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***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

such informal techniques of surveillance began to be absorbed


into government bureaucracy. In 1824, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Office
nineteenth century,

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

Systematic surveillance became even more important after


1848, when Indian Affairs responsibility transferred from the Department of
War to the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought
to comprehensively map the Indigenous population as part of a civilizing
the Mississippi River.

project to change the savage into a civilized man, as a congressional


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.

The secret surveillance eforts by COINTELPRO, police


departments and the NSA used to infiltrate activist
groups such as the Black Panther Party demonstrate a
history of social repression through surveillance that are
aimed at policing radical activists, minorities and Black
people in particular
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.>
Surveillance was central to sustaining and reproducing this system. From the 1940s to
the early 1970s, FBI wiretapping and bugging operations focused on a wide range
of movements, activists, and public figures. The following list of targets compiled by
historian Athan Theoharis gives a flavor of the surveillance and is worth quoting in full: Radical activists
(David Dallin, Charles Malamuth, C. B. Baldwin, Frank Oppenheimer, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Heinrich
Mann, Helene Weigel, Berthold Viertel, Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Richard Criley, Frank Wilkinson),

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

In the late 1950s, the FBI launched its secret


counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which used provocateurs and
informants to infiltrate communist groups initially, but later widened to
include Puerto Rican nationalists, the student movement, the civil rights
movement, and Black liberation movements. About 1,500 of the 8,500 American
Communist Party members were likely FBI informants in the early 1960s. By the end of the
decade, agents who had previously worked in US foreign intelligence were
transferring to the burgeoning field of domestic intelligence to spy on radical
movements, whether employed by the bureau, military intelligence, or the
expanding red squads in local police departments.41 A key part of the FBIs
countersubversion strategy was the manipulation of political activists into
committing criminal acts so that they could be arrested and prosecuted.
Agents provocateurs working for the FBI initiated disruptions of meetings and
demonstrations, fights between rival groups, attacks on police, and
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.
cooperative journalists and legislators.

The telecommunications companies at the time handed over to the NSA all telegrams sent out of and into

NSA analysts were collecting and analyzing


approximately 150,000 telegrams a month . In 1967, the FBI and CIA submitted lists of
the United States. By the early 1970s,

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

it soon became apparent that


these movements were manifestations of a new kind of politics that could not
be understood according to the conspiratorial calculus of front groups and
fellow travelers; surveillance therefore had to be widened to monitor
ordinary participants, particularly in Black communities, in what was
increasingly seen as a popular insurgency. Even then, the hope was that new
electronic technologies would be the answer. National security advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski commented in 1970 that technology would make it
possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and
maintain up-to-date files, containing even personal information about the . . .
behavior of the citizen, in addition to the more customary data .47
thought to be manipulating events behind the scenes. But

The US surveillance regime operates not only through


covert observation but also explicitly in order to
intimidate, threaten, and encouraging dissidents to selfpolice and internalize the surveillance that maintains 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

King and his advisors debated about


whether to expose the FBIs campaign against him and decided it would
ultimately do him more harm than good.10 Thus, King may or may not have felt
as proud as he acted in the face of FBI surveillance . There is, therefore, a tension
about the FBI surveillance.9 But that was an act.

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

the FBIs surveillance of King is that the FBI had a


suicide pact with King. The FBI had offered King a onesided deal: destroy yourself or we
will use our surveillance to destroy you. It may be, however, that this suicide pact was not
this essay. A novel way of thinking about

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

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,
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.

Specifically, surveillance has been used in order to


repress change and social movements through the
policing of riots - Black Power and other radical
movement riots in the 1960s demanding justice were
met with increased surveillance practices in order to
control, infiltrate and police those social movements
Oliver in 8 Professor of Sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison
<Pamela. REPRESSION AND CRIME CONTROL: WHY SOCIAL MOVEMENT
SCHOLARS SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO MASS INCARCERATION AS A FORM OF
REPRESSION 2008 Mobilization: The International Quarterly 13(1): 1-24>
Todays young people are generally taught a celebratory history of the civil
rights movement and the politics of nonviolent resistance centered on the
icons of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Our young are rarely taught
about the riots, and even many academic sources on the Black movement
ignore or downplay the riots. It seems as if those who are old enough to remember the riots are
trying to forget them. But the riots and the larger context of violence around the Black movement are

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

riots prior to the 1960s


were usually initiated by Whites and often involved one-sided White attacks
on Black communities. The 1960s riots, by contrast, primarily involved Black people looting and
urban riots. Race riots are a longstanding feature of U.S. history, but

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

The White press treated any Black claims to the right


to self-defense as extremist violent calls to race war. By 1968, rhetoric had
back when attacked.

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

In the late 1960s,


Black Power organizations were expressing political anger and advo- cating
defiance of White law. Before he was killed in 1965, Malcolm X had received wide
publicity for criticizing nonviolence as a strategy in the face of White
violence. In 1966, SNCC publicly launched the slogan Black Power during the
march through Mississippi where King and Carmichael debated strategy in front of reporters. Malcolm,
Carmichael and most other Black Power advocates understood the slogan to
involve economic and political power and the willingness to meet White
violence with self-defense, not as a call for armed aggression against White
power, but the slogan was frightening to most Whites . There is telling footage in the
Rodney King with a smaller wave of rioting elsewhere (Associated Press 1992).

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

Black people generally saw the riots as extreme expressions of Black


political grievances, and many saw them as rebellions or insurrections. A
large majority of Black people told survey researchers that the underlying
cause of the riots was dissatisfaction with racial discrimination and inequality .
of the riots.

(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

The riots had political


consequences, as a substantial body of scholarship has docu- mented. For example, Buttons (1978)
10% tax increase (Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969).

detailed compilation of qualitative interview data and quantitative expenditure patterns show substantial

on policies to prevent riots through welfare payments, low income


housing, jobs programsespecially summer jobs programs for youths, which were seen as riot
insuranceand training for police in better community relations , especially before
impacts

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

Local police, the FBI, the U.S. Army, and


the CIA all had major domestic surveillance operations that had placed
informers and agents in virtually every movement organization in the
country. In the 1964 election, Goldwater made safety in the streets and opposition to civil rights part
build up in police departments all over the country.

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

The White populace in general and key


elements of the White eliteparticularly the FBI and the US military
believed that the Black riots were planned and orchestrated by Black
militants with Communist connections, or by Black Muslims (who, while not
Communist, were seen as just as dangerous). Communist conspiracies also were believed
to underlie the other radical movements of the period, including especially
the student antiwar movement and all of the various left-wing parties and
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
only riots were repressed in the 1960s, of course.

played a major role in disrupting the organizations against which it was directed.

This legacy of repression through surveillance continues


today surveillance of the demonstrations in Baltimore
show the way that it is used to target and coordinate
state repression of activists
Gaist in 15 <Thomas. FBI spy planes used in police-military operation
against Baltimore protests May 7, 2015.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/07/balt-m07.html>
Two small planes flew carefully planned routes over crowds assembled in
West Baltimore during the mass demonstrations against the police murder,
according to flight records from a third party called Flightradar 24, cited by the Post . An unnamed
source said the planes were equipped with infrared technology designed to
track the movements of individual human beings on the ground. The
Baltimore Police Department deferred all inquiries on the matter to the FBI,
which has refused to comment. Thus far, the US government has rejected
demands by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups for an explanation of
the domestic spying operation. The extended aerial surveillance operation
only came to light as a result of personal investigations by citizens who

noticed unusual airplane activity overhead.

It remains unclear precisely what other forms

One could assume,


however, that the monitoring of crowd movements was used to help
coordinate the military response against protesters , much like satellite, drone
and other airborne technologies do for battlefield operations in Afghanistan or
Iraq. Known technologies used by the government include mass cell phone
data capture, high-resolution photography and facial recognition. An
unnamed US official who spoke with the Post confirmed the use of federal
surveillance assets in support of the military-police mobilization in
Baltimore. The FBI deployed the planes to bolster the surveillance assets deployed by the citys own
of technology outside of infrared surveillance were onboard the aircraft.

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

During the Baltimore protests various career police


officers boasted on CNN that federal and state law enforcement agencies had
intelligence assets among the crowds in Baltimore. The police also said
they were monitoring social media to track protests . The military operation in
40 miles from Washington, DC.

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 operation in Baltimore is part of an expanding


program of persistent surveillance. According to the ACLU, new
technologies, using sophisticated high-tech version of radar that is akin to a
camera to track movements in detail across an immense territory, have
been deployed or are in development,
last year as enemy forces.

White supremacy and colonialism are maintained through


enduring archetypes not the law the structure just
morphs to respond to legal changes intended to remedy
injustice i.e. even though there are no longer laws
explicitly allowing slavery or segregation, the structure of
oppression is still maintained in race neutral laws
Heitzeg in 15 - Professor of Sociology and Director of the interdisciplinary
Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program at St. Catherine University, St. Paul,
MN <Nancy. On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights
Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The
Limits Of The Law Hamline University's School of Law's Journal of Public Law
and Policy Volume 36 Issue 1 Article 3. Pgs 54-79>
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

These strokes of the pen, of


course, could not remove bigotry long steeped in racist archetypes; nor could
this legislation remove the structural barriers of nearly 400 years of white
racial preference and cumulative advantage in the accumulation of wealth
and property, access to education and housing, health and well-being, and all
matter of social opportunities.4 Racism, as both white supremacist/anti-black
ideology and institutionalized arrangement, remains merely transformed
with its systemic foundations intact. Segregation in housing and education persists at
subverted via both legislation and judicial interpretation.3

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

race neutrality has perhaps ushered in an era of more


insidious de facto discrimination that i s now denied through color-blind
rhetoric. A large body of research documents the paradigmatic shift from overt essentialist racism to
color-blindness.6 This style of racism relies heavily on ideological frames and
linguistic shifts which allow whites to assert they do not see race, deny
structural racism, claim a level playing field that now victimizes them with
reverse discrimination and appeals to the race card, and argue that any
discussion of race/racism is, in fact, racist and only serves to foment divisions
rather than reflect/redress societal realities. Color-blind racism also creates a set of code
terms that implicitly indict people of color without ever mentioning race.7 In the Post-Civil Rights Era, the
color-blind paradigm has become deeply ensconced in law and politics .
Civil Rights Acts requirement of

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.

This is especially true in the context of surveillance it


operates by policing and maintaining racial hierarchy
under the guise of a post-racial, multicultural America
Douglas in 12 <Delia. Venus, Serena, and the Inconspicuous Consumption
of Blackness: A Commentary on Surveillance, Race Talk, and New Racism(s)
Journal of Black Studies 43(2) 127145>
Neither the end of official segregation nor the increased diversity of the U.S.
population has led to the expansion of democratic ideals. Rather, in response to these
judicial and demographic shifts, this postcivil rights era has been marked by Whites
increased sense of anxiety about the undermining of White racial domination
(Bonilla-Silva, 2004; McKinney, 2005; Winant, 1997). Consequently, we are witnessing a number of

discursive moves that work to maintain White racial privilege and power while
simultaneously downplaying the persistence of racial inequality . Many agree, for
example, that the form and content of contemporary racism(s) are subtle and covert, in that

racialized discrimination and animosity are embedded in our


everyday practices, attitudes, identifications, social relations, and
organizations (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Essed, 2002). In addition, research indicates that in this
presumed era of color blindness and postraciality, the presence of Blacks
takes on a particular conspicuousness in relation to other racial groups; antiBlack hostility is alive and well (Feagin, 1991; Joseph, 2009; Reeves, 1998). Furthermore, the
end of legal racial separation is marked by the emergence of a new politics
of containment (Collins, 1998, p. 35), made manifest through the application of various formations
of power such that surveillance has become an important method of social control.
Surveillance refers not only to the practice of observing people in public
spaces; it is also linked to the rapid and seemingly endless display of
media representations that influence public discourse (Collins, 1998; Fiske,
1996). Consequently, mass media have become a key pedagogical device as visual and print media
imagery and narratives have infiltrated our lives in an unprecedented manner (Gabriel, 1998; Giroux,

the volume of narratives obscures the increasingly limited


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

Therefore, ____ and I advocate counterhegemonic


storytelling as a method for curtailing domestic
surveillance in the United States.

This is necessary in order to challenge the dominant


narratives used to authorize racialized surveillance
practices it reshapes, reverses, and reframes the status
quo ways of knowing colonized people as threatening,
exotic, and inferior
Jiwani in 11 <Yasmin. Pedagogies of Hope: Counter Narratives and AntiDisciplinary Tactics 30th August 2011. The Review of Education, Pedagogy,
and Cultural Studies, 33:333353>
tactical interventions contesting and disrupting colonial and
hegemonic ways of colonial storytelling, we might conceive of them as forms of making do that
cluster around particular thematic categories. These include reverse, reversing the gaze so that
the hidden scripts of the colonized and their ways of seeing the world are
brought to the fore thereby throwing into relief the powers of dominance and the experiences of the colonized;
In thinking through

re-appropriation, appropriating the language, forms, and images previously taken by the colonizers and imbuing them
with meanings that resonate with the colonized;

reframing, taking taken-for-granted meanings


or chains of signification and recasting them in ways that testify to the
agency and power of the colonized or subjugated; and jamming, making
apparent the concealed messages of dominant images and representations
and through rupturing the chains of signification creating new meanings or
alternative messages. There are a number of interesting visual examples of these tactical interventions that I
detail below. However, before turning to these examples, a detour revisiting some key, characteristic features of the
dominant colonial and hegemonic narratives that abound in visual media is necessary. Although there are many colonial
narratives, for the sake of brevity and as an analytical device I am condensing what seem to be the central features of the
ideal-type colonial narrative, particularly in its visual and literary forms. I am collapsing Orientalism (Said 1978) as a
specific field of discursive formation within this ideal type, bearing in mind that colonial discursive formations are
polyvalent (Lowe 1994). However, there are central unifying elements that cohere the various facets of these discourses
(see Said 1985). In his insightful and influential study of colonial literature, Abdul JanMohamed (1985) identifies the key
characteristic of colonial discourse as the construction of difference through allegorical extensions. These are fully
activated during the hegemonic phase of colonialism when consent by the governed is essential to continued domination.

The dominant model of power- and interest-relations in all


colonial societies is the Manichean opposition between the putative
superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native. This
axis in turn provides the central feature of the colonialist cognitive framework
and colonialist literary representation: the Manichean allegory, a field of diverse yet
interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil,
superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion,
rationality and sensuality, self and other, subject and object . The power relations
JanMohamed asserts:

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

as deep structure, they absorb change in a way that tends to


generate more novel representations that still cohere around the baseimages embedded in a grammar of race. The process by which Otherness is
commodified for consumption is one example of this cooptation, for here the
negative connotations of Otherness are transformed so as to render them
more positive and appealing, and thus palatable for consumption. The visual
(2006), but rather that

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

other representational strategies or discursive


moves deployed in colonial narratives include the erasure of identity, culture,
and history; interchangeability, which is linked to erasure, whereby one group
of natives is represented to stand in for another and where specificity is
eroded; and homogeneity or monolithic representations, whereby differences
within groups are leveled. Particular representations that draw from these discursive
strategies include representations of the colonized or subjugated populations
as exotic backdrops or hordes thus depriving them of singularity,
specificity, or individuality; appropriating their stories and histories and
recasting them within the framework of the white eye (Hall 1990) or the white gaze (a
2008). In addition to the Manichean allegories,

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

removing them, as Hall points out, from the realm


of history and into the domain of nature. As strategies, these discursive
formations work to exclude, marginalize, exoticize, and or demonize
subjugated peoples. Below I summarize these disciplinary discursive strategies and the range of antiwhere differences are essentialized and naturalized,

disciplinary tactical responses they have generated (see Table 2).

Social movements are efective in shaping the culture and


structure of society the af is necessary to combat the
surveillance aimed at preventing them from flourishing
Assadourian in 10 <Erik. The Power of Social Movements 2010.
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/transformingcultures/contents/socialmovements/>
social movements have played a powerful part in stimulating
rapid periods of cultural evolution, where new sets of ideas , values, policies,
or norms are rapidly adopted by large groups of people and subsequently
embedded firmly into a culture. From abolishing slavery and ensuring civil rights for all to
securing womens suffrage and liberating states nonviolently from colonial rulers, social movements
have dramatically redirected societal paths in just an eye blink of human
history. For sustainable societies to take root quickly in the decades to come,
the power of social movements will need to be fully tapped . Already,
interconnected environmental and social movements have emerged across
the world that under the right circumstances could catalyze into just the force
needed to accelerate this cultural shift. Yet it will be important to find ways to frame the
Throughout history,

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.

Through educational efforts, storytelling, and community organizing, the


benefits of the lost wisdom of living simply can be rediscovered and spread,
transforming not just personal lifestyles but broader societal
priorities. A third movement that could help redirect broader cultural norms, traditions, and values is
the fairly recent development of ecovillages. Sustainability educator Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn
ecovillage paints a picture of the exciting role that these are playing around the world. These sustainability
incubators are reinventing what is natural and spreading these ideas to broader societynot just through
modeling these new norms but through training and courses in ecovillage living, permaculture, and local
economics. Similar ideas are also spreading through cohousing communities, Transition Towns, and even
green commercial developments like Dockside Green in Canada and Hammarby Sjstad in Sweden. Two
Boxes in this section describe some other exciting initiatives. One provides an overview of a new political
movement called dcroissance (in English, degrowth), which is an important effort to remind people that
not only can growth be detrimental, but sometimes a sustainable decline is actually optimal. And a Box on
the Slow Food movement describes the succulent power of organizing people through their taste buds.
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.

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

such informal techniques of surveillance began to be absorbed


into government bureaucracy. In 1824, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Office
nineteenth century,

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

Systematic surveillance became even more important after


1848, when Indian Affairs responsibility transferred from the Department of
War to the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought
to comprehensively map the Indigenous population as part of a civilizing
the Mississippi River.

project to change the savage into a civilized man, as a congressional


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.

The secret surveillance eforts by COINTELPRO, police


departments and the NSA used to infiltrate activist
groups such as the Black Panther Party demonstrate a
history of social repression through surveillance that are
aimed at policing radical activists, minorities and Black
people in particular
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.>
Surveillance was central to sustaining and reproducing this system. From the 1940s to
the early 1970s, FBI wiretapping and bugging operations focused on a wide range
of movements, activists, and public figures. The following list of targets compiled by
historian Athan Theoharis gives a flavor of the surveillance and is worth quoting in full: Radical activists
(David Dallin, Charles Malamuth, C. B. Baldwin, Frank Oppenheimer, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Heinrich
Mann, Helene Weigel, Berthold Viertel, Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Richard Criley, Frank Wilkinson),

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

In the late 1950s, the FBI launched its secret


counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which used provocateurs and
informants to infiltrate communist groups initially, but later widened to
include Puerto Rican nationalists, the student movement, the civil rights
movement, and Black liberation movements. About 1,500 of the 8,500 American
Communist Party members were likely FBI informants in the early 1960s. By the end of the
decade, agents who had previously worked in US foreign intelligence were
transferring to the burgeoning field of domestic intelligence to spy on radical
movements, whether employed by the bureau, military intelligence, or the
expanding red squads in local police departments.41 A key part of the FBIs
countersubversion strategy was the manipulation of political activists into
committing criminal acts so that they could be arrested and prosecuted.
Agents provocateurs working for the FBI initiated disruptions of meetings and
demonstrations, fights between rival groups, attacks on police, and
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.
cooperative journalists and legislators.

The telecommunications companies at the time handed over to the NSA all telegrams sent out of and into

NSA analysts were collecting and analyzing


approximately 150,000 telegrams a month . In 1967, the FBI and CIA submitted lists of
the United States. By the early 1970s,

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

it soon became apparent that


these movements were manifestations of a new kind of politics that could not
be understood according to the conspiratorial calculus of front groups and
fellow travelers; surveillance therefore had to be widened to monitor
ordinary participants, particularly in Black communities, in what was
increasingly seen as a popular insurgency. Even then, the hope was that new
electronic technologies would be the answer. National security advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski commented in 1970 that technology would make it
possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and
maintain up-to-date files, containing even personal information about the . . .
behavior of the citizen, in addition to the more customary data .47
thought to be manipulating events behind the scenes. But

The US surveillance regime operates not only through


covert observation but also explicitly in order to
intimidate, threaten, and encouraging dissidents to selfpolice and internalize the surveillance that maintains 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

King and his advisors debated about


whether to expose the FBIs campaign against him and decided it would
ultimately do him more harm than good.10 Thus, King may or may not have felt
as proud as he acted in the face of FBI surveillance . There is, therefore, a tension
about the FBI surveillance.9 But that was an act.

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

the FBIs surveillance of King is that the FBI had a


suicide pact with King. The FBI had offered King a onesided deal: destroy yourself or we
will use our surveillance to destroy you. It may be, however, that this suicide pact was not
this essay. A novel way of thinking about

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

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,
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.

Specifically, surveillance has been used in order to


repress change and social movements through the
policing of riots - Black Power and other radical
movement riots in the 1960s demanding justice were
met with increased surveillance practices in order to
control, infiltrate and police those social movements
Oliver in 8 Professor of Sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison
<Pamela. REPRESSION AND CRIME CONTROL: WHY SOCIAL MOVEMENT
SCHOLARS SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO MASS INCARCERATION AS A FORM OF
REPRESSION 2008 Mobilization: The International Quarterly 13(1): 1-24>
Todays young people are generally taught a celebratory history of the civil
rights movement and the politics of nonviolent resistance centered on the
icons of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Our young are rarely taught
about the riots, and even many academic sources on the Black movement
ignore or downplay the riots. It seems as if those who are old enough to remember the riots are
trying to forget them. But the riots and the larger context of violence around the Black movement are

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

riots prior to the 1960s


were usually initiated by Whites and often involved one-sided White attacks
on Black communities. The 1960s riots, by contrast, primarily involved Black people looting and
urban riots. Race riots are a longstanding feature of U.S. history, but

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

The White press treated any Black claims to the right


to self-defense as extremist violent calls to race war. By 1968, rhetoric had
back when attacked.

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

In the late 1960s,


Black Power organizations were expressing political anger and advo- cating
defiance of White law. Before he was killed in 1965, Malcolm X had received wide
publicity for criticizing nonviolence as a strategy in the face of White
violence. In 1966, SNCC publicly launched the slogan Black Power during the
march through Mississippi where King and Carmichael debated strategy in front of reporters. Malcolm,
Carmichael and most other Black Power advocates understood the slogan to
involve economic and political power and the willingness to meet White
violence with self-defense, not as a call for armed aggression against White
power, but the slogan was frightening to most Whites . There is telling footage in the
Rodney King with a smaller wave of rioting elsewhere (Associated Press 1992).

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

Black people generally saw the riots as extreme expressions of Black


political grievances, and many saw them as rebellions or insurrections. A
large majority of Black people told survey researchers that the underlying
cause of the riots was dissatisfaction with racial discrimination and inequality .
of the riots.

(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

The riots had political


consequences, as a substantial body of scholarship has docu- mented. For example, Buttons (1978)
10% tax increase (Urban America and Urban Coalition 1969).

detailed compilation of qualitative interview data and quantitative expenditure patterns show substantial

on policies to prevent riots through welfare payments, low income


housing, jobs programsespecially summer jobs programs for youths, which were seen as riot
insuranceand training for police in better community relations , especially before
impacts

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

Local police, the FBI, the U.S. Army, and


the CIA all had major domestic surveillance operations that had placed
informers and agents in virtually every movement organization in the
country. In the 1964 election, Goldwater made safety in the streets and opposition to civil rights part
build up in police departments all over the country.

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

The White populace in general and key


elements of the White eliteparticularly the FBI and the US military
believed that the Black riots were planned and orchestrated by Black
militants with Communist connections, or by Black Muslims (who, while not
Communist, were seen as just as dangerous). Communist conspiracies also were believed
to underlie the other radical movements of the period, including especially
the student antiwar movement and all of the various left-wing parties and
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
only riots were repressed in the 1960s, of course.

played a major role in disrupting the organizations against which it was directed.

This legacy of repression through surveillance continues


today surveillance of the demonstrations in Baltimore
show the way that it is used to target and coordinate
state repression of activists
Gaist in 15 <Thomas. FBI spy planes used in police-military operation
against Baltimore protests May 7, 2015.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/07/balt-m07.html>
Two small planes flew carefully planned routes over crowds assembled in
West Baltimore during the mass demonstrations against the police murder,
according to flight records from a third party called Flightradar 24, cited by the Post . An unnamed
source said the planes were equipped with infrared technology designed to
track the movements of individual human beings on the ground. The
Baltimore Police Department deferred all inquiries on the matter to the FBI,
which has refused to comment. Thus far, the US government has rejected
demands by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups for an explanation of
the domestic spying operation. The extended aerial surveillance operation
only came to light as a result of personal investigations by citizens who

noticed unusual airplane activity overhead.

It remains unclear precisely what other forms

One could assume,


however, that the monitoring of crowd movements was used to help
coordinate the military response against protesters , much like satellite, drone
and other airborne technologies do for battlefield operations in Afghanistan or
Iraq. Known technologies used by the government include mass cell phone
data capture, high-resolution photography and facial recognition. An
unnamed US official who spoke with the Post confirmed the use of federal
surveillance assets in support of the military-police mobilization in
Baltimore. The FBI deployed the planes to bolster the surveillance assets deployed by the citys own
of technology outside of infrared surveillance were onboard the aircraft.

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

During the Baltimore protests various career police


officers boasted on CNN that federal and state law enforcement agencies had
intelligence assets among the crowds in Baltimore. The police also said
they were monitoring social media to track protests . The military operation in
40 miles from Washington, DC.

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 operation in Baltimore is part of an expanding


program of persistent surveillance. According to the ACLU, new
technologies, using sophisticated high-tech version of radar that is akin to a
camera to track movements in detail across an immense territory, have
been deployed or are in development,
last year as enemy forces.

Plan: The United States federal government should end


its domestic surveillance of radical social movements.

Everyday, discriminatory violence is concealed by focusing


on low probability events like nuclear war instead of the
quotidian forms of violence that authorize violence on a
greater scale
Omolade 89, [1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for
the past twenty years and an organizer in both the womens and civil
rights/black power movements, We Speak for the Planet in Rocking the
ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics, pp. 172-176]

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

movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history

mobilized against women of color. The political advancements of white


men have grown directly from the devastation and holocaust of people
of color and our lands. This technological and material progress has been in direct proportion
to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the dayto- day survival, political struggles,
and rising up of women of color, especially black women in the United States, reveal both
complex resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often conflicted
responses to the military and war. The Holocausts Women of color are survivors
of and remain casualties of holocausts, and we are direct victims of
war-that is, of open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. But
women of color were not soldiers, nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to
the white man for guns, nor did we sell or lease our lands to the white man for
wealth. Most men and women of color resisted and fought back, were
slaughtered, enslaved, and force marched into plantation labor
camps to serve the white masters of war and to build their empires and war
machines. People of color were and are victims of holocausts -that is, of great
and widespread destruction, usually by fire . The world as we knew and
created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The
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

women of color, we, too,


are "remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the world. We
must remember the names of concentration camps such as Jesus,
Justice, Brotherhood, and Integrity, ships that carried millions of
African men, women, and children chained and brutalized across the
ocean to the "New World." We must remember the Arawaks, the Taino, the
Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware , and
the other Native American names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for
tribes of people who are no more. We must remember the holocausts visited
against the Hawaiians, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pacific Island
peoples, and the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . We must
remember the slaughter of men and women at Sharpeville, the children
of Soweto, and the men of Attica. We must never, ever, forget the children
disfigured, the men maimed, and the women broken in our holocaustswe must remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the stories and
teach them to our children and our children's children so the world can never
forget our suffering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the
Nazis is over, our holocausts continue. We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in
the Argentinian square silently demanding news of our missing kin from
the fascists who rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see our
mothers and fathers shot in front of our eyes. We are the Palestinian
and Lebanese women and children overrun by Israeli, Lebanese, and
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
names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds. Yet as

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

Peace is not merely an


absence of 'conflict that enables white middleclass comfort , nor is it
simply resistance to nuclear war and war machinery. The litany of
"you will be blown up, too" directed by a white man to a black
woman obscures the permanency and institutionalization of war, the
violence and holocaust that people of color face daily . Unfortunately, the
holocaust does not only refer to the mass murder of Jews, Christians, and
atheists during the Nazi regime; it also refers to the permanent
institutionalization of war that is part of every fascist and racist
regime. The holocaust lives. It is a threat to world peace as
pervasive and thorough as nuclear war.
of black teenagers by a white man, such as happened in New York City.

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.

To accept the racist universe to the


slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence . It is to
accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to
agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person]

man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism


illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated;
that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition . The anti-racist
struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate
passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However,
it remains true that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice
among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly
speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human

One cannot found a


moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies
the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is the truly capital sin.fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of
order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy.

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

the roles will


be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own
death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat
you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were once a stranger in
Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because
you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again
someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal indeed, it is a contract,
however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for
all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice
commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by
all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence,
and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live
in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps,

Even if policy action fails critiquing unjust police practices


is necessary to challenge the dominant narrative and who
produces it - you should still vote af because our speech
act is important
Billies in 13 <Michelle. producing bodies, knowledge, and community In
everyday civilian struggle over surveillance 2013. Pgs 3-6. Proquest>
Critiquing the coercive and unjust aspects of police interactions is vital for
disrupting slippery links between assumed criminality, race, gender, inherent
aggression, and the necessity of force to establish control among civilians.
Such work is also integral for framing the complicated ways civilians relate to
the role of policing in their lives. The lack of social psychological and critical
criminological critique of the racialized, sexual, and gendered facilitation of

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.

Social movements are efective in shaping the culture and


structure of society the af is necessary to combat the
surveillance aimed at preventing them from flourishing
Assadourian in 10 <Erik. The Power of Social Movements 2010.
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/transformingcultures/contents/socialmovements/>
social movements have played a powerful part in stimulating
rapid periods of cultural evolution, where new sets of ideas , values, policies,
or norms are rapidly adopted by large groups of people and subsequently
embedded firmly into a culture. From abolishing slavery and ensuring civil rights for all to
securing womens suffrage and liberating states nonviolently from colonial rulers, social movements
have dramatically redirected societal paths in just an eye blink of human
history. For sustainable societies to take root quickly in the decades to come,
the power of social movements will need to be fully tapped . Already,
interconnected environmental and social movements have emerged across
the world that under the right circumstances could catalyze into just the force
needed to accelerate this cultural shift. Yet it will be important to find ways to frame the
Throughout history,

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.

Through educational efforts, storytelling, and community organizing, the


benefits of the lost wisdom of living simply can be rediscovered and spread,
transforming not just personal lifestyles but broader societal
priorities. A third movement that could help redirect broader cultural norms, traditions, and values is
the fairly recent development of ecovillages. Sustainability educator Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn
ecovillage paints a picture of the exciting role that these are playing around the world. These sustainability
incubators are reinventing what is natural and spreading these ideas to broader societynot just through
modeling these new norms but through training and courses in ecovillage living, permaculture, and local
economics. Similar ideas are also spreading through cohousing communities, Transition Towns, and even
green commercial developments like Dockside Green in Canada and Hammarby Sjstad in Sweden. Two
Boxes in this section describe some other exciting initiatives. One provides an overview of a new political
movement called dcroissance (in English, degrowth), which is an important effort to remind people that
not only can growth be detrimental, but sometimes a sustainable decline is actually optimal. And a Box on
the Slow Food movement describes the succulent power of organizing people through their taste buds.

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

Baltimore and Surveillance


Surveillance is being deployed in order to monitor, police
and control social movements surveillance in Baltimore
proves
Gaist in 15 <Thomas. FBI spy planes used in police-military operation
against Baltimore protests May 7, 2015.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/07/balt-m07.html>
Two small planes flew carefully planned routes over crowds assembled in
West Baltimore during the mass demonstrations against the police murder,
according to flight records from a third party called Flightradar 24, cited by the Post . An unnamed
source said the planes were equipped with infrared technology designed to
track the movements of individual human beings on the ground. The
Baltimore Police Department deferred all inquiries on the matter to the FBI,
which has refused to comment. Thus far, the US government has rejected
demands by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups for an explanation of
the domestic spying operation. The extended aerial surveillance operation
only came to light as a result of personal investigations by citizens who
noticed unusual airplane activity overhead. It remains unclear precisely what other forms
of technology outside of infrared surveillance were onboard the aircraft. One could assume,
however, that the monitoring of crowd movements was used to help
coordinate the military response against protesters , much like satellite, drone
and other airborne technologies do for battlefield operations in Afghanistan or
Iraq. Known technologies used by the government include mass cell phone
data capture, high-resolution photography and facial recognition. An
unnamed US official who spoke with the Post confirmed the use of federal
surveillance assets in support of the military-police mobilization in
Baltimore. The FBI deployed the planes to bolster the surveillance assets deployed by the citys own
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

During the Baltimore protests various career police


officers boasted on CNN that federal and state law enforcement agencies had
40 miles from Washington, DC.

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 operation in Baltimore is part of an expanding


program of persistent surveillance. According to the ACLU, new
technologies, using sophisticated high-tech version of radar that is akin to a
camera to track movements in detail across an immense territory, have
been deployed or are in development,
last year as enemy forces.

Riots and Surveillance


Surveillance has historically been used in order to repress
change and social movements through the policing of
riots - Black Power and other radical movement riots
in the 1960s demanding justice were met with increased
surveillance practices in order to control, infiltrate and
police those social movements
Oliver in 8 Professor of Sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison
<Pamela. REPRESSION AND CRIME CONTROL: WHY SOCIAL MOVEMENT
SCHOLARS SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO MASS INCARCERATION AS A FORM OF
REPRESSION 2008 Mobilization: The International Quarterly 13(1): 1-24>
Todays young people are generally taught a celebratory history of the civil
rights movement and the politics of nonviolent resistance centered on the
icons of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Our young are rarely taught
about the riots, and even many academic sources on the Black movement
ignore or downplay the riots. It seems as if those who are old enough to remember the riots are
trying to forget them. But the riots and the larger context of violence around the Black movement are

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

riots prior to the 1960s


were usually initiated by Whites and often involved one-sided White attacks
on Black communities. The 1960s riots, by contrast, primarily involved Black people looting and
urban riots. Race riots are a longstanding feature of U.S. history, but

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

The White press treated any Black claims to the right


to self-defense as extremist violent calls to race war. By 1968, rhetoric had
back when attacked.

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

In the late 1960s,


Black Power organizations were expressing political anger and advo- cating
defiance of White law. Before he was killed in 1965, Malcolm X had received wide
publicity for criticizing nonviolence as a strategy in the face of White
violence. In 1966, SNCC publicly launched the slogan Black Power during the
march through Mississippi where King and Carmichael debated strategy in front of reporters. Malcolm,
Carmichael and most other Black Power advocates understood the slogan to
involve economic and political power and the willingness to meet White
violence with self-defense, not as a call for armed aggression against White
power, but the slogan was frightening to most Whites . There is telling footage in the
Rodney King with a smaller wave of rioting elsewhere (Associated Press 1992).

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

Black people generally saw the riots as extreme expressions of Black


political grievances, and many saw them as rebellions or insurrections. A
large majority of Black people told survey researchers that the underlying
cause of the riots was dissatisfaction with racial discrimination and inequality .
of the riots.

(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).

The riots had political

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

on policies to prevent riots through welfare payments, low income


housing, jobs programsespecially summer jobs programs for youths, which were seen as riot
insuranceand training for police in better community relations , especially before
impacts

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

Local police, the FBI, the U.S. Army, and


the CIA all had major domestic surveillance operations that had placed
informers and agents in virtually every movement organization in the
country. In the 1964 election, Goldwater made safety in the streets and opposition to civil rights part
build up in police departments all over the country.

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

The White populace in general and key


elements of the White eliteparticularly the FBI and the US military
believed that the Black riots were planned and orchestrated by Black
militants with Communist connections, or by Black Muslims (who, while not
Communist, were seen as just as dangerous). Communist conspiracies also were believed
to underlie the other radical movements of the period, including especially
the student antiwar movement and all of the various left-wing parties and
only riots were repressed in the 1960s, of course.

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

King and his advisors debated about


whether to expose the FBIs campaign against him and decided it would
ultimately do him more harm than good.10 Thus, King may or may not have felt
as proud as he acted in the face of FBI surveillance . There is, therefore, a tension
about the FBI surveillance.9 But that was an act.

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

the FBIs surveillance of King is that the FBI had a


suicide pact with King. The FBI had offered King a onesided deal: destroy yourself or we
will use our surveillance to destroy you. It may be, however, that this suicide pact was not
this essay. A novel way of thinking about

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

such informal techniques of surveillance began to be absorbed


into government bureaucracy. In 1824, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Office
nineteenth century,

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

Systematic surveillance became even more important after


1848, when Indian Affairs responsibility transferred from the Department of
War to the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought
to comprehensively map the Indigenous population as part of a civilizing
project to change the savage into a civilized man, as a congressional
the Mississippi River.

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.

Surveillance -> Infiltration


Secret surveillance has historically been used to infiltrate
and police activists, minorities and black people in
particular through COINTELPRO, police departments and
the NSA
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.>
Surveillance was central to sustaining and reproducing this system. From the 1940s to
the early 1970s, FBI wiretapping and bugging operations focused on a wide range
of movements, activists, and public figures. The following list of targets compiled by
historian Athan Theoharis gives a flavor of the surveillance and is worth quoting in full: Radical activists
(David Dallin, Charles Malamuth, C. B. Baldwin, Frank Oppenheimer, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Heinrich
Mann, Helene Weigel, Berthold Viertel, Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Richard Criley, Frank Wilkinson),
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

In the late 1950s, the FBI launched its secret


counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which used provocateurs and
informants to infiltrate communist groups initially, but later widened to
include Puerto Rican nationalists, the student movement, the civil rights
movement, and Black liberation movements. About 1,500 of the 8,500 American
Communist Party members were likely FBI informants in the early 1960s. By the end of the
decade, agents who had previously worked in US foreign intelligence were
transferring to the burgeoning field of domestic intelligence to spy on radical
movements, whether employed by the bureau, military intelligence, or the
expanding red squads in local police departments.41 A key part of the FBIs
countersubversion strategy was the manipulation of political activists into
committing criminal acts so that they could be arrested and prosecuted.
Agents provocateurs working for the FBI initiated disruptions of meetings and
demonstrations, fights between rival groups, attacks on police, and
cooperative journalists and legislators.

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

NSA analysts were collecting and analyzing


approximately 150,000 telegrams a month . In 1967, the FBI and CIA submitted lists of
the United States. By the early 1970s,

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

it soon became apparent that


these movements were manifestations of a new kind of politics that could not
be understood according to the conspiratorial calculus of front groups and
fellow travelers; surveillance therefore had to be widened to monitor
ordinary participants, particularly in Black communities, in what was
increasingly seen as a popular insurgency. Even then, the hope was that new
electronic technologies would be the answer. National security advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski commented in 1970 that technology would make it
possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and
maintain up-to-date files, containing even personal information about the . . .
behavior of the citizen, in addition to the more customary data .47
thought to be manipulating events behind the scenes. But

COINTELPROs use to infiltrate black nationalists


demonstrates the way that surveillance is used in order to
control and disband movements that challenge white
supremacy, US capitalism and militarism
Boykof in 7 <Jules. Surveillance, Spatial Compression, and Scale: The FBI
and Martin Luther King Jr Antipode. Pgs 729-753. http://julesboykoff.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff-Antipode-article-1.pdf>
a
notable shift occurred in terms of the reasons for the surveillance of Martin
Amidst these procedural changes for intelligence activities, and the overall decrease in surveillance,

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

Kings cross-examination of capitalism


and its intersection with militarism was articulated forcefully on 4 April 1967
when King delivered an anti-Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church in New
York where he said that the United States was the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today. 12 The FBI responded aggressively to Kings
speech and his mounting anti-imperialist critique of the militaryindustrial
complex by initiating a COINTELPRO against the SCLC under the Black
NationalistHate Group rubric. The FBIs stated purpose of its Black
NationalistHate Group COINTELPRO was to expose, disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black-nationalist, hate-type
organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and
supporters to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder. King
was listed specifically as a primary target of the COINTELPRO. All FBI Field Offices
received official directives that delineated the following long-range goals. 1
Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups ... An effective
coalition of black nationalist groups might be ... the beginning of a true black
revolution. 2 Prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the
militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a
messiah; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely
Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position . Elijah Muhammad is
was perfectly in keeping with that development.

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

Prevent militant black nationalist groups from gaining respectability, by

discrediting them (Hoover 1968). This COINTELPRO was in effect through Kings
assassination on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.13

These infiltration practices were used to provide the state


with intelligence in order to disrupt activists like Martin
Luther King Jr and Black Nationalist groups surveillance
functions as a form of social control that stops social
change and maintains subjugation
Boykof in 7 <Jules. Surveillance, Spatial Compression, and Scale: The FBI
and Martin Luther King Jr Antipode. Pgs 729-753. http://julesboykoff.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff-Antipode-article-1.pdf>
a
notable shift occurred in terms of the reasons for the surveillance of Martin
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.
Amidst these procedural changes for intelligence activities, and the overall decrease in surveillance,

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

Kings cross-examination of capitalism


and its intersection with militarism was articulated forcefully on 4 April 1967
when King delivered an anti-Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church in New
York where he said that the United States was the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today. 12 The FBI responded aggressively to Kings
speech and his mounting anti-imperialist critique of the militaryindustrial
complex by initiating a COINTELPRO against the SCLC under the Black
NationalistHate Group rubric. The FBIs stated purpose of its Black
was perfectly in keeping with that development.

NationalistHate Group COINTELPRO was to expose, disrupt, misdirect,


discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black-nationalist, hate-type
organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and
supporters to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder. King
was listed specifically as a primary target of the COINTELPRO. All FBI Field Offices
received official directives that delineated the following long-range goals. 1
Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups ... An effective
coalition of black nationalist groups might be ... the beginning of a true black
revolution. 2 Prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the
militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a
messiah; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely
Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position . Elijah Muhammad is
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

Prevent militant black nationalist groups from gaining respectability, by


discrediting them (Hoover 1968). This COINTELPRO was in effect through Kings
assassination on 4 April 1968

Explicit Surveillance -> Self-Police


Surveillance is used in order to control dissent and
infiltrate movements that challenge the status quo both
through secret surveillance as well as overt surveillance
used to intimidate and disincentivize change
Boykof in 7 <Jules. Surveillance, Spatial Compression, and Scale: The FBI
and Martin Luther King Jr Antipode. Pgs 729-753. http://julesboykoff.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff-Antipode-article-1.pdf>
Surveillance is frequently carried out covertly, without the targets
knowledge, but it may also be manifested overtly , in ostentatious fashion, in
order to let dissidents know they are being monitored. Glick (1989:53) calls
this latter type conspicuous surveillance, and argues that the objective is not to collect
information (which is done surreptitiously), but to harass and intimidate,
thereby scaring of potential activists and driving away those who
[have] already become involved. A common mode of ostentatious surveillance includes
FBI or police interviews of dissidents. During these interviews, investigators can, either furtively or
unequivocally, let dissidents know that their actions have been or are being tracked by state authorities. In
a document entitled New Left NotesPhiladelphia, filed on 16 September 1970, an FBI agent described
the merits of carrying out intensive interviews with dissidents and their hangers-on. The agent declared
that the investigative interviews not only enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles but also further
serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox (document reprinted in Cowan,
Egleson and Hentoff 1974:138141).2 Intelligence gathering is another important aspect of surveillance.
This intelligence can later be used to harass, intimidate, prosecute, and rally institutional support against
dissident citizens. Indeed, it may be the most common activity of control agents. Donner (1980) asserts

intelligence, as gathered through surveillance, is used to address a central


contradiction in the US political system: the challenge of protecting the
political freedoms inherent to liberal democracy while at the same time
maintaining the status quo. This status-quo enforcing mode of dissent suppression can take the
that

form of electronic surveillance,3 wiretapping, mail opening, file storage, and black bag jobs. 4

Surveillance can also be facilitated by informants who infiltrate dissident


groups and movements.5 Regardless of the form surveillance comes in, it has
the effect of compressing space, both corporeal and tactical. Surveillance
compresses the physical space in which dissident citizens can comfortably
operate, which, in turn, constricts dissidents tactical repertoires . Such spatial
compression emerges from the strong relationship that surveillance has with the social mechanism of

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.

Surveillance has historically been used in order to


suppress dissident groups from challenging the status
quo not only through direct enforcement but also through
intimidation meant to teach people to self-police
Boykof in 7 <Jules. Surveillance, Spatial Compression, and Scale: The FBI
and Martin Luther King Jr Antipode. Pgs 729-753. http://julesboykoff.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff-Antipode-article-1.pdf>
Surveillance often takes the form of a seemingly innocuous (and sometimes
even helpful) legibility project, and many of these projects have subtly but
surely become a largely unquestioned part of the social structure (Marx 2006;
Scott 1998). Parenti (2003) calls this the soft cage of massive routine surveillance
that leads to the internalization of the states gaze , thereby setting into motionif not
normalizingspatial compression and the stultification of dissident rescaling via the mechanism of

Intimidation, then, is a cumulative, self-regulatory effect of how the


gaze of the state affects the practice of dissent . In other words, through
intimidation, people police themselves. Simultaneously, intimidation diminishes the
intimidation.

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

Reagan issued Executive Order 12333, which allowed the FBI


to again more freely engage in wiretaps and black-bag-job type break-ins
(Reagan 1982). Also, recent legislationsuch as the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001
makes it markedly easier for the FBI to carry out surveillance on potential
dissidents in our contemporary moment. More specifically, Section 213 of the USA PATRIOT
1981 President Ronald

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

Thus the reasonable cause standard


quietly replaces the probable cause, a common feature of the law. In practice,
under a sneak-and-peek warrant the FBI can covertly enter a residence
when the occupant is not there and can seize the occupants possessions,
copy, photograph, or alter them, and not inform the occupant of this for a
reasonable period thereafter (US Congress 2001:Sec 213). Section 215 of the Patriot Act also
immediate notification may have an adverse result.

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

Under the US Congresss reauthorization of the Act, this gag


order was changed from everlasting to a one-year period, after which
information providers can challenge the restraint (Stolberg 2006). Many dissidents
experiencing heightened surveillance made possible by the USA PATRIOT Act
have asserted that surveillance has affected their ability to practice dissent
or to attract recruits for fear of being dubbed criminal extremists . In a sense,
Bureaus inquiries.

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

Repression influenced whether social allies were physically,


organizationally, or ideologically available to potential state defectors . This
actors.

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

In the United States, the state apparatus has consistently


acted to contract the scale of dissident practice . The case study of Martin Luther King Jr
geographical processes.

and the SCLC highlights such scale squelching, the inverse of what Smith (1992:60) dubs scale jumping.

Surveillance not Explicit


The US uses national security and the war on drugs
as neutral covers for racist surveillance and policing
practices
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 War on Drugslaunched by President Reagan in 1982dramatically
accelerated the process of racial securitization . Michelle Alexander notes that At the time
he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important

the drug war from the outset


had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public
concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan
made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined others
the undeserving.52 Operation Hammer, carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1988,
illustrates how racialized surveillance was central to the War on Drugs. It involved
hundreds of officers in combat gear sweeping through the South Central area
of the city over a period of several weeks, making 1,453 arrests, mostly for
teenage curfew violations, disorderly conduct, and minor traffic offenses.
Ninety percent were released without charge but the thousands of young
Black people who were stopped and processed in mobile booking centers had
their names entered onto the gang register database , which soon
contained the details of half of the Black youths of Los Angeles . Entry to the
issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for

database rested on such supposed indicators of gang membership as high-five handshakes and wearing

Officials compared the Black gangs they were supposedly


targeting to the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and the
murderous militias of Beirut, signaling the blurring of boundaries
between civilian policing and military force, and between domestic
racism and overseas imperialism.53 In the twelve years leading up to 1993, the rate of
red shoelaces.

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

A predictable outcome of such systems of


classification and criminalization is the routine racist violence carried out by
seize them and take them away.57

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.

The state manufactures threats in order to justify


surveillance and control over the population and is
authorized through security discourse
Billies in 13 <Michelle. producing bodies, knowledge, and community In
everyday civilian struggle over surveillance 2013. Pgs 3-6. Proquest>
After 9/11, the OM policing that accompanied economic development and social welfare reforms has

New security processes are rapidly being


normalized - stepped up ID checks, screening at airports, and the linking
police and immigration databases and practices . The NYPD budget has expanded with
increasingly entwined with logics of security.

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

the material and ideological spread of security discourse and


practice (such as the See Something, Say Something campaign that put city dwellers on the look-out
for suspicious behavior) provides a powerful warrant for escalated stop and
frisk. As Pain (2001) explains, promoting the idea of suspicious others, is often
invoked at the level of governance in order to excite fear and promote
support for punitive strategies (p. 902). Defined by those who are rejected from
it for their dangerousness - the public is made secure by being
insulated from manufactured threat (Massumi, 2010). As Kaplan (2003) states,
argue that

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

since this was Covey's customary modus


operandi, the slaves felt it dangerous "to stop a single minute . His comings were
like a thief in the night. He appeared to us as being ever at hand . He was under
get to work (p. 57). As Douglass explains,

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

Although lacking the


sophistication of twentieth-century surveillance technologies, Covey's
and authority upon his subjects in order to rule them by fear.

maneuverings and strategies nonetheless impacted the slaves in a way


similar to the effect carceral technologies have on prisoners. That is, Covey
was able to make his gaze be experienced as if he were always present . In
other words, Covey, like the Panopticon, took on a ubiquitous aura even when absent. Though in reality
limited by his physical existence, his practice of surprise attacks, coupled with the stark penalties
exercised upon those caught idle or not working efficiently, allowed Covey to transcend his spatial

Having created an atmosphere of fear in which the slaves lived and


moved and had their being, Covey's actual physical presence was in effect no
longer needed. That is, the sign of a broken slave was the internal inscription
of the master's gaze, or in more Foucauldian terms, the interiorization of the panoptic gaze and
limitations.

the subsequent creation of a new subjectivity, the slave subject.

Surveillance -> Post-Racial US


The law and government practices morph to respond to a
changing political world while maintaining the same
structure of racial subjugation surveillance operates to
maintain racial hierarchy in a post-racial, multicultural
America
Douglas in 12 <Delia. Venus, Serena, and the Inconspicuous Consumption
of Blackness: A Commentary on Surveillance, Race Talk, and New Racism(s)
Journal of Black Studies 43(2) 127145>
Neither the end of official segregation nor the increased diversity of the U.S.
population has led to the expansion of democratic ideals. Rather, in response to these
judicial and demographic shifts, this postcivil rights era has been marked by Whites
increased sense of anxiety about the undermining of White racial domination
(Bonilla-Silva, 2004; McKinney, 2005; Winant, 1997). Consequently, we are witnessing a number of

discursive moves that work to maintain White racial privilege and power while
simultaneously downplaying the persistence of racial inequality . Many agree, for
example, that the form and content of contemporary racism(s) are subtle and covert, in that

racialized discrimination and animosity are embedded in our


everyday practices, attitudes, identifications, social relations, and
organizations (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Essed, 2002). In addition, research indicates that in this
presumed era of color blindness and postraciality, the presence of Blacks
takes on a particular conspicuousness in relation to other racial groups; antiBlack hostility is alive and well (Feagin, 1991; Joseph, 2009; Reeves, 1998). Furthermore, the
end of legal racial separation is marked by the emergence of a new politics
of containment (Collins, 1998, p. 35), made manifest through the application of various formations
of power such that surveillance has become an important method of social control.
Surveillance refers not only to the practice of observing people in public
spaces; it is also linked to the rapid and seemingly endless display of
media representations that influence public discourse (Collins, 1998; Fiske,
1996). Consequently, mass media have become a key pedagogical device as visual and print media
imagery and narratives have infiltrated our lives in an unprecedented manner (Gabriel, 1998; Giroux,

the volume of narratives obscures the increasingly limited


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

Nuclear War Focus Bad


This surveillance is part of a larger structure of everyday,
discriminatory violence which is concealed by focusing on
low probability events like nuclear war instead of the
quotidian forms of violence that authorize violence on a
greater scale
Omolade 89, [1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for
the past twenty years and an organizer in both the womens and civil
rights/black power movements, We Speak for the Planet in Rocking the
ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics, pp. 172-176]

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,

movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history


mobilized against women of color. The political advancements of white
men have grown directly from the devastation and holocaust of people
of color and our lands. This technological and material progress has been in direct proportion
to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the dayto- day survival, political struggles,
and rising up of women of color, especially black women in the United States, reveal both
complex resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often conflicted
responses to the military and war. The Holocausts Women of color are survivors
of and remain casualties of holocausts, and we are direct victims of
war-that is, of open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. But
women of color were not soldiers, nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to
the white man for guns, nor did we sell or lease our lands to the white man for
wealth. Most men and women of color resisted and fought back, were
slaughtered, enslaved, and force marched into plantation labor
camps to serve the white masters of war and to build their empires and war
machines. People of color were and are victims of holocausts -that is, of great
and widespread destruction, usually by fire . The world as we knew and
created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The
and

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

women of color, we, too,


are "remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the world. We
must remember the names of concentration camps such as Jesus,
Justice, Brotherhood, and Integrity, ships that carried millions of
African men, women, and children chained and brutalized across the
ocean to the "New World." We must remember the Arawaks, the Taino, the
Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware , and
the other Native American names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for
tribes of people who are no more. We must remember the holocausts visited
against the Hawaiians, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pacific Island
peoples, and the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . We must
remember the slaughter of men and women at Sharpeville, the children
of Soweto, and the men of Attica. We must never, ever, forget the children
disfigured, the men maimed, and the women broken in our holocaustswe must remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the stories and
teach them to our children and our children's children so the world can never
forget our suffering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the
Nazis is over, our holocausts continue. We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in
the Argentinian square silently demanding news of our missing kin from
the fascists who rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see our
mothers and fathers shot in front of our eyes. We are the Palestinian
and Lebanese women and children overrun by Israeli, Lebanese, and
names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds. Yet as

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

Peace is not merely an


absence of 'conflict that enables white middleclass comfort , nor is it
simply resistance to nuclear war and war machinery. The litany of
"you will be blown up, too" directed by a white man to a black
woman obscures the permanency and institutionalization of war, the
violence and holocaust that people of color face daily . Unfortunately, the
holocaust does not only refer to the mass murder of Jews, Christians, and
atheists during the Nazi regime; it also refers to the permanent
institutionalization of war that is part of every fascist and racist
regime. The holocaust lives. It is a threat to world peace as
pervasive and thorough as nuclear war.
of black teenagers by a white man, such as happened in New York City.

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.

To accept the racist universe to the


slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence . It is to
accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to
agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person]
man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism
illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated;
that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition . The anti-racist
struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate
passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However,
it remains true that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice
among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly
speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human

One cannot found a


moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies
the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is the truly capital sin.fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of
order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy.

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

the roles will


be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own
death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat
you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were once a stranger in
Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because
you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again
someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal indeed, it is a contract,
however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for
all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice
commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by
all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence,
is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps,

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.

Value-neutral impact analysis cannot account for the day


to day impact of racismdefault to the systemic harms
Mohan 93 [Professor at LSU (Brij, Eclipse Of Freedom, p. 3-4)]
The ordeal of existence transcends the thermonuclear fever because the
latter does not directly impact the day-to-day operations of the common
people. The fear of crime, accidents, loss of job, and health care on the one
hand; and the scourges of racism, sexism, and agism on the other hand have
created a counterculture of denial and disbelief that has shattered the faade
of civility. Civilization loses its significance when its social institutions have
become counterproductive. It is the aspect of the mega-crisis that we are
concerned about. The ordeal of existence, as I see it, has three relevant facets: Crisis of
modernity, Contradictions of paradigms, Complexity of social phenomenon. Reinventing civility calls for an
exposition of these elements without a vituperative intent. Each of these aspects has normative and
structural dimension involving a host of theories. The politics, metaphors, and rhetoric, however, color the

a value-neutral assessment cannot


be a politically correct statement on the human condition.
shape and substance of each analytical output. Therefore,

Social Movements Work


Social movements can create change and the af is a
necessary part of those movement
Jensen in 11 - Journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and
board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin<Robert.
The power - and limits - of social movements July 12 th, 2011.>
In dissident politics in the United States, we have long argued that this quest for economic and military
dominance cant be squared with basic moral and political principles. Were on top, but its unjust and

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

The speaker reminds the audience that the work of popular


movements remains incomplete and that we owe it to generations past and
American apartheid.

future -- and to ourselves -- to press on .

Im familiar with that exchange because Ive both


been in those audiences and also been the speaker offering that analysis. Its an honest response -historically accurate and morally defensible -- but these days Im less comfortable with that stock answer.
Yes, we must remember the promise of social movements, inspired by past successes. But we also need to
be clear about their limits in the present and future. Lets push the example of the civil rights movement a
bit: When Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 1963 March on
Washington, he spoke of a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. He argued that the architects
of our republic had signed a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir, which
guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For black Americans, that
note has come back marked insufficient funds, King said. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient
funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that
will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. In 1963, King was speaking in
a world that promised endless bounty, and his claim was that black people had a right to their fair share of
that bounty; the metaphor of checks and banks was not only metaphorical. He spoke of political liberty,
but the assumption was that with the riches of freedom would come, if not actual riches, certainly a more

White America didnt particularly like letting


black -- or indigenous, Latino, Asian -- people into the winners circle, but
once it became impossible to maintain apartheid-by-law, white folks gave a
bit of ground. White society grudgingly gave that ground in the middle of a
post-World War II boom that promised endless expansion. The fight for racial
justice took place on a relatively stable platform of U.S. global political power
and economic growth. The same context applies to other social movements
of that period fighting for workers rights, womens rights, lesbian/gay rights,
ecological awareness. Moving into the 1990s, it also applies to the global
justice movement that focused on the economic imperialism of the First
World, and even to the anti-war movement of the early 2000s. There were, of
equitable share of the countrys wealth.

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

we should focus on creating more


actual physical spaces and real human networks based on
progressive/left/radical values, putting as much energy as needed to anchor
and solidify them, even if it takes time away from issue-oriented campaigns.
conclusions, maybe nothing more than gut instincts. First,

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.

Social movements are efective in shaping the culture and


structure of society the af is necessary to combat the
surveillance aimed at preventing them from flourishing
Assadourian in 10 <Erik. The Power of Social Movements 2010.
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/transformingcultures/contents/socialmovements/>
social movements have played a powerful part in stimulating
rapid periods of cultural evolution, where new sets of ideas , values, policies,
or norms are rapidly adopted by large groups of people and subsequently
embedded firmly into a culture. From abolishing slavery and ensuring civil rights for all to
securing womens suffrage and liberating states nonviolently from colonial rulers, social movements
have dramatically redirected societal paths in just an eye blink of human
history. For sustainable societies to take root quickly in the decades to come,
the power of social movements will need to be fully tapped . Already,
interconnected environmental and social movements have emerged across
the world that under the right circumstances could catalyze into just the force
needed to accelerate this cultural shift. Yet it will be important to find ways to frame the
Throughout history,

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.

Through educational efforts, storytelling, and community organizing, the


benefits of the lost wisdom of living simply can be rediscovered and spread,
transforming not just personal lifestyles but broader societal
priorities. A third movement that could help redirect broader cultural norms, traditions, and values is
the fairly recent development of ecovillages. Sustainability educator Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn
ecovillage paints a picture of the exciting role that these are playing around the world. These sustainability
incubators are reinventing what is natural and spreading these ideas to broader societynot just through
modeling these new norms but through training and courses in ecovillage living, permaculture, and local
economics. Similar ideas are also spreading through cohousing communities, Transition Towns, and even
green commercial developments like Dockside Green in Canada and Hammarby Sjstad in Sweden. Two
Boxes in this section describe some other exciting initiatives. One provides an overview of a new political
movement called dcroissance (in English, degrowth), which is an important effort to remind people that
not only can growth be detrimental, but sometimes a sustainable decline is actually optimal. And a Box on
the Slow Food movement describes the succulent power of organizing people through their taste buds.
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
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.

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,

If our vantage point is once removed, however,


then individualized counter-surveillance efforts appear to provide the
necessary provocations for those with institutional power to diagnose and
correct inefficiencies in their mechanisms of control. Even if this second
conclusion is persuasive, however, it should not imply that activists and
counter-surveillance practitioners should dispense with their
interventionist projects, but instead that they should diligently avoid
reproducing the exclusionary logics and reactionary stances of those whom
they critique. For instance, high-tech interventions may attract public attention because of their
temporally bounded sites of contestation.

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 strength of social movements lies in their


inclusiveness and in their participatory structures (Breyman 2001; Juris 2004). So
while these attributes might signify areas of vulnerability for
activists, they remain the magnets that draw people into movements
and mobilize them behind causes. They are the qualities that need to be
nourished for less individualistic and more effective activism to take root.
but not necessarily the best ones.

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

Douglass. In fact, a few lines later he says that he "now understood . . .


the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand
achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the
pathway from slavery to freedom" (NL, pp. 37-38). At that point in his life, Douglass
vowed to himself that whatever it might take, he would learn to read. His
strong impression on young

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

As historical beings we not only appropriate actively the discourses of


others, but we are also shaped passively by these multiple discourses
constituting what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia." According to Bakhtin, "authoritative discourse"
or an "authoritative word" is more than simply a set of rules, directives, and
fact-like information; it "strives rather to determine the very bases of our
ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior, it
performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive
discourse " (DI, p. 342). In broad strokes, authoritative discourse, whether
"religious, political, or moral," comes from those holding positions of authority
"the word of a father, of adults and of teachers etc." (p. 342). In contrast, internally
persuasive discourse in its most common variant "is denied all privilege,
others."9

backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in


society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal
code" (p. 342). The latter also [End Page 260] cannot but arise out of the heteroglossia of authoritative
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

Because its history as already accepted authority precedes


us, authoritative discourse is not simply one discourse among others. Rather,
it resists egalitarian status and imposes itself as sovereign. Manifesting itself
in the form of religious, political, or scientific dogma , such discourse "is given (it
the fathers" (p. 342).

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

when an individual actively in process of "ideological becoming"


experiences an event or encounters a counterdiscourse compelling him or her to
question the authoritative discourse, a gap between these two kinds of
discourse occurs. As Bakhtin explains, "Consciousness awakens to independent ideological life
authoritative discourse. However,

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).

The af is a form of tactical intervention that destabilizes


status quo ways of knowing the colonized by bringing to
the fore subjugated knowledge
Jiwani in 11 <Yasmin. Pedagogies of Hope: Counter Narratives and AntiDisciplinary Tactics 30th August 2011. The Review of Education, Pedagogy,
and Cultural Studies, 33:333353>

The story of colonialism is a story of race and its construction, dissemination,


popularization, and legitimization. Colonialism and its legacy are constitutive of a
concentration of power that determines the lens through which Others are seen and the acts that are
enacted on them legitimized. The base grammar of race that underpins the colonial mentality and that
operates in organizing the colonizers visual field is predicated on Manichean allegories that naturalize race

Colonial strategies thus


constitute and are constitutive of disciplinary regimes of power (along with such
regulatory powers as biopower). This disciplinary power is apparent in the discursive
strategies that are used to exclude, marginalize, exoticize, and demonize
Others. De Certeau argues that the space of the tactic is a mobile space. From the margins,
tactical interventions work to destabilize, dislodge, and, at times, neutralize
dominant mythologies and disciplinary strategies. Tactics, unlike strategies, have to
and essentialize the various attributes that are enchained to it.

make use of the masters tools but they do so in creative ways, and in the terrain of media production;

such tactics range from anti-colonial archaeologies of knowledge, bringing to


the fore the subjugated and subordinated knowledges of colonized Others.
Through counter memorials, exilic media and through a documentation of the
struggles and violations that have occurred, such tactical media celebrate the
perseverance of the histories, identities, and realities of those on the margins .
These archeological tactics are often accompanied by other forms of intervention such as media jijutsu

They may deploy montage as a visual


critique (to quote Hamilton 2001), reverso, as in reversing the gaze, reflectionism,
parody, satire, and a host of other tactics that are accessible and that can be
welded as tools of the weak.
as described by Shohat and Stam (1994).

Critiquing unjust police practices is necessary to


challenge the dominant narrative itself and who produces
it
Billies in 13 <Michelle. producing bodies, knowledge, and community In
everyday civilian struggle over surveillance 2013. Pgs 3-6. Proquest>
Critiquing the coercive and unjust aspects of police interactions is vital for
disrupting slippery links between assumed criminality, race, gender, inherent
aggression, and the necessity of force to establish control among civilians.
Such work is also integral for framing the complicated ways civilians relate to
the role of policing in their lives. The lack of social psychological and critical
criminological critique of the racialized, sexual, and gendered facilitation of
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.
Goldberg, 2005).

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

Today, we are once again in a period of


revelation, concern, and debate on national security surveillance. Yet if real
change is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will
need to be fully confrontedor opposition to surveillance will once
again be easily defeated by racial security narratives. The significance
of the Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of the NSAs mass
surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider can have. The result
has been a generalized level of alarm as people have become aware of how
intrusive surveillance is in our society, but that alarm remains
constrained within a public debate that is highly abstract, legalistic,
and centered on the privacy rights of the white middle class. On the one
hand, most civil liberties advocates are focused on the technical details of
potential legal reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard privacy.
Such initiatives are likely to bring little change because they fail to
confront the racist and imperialist core of the surveillance system . On
the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government
surveillance can be fixed simply by using better encryption tools. While
encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a government
agency would need to monitor an individual, they do nothing to unravel the
larger surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns
the Middle Eastunderstand its workings.

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

national security surveillance can draw entire


communities into its web, while reassuring average people (code for the
normative white middle class) that they are not to be troubled. In the eyes of
the national security state, this average person must also express no political
views critical of the status quo.
this comment, it points to the ways that

Even successful legal victories against discriminatory


surveillance and policing practices dont create change
because they do not challenge racialized and sexualized
political economies focusing on legal definitions,
oversight and rights fail
Billies in 13 <Michelle. producing bodies, knowledge, and community In
everyday civilian struggle over surveillance 2013. Pgs 3-6. Proquest>
Policing in NYC ofers an important place to begin investigating
surveillance threat. NYC police recorded over 684,000 encounters of stop,
question, and frisk in 2011, a six-fold increase since 2002 (Center for Constitutional
Rights, 2012a). Over 87 percent of those stopped were Black and Latino/a , two
and a half times their relative representation in the population (New York Civil
Liberties Union, 2012b). Over a fifth of stops (21.6 percent) in 2011 involved the use of physical force:
hands, suspect on ground, suspect against wall, weapon drawn, weapon pointed, baton, handcuffs,
pepper spray, and other (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2012a). Yet just over a tenth of stops (11.7
percent) that year resulted in a ticket, summons or arrest (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2012a). Further,
officers found only 780 guns, that is, in 0.1 percent of stops. Youth, feminist, and queer researchers
complicate and add to the story of excessive policing among men of color. Polling for Justice (M. Fine,
Stoudt, Fox, & Santos, 2010; Stoudt, Fine, & Fox, 2011/12) a significant participatory action research
(PAR)5 project that surveyed young people in NYC found that youth have mixed experiences with the
police. Eighty percent of the 1,100 young people surveyed do not trust the police, only half agreed that
police protect young people like themselves and nearly a third report feeling stressed out by concerns
about police. Most of the sample have had police contact in the last six months. And, while 60 percent

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

40 percent of young women aged 16 to 21, primarily

from communities of color, reported sexual harassment from police

(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

police harassment and violence


including verbal (disrespectful, derogatory, abusive language and tone), physical (throwing
civilians against a wall or to the ground, breaking bones), sexual (extorting sex from women to avoid
arrest, public strip search), and legal (fabricated violations and misdemeanors, arrest without
reasonable suspicion or cause) forms. Researchers have added categories of harm based on their
civilian perspective have generated a core typology of

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

Current public challenges to SQF tend to focus on the infringement on civil


rights, arguing for adherence to the reasonable suspicion standard and
against racially motivated targeting. However, as I discuss below, even
successful lawsuits have not prevented the NYPD from extensive
proliferation of questionable and threatening stop and frisk
practices. By describing one such lawsuit, as well as the larger context of forces influencing NYPD
practice, in the next section I present policing as an enactment of racialized
and sexualized political economics, creating a form of urban life
dominated by surveillance and discrimination increasingly supported
by discourses of security and risk. The Sociopolitics of Stop and Frisk: Policing Excess
Bodies and Space The Failure of a successful lawsuit. After years of mounting complaints,
the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a class action lawsuit against
New York Police Department (NYPD or the Department) and the City in 1999 (Center for
Constitutional Rights). Among its core issues, Daniels et al. challenged the Departments
practices of a) racial profiling and b) unwarranted stop and frisks. At the time, the
NYPD Street Crimes Unit (SCU) had become notorious for both and the suit also called on
Bronx, NY.

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

While CCR won Daniels et al., it lost the larger battle


against the NYPDs arbitrary use of power. The result is a city in which
Department wide.

unconstitutional and dangerous invasions in black and brown peoples lives, and the lives of every other
NYPD target, have been reaching new scales.

--System Just Morphs


New forms of social control and surveillance emerge as
old forms are removed or ruled unconstitutional the
Smith Act, COINTEL and FBI surveillance in the 50s and
60s prove
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, 182-183>
The first COINTEL program was initiated against the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1956. Throughout much of the 20th century, membership in the CP-USA
had been an offense prosecutable under the Smith Act , which forbade
individuals from advocating the overthrow of the government by force or
organizing or belonging to a group that had such a goal. During the mid1950s, the US Supreme Court ruled the Smith Act unconstitutional, and as an
alternative the FBI established the framework for COINTELPRO, which would
use covert political repression to do the work that had previously
been handled through the courts. But consistent with our earlier point about the blurred
distinction between such actions and more conventional surveillance activities , this program against the
CP-USA operated in concert with the FBIs existing intelligence work. Bureau agents
used information they obtained through the covert surveillance of CP-USA members and their associates to spread
misinformation and falsehoods about individual members motives and the groups methods and goals. Agents also
developed a large number of informants, frequently utilizing them as agents provocateurs, or operatives working to
systematically break down trust and cohesion within their target groups (Churchill & VanderWall, 1990; Cunningham,
2004: Marx, 1974). These activities were confined to the Bureau itself, but initiated with the consent of the Eisenhower

Through the early 1960s, the COINTELPRO against the CP


expanded in scope; in 1961 a second program was initiated against the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), followed by COINTELPROs against White Hate
Groups in 1964, Black Nationalist/Hate Groups in 1967, and the New Left
in 1968. The White Hate Groups program, directed mostly against a range of KKK-affiliated organizations, broadened
administration.

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 is maintained through enduring


racialized archetypes not the law the structure just
morphs to respond to legal changes intended to remedy
injustice
Heitzeg in 15 - Professor of Sociology and Director of the interdisciplinary
Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program at St. Catherine University, St. Paul,
MN <Nancy. On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights
Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The
Limits Of The Law Hamline University's School of Law's Journal of Public Law
and Policy Volume 36 Issue 1 Article 3. Pgs 54-79>

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

These strokes of the pen, of


course, could not remove bigotry long steeped in racist archetypes; nor could
this legislation remove the structural barriers of nearly 400 years of white
racial preference and cumulative advantage in the accumulation of wealth
and property, access to education and housing, health and well-being, and all
matter of social opportunities.4 Racism, as both white supremacist/anti-black
ideology and institutionalized arrangement, remains merely transformed
with its systemic foundations intact. Segregation in housing and education persists at
subverted via both legislation and judicial interpretation.3

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

race neutrality has perhaps ushered in an era of more


insidious de facto discrimination that i s now denied through color-blind
rhetoric. A large body of research documents the paradigmatic shift from overt essentialist racism to
color-blindness.6 This style of racism relies heavily on ideological frames and
linguistic shifts which allow whites to assert they do not see race, deny
structural racism, claim a level playing field that now victimizes them with
reverse discrimination and appeals to the race card, and argue that any
discussion of race/racism is, in fact, racist and only serves to foment divisions
rather than reflect/redress societal realities. Color-blind racism also creates a set of code
terms that implicitly indict people of color without ever mentioning race.7 In the Post-Civil Rights Era, the
color-blind paradigm has become deeply ensconced in law and politics .
Civil Rights Acts requirement of

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

our habit of focusing on the stage where the


major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to
our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility
leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent ` powerlessness and its
accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens
even more so those of other nations have come to feel secure in their obvious nonresponsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and BosniaHercegovina or Somalia since the decisions for such events are always made
elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a
collective `assumption' of responsibility. Yet

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

it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any


relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the
connections between those political decisions and our own personal
decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls `organized irresponsibility', upholding
own sphere of action. In particular,

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

For we tend to think that we cannot


`do' anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation;
because we are not where the major decisions are made . Which is why many
of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of
mental deputy politics, in the style of `What would I do if I were the general, the
prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem
to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly
effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of
what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative
insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually no possibilities': what I
could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a
thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers:

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

'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the


troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our `noncomprehension: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for
working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological
current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the
want a moral revolution."

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

--Doesnt Solve Structural


Violence
Their interpretation creates short term solutions masking
larger destructive social relationsonly our strategy can
create break down these normative structures there is
no policy solution for sexual violence or everyday
discrimination against people of color, but the distancing
their interpretation forces means these everyday acts of
violence will go unchecked and uncriticized
Eckersley 02
<Robyn, Environmental Pragmatism, ecocentrism and deliberative
democracy: between problem-solving and fundamental critique,
http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00001950/02/Envpragchap5.pdf
Professor in the School of Politics, Sociology and Criminology, University of
Melbourne>
From the point of view of those who advocate change on behalf of the
environmentally disempowered, such a methodological focus is too
narrowly conceived. Approaching environmental problems and conflicts with the
open-minded, respectful and practical disposition suggested by pragmatists
can be positively foolhardy when there are more powerful forces arrayed
around the negotiating table, and especially when their arguments resonate
with dominant economic discourses. Indeed, maintaining a narrow problemsolving focus runs the risk of perpetuating structural injustices by, for example,
ameliorating environmental side-effects for particular local communities and
making the structural injustices a little easier to live with. This problem is generally
recognized by new social movements and radical democratic theorists and requires difficult and ongoing
practical judgments about whether to cooperate in policy dialogues or adopt more confrontational
strategies, which may extend to civil disobedience in those cases where the relevant legal and policy

Boycotting the processes of negotiation in


order to highlight more systemic injustices may be more politically and
strategically beneficial than participating in negotiations, even when such
negotiations may carry the promise of producing compromises and
incremental policy shifts in favor of such groups in particular cases. That such tactics are
regularly employed by environmental justice and wilderness advocates is testimony to,
among other things, the political frustration experienced by those with limited
resources and limited control over agenda setting. Of course, a cynic might suggest
regimes are believed to be manifestly unjust.

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

When differences in communicative


power distort democratic communication, both justice and democracy are
more likely to be served by persisting with critical advocacy rather than
submitting to mediation and narrow problem- solving.
parameters of policy deliberations in such democracies.

--A2 Research Skills


The traditional, institutional research skills their
interpretation calls for veils inequality, stagnates social
change and ignores the way culture and power intersect
with research and the law
Darder in 11 <Antonia. Institutional Research as a Tool for Cultural
Democracy Counterpoints, Vol. 418, A DISSIDENT VOICE: Essays on
Culture, Pedagogy, and Power (
2011), pp. 61-75>
Without doubt, institutional relations of power are always at work in the manner in which traditional

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.

Instead of utilizing institutional resources for necessary


organizational change, time, money, and human expertise are diverted to
abstract research tasks that in and of themselves change nothing . It is as if
change could somehow be pretended or magically actualized through the technocratic accumulation of
volumes of "scientific" research reports. Frank Fisher (1985) describes the power of such "technocracy":
The power of technocracy is based on a positivistically oriented empirical conception of knowledge, which
is reflected in a growing inventory of operational techniques such as cost-benefit analysis, operations
research, systems analysis, strategic planning and computer simulations. Emphasizing the tenets of valueneutral objectivity, empirical operationalism and professional expertise, modern technocracy stands or

what is clearly missing in the


traditional perspective concerning institutional research is an
acknowledgment of the manner in which culture and power intersect
support a view of research that is apolitical and ahistorical . The standards
falls with the ideology of scientism [p. 232). In summary,

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

Although literacy opened up new worlds for Douglass and


remained a highly valued achievement, Douglass came to see its limitations
for the black other in white antebellum America, the achievement of
literacy translated at most into a partial liberation . As we have seen, in his struggle to
reality of slavery.

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

Although Douglass's field of


possibilities was severely constricted, [End Page 265] he was able to exercise his
volitional and rational capacities in order to reshape his destiny. He learned
not only how to survive in the midst of a "dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, value jud gments and accents" (DI, p. 276),
but he learned to take those very same "alien words" and improvise new
melodies in the silent (white) spaces between the already written (black)
notes. This is not, however, to suggest that Douglass's improvisations were entirely new creations. After
Foucault's account of the correlativity of power and resistance.

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

he was able to use discursive elements of the master narratives to


create a powerful counterhegemonic discourse allowing him both to assert
his humanity and to resist and reconfigure the subjective scriptings imposed
by the white other. In short, Douglass worked within the power relations and mechanisms of an
slavery,

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]

Subjugation is maintained through the power of


authoritative discourse but counterdiscourse creates the
possibility for new relationships, meanings and contexts
their authors assume that non-Black people are the only
people who determine the meaning of the signifier
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

Douglass. In fact, a few lines later he says that he "now understood . . .


the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand
achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the
pathway from slavery to freedom" (NL, pp. 37-38). At that point in his life, Douglass
vowed to himself that whatever it might take, he would learn to read. His
strong impression on young

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

As historical beings we not only appropriate actively the discourses of


others, but we are also shaped passively by these multiple discourses
constituting what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia." According to Bakhtin, "authoritative discourse"
or an "authoritative word" is more than simply a set of rules, directives, and
fact-like information; it "strives rather to determine the very bases of our
ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior, it
performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive
discourse " (DI, p. 342). In broad strokes, authoritative discourse, whether
"religious, political, or moral," comes from those holding positions of authority
"the word of a father, of adults and of teachers etc." (p. 342). In contrast, internally
persuasive discourse in its most common variant "is denied all privilege,
backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in
society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal
code" (p. 342). The latter also [End Page 260] cannot but arise out of the heteroglossia of authoritative
others."9

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

Because its history as already accepted authority precedes


us, authoritative discourse is not simply one discourse among others. Rather,
it resists egalitarian status and imposes itself as sovereign. Manifesting itself
in the form of religious, political, or scientific dogma , such discourse "is given (it
the fathers" (p. 342).

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

when an individual actively in process of "ideological becoming"


experiences an event or encounters a counterdiscourse compelling him or her to
question the authoritative discourse, a gap between these two kinds of
discourse occurs. As Bakhtin explains, "Consciousness awakens to independent ideological life
authoritative discourse. However,

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

This is as true today as it has been


historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history
of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national security
surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US
colonialism and empire. The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of
in making sense of it and organizing opposition.

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

throughout the history of the United States the


systematic collection of information has been interwoven with mechanisms of
racial oppression. From Anglo settler-colonialism, the establishment of the
plantation system, the postCivil War reconstruction era, the US conquest of
the Philippines, and the emergence of the national security state in the postWorld War II era, to neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era, racialized
surveillance has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire . It is,
however, important to note that the production of the racial other at these
various moments is conjunctural and heterogenous. That is, the racialization
of Native Americans, for instance, during the settler-colonial period took
different forms from the racialization of African Americans . Further, the dominant
systems of surveillance. We show how

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

State surveillance regimes have always


sought to monitor and penalize a wide range of dissenters, radicals, and
revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no means all of these cases. Our focus here
for Washingtons army in the American Revolution.

is on the production of racialized others as security threats and the ways


this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations. Further, the current system of mass
surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of racialized security surveillance
that feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the Obama administration and that disproportionately
target African Americans, contributing to their mass incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as

racialized groupings are produced in the very act of


collecting information about certain groups deemed as threats by the
national security statethe Brown terrorist, the Black and Brown drug dealer
and user, and the immigrant who threatens to steal jobs . We conclude that
security has become one of the primary means through which racism is
ideologically reproduced in the post-racial, neoliberal era. Drawing on W. E.
B. Duboiss notion of the psychological wage , we argue that neoliberalism has
been legitimized in part through racialized notions of security that offer a new
psychological wage as compensation for the decline of the social wage and
its reallocation to homeland security.
the New Jim Crow.4 We argue that

--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

Their policies and pronouncements did not challenge the


bases of racial and sexual ideology, but rather uncritically accepted
and reified them. The revolution read race, gender, and sexuality, as
extrinsic efects of capital, not as co-constructed and
interarticulated through political economy, history, culture, and
the rumba.

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.

While class and commodification are relevant they are not


holistic these instances can only be understood by
seeing how class oppression works synergistically with
racialized sexuality to maintain exploitation the fact that
they do not account for this means their alternative will
reproduce violence and stop coalitions necessary for
revolution
Belkhir in 1 <Jean Ait. Marxism Without Apologies: Integrating Race,
Gender, Class; A Working Class Approach Race, Gender & Class8.2 (Apr 30,
2001): 142.>

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

Marxism produced virtually nothing


of real usefulness about gender inequality and the liberation of women. For Vogel
(1983): "Marx and his collaborator Engels had little to say about the
emancipation of women.... For them it was a marginal problem." As a result,
the sexist bias in Marxism contributed to the growth of distortions in their
analysis of capitalism. In her famous article entitled: The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
ended by ending capitalism alone." Feminism often suggests that

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."

since capital and private property do not cause


the inequality of women, their abolition alone will not result in the end
of gender inequality. Only specifically feminist analysis revealed the systemic character of the patriarchal
As such feminists argued (e.g., Hartman, 1981),

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

"inferiorisation of women" is the socialization process of children


outside and inside the home where "the patriarchal ideology, that men are
superior to women," are taught and, where the inferior position of women is reinforced by the
churches, unions, armies, factories, offices, media, publicity, schools, etc . The
reproduction of 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

racism has blunted the critical faculties of white


progressives from the colonial period to the present Blacks have seen an
endless series of prominent white liberal and progressive allies betray their
trust and embrace the politics of white supremacy. Marxists have always insisted
Marable (1996) argues that

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

Marxism -- which also suggests that


the relations between superstructure and base are reciprocal, each affecting the other -- but
of economic determinism. Racism was, therefore, only part of the larger class
question. Small wonder, then, that until today, no progressive or Marxist
white organizations, Old Left or New, had won over any significant
number of black and people of color activists, intellectuals, or
workers.
American progressives and Marxists adhered to was a philosophy not of

--A2 Discourse Link


Neoliberalism and capital structures of exploitation are
authorized by the way economic rationality is afectively
produced in subjects. Debasing and emancipating
afective economies is critical to any strategy of
resistance they ignore capitalism as a mindset not just
capital exchange
Gammon 12, Earl Gammon, professor of sociology at the University of
East Anglia, UK, The Psycho- and Sociogenesis of Neoliberalism, Critical
Sociology, 39(4) 511-528.

the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s was


not simply the result of narrowly conceived political and economic
expedients, but was also driven by non-rational afective forces. The
As this analysis has attempted to show,

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,

the reemergence of global finance , did not play an important role in


reshaping the prevailing political-economic discourse, but such forces alone do not account for
the investment in the performance of neoliberal subjectivity . By turning to
Eliass theorization of the civilizing process, this analysis attempted to
elucidate the historical contours of the psycho-social pressures that have
shaped the behaviours and outlook of the subjects of neoliberal
governmentality. The civilizing process over the span of centuries
induced heightened levels of afective and bodily self-control and
self-discipline, which in turn permitted the intensification of the
social interdependence essential to the functioning of market
civilization. At certain historical conjunctures, though, the anxiety induced by the
particularly with

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

The neoliberal subject rhetorically


employs political equality as a means of expressing violent resentment
against those with whom identification is inconceivable. The neurosis of
neoliberalism not only entails the manifestation of unsustainable
social practices, whether the recklessness of haute finance or
immiserating structural adjustment policies, but also entails a level
of self-harm for neoliberal subjects. The realization of a hermetically-sealed self is a
historical injustices and dehumanizes disparaged others.

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

the resulting fallout. Ultimately,


escaping the dispassionate destructiveness of the current epoch
requires that we penetrate beyond the prevailing political-economic
rhetoric, bringing to consciousness the repressed psychical conflicts
that form the basis of our neurotic attachment to neoliberalism.
themselves under greater economic strain in

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

Dissension created by stir[ring] up personal relationships can


spark emotions such as dejection, fear, paranoia, depression, and anger,
which can have their own independent effects on movement maintenance.
persistence.

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

Persistent surveillance created fear and


anxiety among activists and potential activists, either for their own
well-being or that of those near to them. As African-American postal worker Arthur
Drayton, who lost his job in the 1940s because of alleged loyalty issues, put
it, federal agents did frighten the hell of mey[t]hey were hounding me so
in response to covert forms of social control.

(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

Lesbian activists in the womens movement


in Kentucky during the 1970s had to confront the fear of being outed to their
parents or employers by FBI investigators doing background checks on
activists (Schultz & Schultz, 1989). Even those who claimed to have adjusted to the
presence of undercover agents themselves, such as Paul Robeson, Jr., son of
long-time FBI target Paul Robeson, expressed fear for the well-being of his
children (Schultz & Schultz, 2001). The fear inspired by persistent covert activities
also extended to potential recruits. Before going to Berkeley to begin college, Jackie Goldberg,
(quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 1989, p. 173).

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

federal government agents investigations of organizing activities


in a largely unsuccessful civil rights movement campaign in Albany, GA in the
early 1960s incurred great fear and misgiving on the part of those
we were trying to organize (quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 2001, p. 169). James Jasper
remembers that

(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

informants infiltrated more than just


political organizations, they also infiltrated activists personal lives . It
was this invasion of his privacy that most upset the VVAWs Camil. Not only did he not understand how one
of his best friends been an informant, but it really hurt [his] head a lot when he found out that a woman
had been assigned by the government to sleep with him (quoted in Schultz & Schultz, 1989, p. 331).

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)

Their alternative just maintains the status quo by


silencing violent histories which is what justifies further
injustice
Schwab, 6 [Gabriele, Writing against memory and forgetting Literature
and Medicine 25.1 (2006) 95-121]
Human beings have always silenced violent histories. Some histories,
collective and personal, are so violent we would not be able to live our daily lives if
we did not at least temporarily silence them. A certain amount of splitting is conducive to
survival. Too much silence, however, becomes haunting. Abraham and Torok link the
formation of the crypt with silencing, secrecy, and the phantomatic return of the past. While the secret is
intrapsychic and indicates an internal psychic splitting, it can be collectively deployed and shared by a

The collective or communal silencing of violent histories leads


to the transgenerational transmission of trauma and the specter of an
involuntary repetition of cycles of violence. We know this from history, from
literature, and from trauma studies. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, Hannah
people or a nation.

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

When European men massacred these indigenous peoples, Arendt


argues, they did so without allowing themselves to become aware of the fact
that they had committed murder. Like Conrad's character [End Page 100] Kurtz, many of
these adventurers went insane. They had buried and silenced their guilt ; they had
buried and silenced their humanity. But their deeds came back to haunt them
in a vicious cycle of repetition. Arendt identifies two main political devices for imperialist rule:
needs'" (190).

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

While the genocide of indigenous


peoples under colonial and imperial rule was silenced in a defensive
discourse of progressing civilization, it returned with a vengeance. Race and
his fellow-man and no people for another people" (207).

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]

the "boomerang efect" emerges from a


dialectics of isomorphic oppression that as a rule remains largely
unacknowledged and relegated to the cultural unconscious. Together with the
ghost effect that emerges from the silencing of traumatic memories, this boomerang effect
increases the danger of the repetition and ghostly return of violent histories .
out" (41, Cesaire's italics).8 What Cesaire calls

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

The capacity for resistance can be linked to a


political agenda that focuses on the formation of identities denied by the
universal discourse of subjecthood. The destabilization of the universal
subject position through practices of resistance opens up a realm of cultural
space for the establishment of identities that have been silenced. Thus,
attempts to problematize the norm become a precondition for
articulating diference. Moreover, by operating within the dominant
discourse, subjects that have been historically denied participation
can appropriate and redeploy the terms of the dominant discourse. It
is this cultural phenomenon of discursive appropriation a parasitic
redeployment of the excess of discursive meaning that amounts to the
cultural practice of postmodern theory.
by the National Endowment for the Arts)

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]

Williams challenged the class-based arrogance


of scriptocentrism, pointing to the error and delusion of highly
educated people who are so driven in on their reading that they
fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative
activity such as theatre and active politics. This error resembles that
of the narrow reformer who supposes that farm labourers and village
craftsmen were once uneducated, merely because they could not read . He
argued that the contempt for performance and practical activity , which
is always latent in the highly literate, is a mark of the observers limits,
not those of the activities themselves ([1958] 1983:309).Williams critiqued scholars for
limiting their sources to written materials; I agree with Burke that scholarship is so skewed
toward texts that even when researchers do attend to extralinguistic
human action and embodied events they construe them as texts to be
read. According to de Certeau, this scriptocentrism is a hallmark of Western
imperialism. Posted above the gates of modernity, this sign: Here only
In even stronger terms, Raymond

what is written is understood. Such is the internal law of that which


has constituted itself as Western [and white]

2 Is a means of co-opting the af


Benford '93
[Robert Frame Disputes within the Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Accessed via JSTOR, August 23,
2009]

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

activists speculated that one or two participants, who


frequently initiated verbal skirmishes, were perhaps "right wing plants" or
"government agents" deployed to sabotage the movement.
movement, on several occasions

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,

If our vantage point is once removed, however,


then individualized counter-surveillance efforts appear to provide the
necessary provocations for those with institutional power to diagnose and
correct inefficiencies in their mechanisms of control. Even if this second
conclusion is persuasive, however, it should not imply that activists and
counter-surveillance practitioners should dispense with their
interventionist projects, but instead that they should diligently avoid
reproducing the exclusionary logics and reactionary stances of those whom
they critique. For instance, high-tech interventions may attract public attention because of their
temporally bounded sites of contestation.

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 strength of social movements lies in their


inclusiveness and in their participatory structures (Breyman 2001; Juris 2004). So
while these attributes might signify areas of vulnerability for
activists, they remain the magnets that draw people into movements
and mobilize them behind causes. They are the qualities that need to be
nourished for less individualistic and more effective activism to take root.
but not necessarily the best ones.

A2 Colonized are Powerless


The power held by dominant and oppressed groups
may be assymetrical but the colonized, their actions and
how they think can still shape and reshape structures of
subjugation
Billies in 13 <Michelle. producing bodies, knowledge, and community In
everyday civilian struggle over surveillance 2013. Pgs 3-6. Proquest>
At the same time, focusing solely on the risk of harm limits the full meaning of this encounter. As I show
through my research, civilians persistently struggle against this threat, reflecting what is at stake for them
their ability to retain a sense of control over the encounter and the conditions shaping their daily lives.
Widening the unit of analysis from harm to struggle shifts attention to the interaction as a dynamic and
reframes these relations of power as more than a simple, imbalanced opposition. Instead, based on my
research, I theorize a civilian psychology of responsiveness that enables

those targeted to engage

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

interactions between state authorities and civilians


work to keep domination in place. Battling psychological theories that naturalize these
relations, Fanons (1967, 2004) searing critique tears at !!4 assumptions about the
inherent inferiority of those living under colonial rule, reframing the
problems of colonized peoples as a manifestation of their psychic
negotiation of racist, colonial violence.3 Theorists like D. Hook (2008) and Oliver
oppression often examine how

(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;

targeted civilians seek freedom and justice


even as they manage the threat of harm. From this perspective, civilian
actions become conscious and non conscious assertions rather than fearbased accommodations that are only, or mostly, psychologically damaging.
Tuck, 2009)4 guides my analysis of the ways

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.

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