Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Social Movements
Social Movements
Surveillance Af
Resolution
Resolved: The United States federal government should
substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.
1AC
1AC - Critical
Domestic surveillance in America has historically been
used to document and police people through an
officializing white gaze that entrenches and protects U.S.
colonialism the mapping and defining of the
population is racialized and used to diferentiate and
control populations
Kundnani and Kumar in 15 - Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of
Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. Arun Kundnani
teaches at New York University. His latest book is The Muslims Are Coming!
Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. <Arun and Deepa.
Race, surveillance, and empire International Socialist Review. Issue 96,
Spring 2015.>
the colonial
states of North America: The discovery of dark, unknown lands, which were
conceptually emptied of their peoples and cultures so that their wilderness
might be brought properly to orderi.e., fixed and named and mapped by
an officializing white gaze.9 Through, for example, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, the United States sought to develop methods of identification,
categorization, and enumeration that made the Indigenous population
visible to the surveillance gaze as racial others . Surveillance that defined
and demarcated according to officially constructed racial typologies enabled
the colonial state to sort tribes according to whether they accepted the
priorities of the settler-colonial mission (the good Indians) or resisted it (the
bad Indians).10 In turn, an idea of the US nation itself was produced as a homeland of white,
John Comaroffs description of this process in southern Africa serves equally to summarize
propertied men to be secured against racial others. No wonder, then, that the founding texts of the
modern state invoke the Indigenous populations of America as bearers of the state of nature, to which
the modern state is counterposedwitness Hobbess references to the the Savage people of America.11
The earliest process of gathering systematic knowledge about the other by colonizers often began with
trade and religious missionary work. In the early seventeenth century, trade in furs with the Native
population of Quebec was accompanied by the missionary project. Jesuit Paul Le Jeune worked extensively
with the Montagnais-Naskapi and maintained a detailed record of the people he hoped to convert and
civilize.12 By studying and documenting where and how the savages lived, the nature of their
relationships, their child-rearing habits, and the like, Le Juene derived a four-point program to change the
behaviors of the Naskapi in order to bring them into line with French Jesuit morality. In addition to
sedentarization, the establishment of chiefly authority, and the training and punishment of children, Le
Juene sought to curtail the independence of Naskapi women and to impose a European family structure
based on male authority and female subservience.13 The net result of such missionary work was to pave
the way for the racial projects of colonization and/or integration into a colonial settler nation. By the
of Indian Affairs (later Bureau), which had as one of its tasks the mapping and counting of Native
Americans. The key security question was whether to forcibly displace Native Americans beyond the
colonial territory or incorporate them as colonized subjects; the former policy was implemented in 1830
when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and President Jackson began to drive Indians to the west of
use of surveillance
to produce a census of a colonized population was the first step to controlling
it. Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as define and rule, a process in which, before managing a
heterogeneous population, a colonial power must first set about defining it ; to
do so, the colonial state wielded the census not only as a way of
acknowledging difference but also as a way of shaping, sometimes even
creating, difference.16 The ethnic mapping and demographics unit
programs practiced by US law enforcement agencies today in the name of
counterterrorism are the inheritors of these colonial practices. Both then and
now, state agencies use of demographic information to identify
concentrations of ethnically defined populations in order to target
surveillance resources and to identify kinship networks can be utilized for
the purposes of political policing. Likewise, todays principles of counterinsurgency
warfarewinning hearts and minds by dividing the insurgent from the nonresistantecho similar
techniques applied in the nineteenth century at the settler frontier.
prominent liberal and radical attorneys (Bartley Crum, Martin Popper, Thomas Corcoran, David Wahl,
Benjamin Margolis, Carol King, Robert Silberstein, National Lawyers Guild, Fred Black), Radical labor
leaders and unions (Harry Bridges; United Auto Workers; National Maritime Union; National Union of Marine
Cooks and Stewards; United Public Workers; United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers; Food, Tobacco,
Agricultural and Allied Workers; International Longshoremens and Warehousemens Union; CIO Maritime
Committee; Congress of Industrial Organizations Council), Journalists (I. F. Stone, Philip Jaffe, Kate Mitchell,
Mark Gayn, Leonard Lyons, William Beecher, Marvin Kalb, Henry Brandon, Hedrick Smith, Lloyd Norman,
Hanson Baldwin, Inga Arvad), Civil-rights activists and organizations (Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X;
Southern Christian Leadership Conference; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;
March on Washington Movement; Gandhi Society for Human Rights; Elijah Muhammad; Nation of Islam;
Stokely Carmichael; H. Rap Brown; Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; Alabama Peoples
Education Association; Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants; Southern Conference for Human Welfare;
Black Panther Party; Universal Negro Improvement Association; African Liberation Day Committee), The
Students for a Democratic Society, Ku Klux Klan, National Committee to Abolish HUAC, Socialist Workers
Party, Washington Bookstore Association, Northern California Association of Scientists, Federation of
American Scientists, American Association of Scientific Workers, preWorld War II isolationists (Henry
Grunewald, Ethel Brigham, John OBrien, Lillian Moorehead, Laura Ingalls, America First, Jehovahs
Witnesses, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce), and even prominent personalities (Joe Namath, Harlow
Shapley, Edward Condon, Edward Prichard, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Spock).40 In a bid to shape public
opinion, the FBI also launched a mass media campaign in 1946 that released educational materials to
The telecommunications companies at the time handed over to the NSA all telegrams sent out of and into
names to the National Security Agency of key activists in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements,
hoping that the NSA would be able to find evidence of the communist conspiracy that President Lyndon
Johnson thought must be causing the new militancy of the 1960s. The list included politically active public
figures such as actress Jane Fonda and singer Joan Baez, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver,
and Abbie Hoffman. NSA officers began surveillance of these activists communications, using special
records procedures to prevent discovery of what they knew to be an illegal program. This watch list
program was expanded under President Nixon and named Operation Minaret; in all, the international
communications of more than a thousand US citizens and organizations and more than two thousand
foreign citizens were intercepted.45 Such was the proliferation of government spying in the 1960s that
even such a minor law enforcement agency as the Ohio Highway Patrol ran an intelligence unit claiming to
have student informers on every campus in the state.46 The vast expansion of state surveillance in the
1960s was a response to the new militancy of the movements against the imperialist war in Vietnam and
for civil rights and Black liberation. Initially, security officials assumed the Civil Rights movement in the
South, the campus protests, and the Black insurrections in northern cities were the result of a communist
conspiracy; informants and electronic monitoring were deployed to try to identify the hidden agitators
between thinking of King as having a core self that was prideful and thinking of that prideful self as nothing
more than a performance. In keeping with Judith Butlers theory of performativity, I will suggest that the
performance of identity is all that identity consists of.11 We are no more than what we pretend to be. The
external self we project to others is as real as the internal self that we feel we are holding back. So we
need not resolve the issue of whether Kings pride was how he really felt or just an act. If King played a
proud individual on television, that was as true a part of his identity as any other. This performative notion
of the self has implications for how we think about surveillance; I will start to map out those implications in
so one-sided. The FBI may have been destroying itself at the same time it tried to destroy King.12 In the
mid-1970s, the Church Committee would reveal the nature of the FBIs 1960s surveillance activities.
Revelation of the FBIs surveillance of King was a centerpiece of the Church Committees criticisms of the
FBI.13 As a result of the Church Committees report, Congress attempted to seriously curtail the FBIs
surveillance powers.14 The FBIs suicide pact with King wound up being mutual: we will destroy ourselves
in the United
Statess contemporary surveillance regime. The surveilled are encouraged to
in an attempt to destroy you. The dynamics of this suicide pact may well be reproduced
while the internal sense of self is not more real than the
performance of the self, allowing people to make their internal and performed
selves consistent will make people feel more self actualized . Our government is at
repercussions.21 I argue that
its best when it maximizes the ability of individuals to self-actualize through identity performance.
The most
important thing to understand about this story is that the story itself was
hotly contested and debated at the time. In fact, there was an intense debate
about what to call them: rebellions, insurrections, civil disorders, urban
unrest? I use the term riot because that is what they were called in the mainstream White press.
central to understanding the massive repression we have seen in the U.S. since then.
Dozens of long books and hundreds of articles have told the story in many different ways. In my telling, I
am trying briefly to capture the flavor of the debates, emotions, and issues at stake at the time. The year
1968 was traumatic on many fronts. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. The
U.S. antiwar movement was dominating college campus life. Inde- pendence movements were strong in
Africa. There was revolutionary turmoil in France and protest movements in many countries. All of this
social unrest is relevant, but for under- standing repression in the U.S., we need to remember the Black
burning property. Riots increased in frequency from 1963. The huge 1965 Los Angeles (Watts) riot lasted
several days, was covered full-time on television, and included rooftop snipers shooting at firemen and
crowds chanting burn baby, burn; it has been called the entry of the Black working class into the
struggle. There were more riots in 1966 and then a huge wave of hundreds of riots in 1967, including huge
riots in Newark and Detroit, and then hundreds of riots again in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King,
Jr. The general time trend can be seen in figure 3, copied from Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney (1996),
which shows event counts from New York Times articles. Research by Myers (1997; 2000) shows that riots
diffused between cities in waves connected by mass media coverage, especially television broadcast
networks, while within cities, participants learned of riots through informal communication (Feagin and
Hahn 1973). By the end of the 1960s, virtually every city with a large Black population had had at least
one riot; some had had dozens. Whole sections of major cities had been burned out. Part of the debate was
where to begin the story. Violence began, of course, much earlier, in the White terrorism of the postReconstruction era, in the White communal urban riots of the early 20th century, and in the violent
resistance of both Southern Whites and Northern Whites to nonviolent political actions by Blacks. After the
Birmingham protest, 1963 saw a huge wave of disruptive nonviolent protests in dozens of cities and a huge
wave of White violence in response. Throughout the 1960s, Black leaders and the Black masses hotly
debated whether Black people should eschew all protest to avoid White violent retaliation, engage in
disruptive protest and respond to White violence with unmerited suffering as a moral victory, or fight
escalated even more, and both Blacks and Whites were using apocalyptic language (see, for example,
Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969; Yette 1971). Surveys of Blacks conducted be- tween 1964 and
1968 found that 12 to 17% of Black respondents advocated violence as the best way for Blacks to gain
their rights, one-third to two-thirds (depending on the survey) said that violence helped the cause, and 11
to 35% (depending on the city) were estimated to have participated in several large riots (Feagin and Hahn
1973: 275-82). Some kind of violent race war seemed possible to many observers; in fact, it seemed to be
already underway. A poll in 1968 found that 81% of the population said that law and order has broken
down and 53% reported fear of racial violence (Louis Harris and Associates1968; Urban America and
Urban Coalition 1969). The race war did not happen and the riots declined after 1969. Contrary to popular
belief, however, riots did not go away entirely, as figure 3 indicates. Feagin and Hahn (1973) cite evidence
from a variety of sources that there were hundreds of disorders between 1969 and 1972. There were
scattered riots periodically after that, including a big riot in Miami in 1980 (Ladner, Schwartz, Roker,
Titterud 1981) and a huge riot in Los Angeles after the 1992 not guilty verdict for the police who beat
first episode of part 2 of the Eyes on the Prize PBS video (newly re- released): one of the White civil rights
workers who participated in the 1966 Mississippi march tells the camera that he felt very frightened when
standing in the middle of an angry Black crowd shouting Black Power.1 (Movement scholars who stress
the importance of emotion would do well to revisit the frustration and anger of the Black movement in the
late 1960s, as well as White fear.) There were intense debates at the time about the causes and meaning
(Feagin and Sheatsley 1968; Louis Harris and Associates 1968; Urban Am- erica and Urban Coalition 1969)
One survey in Los Angeles in the late 1960s conducted by a less sympathetic researcher found that Blacks
who subscribed to Black Muslim ideology were more likely to support riots, also finding that their support
was more oriented toward concerns about Black disadvantage than to Muslim theology (Tomlinson 1970).
At the same time, Black people disagreed strongly about whether the riots would help, hurt, or make no
difference to the Black cause, with roughly equal numbers choosing each option (Urban America and Urban
Coalition 1969). Moderate Black leaders and many social scientists argued that insurrection was the
weapon of those whose grievances were not met through peaceful channels (see, for example, Lieberson
and Silverman 1965; Lieske 1978). The Kerner Commission (United States Nation- al Advisory Commission
the cause
of the riots was White racism, discrimination, blocked hopes, and a climate of
lawlessness that had been created by widespread White resistance to laws
mandating equal treatment. President Johnson officially rejected this report. Social scientists
on Civil Disorders 1968), writing after the 1967 riots and before the 1968 riots, argued that
stressed that discriminatory and oppressive police practices both fueled underlying grievances and had
exacerbated racial tensions both historically and in the recent era (Marx 1970a; Perez, Berg, and Myers
2003). Bryan (1979) explicitly argues from the survey data that the riots needed to be understood as part
of the Black movement. In more recent studies of a longer series of race riots, Olzak and colleagues found
that ethnic competition in labor markets predicts riots, not simple deprivation (Olzak and Shanahan 1996;
Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney 1996). Herman stresses the additional importance of residential
succession and spatial competition, showing that most riot fatalities in Detroit and Newark in 1967
occurred in areas of high racial turnover (2005). Popular White views were very different. Several surveys
were cited in a special report written in 1968 one year after the Kerner Commission report (Urban America
and Urban Coalition 1969: 103-104). Nearly half (48.5%) of Whites said the disorders had been planned,
versus only 18% of Blacks. Instead of discrimination and unfair treatment (chosen by 48.5% of Blacks),
Whites said that the main causes of the disorder were looters and other undesirables (34%) and Black
power or other radicals (23.5%). When asked their opinion Repression and Crime Control 7 of the Kerner
Commission report, 53% of whites disagreed that riots were mainly caused by racism, and 59% disagreed
that they were not organized. When asked whether disorders help or hurt the cause of Negro rights, 64%
of Whites said hurt, mostly because they increased anti-Negro sentiments (versus 23% of Blacks). When
Whites were asked whether Negroes with same education were better or worse off than they were, 42%
said better, 46% said same, 5% said worse. Then when they were shown data that Blacks were worse off
and asked why, 19% of Whites chose discrimination, 56% something about Negroes themselves, and
19% a mixture of both. A survey of members of Congress found that they tended toward the popular White
views of the riots (Hahn and Feagin 1970). Many Whites mixed sympathy with fear in their views of Blacks.
Most Whites in the 1960s understood Black Power to refer to riots and violent resistance and a majority
reported feeling afraid of riots (Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969). This was not inconsistent with
recognizing the reality of Black grievances. In the same surveys cited above, when Whites were asked if
they would approve of programs to improve living conditions for Blacks, 53% said yes even if it cost them a
detailed compilation of qualitative interview data and quantitative expenditure patterns show substantial
1968. Feagin and Hahn (1973) provide another summary of these responses. Haines (1983) showed that
foundation funding for moderate Black political organizations also escalated in response to the riots. B ut
alongside the carrot of improved social provision was the stick of coercive
social control. Comparing the percentage increase in per capita expenditures of various types in all
the cities over size 50,000 that did and did not have Black riots, Welch (1975) found a strong
positive effect of riots on increases in police expenditures ; the difference for
welfare expenditures was positive but not significant, while there was no
difference for the other kinds of expenditures. There were substantial
expenditures on riot control, including increasing funding and training to the
National Guard and the Army as military back up to police for riot control, a
build up of domestic intelligence and surveillance capacity and
coordination, including undercover agents from both military and
the FBI as well as local police, and in- creased federal funding for local police departments
(Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969; also see Button 1978: 107-179 and Feagin and Hahn 1973: 22638). By 1968, there had been a huge military build up to prepare for a possible civil war, as well as a huge
of his campaign platform, and Black Republicans were essentially driven out of the party (Branch 1998);
Goldwater was soundly defeated by Johnson even as White Southerners changed from Democrat to
Republican. By the 1968 election, support for the repressive res- ponse to riots had grown. Humphrey
argued that riots were caused by discrimination and deprivation, and many still agreed with him, but it was
Nixons law-and-order program and the Southern strategy that won the election, with overtly racist
George Wallace taking another 13% of the popular vote. Although Nixon continued funding for many of the
social welfare prevention programs until the threat of riots was deemed low after the 1972 election, his
administration and especially his attorney general, John Mitchell, escalated the federal support for the
repressive approach to riot control. There was a huge increase in federal funding for police between 1968
and 1972, including a doubling of federal funding for riot control by local police (Button 1978: 138-39). Not
played a major role in disrupting the organizations against which it was directed.
police agencies, the Post source said. Government aviation watchdogs had previously tracked one of the
planes used in the operation while it was making unexplained patrols around Langley, Virginia, the
headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. The revelations have highlighted the increasing
deployment of militarized spying technologies and urban warfare techniques, honed by US military forces
in the Middle East and Central Asia, against the American people. Private spying firms with ties to the US
government, such as Persistent Surveillance Systems, have developed airborne surveillance technologies
on behalf of the government that are capable of recording huge areas, up to 25-square-miles of urban
environment at a time. Persistent CEO Ross McNutt noted that standard scale aerial surveillance
technology used by the government records high-resolution footage of urban environments simultaneously
across five city blocks, at a minimum. In response to the eruption of social outrage after the April 20
funeral of police murder victim Freddie Gray, the states Republican governor declared a state of
emergency and deployed thousands of National Guard troops and militarized police units. The citys
Democratic mayor also imposed a 10 pm-5 a.m. curfew. Humvees, armored vehicles, helicopters and fixed
wing aircraft were put into operation by state and federal security forces as part of a coordinated plan to
suppress the demonstrations. Gatherings of discontented, unarmed civilians were subjected to a barrage
of non-lethal weaponry and hundreds were arrested. The crackdown in Baltimore proceeded in line with
doctrines drawn up by the US Defense Department in its Graduated Defense Matrix, which lays out
tactics for the military suppression of large-scale demonstrations. The operation in Baltimore was a further
test of martial law-style operations. Previous exercises took place in connection with the lockdown in
Boston in 2013 and last years suppression of protests against the police killing of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is a small suburb of St. Louis, but Baltimore is a city of 622,000, located just
Baltimore is the latest indication of the advanced preparations for military rule in America. Politically
isolated, incapable of and opposed to any measures to ameliorate the conditions of grinding poverty and
immense social inequality in America, the ruling class looks upon the masses of workers and youth with
hatred and fear. It has recently been revealed that paramilitary forces referred to protesters in Ferguson
levels beyond that noted in Brown v. Board of Education, racial wealth gaps grow, and racial disparities in
criminal injustice proliferate at a pace that has led to the label The New Jim Crow. In tragic irony, the
Continued movement towards race-neutrality is the hallmark of a series of Supreme Court decisions that
deny the role of institutionalized racism and increasingly limit the role of race in constitutional remedies for
inequality in matters of affirmative action and educational access, voting rights, and all matters of criminal
injustice.8 Criminal justice as it did post- Reconstruction continues to play a central role in the
continued subjugation of Blacks, in particular, and will serve as the central example of both past and
current patterns of discrimination.
discursive moves that work to maintain White racial privilege and power while
simultaneously downplaying the persistence of racial inequality . Many agree, for
example, that the form and content of contemporary racism(s) are subtle and covert, in that
re-appropriation, appropriating the language, forms, and images previously taken by the colonizers and imbuing them
with meanings that resonate with the colonized;
underlying this model set in motion such strong currents that even a writer who is reluctant to acknowledge it and who
Such Manichean
allegories, it could be argued, in effect constitute a grammar of race. This
grammar, as Stuart Hall (1990, 14) maintains, is central to colonial discursive formations
and structured around the following power coordinates: fixed relations of
subordination and domination, with stereotypes grouped around the poles
of superior and inferior natural species , and the displacement of these
stereotypes, imagery, and themes from the language of history into the
language of Nature (1990, 14). Hence, the effect is an essentialized view of the
colonized as inferior and subordinate. If we are to apply a structural metaphor to these insights, it
can be argued that the grammar of race constitutes the deep structure, and that the
various binaries and allegories are permutations and combinations that
emanate at the surface structures of colonial discourses . This is not to suggest that such
may indeed be highly critical of imperialist exploitation is drawn into its vortex. (1985, 63)
surface structures have no impact on the deep structure of the imperial formations of empire, to use Stolers terms
expressions of this grammar of race are evident in the art, advertising, and literature of the high period of colonialism
(Auerbach 2002; McClintock 1995). However, as Stam and Spence (1985, 637) note, [s]ince the beginnings of cinema
coincided with the height of European imperialism, it is hardly surprising that European cinema portrayed the colonized in
an unflattering light. In their groundbreaking analysis of the colonial influence on cinema, Shohat and Stam (1994)
provide detailed analytical accounts of early Hollywood representations of the Other, as well as the tropes that have
continued on to permeate contemporary visual media such as popular television programs, documentaries, and
blockbuster films (see also Boggs and Pollard 2006; Burris 2008; Jiwani 2005, 2010; Nakamura 2009; Shaheen 2003; Sohn
white and dominant point of view), which is naturalized through exnomination (Gabriel 1998); and polarizing these
representations so as to conform to the grammar of race where relations of dominance and subordination are fixed and
sustainability movement to make it not just possible but attractive. This will increase the likelihood that the
changes will spread beyond the pioneers and excite vast populations. This section looks at some ways this
is happening already. John de Graaf of the Take Back Your Time movement describes one way to sell
sustainability that is likely to appeal to many people: working fewer hours. Many employees are working
longer hours even as gains in productivity would allow shorter workdays and longer vacations. Taking back
time will help lower stress, allow healthier lifestyles, better distribute work, and even help the
environment. This last effect will be due not just to less consumption thanks to lower discretionary incomes
but also to people having enough free time to choose the more rewarding and often more sustainable
choicecooking at home with friends instead of eating fast food, for example, making more careful
consumer decisions, even taking slower but more active and relaxing modes of transport. Closely
connected to Take Back Your Time is the voluntary simplicity movement, as Cecile Andrews, co-editor of
Less is More, and Wanda Urbanska, producer and host of Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska, discuss. This
encourages people to simplify their lives and focus on inner well-being instead of material wealth. It can
help inspire people to shift away from the consumer dream and instead rebuild personal ties, spend more
time with family and on leisure activities, and find space in their lives for being engaged citizens.
It is
just our imaginations that limit how we can present sustainability in ways that
inspire people to turn off their televisions and join the movement. Only then,
with millions of people rallying to confront political and economic systems
and working to shift perceptions of what should feel natural and what
should not, will we be able to transform our cultures into something that will
withstand the test of time.
These are just a few of the dozens and dozens of social movements that could have been examined.
1AC Policy
Domestic surveillance in America has historically been
used to document and police people through an
officializing white gaze that entrenches and protects U.S.
colonialism the mapping and defining of the
population is racialized and used to diferentiate and
control populations
Kundnani and Kumar in 15 - Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of
Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. Arun Kundnani
teaches at New York University. His latest book is The Muslims Are Coming!
Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. <Arun and Deepa.
Race, surveillance, and empire International Socialist Review. Issue 96,
Spring 2015.>
the colonial
states of North America: The discovery of dark, unknown lands, which were
conceptually emptied of their peoples and cultures so that their wilderness
might be brought properly to orderi.e., fixed and named and mapped by
an officializing white gaze.9 Through, for example, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, the United States sought to develop methods of identification,
categorization, and enumeration that made the Indigenous population
visible to the surveillance gaze as racial others . Surveillance that defined
and demarcated according to officially constructed racial typologies enabled
the colonial state to sort tribes according to whether they accepted the
priorities of the settler-colonial mission (the good Indians) or resisted it (the
bad Indians).10 In turn, an idea of the US nation itself was produced as a homeland of white,
John Comaroffs description of this process in southern Africa serves equally to summarize
propertied men to be secured against racial others. No wonder, then, that the founding texts of the
modern state invoke the Indigenous populations of America as bearers of the state of nature, to which
the modern state is counterposedwitness Hobbess references to the the Savage people of America.11
The earliest process of gathering systematic knowledge about the other by colonizers often began with
trade and religious missionary work. In the early seventeenth century, trade in furs with the Native
population of Quebec was accompanied by the missionary project. Jesuit Paul Le Jeune worked extensively
with the Montagnais-Naskapi and maintained a detailed record of the people he hoped to convert and
civilize.12 By studying and documenting where and how the savages lived, the nature of their
relationships, their child-rearing habits, and the like, Le Juene derived a four-point program to change the
behaviors of the Naskapi in order to bring them into line with French Jesuit morality. In addition to
sedentarization, the establishment of chiefly authority, and the training and punishment of children, Le
Juene sought to curtail the independence of Naskapi women and to impose a European family structure
based on male authority and female subservience.13 The net result of such missionary work was to pave
the way for the racial projects of colonization and/or integration into a colonial settler nation. By the
of Indian Affairs (later Bureau), which had as one of its tasks the mapping and counting of Native
Americans. The key security question was whether to forcibly displace Native Americans beyond the
colonial territory or incorporate them as colonized subjects; the former policy was implemented in 1830
when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and President Jackson began to drive Indians to the west of
use of surveillance
to produce a census of a colonized population was the first step to controlling
it. Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as define and rule, a process in which, before managing a
heterogeneous population, a colonial power must first set about defining it ; to
do so, the colonial state wielded the census not only as a way of
acknowledging difference but also as a way of shaping, sometimes even
creating, difference.16 The ethnic mapping and demographics unit
programs practiced by US law enforcement agencies today in the name of
counterterrorism are the inheritors of these colonial practices. Both then and
now, state agencies use of demographic information to identify
concentrations of ethnically defined populations in order to target
surveillance resources and to identify kinship networks can be utilized for
the purposes of political policing. Likewise, todays principles of counterinsurgency
warfarewinning hearts and minds by dividing the insurgent from the nonresistantecho similar
techniques applied in the nineteenth century at the settler frontier.
prominent liberal and radical attorneys (Bartley Crum, Martin Popper, Thomas Corcoran, David Wahl,
Benjamin Margolis, Carol King, Robert Silberstein, National Lawyers Guild, Fred Black), Radical labor
leaders and unions (Harry Bridges; United Auto Workers; National Maritime Union; National Union of Marine
Cooks and Stewards; United Public Workers; United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers; Food, Tobacco,
Agricultural and Allied Workers; International Longshoremens and Warehousemens Union; CIO Maritime
Committee; Congress of Industrial Organizations Council), Journalists (I. F. Stone, Philip Jaffe, Kate Mitchell,
Mark Gayn, Leonard Lyons, William Beecher, Marvin Kalb, Henry Brandon, Hedrick Smith, Lloyd Norman,
Hanson Baldwin, Inga Arvad), Civil-rights activists and organizations (Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X;
Southern Christian Leadership Conference; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;
March on Washington Movement; Gandhi Society for Human Rights; Elijah Muhammad; Nation of Islam;
Stokely Carmichael; H. Rap Brown; Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; Alabama Peoples
Education Association; Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants; Southern Conference for Human Welfare;
Black Panther Party; Universal Negro Improvement Association; African Liberation Day Committee), The
Students for a Democratic Society, Ku Klux Klan, National Committee to Abolish HUAC, Socialist Workers
Party, Washington Bookstore Association, Northern California Association of Scientists, Federation of
American Scientists, American Association of Scientific Workers, preWorld War II isolationists (Henry
Grunewald, Ethel Brigham, John OBrien, Lillian Moorehead, Laura Ingalls, America First, Jehovahs
Witnesses, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce), and even prominent personalities (Joe Namath, Harlow
Shapley, Edward Condon, Edward Prichard, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Spock).40 In a bid to shape public
opinion, the FBI also launched a mass media campaign in 1946 that released educational materials to
The telecommunications companies at the time handed over to the NSA all telegrams sent out of and into
names to the National Security Agency of key activists in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements,
hoping that the NSA would be able to find evidence of the communist conspiracy that President Lyndon
Johnson thought must be causing the new militancy of the 1960s. The list included politically active public
figures such as actress Jane Fonda and singer Joan Baez, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver,
and Abbie Hoffman. NSA officers began surveillance of these activists communications, using special
records procedures to prevent discovery of what they knew to be an illegal program. This watch list
program was expanded under President Nixon and named Operation Minaret; in all, the international
communications of more than a thousand US citizens and organizations and more than two thousand
foreign citizens were intercepted.45 Such was the proliferation of government spying in the 1960s that
even such a minor law enforcement agency as the Ohio Highway Patrol ran an intelligence unit claiming to
have student informers on every campus in the state.46 The vast expansion of state surveillance in the
1960s was a response to the new militancy of the movements against the imperialist war in Vietnam and
for civil rights and Black liberation. Initially, security officials assumed the Civil Rights movement in the
South, the campus protests, and the Black insurrections in northern cities were the result of a communist
conspiracy; informants and electronic monitoring were deployed to try to identify the hidden agitators
between thinking of King as having a core self that was prideful and thinking of that prideful self as nothing
more than a performance. In keeping with Judith Butlers theory of performativity, I will suggest that the
performance of identity is all that identity consists of.11 We are no more than what we pretend to be. The
external self we project to others is as real as the internal self that we feel we are holding back. So we
need not resolve the issue of whether Kings pride was how he really felt or just an act. If King played a
proud individual on television, that was as true a part of his identity as any other. This performative notion
of the self has implications for how we think about surveillance; I will start to map out those implications in
so one-sided. The FBI may have been destroying itself at the same time it tried to destroy King.12 In the
mid-1970s, the Church Committee would reveal the nature of the FBIs 1960s surveillance activities.
Revelation of the FBIs surveillance of King was a centerpiece of the Church Committees criticisms of the
FBI.13 As a result of the Church Committees report, Congress attempted to seriously curtail the FBIs
surveillance powers.14 The FBIs suicide pact with King wound up being mutual: we will destroy ourselves
in the United
Statess contemporary surveillance regime. The surveilled are encouraged to
in an attempt to destroy you. The dynamics of this suicide pact may well be reproduced
while the internal sense of self is not more real than the
performance of the self, allowing people to make their internal and performed
selves consistent will make people feel more self actualized . Our government is at
repercussions.21 I argue that
its best when it maximizes the ability of individuals to self-actualize through identity performance.
The most
important thing to understand about this story is that the story itself was
hotly contested and debated at the time. In fact, there was an intense debate
about what to call them: rebellions, insurrections, civil disorders, urban
unrest? I use the term riot because that is what they were called in the mainstream White press.
central to understanding the massive repression we have seen in the U.S. since then.
Dozens of long books and hundreds of articles have told the story in many different ways. In my telling, I
am trying briefly to capture the flavor of the debates, emotions, and issues at stake at the time. The year
1968 was traumatic on many fronts. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. The
U.S. antiwar movement was dominating college campus life. Inde- pendence movements were strong in
Africa. There was revolutionary turmoil in France and protest movements in many countries. All of this
social unrest is relevant, but for under- standing repression in the U.S., we need to remember the Black
burning property. Riots increased in frequency from 1963. The huge 1965 Los Angeles (Watts) riot lasted
several days, was covered full-time on television, and included rooftop snipers shooting at firemen and
crowds chanting burn baby, burn; it has been called the entry of the Black working class into the
struggle. There were more riots in 1966 and then a huge wave of hundreds of riots in 1967, including huge
riots in Newark and Detroit, and then hundreds of riots again in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King,
Jr. The general time trend can be seen in figure 3, copied from Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney (1996),
which shows event counts from New York Times articles. Research by Myers (1997; 2000) shows that riots
diffused between cities in waves connected by mass media coverage, especially television broadcast
networks, while within cities, participants learned of riots through informal communication (Feagin and
Hahn 1973). By the end of the 1960s, virtually every city with a large Black population had had at least
one riot; some had had dozens. Whole sections of major cities had been burned out. Part of the debate was
where to begin the story. Violence began, of course, much earlier, in the White terrorism of the postReconstruction era, in the White communal urban riots of the early 20th century, and in the violent
resistance of both Southern Whites and Northern Whites to nonviolent political actions by Blacks. After the
Birmingham protest, 1963 saw a huge wave of disruptive nonviolent protests in dozens of cities and a huge
wave of White violence in response. Throughout the 1960s, Black leaders and the Black masses hotly
debated whether Black people should eschew all protest to avoid White violent retaliation, engage in
disruptive protest and respond to White violence with unmerited suffering as a moral victory, or fight
escalated even more, and both Blacks and Whites were using apocalyptic language (see, for example,
Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969; Yette 1971). Surveys of Blacks conducted be- tween 1964 and
1968 found that 12 to 17% of Black respondents advocated violence as the best way for Blacks to gain
their rights, one-third to two-thirds (depending on the survey) said that violence helped the cause, and 11
to 35% (depending on the city) were estimated to have participated in several large riots (Feagin and Hahn
1973: 275-82). Some kind of violent race war seemed possible to many observers; in fact, it seemed to be
already underway. A poll in 1968 found that 81% of the population said that law and order has broken
down and 53% reported fear of racial violence (Louis Harris and Associates1968; Urban America and
Urban Coalition 1969). The race war did not happen and the riots declined after 1969. Contrary to popular
belief, however, riots did not go away entirely, as figure 3 indicates. Feagin and Hahn (1973) cite evidence
from a variety of sources that there were hundreds of disorders between 1969 and 1972. There were
scattered riots periodically after that, including a big riot in Miami in 1980 (Ladner, Schwartz, Roker,
Titterud 1981) and a huge riot in Los Angeles after the 1992 not guilty verdict for the police who beat
first episode of part 2 of the Eyes on the Prize PBS video (newly re- released): one of the White civil rights
workers who participated in the 1966 Mississippi march tells the camera that he felt very frightened when
standing in the middle of an angry Black crowd shouting Black Power.1 (Movement scholars who stress
the importance of emotion would do well to revisit the frustration and anger of the Black movement in the
late 1960s, as well as White fear.) There were intense debates at the time about the causes and meaning
(Feagin and Sheatsley 1968; Louis Harris and Associates 1968; Urban Am- erica and Urban Coalition 1969)
One survey in Los Angeles in the late 1960s conducted by a less sympathetic researcher found that Blacks
who subscribed to Black Muslim ideology were more likely to support riots, also finding that their support
was more oriented toward concerns about Black disadvantage than to Muslim theology (Tomlinson 1970).
At the same time, Black people disagreed strongly about whether the riots would help, hurt, or make no
difference to the Black cause, with roughly equal numbers choosing each option (Urban America and Urban
Coalition 1969). Moderate Black leaders and many social scientists argued that insurrection was the
weapon of those whose grievances were not met through peaceful channels (see, for example, Lieberson
and Silverman 1965; Lieske 1978). The Kerner Commission (United States Nation- al Advisory Commission
the cause
of the riots was White racism, discrimination, blocked hopes, and a climate of
lawlessness that had been created by widespread White resistance to laws
mandating equal treatment. President Johnson officially rejected this report. Social scientists
on Civil Disorders 1968), writing after the 1967 riots and before the 1968 riots, argued that
stressed that discriminatory and oppressive police practices both fueled underlying grievances and had
exacerbated racial tensions both historically and in the recent era (Marx 1970a; Perez, Berg, and Myers
2003). Bryan (1979) explicitly argues from the survey data that the riots needed to be understood as part
of the Black movement. In more recent studies of a longer series of race riots, Olzak and colleagues found
that ethnic competition in labor markets predicts riots, not simple deprivation (Olzak and Shanahan 1996;
Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney 1996). Herman stresses the additional importance of residential
succession and spatial competition, showing that most riot fatalities in Detroit and Newark in 1967
occurred in areas of high racial turnover (2005). Popular White views were very different. Several surveys
were cited in a special report written in 1968 one year after the Kerner Commission report (Urban America
and Urban Coalition 1969: 103-104). Nearly half (48.5%) of Whites said the disorders had been planned,
versus only 18% of Blacks. Instead of discrimination and unfair treatment (chosen by 48.5% of Blacks),
Whites said that the main causes of the disorder were looters and other undesirables (34%) and Black
power or other radicals (23.5%). When asked their opinion Repression and Crime Control 7 of the Kerner
Commission report, 53% of whites disagreed that riots were mainly caused by racism, and 59% disagreed
that they were not organized. When asked whether disorders help or hurt the cause of Negro rights, 64%
of Whites said hurt, mostly because they increased anti-Negro sentiments (versus 23% of Blacks). When
Whites were asked whether Negroes with same education were better or worse off than they were, 42%
said better, 46% said same, 5% said worse. Then when they were shown data that Blacks were worse off
and asked why, 19% of Whites chose discrimination, 56% something about Negroes themselves, and
19% a mixture of both. A survey of members of Congress found that they tended toward the popular White
views of the riots (Hahn and Feagin 1970). Many Whites mixed sympathy with fear in their views of Blacks.
Most Whites in the 1960s understood Black Power to refer to riots and violent resistance and a majority
reported feeling afraid of riots (Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969). This was not inconsistent with
recognizing the reality of Black grievances. In the same surveys cited above, when Whites were asked if
they would approve of programs to improve living conditions for Blacks, 53% said yes even if it cost them a
detailed compilation of qualitative interview data and quantitative expenditure patterns show substantial
1968. Feagin and Hahn (1973) provide another summary of these responses. Haines (1983) showed that
foundation funding for moderate Black political organizations also escalated in response to the riots. B ut
alongside the carrot of improved social provision was the stick of coercive
social control. Comparing the percentage increase in per capita expenditures of various types in all
the cities over size 50,000 that did and did not have Black riots, Welch (1975) found a strong
positive effect of riots on increases in police expenditures ; the difference for
welfare expenditures was positive but not significant, while there was no
difference for the other kinds of expenditures. There were substantial
expenditures on riot control, including increasing funding and training to the
National Guard and the Army as military back up to police for riot control, a
build up of domestic intelligence and surveillance capacity and
coordination, including undercover agents from both military and
the FBI as well as local police, and in- creased federal funding for local police departments
(Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969; also see Button 1978: 107-179 and Feagin and Hahn 1973: 22638). By 1968, there had been a huge military build up to prepare for a possible civil war, as well as a huge
of his campaign platform, and Black Republicans were essentially driven out of the party (Branch 1998);
Goldwater was soundly defeated by Johnson even as White Southerners changed from Democrat to
Republican. By the 1968 election, support for the repressive res- ponse to riots had grown. Humphrey
argued that riots were caused by discrimination and deprivation, and many still agreed with him, but it was
Nixons law-and-order program and the Southern strategy that won the election, with overtly racist
George Wallace taking another 13% of the popular vote. Although Nixon continued funding for many of the
social welfare prevention programs until the threat of riots was deemed low after the 1972 election, his
administration and especially his attorney general, John Mitchell, escalated the federal support for the
repressive approach to riot control. There was a huge increase in federal funding for police between 1968
and 1972, including a doubling of federal funding for riot control by local police (Button 1978: 138-39). Not
played a major role in disrupting the organizations against which it was directed.
police agencies, the Post source said. Government aviation watchdogs had previously tracked one of the
planes used in the operation while it was making unexplained patrols around Langley, Virginia, the
headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. The revelations have highlighted the increasing
deployment of militarized spying technologies and urban warfare techniques, honed by US military forces
in the Middle East and Central Asia, against the American people. Private spying firms with ties to the US
government, such as Persistent Surveillance Systems, have developed airborne surveillance technologies
on behalf of the government that are capable of recording huge areas, up to 25-square-miles of urban
environment at a time. Persistent CEO Ross McNutt noted that standard scale aerial surveillance
technology used by the government records high-resolution footage of urban environments simultaneously
across five city blocks, at a minimum. In response to the eruption of social outrage after the April 20
funeral of police murder victim Freddie Gray, the states Republican governor declared a state of
emergency and deployed thousands of National Guard troops and militarized police units. The citys
Democratic mayor also imposed a 10 pm-5 a.m. curfew. Humvees, armored vehicles, helicopters and fixed
wing aircraft were put into operation by state and federal security forces as part of a coordinated plan to
suppress the demonstrations. Gatherings of discontented, unarmed civilians were subjected to a barrage
of non-lethal weaponry and hundreds were arrested. The crackdown in Baltimore proceeded in line with
doctrines drawn up by the US Defense Department in its Graduated Defense Matrix, which lays out
tactics for the military suppression of large-scale demonstrations. The operation in Baltimore was a further
test of martial law-style operations. Previous exercises took place in connection with the lockdown in
Boston in 2013 and last years suppression of protests against the police killing of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is a small suburb of St. Louis, but Baltimore is a city of 622,000, located just
Baltimore is the latest indication of the advanced preparations for military rule in America. Politically
isolated, incapable of and opposed to any measures to ameliorate the conditions of grinding poverty and
immense social inequality in America, the ruling class looks upon the masses of workers and youth with
hatred and fear. It has recently been revealed that paramilitary forces referred to protesters in Ferguson
efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear
testing, stockpiling, and weaponry, while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to
countries and factions around the world, vividly demonstrate how "peace" can become an
abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly
blind to the constant wars and threats of war being waged against
people of color and the planet by those who march for "peace" and by
those they march against. These pacifists, like Gorbachev and Reagan,
frequently want people of color to fear what they fear and define
peace as they define it. They are unmindful that our lands and peoples
have already been and are being destroyed as part of the "final
solution" of the "color line." It is difficult to persuade the remnants of
Native American tribes, the starving of African deserts, and the
victims of the Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the
major danger to human life on the planet and that only a nuclear
"winter" embodies fear and futurelessness for humanity . The peace
movement suffers greatly from its lack of a historical and holistic perspective,
practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of people of
color; the movement's goals and messages have therefore been easily
coopted and expropriated by world leaders who share the same
culture of racial dominance and arrogance. The peace movement's racist
blinders have divorced peace from freedom, from feminism, from
education reform, from legal rights, from human rights, from
international alliances and friendships, from national liberation,
from the particular (for example, black female, Native American male) and the general
(human being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-black power
movement in the United States have always demanded peace with justice, with
liberation, and with social and economic reconstruction and cultural freedom at home
and abroad. The integration of our past and our present holocausts and our
struggle to define our own lives and have our basic needs met are at the
core of the inseparable struggles for world peace and social
betterment. The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always been its
Recent
whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring
about basic changes. It is axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who
are oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed.
Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized and struggled-most
especially, because of their particular history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a
society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination, enlightened science,
and
brothers and sisters of Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring
to speak of it with our lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have
developed the Nazi techniques of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and
stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and the elderlythe "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid bantustans without resources for survival have
replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites
achieve two objectives: The work camps destroy black family and community life, a presumed source of
resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose purpose is to serve the South African state's
drive toward wealth and hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any democratic
rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful assembly, to free speech,
and to political representation. The regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of
dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such as Stephen Biko; penal colonies such
as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely arrested without cause, detained without
limits, and confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation.
Legally and economically, South African apartheid is structural and institutionalized racial war. The
Organization of African Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to
review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The meeting considered
South Africa's racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans
on the continent and a stark reminder of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of
institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who
have used nonviolent resistance charged that those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as
their oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary movements have used organized violence. This is
especially true of national liberation movements that have obtained state power and reorganized the
institutions of their nations for the benefit of the people. If men and women in South Africa do not use
organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be that pacifism
and nonviolence cannot become a way of life for the oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and
limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the developing communities
and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who have and use
nonviolent weapons will refrain from using them long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political
battles. To survive, peoples in developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and
approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South Africa;
sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting
humanitys spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not
It is not
just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments.
Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of
such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing
injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is
just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers.
debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others
daily police practices in NYC, and the often missing perspective of civilians means the nature
of provocative policing remains partially buried not only within dominant
narratives from the police perspective but even among counternarratives
(those stories that provide an account that challenges the master, or dominant narrative). The next
chapter describes the use of participatory action research to begin filling these gaps as well as the
analyses of data from focus groups and archival research in order to respond to unanswered questions
about surveillance threat and civilian response in the police-civilian interaction.
sustainability movement to make it not just possible but attractive. This will increase the likelihood that the
changes will spread beyond the pioneers and excite vast populations. This section looks at some ways this
is happening already. John de Graaf of the Take Back Your Time movement describes one way to sell
sustainability that is likely to appeal to many people: working fewer hours. Many employees are working
longer hours even as gains in productivity would allow shorter workdays and longer vacations. Taking back
time will help lower stress, allow healthier lifestyles, better distribute work, and even help the
environment. This last effect will be due not just to less consumption thanks to lower discretionary incomes
but also to people having enough free time to choose the more rewarding and often more sustainable
choicecooking at home with friends instead of eating fast food, for example, making more careful
consumer decisions, even taking slower but more active and relaxing modes of transport. Closely
connected to Take Back Your Time is the voluntary simplicity movement, as Cecile Andrews, co-editor of
Less is More, and Wanda Urbanska, producer and host of Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska, discuss. This
encourages people to simplify their lives and focus on inner well-being instead of material wealth. It can
help inspire people to shift away from the consumer dream and instead rebuild personal ties, spend more
time with family and on leisure activities, and find space in their lives for being engaged citizens.
Across cultures and time, food has played an important role in helping to define peoples realities.
Mobilizing food producers as well as consumers to clamor for healthy, fair, tasty, sustainable cuisines can
be a shrewd strategy to shift food systems and, through them, broader social and economic systems.
It is
just our imaginations that limit how we can present sustainability in ways that
inspire people to turn off their televisions and join the movement. Only then,
with millions of people rallying to confront political and economic systems
and working to shift perceptions of what should feel natural and what
should not, will we be able to transform our cultures into something that will
withstand the test of time.
These are just a few of the dozens and dozens of social movements that could have been examined.
Case Cards
intelligence assets among the crowds in Baltimore. The police also said
they were monitoring social media to track protests . The military operation in
Baltimore is the latest indication of the advanced preparations for military rule in America. Politically
isolated, incapable of and opposed to any measures to ameliorate the conditions of grinding poverty and
immense social inequality in America, the ruling class looks upon the masses of workers and youth with
hatred and fear. It has recently been revealed that paramilitary forces referred to protesters in Ferguson
The most
important thing to understand about this story is that the story itself was
hotly contested and debated at the time. In fact, there was an intense debate
about what to call them: rebellions, insurrections, civil disorders, urban
unrest? I use the term riot because that is what they were called in the mainstream White press.
central to understanding the massive repression we have seen in the U.S. since then.
Dozens of long books and hundreds of articles have told the story in many different ways. In my telling, I
am trying briefly to capture the flavor of the debates, emotions, and issues at stake at the time. The year
1968 was traumatic on many fronts. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. The
U.S. antiwar movement was dominating college campus life. Inde- pendence movements were strong in
Africa. There was revolutionary turmoil in France and protest movements in many countries. All of this
social unrest is relevant, but for under- standing repression in the U.S., we need to remember the Black
burning property. Riots increased in frequency from 1963. The huge 1965 Los Angeles (Watts) riot lasted
several days, was covered full-time on television, and included rooftop snipers shooting at firemen and
crowds chanting burn baby, burn; it has been called the entry of the Black working class into the
struggle. There were more riots in 1966 and then a huge wave of hundreds of riots in 1967, including huge
riots in Newark and Detroit, and then hundreds of riots again in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King,
Jr. The general time trend can be seen in figure 3, copied from Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney (1996),
which shows event counts from New York Times articles. Research by Myers (1997; 2000) shows that riots
diffused between cities in waves connected by mass media coverage, especially television broadcast
networks, while within cities, participants learned of riots through informal communication (Feagin and
Hahn 1973). By the end of the 1960s, virtually every city with a large Black population had had at least
one riot; some had had dozens. Whole sections of major cities had been burned out. Part of the debate was
where to begin the story. Violence began, of course, much earlier, in the White terrorism of the postReconstruction era, in the White communal urban riots of the early 20th century, and in the violent
resistance of both Southern Whites and Northern Whites to nonviolent political actions by Blacks. After the
Birmingham protest, 1963 saw a huge wave of disruptive nonviolent protests in dozens of cities and a huge
wave of White violence in response. Throughout the 1960s, Black leaders and the Black masses hotly
debated whether Black people should eschew all protest to avoid White violent retaliation, engage in
disruptive protest and respond to White violence with unmerited suffering as a moral victory, or fight
escalated even more, and both Blacks and Whites were using apocalyptic language (see, for example,
Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969; Yette 1971). Surveys of Blacks conducted be- tween 1964 and
1968 found that 12 to 17% of Black respondents advocated violence as the best way for Blacks to gain
their rights, one-third to two-thirds (depending on the survey) said that violence helped the cause, and 11
to 35% (depending on the city) were estimated to have participated in several large riots (Feagin and Hahn
1973: 275-82). Some kind of violent race war seemed possible to many observers; in fact, it seemed to be
already underway. A poll in 1968 found that 81% of the population said that law and order has broken
down and 53% reported fear of racial violence (Louis Harris and Associates1968; Urban America and
Urban Coalition 1969). The race war did not happen and the riots declined after 1969. Contrary to popular
belief, however, riots did not go away entirely, as figure 3 indicates. Feagin and Hahn (1973) cite evidence
from a variety of sources that there were hundreds of disorders between 1969 and 1972. There were
scattered riots periodically after that, including a big riot in Miami in 1980 (Ladner, Schwartz, Roker,
Titterud 1981) and a huge riot in Los Angeles after the 1992 not guilty verdict for the police who beat
first episode of part 2 of the Eyes on the Prize PBS video (newly re- released): one of the White civil rights
workers who participated in the 1966 Mississippi march tells the camera that he felt very frightened when
standing in the middle of an angry Black crowd shouting Black Power.1 (Movement scholars who stress
the importance of emotion would do well to revisit the frustration and anger of the Black movement in the
late 1960s, as well as White fear.) There were intense debates at the time about the causes and meaning
(Feagin and Sheatsley 1968; Louis Harris and Associates 1968; Urban Am- erica and Urban Coalition 1969)
One survey in Los Angeles in the late 1960s conducted by a less sympathetic researcher found that Blacks
who subscribed to Black Muslim ideology were more likely to support riots, also finding that their support
was more oriented toward concerns about Black disadvantage than to Muslim theology (Tomlinson 1970).
At the same time, Black people disagreed strongly about whether the riots would help, hurt, or make no
difference to the Black cause, with roughly equal numbers choosing each option (Urban America and Urban
Coalition 1969). Moderate Black leaders and many social scientists argued that insurrection was the
weapon of those whose grievances were not met through peaceful channels (see, for example, Lieberson
and Silverman 1965; Lieske 1978). The Kerner Commission (United States Nation- al Advisory Commission
the cause
of the riots was White racism, discrimination, blocked hopes, and a climate of
lawlessness that had been created by widespread White resistance to laws
mandating equal treatment. President Johnson officially rejected this report. Social scientists
on Civil Disorders 1968), writing after the 1967 riots and before the 1968 riots, argued that
stressed that discriminatory and oppressive police practices both fueled underlying grievances and had
exacerbated racial tensions both historically and in the recent era (Marx 1970a; Perez, Berg, and Myers
2003). Bryan (1979) explicitly argues from the survey data that the riots needed to be understood as part
of the Black movement. In more recent studies of a longer series of race riots, Olzak and colleagues found
that ethnic competition in labor markets predicts riots, not simple deprivation (Olzak and Shanahan 1996;
Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney 1996). Herman stresses the additional importance of residential
succession and spatial competition, showing that most riot fatalities in Detroit and Newark in 1967
occurred in areas of high racial turnover (2005). Popular White views were very different. Several surveys
were cited in a special report written in 1968 one year after the Kerner Commission report (Urban America
and Urban Coalition 1969: 103-104). Nearly half (48.5%) of Whites said the disorders had been planned,
versus only 18% of Blacks. Instead of discrimination and unfair treatment (chosen by 48.5% of Blacks),
Whites said that the main causes of the disorder were looters and other undesirables (34%) and Black
power or other radicals (23.5%). When asked their opinion Repression and Crime Control 7 of the Kerner
Commission report, 53% of whites disagreed that riots were mainly caused by racism, and 59% disagreed
that they were not organized. When asked whether disorders help or hurt the cause of Negro rights, 64%
of Whites said hurt, mostly because they increased anti-Negro sentiments (versus 23% of Blacks). When
Whites were asked whether Negroes with same education were better or worse off than they were, 42%
said better, 46% said same, 5% said worse. Then when they were shown data that Blacks were worse off
and asked why, 19% of Whites chose discrimination, 56% something about Negroes themselves, and
19% a mixture of both. A survey of members of Congress found that they tended toward the popular White
views of the riots (Hahn and Feagin 1970). Many Whites mixed sympathy with fear in their views of Blacks.
Most Whites in the 1960s understood Black Power to refer to riots and violent resistance and a majority
reported feeling afraid of riots (Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969). This was not inconsistent with
recognizing the reality of Black grievances. In the same surveys cited above, when Whites were asked if
they would approve of programs to improve living conditions for Blacks, 53% said yes even if it cost them a
10% tax increase (Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969).
consequences, as a substantial body of scholarship has docu- mented. For example, Buttons (1978)
detailed compilation of qualitative interview data and quantitative expenditure patterns show substantial
1968. Feagin and Hahn (1973) provide another summary of these responses. Haines (1983) showed that
foundation funding for moderate Black political organizations also escalated in response to the riots. B ut
alongside the carrot of improved social provision was the stick of coercive
social control. Comparing the percentage increase in per capita expenditures of various types in all
the cities over size 50,000 that did and did not have Black riots, Welch (1975) found a strong
positive effect of riots on increases in police expenditures ; the difference for
welfare expenditures was positive but not significant, while there was no
difference for the other kinds of expenditures. There were substantial
expenditures on riot control, including increasing funding and training to the
National Guard and the Army as military back up to police for riot control, a
build up of domestic intelligence and surveillance capacity and
coordination, including undercover agents from both military and
the FBI as well as local police, and in- creased federal funding for local police departments
(Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969; also see Button 1978: 107-179 and Feagin and Hahn 1973: 22638). By 1968, there had been a huge military build up to prepare for a possible civil war, as well as a huge
of his campaign platform, and Black Republicans were essentially driven out of the party (Branch 1998);
Goldwater was soundly defeated by Johnson even as White Southerners changed from Democrat to
Republican. By the 1968 election, support for the repressive res- ponse to riots had grown. Humphrey
argued that riots were caused by discrimination and deprivation, and many still agreed with him, but it was
Nixons law-and-order program and the Southern strategy that won the election, with overtly racist
George Wallace taking another 13% of the popular vote. Although Nixon continued funding for many of the
social welfare prevention programs until the threat of riots was deemed low after the 1972 election, his
administration and especially his attorney general, John Mitchell, escalated the federal support for the
repressive approach to riot control. There was a huge increase in federal funding for police between 1968
and 1972, including a doubling of federal funding for riot control by local police (Button 1978: 138-39). Not
tendencies that flowered in that era, but also all the radical ethnic
movements, including the Chicano and American Indian movements, as well
as Black separatists and militants. The massive repression of all types of
radical social movements is well documented (Marx 1970a; 1973; and 1974). There
was massive surveillance and infiltration of the whole array of left
wing and ethnic minority organizations, and also of the KKK, and this repression
played a major role in disrupting the organizations against which it was directed.
Internalized Surveillance
The US surveillance regime operates not only through
covert observation but also by encouraging dissidents to
self-police and internalize the surveillance to maintain the
status quo
Cooper in 9 - professor of law at Suffolk University <Frank. Surveillance
and Identity Performance: Some Thoughts Inspired by Martin Luther King
(2009). Suffolk University Law School Faculty Publications. Paper 55>
It seems that King, far from being the steadfast figure depicted by U2, struggled with how to respond to
the FBI surveillance. Ultimately, King decided to act as though he either did not know about or did not care
between thinking of King as having a core self that was prideful and thinking of that prideful self as nothing
more than a performance. In keeping with Judith Butlers theory of performativity, I will suggest that the
performance of identity is all that identity consists of.11 We are no more than what we pretend to be. The
external self we project to others is as real as the internal self that we feel we are holding back. So we
need not resolve the issue of whether Kings pride was how he really felt or just an act. If King played a
proud individual on television, that was as true a part of his identity as any other. This performative notion
of the self has implications for how we think about surveillance; I will start to map out those implications in
so one-sided. The FBI may have been destroying itself at the same time it tried to destroy King.12 In the
mid-1970s, the Church Committee would reveal the nature of the FBIs 1960s surveillance activities.
Revelation of the FBIs surveillance of King was a centerpiece of the Church Committees criticisms of the
FBI.13 As a result of the Church Committees report, Congress attempted to seriously curtail the FBIs
surveillance powers.14 The FBIs suicide pact with King wound up being mutual: we will destroy ourselves
in the United
Statess contemporary surveillance regime. The surveilled are encouraged to
destroy themselves in order to avoid surveillance. Meanwhile, the FBI destroys
itself, whether it is eventually curtailed or not, in the process of surveying its
citizenry. The surveilled are encouraged to destroy themselves in at least two ways.
First, surveillance chills.15 When we believe our expressions or associations
might be surveilled, we curtail our activities by a wider berth than is
necessary in order to assure we are in compliance with official norms .16 Second,
and more relevant to performativity theory, pervasive surveillance encourages people to
perform their identities in certain ways and discourages them from
performing their identities in other ways .17 Surveillance curbs dissenters more
than those in the mainstream and thus maintains the status quo.18 Meanwhile,
in an attempt to destroy you. The dynamics of this suicide pact may well be reproduced
the government destroys itself by means of its own surveillance. This is so assuming that what makes our
form of government special is its commitment to the self-actualization of its citizens.19 Self-actualization is
the process whereby people create their own identity by means of experimenting with different behaviors.
It is possible for people to live in an environment that is more or less alienating to the way in which they
perform their identities. Performativity scholars such as Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati say that people
can have an internal sense of self that is distinct from the identity that others attribute to them.20 Kenji
Yoshino emphasizes that individuals may self-actualize but only when they are generally free to perform
their external identity in ways that are consistent with their internal senses of self without fear of
while the internal sense of self is not more real than the
performance of the self, allowing people to make their internal and performed
selves consistent will make people feel more self actualized . Our government is at
repercussions.21 I argue that
its best when it maximizes the ability of individuals to self-actualize through identity performance.
Colonialism/surveillance
intertwined
Surveillance is used to document, control and police
people through an officializing white gaze that entrenches
and protects U.S. colonialism
Kundnani and Kumar in 15 - Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of
Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. Arun Kundnani
teaches at New York University. His latest book is The Muslims Are Coming!
Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. <Arun and Deepa.
Race, surveillance, and empire International Socialist Review. Issue 96,
Spring 2015.>
the colonial
states of North America: The discovery of dark, unknown lands, which were
conceptually emptied of their peoples and cultures so that their wilderness
might be brought properly to orderi.e., fixed and named and mapped by
an officializing white gaze.9 Through, for example, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, the United States sought to develop methods of identification,
categorization, and enumeration that made the Indigenous population
visible to the surveillance gaze as racial others . Surveillance that defined
and demarcated according to officially constructed racial typologies enabled
the colonial state to sort tribes according to whether they accepted the
priorities of the settler-colonial mission (the good Indians) or resisted it (the
bad Indians).10 In turn, an idea of the US nation itself was produced as a homeland of white,
John Comaroffs description of this process in southern Africa serves equally to summarize
propertied men to be secured against racial others. No wonder, then, that the founding texts of the
modern state invoke the Indigenous populations of America as bearers of the state of nature, to which
the modern state is counterposedwitness Hobbess references to the the Savage people of America.11
The earliest process of gathering systematic knowledge about the other by colonizers often began with
trade and religious missionary work. In the early seventeenth century, trade in furs with the Native
population of Quebec was accompanied by the missionary project. Jesuit Paul Le Jeune worked extensively
with the Montagnais-Naskapi and maintained a detailed record of the people he hoped to convert and
civilize.12 By studying and documenting where and how the savages lived, the nature of their
relationships, their child-rearing habits, and the like, Le Juene derived a four-point program to change the
behaviors of the Naskapi in order to bring them into line with French Jesuit morality. In addition to
sedentarization, the establishment of chiefly authority, and the training and punishment of children, Le
Juene sought to curtail the independence of Naskapi women and to impose a European family structure
based on male authority and female subservience.13 The net result of such missionary work was to pave
the way for the racial projects of colonization and/or integration into a colonial settler nation. By the
of Indian Affairs (later Bureau), which had as one of its tasks the mapping and counting of Native
Americans. The key security question was whether to forcibly displace Native Americans beyond the
colonial territory or incorporate them as colonized subjects; the former policy was implemented in 1830
when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and President Jackson began to drive Indians to the west of
committee put it. By the 1870s, Indians were the quantified objects of
governmental intervention; resistance was subdued as much through
rational techniques of racialized surveillance and a professional
bureaucracy as through war.14 The assimilation of Indians became a
comprehensive policy through the Code of Indian Offenses, which included
bans on Indigenous cultural practices that had earlier been catalogued by
ethnographic surveillance. Tim Rowse writes that For the U.S. government to extinguish Indian
sovereignty, it had to be confident in its own. There is no doubting the strength of the sense of manifest
destiny in the United States during the nineteenth-century, but as the new nation conquered and
purchased, and filled the new territories with colonists, it had also to develop its administrative capacity to
govern the added territories and peoples. U.S. sovereign power was not just a legal doctrine and a popular
conviction; it was an administrative challenge and achievement that included acquiring, by the 1870s, the
ability to conceive and measure an object called the Indian population.15 The
use of surveillance
to produce a census of a colonized population was the first step to controlling
it. Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as define and rule, a process in which, before managing a
heterogeneous population, a colonial power must first set about defining it ; to
do so, the colonial state wielded the census not only as a way of
acknowledging difference but also as a way of shaping, sometimes even
creating, difference.16 The ethnic mapping and demographics unit
programs practiced by US law enforcement agencies today in the name of
counterterrorism are the inheritors of these colonial practices. Both then and
now, state agencies use of demographic information to identify
concentrations of ethnically defined populations in order to target
surveillance resources and to identify kinship networks can be utilized for
the purposes of political policing. Likewise, todays principles of counterinsurgency
warfarewinning hearts and minds by dividing the insurgent from the nonresistantecho similar
techniques applied in the nineteenth century at the settler frontier.
bombings. FBI agents also secretly distributed derogatory and scurrilous material to police, Congress,
elected officials, other federal agencies, and the mass media.42 In an attempt to neutralize Martin
Luther King, Jr., who, the FBI worried, might abandon his obedience to white liberal doctrines (as
indeed he did), he was placed under intense surveillance, and attempts were
made to destroy his marriage and induce his suicide . In various cities, the FBI and
local police used fake letters and informants to stir up violence between rival
factions and gangs to disrupt the Black Panther Party. In a number of cases,
police departments or federal agents carried out the direct assassination of
Black Panthers.44 Since 1945, the government had been running a mass
spying program known as Project Shamrock, which the NSA took over in 1952.
The telecommunications companies at the time handed over to the NSA all telegrams sent out of and into
names to the National Security Agency of key activists in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements,
hoping that the NSA would be able to find evidence of the communist conspiracy that President Lyndon
Johnson thought must be causing the new militancy of the 1960s. The list included politically active public
figures such as actress Jane Fonda and singer Joan Baez, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver,
and Abbie Hoffman. NSA officers began surveillance of these activists communications, using special
records procedures to prevent discovery of what they knew to be an illegal program. This watch list
program was expanded under President Nixon and named Operation Minaret; in all, the international
communications of more than a thousand US citizens and organizations and more than two thousand
foreign citizens were intercepted.45 Such was the proliferation of government spying in the 1960s that
even such a minor law enforcement agency as the Ohio Highway Patrol ran an intelligence unit claiming to
have student informers on every campus in the state.46 The vast expansion of state surveillance in the
1960s was a response to the new militancy of the movements against the imperialist war in Vietnam and
for civil rights and Black liberation. Initially, security officials assumed the Civil Rights movement in the
South, the campus protests, and the Black insurrections in northern cities were the result of a communist
conspiracy; informants and electronic monitoring were deployed to try to identify the hidden agitators
Luther King Jr. According to Garrow (1981:172), in the fall of 1965, the objective of
surveillance shifted from discrediting King to prefiguring the civil-rightsrelated activities of King and the SCLC. This phase of s urveillance aimed to
gain political intelligence that would allow the Bureau to more effectively
disrupt the movement. This change in purpose was facilitated by the infiltration of an informant.
The FBI had numerous informants working inside the SCLC. Because of the onerous amount of transcribing
and paperwork that a wiretap or Elsur generates, the Bureau had been looking for an infiltrator since at
least the middle of 1963 (Garrow 1981:173). By the fall of 1965, the Bureau had its man: James A Harrison,
a young accountant in the SCLC who agreed to double as an FBI informant. Codenamed AT 13878-S,
Harrison worked closely with Atlanta Agent Alan G Sentinella; they met weekly, with Harrison providing
particulars on Kings itinerary and travel plans (Churchill and Vander Wall 2002:55; Branch 2006:369). They
also communicated by telephone. Harrison also recounted for the FBI specific conversations between King
and his top aides, proffered lists of cities and rural areas where King aimed to recruit supporters, and
accompanied King and a number of other SCLC workers to Memphis during the final weeks of Kings life.
Harrison produced substantial information on the SCLCs internal affairs to the FBI. For his efforts, the
Bureau paid Harrison more than the salary King and the SCLC paid him (Branch 2006:662, 668). Harrison
was not the only person to penetrate the SCLCs ranks. As part of an expanded program to infiltrate and
surveil the Poor Peoples Movement, FBI informants wedged their way into the campaign where they
deliberately disrupted organizing activity. In Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, DC, FBI informants stultified
the campaign by staging dirty tricks and fanning internal dissension (Garrow 1986:607). Civilrights
organizer Hosea Williams reportedly lost 200 recruits because of Bureau whisper campaigns that wafted
through both the on-the-ground mobilizing sessions and the mass media (Branch 2006:709). The Poor
Peoples Movement was designed to scale shift from various localized anti-poverty struggles to a descent
on Washington, DC where thousands of protesters were to demand from Congress a federally legislated
economic bill of rights. The program ultimately collapsed in June 1968, two months after Kings
assassination, thereby finalizing the FBIs scale squelching through various forms of surveillance. The
change in the purpose of state surveillance also coincided with Kings radical turn, where he deeply and
publicly questioned US militarism and imperialistic tendencies. Along the way, he began to interrogate
capitalism as the system that gave rise to such trends as it objectified human beings. Therefore, Garrow
(1981:208) writes, In the last twelve months of his life King represented a far greater political threat to
the reigning American government than he ever had before. An intensified interest in his political activities
less of a threat because of his age. King could be a real contender for this position should he abandon his
supposed obedience to white, liberal doctrines (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. ... 3
discrediting them (Hoover 1968). This COINTELPRO was in effect through Kings
assassination on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.13
The FBI had numerous informants working inside the SCLC. Because of the onerous amount of transcribing
and paperwork that a wiretap or Elsur generates, the Bureau had been looking for an infiltrator since at
least the middle of 1963 (Garrow 1981:173). By the fall of 1965, the Bureau had its man: James A Harrison,
a young accountant in the SCLC who agreed to double as an FBI informant. Codenamed AT 13878-S,
Harrison worked closely with Atlanta Agent Alan G Sentinella; they met weekly, with Harrison providing
particulars on Kings itinerary and travel plans (Churchill and Vander Wall 2002:55; Branch 2006:369). They
also communicated by telephone. Harrison also recounted for the FBI specific conversations between King
and his top aides, proffered lists of cities and rural areas where King aimed to recruit supporters, and
accompanied King and a number of other SCLC workers to Memphis during the final weeks of Kings life.
Harrison produced substantial information on the SCLCs internal affairs to the FBI. For his efforts, the
Bureau paid Harrison more than the salary King and the SCLC paid him (Branch 2006:662, 668). Harrison
was not the only person to penetrate the SCLCs ranks. As part of an expanded program to infiltrate and
surveil the Poor Peoples Movement, FBI informants wedged their way into the campaign where they
deliberately disrupted organizing activity. In Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, DC, FBI informants stultified
the campaign by staging dirty tricks and fanning internal dissension (Garrow 1986:607). Civilrights
organizer Hosea Williams reportedly lost 200 recruits because of Bureau whisper campaigns that wafted
through both the on-the-ground mobilizing sessions and the mass media (Branch 2006:709). The Poor
Peoples Movement was designed to scale shift from various localized anti-poverty struggles to a descent
on Washington, DC where thousands of protesters were to demand from Congress a federally legislated
economic bill of rights. The program ultimately collapsed in June 1968, two months after Kings
assassination, thereby finalizing the FBIs scale squelching through various forms of surveillance. The
change in the purpose of state surveillance also coincided with Kings radical turn, where he deeply and
publicly questioned US militarism and imperialistic tendencies. Along the way, he began to interrogate
capitalism as the system that gave rise to such trends as it objectified human beings. Therefore, Garrow
(1981:208) writes, In the last twelve months of his life King represented a far greater political threat to
the reigning American government than he ever had before. An intensified interest in his political activities
form of electronic surveillance,3 wiretapping, mail opening, file storage, and black bag jobs. 4
Spatial
compression hinders dissident citizens from reorganizing spatial scales, which
is an integral part of social strategies to combat and defend control over
limited resources and/or a struggle for empowerment (Swyngedouw and Heynen
2003:913). In this paper, the struggle over the production of scale will be explored through the
FBIs surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr during a sociospatial conjuncture
spanning 1957 through 1968.
intimidation, as embedded within the process of social-movement demobilization.
possibility of gaining external assistance from potential movement supporters and therefore mitigates
against scale jumping. Despite the attempts of the Church Committee to place restrictions on the
surveillance activities of the FBI (US Senate 1976:370371), the Bureau was hardly de-toothed. In fact, in
Act permits federal agents to carry out sneak-and-peek searches, which are searches of an individuals
home or office that do not require showing a search warrant until after the search has occurred. This
delayed notice may occur as long as the Bureau can show reasonable cause to believe that providing
relates to surveillance and therefore spatial compression. Section 215 allows the FBI to obtain any
tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) as long as these items are
relevant to a terrorism investigation. The law does not require the FBI to demonstrate that the records
are those of a person linked to suspected terrorists (US Congress 2001:Sec 215). The original PATRIOT Act
permanently gagged people who fulfill these orders, preventing them from telling anyone about the
the watchword communism has been replaced by terrorism, and by blunting the probable-cause
requirements for surveillance, this legislation has afforded the FBI renewed and capacious space to carry
out widespread surveillance for anti-terrorism, national-security purposes. Surveillance-induced deterrence
has been fortified by recent revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been surveilling US
citizens without a warrant (Risen and Lichtblau 2005). In general, the combination of high technology and
recent legislation like the USA Patriot Act is likely to extend surveillance as a staple mode of spatial
compression for years to come. Since 1976 when the Church Committee issued its Final Report, technology
has advanced significantly, and, as technology has advanced, so has the possibility of ever more
surreptitious forms of surveillance. Herbert Marcuse (1964:xv) wrote, Technology serves to institute new,
more effective, more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. Perhaps with the Internet and
ever-advancing tracking technologies (Shoval and Isaacson 2006)including the US militarys global
surveillance and power projection networks (Graham 2006:250)this assertion has never been truer.
Ever-faster computer networks with skyrocketing storage capacities qualitatively alter modern-day
surveillance, facilitating complex regimes of dataveillance that are quietly embedded in the routines of
everyday life. Data warehouses allow for the The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr 751 storage of information
that may seem innocuous today but that may be incriminating tomorrow, thus allowing for social sorting
(Lyon 2003b; Parenti 2003). Marcuse astutely points us toward an important dialectic for dissident citizens
to consider: the relational nature of technologyfacilitated opportunity and suppression via surveillanceinduced spatial compression. Vincent Boudreau (2002:30) notes that Over time, interactions between
state repression and social movements created sets of relational possibilities between social and state
article attempts to imbue such an assessment with notions of space and scale since these relational
possibilities, which include spatial compression and the stultification of scale jumping, are inherently
and the SCLC highlights such scale squelching, the inverse of what Smith (1992:60) dubs scale jumping.
database rested on such supposed indicators of gang membership as high-five handshakes and wearing
incarceration of Black Americans tripled,54 establishing the system of mass incarceration that Michelle
Alexander refers to as the new Jim Crow.55 And yet those in prison were only a quarter of those subject to
supervision by the criminal justice system, with its attendant mechanisms of routine surveillance and
intermediate sanctions, such as house arrests, boot camps, intensive supervision, day reporting,
community service, and electronic tagging. Criminal records databases, which are easily accessible to
Goffman
has written of the ways that mass incarceration is not just a matter of
imprisonment itself but also the systems of policing and surveillance
that track young Black men and label them as would-be criminals
before and after their time in prison. From stops on the street to
probation meetings, these systems, she says, have transformed poor Black
neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives . A climate of fear and
potential employers, now hold files on around one-third of the adult male population.56 Alice
suspicion pervades everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities will
police forces and the regular occurrences of police killings of Black people ,
such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. Discussions of the surveillance
of Muslim Americans usually begin with 9/11 and make little attempt to locate
them in the longer history of racial surveillance in the United States. Yet the
continuities are striking, particularly for Black Muslims, who have been seen
as extremists and subject to national security monitoring since the 1940s.
Already in the late 1960s, Arab American student groups involved in
supporting the Palestinian national movement had come under surveillance
and, in 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives known as
Operation Boulder that enabled the CIA and FBI to coordinate with the proIsrael lobby in monitoring Arab activists.
federal national security funds made available after 9/11 and stop and frisk has skyrocketed. The !!19
NYPD has been spying on range of communities using CIA officers to train its intelligence officers (Apuzzo
& Goldman, 2011; Goldman, Sullivan, & Apuzzo, 2011). While Vitale (2011) argues that such changes have
almost exclusively affected NYPD counterterrorism efforts and have had little impact on beat officers; I
homeland security is about...seeing the homeland in a state of constant emergency from threats within
and without (in order to) generate forms of radical insecurity (cited in DeGenova, 2002, p. 423).
This
warrant, to protect the (narrowly defined) public from a fear that cannot be
relieved extends the possibilities for stop and frisk beyond its historical
reliance on public safety discourse into a national security that all must do
their part to defend. The case that heads this chapter acts as coordinate in a geography of
policing that functions as an often violent keeping of both local and national
order. With stop and frisk, the nature of surveillance is changing the nature of
urban civil life and civilians are fighting over those changes. Yet, the benefit
to some previously rejected groups seems to be outweighing any allegiance
to sides that continue to oppose these shifts
Surveillance = Racialized
Panopticon
The afs critique of racialized surveillance is a critique of
the structure of the Panopticon the surveillant practices
of the prison industrial complex and other forms of
policing are rooted in the way whites established
disciplinary power over slaves
Nielson in 11 <Cynthia. Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on
Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls
Philosophy and Literature. Volume 35, Number 2, October 2011. Pgs 251367>
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault develops a notion often referenced in the
literature as panopticism. Drawing upon Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a
towerlike structure designed to facilitate simultaneous surveillance of
prisoners from a stable centralized location, Foucault describes how prisons
and other institutions continue the panoptic tradition , albeit with everincreasing technological sophistication. As Foucault explains, the very architectural
structure of the Panopticon allows the gaze of the warden upon the prisoners
to be experienced as perpetual and inescapable . Through various means
from psychological manipulation to the application of physical violencethe
prisoners are made aware of this ever-present gaze and over time the
external surveillance is internalized. Although Douglass's writings precede
Foucault's by more than a century, the former's vivid descriptions of life as a
slave in a racialized society parallel and corroborate the latter's analyses,
which is not to deny genuine historical, institutional, and technological
differences. For example, Douglass describes how Mr. Covey, a well-known slavebreaker to whom he was sent for "disciplinary purposes," exerted his own
pantoptic gaze upon the slaves. In order to maximize his slaves' production
and to make his slaves "feel that he was ever present," Mr. Covey would
approach the slaves clandestinely and at irregular times in order to catch
them by surprise (p. 56). While the slaves were laboring in the fields, Covey would even crawl on all
fours to maintain his stealth. Then he would appear suddenly, yelling loudly and commanding the slaves to
every tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the plantation" (p. 57). Notice how
Douglass employs biblical images in his description of Covey: the New Testament compares Jesus's second
advent, of which none but the Father knows the precise time or day, to a coming "like a thief in the night"
(1 Thess. 5:2, NRSV). In accordance with my earlier mention of slaveholders operating in lawless spaces,
Douglass here describes Covey as mimicking the divine attribute of omnipresence in order to impose his
will upon his subjects and further assert his sovereignty. If this characterization is correct, then Covey's
actions reveal not only his own perverse view of power, but they also tell us something about his [End
Page 254] view of God. In other words, Covey does not see God as a lover wooing his wandering beloved
or a shepherd willing to risk his life to bring back his straying sheep; rather, his God must assert his power
discursive moves that work to maintain White racial privilege and power while
simultaneously downplaying the persistence of racial inequality . Many agree, for
example, that the form and content of contemporary racism(s) are subtle and covert, in that
efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear
testing, stockpiling, and weaponry, while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to
countries and factions around the world, vividly demonstrate how "peace" can become an
abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly
blind to the constant wars and threats of war being waged against
people of color and the planet by those who march for "peace" and by
those they march against. These pacifists, like Gorbachev and Reagan,
frequently want people of color to fear what they fear and define
peace as they define it. They are unmindful that our lands and peoples
have already been and are being destroyed as part of the "final
solution" of the "color line." It is difficult to persuade the remnants of
Native American tribes, the starving of African deserts, and the
victims of the Cambodian "killing fields" that nuclear war is the
major danger to human life on the planet and that only a nuclear
"winter" embodies fear and futurelessness for humanity . The peace
movement suffers greatly from its lack of a historical and holistic perspective,
practice, and vision that include the voices and experiences of people of
color; the movement's goals and messages have therefore been easily
coopted and expropriated by world leaders who share the same
culture of racial dominance and arrogance. The peace movement's racist
blinders have divorced peace from freedom, from feminism, from
education reform, from legal rights, from human rights, from
international alliances and friendships, from national liberation,
from the particular (for example, black female, Native American male) and the general
(human being). Nevertheless, social movements such as the civil rights-black power
movement in the United States have always demanded peace with justice, with
liberation, and with social and economic reconstruction and cultural freedom at home
and abroad. The integration of our past and our present holocausts and our
struggle to define our own lives and have our basic needs met are at the
core of the inseparable struggles for world peace and social
betterment. The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always been its
Recent
whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring
about basic changes. It is axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who
are oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed.
Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized and struggled-most
especially, because of their particular history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a
society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination, enlightened science,
experience of Jews and other Europeans under the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the
totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of torture, and the demonical apparatus of war aimed at
the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain death at Auschwitz and
said, "You will be a remembrance-You tell the story. You survive." She lived. He died. Many have criticized
the Jews for forcing non-Jews to remember the 6 million Jews who died under the Nazis and for etching the
U.S. soldiers. We are the women and children of the bantustans and
refugee camps and the prisoners of Robbin Island. We are the starving in
the Sahel, the poor in Brazil, the sterilized in Puerto Rico. We are the
brothers and sisters of Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring
to speak of it with our lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have
developed the Nazi techniques of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and
stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and the elderlythe "useless appendages of South Africa"-into barren, arid bantustans without resources for survival have
replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sex-segregated barracks and cells attached to work sites
achieve two objectives: The work camps destroy black family and community life, a presumed source of
resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose purpose is to serve the South African state's
drive toward wealth and hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa disallows any democratic
rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful assembly, to free speech,
and to political representation. The regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house arrests of
dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such as Stephen Biko; penal colonies such
as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely arrested without cause, detained without
limits, and confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation.
Legally and economically, South African apartheid is structural and institutionalized racial war. The
Organization of African Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to
review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The meeting considered
South Africa's racist apartheid regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans
on the continent and a stark reminder of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of
institutionalized oppression and strife." Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who
have used nonviolent resistance charged that those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as
their oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary movements have used organized violence. This is
especially true of national liberation movements that have obtained state power and reorganized the
institutions of their nations for the benefit of the people. If men and women in South Africa do not use
organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave. Could it be that pacifism
and nonviolence cannot become a way of life for the oppressed? Are they only tactics with specific and
limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the developing communities
and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who have and use
nonviolent weapons will refrain from using them long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political
battles. To survive, peoples in developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and
approaches. Sometimes arms are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South Africa;
sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting
Racism/Structural Violence
Outweighs
Racism must be rejected in every instance without
compromise
Memmi 2k, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris 2000, Albert-;
RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission,
without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a
struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One
cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house,
especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other
people which is to diminish what is human.
humanitys spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not
It is not
just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments.
Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of
such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing
injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is
just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers.
debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others
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.
Whether or not the United States has ever had a legitimate claim
to that top spot -- or whether there should be spots on top for any nation(s) -the days of uncontested dominance are over: Our economy is in permanent
decline and our military power continues to fade . We are still the wealthiest
society in history, but we are no longer the dynamic heart of the global
economy. Our military is still able to destroy at will, but the wars of the past
decade have demonstrated the limits of that barbarism. How should the U.S. public
unsustainable.
react to this shift? One approach would be to acknowledge that predatory corporate capitalism based on
greed and First World imperialism based on violence have produced obscene levels of inequality, both
within societies and between societies, that are inconsistent with those basic moral and political principles.
Our task is to reshape systems and institutions before its too late . That kind
of critical self-reflection also leads to the conclusion that our society not only
fails on the criterion of social justice but also is ecologically unsustainable. We
are a profligate, consumption-mad society, in a world in which unsustainable living arrangements are the
norm in the developed world and spreading quickly in the developing world. We cant predict the time
frame for collapse if we continue on this trajectory, but we can be reasonably certain that without major
changes in our relationship to the larger living world the ecosphere will at some point (likely within
decades) be unable to support large-scale human life as we know it. These crises, if honestly
acknowledged and squarely faced, would test our capacity to analyze and adapt -- theres no guarantee
that enough time remains to prevent catastrophe. Without such honesty, there is no hope of a decent
future. So, the bad news is that were in trouble. The worse news is that the mainstream political culture
cannot face this reality. Dissident political organizing must take into account the fact that contemporary
America is deeply delusional. Our collective life is shaped by a propaganda-driven political system that
ignores and evades. Political leaders -- from the reactionary right of the Republican Party to the liberal left
of the Democratic Party -- are not interested in creating new systems to face these challenges but instead
are mired in trivial debates about how to duct-tape together the existing social, economic, and political
systems to allow us to live in our delusions a bit longer. In addition to critiquing the delusions of the
dominant culture, we dissidents have to make sure we dont absorb those same delusions. We have to be
honest not only about the promise of social movements but their limits. My fear is that many -- maybe
even most -- people who identify with progressive/left/radical politics are in denial about the depth of the
crises and, therefore, prone to misjudge the potential of traditional social movements. Those of us who
define ourselves by our commitment to social justice and ecological sustainability -- those who want to
this often
plays out: A dissident speaker offers a critique of some aspect of the
dominant cultures political, economic, or social systems. The task of taking
on those systems seems overwhelming, and someone in the audience asks,
Is there any hope that we can change things? The speaker acknowledges
the difficulty of the task, but points out that social movements in the past
have faced great challenges, lost many battles along the way, and
persevered to make the world a better place . In the United States, the speaker often cites
make the world a better place -- have to be careful to avoid delusions of our own. Heres how
the civil rights movement as an example: Courageous people organizing over centuries to challenge the
deeply entrenched white supremacy that defined the country, ending first slavery and then formal
course, ups and downs in these decades. The U.S. debacle in Southeast Asia led to doubts about U.S.
power and methods, but those were washed away by the demise of the Soviet Union and the American
victory in the Cold War at the end of the 1980s. There were economic recessions, but they didnt disturb
a widely shared belief that the economy, over the long haul, would grow indefinitely. There was a brief
period of concern in the 1970s about environmental limits, but when predictions of short-term disaster
proved imprecise, most people quit worrying. Most of the dissident political analysis and organizing of the
past half century also has gone forward with an assumption of economic growth and ecological stability.
The goal of much of this organizing was to make that stable, growing world a fairer place with a more just
distribution of power and resources. I believe that even many of those fighting against U.S. domination of
the world expected -- and wanted -- to live in a world in which the United States remained if not central
and obscenely wealthy, at least important and comfortable. To borrow a phrase from songwriter John
Gorka, that is the old future, and the old futures gone -- dead and gone, never to return. While the
dominant culture may indulge its delusions of endless bounty, thats not how the cards are falling. What
does that mean for political dissidents? With so many variables and contingencies, any attempt at specific
prediction cant be taken seriously. But we have to do our best to anticipate what is coming so that we can
organize as effectively as possible. The key shift: We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not
expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural
resources) and more of other things weve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and
environmental disruption). That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our
political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by
subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources
and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesnt
automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during
hard times. My concerns about this are exacerbated by two trends in contemporary society: a diminished
capacity for empathy and a dwindling connection to the natural world. On empathy: Capitalism defines
human beings as primarily greedy, self-interested animals designed to maximize their own position,
especially in the acquisition of material goods and status. That instinct obviously is part of our nature, but
-- just as obviously -- that is not all there is to human nature; given the long evolutionary history of humans
in band-level societies defined by solidarity and cooperation, we should assume the greedy instincts
probably are not primary. Yet in capitalism that sociopathic instinct is rewarded and reinforced. With each
generation that lives in such a system, our capacity for empathy is undermined. This is not an argument
against individuality or for complete subordination to the collective, but merely recognition of one of the
ugliest aspects of capitalism -- the belief that we can ignore the fate of others and still make a decent
world. On nature: In a high-energy/high-technology society that is increasingly mass-mediated, with each
generation we grow more alienated from the larger living world. Just as capitalism undermines our
connections to each other, industrial society undermines our connections to other species and the
ecosystems on which we depend. The industrial world is a dead world, and our immersion in that world
makes it harder for us to see what is dying. This is not an argument against all technology or humans use
of our creative capacity to change our environment, but merely recognition of one of the scariest aspects
of modernity -- the belief that we can ignore the living world and still live in the world. There is nothing
terribly new in these warnings. Lets go back to the civil rights movement and another of Kings
memorable speeches, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside
Church in New York City. In his critique of the U.S. attack on Vietnam and the larger forces behind that
attack, King said: I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a
nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented
society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights,
are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered. Ask yourself, where do we stand on the struggle to move
from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society? What about our obsession with machines and
computers? The cultures worship of profit motives and property rights? How much progress have the past
four decades of progress brought? None of this is a call to abandon organizing or sink into the paralysis of
despair. Its simply a suggestion that we deal with reality. Is the sky falling? Of course not, because the sky
doesnt fall -- thats the wrong metaphor. Better to ask, is the sky darkening? What is my program for
organizing in a world beneath a darkened sky? I have no program, only some observations and tentative
As we work on specific policy issues, lets organize with an eye toward building not coalitions but
communities. In hard times, coalitions evaporate, but communities have a shot at surviving. Second,
whatever projects we pursue, there should be a component that connects people to the non-human world
and includes physical work in that world. We need not disconnect completely from our abstract analytical
work and computers, but every project should give us a chance to do physical work with others, outdoors
as much as possible. Those first two instincts have led me to redirect a considerable amount of my time,
energy, and money to a progressive community center we are building in Austin, TX, 5604 Manor,
http://www.5604manor.org/. There is important and exciting organizing and advocacy work going on there,
but just as important is the community-building activity as we renovate the building, clean up the back
yard, plant gardens, and get to know each other across lines of age, race, and language. These instincts
are captured in the first stanza of William Staffords poem, A Ritual to Read to Each Other: If you dont
know the kind of person I am and I dont know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may
prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. My third instinct may seem
obvious: We need to tell all the truths that we know and feel. My sense is that this is our most difficult task,
to speak honestly of the darkening sky. In the dominant culture, such talk is most often ignored -- people
either refuse to listen, laugh it off, or deride it as defeatist. Even in dissident circles, attempts to discuss
these subjects bluntly often lead people to disengage or demand that I only speak in a positive manner.
But
every day there are more people -- though still a small minority -- who
want to face what is coming, even though such a reckoning deepens our
grief. Our task is to speak aloud what others may feel but may be afraid to
voice. Perhaps the most radical act today is to speak the truth about a
darkening sky and remain committed to organizing, knowing there is no
guarantee we can endure, let alone prevail . This spirit is captured in the last stanza of
Staffords poem: For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them
back to sleep; the signals we give -- yes, no, or maybe -- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
The potential power of social movements at this moment in history flows from
this commitment to speaking the truth -- not truth to power, which is too
invested in its delusions to listen -- but truth to each other.
sustainability movement to make it not just possible but attractive. This will increase the likelihood that the
changes will spread beyond the pioneers and excite vast populations. This section looks at some ways this
is happening already. John de Graaf of the Take Back Your Time movement describes one way to sell
sustainability that is likely to appeal to many people: working fewer hours. Many employees are working
longer hours even as gains in productivity would allow shorter workdays and longer vacations. Taking back
time will help lower stress, allow healthier lifestyles, better distribute work, and even help the
environment. This last effect will be due not just to less consumption thanks to lower discretionary incomes
but also to people having enough free time to choose the more rewarding and often more sustainable
choicecooking at home with friends instead of eating fast food, for example, making more careful
consumer decisions, even taking slower but more active and relaxing modes of transport. Closely
connected to Take Back Your Time is the voluntary simplicity movement, as Cecile Andrews, co-editor of
Less is More, and Wanda Urbanska, producer and host of Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska, discuss. This
encourages people to simplify their lives and focus on inner well-being instead of material wealth. It can
help inspire people to shift away from the consumer dream and instead rebuild personal ties, spend more
time with family and on leisure activities, and find space in their lives for being engaged citizens.
It is
just our imaginations that limit how we can present sustainability in ways that
inspire people to turn off their televisions and join the movement. Only then,
with millions of people rallying to confront political and economic systems
These are just a few of the dozens and dozens of social movements that could have been examined.
and working to shift perceptions of what should feel natural and what
should not, will we be able to transform our cultures into something that will
withstand the test of time.
innovative use of technologies, but they can defy replication by others without comparable technical
capabilities or resources. Furthermore, focusing on individual agents of surveillance (such as store clerks,
security guards, camera operators, or police) artificially reduces the complexity of the problem: many of
these individuals are underpaid yet completely dependent upon their jobs, so they might be easy targets,
Solvency Cards
Subjugation is maintained through the power of
authoritative discourse but counterdiscourse creates the
possibility for new relationships, meanings and contexts
Nielson in 11 <Cynthia. Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on
Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls
Philosophy and Literature. Volume 35, Number 2, October 2011. Pgs 251367>
Auld's remarks on the dangers of teaching a slave to read and the seriousness with which he spoke made a
motivation was in large part due to the strong opposition he sensed in Mr. Auld to his becoming literate.
"What he most dreaded, that I most desired . . .; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my
learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn" (NL, p. 38). In short, at
this point in Douglass's journey, he was convinced that his freedom could be achieved primarily through
Douglass
also perceived a connection between knowledge and power [End Page 259] and
that the asymmetrical master/slave relation was maintained by keeping the
slave uneducated. Knowledge must flow in one directionfrom master to
slave. The (dominating) authority defining the master depends in part upon his ability to keep the slave
the attainment of literacy. Thus, he committed himself to achieving this goal at all costs.
ignorant and to (at least) create the impression of the master's own intellectual superiority and ability to
exercise local as well as sociopolitical and legal disciplinary actions should the slave rebel. As Lisa Sisco
observes, "Douglass
understands that literacy can provide the power to redefine relationships of authority."8 Literacy, however, must be understood as
polysemous, dynamic, and occurring in stages. To emphasize the processive character of
literacy, Sisco describes Douglass's phase in which he realized that the productive nature of the power
relation between master and slave was constituted and maintained in part by keeping the slave ignorant,
as "pre-literate" ("WSL," p. 196). At this stage, Douglass is not yet literate but is "attracted to an abstract
ideal of literacy" (p. 196). As we shall see shortly, once he advances in his abilities to read, write, and
engage in public discourse, he begins to experience the very double-sidedness of literacy described by Mr.
Auldfor the slave, education "could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him
discontented and unhappy" (NL, p. 37). Sisco then brings Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptions of "authoritative
discourse" and "internally persuasive discourse" into conversation with Douglass's account of his
movement from slavery to freedom. According to Bakhtin, individuals find themselves always and ever in
the process of an "ideological becoming," which is a "process of selectively assimilating the words of
sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as it were, hieratic)
language. . . . It is akin to taboo, i.e., a name that must not be taken in vain" (p. 342). In other words, one
ought not question authoritative discourseto do so is itself a transgressive and treasonous act, a sign of
rebellion or perhaps backwardness. Not only does a certain rigidity and calcification characterize
authoritative discourse, but likewise its "framing context" is immovable, frozen. Such language "remains
sharply demarcated, compact and inert: . . . it is fully complete, it has but a single meaning, the letter is
fully sufficient to the sense and calcifies it" (p. 343). One cannot improvise with authoritative discourse,
nor can one reharmonize its melodies; it requires a unison voice; it demands complete replication with no
key changes, modulations, or ornamentations. It calls for "unconditional allegiance" and "permits no play
with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously
creative stylizing variants on it. . . . One must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it" (p. 343). As my
brief description indicates, authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse are polysemous and
have (ongoing) dynamic dialogical relations with one another, pressuring, convincing, infusing, and at
times coinciding and merging harmoniously with one another. Since we are born into and inherit
authoritative discourses, at least some of these discourses are experienced as internally persuasive even if
unacknowledged. Here, the qualifier "internally persuasive" signifies a kind of unreflective embrace of
precisely in a world of alien discourses [End Page 261] surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially
separate itself; the process of distinguishing between one's own and another's discourse . . . is activated
rather late in development" (p. 345). Prior to an individual moving toward this more reflective mode of
discourse discrimination and active appropriation, he or she first experiences a "separation between
internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse" (p. 345). Because internally
persuasive discourse is constituted from a cacophony of alien discourses, even when we shape a discourse
of our own, that new discourse is of course never simply ours. Nonetheless, there is a productiveness and
It allows
"new" words and discourses to emerge out of the discourses with which we
are already familiar and within which we live; it manifests an openness, a
dynamism fostering development and application "to new material, new
conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts . More
than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally
persuasive discourses" (pp. 345-46). In fact, according to Bakhtin, "Ideological development is just
flexibility about internally persuasive discourse creating space for personal assimilation.
such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of
view, approaches, directions and values" (p. 346).
make use of the masters tools but they do so in creative ways, and in the terrain of media production;
Answers To
A2 Framework
--Reform Fails
Legal reform and oversight mechanisms fail to address
the complex history of surveillance in America without
addressing how certain people are constructed as
dangerous and deserving of surveillance racist targeting
will continue under the guise of national security
Kundnani and Kumar in 15 - Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of
Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. Arun Kundnani
teaches at New York University. His latest book is The Muslims Are Coming!
Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. <Arun and Deepa.
Race, surveillance, and empire International Socialist Review. Issue 96,
Spring 2015.>
The mechanisms of surveillance outlined in this essay were responses to
political struggles of various kindsfrom anticolonial insurgencies to slave
rebellions, labor militancy to anti-imperialist agitation . Surveillance practices
themselves have also often been the target of organized opposition. In the 1920s and 1970s, the
surveillance state was pressured to contract in the face of public disapproval. The antiwar activists who
broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and stole classified documents managed to
expose COINTELPRO, for instance, leading to its shut down. (But those responsible for this FBI program
were never brought to justice for their activities and similar techniques continued to be used later against,
for example in the 1980s, the American Indian Movement, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People
of El Salvador.68) Public concern about state surveillance in the 1970s led to the Church committee report
on government spying and the Handschu guidelines that regulated the New York Police Departments
spying on political activities. Those concerns began to be swept aside in the 1980s with the War on Drugs
and, especially, later with the War on Terror. While significant sections of the public may have consented to
the security state, those who have been among its greatest victimsthe radical Left, antiwar activists,
racial justice and Black liberation campaigners, and opponents of US foreign policy in Latin America and
about loss of sales to foreign customers concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon
Valley, what should be a debate about basic political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits.69
Another and perhaps deeper problem is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit
the current situationsuch as George Orwells discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden
himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the type of government surveillance we face
today.70 Reference to Orwells 1984 has been widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the book
were said to have soared following Snowdens revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a
new form of Big Brother is, on one level, supported by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groups
Muslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalistsstate surveillance certainly looks Orwellian. But this
level of scrutiny is not faced by the general public. The picture of surveillance today is therefore quite
different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwells 1984, which assumes an
undifferentiated mass population subject to government control. What we have instead today in the United
States is total surveillance, not on everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by their race,
religion, or political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as the bad guys. In March 2014, Rick
Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told an audience: Contrary to some of the stuff thats been printed,
we dont sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If youre not connected to one of
those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.72 In the national security world, connected
to can be the basis for targeting a whole racial or political community so, even assuming the accuracy of
Youth
who identify as Multi-racial as well as youth who identify as African American
or Caribbean were more likely to report negative contact with police. Among
reported a positive encounter with the police, 84 percent report having a negative encounter.
women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, the numbers, which are hard to come by, need to
be more thoroughly theorized. The New York Times reported 46,784 women were stopped in 2011, 6.9
percent of stops (Ruderman, 2012) !!8 about which the major advocacy and academic institutes are mostly
silent. A study in NYC found that
(Fine et al.,
2003). The Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative (2010) found that 47 percent of the 171 low income
LGBTQ people they surveyed in NYC had been stopped by police in the prior two
years, increasing to 62 percent among transgender- and Two Spirit-identified respondents. Studies from the
theoretical emphasis and unique populations, such as Cooper, Moore, Gruskin, and Krieger (2004) who
include psychological police violence (being stopped without cause) and neglectful policing (egregious
delay to call regarding serious crime, refusing to file police report) in their study of a police precinct in the
the NYPD to disband the unit. It did so, not in response to the case per se but after Amadou Diallo was shot
by SCU officers in 1999. The City subsequently resolved Daniels in a settlement four years later .
In what
seemed like an important, if partial, victory, the NYPD was required to establish
a written anti-racial profiling policy and to review all cases of stop and frisk
for the presence or absence of reasonable suspicion . However, by 2008, the
end of the five year stipulation period, the NYPD had not only failed to comply
with stop and frisk review requirements or curtail racial profiling, it had
dramatically expanded the very practices the lawsuit restrained .6
Despite court ordered adherence to reasonable suspicion standards and a policy of racial
nondiscrimination, the NYPD took the stop and frisk strategies tested by the SCU and applied them
unconstitutional and dangerous invasions in black and brown peoples lives, and the lives of every other
NYPD target, have been reaching new scales.
the FBIs reach in significant ways; it set a precedent through which the Bureau began to deal with purely domestic
threats to national security, rather than only those which were posited to be somehow linked to hostile foreign powers and
thus, by definition, involved in subversive activities
White supremacy - once writ large in the law via slavery and Jim Crow
segregation was removed from its legalized pedestal with the Civil Rights Act of
1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and finally, The Fair Housing Act of 1968.2 The law became
race neutral and it now suddenly was illegal to discriminate on the basis on
race in housing, employment, public accommodations and access to the franchise. Advocates hoped
that this legislation would finally bring to fruition the overdue promise of the Civil War Amendments, long
levels beyond that noted in Brown v. Board of Education, racial wealth gaps grow, and racial disparities in
criminal injustice proliferate at a pace that has led to the label The New Jim Crow. In tragic irony, the
Continued movement towards race-neutrality is the hallmark of a series of Supreme Court decisions that
deny the role of institutionalized racism and increasingly limit the role of race in constitutional remedies for
inequality in matters of affirmative action and educational access, voting rights, and all matters of criminal
injustice.8 Criminal justice as it did post- Reconstruction continues to play a central role in the
continued subjugation of Blacks, in particular, and will serve as the central example of both past and
current patterns of discrimination.
--Roleplaying Bad
You are not a policy-makerpretending you are absolves
individual responsibility for violenceensures the afs
impacts are inevitable.
Kappeler, 1995 (Susanne, The Will to Violence, p. 10-11)
We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an
entire society which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich
Beck says, upholding the notion of `collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible
for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a
universal acquittal.' On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential
responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at
particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We
need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any
Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not
even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our
the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually
organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal
general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN finding expression in ever more prevalent
formulations like `I want to stop this war', `I want military intervention', `I want to stop this backlash', or `I
advantages these offer. And we `are' the war in our `unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the
`fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't' our readiness, in other words, to build identities,
We share in the
responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us,
that is, in the way we shape `our feelings, our relationships, our values'
according to the structures and the values of war and violence . destining of
revealing insofar as it pushes us in a certain direction. Heidegger does not
regard destining as determination (he says it is not a fate which compels), but rather
as the implicit project within the field of modern practices to subject all
aspects of reality to the principles of order and efficiency , and to pursue reality down
to the finest detail. Thus, insofar as modern technology aims to order and render
calculable, the objectification of reality tends to take the form of an
increasing classification, differentiation, and fragmentation of reality. The possibilities for how
things appear are increasingly reduced to those that enhance calculative activities. Heidegger
perceives the real danger in the modern age to be that human beings will continue
to regard technology as a mere instrument and fail to inquire into its essence .
He fears that all revealing will become calculative and all relations technical , that
the unthought horizon of revealing, namely the concealed background practices that make
technological thinking possible, will be forgotten. He remarks: The coming to presence of technology
threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in
ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of
standing-reserve. (QT, 33) 10 Therefore, it is not technology, or science, but rather
the essence of technology as a way of revealing that constitutes the danger;
for the essence of technology is existential , not technological. 11 It is a matter of
how human beings are fundamentally oriented toward their world vis a vis
their practices, skills, habits, customs, and so forth. Humanism contributes to this danger insofar as it
one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the `others'.
fosters the illusion that technology is the result of a collective human choice and therefore subject to
human control. 12
that refusing to continue a formal dialogue because it is not free enough is really just a code for saying
that the dialogue is not running in the direction that the environmental advocate might wish. While this
accusation is necessarily true (and therefore frequently made) in real-world liberal democracies, it also
trivializes or fails to acknowledge the systemic injustices and associated discourses that constrain the
the
primary purpose of traditional research and the cultural values that inform it
is directly related to the production of knowledge; and this knowledge is
intimately linked to questions of social power. Michel Foucault (1977) describes this
research is defined, implemented, and utilized within educational environments. Ino ther words,
relationship between knowledge and power: Truth isa thing of this world: itis produced only by virtue of
multiple forms of constraints. And it induces regular effects ofpower. Each society [culture] has its regime
of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function
as true; the mechanism and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the
means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of
The emphasis
on objectivity and value-free knowledge can readily be understood from the
standpoint of preserving the integrity of the status quo. It is generally those
who are most protective of current conditions who most adamantly insist on
institutional research that reflects aneutral and objective perspective and
who, likewise, respond with great suspicion to research results that challenge
the existing relations of power. Further, this emphasis on objective and value free research
functions to veil the implicit control the dominant culture holds over
subordinate populations. Slater (1991) addresses this phenomenon and its consequences: It
truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. [p. 131]
is easier for those who are satisfied with things as they are to appear neutral, unemotional, and
unmotivated. The motivational impetus of those who seek change is more visible. They are more likely to
be seen as "shrill" or"strident.". . .Those who seek change - those who attempt to challenge [explicitly] the
powers that be - must speak louder in order to be heard at all, and the demand for aquieter, "more
objective" voice is an effective way to silence them .... [And] when dissenting voices grow in numbers,
authoritarian [institutions] will often stave off change by calling for further study, [p. 100] Slaters
comments point to the manner in which institutional research is used to prevent movement and to subvert
institutional transformation.
and norms assigned and the approach utilized are encapsulated in a belief in the existence of universal
values and an ideal of individualism and assimilation. These function to perpetuate a view of research that
is not only devoid of critical insight, but that reduces knowledge into abstract parts and perceives ideas as
traditional
research reinforces the homogenizing intent of the dominant culture, while
negating the cultural reality of subordinate groups; perpetuates a deficient view of
women and people of color, while positioning the researcher as neutral and objective; denies the
political nature of the research process, while assuming a moral posture of
superiority; defines what constitutes legitimate knowledge, while ignoring the
impact of sociopolitical contexts on such a value judgment ; and de-emphasizes
useful only to the extent that they produce actions that sustain the status quo. By so doing,
issues of social class and sexual orientation, while the hidden values reproduce social class inequality and
compulsory heterosexuality
A2 Afropessimism
--Link Turn/Perm
When we speak words are material they might be right
that the structure that renders Black people socially dead
may be created ontologically by non-Blacks but the
assumption that the structure cant be reshaped and
challenged by Black people is wrong
Nielson in 11 <Cynthia. Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on
Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls
Philosophy and Literature. Volume 35, Number 2, October 2011. Pgs 251367>
Douglass's awareness of the paradoxes of
literacy for the slave in an oppressive context. In such an environment,
literacy exhibits a "capacity to simultaneously empower and imprison , to
'bless' and to 'curse'" ("WSL," p. 199). Douglass's literacy and the newly acquired facility to mount
Commenting on this passage, Sisco highlights
well-reasoned arguments against the immorality of slavery were not enough to liberate him from the
become an educated person, Douglass came to understand the heteroglossia of such words as "literacy,"
the
authoritative discourses of proslavery advocates , they stifle, oppress, and seek
to keep Douglass bound and dehumanized. However, when they are
reharmonized and infused with new meanings via Douglass's appropriations,
they provide him with some breathing room, opening a liminal space in
which he can gain a foothold and begin to resist and reconfigure the
sociocultural narrative scripting him as subhuman, essentially
instrumental, and socially dead. Douglass's resistance to the dominant discourses of his
"freedom," "enslavement," and the like. When these words are woven together to form
day and his ability to enter into and reshape the heteroglossia of his world strengthen and corroborate
all, as Sisco observes, while Douglass's journey to literacy involved acts of resistance, nonetheless the
process of defining and shaping his own voice was always vis--vis the white other. That is, in the very act
in which "Douglass opposes Auld, he is also copying his young master's hand, imitating his style. . . .
Douglass's handwriting, the unique mark of literacy, always bears the trace of his unwitting teachers and
enslavers" ("WSL," p. 204). Returning to Douglass's Narrative and acknowledging the literary and
Douglass's voice
emerges in a subverting act through and by means of reappropriating the
dominant discourses of the day. As Sekora notes, Douglass had become increasingly frustrated
discursive complexities discussed via Sisco and Sekora, in the appendix
with his white abolitionist counterparts and "came eventually to distrust all of these constraints upon black
expression."11 Breaking out of the set form, Douglass reserves the appendix for himself. There he states
explicitly that his disparaging comments about religion "apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and
with no possible reference to Christianity proper" (NL, p. 97). Crafting carefully his condemnatory remarks,
he first sets "the Christianity of this land" in opposition to "the Christianity of Christ," describing the former
as "bad, corrupt, and wicked" and the latter as "good, pure, and holy." To call the religion of America
"Christianity" is, according to Douglass, "the climax of all misnomers," and the "boldest of all frauds." As he
dwells upon the "hypocritical Christianity of this land" with its "religious pomp and show," he is overcome
with contempt and disgust (p. 97). Next, having developed his themes and set forth his contrasting,
opposing voices, Douglass begins a movement composed of line after dissonant line detailing the
inconsistencies of America's so-called "Christianity." For example, Douglass highlights the violence in which
these "ministers" and "missionaries" engage. "The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the
week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus" (p. 97). This same
man robs, rapes, and ravishes black families; in one breath, he denies [End Page 266] slaves the right to
be educated and then "proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible" (p. 97). With these examples, we see
Douglass take up scriptural language and images, whose meanings had been distorted for exploitative
purposes, and he infuses them with new meanings having direct bearing on his present situation.
Douglass's creative rescripting of his own identity and his reclaiming of the Christian narrative for
emancipatory and denunciatory "prophetic" purposes are variants of Foucault's "reverse discourse." As
Foucault explains in volume one of History of Sexuality, in reverse discourse one utilizes the "discursive
elements"that is, common phrases, terms, metaphors, and so forthof the dominant discourse in order
to undermine that discourse and to open a space for new subjectivities to emerge, or as Foucault would
say, for becoming otherwise than we are.12 Here it is important to stress that, according to Foucault,
reverse or counterhegemonic discourse is not merely reactionary; it, like the dominant discourse, is
productive. In other words, social realitiesin particular, social identitiesare created, shaped, and
solidified by means of this discursive activity. Given Douglass's context, in which a particular
inflection of American Christianity had developed its own authoritative discourses in order to justify
oppressive slave society, and his acts of resistance proved successful on multiple counts. Douglass's
narrative helps us to see concretely and feel dramatically Foucault's emphasis on the productive, rather
than merely oppressive, dimensions of power relations. Likewise, the often grim picture associated with
Foucault's conclusionthat there is no outside to poweris given, by way of Douglass's account of his
struggle for emancipation, a brighter hue. If power and resistance are correlative, then the allpervasiveness of power relations necessarily means the all-pervasiveness of resistance possibilities, and
thus the hope that we might become, like Douglass, other than what we are. [End Page 267]
motivation was in large part due to the strong opposition he sensed in Mr. Auld to his becoming literate.
"What he most dreaded, that I most desired . . .; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my
learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn" (NL, p. 38). In short, at
this point in Douglass's journey, he was convinced that his freedom could be achieved primarily through
Douglass
also perceived a connection between knowledge and power [End Page 259] and
that the asymmetrical master/slave relation was maintained by keeping the
slave uneducated. Knowledge must flow in one directionfrom master to
slave. The (dominating) authority defining the master depends in part upon his ability to keep the slave
the attainment of literacy. Thus, he committed himself to achieving this goal at all costs.
ignorant and to (at least) create the impression of the master's own intellectual superiority and ability to
exercise local as well as sociopolitical and legal disciplinary actions should the slave rebel. As Lisa Sisco
observes, "Douglass
understands that literacy can provide the power to redefine relationships of authority."8 Literacy, however, must be understood as
polysemous, dynamic, and occurring in stages. To emphasize the processive character of
literacy, Sisco describes Douglass's phase in which he realized that the productive nature of the power
relation between master and slave was constituted and maintained in part by keeping the slave ignorant,
as "pre-literate" ("WSL," p. 196). At this stage, Douglass is not yet literate but is "attracted to an abstract
ideal of literacy" (p. 196). As we shall see shortly, once he advances in his abilities to read, write, and
engage in public discourse, he begins to experience the very double-sidedness of literacy described by Mr.
Auldfor the slave, education "could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him
discontented and unhappy" (NL, p. 37). Sisco then brings Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptions of "authoritative
discourse" and "internally persuasive discourse" into conversation with Douglass's account of his
movement from slavery to freedom. According to Bakhtin, individuals find themselves always and ever in
the process of an "ideological becoming," which is a "process of selectively assimilating the words of
discourses; yet it can be reharmonized and reframed in a way that "pure" authoritative discourse cannot.
The latter comes "with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced
zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of
sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as it were, hieratic)
language. . . . It is akin to taboo, i.e., a name that must not be taken in vain" (p. 342). In other words, one
ought not question authoritative discourseto do so is itself a transgressive and treasonous act, a sign of
rebellion or perhaps backwardness. Not only does a certain rigidity and calcification characterize
authoritative discourse, but likewise its "framing context" is immovable, frozen. Such language "remains
sharply demarcated, compact and inert: . . . it is fully complete, it has but a single meaning, the letter is
fully sufficient to the sense and calcifies it" (p. 343). One cannot improvise with authoritative discourse,
nor can one reharmonize its melodies; it requires a unison voice; it demands complete replication with no
key changes, modulations, or ornamentations. It calls for "unconditional allegiance" and "permits no play
with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously
creative stylizing variants on it. . . . One must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it" (p. 343). As my
brief description indicates, authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse are polysemous and
have (ongoing) dynamic dialogical relations with one another, pressuring, convincing, infusing, and at
times coinciding and merging harmoniously with one another. Since we are born into and inherit
authoritative discourses, at least some of these discourses are experienced as internally persuasive even if
unacknowledged. Here, the qualifier "internally persuasive" signifies a kind of unreflective embrace of
precisely in a world of alien discourses [End Page 261] surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially
separate itself; the process of distinguishing between one's own and another's discourse . . . is activated
rather late in development" (p. 345). Prior to an individual moving toward this more reflective mode of
discourse discrimination and active appropriation, he or she first experiences a "separation between
internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse" (p. 345). Because internally
persuasive discourse is constituted from a cacophony of alien discourses, even when we shape a discourse
of our own, that new discourse is of course never simply ours. Nonetheless, there is a productiveness and
It allows
"new" words and discourses to emerge out of the discourses with which we
are already familiar and within which we live; it manifests an openness, a
dynamism fostering development and application "to new material, new
conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts . More
than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally
persuasive discourses" (pp. 345-46). In fact, according to Bakhtin, "Ideological development is just
flexibility about internally persuasive discourse creating space for personal assimilation.
such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of
view, approaches, directions and values" (p. 346).
A2 Cap
--Perm
The permutation is key to address the intersection of capitalism and
racialized surveillance the alternative fails because it whitewashes
oppression and misunderstands how surveillance and policing
operate
Kundnani and Kumar in 15 - Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of
Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. Arun Kundnani
teaches at New York University. His latest book is The Muslims Are Coming!
Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. <Arun and Deepa.
Race, surveillance, and empire International Socialist Review. Issue 96,
Spring 2015.>
the debate on national security surveillance that has
emerged in the United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully
inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of race and empire at
the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for the ways national security
In what follows, we argue that
surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this surveillance to
the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective
moments in the history of national security surveillance in North America, tracing its imbrication with race,
empire, and capital, from the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is on how
race as a sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in the United States through
construction of Blackness under slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the neoliberal
era; these ideological shifts are the product of specific historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at
various moments, determine who will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and for how long. In
the second part, we turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror
shape national security surveillance practices. The intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has been
carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements such as
Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order. This
is not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For
instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s were passed by the Federalist government against
the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied
--Alt Fails
Their alternative causes violence their colorblind,
gender-neutral strategy will recreate the systems of
domination we critique this is proven by multiple
historical instances sexual violence against women and
queer folk was actively covered up in the Occupy
Movement in the name of saving face for the revolution,
the Cuban revolution which was an anticapitalist
revolution used the same narrative of the neg the alt
recreates violence
Allen (Jafari S., Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University)
2011 (Venceremos? The erotics of black self-making in Cuba, pgs. 95-97 , Duke University Press, C.A.)
The conjunctures of intentions of revolutionary leaders , black intellectuals,
and the Hispanic Cuban elite in Cuba, as well as the cold war politics of the United States and Soviet
Union, conditioned the choices of the revolutionary government at the triumph
of the Revolution. They promised a peoples revolution, but they were
also strictly constrained by old hegemonies and new political
exigencies. Foucault points out in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972) that discourses are
constantly recuperated and reformed in various ways . In this instance,
racialized and sexualized hegemonies that reckon the root of racist
segregation as the behavior of Afro-Cubans, which would be gradually
improved by the progressive force of European culture and European
genes, is now posed, in a lightning-quick sleight, as a
superstructural efect of the base of capitalist oppression, which
following Marxist reasoning would be cut of with the establishment
of a socialist society. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 cannot
be said to have completely ruptured the old racial order, due to its
recuperationeven sleightof the same racist tropes that hold, as the common Cuban
aphorism states, est en la pinta, or it [that African element that makes black people
behave in a certain way] is in the blood . It did bring the promise of a new raceless
society in which black and other Cubans of color could rise from the ranks of the
permanent underclassonly if in fact they were willing to make themselves
into proper Cuban subjects. The anti-imperialist radical wing of the middle class,
following Marxist principles, cast the historical interpellations of blacks
as lazy, insolent, hypersexual, and superstitious as negative
tendencies that socialism would cure. In analysis and discursive affect, this is not qualitatively
different from Ortizs moves or motivations. Here there is a revolutionary sleight of handor a handing off of partners in
individual agency. Thus, the revolutionary government and official intellectuals sought to change behaviors
that were observable among the poor, uneducated masses in general yet thought to stem from Cubas African
inheritance. The new regime immediately set out to create policies to combat negative tendencies, which they framed
as a result of poverty and disaffection from the mainstream of prerevolutionary Cuba, in which the labor and human
potential of the masses were alienated and suppressed.
More than ever there is a need for the continued struggle against historical
social inequalities based on race, class and gender . We need to integrate racism, sexism and
classism into the Marxist analysis of capitalism in which race or gender or class serves as a
point of entry through which the varied forms of social inequality can and
must be understood. Thus, in recognizing the centrality of race, gender and
class issues in the struggle against economic inequality and exploitation and
cultural subordination and domination, we will be able to avoid the dramatic
mistakes of the past that considered racism, sexism and classism as divisive
issues. Marxism and the "Woman Question" In their article Marxist Theory and the Oppression of Women, Morrissey
& Stoecker (1994) argue "those who follow Marx and Engels are left with a Marxist theory that is ambiguous on whether
the source of women's oppression might be independent of the source of capitalism and whether this oppression could be
Towards a More Progressive Union, Hartman (1981) argued that: "The marriage of Marxism and feminism has been like the
marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism."
relations between men and women necessary to understand gender inequality. Most women writing on feminism began
with the central notion that there was a distinction between sex and gender and argued that "women" were not born, but
made: the problem was culture, not nature that were at the center of women's so-called inferiority. Other feminist writers
also argued that the end of capitalism or patriarchy would not necessarily end the objectification and "subordination" of
women because the control was within culture and the unconscious. Some feminist theorists believe that the gender
hierarchical system is more deeply embedded in the male ego and thus, the various changes in the social order have
remained male dominated, whether capitalist, socialist, fascist, communist, authoritarian, or liberal. Central to the
extensive list of practices, such as clitoridectomy, infibulation, prostitution, pornography, rape, foot-banding, body-veiling,
involuntary sterilization, and sex-object advertising, illustrate the unequal power relationship of women to men, and
finally, modern Asia's anomaly; the girls who do not get born. MARXISM AND THE "RACE PROBLEM." Although much
contemporary sociological writing concerns itself with analyses of race, theories of racial ethnic inequality have never
been a priority in Marxist social science. As Geschwender & Levine (1994) reminds us: "Classical
social
theorists, such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, were not concerned with the
race problem...The authors conclude their reviews of Classical and Recent Theoretical Developments in the Marxist
Analysis of Race and Ethnicity in regretting that certain Marxist theorists make the error of
denying the race problem in the U.S. For instance, Bonacich (1980) reduced racism to an
ideological adjunct to class exploitation. Wallerstein (1972) came very close to eliminating
the concept together by stripping it of any meaning independent of the exploitation process. As consequence, Manning
that the flow of social history is determined by the relationship between subjective and objective factors -- the
superstructure or ideological, cultural, and political apparatuses and the base, or forces of production. But what most
view that its ascendancy was simply a matter of it presenting a viable solution to the woes that confronted
industrial economies in the 1970s and 1980s is questionable, given that neoliberalisms performance was
at best mixed; compared with coordinated market economies, Anglo-Saxon economies failed to produce
significantly higher levels of growth and faired more poorly in terms of unemployment during the 1980s
(Hall and Soskice, 2001: 20). This is not to say that the external pressures on Fordist states in the 1970s,
superego demands has led to unsustainable forms of sociality, with violent outbursts of aggression.
Neoliberalism followed on the heels of a period of attenuated super-ego demands for certain segments of
the population, a period of controlled decontrolling of emotional display. Fordism, while providing a
modicum of narcissistic fulfilment for white men by lessening super-ego demands, was untenable in its
exclusion of women and racialized minorities. As new codes of shame developed regarding feelings of
superiority and inferiority, Fordist mans worldview buckled, eventuating in a narcissistic neurosis:
neoliberalism. The key psychical resistance of the neoliberal neurosis is the inability to shift adherence to
notions of equality from the super-ego to the ego, from conscience to consciousness. Neoliberal man
subverts the demands for equality through an aggressive form of economic sociality that aggravates
costly, if not futile, endeavour. Possessive individualism leads to a situation in which emotional
transference with others, an important element of Freuds psychoanalytic therapy, becomes all but
obstructed (Macpherson, 1990). Unable to attain the idealized selfhood, the neoliberal subject is prone to
an internalized tormenting anger, and projects on to others the blame for its own shortcomings. In
conclusion, years after the onset of the global financial crisis, with pronouncements of the death of
neoliberalism seemingly premature, and despite the recognition by even the likes of Alan Greenspan of the
flaw in the model of the self-correcting market, austerity policies implemented by Western governments
move to reinforce neoliberal governmentality. Given the nature of the manifestation of the neoliberal
neurosis as explained here, it is perhaps unsurprising that racialized minorities and women continue to find
A2 Opacity/Visibility Bad
The fear of surveillance and infiltration is a tactic used in
order to disband and stop social movements the
alternative just replicates the response to surveillance
that maintains structural injustice
Cunningham and Noates in 8 <David and John. What if shes from the
FBI? The Effects of Covert Forms of Social Control on Social Movements
Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond
Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 10, 189-190>
it is
reasonable to assume that covert forms of social control affects the feelings
and emotions of social movement participants who are targeted individually
or who are members of targeted SMOs . There is evidence of such effects in our above
discussion of how covert forms of social control can create dissension
between groups. The FBI would plant provocateurs to create conflict ,
Based on these findings of the emotional effects of surveillance in relatively benign situations,
Cleveland Sellers remembers; [t]hey know how to stir up difficulties in personal relationships, how to play
people off against each other (quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 1989, pp. 256257). Sellers comments,
however, point us beyond the structural issue of how internal dissension can be a barrier to movement
Consistent with Goodwin and Pfaffs (2001) emphasis on the strategic importance of overcoming fear
within activist circles, the testimonies in Schultz and Schultz (1989, 2001) make clear the centrality of fear
(quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 1989, p. 173). Draytons fear was compounded by the fact those around him
did not believe his complaints of government harassment, so its persistence drove [him] to despair
a future member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, remembers she was terrified of getting duped
by Communists and of signing my name to anything or being associated with anyone (quoted in
Participants in
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began dropping out, Scott Camil, the
VVAWs field coordinator in Florida, remembers, when government agents began
interviewing their employers and those of their family members : the
Schultz & Schultz, 2001, p. 295). Though Goldberg overcame her fears, not all did.
government has a lot of power and a lot of money. They can be very disruptive to your life. They got
people thrown out of school. They went to employers of ex-GIs in the VVAW and got them fired for being
communists. I started getting phone calls: Hey, man, I cant come to meetings anymore. The FBI went
to where my mom works. She almost lost her job. (quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 1989, p. 323) John Lewis
(1998, p. 402) has argued that [t]rust and respect are examples of affects with enormous impact on
political action. Generalized trust in the government, for example, lowers the incentive for mobilization.
Trust among members and between members and potential recruits helps build collective identity, is
helpful in the recruitment of members, and fosters the solidarity helpful in the persistence of movements.
Much like the activists in Goodwin and Pfaff (2001) who argued that it was necessary to manage fear,
many activists reported that one had to assume there were infiltrators in their organization and move on or
risk being paralyzed by paranoia. But the following statements by activists who discovered that there were
infiltrators in their organizations suggest that the issue of trust is not so simply solved: Well, it shook me. I
vowed never to get in another organization, not from the fear of getting killed or arrested or anything like
that, but because I just didnt trust people. I always believed that there were and I still do to this day
believe there were so many more informants than well ever know about. It makes you really kind of leery
of trusting people. Its like you have been robbed, beaten, and raped. (Akua Njeri, formerly Deborah
Johnson, of the Chicago area Black Panther Party; quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 2001, p. 236) She was the
spy that hurt me the most because I was closest to her. Sheli Lulkin was a hard worker, a very capable
persony And she made personal friends with Sylvia Kushner, our executive secretary. Sylvia was not in a
good position financially; we couldnt pay her very much. And Sheli was easy with money. She treated
Sylvia to concerts and operasy . (Jack Spiegel of the Alliance to End Repression, quoted in Schultz &
Schultz, 2001, p. 421) Emerson Poe was one of my best friends. My girlfriend and I used to babysit for his
wife and him. When she had a miscarriage, we took care of his kid while they were at the hospital. We
were that close. Poe had been right with me as assistant regional coordinator of VVAW. He worked with us
when we met with the lawyers, talked strategy, and he even helped us select a jury.yIt blew me away. I
couldnt believe he could be an informer.y I dont understand why he went along with them. I dont
understand. (Scott Camil of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 1989, p. 328)
As these testimonies indicate, undercover
there is evidence that covert forms of social control can cause paranoia,
particularly when they are persistent over a long period of time. Paul Robeson, Jr.
Finally,
remembers the toll that surveillance took on his father: Dads isolation in the US was like a quarantine: You
cut off access to the media, you cut off access to artistic outlets, cut off access to everything hoping hell
die on the vine. Then you work on him psychologicallyy. The systemy[is a] paranoia producer, quite
consciously. (quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 2001, p. 149)
Arendt writes about the "phantom world of the dark continent."5 Referring to the adventurers, gamblers,
and criminals who came as luck hunters to South Africa during the gold rush, Arendt describes them as "an
inevitable residue of the capitalist system and even the representatives of an economy that relentlessly
produced a superfluity of men and capital" (189). "They were not individuals like the old adventurers," she
continues, drawing on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "they were the shadows of events with which
they had nothing to do" (189). They found the full realization of their "phantomlike-existence" in the
destruction of native life: "Native life lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee against all
consequences because anyhow it looked to these men like a 'mere play of shadows. A play of shadows, the
dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of incomprehensible aims and
race and bureaucracy. "Race . . . ," she writes, "was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing
human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for
bureaucracy were the two main devices used under fascism during the haunting return to the heart of
Europe of the violence against other humans developed under colonial and imperial rule. The ghosts of
colonial and imperial violence propelled the Jewish holocaust, Arendt shows. In a similar vein, in Discourse
on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire talks about the rise of Nazism in Europe as a "terrific boomerang effect."6 He
argues that before the people in Europe became the victims of Nazism, they were its accomplices, that
"they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it,
legitimized it, because, until then, it [had] been applied only to non-European peoples" (36). Cesaire
continues, "Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism
and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century
that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon"
(36, Cesaire's italics). This is as close as we can come to the argument that, until they face the ghosts of
their own history and take responsibility for all the histories of violence committed under their rule,
Europeans encrypt the ghost of Hitler in their psychic life. Cesaire's statement also contains an argument
about what Ashis Nandy calls "isomorphic oppressions," that is, about the fact that histories of violence
create psychic deformations not only in the victims but also in the perpetrators.7 No one colonizes
innocently, Cesaire asserts, and no one colonizes with impunity either. One of the psychic deformations of
the perpetrator is that he turns himself into the very thing that he projects onto and tries to destroy in the
other: "[T]he colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as
an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself
into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point [End Page 101]
What do we have to offset such a vicious circle of violent returns? Many victims emphasize testimony,
witnessing, mourning, and reparation. Many theories, including psychoanalysis, concur with this
assumption.
A2 Word PICs
PERM do the plan and denounce the connotations
associated with the use of <insert word/term> - the 1AC
criticism is the positive potential for redeployment we
have the ability to clarify how the words in our af are
interpreted
Stychin 94
(Carl F. is a lecturer at Department of Law, University of Keele, Staffordshire (UK); B.A. 1985, University of
Alberta, Canada, 1988, Identities, Sexualities, and the Postmodern Subject: An Analysis of Artistic Funding
Scriptocentrism is bad
1 - Stops active politics
Conquergood 02
[The Drama Review 46, 2 (T174), Summer 2002. Copyright 2002 New York University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research pp 147.
Dwight Conquergood was a professor of anthropology and performance studies at Northwestern University]
Intramovement disputes, if they occur front stage or are otherwise publicized, reveal a
movement's weaknesses and thereby provide opponents with a blueprint for
launching attacks. A movement comprised of opposing factions is particularly
vulnerable to "divide and conquer" tactics. In some cases, agent
provocateurs infiltrate a movement and seek to exacerbate existing tensions
or instigate internal conflict and encourage schisms (Marx 1974; 1979). Although I
found no evidence that such countervailing tactics were employed against the Austin disarmament
A2 Af = Individualistic
Even if they win our method is too individualized and has
the possibility of cooption you should still vote af
because it is these individual conversations that mobilize
collective resistance they have to win that we have been
coopted/infiltrated not that we could be
Monahan in 6 - Associate Professor of Human and Organizational
Development and Medicine at Vanderbilt University. Member of the
International Surveillance Studies Network <Torin. Counter-surveillance as
Political Intervention? SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER
2006) Pgs 515-531>
Are counter-surveillance activities political interventions? Yes, they are clearly
political. The central question remains, however, as to which countersurveillance configurations provide productive critiques and interventions .
Because counter-surveillance movements, in my definition of them, seek to correct unequal distributions of
power, they do destabilize status quo politics on a case- by-case basis on the ground, at specific,
innovative use of technologies, but they can defy replication by others without comparable technical
capabilities or resources. Furthermore, focusing on individual agents of surveillance (such as store clerks,
security guards, camera operators, or police) artificially reduces the complexity of the problem: many of
these individuals are underpaid yet completely dependent upon their jobs, so they might be easy targets,
the encounter as an active site of conflict. I focus in particular on the ways civilians
reference and rely on ideas of community in the face of threats that work to separate and individualize
them, exploring a collective imaginary that shapes their patterns of urban civil life. Psychologies of
(2004) extend Fanons (1967, 2004) thought into psychoanalytic readings of colonizing systems, casting
Lewin
(1943) who understood behavior as a phenomenon emerging from a mutuallyconstitutive person-environment field, I approach police behavior and civilian
response as expressions of a system structured by shifting and asymmetrical
social forces. I research surveillance threat as an expression of larger
dynamics of domination enacted through, but not reducible to, the
psyches of security officials and civilians. These are systemic, not traitbased phenomena. This strategy helps avoid building theory on the backs of what Tuck (2009)
interpersonal relations as psychological expressions and enactments of colonial rule. Drawing on
calls depleted communities, less-than notions of oppressed communities concretized in the social
scientific imagination (p. 409). Instead, Tuck (2009) calls for an epistemological shift toward complexity
and self-determination (p. 416). Liberation psychology (Fine et al., 2003; Martin-Baro, 1994; Moane, 2006;
A2 Af = Academic Colonialism
It is important for both white people and people of color
to interrogate their own subject position as well as
structural inequalities in order to combat and unlearn the
stereotypes about subjugated communities
Milner in 7 <Richard. Race, Culture, and Researcher Positionality: Working
Through Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen Milner, H Richard, IVView
Profile. Educational Researcher36.7 (Oct 2007): 388-400.>
This author introduces a framework to guide researchers into a process of racial and cultural awareness,
consciousness, and positionality as they conduct education research. The premise of the argument is that
dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen can emerge for researchers when they
do not pay careful attention to their own and others' racialized and cultural
systems of coming to know, knowing, and experiencing the world . Education
research is used as an analytic site for discussion throughout this article, but the framework may be
transferable to other academic disciplines. After a review of literature on race and culture in education and
an outline of central tenets of critical race theory, a nonlinear framework is introduced that focuses on
several interrelated qualities: researching the self, researching the self in relation to others, engaged
reflection and representation, and shifting from the self to system. Debates, discussions, and perspectives
on who can and should conduct research with and about people and communities of color are somewhat
common in educational discourse (cf. Banks, 1998; Scheurich & Young, 1997; Tillman, 2002). Tillman, for
instance, raised the questions of who can and should conduct research with and about African Americans.
Like Tillman, I do not believe that researchers must come from the racial or
cultural community under study to conduct research in, with, and about that
community. It seems that researchers instead should be actively engaged ,
thoughtful, and forthright regarding tensions that can surface when
conducting research where issues of race and culture are concerned.
Moreover, it is important that researchers possess or are pursuing deeper
racial and cultural knowledge about themselves and the community or people
under study. Where racialized knowledge is concerned, Tatum (2001) wrote, In a raceconscious society, the development of a positive sense of racial/ethnic
identity not based on assumed superiority or inferiority is an important task
for both [italics added] White people and people of color. The development of this
positive identity is a lifelong process that often requires unlearning the
misinformation and stereotypes [italics added] we have internalized not only
about others, but also about ourselves. (p. 53) In other words, some researchers and people
of color may have been what I call kidnapped into believing that they are inferior and thus concentrate on
negative attributes of people and communities of color. Where cultural knowledge is concerned, what
matters in Tillman's (2002) assessment is "whether the researcher has the cultural knowledge to
accurately interpret and validate the experiences" (p. 4) of others in a study.