Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Black Nationalism Affirmative
Black Nationalism Affirmative
Notes
Black Nationalism
Heres some stuff that should help you understand the thesis:
4 Tenants of Black Nationalism according to Melanye Price
1 Black Self-determination-a Black people need control over their lives can only happen through selfgovernance of a black nation
b Some say not a black nation but instead black communities
2 Control-a independence and self-sustenance by virtue of its own financial, political,
and intellectual resources in the form of self-help programs.
2 Drop the Baggage-a Sever ties with white people that believe or operate on notions of white
superiority and black inferiority
2 Pan-Africanist Identity
a Find the connections between an african american identity and an African
identity and recognize the intersections to create a Pan-African identity
that is key to solving black oppression ad white supremacy
"Because African descendants initially arrived in the United States designated as
chattel rather than fully human citizens and that legacy continued for centuries
afterward, whites and some blacks see blacks as a group that should be kept in
permanent servitude. In order for blacks to embrace independence, they had to rid
themselves of any beliefs in white superiority and black inferiority."
This is strategic because you defend state action but link to none of the DAs. Some
of the DAs with deontological impacts could be threatening BUUUUUUT yall get to
defend circumvention on the aff because it doesnt really matter if the plan has
durable fiat. The perception by Black America of this horridly racist thing would be
enough to spur black nationalist movements. So because circumvention is a thing,
the links to the DAs dont really apply.. except maybe politics... but if youre reading
that against this aff.. hmm
1AC
Plan Texts
Plan Text 1 (decrease surveillance): United States federal
government should substantially curtail surveillance on all
non-black populations.
1ACSurveillance
Overtly racist policies are key to igniting Black Nationalist
movements
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A.
(Magna cum Laude) in geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M
University, PhD in political science with a specialty in the field of American politics
at the Ohio State University Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African
American Public Opinion Accessed via Kindle Books// ekr)
In the current political climate, where overt racial hostility is publicly denounced by
even the most racially conservative sources and more subtle attempts at retreat
from civil rights gains endure, the space for the resurgence of Black Nationalism is
both fertile and fragile. It is fertile because, as this research indicates, there is a
high level of distrust and dissatisfaction with current conditions for blacks. Many feel
blacks should have progressed much further in the forty years since the height of
the Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, as the focus of the federal government and
federal dollars shifts from domestic policy to international concerns and war, those
social programs that were created as remedies to racially biased policies and
practices are more likely to come under attack, which is likely to further distance
blacks from the federal government. It is simultaneously fragile because
characteristics and conditions that foster intraracial ties between blacks seem to be
weaker than in previous iterations of Black Nationalist prominence. To be sure,
blacks still see their fate as tied to that of other blacks, but they are engaging in
high degrees of black blame that lead to conditional rather than unwavering support
for community empowerment efforts. As the gap between the black poor and the
black middle class continues to widen, the ability to opt out (albeit on a limited
basis) of the black community is more attainable than ever before. In the absence of
overt residential segregation and other policies that reinforce blacks communal
solidarity, some blacks may simply choose to withdraw entirely from the African
American community. Unlike in the past, when the only avenue of retreat from
racial hostility was further cloistering oneself in the black community, in the face of
increased racial hostility and absent overtly racist policies, blacks now have more
options in terms of racial coping strategies . This seems especially true among those
who most vehemently reject Black Nationalism and are also more likely to frame
policies around individual concerns rather than community or collective benefits .
Whether there will be a full recovery for displaced Katrina residents is difficult to
tell. We know that Barack Obama will be the forty-fourth president of the United
States. Still, it is likely that blacks will continue to support some level of racial group
independence. If the pendulum shifts toward increased racial hostility and black
frustration, then there should be increased support for Black Nationalism. The ability
of this ideology to gain traction among ordinary citizens in the postCivil Rights era
is undermined by the diminished importance of racial group membership among
younger African Americans. Without legal and social barriers that keep the African
American community bounded, defining problems through a narrow group
membership lens fails to account for real changes in the African American
community that make it more diverse than in any other period. Understanding,
negotiating, and accounting for in-group diversity are the tests of postCivil Rights
black politics. As a result, the effort to achieve political empowerment remains a
collective one. Henderson (2000) notes: DuBois was quite prescient in his view that
the problems of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. . . .
Cruse was no less prescient; his pendulum thesis suggests that the challenge of the
twenty-first century will be the challenge of the culture lineat home and abroad.
(359)
The end-result of this problem, of course, is the death of people, communities, and the
nation. Nevertheless, the consequences of this problem has failed to shock the majority into acting in a manner
consistent with human dignity and the urgency necessary to combat this never-ending war against certain
punish and control the "others" in the name of democracy and fairness. In fact, it was during the 1980s when the
"war on drugs" in particular gained superior footing alongside the emergence of conservative criminology, which
really catapulted the administration of justice away from the rehabilitative practices won in the 1960s-70s and
furthering white supremacy at the expense of minorities (mostly Blacks) and nobody speaks upon it because,
What
complicates this absurdity is the advent or notion of colorblindness color ignorance
-that, in fact, the U.S. presently operates in a reality that excludes race as a factor in any
fashion. The use of colorblindness color ignorance as a reality is, of course, an
theoretically, the processes that govern the administration of justice are based on the consensus model.
further
within society will continue to be micro-managed via the criminal justice system, "democratically" of course.
those who have lived under auspices of validation and superiority for so long
may soon need to rethink their position given the onslaught of the surveillance
complex which is slowly but surely becoming racially indiscriminate in its processes.
Now is the time to bind together as one despite these differences. Whether this is possible
However,
color while remaining in the United States, and thus he urges them to emigrate
elsewhere. He mounts a powerful case, on pragmatic nationalist grounds, in support
of this radical conclusion. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 effectively denied full
citizenship to even free blacks, a denial that was later solidified and made explicit
in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.71 He maintains that whites cannot be rationally
or morally persuaded out of their prejudice because they have a material stake in
black subordination and because they have too little sympathy for what they
consider a degraded race.72Blacks certainly cannot compel whites to treat them as
equals, because whites greatly outnumber and have significantly more power than
blacks.73 Blacks cannot achieve economic parity with whites while living among
them, since whites all but monopolize land, capital, and political influence .74 Living
under such oppressive conditions also fosters servility and resignation among the
oppressed.75 Thus, if blacks were to remain in the United States, they would not
only be sacrificing their right to equal respect, democratic citizenship, and selfgovernment but would also be forgoing the cultivation and expression of a vigorous
character, which no group can do and retain its dignity. And even if blacks were to
gain legal equality with whites in the United States, the antiblack attitudes of the
latter, along with their overwhelming power and shear numbers, would make it
quite difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to fully exercise their civil rights .76
the singular
institutionalization of racist and peculiarly antiblack social/state violence in our living era - the
US imprisonment regime and its conjoined policing and criminalization apparatuses elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery within the American nationbuilding project, especially in the age of Obama. The formation and astronomical growth of the prison
stretch of the historical imagination, nor a radical distension of analytical framing, to suggest that
industrial complex has become a commonly identified institutional marker of massively scaled racist state
the emergence of the criminalization and carceral apparatus over the last forty years has not, and in the
foreseeable future will not build its institutional protocols around the imprisonment of an economically productive or
profitmaking prison labor force (Gilmore, 1999).16 So, if not for use as labor under the 13th Amendment's juridical
mandate of "involuntary servitude,"
the contemporary
US prison regime must be centrally understood as constituting an epoch-defining
statecraft of race: a historically specific conceptualization, planning, and institutional mobilization of state
institutional capacities and state-influenced cultural structures to reproduce and/or reassemble the social
relations of power, dominance, and violence that constitute the ontology (epistemic and
conceptual framings) of racial meaning itself (da Silva, 2007; Goldberg, 1993). In this case, the racial
criminal offenses?17 In excess of its political economic, geographic, and juridical registers,
ontology of the postslavery and post-civil rights prison is anchored in the crisis of social meaning wrought on white
civil society by the 13th Amendment's apparent juridical elimination of the Black chattel slave being. Across
historical periods, the social inhabitation of
affirmed (racial) sovereignty, and everyday social intercourse with other racial beings -
through its positioning as the administrative authority and consenting audience for the nation- and civilizationbuilding processes of multiple racial genocides. It is the bare fact of the white subject's
access and entitlement to the generalized position of administering and consenting to racial
genocide that matters most centrally here. Importantly, this white civil subject thrives on
the assumption that s/he is they are not, and will never be the target of racial
genocide.18 (Williams, 2010) .Those things obtained and secured through genocidal processes
- land, political and military hegemony/dominance, expropriated labor - are in this
sense secondary to the raw relation of violence that the white subject inhabits in
relation to the racial objects (including people, ecologies, cultural forms, sacred
materials, and other modalities of life and being) subjected to the irreparable
violations of genocidal processes. It is this raw relation, in which white social existence materially and
narratively consolidates itself within the normalized systemic logics of racial genocides, that forms the condition of
possibility for the US social formation, from "abolition" onward. To push the argument further: the distended
systems of racial genocides are not the massively deadly means toward some other (rational) historical ends, but
are ends within themselves. Here we can decisively depart from the hegemonic juridical framings of "genocide" as
dictated by the United Nations, and examine instead the logics of genocide that dynamically structure the different
historical-social forms that have emerged from the classically identifiable genocidal systems of racial colonial
conquest, indigenous physical and cultural extermination, and racial chattel slavery. To recall Trask and Marable, the
historical logics of genocide permeate institutional assemblages that variously operationalize the historical forces of
is not one that hinges on the creation of late-20th and early-list century "slave labor," but rather on a reinstitutionalization of anti-slave social violence. Within this historical schema, the post-1970s prison regime
institutionalizes the raw relation of violence essential to white social being while mediating it so it appears as non-
post-civil rights slave state. While it is necessary to continuously clarify and debate whether and how this statecraft
of racial imprisonment is verifiably genocidal, there seems to be little reason to question that it is, at least,
protogenocidal - displaying both the capacity and inclination for genocidal outcomes in its systemic logic and
historical trajectory. This contextualization leads toward a somewhat different analytical framing of the "deadly
symbiosis" that sociologist Loi'c Wacquant has outlined in his account of antiblack carceral-spatial systems. While it
would be small-minded to suggest that the emergence of the late-20th century prison regime is an historical
juridical and cultural implications of slavery's abolition . I have argued elsewhere for a
conception of the US prison not as a selfcontained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material prototype of
organized punishment and (social, civil, and biological) death (Rodriguez, 2006). To understand the US prison as a
regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel
through which technologies of racial domin8ance institutionalize their specific, localized practices of legitimated
(state) violence. Emerging as the organic institutional continuity of racial slavery's genocidal violence, the US prison
regime represents a form of human domination that extends beyond and outside the formal institutional and
geographic domains of "the prison (the jail, etc.)." In this sense, the prison is the institutional signification of a
larger regime of proto-genocidal violence that is politically legitimized by the state, generally valorized by the
cultural common sense, and dynamically mobilized and institutionally consolidated across different historical
moments: it is a form of social power that is indispensable to the contemporary (and postemancipation) social order
and its changing structures of racial dominance, in a manner that elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial
Black citizenship. Black freedom, Black non-resentment, and Black patriotic subjectivity - that constructs the Black
non-slave presidency as the flesh-and-blood severance of the US racial/racist state from its entanglement in the
RECONSTRUCTION The Obama ascendancy is the signature moment of the post-1960s White Reconstruction, a
period that has been characterized by the reformist elaboration of historically racist systems of social power to
accommodate the political imperatives of American apartheid's downfall and the emergence of hegemonic (liberal-
the 1990s as the "twilight of the Second Reconstruction" (Marable. 2007. p. 216)19 and points toward another way
of framing and narrating the period that has been more commonly referenced as the "post-civil rights" era. Rather
than taking its primary point of historical departure to be the cresting of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy of
delimited (though no less significant) political-cultural achievements. White Reconstruction focuses on how this era
is denned by an acute and sometimes aggressive reinvention and reorganization of the structural-institutional
strategically and unevenly dislodged various formal and de facto institutional white monopolies and diversified their
personnel at various levels of access, from the entry-level to the administrative and executive levels (e.g., the
sometimes aggressive diversity recruitment campaigns of research universities, urban police, and the military);
while simultaneously (2) revamping, complicating, and enhancing the social relations of dominance, hierarchy, and
violence mobilized by such institutions - relations that broadly reflect the long historical, substructural role of race in
the production of the US national formation and socioeconomic order. In this sense, the notion of White
military have expanded their capacities to produce local and global relations of racial dominance, at the same time
that they have constituted some of the central sites for diversity recruitment and struggles over equal access). It is,
at the very least, a remarkable and dreadful moment in the historical time of White Reconstruction that a Black
president has won office in an electoral landslide while well over a million Black people are incarcerated with the
overwhelming consent of white/multiculturalist civil society.
forms of Black Nationalism that endeavor to protect and maintain African American
culture, institutions, and traditions separate and apart from others. The latter type of Black
Nationalism is demonstrated most among participants here. TABLE 3.1 Typology of Black Nationalism: Attitudes and
worked, resided, and raised her children entirely in the center city, summarized these essential beliefs in her
discussion about why she agrees with Malcolm X: Well you know if we read the books that Malcolm told us to . . . we
always talk about what we cant do. What we are not able to do, we have not analyzed why we are there mentally
and how do we break that mental slavery . . . um . . . the fact that when you go over to Africa, not in the colonized
areas because you know they are just as confused as the black folks over here but in the rural areas . . . people eat
out of the same plates, people see each other as one. If youre hurting, Im hurting. If you dont have, I dont have.
If you have, I have. So I feel good when you get because that means I got, and I feel bad when you dont have
because that means I dont have. So Im saying that being kidnapped and then being raped of our identity, and like
Paula said you aint going to get it back in thirty years, but to be able to identify that I dont trust people and why
dont I trust people and work on that because the only way youre going to get through it isits almost like having
a phobia, you have to expose yourself to itand say, okay, Im going trust Jerri and Paula and Adrienne, and
somebodys going to let me down, but its okay. Thats where were human. But the point isare we looking out for
the group? Weve been so Europeanized that its me and I. And we forgot about you and us. Keeshas sentiments
progress are central to the beliefs of Black Nationalists, who look inward for resources to address the needs of the
preserve community, Paula referred to a time when this type of community-based living was the norm: PAULA:
There was a time in school when we were on our own and our teachers were black . . . then when we werent
subjected to [negative treatment and stereotypes by white teachers] even though we were still being taught the
dominant culture because for you to survive thats the culture you had to live. You had to have two personalities . . .
JANELLE: Its called by W. E. B. DuBois duality. PAULA: Duality . . . you had to have it. Paula and Keesha also point to
another component of Black Nationalismthe recognition that there are important differences between the way
blacks and whites think and interact with each other and within their own cultural groups. Part of this seems to be
the belief that African Americans have to undergo a cognitive liberation process in which they eschew white
American norms and values. Social movement scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1979) and Doug
McAdam (1982), define cognitive liberation as a multistage process in which individuals relinquish their faith in the
legitimacy of the current system, understand their current situation is changeable, initiate demands, and believe
cognitive
liberation is similar in the sense that ideological adherents recognize the
illegitimacy of the American political system ; however, instead of making demands
and asserting rights in that system, they choose to withdraw and effect
change by creating a new system. Recall Keeshas earlier assertion that black Americans
they are capable of changing the system through their own strategic actions. For Black Nationalists,
need to relinquish those beliefs and behaviors that are Europeanized read white. The
desire to alter ingrained views that are biased toward the dominant is a unique feature of Black Nationalist ideology.
Other ideological groups discuss the best tactics for maneuvering within the current system that for various reasons
Black Nationalists participants begin to define problems within the African American community quite differently
from other participants. They see many of the problems in the black community as evidence of inequality and bias
within the American political system. The government and its actors use institutional rules and norms to prevent
black progress. Further, other institutions that shape American life, like schools, businesses, media outlets, and
banks, form a constellation of rules and norms that render black success more difficult on multiple fronts. The
attribution of blame and its political implications will be discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter, but it should
be noted that how individual participants attributed blame was often connected with the way in which they viewed
whites motives.
emigration, activists and scholars have employed a more expansive meaning of separation to include economic and political
independence within the American political context. African Americans needed to develop businesses, institutions, and organizations
to sustain their community. For instance, another example of attempts to foster independent social and economic independence
included the Buy Black campaign championed by Carlos Cooks in the 1940s and 1950s. Cooks believed this campaign would
make the black community behave like the other racial and ethnic groups. It will have blacks own and control the businesses in
black neighborhoods (Cooks 1977 [1955], 89). The economic independence principle has been lived out quite successfully by
religious Black Nationalists such as the Nation of Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna, both of which promote the
development of independent businesses to their members and have collectively, as organizations, engaged in entrepreneurial
development. Black independence also includes community control of schools and other institutions that serve as socializing agents
for children and adults alike. During the Black Power era, for instance, Black Panthers developed social programsincluding free
clinics, clothing and food drives, and free breakfast programsas a key to recruitment and social change. Abron (1998) suggests
that these programs provide a model of community self-help that was needed then and is still relevant today. For Black
through armed resistance and self-defense . This became particularly important in the Civil Rights era, when
violence against blacks was both ramped up and widely publicized. These events served as both recent historical memory and fuel
to the burgeoning Black Power movement. Support for nonviolence was a point of departure for increasingly radical activists
engaged in social protest in the South during the late sixties. Activists like Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) and Robert Williams
took issue with activists who were wedded to Integrationist and nonviolent strategies despite the continued and escalating violence
against black people (Tyson 1999).
The FBI in the past has taken the position, over the OIGs objections, that it
was prohibited from disclosing FISA-acquired information to the OIG
for oversight purposes because the Attorney General had not designated
anyone in the OIG as having access to the information for minimization
reviews of other lawful purposes, and because there were no specific
provisions in the procedures authorizing such access.
2ACCase
Extensions
Extconsciousness key
Black Nationalism is possible consciousness is a vital first
step.
Fleming 08 Kenyatta Fleming, M.A. Candidate in Africana Studies at Clarke
Atlanta University, 2008 (The History of Black Nationalism and Internal Factors that
Prevented the Founding of an Independent Black Nation-State, Clarke Atlanta
University, January, Accessible Online at
http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1548&context=dissertations, accessed on 7-15-15)
For even the most staunch black nationalists, it would seem that the prospect of
founding an independent nation today is less likely than it was thirty years ago, but
that would be a mistake to assume . The success of black nationalists founding a
sovereign nation lies in their ability to correct their internal problems, develop a
wholistic view that incorporates every sector of African-American society, develop a
long range plan that addresses all facets of nationhood, and meets the needs of its
people. It may take several generations to bring the vision of black statehood into
fruition, but one must remember the long fight of African-Americans to free
themselves from enslavement as evidence of what it will take to make black
statehood a reality.
over similar businesses; they are willing to give conditional support for black candidates; and when they discuss views about
commitment to their racial community, they express beliefs that responsible members should be engaged in a collective struggle for
When
this moderate support for Black Nationalism is coupled with the high level of
frustration and distrust focus group members experience because of their desire for unfettered pursuit of the American
dream and the obstacles to that pursuit because of enduring racial tensions, blacks seem primed for increased
support for Black Nationalism. In fact, the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina seemed to
reopen old wounds and increase support for more independent organization
building. Interestingly, and expectedly, the storm also reinforced notions of linked fate and reiterated the need for blacks to
community uplift. This is true for even those participants in the focus groups who were most opposed to Black Nationalism.
coalesce around issues that adversely and uniquely impact their community. African American churches, fraternal organizations, and
other black organizations set up benefits, collected clothes, and engaged in other efforts in the storms aftermath. In black
communities nationally, impromptu and often informal organizations formed to aid in hurricane relief efforts and to support arriving
storm victims. One Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter noted, In some cases these newly minted black activists were poor themselves,
but they felt a kinship with Katrina victims (Bernstein 2005, F1). Black philanthropic organizations reported a dramatic increase in
giving, and there was growing criticism of mainstream relief organizations like the Red Cross and its ability (or desire) to adequately
meet the needs of African American communities (Dobrzynski 2005). Additionally, the Black Entertainment Television (BET) channel
and a group called the Saving Our Selves Coalition held a telethon that primarily featured young black entertainers, as well as more
campaign, which represents a high point (even if only symbolic) for African American politics. Like Katrina, it continues to highlight
the myriad ways in which African Americans and other groups view the world. Beyond general support for more moderate forms of
It seems to be
a political truism that black Americans feel connected to each other socially,
politically, and economically. That connection generally has been viewed in two primary wayseither fixed and
neutral or fixed and positive. While there is evidence in this analysis to support both of these claims, there is also
support for the need to rethink how black politics scholars measure and employ the
idea of linked fate in their analysis. These focus group participants clearly see themselves as allied with other
Black Nationalism, there is also a great deal of insight to be gleaned from the focus group data on linked fate.
members of the black community; however, the nature of that alliance is far more complicated than our current conceptualizations
suggest. These participants are making distinctions about who is a member of their black community. These distinctions are made
on the basis of social and economic class boundaries, and geographic boundaries, and, interestingly, on the basis of what they see
as socially acceptable behavioral choices. So for many participants this connection is important and sometimes positive, but it
always serves as a problematic rather than a constant.
threshold, the impact of the linked fate lessens, but at lower thresholds of
disillusionment, linked fate can exert a stronger impact. It is not difficult to imagine
that an African American who feels no sense of shared fate can be a passionate
follower of Black nationalism if her disillusionment is strong enough to trigger her
ideological endorsement. This is, after all, a common concern among those who
suspectto borrow Brewers (2002) phrasingthat Black-nationalist organizations
nurture out-group hate, rather than in-group love (see, e.g., Adeleke 1998;
Allen 1995; Davis and Brown 2002). An extremely disillusioned Black person who
believes strongly in her groups interdependence is presumably more likely to be
strongly nationalistic than an African American who expresses only one of these
sentiments (Harris-Lacewell 2004, p. 94), so attempts to stimulate this womans
linked fate could raise her ideological support even more. However, doing so could
possibly decrease the effect that her disillusionment already has on her adherence
to Black nationalism. Extending the navigational metaphor: the importance of an
alternative route becomes most apparent when ones initial pathway is unavailable.
In this case, there is less need for a Black person to rely on disillusionment to fuel
her support for Black nationalism if her sense of linked fate is sufficiently developed.
Conversely, rising levels of disillusionment could potentially attenuate the impact of
linked fate on Black nationalism because linked fate no longer has to compensate
for missing disillusionment.
AT:
What the British and American people gain in security from the surveillance
activities of the NSA and GCHQ is modest in comparison to what they lose in security.
These practices also strip away their moral rights to privacy and freedoms .
The utilitarian appeal put forth by the British and American officials who support these
practices has been shown to be unsustainable in a utilitarian framework largely
because they determine the dictates of utility with a fundamental lack of
understanding of the pleasures and pains involved . [end page 38] Therefore, according to
Mills theory of utility, these surveillance programs are expedient rather than
ethical . Indeed, Mill writes, there have been many institutions throughout history
which have been justified by supposed appeals to utility, only to be condemned
later as blatantly unethical . One example which Mill cites is slavery: at one point in the
history of the United States, slavery was argued to be a necessity of social existence
because the social benefits outweighed the drawbacks .36 It has since been clarified,
however, that the institution is a violation of the utilitarian paradigm that each
ought to receive what he or she justly deserves. Mill writes, The entire history of
social improvement has been a series of transitions by which one custom or
institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence,
has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny .37
Indeed, history will show that the mass surveillance programs of the NSA and GCHQ
Conclusion
followed the dictates of expedience rather than ethics . This fact is evident in a remark by
the head of a British intelligence agency: Theres nothing in it for us in being more open about what we do.38 This
official is clearly more concerned about the efficiency of his organization than the good of British citizens. Indeed,
although the NSA and GCHQ appeal to utilitarianism in attempting to justify their
practices, when these practices ( i.e., their consequences ) are critiqued
according to the utilitarian framework, it becomes clear that these practices are
consistent with efficiency rather than utility . The negative consequences of
these activities clearly outweigh the positive ones: the NSA and GCHQ are
compromising rather than bolstering security in the United States and Britain, and they
are threatening the moral rights promoted in the utilitarian framework
rather than protecting them , so they are detracting from the peaceful
functioning of society rather than facilitating it . Government officials who approve of
the indiscriminate, large-scale spying on American and British citizens by the NSA and
GCHQ claim that, if their practices are limited, the world will go dark and chaos will
ensue. Although the utility behind this argument initially seems compelling , it
does not hold . Those who oversee the intelligence organizations are not fully
informed as to the pleasures [end page 39] and pains involved, and, hence, their ethical
calculus is skewed . In actuality, the negative consequences of these programs
outweigh the positive ones. As a result, these programs can be said to be
expedient rather than ethical , and they ought to be terminated .
slave.16 After Emancipation, the Southern economy was decimated by the Civil War, the destruction of fixed
capital and land, and the collapse of the Confederate currency. It was particularly the newfound mobility of freed
blacks and their refusal to immediately enter into voluntary contractual relations with former slaveholders that
prompted extraeconomic means to enforce their compliance. Freed blacks, situated outside the constraints of wage
labour, needed to be integrated economically yet excluded socially. In a way it was a problem of how to humanise
the sentient object. After all, if the slave was merely a sentient object with no will, how could the freed black
engage in the responsibilities of bourgeois individuality and freedom requisite of waged labour? What would it
mean for a slave to become a free individual? Therefore the central concern after the abolition of slavery for white
civil society was managing the transition from the legalised subjection of slaves to the informal and racialised
subjection of blacks. The figure of the free black from the outset was seen as fundamentally outside the wage
relation, purportedly unhabituated to the ethics of work and hence in need of labour discipline. As such, various
techniques of coercion were utilised against ex-slaves to ironically enforce the construction of consent for the free
labour contract: the glaring disparities between liberal democratic ideology and the varied forms of compulsion
utilized to force free workers to sign labor contracts exceeded the coercion immanent in capital labor relations and
the fate of slavery, but also slavery informed the premises and principles of labor
discipline [] the forms of compulsion used against the unemployed, vagrants, beggars, and others in the
about
postbellum North mirrored the transition from slavery to freedom. The contradictory aspects of liberty of contract
and the reliance on coercion in stimulating free labor modeled in the aftermath of the Civil War were the lessons of
emancipation employed against the poor.
we should
think of black political solidarity as resting not on a common black identity, but on
the common experience of racism and the joint commitment to work together to
combat it. Despite the diversity within the black population in the US, Obama received overwhelming black support, not just in
solidarity. Is it plausible to try to understand Barack Obamas campaign in these terms? TS: In my book, I claim that
the general election, where as a Democrat he could expect to get at least 88 per cent of the black vote, but also in the primary
against Clinton, where a number of blacks thought he was unfairly criticised because of his race. I think this black support, especially
in the south, reflects in part the historical commitment of blacks, despite their many internal differences, to stand together in the
fight for racial justice. Obama is seen by many blacks as a symbol of the successes of our collective historical struggle, and he gives
us hope that further progress lies ahead. Moreover, Obama received overwhelming black support despite the fact that his mother is
white and his father is not a descendent of black American slaves. Because he is generally regarded as black (given the one-drop
rule) and strongly identifies as black, he is accepted as an equal member in the black community and can lay claim to the legacy of
the historic African-American fight for justice. The fact that he attended a black church, is married to an African-American woman,
and has mastered elements of traditional black oratory also helped to solidify his black support. JD: Does an Obama victory also
Many whites
are weary, and have long been weary, of black claims of grievance. Most whites are impatient
with black claims about the continuing significance of racism . They dont think there is a serious
race problem anymore, and they will point to Obamas election as proof that racism does not
affect black life chances, at least not in any serious way. They think that black political solidarity
is no longer necessary and that blacks should stop suggesting that America is a
racist society and reconcile with their fellow white citizens, dropping all talk of
black America. For some whites, this is the significance of Obamas victory-it undermines black claims of grievance and
puts the last nail in the coffin of black identity politics. The fact that Obama ran on a platform of racial
reconciliation, did not specify any concrete proposals for how to combat racial discrimination
in employment and housing or segregation in public schools, and did not make any
overt racial appeals to black voters only seems to buttress the legitimacy of this postracial stance. As this stance becomes more entrenched, and I expect it will, blacks will find it even
more difficult to put problems of racial injustice on the public agenda.
herald the end of a particular way of doing politics? Specifically, identity politics or the politics of recognition? TS:
with the ability to critique or protest the actions of those they have lifted up. It is a
category that is often reserved for those African Americans who have achieved
financial, athletic, or academic success. Cathy Cohen (1999) points to internal
tensions within the African American community between the impulse to protect the
image (or at least counteract prevailing negative stereotypes) and the need to
adequately address certain community problems. She demonstrates this through an
examination of African Americas response to the AIDS/HIV crisis. African American
church officials and community activists on the front line of dealing with the
AIDS/HIV crisis have had to grapple with fulfilling their role as service providers and
coming to grips with the moral dilemmas created by their interactions with the
populations most affected (i.e., gay men, sex workers, and IV drug users). It is likely
that a similar tension will exist in an Obama administration . While racial problems
will continue to exist despite Obamas victory, there will be a strong desire among
African Americans to preserve this historic moment by protecting Obamas image
and refraining from making protest demands that may call for the upheaval of the
status quo. This is particularly interesting given that much of the political progress
made by African Americans has resulted directly from protest demands. The
controversy during the campaign over Obamas pastor, Jeremiah Wright, again,
illustrates this point. There were dueling problems surrounding this controversy. On
one hand, African Americans were singed by what they saw as an overt attack on
their most powerful community institution, the black church. Alternatively, they
wanted to make sure that this problem did not tank Obamas candidacy. Obamas
chances were in clear conflict with the need to defend this critical political and
cultural institution of the black community. This kind of tension will only increase
when Obama begins to govern and is forced to makes choices that potentially
conflict with black preferences and needs.
center of their own ethical profession. They could not face the triumph of their lesser instincts and simultaneously
demonstrations, whites would have to contend with their own conscience and with the demands of blacks. This led
to the second part of Kings strategy: blacks would adopt the tactic of nonviolent direct action. Following the
Gandhian model, blacks would enact political change by taking the moral high ground. King (1986b) suggests that
black protesters do not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The
nonviolent resister must often voice his protests through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that
noncooperation and boycotts are not the ends themselves; they are the means to awaken the end of moral shame
rights through planned campaigns and multiracial coalitions.11 Additionally, Booker T. Washington insisted on
Thus, those
who reject Black Nationalisms more separate and self-deterministic
approach are basically seeking equal access to American institutions , which
would allow them equal opportunity to pursue the vision of the framers. However, the situation is more
complicated when determining potential political goals because its proponents
emphasize alternative or competing identities rather than a singular racial filter and stress
individual effort as a mechanism for change. This leads them to take factors other than racial
group membership and uplift into consideration when making political judgments.
interracial harmony and white good will as prerequisites for Negro advancement (Meier 1991).
In recent years political theorists and philosophers have devoted a great deal of
attention to issues of nationalism, self-determination, and multiculturalism, and in
the process they have challenged the notion that liberal values and principles
require the integration and assimilation of minorities (see Kymlicka 1995; Laden and
Owen 2007; Levy 2000; Tamir 1993; Taylor 1994). Indeed, Will Kymlicka has
suggested that there is now a consensus among liberal theorists in support of
liberal [multi]culturalismthe idea that certain group rights are compatible with
liberal principles. The issue, he suggests, is no longer whether this is the case but
rather what specific policies and institutional arrangements are appropriate for
particular kinds of minorities (Kymlicka 2001, chap. 2). Despite this shift in liberal
theory toward a more friendly view of group rights, public and legal discourse in the
United States with regard to African Americans continues to emphasize integration
and colorblindness as the route to racial equality (Peller 1995; Cochran 1999). In the
case of other minorities, liberal theorists have shown that integration and groupblindness impose considerable and unfair costs on minority group members, and
hence that justice requires groupconsciousness rather than group-blindness,
group autonomy rather than integration and assimilation. Yet this position
has not been prominent in liberal discourse on race. Liberal multiculturalists usually
focus on minorities that are defined foremost by cultural differences, and this has
led to an estrangement in work on minority rights, where African Americans are
treated in one literature and cultural minorities are treated in another. As one
observer put it, when liberal political theorists tackle matters of group difference,
they often evade race in general and the case of African Americans in particular. On
the subject of multicultural challenges to liberal neutrality, for instance, political
theorists tend to focus on minority groups with a high level of cultural cohesion
(Fogg-Davis 2003, 557). Because African Americans are not necessarily a cultural
minority, liberal theorists interested in minority rights have had too little to say
about them (but see Cochran 1999; Gutmann 1996; Ingram 2000; Spinner 1994).
2ACOff Case
2ACDA
2AC FrontlineStem
1. No linkplan gets circumvented, but still resolves the
impacts of the 1ACthats Schulberg and Reilly
2. No link: We are supporting the creation of new
institutions, not defending actions of existing state
institutions
3. Traditional risk assessment strips us of our relations to
others and our dignitythis obscures how structural
violence contributes to large-scale destruction
OBrien 2kPhD, environmental scientist and activist (Mary, 2000, MIT Press,
Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment,
Gigapedia, p. xvii-xviii,)
This book is based on the understanding that it is not acceptable for people to tell you that
the harms to which they will subject you and the world are safe or insignificant. You deserve
to know good alternatives to those harms, and you deserve to help decide which alternative
will be chosen. Underlying this book, however, is a less explicitly stated personal belief,
namely that we humans will never dredge up enough will to alter our habitual, destructive
ways of behaving toward each other and the world unless we simultaneously employ
information and emotion and a sense of relationship to othersother species, other cultures,
and other generations. Using information while divorced from emotion and using information
while insulated from connection to a wide net of others are how destruction of the Earth is
being accomplished. Risk assessment of narrow options is a classic example of using certain
bits of information in such a way as to exclude feeling and to artificially sever connections of
parts to the whole. Risk assessment rips you (and others) out of connection to the rest of the
world and reduces you (if you are even considered at all in the risk assessment) to a
number. You are then consigned to damage or death or risk, depending on how your
number is shuffled around in models, assumptions, and formulas and during risk
management. Assessment of the pros and cons of a range of reasonable alternatives allows the connections to
remain. The cultural emotions connected to a given alternative, for instance, can be a pro or a con, and may be
both, depending on which sector of the community you inhabit. An advantage or a disadvantage of a given
Terror Security K
All of their impact evidence is epistemologically biased. Terror
threats are manufactured by the FBI to justify surveillance.
Greenwald 15 (Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and
is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's executive power and
foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's two-tiered
system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in
the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of
the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of
Bradley Manning. WHY DOES THE FBI HAVE TO MANUFACTURE ITS OWN PLOTS IF TERRORISM AND ISIS ARE SUCH
GRAVE THREATS? https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-terrorism-isis-grave-threats/,
2/26/15 SMahajan)
unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alon
and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find
another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a terror plot : either because
theyre being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the
case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please
the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed
attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant
then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and
persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target
refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the
impoverished target. Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the
last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for
disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the
DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are
terror attack,
kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and
we
should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the
FBI for saving us from their own terror plots . One can, if one really wishes, debate whether
the FBI should be engaging in such behavior. For reasons I and many others have repeatedly argued, these
cases are unjust in the extreme: a form of pre-emptory prosecution where
vulnerable individuals are targeted and manipulated not for any criminal
acts they have committed but rather for the bad political views they have
permissive interpretation of entrapment that it could almost never be successfully invoked. Once again,
expressed . They end up sending young people to prison for decades for crimes which even their sentencing
judges acknowledge they never would have seriously considered, let alone committed, in the absence of FBI
trickery. Its hard to imagine anyone thinking this is a justifiable tactic, but Im certain there are people who believe
Were constantly
bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists,
lone wolf extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times
that. Lets leave that question to the side for the moment in favor of a different issue.
earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce the
noted the last time we wrote about this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ
these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of
1ARUtil
Utilitarian ethics are used by dominant power groups to mask
the need for reform when body counts are the only ethic for
determining value, bodies that arent visible to dominant
power groups are never counted. This allows for structural
violence in the shadows where the official body counts ignore
the impact on marginalized communities thats OBrien.
Ethical concerns should shape your decision calculus the
only way to avoid talking ourselves into atrocity is to create a
set of ethics that are inviolable. Theres always a path to
justify genocide utilitarianism never provides a coherent
method to evaluate competing proposals.
2ACFramework
Bankeys positioning of himself at the borderland while excluding (multiply situated) black people in debate from that same space
with whiteness; this is especially true in the context of debate. The tone of Bankeys criticism assumes black people
NDT champ, from the Kentucky Round Robin, and the attempt to change the rules pertaining to transfer students. We are
language and tonal intonations (regionally specific) when in majority black spaces
(in fact, it seems that it is when we speak authentically in the presence of whites
share ourselves with whitesthat we are charged with the crime of being
intentionally unintelligible). Within debates, (vis--vis framework for example) there is a denial or a
disavowal of even the possibility of an engagement across rhetorical difference , which is the move Bankey makes.
He refuses to code switch in the thesis by not attempting to understand the kinship networks in debate for black people or to
engage in rhetorical practices to demonstrate a commitment to engaging difference at the level of method and performance.[9]
How often do we encounter white people who can code-switch (and no we dont mean the latest hip hop slang) into the
practiced. We believe that these kinds of practices and attempts on the part of black people to meet whites more than half-way are
in communication studies codeswitching, the vernacular, counter-publics, and many other concepts evoke the
double-sidedness of rhetorical practice in ways that complicate the very notion that
there could ever be a pure communication . We therefore invite Bankey to read the Communication Studies
section of the library as well as the Black Studies section. Our relationship to debate can easily be
described as an interracial love affair. The debate community is majority white and
whiteness characterizes the performative and stylistic norms of competitive policy
debate. We need not only refer to Reid-Brinkleys thesis for this kind of analysis. Shelton K. Hill and Pamela Stepps work on
black participation in debate and white stylistic practice has been overlooked for far too long. We think that our relationship
to debate is a romantic/desirous coupling, a flirtation across racial lines that has
often left many of us bruised and bloody at the hands of whiteness and white
people. We are in an abusive relationship, one that denigrates and maligns our
black thinking while engaged in (neo-)liberal efforts to capture our black bodies .
Nonetheless, we work to create an erotics of debate that can affirm our selves in the
face of such denigration. The borderland space that black debaters, judges,
coaches, and directors occupy offers a unique perspective from which to view both
the beauty and the ugliness of our community and its practices. Such a perspective
provides new insights and new avenues of engagement toward changing the
conditions necessary for producing new knowledgethe kind that does not block
the development of black thought based on misdirected accusations of antiintellectualism.
evident for those who choose to see. But also we must point out that
Defense to Agonism
Agonism and deliberation suppress alternate forms of
communication and assume a level playing field
Dryzek 5 (John Dryzek is a PhD, Professor of Political Science and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. He is a
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, former Head of the Departments of Political Science at the Universities of
Oregon and Melbourne and the Social and Political Theory program at ANU, and former editor of the Australian Journal of Political
Science, Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies: Alternatives to Agonism and Analgesia, Political Theory,
http://www.chinesedemocratization.com/materials/6DryzekDeliDemDividedSocieties.pdf //ekr)
Deliberation across divided identities is hard . On a widely shared account, deliberation is what
Bessette calls the mild voice of reason2 exactly what is lacking in tough identity issues, at best an aspiration for
Deliberative
democrats influenced by Rawls might follow him in excluding the background culture from the
purview of public reason. But, as Benhabib points out, issues generated by the background
culture and its comprehensive doctrines can be especially pressing.3 Gutmann and Thompson
believe that deliberation can be extended to deep moral disagreements, but the precondition is
commitment on all sides to reciprocity, the capacity to seek fair terms of cooperation for its own
sake, such that arguments are made in terms the other side(s) can accept .4 Again,
mutual acceptance of reasonableness is exactly what is lacking in divided
societies. Gutmann and Thompson require adoption by all sides of a particular moral psychologyopenness to
how opponents might one day learn to interact once their real differences are dissolved.
persuasion by critical argumentthat is in fact not widely held, and explicitly rejected by (say) fundamentalist
Christians.5 Moreover,
the unitary public reason advanced by Rawls and his followers. Those asserting identities for their part may feel
insulted by the very idea that questions going to their core be deliberated. What they want is instead cathartic
argument by examining two very different responses to divided societies. The first is agonistic, seeking robust
exchange across identities. The recent history of agonism owes much to Hannah Arendt, William Connolly, and
Bonnie Honig,8 but I focus on the work of Chantal Mouffe, because she explicitly advocates agonism against
deliberative democracy in plural societies. The second response is consociational, seeking suppression of
interchange through agreement among well-meaning elites. I do not treat these two as straw man extremes
between which a moderate path should be sought. Indeed, I argue that a defensible discursive democracy for
divided societies can develop elements of both.
Resolved
Resolved doesnt require certainty
Websters 9 Merriam Webster 2009
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resolved)
# Main Entry: 1resolve # Pronunciation: \ri-zlv, -zolv also -zv or -zov\ # Function: verb # Inflected Form(s):
resolved; resolving 1 : to become separated into component parts; also : to become reduced by dissolving or
analysis 2 : to form a resolution : determine 3 : consult, deliberate
2ACNationalism PIC
2AC Frontline
1. Permute: do boththe aff reclaimed notions of nationalism to create
a new inclusive communal culturethats Price
2. The aff is a pre-requisite nationalism was gendered by civil
society the aff escapes those structures the pic as an isolated
instance of resistance cannot solve
Schram 95 (Sanford F. Schram, Associate Professor of Political Science at
Macalester; 1995; Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and The Social
Science of Poverty; Discourses of Dependency: The Politics of Euphemism,, 2123)//CC
The deconstruction of prevailing discursive structures helps politicize the institutionalized practices that inhibit
renaming are not confined to the left, but are endemic to what amounts to a classic American practice utilized
across the political spectrum.7 Homeless, welfare, and family planning provide three examples of how isolated
instances of renaming fail in their efforts to make a politics out of sanitizing language. [end page 21] Reconsidering
the Politics of Renaming Renaming can do much to indicate respect and sympathy. It may strategically recast
concerns so that they can be articulated in ways that are more appealing and less dismissive .
Renaming the
objects of political contestation may help promote the basis for articulating latent
affinities among disparate political constituencies. The relentless march of
renamings can help denaturalize and delegitimate ascendant categories and the
constraints they place on political possibility. At the moment of fissure, destabilizing renamings
have the potential to encourage reconsideration of how biases embedded in names are tied to power relations.8 Yet
isolated acts of renaming do not guarantee that audiences will be any more predisposed to treat things differently
than they were before. The problem is not limited to the political reality that dominant groups possess greater
suggest that paid employment exhausts possibilities for achieving self-sufficiency as to suggest that political action
can be meaningfully confined to isolated renamings.10 Neither the workplace nor a name is the definitive venue for
effectuating self-worth or political intervention.11 Strategies that accept the prevailing work ethos will continue to
marginalize those who cannot work, and increasingly so in a post industrial economy that does not require nearly as
Getting the names right will not matter if the names are interpreted according to
the institutionalized insistences of organized society. 13 Only when those insistences
are relaxed does there emerge the possibility for new names to restructure daily
practices. Texts, as it now has become notoriously apparent, can be read in many ways, and they are most often
read according to how prevailing discursive structures provide an interpretive context for reading them.14 The
meanings implied by new names of necessity [end page 22] overflow their categorizations, often to be
reinterpreted in terms of available systems of intelligibility (most often tied to existing institutions). Whereas
renaming can maneuver change within the interstices of pervasive discursive structures, renaming is limited in
reciprocal fashion. Strategies of containment that seek to confine practice to sanitized categories appreciate the
discursive character of social life, but insufficiently and wrongheadedly. I do not mean to suggest that discourse is
dependent on structure as much as that structures are hegemonic discourses. The operative structures reproduced
through a multitude of daily practices and reinforced by the efforts of aligned groups may be nothing more than
Interrogating structures as discourses can politicize the terms used to fix meaning, produce value, and establish
identity. Denaturalizing value as the product of nothing more than fixed interpretations can create new possibilities
for creating value in other less insistent and injurious ways. The discursively/structurally reproduced reality of
liberal capitalism as deployed by power blocs of aligned groups serves to inform the existentially lived experiences
of citizens in the contemporary postindustrial order.16 The powerful get to reproduce a broader context that works
to reduce the dissonance between new names and established practices. As long as the prevailing discursive
structures of liberal capitalism create value from some practices, experiences, and identities over others, no matter
how often new names are insisted upon, some people will continue to be seen as inferior simply because they do
not engage in the same practices as those who are currently dominant in positions of influence and prestige.
Therefore,
between a feminist and a postmodern conception of subjecthood. (Elements Of the postmodern critique address the
ethical issue that feminism raises: the need to retain agency. They thus posit a subject that is capable Of resistance
and political action. This conception Of the subject is articulated not by retaining a Cartesian concept of agency but
by emphasizing that
modes Of resistance to those discourses out of the elements of the very discourses
that shape them. While the dialectical conception of the subject rests on a definition of agency that is
imported from the Cartesian subject as a given, the postmoderns attempt to formulate concepts of resistance and
creativity apart from Carte- Sian concepts. 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
discursive appropriationa parasitic redeployment Of the excess of dis- cursive meaningthat amounts to the
cultural practice of postmodern theory That (postmodernism) has achieved such diverse cultural currency as a term
terms are
by no means guaranteed their meanings, and that these meanings Can be
appropriated and redefined for different purposes , different contexts, and, more
important, different causes. In fact, this politics Of appropriation, for so long
exclusively the discursive preserve Of the colonizer, has more recently been crucial to
groups on the social margin, Who have preferred, under certain circumstances, to struggle for recognition
thereby demonstrates what has been seen as one of postmodernism's most provocative lessons; that
and legitimacy on es- tablished "metropolitan" political ground By operating within and utilizing the terms Of the
dominant dis- course in subversive fashion, new identities are shapedsubjectivities that emerge in an oppositional
relationship to the universal.
intent of academic debate. The existence of such red lines should not discourage vigorous debate, for there are
many available arguments that deal with substantive issues on any resolution. Our task as a community of debate
educators is to develop judging paradigms that integrate a commitment to the values of diversity and impartiality.
The judge should represent and enforce communal and personal values that exist to promote
the health of argument and the public sphere. At the same time, judges can remain
impartial adjudicators of substantive arguments. While some will cluck about political
correctness and censorship, the debate round is not a speakers corner or a talk show, it is a classroom. If it is a
classroom, then some preconditions must exist if students are to learn. Among these preconditions should be a
guarantee that a persons race, gender, ethnicity, etc., will not be the target of abuse or harassment.
1ARExt Stychin
Discourse shapes reality through social structures
Goueffic 96 -[Louise Goueffic. Author and speaker on discourse, BA graduate studies in
France, Breaking the patriarchal code 1996, http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-PatriarchalCode-Linguistic-Sexual/dp/1879198177] N.H
To address this question, one can consider, for example, why one persons terrorist
is another persons freedom fighter; the contexts in which one would use the terms
liberal, collateral damage or axis of evil; what people mean by woman by
colour', 'hooded youths', 'male nurse', or 'spinster'; and how much information is
conveyed (or not) by the term 'domestic violence'. In addition, violent, shocking, or
high impact events, for example, war, provide vivid and highly charged contexts
where language is paramount. During the Second World War, the Japanese were
constructed as the dehumanized enemy, described as 'specimens' to be 'bagged'. In
Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide, the Tutsis were described as 'cockroaches', the
target of 'bush-clearing' by the Hutus, who were ordered to 'remove tall weeds'
(adults) and 'shoots' (children). The killing of people in wars has typically been reconceptualized as 'action', 'severe measures', 'evacuating', or 'rendering harmless'.
In many cases, 'war' has become 'conflict', 'killing fields' have become 'free fire
zones', and 'killing civilians' has become 'collateral damage' (Bourke, 1999,2001).
These re-conceptualizations help constitute particular versions of events, such as a
bombing, and particular social and power relations, such as those between 'us' and
the 'other' (whoever the doer(s) and the receiver(s) of an action may be). Similarly,
in terms of gender, the use of phrasing such as 'male nurse' or 'female doctor' or
'lady doctor' effectively constitutes particular versions of the social world, where it
is necessary or important for speakers to index gender in that way. The view of
language not as a fixed or closed system, but as dynamic, complex and subject to
change, assumes that every time we use language, we make meaningful selections
from the linguistic resources available to us (Antaki, 1994). This is hardly a
straightforward process, not least because these selections are embedded in a
local/immediate, as well as broader/institutional and socio-cultural context (Antaki,
1988,1994; Fairclough, 1992). Consider, for example, a public debate on the topic of
abortion. The language that may be used to write or talk about this topic must be
viewed in the context of the particular social occasion (e.g. at school, in parliament,
in the media); of the medium (e.g. spoken, written); of who argues (e.g. a doctor, a
leg- islator, a campaigner); for what purpose(s) (e.g. to convince, to change a
situation) and from what perspective. The range of perspectives on abortion may
vary according to the participants' age, sex, education, race, class, or religion, but
also their expecta- tions, experiences, knowledge, expertise, and involvement.
Different perspectives will also reflect and promote different assumptions (or
discourses, as we will see in Chapter 3) around gender, for example, about
women's position in a society, their relative power in terms of decision-making, the
role of parenting, a society's views about sex, and so on. It then becomes obvious
that in order to understand the role that language plays in establishing and
maintaining any social relations, including gender relations, we have to look outside
of language itself, at the wider social processes in which language plays a part
(Graddol and Swann, 1989).
1ARExt Schram
Their isolated instance of laptop sticker activism does
nothing but shut down interrogations of the structures that
informed the oppression
Theyre a form of fake radicalism that shuts down
conversations and distracts from material change. A private
discussion about language choices is a better approach.
Ahmad 15 Asam Ahmad, Coordinator of the Youth Program at the Metropolitan
Action Committee for the Prevention of Violence Against Women & Children,
Coordinator of the It Gets Fatter Projecta body positivity group started by fat
queer people of color, 2015 (A Note on Call-Out Culture, Briarpatch Magazine,
March 2nd, Available Online at http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-noteon-call-out-culture, Accessed 03-05-2015)
Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and
community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive
behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and
actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because call-outs tend to
be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism:
one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself .
What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the
nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter
and Facebook, calling someone out isnt just a private interaction between two
individuals: its a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or
how pure their politics are. Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance
itself is more significant than the content of the call-out. This is why calling in
has been proposed as an alternative to calling out: calling in means speaking
privately with an individual who has done some wrong, in order to address the
behaviour without making a spectacle of the address itself.
In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are
calling out is a human being, and that different human beings in different social
locations will be receptive to different strategies for learning and growing. For
instance, most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has
committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action
becomes a reason to pass judgment on someones entire being, as if there is no
difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking
down the street (who is of course also someones friend). Call-out culture can end
up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and
punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them
as people with complicated stories and histories.
It isnt an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just
in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the
bounds of whos in and whos out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed
through the use of appropriate language and terminology a language and
terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with .
In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time. And what
happens when someone has mastered proficiency in languages of accountability
and then learned to justify all of their actions by falling back on that language? How
do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to
justify oppressive behaviour? We dont have a word to describe this kind of perverse
exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in
progressive circles. Perhaps we could call it anti-oppressivism.
Humour often plays a role in call-out culture and by drawing attention to this I am
not saying that wit has no place in undermining oppression; humour can be one of
the most useful tools available to oppressed people. But when people are reduced
to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender, male, etc.) and mocked as such,
it means were treating each other as if our individual social locations stand in for
the total systems those parts of our identities represent. Individuals become
synonymous with systems of oppression, and this can turn systemic analysis
into moral judgment . Too often, when it comes to being called out, narrow
definitions of a persons identity count for everything.
No matter the wrong we are naming, there are ways to call people out that do not
reduce individuals to agents of social advantage. There are ways of calling people
out that are compassionate and creative, and that recognize the whole individual
instead of viewing them simply as representations of the systems from which they
benefit. Paying attention to these other contexts will mean refusing to unleash all of
our very real trauma onto the psyches of those we imagine represent the systems
that oppress us. Given the nature of online social networks, call-outs are not going
away any time soon. But reminding ourselves of what a call-out is meant to
accomplish will go a long way toward creating the kinds of substantial, material
changes in peoples behaviour and in community dynamics that we envision and
need.
Conquergood Module
**note dont read this with the other Schram and Stychin cards, it would critique
their focus on artificial meanings of words and would be a double turn**
1. Focus on written knowledge is an exercise of Western imperialism
that reproduces White Supremacy
Conquergood 2 (Dwight Conquergood was an associate professor of performance
studies at Northwestern University and an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and
Communication at the State University of New York , Masters in Communication
from the University of Utah, Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern
University Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research
http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/301/psinterventions-tdr.pdf //ekr)
Since the enlightenment project of modernity, the first way of knowing has the Of it
has qualified and repressed other Ways of knowing that are rooted in embodied
experience, oratory; and local contingencies. Between objective knowledge that is
consolidated in texts, and local know-how that circulates on the ground within a
community of memory and practice, there is no contest. It is the choice between
and "Old Wives' tales" (note the gendered as feminine). Michel Foucault coined the
term "subjugated knowledge's" to include all the local, regional, vernacular, naive
knowledges at the bottom of the hierarchy the low other of science (1980:81-84).
These are the nonserious ways of knowing that dominant culture neglects,
excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize. Subjugated knowledges
have been erased because they are illegible; they exist, by and large, as active
bodies of meaning, outside of books, eluding the forces of inscription that would
make them legible, and thereby legitimate (see de Certeau 1998; Scott 1998). What
gets squeezed out by this epistemic violence is the whole realm of complex, finely
nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised,
coexperienced, covertand all the more deeply meaningful because of its refusal to
be spelled out. Dominant epistemologies that link knowing with seeing are not
attuned to meanings that are masked, camouflaged, indirect, embedded, or hidden
in context. The visual/verbal bias Of Western regimes of knowledge blinds bewilders
researchers to meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence,
body tension, arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise
and secrecywhat de Certeau called "the elocutionary experience of fugitive
communication" (2000: 133; see Conquergood 2000). Subordinate people do not
have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency, the
presumptive norm Of clear and direct communication, free and open
debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted.
In his critique of the limitations of literacy, Kenneth Burke argued that print based
scholarship has built-in blind spots and a conditioned deafness: The [written] record
is usually but a fragment of the expression (as the written word omits all telltale
record of gesture and tonality; and not only may our literacy keep us from missing
the omissions, it may blunt us to the appreciation of tone and gesture, so that even
when we witness the full expression, we note only those aspects of it that can be
written down). ([1950] 1969:185) In even stronger terms, Raymond 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 what is written is understood. Such is the internal law of that
which has constituted itself as Western [and white] (1984:161).
Their focus on textual meaning of words is a form of Western academic
privilege that erases other forms of understanding
Conquergood 91 (Dwight Conquergood was an associate professor of performance
studies at Northwestern University and an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and
Communication at the State University of New York , Masters in Communication
from the University of Utah, Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern
University Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,
http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/301/RethinkingEthnog.pdf, //ekr)
The performance paradigm can help ethnographers recognize "the limitations Of
literacy" and critique the textualist bias of western civilization (Jackson, 1989).
Geertz (1973, p. 452) enunciates the textual paradigm in his famous phrase: "The
culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the
anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders Of those to whom they properly
belong." In other words, the ethnographer is construed as a displaced, somewhat
awkward reader Of texts. Jackson vigorously critiques this ethnographic textualism
(1989, p. 184): By fetishizing texts, it dividesas the advent of literacy itself did
readers from authors, and separates both from the world. The idea that "there is
nothing outside the text" may be congenial to someone whose life is confined to
academe, but it sounds absurd in the village worlds where anthropologists carry out
their work, where people negotiate meaning in face-to-face interactions , not as
individual minds but as embodied social beings. In other words, textualism tends to
ignore the flux Of human relationships, the ways meanings are created
intersubjectively as well as ' 'intertextually embodied in gestures as well as in
words, and connected to political, moral, and aesthetic interests. Though possessed
Of a long historical commitment to the spoken word rhetoric and communication
suffer from this same valorizing of inscribed texts. A recent essay in the Quarterly
Journal Of Speech (Brummett, 1990, p. 71; emphasis mine) provides a stunning
example of the field's extreme textualism: "Such a (disciplinary I grounding can only
come about in the moment of methodological commitment when someone sits
down with a transcript Of discourse and attempts to explain it to students Or
colleaguesin that moment we become scholars of communication." In the quest
2ACFiat PIC
2AC Frontline
1. No linkTheir args assume we are reformism and that the state
creates progressive laws
It seems a possibility worth considering that there is not, and is not going to be, any
critical speaker for whom the reconstructive, the visionary, the committed moment
is not always already coming, and thus is not always already here. We can
deconstruct because we can reconstruct; we are anti-normative insofar as we are
normative. As the reconstructive moment seems ineradicable, so too does the
human experience of agency. It seems, in other words, a possibility worth
considering that the problematic, elusive, "humanist" experience of subjectivityagency-is an historically irreversible , inexpungible , constitutive aspect of our
experience of (human) being. Part of what we do, as concept-making strivers caught
in forms of life, is think about the good-the better-world and ourselves acting
towards it. We cannot deny our own agency . (We cannot speak the sentence of
denial except as speaking subjects, affirming by speaking the sentence what the
sentence means to deny.) We can call agency into question, and we had better, but
to call into question is also to (re)affirm , (re)create , (re)construct.
2ACAfropessimism K
2AC Frontline
1. They misunderstand the relationship between blackness
and Civil Societyit is ontic not ontological
Hudson 13 Peter Hudson, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2013 (The state and the colonial unconscious,
Social Dynamics, Volume 39, Number 2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions
via Taylor & Francis Online, p. 265-266)
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There always has to exist an
outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the
existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isnt excluded
insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered
ontological), its content (what fills it) as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction are contingent. In
the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for
all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the
other words,
other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and never
the
specific modes of the othering of otherness are nowhere decided in advance (as
[end page 265] a certain ontological fatalism might have it) ( see Wilderson 2008).
The social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of
these signifiers is never necessary because they are signifiers . To be sure,
colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to
blacks who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic that
is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology of the social
which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social . In this
terminally settled. Put differently, the curvature of intersubjective space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus,
sense, then, the white man doesnt exist, the black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the
division is constitutive of
the social, not the colonial division . Whiteness may well be very deeply
sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the ontological difference (see Heidegger
1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic . It may be so deeply
sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not
follow that the void of black being functions as the ultimate substance, the
transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest.
What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its
ontological differential. A crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by
colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations
the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give
way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the lived experience (vecu) of the
colonised subject. The colonised is traversing the fantasy (Zizek 2006a, 4060) all the time; the void of the verb
to be is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the
symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 Fixed into non-fixity, he
is eternally suspended between element and moment5 he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the
production of meaning and is thus the point of entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism. Be this as it
i.e., anti-white modes of struggle are not (just) psychic6 but involve the reactivation (or desedimentation)7 of colonial objectivity itself.
struggle against subjection and how racial norms might be recited in new directions, given that the coercive
demands of discipline and performative constraints makes it seem like race is an insurmountable limit or closed
A number of scholars have examined these realities and advanced critical accounts of what they identify as the
Saidiya Hartman, in her provocative Lose Your Mother: A journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) refers to this
haunting as slavery's afterlife. She insists that we do not live with the residue or legacy of slavery but, rather, that
slavery lives on. It 'survives' (Sexton 2010, 15), through what Loic Wacquant (2002, 41) has identified as slavery's
fu nctional surrogates: Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. For Hartman, as echoed by other scholars, slavery has
yet to be undone:
Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched
centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery- skewed life chances, limited access to health and education,
premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6)
Wilderson III, in his Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms (2009),
powerfully frames slavery's afterlife as resulting in a form of social death for black
subjects and, more than this, he argues that black subjectivity is constituted as
ontological death. For Wilderson, " the Black [is) a subject who is always already positioned as Slave"
Frank B.
(2009, 7) in the United States, while everyone else exists as "Masters" (2009, 10 ).8
Studies of slavery's afterlife and the concept of social death have inarguably made
essential contributions to understandings of race.9 The strengths of such analyses lie in the salient ways they
have theorized broad social systems of racism and how they have demanded the foregrounding of suffering, pain,
violence, and death. Much of this scholarship can be put or is productively in conversation with Foucault's account
ofbiopolitics that, as I noted earlier, regulates at the level of the population. Where sovereignty 'took life and let
live,' in the contemporary sphere biopolitics works to 'make live.' However, certain bodies are not in the zone of
protected life, are indeed expendable and subjected to strategic deployments of sovereign power that 'make die.' It
is here that Foucault positions the function of racism. It is, he argues, "primarily a way of introducing a break into
the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die" (2003b,
254). Thus, certain bodies/subjects are killed - or subjected to sovereign power and social death- so that others
might prosper. 10
Hartman
examines the 'must die' imperative of social death understood broadly as a lack of
social being-but she also illuminates how, within such a context, slave "performance
and other modes of practice . .. exploit[ed), and exceed[ed] the constraints of
domination" (1997, 54, my emphasis). Hartman analyzes quotidian enactments of slave
agency to highlight practices of "(counter)investment" (1997, 73) that produced "a
reconstructed self that negates the dominant terms of identity and existence" (1997,
72). 11 She thus argues that a form of agency is possible and that , while "the conditions of
domination and subjugation determine what kinds of actions are possible or effective"
(1997, 54), agency is not reducible to these conditions (1997, 55).'2 The questions that I
In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997),
ask in this analysis travel in this direction, and aim to build on this aspect of Hartman's work. In doing so I make two
my work focuses
then on "examining ... social and political lives rather than assuming . . . lack of
social being " in order to think about how subjects can and have "made a social
world out of death itself" (Brown 2009, 1233) or how, more generally, race can be
contestations of (a never totalizing) power. Echoing the call raised by Brown (2009, 1239),
reconfigured within the broader workings of what I am calling racial discipline and
performative imperatives.
this study insists on a
shift in perspective in terms of how power is thought about . As I have remarked, I am not
But in addressing the quotidian and those efforts to remake condition and identity,
focused on biopolitics or what can be seen as solely sovereign forms of power that are deployed to condition who
will live and who will die. Instead, I am concerned with disciplinary power, which is articulated simultaneously but at
a different level to biopolitics (and despi te the exercise of sovereign forms of power} (Foucault 2003a, 250). For
[BEGIN ENDNOTE]
Brown, in his "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery" (2009), has
examined a number of scholars who seemingly take up such a viewpoint, in that they broadly
position blackness as a totalizing state that, historically and in the present, renders
slavery synonymous with social death and blackness as always already synonymous
with slavery. Brown focuses specifically on the academic uptake and what he sees
as the problematic distillation and extension of Orlando Patterson's (1981) concept
of"slavery as social death;' where social death indicates a lack of social being. As a scholar of slavery,
Brown is most concerned with examining the limitations of this idea in relation to the enslaved, but he is also
interested in how the idea is used in relation to the present . For Brown, Patterson's
"slavery as social death," and contemporary usages of this concept to
account for the present, advance a troubling transhistorical
characterization of slavery He argues in line with I-Ierman Bennett (quoted in Brown 1009, 1133),
14. Historian Vincent
there are
many points of agreement between the racial formation and systemic racism
theories. Where we disagree most strongly is over our respective understanding of racial
politics. Feagin and Elias focus so intensely on racism that they lose sight of the
complexities of race and the variations that exist among and within racially defined
groups. In their systemic racism account white racist rule is so comprehensive
and absolute that the political power and agency of people of colour virtually
disappear . Indeed, the white racial frame (Feagin 2009) is so omnipotent that white
racism seems to usurp and monopolize all political space in the USA. Yes, counter
framing is present, but it appears marginal at best, unable effectively to challenge the
pervasiveness, persistence and power of white racism. Since Feagin and Elias
dismiss ideas of racial democracy tout court, their perspective makes it difficult
to understand how anti-racist mobilization or political reform could ever
have occurred in the past or could ever take place in the future . They see
racism as so exclusively white that any notion of white anti-racism is virtually ignored
Their essay has an overly tendentious tone and sometimes misreads and misinterprets our book. Still
Despite Feagin and Elias's good intentions of linking their analysis to anti-racist practice, we believe their
views have quite the opposite effect: without intending to do so, they dismiss the political
agency of people of colour and of anti-racist whites. In Feagin/Elias's view, systemic
racism is like the Borg in the Star Trek series : a hive-mind phenomenon that
assimilates all it touches. As the Borg announce in their collective audio message to intended
targets, Resistance is futile.
We have a smaller space than the main essay, so we'll dispense with a point-by-point refutation of their
understanding of racial formation theory. We assume readers of Racial Formation and of our other work know that
respect but also situate ourselves in the black radical tradition, especially the Duboisian tradition. We will focus on
our fundamental point of disagreement with Feagin and Elias how we respectively
understand the very nature of racial politics in the USA.
Here we will engage Feagin and Elias on a few important questions that will highlight both where we agree and
where we disagree. Our topics are as follows:
What is the relationship between race and racism?
What is distinctive about our own historical epoch in the USA from post-Second World War to the present with
respect to race and racism?
What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends?
We discuss these questions with the intent of clarifying racial formation theory as well as sharpening the debate
with the systemic racism perspective. We appreciate the opportunity to do so.
What is the relationship between race and racism?
(race) to distinguish their use of the concept from popular biological notions of human variation. This is meant to
designate the wobbly social scientific status of the race concept.
dreams (Kelley 2002) that shape racial conflict as much as the white racism emphasized by Feagin and Elias.
OK, what about racism? There are points of agreement and difference between Feagin and Elias's perspective and
ours. We provide a hard-core definition and extensive discussion (Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 6976), defining
Then there is the white privilege question, which builds on Du Bois's analysis (1999, p. 700) of the psychological
wage received by poor whites in virtue of their race. While we are in substantial agreement with the privilege
How
do we account for white anti-racism if we understand privilege as the source of
racism? Is white anti-racism even possible, if racism is envisioned as a n economistic
zero-sum game in which clear winners and losers are demarcated?
argument regarding whites possessive investment in racism (Lipsitz 1998), there are problems there too.
We think that
shapes race . Racial identities (individual and group), and other race-oriented concepts as well, are
unstable . They are not uniforms; races are not teams; they are not defined
solely by antagonism to one another . They vary internally and ideologically;
they overlap and mix; their positions in the social structure shift; in other words they are shaped by
political conflict.
white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and
permanent. There is little sense that the white racial frame evoked by systemic
racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss
important rearrangements and reforms as merely a distraction from more ingrained
In Feagin and Elias's account,
structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias
2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility to argue that
white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely
engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression .
Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial democracy is an oxymoron a word defined in the
dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and
What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and
racism?
Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and
neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial
inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites employment, health,
education persist and in many cases have increased . Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a
dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event.
Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as
Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement,
and that we overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities (Feagin and
Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about racial reaction in a
chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments
Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the South for a generation count as convergence?
The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci
argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci
1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process;
here the US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its
hegemony . But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls passive
revolutions cann ot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions
must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not
absolute rule .So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted
the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think
that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the
more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil
society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement
race-based
movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined others and the
democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both
the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These
demands broadened and deepened democracy itself . They facilitated not only the democratic
of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe,
gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social
justice and inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and
the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.
1arExt Hudson
Theyre still wrong
Social death ignores historical patterns
Brown 9 Vincent, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @
Harvard Univ., December, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,"
American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249
THE PREMISE OF ORLANDO PATTERSONS MAJOR WORK, that enslaved Africans were natally alienated and culturally isolated, was challenged even before he published his influential thesis, primarily by scholars concerned with
survivals or retentions of African culture and by historians of slave resistance. In the early to mid-twentieth century, when Robert Parks view of the Negro predominated among scholars, it was generally assumed that the slave
historians
argued
that while enslaved Africans could not have brought intact social,
political, and religious institutions with them to the Americas, they did maintain
significant aspects of their cultural backgrounds
trade and slavery had denuded black people of any ancestral heritage from Africa. The
the
.32 Herskovits ex- amined Africanismsany practices that seemed to be identifiably Africanas
useful symbols of cultural survival that would help him to analyze change and continuity in African American culture.33 He engaged in one of his most heated scholarly disputes with the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, a student of
Parks, who empha- sized the damage wrought by slavery on black families and folkways.34 More recently, a number of scholars have built on Herskovitss line of thought, enhancing our understanding of African history during the
35
much use for the concept of social death. The early efforts of writers such as Herbert Aptheker aimed to derail the popular notion that American slavery had been a civilizing institution threatened by slave crime.36 Soon after,
studies of slave revolts and conspiracies advocated the idea that resistance demonstrated the basic humanity and intractable will of the enslavedindeed, they often equated acts of will with humanity itself. As these writ- ers turned
toward more detailed analyses of the causes, strategies, and tactics of slave revolts in the context of the social relations of slavery, they had trouble squaring abstract characterizations of the slave with what they were learning
about the en- slaved.37 Michael Craton, who authored Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, was an early critic of Slavery and Social Death, protesting that what was known about chattel bondage in the
Americas did not confirm Pattersons definition of slavery. If slaves were in fact generally dishonored, Craton asked, how does he explain the degrees of rank found among all groups of slavesthat is, the scale of reputation
that so frustrated masters and compromised their power, sometimes fatally.38 The dynamics of
The cultural continuity and resistance schools of thought come together pow- erfully in an important
book by Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Re- sistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. In Ruckers analysis of slave revolts, conspiracies, and daily recalcitrance, African concepts, values, and cul- tural
America
and
, the
in South Carolina, as well as the plots, schemes, and insurgencies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turnerdeftly teasing out the African origins of many of the attitudes and actions of the black
2ACBlack Feminism K
2AC Frontline
1. NO linkwe create new institutions that are inclusive and
built upon identity formation and creationthats Price
2. Black Nationalism is key to Black Feminism dismissal
empirically fails and undermines struggles.
Higashida 11 Cheryl Higashida, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the
University of California, Boulder, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from Cornell University, M.A.
in Ethnic Studies from Cornell University, B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University
of California, Berkley, 2011 (Introduction, Black Internationalist Feminism,
Published by the University of Illinois Press, ISBN: 9780252093548, pgs. 7-10)
Yet as Neil Lazarus points out, even the most crushing of these failures , of which
there have been many, cannot eradicate the historical fact of anticolonial
independence and its impact on hundreds of millions throughout the world.
Moreover, Lazarus writes, "the concrete achievements of this struggle for national
liberation are still intact and continue to provide a vital resource for present-day
social and cultural practice" Whether by reminding us that the rights of small
nations and struggles for sovereignty continue to matter or that rich traditions of
resistance to U.S. neoimperialism and alternative formulations of transnational
citizenship point beyond the impasses of the war on terror or that woman of color
and/or lesbian feminisms have been forged out of battles for self-determination ,
political movements centrally concerned with national liberation, such as the
postwar Black Left and the Black Power movement to which it helped give rise, are
major landmarks on the terrain of progressive politics and culture.
This is not to say that the triumphs of Third Worldist national liberation movements
negate their often-virulent heteropatriarchy, but that their limitations with respect
to gender and sexuality do not primarily define their (ir)relevance to
contemporary social movements, especially when considering African American
women writers on the postwar Black Left. Their work challenges the narrative of
decline of anticolonial nationalism as a historical force, which Aijaz Ahmad dates to
the mid-1970s. As Timothy Brennan observes, this periodization does not fit details
like the rise Of the New People's Army of the Philippines, the right-wing clerical antiimperialism of the Iranian revolution, the victory Of the New Jewel movement in
Granada (sic, and the battle of Quito Carnavale in Angola between the Cuban and
South African armies that led directly to the Namibian accordsall of them post1975, and all of them (again) With resonant activist effects in the metropolis,
particularly in the form Of the American antiapartheid movement as well as Jesse
Jackson's foreign-policy statements in the 1984 presidential elections.
Audre Lorde, who was inspired by Grenada's New Jewel Movement to make national
liberation central to her feminism; Lorraine Hansberry, whose Fanonian analysis in
her posthumously completed play, Les Blancs (1970), remained relevant to the
unfolding Angolan revolution; and Alice Childress and Rosa Guy, who revisited the
histories and politics of the anticolonial Black Left in novels published in 1979 and
1995, demonstrate that revolutionary nationalism continued to shape Black feminist
and queer politics well into the late twentieth centuryand that radical Black
women writers reshaped revolutionary nationalism. When we dismiss intellectual
and political formations that hold national liberation to be indispensable to
emancipatory politics, we silence a rich strand of Black feminism and deny
the very heterogeneity it strives to foster.
potential in the face Of the new racism. Historically, because African American
women lived racially segregated lives, Black feminism found expression within the
confines of Black community polities. This meant that African American fem-inism
had a dialectical and synergistic relationship with Black nation-alism as a "Black
feminist nationalism" or "Black nationalist feminism." Black women participated in
community politics, and the models that developed there moved into modern Black
feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Individual African American women also
participated in and continued to work within U.S. mainstream feminism during this
pe- riod, a fact that is lost on those who argue that feminism is for VY11ite women.
African American women have been in feminism since its in- ception, and during the
1970s and 1980s they launched a distinctive, albeit less well known, Black feminist
movement. IS Like mainstream feminism, conservative forces that set Out to
dismantle women's rights also affected Black feminist politics in the 1980s and
1990s. Black feminism garnered increasing recognition within the academy, yet it
also began to succumb to the pressures Of the new racism to eschew group-based
polities Of all sorts. Currently, the shift away from its roots in Black political activism
has led some to ask: Whatat has Black femi- nism built within African American
communities?
1ARIntersectionality Bad
Intersectionality homogenizes the experiences of black women
Nash 11 (Jennifer Nash, Assistant Professor in African Studies at George
Washington University, Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University,
J.D. from Harvard Law School, A.B. in Womens Studies from Harvard College,
Hometruths on Intersectionality
https://www.academia.edu/2391042/Hometruths_on_Intersectionality, //ekr)
This narrower intersectionality has been detrimental to black feminism for three
reasons. First, while race/gender has become the primary intersection that captures
black feminist attention, marginalization has emerged as the principal analytic used
to study this intersection. Because intersectionality has come to equate black
women's lived experiences with marginalization, black feminism has neglected to
rigorously study the heterogeneity of "black woman" as a category. 7 Second,
because black feminism attends to race/gender almost exclusively, black feminism
has effectively subcontracted out explorations of other intersections to a range of
related intellectual projects. Third, and most importantly, because intersectionality
has become the preeminent black feminist lens for studying black women's
experiences, intersectionality itself is never subjected to critical scrutiny. Instead,
intersectionality is now often treated as synonymous with black feminism or, as
Ange-Marie Hancock argues, with "women of color studies,' rather than as a product
of black feminism. Intersectionality's synonymity with black feminism allows it to
enjoy an invisible theoretical monarchy, 9 so that it is now treated as "a primary, if
not singular, feminist method, and the paradigmatic frame through which women's
lives are understood and theorized, as the only tool necessary to study the intimate
relationship between race, gender, and a host of other social categories. This Article
suggests that intersectionality's current relationship with black feminism is neither
inevitable nor the effect of historical accident; instead, it is the result of a set of
historical convergences. This Article traces shifts in black feminism'S conception Of
intersectionality over time to better understand the particular relationship between
black feminism and intersectionality in our current moment. Ultimately, I am
interested in examining changes in intersectionality's interaction with black
feminism over time, challenging the tendency to elide intersectionality's historical
formations and transformations.
Dialogue and principled coalition create possibilities for new versions of truth .
Alice Walker's answer to the question of what she felt were the major differences
between the literature of African-Americans and whites offers a provocative glimpse
of the types of truths that might emerge through an epistemology based on
dialogue and coalition. Walker did not spend much time considering this question,
since it was not the difference between them that interested her, but, rather, the
way Black writers and white writers seemed to be writing one immense story, with
different parts of the story coming from a multitude of different perspectives. In a
conversation with her mother, Walker refines this epistemological vision: "I believe
that the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put
together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the
missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after"
(1983, 49). Her mother's response to Walker's vision of the possibilities of dialogues
and coalitions hints at the difficulty of sustaining such dialogues under oppressive
conditions: "'Well, I doubt if you can ever get the true missing parts of anything
away from the white folks,' my mother says softly, so as not to offend the waitress
who is mopping up a nearby table; 'they've sat on the truth so long by now they've
mashed the life out of it'" (1983, 49).