhites that give raise to the racial disparity.
Even in this most racist of cultures,

I do not think that the elliptical idea of white privilege can bear much weight philosophically. It certainly does not add anything to the idea of white race treason. To say
that one is a white race traitor because one is against white race privilege is to say that in the sense of the civil rights movement-era American South one would betray
the criminal intent of white people because compared to nonwhites who have been discriminated against and excluded, whites are better off. What is left out here is the
claim that is was wrong and unfair for nonwhites to have been discriminated against and excluded. There may also be a tacit assumption lurking that whites are
better off in some absolute sense when they are only better off relative to nonwhites. That is, if nonwhites were included in general privileges and
not discriminated against, the net long-term effect might be more benefits for whites than they have now. Furthermore, the use of the term white privilege makes it seem
as though white people have advantages and status that only white racist think they should have. To speak as though these privileges

exist puts the comparative disadvantages of nonwhites in the face in the way that would seem (to me) to add further insult to injury.
At this point it might be objected that some white people feel guilty about the fact that whites are so much better off than nonwhites.

THE

NEGATIVE IS TOO AGGRESSIVE IN THEIR DESCRIPTIONS OF WHITENESS DESCRIBING WHITENESS

SOLELY IN TERMS OF EXPLOITATION SHUTS DOWN ALLIANCES AND WILL NOT PRODUCE SUBSTANTIVE
CHALLENGES TO RACISM

GIROUX, 1997 (H.A. WHITE SQUALL: RESISTANCE

11(3) P 376-378)

AND THE

PEDAGOGY

OF

WHITENESS, CULTURAL STUDIES,

it is crucial for cultural

workers and educators to recognize the limits of this work and begin to move beyond the current impasse of reducing 'whiteness'
exclusively to forms of exploitation and domination. More specifically, much of the current literature fails to capture the complexity that
marks 'whiteness' as a form of identity and cultural practice. The distinction between 'white ness' as a dominating ideology and white
people who are positioned across multiple locations of privilege and subordination is often sacrificed to the assumption that
'whiteness' is simply 'the terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back' (Roe diger, 1994:
While the recent scholarship on 'whiteness' has provided an important theoretical service for broadening the debate on race and racism,

13). Being white in this context appears by default to make one a racist.
While rightly unmasking 'whiteness' as a mark of ideology and racial privilege,

the new scholarship fails to provide a nuanced, dialectical and layered

account of 'whiteness' that would allow white youth and others to appropriate selective elements of white identity and culture as
oppositional. This theoretical lacuna suggests that workers, educators and students face the task of rethinking the subversive possibility of 'whiteness' . Such a peda
gogical and political challenge means, in part, re imagining 'whiteness' beyond both the fixed boundaries of identity politics, defined primarily through a discourse of
separatism and white supremacy, or as an act of bad faith whites exhibiting what Eric [ott calls 'blackface's unconscious return' (quoted in Stowe, 1996: 76)11

91

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: WHITE PRIVILEGE FOCUS BAD

THE

CRITIQUE TOTALIZES WHITE IDENTITY, IGNORING CRUCIAL CLASS DIFFERENCES; WHITES ALREADY
RECOGNIZE THEIR WHITE IDENTITY.

PAUL R. CROLL, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AT MINNESOTA UNIVERSITY, 2007 (MODELING DETERMINANTS

OF WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY: RESULTS FROM A NEW NATIONAL SURVEY, SOCIAL FORCES, MUSE)
In the American Mosaic Project Survey, 37 percent of whites said their white racial identity was very important (Hartmann and Croll, forthcoming). The percentage of
nonwhites who said their racial identity was very important was much higher, at 72 percent. This shows a significant gap in the importance of racial identities between
whites and non-whites. Nonetheless, the fact that more than a third of whites claim a strong racial identity is an important finding because

many of the central works in whiteness theory from the 1990s predicted that whites, by and large, were unaware of their own racial
identity (Doane 1997; Feagin and Vera 1995; Frankenberg 1993). Furthermore, looking at people who said their racial identity was either very
important or somewhat important brings the percentages up to 74 percent for whites and 90 percent for non-whites. One-third of
whites have a strong white racial identity and almost three-fourths of whites put some importance on their white racial identity. These
results provide basic information about the importance of white racial identity for whites. Given these findings, it is important to explore the
determinants of strong white racial identities.
Background: White Racial Identity
White racial identity is a key component in the study of whiteness. The concept of whiteness itself, however, is difficult to define precisely given the fluid nature of
"white;" the concept is socially constructed and must [End Page 614] always be situated in its historical context (Duster 2001; Rasmussen et al. 2001). The
interdisciplinary nature of the field and the wide range of topics examined within whiteness studies also add to the difficulty in defining whiteness. However, even with
the amorphous nature of whiteness, whiteness studies can be defined as a field that "reverses the traditional focus on research on race relations by concentrating
attention upon the socially constructed nature of white identity and the impact of whiteness upon intergroup relations." (Doane 2003:3)
Previous research on white racial identity has shown important variations in white racial identity across groups and social locations. Both Hartigan (1999, 2005) and
McDermott (2006) have documented how white racial identity is experienced for poor and working-class whites . Other prior research has examined
the contradictory (and controversial) nature of "white trash," a concept that scholars have shown plays a role in defining the boundaries of white racial identities (Wray
2006; Wray and Newitz 1997). Previous research also suggests that whites' levels of education are important to consider when studying
variations in white racial identity (Jackman 1994; Jackman and Muha 1984). The claim that white racial identity is "a complex, situated

identity rather than a monolithic one" is central to McDermott and Samson's recent review of research on white racial and ethnic
identity in the United States (McDermott and Samson 2005:245). Taken together, these works demonstrate the need to consider group
differences and the effects of social characteristics when exploring white racial identity at a national level. \\

92

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF TURN: REDEPLOYMENT

A) TURN: THE

NEGATIVES FOCUS ON WHITENESS WILL BE REDEPLOYED BY CONSERVATIVES TO

CONSOLIDATE POWER THROUGH MORE INSIDIOUS AND VIOLENT FORMS OF RACISM

GIROUX, 1997 (H.A. WHITE SQUALL: RESISTANCE

11(3) P 376-378)

AND THE

PEDAGOGY

OF

WHITENESS, CULTURAL STUDIES,

Displaced from its

common sense status as an unnamed, universal moral referent, 'whiteness' as a category of racial identity was appropriated by diverse
conservative and right wing groups, as well as critical scholars, as part of a broader articulation of race and difference, though in different ways and for
radically opposed purposes. For a disparate number of whites, mobilized, in part, by the moral panic generated by right wing attacks on
immigration, race preferential policies and the welfare state, 'whiteness' became a signifier for middle class resistance to 'taxation, to
the expansion of state furnished rights of all sorts, and to integration ' (Winant, 1992: 166). Threatened by the call for minority rights, the rewriting of
American history from the bottom up, and the shifting racial demographics of the nations' cities, whites felt increasingly angry and resentful over what
was viewed as an attack on their sense of individual and collective consciousness .' As 'whiteness' came under scrutiny by various
social groups as an oppressive, invisible centre against which all else is measured, many whites began to identify with the 'new racism'
epitomized by right wing conservatives such as talk show host, Rush Limbaugh.2 Winning over vast audiences with the roar of the 'angry white male' bitter
In the early 1990s the debate over race took a provocative turn as 'whiteness' became increasingly visible as a symbol of racial identity.

over imagined racial injuries committed against whites, Limbaugh's popularity affirmed that race had become the most significant social force of the 1980s and 1 990s.
In an era of economic restructuring, poverty and diminishing opportunities for most black Americans, right wing whites had convinced themselves of their loss of
privilege. For these groups, archconservative actor and mythic white male, Michael Douglas, becomes less a symbol of 'falling down' in a tragic Hollywood morality
tale about white supremacy and paranoia and more a moral crusader fighting a holy if lost war. Thus, the discourse of race became a vehicle for appeasing
white anxiety and reinventing both the subject and meaning of what one might loosely call 'social justice' . The progressive legacy of identity
politics as 'a crucial movement to expand citizenship to people of color and other subordinated groups' was either trivialized or dismissed as conservatives appropriated
the politics of identity as a defining principle of 'whiteness' (Yudice, 1995). John Brenkman (1995: 14) high lights this appropriation by claiming that 'the constituency
whose beliefs and fears have been most significantly molded to their racial identity in the 1980s are white'.

A siege mentality arose for policing cultural boundaries and reasserting national identity. The discourse of 'whiteness' as an ambivalent
signifier of resentment and confusion gives expression to a mass of whites who feel victimized and bitter while it masks deep
inequalities and exclusionary practices within the current social order. Shifting the politics of race from the discourse of white supremacy, the
historical legacy of slavery and segregation as well as the ongoing burden of racial injustice endured by African-American and other minorities in the United States,
politicians such as Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson mobilized a new populist discourse about family, nation, traditional values and
individualism as part of a broader resistance to multicultural democracy and diverse racial culture. In the rapidly expanding medium of talk radio, conservatives bashed
blacks for many of the social and economic problems facing the country.' Conservative columnist Mickey Kaus exemplifies this sensibility in his comment: 'I may want
to live in a society where there is no alienated race and no racism, where I need not feel uncomfortable walking down the street because I'm white' (quoted in Bren
kman, 1995: 34). As race became paramount in shaping American politics and everyday life from the 1980s on, racial prejudice in its overt forms was considered a
taboo. While the old racism maintained some cache among the more vulgar, right wing conservatives (for example, New York city's radio talk show host Bob Grant), a
new racist discourse emerged in the United States. The new racism was coded in the language of 'welfare reform, neighborhood schools,

toughness on crime and "illegitimate" births'. Cleverly designed to mobilize white fears while relieving whites of any semblance of
social responsibility and commitment, the new racism served to rewrite the politics of 'whiteness' as a besieged racial identity . As the
racial backlash intensified in the broader culture, 'whiteness' assumed a new form of political agency visible in the rise of right wing militia groups, skinheads, the anti
PC crusades of indignant white students and conservative, academic organizations such as the National Association of Scholars and the Southern League.4

93

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF TURN: REDEPLOYMENT

B) WHITE SUPREMACISTS WILL SPARK A RACE WAR, CULMINATING IN GENOCIDE.
SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER, 2006 (EXTREMISM AND THE MILITARY,INTELLIGENCE REPORT,
HTTP://WWW.SPLCENTER.ORG/INTEL/INTELREPORT/ARTICLE.JSP?AID=629)
But today the nightmare is back. Facing intense pressure to meet manpower goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, some commanders and recruiters have relaxed the
standards that Weinberger and Perry sought to impose. As reported in a remarkable cover story by David Holthouse , many neo-Nazis have served or are
serving in Iraq. Hundreds anonymously proclaim their ideology in racist online venues. At a single base, Fort Lewis, Wash., 320 soldiers are
involved in extremist activity, according to a Defense Department investigator -- but just two of them have been discharged.
How serious is the problem? According to the Defense Department investigator and others who spoke to the Intelligence Report, there are
"thousands" of soldiers in the Army alone who are involved in extremist or gang activity. If that sounds high, it's worth remembering that a 1996
study found that 0.52% of soldiers interviewed by military officials admitted to being members of a neo-Nazi or white supremacist group -- a far higher percentage than
in the general population.

The ramifications are frightening. Timothy McVeigh, whose volcanic anger at the government partly stemmed from his service in the
first Gulf War, went on to murder 168 people. Others, such as then-Green Beret Michael Tubbs of Florida, stole military weapons and
explosives in plots to attack black and Jewish targets . And still others emerged from the armed forces to teach high-level military skills to fellow
extremists, like White Patriot Party leaders did in the mid-1980s.

Hate groups and neo-Nazi ideologues routinely encourage their followers to join the military to hone their warrior skills . In the late
1990s, former Special Forces soldier and neo-Nazi leader Steven Barry urged skinheads to join the infantry "because the coming race
war, and the ethnic cleansing to follow, will be very much an infantryman's war. It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-byneighborhood, until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are ... hunted down."

94

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

NO ALT SOLVENCY
ALTERNATIVE CANT SOLVE: INDETERMINACY OF ACTION DOOMS WHITE ANTI-RACIST PROJECTS
PAUL C. TAYLOR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY TEMPLE UNIVERSITY 2007 (THE JOURNAL OF
SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY VOLUME 21, NUMBER 3, 2007 (NEW SERIES) RACE, ETHICS, SEDUCTION,
POLITICS)
In Sullivan's scenario, a group of white women convene to get up to speed on race and racism, and they limit their membership to white women so as not to burden
non-white women with the task of teaching them about race. But, as Sullivan puts it, their decision to compose an all-white group was part of the very problem that
they should be addressing. What is this problem? That the women have enacted a familiar form of white privilege: White people's taking it upon

themselves to decide when they want to engage with non-white people and when they do not. If they had chosen to convene a mixed
race session, they would have created the very same problem (Sullivan 2006, 181).
The problem, I take it, is the continued centrality of white decision makingthe fact that the white women could unilaterally decide and were comfortable with, and
oblivious to, the existence and import of this privilege. But Sullivan is not clear about how to solve the problem or about whether there is a solution. As she says, had
they decidedunilaterally, one imagines, as they were the ones having the meetingto invite some nonwhite women, they would have faced the same problem. A
regress problem seems to be looming: should they ask some [End Page 202] nonwhite people whether they can ask them to attend? Wouldnt that be the same problem,
only with an extra layer of padding?
The section in which this case appears seems to have as its moral a kind of double-barreled tragic meliorism. On the one hand, it recommends a kind of

pessimistic activism: white people must give up the sense that they must always be right, but they must still try to do the right thing.
On the other hand, it insists on a kind of fallibilist analysis: sometimes, as Sullivan says, the best thing for white people to do is to
leave other people alone. This is also sometimes not the best thing to do. And one can never know with any certainty or assurance of
guarantee when the hands-off policy is the right one.

ALTERNATIVE
WAYS.

DOESNT SOLVE: NO WAY TO MAKE PEOPLE RECOGNIZE THEIR PRIVILEGE IN PRODUCTIVE

PAUL C. TAYLOR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHYTEMPLE UNIVERSITY 2007 (THE JOURNAL OF

SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY VOLUME 21, NUMBER 3, 2007 (NEW SERIES) RACE, ETHICS, SEDUCTION, POLITICS)
My third worry has to do, finally, with politics. One

of the aims of Revealing Whiteness is of course to do the work of a postsupremacist ethic. It tells
us some of what we, what some of us, must do in order to be ethically responsible inhabitants of a social world that has officially
forsaken racism and racial injustice. Unfortunately, not allperhaps even not manywhite people will take this counsel in the proper
spirit. I wonder what Sullivan wants us to do with these unreconstructed privilegists (to borrow one of her helpful neologisms). I will build on my
earlier dalliance with the idea of therapeutic engagement and call this a concern about the resistance to antiracist therapy.
The limits of antiracist therapy can point us in at least two directions. One direction finds us considering such things as moral motivation and weakness of the will.

I
am more interested in the other, more explicitly political direction. Here we take up questions about the burden of dealing with
unreconstructed privilegiststhe people who do not subject themselves to therapy or take it in the proper spiritin the postracist
polity.
Looking in this more political direction reminds us that we have to pair Sullivan's postsupremacist ethic with some vision of politics,
with some vision of, to be precise, political mobilization and organization . This raises questions that she says nothing about, as far as I can tell.
Reticence is in this case not an unreasonable choice, given the wealth of topics she does profitably take up and her understandable desire to complete the argument in
fewer than six hundred pages. But I would like to know: How can unreconstructed privilegists be made to confront and overcome
themselves? By a regime of public education ? By a grassroots movement of antiracist civil society organizations? By a triumphant antiracist
revolution, one that turns the world upside down and forcibly uproots racist meanings by troubling the soilthe institutions and culture of, as it might be, modern,
Western, liberal, or European societythat has sustained these meanings for so long? None of the above? Or some combination?

95

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: RACISM INEVTIABLE

THE ALTERNATIVE DOESNT SOLVE-RACISM WILL ALWAYS BE A PROBLEM NO
COMBATED.
JOHN BRITTIAN, PROFESSOR AT UNIVERSITY OF CONNETICUT, SCHOOL OF LAW, 2003
[IS RACISM PERMANENT? POVERTY AND RACE RESEARCH ACTION COUNCIL,
HTTP://WWW.PRRAC.ORG/FULL_TEXT.PHP?
TEXT_ID=581&ITEM_ID=5905&NEWSLETTER_ID=11&HEADER=RACE+%2F+RACISM]

MATTER HOW IT IS

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more
than temporary `peaks of progress, short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white
dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate
defiance. Other civil rights advocates have expressed similar views. Robert Carter, a veteran civil rights lawyer and later federal district court judge,
once said that the pioneer civil rights leaders thought that racial segregation was the disease. Once the civil rights movement eliminated the segregation,
the society would achieve racial equality for the African American people. Instead, the leaders discovered that the segregation was
only the symptom, and White racism was the disease. Still further, Kenneth B. Clark, a brilliant psychologist who conducted the studies concerning the
adverse impact of segregated education on the learning abilities of Black children, recently lamented (see his contribution in Race In America: The Struggle for
Equality, Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., eds., 1993): Reluctantly, I am forced to face the likely possibility that the United States will never rid
itself of racism and reach true integration. I look back and shudder at how naive we all were in our belief in the steady progress racial minorities would make
through programs of litigation and education, and while I very much hope for the emergence of a revived civil rights movement with innovative

programs and educated leaders, I am forced to recognize that my life has, in fact, been a series of glorious defeats.
I agree with the thoughts of these civil rights activists about the "permanence of racism" in America. The conditions of White racism remain
the same, but some of the underlying assumptions may have changed. The traditional civil rights ideology was founded on the unstated assumption
that human beings are equal in the eyes of God-the same; and that human nature unites us all in a common essences Together we will, in the words of Dr.
Martin Luther King, reach the "promised land" of racial equality. The permanence of racism thesis attacks that "sameness" theory. Black feminists have stood up to say,
"I am not the same as you and do not speak for me." This movement, dubbed anti-essentialism, suggests that no essence unites us as human beings. Rather, we are all
individuals leading the attack with unique experiences that can neither be classed nor categorized. (For example, the Black lesbian faces a dilemma about which civil
rights organizations to join. Should she join NOW, led by White women, or the NAACP led by Black men, or ACT-UP lead by gay and lesbian White people?) Anti-

essentialists argue that unity must be built more by realistic connections, instead of relying on abstract and unreal notions of a
common essence. Similarly, the permanence of racism thesis criticizes the idea that most White people in America will grant Black
people, equal rights. In fact, according to Be African Americans advanced socially, politically and economically when the particular principle appealed to White
Americans' self-interest. This means that people of color cannot rely on the majority of White people for a shared commonality of all
human beings for equal treatment I recall a personal experience when I was a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi involving an old Black
woman in Sunflower County with a fighting spirit like Fannie Lou Hamer. We came out of the federal court house one day after the judge praised
the Black people for challenging some obvious vestige of racial segregation, but he denied their request for relief on some seemingly
unpersuasive legal technicality. I sought to comfort her with condolences about the case that the people had lost. She taught me a lesson based on the knowledge
that she acquired in life rather than by formal schooling. I never forgot. When she insisted that they had won, I tried to correct her on the legality of
the decision, but she interrupted. She said they won because the Black people had the White people in town very scared about the
potential impact of a favorable decision for them. True, everyone knew the White people were extremely concerned about a major change in the political
relations with Black people. I thought to myself, how could this Black lady think that they had won? Then she said, "Lawyer Brittain, I just lives to upset these White
folks and today we upset them." Hence, the permanence of racism theory means that this work will never end , only the battle fronts and tactics
change..

96

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

TURN: WELFARE GOOD

THE

PROBLEM ISNT TOO LITTLE WELFARE, BUT NOT ENOUGH:

RACIALIZATION OF POVERTY.

UNDOING

WELFARE REFORM CHALLENGES THE

MICHAEL K. BROWN PROF OF POLITICS, UC SANTA CRUZ, 2003 (GHETTOS, FISCAL FEDERALISM AND WELFARE
REFORM, RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE
SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
This debate misconstrues the problems facing poor women and their children and fails to explain why racialized poverty endures.
Growth in the number of female headed families among African Americans has less to do with persistent poverty than the loss of jobs
in inner cities, declining demand for unskilled labor, and racially segregated neighborhoods.' Equally important to these well known
causes of racialized poverty is one that often goes unstated: public disinvestment in ghetto communities. The problem with
governmental policy is not that it has been too generous or that it contributes to the bad behavior of poor women. Rather, it has always
been insufficient. Neoliberal welfare reformers recognized these realities and assumed that any policy predicated on eliminating the AFDC entitlement and forcing
poor women into the labor market would require substantial public investment in day care, employment training and education, health services, and a variety of social
services. This was the premise underlying their hopes for the 1988 Family Support Act, which was supposed to provide new resources for poor women and their
families. And it was the basis of the Faustian bargain neoliberals made when they agreed to the 1996 welfare reform bill.

TANF appealed to many "new Democrats" because it held out the possibility of fashioning a race neutral, work conditioned safety net
that could address inner city poverty. Whites, particularly white Democrats, strongly prefer race neutral policies (Sniderman and Carmines
1997, 104 To). Neoliberal welfare reformers also assumed that TANF was a way of reconciling the mantra of individual responsibility that is the ideology of welfare
reform with the economic realities of low wage labor markets. The challenge facing policymakers, they assume, is how to make a work

conditioned safety net function in an hourglass economy where demand for unskilled labor has dramatically declined and economic
growth is less effective in reducing poverty. It was obvious during the long debate over welfare reform that any work conditioned
policy would be very expensive. Yet liberal welfare reformers lost their wager when they agreed to block grants. TANF's fiscal
structure undermines any possibility of, building a viable work conditioned safety net: it gives states powerful financial incentives to
reduce caseloads and few incentives to reduce concentrated poverty in inner cities.
Under TANF federal funding no longer oscillates with changes in caseloads, as it did under AFDC. The AFDC entitlement was based on an
open ended grant in aid in which the federal government matched state expenditures on a sliding scale that provided proportionally more resources to poor states.
Regardless of the number of cases, the federal government paid from 50 to 8o percent of the statewide average cost of the caseload. Congress replaced this open ended
grant with a block grant and capped spending at $16.5 billion annually. The money is allocated to the states based on their caseloads. TANF is a far more rigid program
than AFDC. From the vantage point of the federal budget, an "uncontrollable" entitlement program is now a fixed appropriation where Congress will determine the
volume of spending. From the vantage point of states, caseload reductions yield a financial windfall. Since federal funding no longer fluctuates with the

size of the caseload, states are allowed to keep any unexpended federal dollars.
States lost open ended federal funding but acquired more freedom to choose how to spend federal money.

Under the law states may shift up

to 30 percent of TANF funds to either the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) or the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG).' States can also reallocate federal welfare
dollars. The law requires that state funds be spent for former AFDC programs or programs for TANF recipients, but no such restriction applies to federal dollars.

Conceivably states could use federal dollars to pay for other state social welfare programs and reduce the amount of state spending. By
substituting federal for state dollars, governors and legislatures free up state money for tax cuts or other programs. 3 Executives and
legislators can also reallocate TANF dollars geographically, and they will undoubtedly succumb to the temptation to do so at least if experience with previous block
grants at the city and county level is any guide.
Capped funding, substitution of federal for state dollars, and geographical dispersion of TANF funds potentially vitiate any work based safety net. So far, though, the
anticipated fiscal crunch has failed to materialize . Total spending is down due to the mandated reduction in the state contribution, but because

caseloads have declined so far so fast and funding is based on the higher 1994-95 caseloads, states have reaped a financial windfall.
According to the General Accounting Office, states received $4. billion more under TANF for their 1997 caseloads than they would
have received under the "pre reform cost structure."4 Presumably, states will be able to increase spending for the remaining women
and children, though there is no guarantee they will do so. What is clear is that TANF's fiscal incentives have driven states to adopt a
"work first model."5
Some states have been very aggressive in using the law to push recipients into any available job. Caseloads in Wisconsin, Wyoming, Idaho, and Mississippi have
dropped by 8o percent or more, and in 13 other states the decline exceeds 6o percent. Many states have transformed welfare offices into job centers . States have

made the application process more difficult and some states divert poor mothers from assistance by paying them to stay away.
Needy and eligible individuals are deterred a consequence, from seeking cash assistance . What states have not done is provide alternatives to
employment such as education or job training. Just 6 percent of the two million adults on the TANF rolls are in educational or work training programs. However, many
states have made it easier for single mothers to work and keep their benefits, and as a result about one third of those women remaining on the TANF rolls combine work
with welfare (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2000d, I, 5).

97

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

TURN: WELFARE GOOD

EXPANDING

WELFARE RESTORES RIGHTS TO THOSE WHO WERE EXCLUDED BEFORE.

THE DIGNITY OF ALL PEOPLE.

OUR PLAN

INSISTS ON

HOLLOWAY SPARKS ASST PROF OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, PENN STATE, 2003 (QUEENS, TEENS, AND MODEL MOTHERS
RACE AND THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR),
RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
The morals test in the PRWORA contract is also selectively applied. Poor women (and more recently, poor men) who have children
out of wedlock are judged to fail the morals test and are sanctioned with the loss of income, privacy, and autonomy . Wealthy heterosexual
men, in contrast, do not face the same penalties. As an example, Jesse Jackson might well lose moral clout for fathering a child outside of wedlock, but he is unlikely to
lose rights in the way that poor welfare recipients do under the PRWORA. Most wealthy heterosexual women enjoy the same ability to retain rights when they fail to
pass the morals test.

Both the "work" test and the "morals" test of the PRWORA's contract thus help justify a racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist
withdrawal of rights from welfare recipients. As Uma Narayan has argued, such contractual models of rights and citizenship ultimately stem from the view
that rights should depend on one's contributions to public life (s9). Whether this contribution comes via waged work (Shklar ii) or unwaged care work (Mink 1998),

Narayan suggests that we should instead "insist that dignity, worth and social standing matter to all who are participants in national
life, that is, who are part of the national cormmunity, independently of how they contribute to it" (Narayan 1997, sz).
Such a view of rights and citizenship as based on participation rather than contributions might well help displace the paternalistically constructed obligations that some
powerful citizens have been able to impose on others through the Personal Responsibility Act.

AFF

SOLVES THE KRITIK: REMOVING

DIFFERENTLY, WHICH SOLVES RACISM.

______________

ALLOWS THE MINORITY POOR TO LIVE

FRANCES FOX PIVEN, PROF OF SOCIOLOGY, CUNY GRADUATE CENTER, 2003(WHY WELFARE IS RACIST, THE
POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS (EDITOR), RICHARD C.
FORDING (EDITOR))
I would not conclude therefore, nor would DuBois, that the TANF welfare regime is merely the cipher for a racism originating elsewhere.
Not only does a punitive welfare system shore up a racist economic order in material terms by denying assistance, but by so doing, it
ensures that many blacks remain impoverished, some of them desperately impoverished, that their family life remains insecure, and
that when they do work, they are consigned to the trap of low wage work. When racial difference is thus joined to economic and social
degradation, race prejudice flourishes. Moreover, TANF has brought with it a powerful public rhetoric that treats welfare receipt as an
addiction and not a necessity, and castigates recipients for sexual license. This rhetoric or discourse of welfare reform is reiterated by
the new welfare administrative practices, by rituals that require people to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops, and by practices
that strip potential recipients of information, of rights and of power. The implementation of TANF thus creates its own theater of racial
degradation. Du Bois thought that if the freedmen had been allowed to live differently, then the racism of Philadelphians, and of
Americans generally, would have faded. If the minority poor were allowed to live differently now, then contemporary racism might
also fade.

98

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

TURN: HIGHLIGHTING RACISM BAD

HIGHLIGHTING THE RACIAL NATURE OF POVERTY CAN RESULT IN RACIST POLICIES.
SANFORD F. SCHRAM TEACHES SOCIAL THEORY AT BRYN MAWR 2003 (PUTTING A BLACK FACE ON
WELFARE THE POLITICS OF WELFARE REFORM (PAPERBACK) BY SANFORD F. SCHRAM (EDITOR), JOE SOSS
(EDITOR), RICHARD C. FORDING (EDITOR))
Breaking with the conventional wisdom on racialized depictions of welfare has its own pitfalls. The risk here is the "Moynihan problem"; that is,
looking into welfare along racial lines may he associated with Daniel P. Moynihans controversial work on the subject, the Negro Family (1965). This short (78 page)
internal U.S. Department of Labor report, emphasizing the then well accepted theme of pathology among economically marginalized African Americans, was leaked to
the press by Moynihan himself (Lemann '99', 171 72).

The report's distinctive claim was that welfare dependency among single parent African American families was starting to spiral out of
control due to a breakdown in values in black communities. While the number of families on welfare historically had tracked the black male
unemployment rate, in the early 196os, Moynihan suggested, the welfare participation rate for African Americans was becoming "unglued." The link between the black
male unemployment rate and welfare caseloads was becoming weaker. Black poverty was turning into an autonomous problem disconnected from
the status of the economy, indicating that the black family was becoming wrapped in a "tangle of patholog y" (Katz 1989). To underscore its
importance as a finding of social science, Moynihan would in time proudly call this phenomenon the "Moynihan Scissors" (Moynihan '985). His analysis has been
criticized on methodological grounds for tying the unemployment of black males with the welfare caseload for all races, and subsequent research has shown the
correlation to be unsubstantiated (O'Connor zoo, zo 6). The report reached bad conclusions on the basis of bad research.
Moynihan may have intended to highlight racial unfairness in the broader society (O'Connor 2001, 203 10), but that is not how his effort
was received. Instead, the report was criticized for essentializing racial differences, reinforcing racist attitudes, and promoting the idea

of a selfcreated "culture of poverty" in which low income African American families were mired making them personally responsible
for their own plight. In particular, the report was condemned for stressing racial background as the key factor in producing poverty
among African American families and neglecting its political and economic roots . Although Moynihan was rarely labeled a racist, his work was
seen as "blaming the victim" (Ryan 1971).

The report deserved such interpretations, in its effects if not intention . Conservatives appropriated it to justify cutbacks in public assistance on the
grounds that it promoted "welfare dependency" and undermined "personal responsibility" among African American families (O'Connor 2001). The Right campaigned
on this theme for three decades, finally ending welfare as an entitlement in 1996. In spite of Moynihan's own pained resistance to that disentitlement,
the seeds for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 were sown in the Moynihan report (Katz
zoo,).

99

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: RACE NEUTRALITY GOOD

TURN: THE

NEGATIVE IS JUST DEFENDING THE VICTIM: WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE THAT FIGHTING RACISM
DIRECTLY WONT SOLVE SOCIAL ILLS: RACE-NEUTRAL POLICIES ARE KEY TO CHANGE THE CULTURE OF
POVERTY AND MAINTAIN POLITICAL SUPPORT.

SUDHIR VENKATESH 2009 (HTTP://WWW.SLATE.COM/ID/2213618/ SLATE MAGAZINE HOW TO UNDERSTAND

CULTURE OF POVERTY)

THE

More Than Just Race, which draws on Wilson's earlier research as well as more recent studies, is yet more proof of his willingness to ignore political and academic
pieties and his will to make social science relevant to the public . Wilson wants to explain inner-city behaviorsuch as young black males' disdain

for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for childrenwithout pointing simplistically to
discrimination or a deficit in values. Instead, he argues that many years of exposure to similar situations can create responses that look
as if they express individual will or active preference when they are, in fact, adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion.
Consider a young man who works in the drug economy. Doing so doesn't mean he places little if any value on legitimate work. Employment opportunities are limited in
the man's racially segregated neighborhood. There are few neighbors and friends who have social connections to employers, and most of the good jobs are far away. To
complicate matters, many of his friends and neighbors are probably connected to the drug trade. Survival and peer pressure dictate that the man will seek

out the dangerous, illegal jobs that are nearby, even while he may prefer a stable, mainstream job. Delinquent behavior? Certainly, but
more than likely a comprehensible response to lack of opportunity.
One could apply the same logic to teenage pregnancy, another all too common feature of inner-city life. The political left and right both argue that the prospect of
welfare payments can motivate young women to have childrenconservatives point to delinquent values, while liberals deem this a response to lack of income. Apply
Wilson's "socialization" lens, and learned behaviors take priority over economic need: Young women achieve both personal identity and social validation in their
community by entering into motherhood. They join others whose lives are similarly defined by early parenting. The receipt of welfare helps them contribute to the
household while placing them on a surer moral footing than those who fail to bring income into the home.
Wilson does more than argue for the rationality of such behaviors. The actions of both the young man and the teenage mother are "cultural," he

suggests, because they follow from the individual's perceptions of how society works. These perceptions are learned over time, and
they create powerful expectations that can lead individuals to act in ways that, to the outside world, suggest insolence, laziness,
pathology, etc. In this way, Wilson's framework seeks to find individual agency in contexts of dire economic hardship.
Wilson describes this process succinctly: "Parents in segregated communities who have had experiences [with discrimination and disrespect] may transmit to children,
through the process of socialization, a set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how one should respond to circumstances. In the process children may acquire
a disposition to interpret the way the world works that reflects a strong sense that other members of society disrespect them because they are black."
If you think you're at a disadvantage (however justified or unjustified that belief may be), you internalize your status, such that your low expectations become as durable
an obstacle as the discrimination you might be facing. This is why people (of any race and social class) turn down assistance: The simple belief that help is futile can be
a powerful deterrent to social change.
What Wilson argues may sound obvious and even a bit like Psychology 101, but there is a deeper motivation to his writing. Wilson appreciates Moynihan for shedding
light on ghetto poverty. But by focusing on the capacity of the poor to act rationally and thoughtfully, Wilson wants us to get off the victimhood

bandwagon that followed Moynihan. In his view, neither defending the victim nor blaming the victim is very helpful in moving us
forward.
Moynihan was also not altogether hopeful that black family patternswhich he traced to a legacy of slaverymight change, although, to be fair, his report was not
intended as a primer on poverty-alleviation strategy. Wilson's history is more recent, and his optimism is apparent: Three generations of black ghetto dwellers have been
relying on welfare and sporadic work and doing so in isolation from the mainstream. It is folly to believe that some distinctive behavior, values, or outlooks have not
arisen as a consequence. Whereas Moynihan seemed at pains to point out "pathology" in the black community, in Wilson's work, the recognition functions almost like
confession: Let us face the truth, so that we may finally bring forth change.
The book stands to have a powerful impact in policy circles because it points to the elephant in the room. Wilson knows it is difficult to engineer cultural change. We
can train black youths, we can move their families to better neighborhoods, etc., but changing their way of thinking is not so easy. Evidence of this lies in the many
"mobility" programs that move inner-city families to lower-poverty suburbs: Young women continue to have children out of wedlock and, inexplicably, the young men
who move out return to their communities to commit crime! These patterns flummox researchers and, according to Wilson, they will continue to remain mysterious
until we look at culture for an answer.
Critics will complain that Wilson himself has little to offer in terms of policy recommendations. But More Than Just Race contains some clues as to where he may be
headed. He emphasizes the advantages of "race neutral" programs. Wilson knows that Americans and their elected leaders are more

likely to support initiatives that are not identified with poor blacks. And in this economy, there is no shortage of disadvantaged
Americanswhite or blackwho require employment assistance and supportive services. He is also partial to addressing joblessness first,
despite his insistence that culture matters (and that behaviors don't change as quickly as policymakers wish). Wilson repeatedly points to the benefits that jobs programs
and vocational training have on the cultural front. Stated somewhat crudely, increasing employment will reduce the number of people who might

promote or even condone deviant behavior. Change might not occur overnight, and it may not be wholesale, but it will take place.

100

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF AT: FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS RACIST

Turn: Federal control of welfare key to racist implementation by the states and localities.
Frances Fox Piven, prof of sociology, CUNY graduate center, 2003(Why Welfare is Racist, the Politics of Welfare Reform (Paperback) by Sanford F. Schram (Editor),
Joe Soss (Editor), Richard C. Fording (Editor))

The conclusion that emerges from these different approaches to an examination of American welfare is harsh but indisputable. Welfare
policy and practice in the United States is infused with racial biases . Still, that said, there are historical differences that bear both on our understanding
of the racism of the new welfare system, and on our ability to think about the contours of genuine reform. There are good empirical grounds for thinking
that American welfare is less racist when the role of the federal government enlarges, and when the system is more tightly bound by
law and regulation. There are several reasons. One is simply that state and local governments find redistributional policies politically
difficult They are especially susceptible to threats from business and affluent residents to move out of the jurisdiction if taxes are
raised to pay for programs that benefit those less well off. As a consequence, employer groups in particular have great influence on
subnational governments, and they use that influence to shift the state and local tax burden to the working and middle class who
cannot easily threaten to move. Not surprisingly, in a regressive tax system, expenditures that are seen as benefiting the minority poor
are more likely to provoke popular resentment.
Another reason that federal policies are at least potentially more benign to minorities was suggested by Grant McConnell (1966) many
years ago: "As the most important and influential local interests gain by being placed in a small sphere, the least influential lose
power"105). Moreover, "The informal structure of the small community will usually be able to suppress a challenge before it becomes
overt (107).
Finally, because devolution of responsibility for welfare to subnational governments produces a myriad of particularistic welfare
systems, it reduces the power of subordinate minorities to monitor and enforce such rights as they have, thus smoothing the way for
more discretionary and arbitrary patterns of welfare administration. Perhaps it is needless to add that minorities have not fared well in
American history under local and discretionary rule.

101

WHITENESS K

UTNIF 2009

AFF: TURN WHITE GUILT

THE

NEGATIVES FOCUS ON WHITE PRIVILEGE PRODUCES A DISABLING WHITE GUILT, MAKING IT

IMPOSSIBLE TO FIGHT RACISM.

SHANNON SULLIVAN, PROFESSOR AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2008, ("WHITENESS AS WISE

PROVINCIALISM: ROYCE AND THE REHABILITATION OF A RACIAL CATEGORY." A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 44.2 (2008): 236-262. PROJECT MUSE. [LIBRARY NAME], [CITY], [STATE
ABBREVIATION]. 12 JUN. 2009 <HTTP://MUSE.JHU.EDU/>.)
While white people have a violent history (and
sometimes present) as a race and continue to benefit [End Page 251] from economic, psychological, geographical, and other forms of
racial privilege, I do not think that guilt is the most helpful way to respond to white supremacy and hegemony. In part, this is because
white guilt tends to direct white people to their feelings in a non-productive way. Let me elaborate this point. Some critical race theorists, such as
I deliberately have refrained from using the term guilt when sketching the contours of white humility.

Ignatiev, have suggested that anti-racist workshops for white people are problematic because they tend to focus on helping white people feel good about themselves
rather than on political struggle against racism.32 I disagree that white peoples feelings about their whiteness are irrelevant to anti-racist struggle, but I agree that such
struggle is the point. White guilt tends to produce a self-focused, emotional wallowing that distracts white people from political struggle

while making it seem as if they are doing something to counter racism.33

A related reason that I do not describe white humility in terms of guilt is that white guilt can produce a kind of moral paralysis in white people, especially with regard to
issues of race. Feeling guilty about past oppression of non-white people and the ongoing racial privileges they enjoy, white people

sometimes feel demoralized and unworthy and thus incapable of making moral judgments about racial matters since they are tainted
by their whiteness. Indeed, Shelby Steele has gone so far as to define white guilt as the vacuum of moral authority that comes from
simply knowing that ones race is associated with racism. 34 Steele argues that white people today who acknowledge the existence of white racism step
into a void of vulnerabilityellipsis[that] leaves no room for moral choice.35 One could say that white guilt humbles white people, but it does so by obligat[ing] [them]
to black people because they needed the moral authority only black people could bestow.36 This kind of humility merely reverses the previous situation in which only
white people could have moral authority. While that reversal might seem like a good development from an anti-racist perspective, it tends to make black and other nonwhite people solely responsible for white redemption and deliverance from racism.

Steeles analysis of white guilt and racial discrimination more broadly is problematic in several ways, including its atomistic
individualism and dismissal of systemic racism. But Steele accurately portrays a danger that faces many anti-racist white people and that a wise whiteness
should avoid. Understood as taking responsibility for past and present forms of white oppression of non-white people, then white guilt surely has a role to play in wise
whiteness. But if white guilt translates into the inability to make moral and other judgments if issues of race are involved, it undermines
white attempts to fight racism . If white humility is to support those efforts, it cannot take the form of ducking obligation to make decisions about racial matters
and positing non-white people as the only possible moral agents, especially when it comes to race. [End Page 252]

102