2015 NDI 6WS Cointelpro

Affirmative

1AC
We begin with an ending:
In 1971, the Counter Intelligence Program was terminated after the
infiltration, surveillance, and disruption of domestic political
organizations was exposed to the public. The official history has
rendered COINTELPRO a thing of the past, a ghost put to rest in our
new post-racial era but the program that wiretapped Martin Luther
King Jr. and planned the killings of countless Black Panthers did not
disappear, it simply became an absent presence, manifesting more
covertly despite its disavowal.
Glick 90lawyer, teacher, writer and activist who founded the Law Schools Community
Economic Development Clinic (Brian, Mar. 1990, The Face of COINTELPRO, South End
Press, http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Cointelpro_Papers.pdf)
By discontinuing use of the term "COINTELPRO," the Bureau gave the appearance of acceding
to public and congressional pressure. In reality, it protected its capacity to continue precisely the
same activity under other names. Decentralization of covert operations vastly reduced the
volume of required reporting. It dispersed the remaining documentation to individual case files in diverse field offices,
and it purged those files of any caption suggesting domestic covert action. The Bureau's "sensitive techniques and operations" have
since been further insulated from public scrutiny. Scheduled

congressional hearings into the Bureau's mid1970s campaign against AIM were squelched by means of what turns out to have been yet
another FBI covert operation. The FOIA has been drastically narrowed, with thousands of files reclassified "top secret."
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act now makes it a federal crime to disclose" any information that identifies an individual as a
covert agent." This

careful concealment of post-COINTELPRO domestic counterintelligence action

is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate the U.S. political police. Central to that effort has been a
sophisticated campaign to refurbish the public image of the FBI. The Bureau's egomaniacal, reactionary, crudely racist and sexist
founder, J. Edgar Hoover, died in 1972. After interim directors failed to restore the Bureau's prestige, two federal judges, William
Webster and William Sessions, were recruited to clean house and build a "new FBI." The new directors have cultivated a lowvisibility managerial style and discreetly avoided public attack on prominent liberals. Anticommunism - the time-honored rationale
for political police work - has been augmented by "counter-terrorism" and "the war on drugs," pretexts that better resonate with
current popular fears. The old myth of the FBI as crime-busting protector of democratic rights has been revived in modern garb by
films like Mississippi Burning and the television series, Mancuso FBI. This

repackaging seems to have sold the

"new FBI" to some of the most prominent critics of earlier COINTELPRO . University professors
and congressional committees that helped to expose the domestic covert action of the past now
deny its persistence in the present. Because of their credentials, these respectable "objective" sources do more damage
than the FBI's blatant right-wing publicists. Left uncontested, their sophistry could disarm a new generation of activists, leaving
them vulnerable to government subversion. The introduction to The COINTELPRO Papers refutes one such academic expert, Athan
Theoharis, in his preposterous claim that the FBI's war on AIM during the 1970s was not a COINTELPRO-style "program of
harassment." Equally treacherous is The FBI and CISPES, a 1989 report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence." This is
nothing more than a whitewash of the Bureau's covert and extralegal effort to wipe out domestic opposition to U.S. intervention in
Central America. That FBI campaign was first made public by a central participant, Frank Varelli. The Bureau admits it paid Varelli
from 1981 to 1984 to infiltrate CISPES. Varelli has testified that the FBI's stated objective was to "break" CISPES. He recounts a
modus operandi straight out of the annals COINTELPRO - from break-ins, bogus publications and disruption of public events to
planting guns on CISPES members and seducing CISPES leaders in order to get blackmail photos for the FBI.' Alerted by Varelli's
disclosures, the Center for Constitutional Rights obtained a small portion of the Bureau's CISPES files and released them to the
press. The files show the U.S. government targeting a very broad range of religious, labor and community groups opposed to its
Central America policies.They

confirm that the FBI's objective was to attack and "neutralize" these

groups" Mainstream media coverage of these revelations elicited a flurry of congressional

investigations and hearings. Publicly exposed, the FBI tried to scapegoat the whistle blower . Its
inhouse investigation found Varelli "unreliable" and held his false reports of CISPES terrorism responsible for the entire FBI
operation. The

Bureau denied any violation of the constitutional rights of US. citizens or

involvement in the hundreds of breakins reported by Central America activists. A grand total of six
agents received "formal censure" and three were suspended for 14 days. The FBI moved its CISPES file to the national archives and
Director Sessions declared the case dosed, a mere "aberration" due to "failure in FBI management."' The Bureau's slander of Varelli
gave the congress an easy way out. The

single congressional report, The FBI and CISPES, endorses the

FBI's entire account, without any reservation or qualification. It legitimizes a cover-up of
current covert operations by exploiting the past reputation of the Senate Intelligence
Committee.

Continuing suppression of black activism warps the linear narrative

of progress, proving that time does not pass but accumulates
antiblack surveillance has persisted from the past to rupture violently
into the present.
Moore 6/3 -- Senior Editor at Mic and co-managing editor of The Feminist Wire (Darnell L. Moore, June 3, 2015, Why Some Black
Activists Believe They're Being Watched by the Government, http://mic.com/articles/119792/why-some-black-activists-believe-they-re-beingwatched-by-the-government), acui

The home of activist Patrisse Cullors was raided twice last year by law enforcement in Los
Angeles. During one raid, officers told Cullors they were looking for a suspect who had allegedly fled in the direction of her house.
But neither time did Cullors believe the officers had a strong rationale for invading her home. Instead, Cullors told Mic, she
believed the raids were devised by police in response to the public campaigning of Dignity and
Power Now, a grassroots organization Cullors founded that advocates on behalf of incarcerated
people in Los Angeles. She also believes similar surveillance methods are used to monitor many
black activists today. "Surveillance is a huge part of the state's role. Surveillance has been used
for a very long time, but some of the means, like social media account monitoring, are new,"
Cullors, who is also a cofounder of Black Lives Matter, told Mic. "Local enforcement surveils by
tracking the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which allows law enforcement to show up at actions
before they begin." Mic has reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department for comment. Recent statements by FBI
deputy director Mark F. Giuliano may give credence assumptions like Cullors that black activists are being watched. During a press
conference on May 21 prior to the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a white Cleveland police officer involved in the shooting death of two
unarmed black people, Giuliano addressed the potential for continued protests in response to the verdict. "It's outsiders who tend
to stir the pot," Giuliano said. "If we have that intel we pass it directly on to the [Cleveland Police Department]. We have worked with
Ferguson, we've worked with Baltimore and we will work with the Cleveland PD on that very thing. That's what we bring to the
game." Mic has reached out to the FBI's Office of Public Affairs for comment. A history of black surveillance: The "game" Giuliano is
referencing namely, the intricate workings of what some law enforcement units, like New York Police Department, employ in
response to counterterrorism and protests is not novel. Black

movements have historically been watched by

the state, and black activists have long been surveilled in response to their organizing. Half a century
ago, J. Edgar Hoover used his powers as the FBI director to spy on black activists; as part of the counterterrorism
COINTELPRO program in the 1960s and '70s, the FBI tapped phones and embedded spies in
organizations and movements, including the Black Panthers. It is also now well-known that Martin Luther
King, Jr. was extensively monitored by the FBI. "American history explodes with examples of state
surveillance of black people and black activism," Harvard University historian Tim McCarthy
told Mic. "From the Fugitive Slave Law and prohibitions on abolitionist 'propaganda' to black
codes and wiretapping and the militarization of the police, the state has always employed
diverse mechanisms of control in a deliberate effort to derail the long black freedom struggl e.
"Even the notion of U.S. citizenship itself has been a site of policing based principally on race, from the birth of the nation to the age
of Obama." FBI files on black activists like James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Lucille Clifton, W.E.B

DuBois and Louise Thompson Patterson have recently been made public, as part of the FB Eyes Digital Archive. But despite the
preponderance of evidence regarding state surveillance of activists in the past, it can be difficult to prove the existence of actions
many activists assume are taking place in the present. Potentially supporting their claims, however, are current surveillance
protocols of security firms and local police departments. In March, for example, the Intercept obtained documents revealing that
security members at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, monitored local Black Lives Matter activists by using a fake
Facebook account to "befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge." Mall of
America has previously declined to comment on the Facebook monitoring. Mic has reached out to Mall of America's public affairs
department for comment. While unconfirmed, measures that some activists assume are currently taking place, such as using
activists as informants in movements, have been reported before. The New York Times reported the FBI used an Austin-based
activist as an informant to provide details about potential protests leading up to the 2008 Republican National Convention in
Minnesota, for example, though the FBI has yet to confirm or deny the allegation. Personal

stories: Some activists

across the country, such as Ash-Lee Henderson, a black organizer from Tennessee, have
personal testimonies of surveillance. Last year, Henderson participated in a series of direct actions in her hometown of
Chattanooga led by Concerned Citizens for Justice, a grassroots organization that fights for black liberation and an end to police
crimes, criminalization and mass incarceration. The actions were designed to bring attention to various forms of state-sanctioned
violence, including police abuse, affecting black people across the country. Henderson was arrested while participating in a protest
on the National Day of Protest to End Police Brutality in October 2014. After her arrest, she recalled learning about a private
Facebook group created by police officers in Tennessee and those supportive of police called "Police Lives Matter." "Police and their
family members were constantly making threats and mean-spirited jokes [aimed at activists] on their page," Henderson told Mic.
She said one police officer made a meme of her, which meant her image had been shared among other officers and that they would
now know her by name and likeness. She obtained another meme of a different image of herself shortly after, and became more
convinced that activists were being watched. Henderson

suspects she'd been targeted for speaking publicly

about police abuse a suspicion exacerbated by a series of events following her arrest. "During
a day of action in December, my mother and 3-year-old niece were followed by the police from
our church to my house (about a 30-minute drive), because they were in my car." Henderson said she
believed "the police were attempting to see where our next action was. In the month of December alone, members of our leadership
team were pulled over and harassed by police officers at least once a week in two different states." The Chattanooga Police
Department told Mic, "While we do not routinely follow specific hashtags, we do review all forms of publicly available information
when current or anticipated events warrant it. We will continue to make every attempt to stay informed of potential exercises of free
speech in an effort to supply activists, marchers, organizers and citizens with a safe environment to express their views."

Interference: The public must consider the long history of state surveillance and suppression of
black movements as a specific problem of anti-black state violence and racial profiling. At stake
is the extent to which state surveillance measures, whether they mean social media monitoring
or following specific activists' actions, violate activists' First Amendment Rights, particularly the
right to peacefully protest. Keegan Stephan writes at AlterNet, "For the FBI to interfere with civic act through their
information-gathering techniques and by passing that information to police forces that cannot be trusted to use it without infringing
on people's First Amendment rights is a clear violation of the FBI's own mandate." Despite potential surveillance, activists are
determined to continue their work. Their continued quest for liberation should encourage contemporary activists following their
example. "These allegations will not curtail the movement and only provide further evidence of the embedded institutional
inequities," Monica Dennis, an organizer with Black Lives Matter in New York City, told Mic. "Furthermore, our

movements
are rooted in the black radical traditions of resilience and creative resistance which simply
means we are capable of quickly adapting and shifting despite external efforts to disrupt our
organizing."

Information is not neutral it has been used to oppress communities

for decades our critique is key to challenge the dominant system therefore we advocate that the United States federal government should curtail its surveillance of
marked bodies.

(OR that surveillance of marked bodies should be curtailed)

Cyril 15 poet, activist, co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice
(Malkia Amala Cyril, April 2015, Black America's State of Surveillance, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance), acui

Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by

Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mothers
visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white
civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for
centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. Its time for
journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes
learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically
been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an
impoverished underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance
technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of
indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological
advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the
privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not

For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from

government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a
involved in any crime.

complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our
built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this

Predictive
policing, also known as Total Information Awareness, is described as using advanced
technological tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make
determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to
be neutral. They arent. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance
technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face
of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de facto system of separate and
unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions
of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime
prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life
crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is
just high-tech racial profilingindiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing
practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily
organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago.

movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers,
which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning
software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been
touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors.
According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and
identifying information. When used to track a suspects cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are
in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons
like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the
intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed as
official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive

As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible
to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true .
Predictive policing doesnt just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop
and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost
90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the
dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports
collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the
future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white
Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech
surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts . The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement
databases like e-Verify and Prism.

agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat mainstream
Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained.
From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national
security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small
children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the
Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities.

Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated

than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that
statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at
least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a
broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA
could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people,
Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by
law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media
environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism .
Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections

Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological

trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, Everything
we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an
catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too.

incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The

We can
help black lives matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that
leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers .
Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can
counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it
are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only
those that aint been heard yet. Lets birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the
twenty-first century create equity and justice for allso all bodies enjoy full and equal
protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more.
decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century.

Stigmatization of black women receiving welfare dehumanizes the

subject receiving the welfare only discussions of this stigma can
resolve it
Masters, Lindhorst, and Meyers 14 (Tatiana, Taryn, and Marcia- PhDs in the
School of Social Work, University of Washington, Jezebel at the welfare office: How racialized
stereotypes of poor women's reproductive decisions and relationships shape policy
implementation, J Poverty, 2014, Jan 1, Vol 18, Issue 2, pgs 109-129,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4002050/)
the private
sexual decisions and relationships of poor women continue to be a focus of intervention in the
day-to-day interactions welfare caseworkers have with their clients . Negative myths regarding
poor women's reproductive decisions and relationships (Collins 1990, 2004; Roberts 1997) are expressed in
This research indicates that though sexuality-related topics are not discussed in the majority of welfare interviews,

welfare offices both through their influence on welfare policy and regulations and through the effect these myths have on worker
behavior. How

workers talk with (and implicitly frame clients) is prescribed by bureaucratic mandates
whose underlying assumptions reflect racialized myths antagonistic to poor women (Collins 1990;
Hays 2003; Roberts 1997). Workers own informal, discretionary conversations with clients reflected moralizing messages that were
also shaped by negative perceptions of poor women's sexuality. While workers talk expressing personal

judgments of
clients may seem more offensive than their bureaucratized language, both styles of speech
contribute to the dehumanization of welfare clients. The more subtle action of the bureaucratic
imperative should not be disregarded; both of these strategies reflect the widely accepted false
beliefs that poor women on welfare make careless or financially calculating reproductive
decisions and that woman-headed families are not legitimate. Just as the style of mainstream
U.S. talk on race has gradually become less overtly and personally racist, more subtle and
bureaucratized in its action (Bonilla-Silva 2006), so analogously has welfare office talk regarding

sexuality. By embedding conversations about sexual matters in bureaucratic talk about child
support enforcement and the family cap, these conversations are transformed from overtly intrusive discussions
of private issues into normalized outcomes of the need to ask for financial help . Women of other class
backgrounds would be unlikely to submit to these interrogations, but the United States current approach to
ensuring a social safety net allows this continued focus for poor women (Hays 2003). This analysis
demonstrates that negative ideas about poor women and their fertility and family formation
decisions persist in welfare policy and in its day-to-day implementation by caseworkers, but that they are
often veiled in bureaucratic language. Our findings regarding the apparent absence of differences in welfare office talk
related to the race or gender of workers or clients are congruent with recent work by welfare implementation scholar Watkins-Hayes
(2009), who observes that caseworkers attitudes and behaviors are not determined by their social group membership alone. Rather,
we observed workers fairly consistent application of an ideology of irresponsible fertility to clients regardless of clients races or
their own. We ascribe this

pattern to the racialization of welfare through which the state sanctions

discourse (bureaucratic scripts and discretionary utterances) which reinforce underlying
negative racial stereotypes, and normalizes the application of these myths to all poor women ,
regardless of race. While Black and white women comprise roughly equal proportions of total TANF recipients (35.7% and 33.4%,
respectively), African

American women are disproportionately represented among welfare clients

has been associated with Blackness in the
collective mind of the U.S. public ever since African American women gained access to these
programs in the 1960s (Gilens 1999; Quadagno 1994; Roberts 1997); in these findings, we see negative myths re garding Black
(Hays 2003; U.S. Department of Human Services 2006). Welfare

women's sexuality and childbearing extended to include all women on welfare, regardless of their individual races. Our findings are
based on data that are over 10 years old, and we cannot be certain that the same racialized discourses we identified are employed in
welfare offices today. However, scholars of race and policy such as Michelle Alexander (2010) have illuminated a pattern in which

systems of racial control in the US, which tend to be more overtly colorblind, emerge to
replace those that are overturned. In this analysis, which seems likely to extend to welfare office practices, it is probable
that these deep negative myths persist and continue to shape caseworker language, though they
may look slightly less racially influenced on the surface. We also noted differences among the three states
new

studied in both the amount and the style of conversations on reproductive decisions and relationships (see Table 1). Caseworkerclient interactions in Georgia were more likely than those in Texas or Michigan to include sexuality-related topics, however, these
conversations were less likely to involve discretionary moralizing by workers than those in other sampled states. In Texas, while
interactions were less likely than in Georgia or Michigan to include discussion of clients sexuality, when such discussions did occur,
they were quite likely to involve moralizing discourses in addition to bureaucratic language; such moralizing was also more likely in
Michigan than it was in Georgia. One possible explanation for these findings is that negative myths regarding poor women's fertility
have a tendency to enter welfare office conversations, and if they do not do so in bureaucratically mandated ways, they may be more
likely to do so through caseworkers personal moralizing. In states with explicit reproduction-related policies, like Georgia with its
family cap, workers were mandated to discuss sexuality-related topics, and thus did so more frequently. Absent such policies in
Michigan and Texas, conversations regarding sex and reproduction occurred less often, but because these conversations arose more
at workers discretion, they often included optional, personal moralizing. In light of these results, it is important to note that
individual welfare workers are not solely responsible for talking in ways that position clients negatively (Lindhorst, Meyers & Casey
2008). The actions of these workers reflect a structural reality: Across states and settings, caseworkers are required by law to discuss
aspects of the private sexual lives of poor women. Current welfare policy, informed by an ideology which positions poor women as
irresponsible in their fertility and illegitimate in their family formation, speaks through these workers. This study has implications

Our
findings indicate the importance of careful theoretical attention to race and processes of
racialization in any study examining welfare. Roberts statement that race fuels the welfare debate
even when it is not mentioned (1997: 215) is exemplified by our finding that racialized myths regarding poor women's
sexuality enter the welfare interview across multiple dimensions of potential difference. This dehumanizing framing of
poor women was expressed both through workers optional moralizing talk about sexualityrelated issues and in their bureaucratized language. Regardless of caseworker race, client race, or racial pairing of
both for the theoretical framing of future research on welfare, and for the implementation and creation of welfare policy.

the worker-client dyad, these stereotypes affected workers language in welfare interviews. Viewed one way, this finding might be
considered null. However, a theoretical attunement to processes of racialization supports a more convincing interpretation:

that

the dominant discourse of African American women's irresponsible reproduction and

inappropriate family structure in which welfare interviews are embedded acts to color all
welfare recipients and the language workers use with them. Regarding policy implications, our
analysis suggests that demeaning racialized stereotypes may influence welfare policy's creation

and implementation in both obvious and subtle ways. Different training and supervision might decrease the
amount of discretionary moralizing done by caseworkers. However, such a solution would only address part of the problem.
Negative myths regarding poor women's sexuality not only shape workers optional talk, but may also play a role in welfare policy
itself. Thus, it is likely that these myths will continue to affect day-to-day talk in welfare offices even if they emerge through the less
obviously offensive bureaucratic language mandated by policy. This problem is sustained by tenacious stereotypes that act at many
levels. The

pervasiveness of these stereotypes means that attempts to challenge them must focus
on depths, not surfaces. To change the discretionary messages welfare workers give their clients, both their underlying
perceptions of poor women and women of color, and more critically, the perceptions of policy makers, must
be changed. This type of deep intervention will not proceed quickly or easily. It will require, at
minimum, the kind of open discussion of race and racism that is rare in the U.S. (Alexander 2010;
Bonilla-Silva 2006). However, such work has the potential to decrease the influence of negative myths
upon those who implement welfare policy as caseworkers as well as reframing these issues for those
who make it as elected representatives and those who shape it with participation as citizens.

Racialized surveillance fungibilizes black bodies and reduces them to

absolute dereliction
Marshall 12 (Stephen H.-Associate Professor of political theory in The Departments of
American Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin,
The Political Life of Fungibility, Theory and Event, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012, Project Muse)
Paradigmatic of this ghastly transnational predicament is public sanction of or disinterest in
blacks acute vulnerabilities to mass incarceration, homicide, police brutality, HIV infection,
infant mortality, and under-education, among other things.5 The killing of Trayvon Martin bears
particularly eloquent witness. Martin, an unarmed 17 year old was shot dead at intermediate range by a
self-appointed neighborhood watch captain and dispatched without dignity to the morgue as a
John Doe where he would lay for over 24 hours. Five hours after the shooting, Martins assailant would be released by the
Sanford police department uncharged and under no suspicion. Presumed guilty by his shooter and the police ,
Martin would have been added to the staggering list of forgotten victims of violent death at the hands of law enforcement or their
auxiliaries were it not for the heroic discipline, political savvy, and tireless efforts of his parents Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin
and their supporters in print and electronic media. Presumed

guilt constituted Martins peculiar vulnerability

and this presumption has a political constitution. When Zimmerman saw Martin he saw
criminality, understood as the commission of crime, an intension to commit crime, an escape
from prior crime, or some combination of the three. Tempting as it may be to look to the War on Drugs during
the Reagan era as the seedbed for state practices of racialized surveillance, interdiction, and
incarceration, both the Reagan eras escalation of these practices and the presumption of
Martins guilt are bound up with the criminalization of blackness that emerges in the context of
US slavery. This is a history of racialization in which black agency is figured as criminality. Although the US Constitution
artfully evades the word slavery and refuses express enumeration of the racial attributes of citizenship, it articulates the
figure of black criminality as fundamental law and affirms practices of racialized
surveillance and interdiction as civic virtue . Answering to lingering Jeffersonian questions about black
humanity engendered by the 3/5 clause of Article I, Section II, Article IV defines national citizenship by setting it in an antagonistic
relation to the crime of black fugitivity. Opposing

the immunities and privileges of citizenship to the

culpable derelictions of treason, felony, and escape from slavery, the framers yoke blackness to
crime, legislate the intelligibility of black agency in the figure of the fugitive slave, and inscribe
the immunities and privileges of citizenship as both a freedom from the presumption of
criminal alterity and a duty to interdict the fugitive. Noting the fragility of constitutions and the indispensable
constitutional scaffolding provided by criminal alterity and norms of interdiction, Alexis de Tocqueville writes, the genuine sanction
of political laws is to be found in the penal laws, and if the sanction is lacking, the law sooner or later loses its force. Therefore, the
man who judges the criminal is really the master of society.6 By expressly granting blacks entitlement to immunities and

privileges of citizenship, the 14th Amendment (1868) sought to abolish black fugitivity and dissipate the antagonism between it and
US citizenship. Grand as was the effort, such a revolution proved impossible. With

commercial exchange of black

bodies prohibited except as punishment for crime, Historian Kali Gross notes how Northern white
newspapers invent the figure of the Colored Amazon to allege the growing menace of black
womens criminality and supply a new and growing commercial trade in blackness. 7 Concurrently,
white southerners rehabilitate black fugitivity in the more menacing figure of the black rapist
and re-found the old antagonism upon the violent hatred patriarchal societies cultivate against
sexual predators who assail the women it values. At the turn of the century, southern intellectuals leading role in
propagating selective census data which reflected repressive criminalization of southern black life helped to give birth to modern

one of
the crucial legacies of race conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of
everyday surveillance is its contribution to a statistical rhetoric of black criminality that
operates as a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority.8 When the figures of the
welfare queen and drug warlord were vibrantly recirculated in the 1980s in connection with the
southern strategy of the Republican Party, they neither inaugurated the criminalization of blackness nor simply revived
crime statistics as well as make the case that northern blacks were also unfit for citizenship. As Kalil Muhammad notes,

a disreputable national tradition of racial animus. Recovering constitutional principle that posits an antagonism between the citizen
and the fugitive slave, the party refashioned black fugitivity in order to restore American citizenship in the post-civil rights Era.

Racialized criminal system violence is neither static nor spectacular,

but underwritten by a deeply entrenched network of values
traditional empirical methods dont provide us with the necessary
tools to address this form of violence.
Geoff Ward, September 2014, associate prof. Criminology @ UC Irvine, The slow violence of
state organized race crime, Theoretical Criminology;
Less spectacular racial violence State organized race crime does not typically involve spectacular
violence repre- sented by lynchings or police shootings, the many thousands of such victims notwith- standing.
More characteristic is subtler personal or structural violence contributing to disaccumulation, collective under-development, and generational disadvantage. While the parading Klan
in full regalia and flaming crosses is most symbolic of Klan terror, city charters, camouflaged cab fleets, and quiet links with state
officials and agencies warrant greater concern and attention. This

unspectacular quality to violent racial

subjugation is particularly challenging for crim- inological research , whether interested in events
of victimization themselves, or past and pre- sent contextual implications, including
questions of remedy. Consider the ordeal of a young man I recently met at the William Winter Institute for Racial
Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, who shared a personal experience of state organized race crime. He was a sophomore
at the University of Mississippi, the flagship state school and 20th-century light- ning rod of segregationist resistance, a descendant
of black Americans long denied access to this public institution. He hailed from the Delta, about 60 miles west on Highway 6, and
was volunteering with the Mississippi Truth Project. The truth he shared speaks to the socio- historical depth and complexity of
racial violencetranscending time and place, binding past and futureand lasting need for transitional racial justice (see Coates,
2014; Valls, 2003). As we interacted over the few days I was in town I encouraged him to consider an academic career, an idea
quickly rejected. I have to go to law school, he said. Undeterred, I reacted with, why law school, probably with a dubious look. He
matter-of-factly replied: I have to get our house back. Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on
September 29, 2014 Ward 5 He explained that his family had been forced from its home by illegal and we can assume violent or at
least threatening means amid the 1960s opposition to civil rights mobilization. This dispossession was generally abetted by denials
of legal protection and recourse, an ordeal of legal violence (Menjivar and Abrego, 2012) once routine in Mississippi and other
parts of the country. In fact, these race crimes were often state organized in all the ways mentionedthey involved state actors (e.g.
sheriffs) either among or sympathetic with aggressors, they involved withholding of criminal or civil law enforcement, and were
often rationalized by legal officials with dubious allegations of crime and deviance. Especially

striking about this

experience are the subtleties and legacies of this reported incident of race crime , which was
never recorded as such. This young man and his family grew up in relatively run-down and tenuous housing within blocks
of their old home, a proximity affording regular reminders, insulting all over again to ones personal dignity and family name.

Meanwhile, besides unearned advantages rooted in anothers disad- vantage, implications for the white family gaining a house might
involve a blend of race pride, guilt, animus, and avoidance. Whatever their shapes, lasting

impressions likely live on as

festering old sores, with harms still shaping relative dis/advantages down two family lines, a
young mans identity, and background tensions in a community. I have not verified his home
loss claim and the ability to do so is hampered by silences in state records, but data on anticivil rights violence and reprisal in the period suggest its probability . I was visiting
Mississippi to begin collecting data on events of racial vio- lence, reprisal, intimidation (e.g. shootings, bombings, job losses, arson,
etc.) around that state and other civil rights battlefields, and we now have a growing list of over one thou- sand events in Mississippi
alone from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, much of it from the Delta. Our

data collection will miss many events,

hidden in such stories, and unrecorded in annals of law, news, and our disciplines, but
nevertheless among us. We often refer to the post-civil rights period to name a temporal breakbefore and since rights
were wonbut the crime in that Mississippi story cuts across that formal divide, with its question of justice still lingering. The
alleged race crime was not only once suffered once by older family members violently driven out on a specific date, or with days to
gather their things, but has been imposed over and over again through the generational returns on this disaccumulation of property
and status. Any white

family advantages, with potential corre- sponding accumulations of wealth,

education, and influence, widen that status gap further. While my informant shares a story of
resistance, he also belies the social ecological damage and endurance of racial injustice, a
destruction networking his and our past, present, and future. Of course populations are generally
unaware of bad deeds done, to and by whom, when and where, in the more and
less recent past, and so too are social scientists. Yet we live with the legacy of these deeds, such as jobs
or homes lost following reports of a name on a petition to desegregate schools. When registering to vote led to the loss
of a family business, or some other black status offense meant a family member was killed or seriously injured,
these loses of capital, experience, security, and support were unlikely static but rather enduring.
For example, we live with the underdevelopment of black youth, through Jim Crow
educational and youth justice systems, and what comes of them as adults. Our society is
likely substantially shaped by these mainly undeclared inherit- ances of unearned
advantages and disadvantages, the race relational residuals of what
environmentalists call slow violence (Nixon, 2011), which are so often unseen. Downloaded from
tcr.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on September 29, 2014 6 Theoretical Criminology Killing life chances, slowly

State organized race crime typically manifests as slow violence a violence occur[ing]
gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction ... dispersed across
time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all
(Nixon, 2011: 2). I first grew aware of the personal and structural violence of state organized race crime
while studying the rise, fall, and repercussions of Jim Crow juvenile justice, a racially violent parental state
institution operating for most of the past century. Here state organized race crime targeted what WEB Du Bois (1916)
called the immortal child, a term he used to politicize child-welfare, stressing the linked fates of black youth and
communitiessocially, economically, and politically. While varyingly expressed in local contexts of social control, Jim Crow
juvenile jus- tice systems were commonly organized by white supremacist ideology, including a
widely held schema that whiteness was a proxy for amenability to civic integration, diminished
criminal culpability, and thus, the desert of preferential treatment. Such notions, bolstered by
racist social science and popular discourse (see Wesley, 1940), had to be combined with white
domination of parental state authority to be enforced and thus accomplish race-based (i.e. white) opportunity
hoarding and corresponding (nonwhite) underdevelopment. Racial domination of parental state values and
resourcesthe praxis of juvenile justicefacilitated improved life chances for white children and youth ,
and the families and communities they grew into, while institutionalizing social, economic, and political
underdevelopment of black youth and communities. For black civic leaders this systematic denial
of youth justice and associated community under-development amounted to
killing the seeds of a people, a harm literally maturing slowly over time, by
hobbling black youth and the race. Subjugation of black youth and communities through

Jim Crow juvenile justice was sometimes brutal, befitting usual uses of the term violence. It
involved over 200 state executions of black youth, including several where small bodies
unintended for killing devices made for macabre spectacles. In South Carolina, where 14-yearold George Stinney was electrocuted with great difficulty in 1941, descendants are still fighting to
prove his innocence today. Youth executions grew dramatically over the first half of the 20th century, as the liberal juvenile
court movement unfolded, a paradox traceable to the fact that black youth were increasingly overrepresented in these state killings,
and not the embryonic citizen imagined or embraced by state actors, particularly in the US South. There were plenty of lethal and
debilitating ordeals for black youth deserving more recognition today. The recent discovery of dozens of unmarked graves at
Floridas century-old Arthur Dozier Training School, lying in what had been the colored section, is forcing some reckoning with at
least the extreme racial violence of Jim Crow juvenile justice (Usborne, 2013). Yet the

victimization far more common to

these systems, and most concerning to activists, was an attritional and invisible form akin to what Rob
Nixon (2011) describes as slow violence. We often think of racial violence in terms of dramatic,
isolated incidentsa nefarious lynch mob, bombings of activist homes and institutions,
unmarked gravesbut these are part of the story, a proportionally smaller part. Most
common to Jim Crow juvenile justice was the structural violence of systematic malign neglect, a
slow violence of individual and group underdevelopment. For example, Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com
at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on September 29, 2014 Ward 7 there were state administered whippings in North Carolina and
surely other courts, which white officials believed especially appropriate and efficient means of sanction- ing descendants of slaves
they did not intend to serve with rehabilitative ideals and resources. Unwanted in white-only reformatories, scores of black girls and
boys were instead whipped and released, without regard for their developmental interests. The Black Child Saversgenerations of
black civil leaders organizing against Jim Crow juvenile justice from the 1890s through the 1960smobilized in opposition to this
violence of attrition, threatening linked fate. Their success in countering Jim Crow juve- nile justice was aided by framing it as a
system of slow genocide, where violence and neglect toward black children amounted to collective violence, diminishing group prospects by limiting life chances of youth. The young man I met in Mississippi was reckon- ing with slow violence, his inheritance of
injustice, in attempting to legally reclaim his family home and all that it represents. Whatever the final cadaver count at the reformatory in Florida, the larger number of victims will surely be those who survived its violent ordeals, but only as walking dead, with
bodies and spirits broken in ways that quietly limited their personal and group prospects, likely to this day. Reckoning with the slow
violence of state organized race crime Rob Nixon (2011: 8) stresses

that slow violence presents distinct

scientific, legal, politi- cal, and representational challenges. Absent overt indicators of state
organized race crime, or spectacular racial violence, it is difficult to address these
phenomena theoreti- cally, empirically, and practically. How do we engage each other, our students,
policy makers, and others in constructive reflection on formless threats whose fatal [or other- wise injurious]
repercussions are dispersed across space and time (Nixon, 2011: 10)? Assuming the offense was proven, what
would it mean for the young man from the Mississippi Delta to get his house back, as he put it? Clearly, house keys would
not suf- fice to remedy the crime this family and community experienced over and again for decades. How might transitional justice resolve this case or others, such as the unmarked graves and walking dead of Dozier? How
do you measure and reconcile these events and their legaciesthe microclimates of racial
conflict, local distillations of distrust and resentment, or hobbled generations of youth, and
families and communities they fall into? Existing research methods, curricula, and
legal and political structures are often unfit to address state organized race crime
of any sort. This is in part for problems of official com- plicity, whose distortions of legal
principles, processes, and data contribute to the hazy temporal and spatial outlines of these particular
crime scenes. Usual proxies that come to mindconcentrated disadvantage, crime rates, or race and class status
characteristics, for exampleare crude and misleading instruments. These messy amalgams of race and crime,
and their questions of racial justice, elude much attention in criminological research in part for their sheer difficulty. But the truth is
criminology has not made much effort to shed light on this race and crime relationship, or its miscarriages of justice. Reading
through records of 20th-century US race crimefragmented accounts of people shot dead for chasing freedom dreams; homes,
schools, and businesses lost for association with the samequestions of crime causation, victimization, and remedy Downloaded
from tcr.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on September 29, 2014 8 Theoretical Criminology seem equally urgent and
irresolvable. Yet there have been rich discussions of historical racial violence, its legacies, and contemporary remedy primarily
outside of criminology, among scholars in sociology, law, politics, philosophy, and other fields (see King et al., 2009; Messner et al.,
2005; Minow, 2009; Valls, 2003). Criminology has been mostly disengaged, when our engagement might offer
valuable perspective, disciplinary enrich- ment, and chances to make amends for disciplinary complicity.

Just as the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a

field office to expose COINTELPRO, our uncovering of a
counterhistory steals through the cracks of the dominant narrative in
the name of resistance and justice.
Fiske 96 (John Fiske, Spring 1996, Black Bodies of Knowledge: Notes on an Effective History, Cultural Critique No. 33 p. 188 - 192), acui
Effective history emphasizes events, discontinuities, and multiplicities over the homogenizing
trend of the grand narrative of traditional history. An event, for Foucault, is not, as in traditional
history, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but "a reversal in the relationship of forces" (Foucault, "Nietzsche"
148), a moment when power is most nakedly experienced, resisted, turned, evaded, or even merely
exposed. An event is an instance in what he calls "the hazardous play of dominations," which is to be found not in structural social relations, such
as those between classes, races, or genders, but in the "meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations" (Foucault, "Nietzsche" 154). His
emphasis on the

microphysics of power introduces discontinuities and multiplicities into the story of

history. The body and the self are destabilized and multiplied. The useless slave (about to made useful) bleeding to
death in the chair has many bodies and identities, some torn from Africa, others commodified by whites, dehumanized, made into a specimen, and,
once dissected, discarded as inert lumps of flesh and bone. The

discontinuities between Nat Turner and Henrietta

Lack, both with their multiplied bodies, are what make their similarities so effective, and an
official history would miss both or would dismiss the similarity within discontinuity as
coincidence or as nonsignifying. And the final characteristic of an effective history is that it
must contain its own perspective; it cannot aspire to a transcendent objectivism, but must be
effective for somebody, and that social body must be explicit in the history . I selected these fragments from
my listening to Black Liberation Radio as a hypothetical example of what a counterhistory might look like. There can be no singular
counterhistory, for its effectiveness is dependent upon the conditions of the body-of the
individual through to the social-that constructs it as it is only in those conditions that its
effectiveness can be traced. I selected them, too, as examples of "events" where social power is meticulously inscribed upon the body and
which, as a result, embody an "affect," an intensity of feeling whereby the social forces of history are
experienced in the body and its senses; in their retelling, such events evoke in the bodies of their
listeners traces of those original experiences. When I first heard them, I experienced a shudder, a bodily frisson, that is a
necessary part of their effectiveness. But for whites, these retold events must produce a different bodily affect and, thus, a different historical
effectiveness than for African Americans. In effect, it is not the white body that experienced this power, and it is not in that white body that that power
can be countered or resisted. For

African Americans, however, these events can carry their histories into
the present, not just as understandings of the continuity between past and present, but as
experiences of it. They are historical events, but the effectiveness of their history depends upon
their historians embodying them and imbricating them into the experience, and therefore
understanding, of the present. The embodying of these fragments may be relatively straightforward, but their fragmentary disjunction
is more problematic. Foucault promotes the discontinuities of events as a counter to the abstracting thrust of the "grand narrative" history that he
opposes. These radio fragments-in effect, fragments of life-are locations that witness the application of the microphysics of power to bodies, and it is in
this context that one must understand that power. The fragments

are where the action is, and the action is the

interplay between history and the body. In these microtechnological moments, power stops
being an abstract system and becomes a material force applied both technologically and
discursively. A common misreading of Foucault's concept of discontinuity as a proposal for fragmentation rather than a strategy against a
master narrative underemphasizes the systematicity of the power that buys a fit slave for $40 and an injured one for $1; that power becomes material at
the moment of economic exchange when one body is taken to the plantation and the other to the holding pen. When

the power passes

beyond the discursive, a matter of exchange, to the technological as it is applied instrumentally
to the body, its materiality becomes inescapable. The applied technology of the whip transforms
the fit body into a body of labor. Similarly, the technology of the knife that opens a vein in the body bound to a chair and of the knife
that dissects it on the operating table trans forms the sick body into a body of knowledge. These are the events in that "hazardous
play of dominations" that transform the Black body into a white body of knowledge or of labor.

Positively, the discontinuity of events inherently denies any absolute hierarchy of evidential reliability. In the forementioned fragments, for instance,
the advertisements in the Charleston Mercury exist in archives which anyone can read. How they are interpreted and how they are integrated into a
history, of course, are not archived and not equally available to everyone. In essence, they are the product of the specific researcher's work. Similarly, in
Fragment 4, there is documentary evidence of the existence of a man called McKeever, his address, and his daytime occupation. Boyd's Directory of the
District of Columbia, an annually published list of the name, address, and occupation of each resident, regularly includes the names of both Samuel and
Eliza McKeever from 1883 until 1907, the last date Eliza's name appears. It also lists his daytime occupation variously as laborer; rags, junk, buyer; and,
in his later years, elevator operator. His nighttime occupation, of course, remains undocumented and exists only in oral history. Gladys-Marie

Fry has collected a fascinating number of Black oral histories about him, whose proliferating
details, through their imaginative power, act as authenticators by which belief is made into
truth. Such details include the thick rubber soles on his shoes, the burlap on the wheels of his cart, and his long dark cloak. Perhaps most vivid of all,
though, is the fact that one of the bodies he sold was that of his wife, whom he killed unwittingly in a dark street. Provided orally and not in the
traditional form of archives, these facts are not equally available to all. Gathering them involves becoming familiar with their circulation, gaining the
trust of those who own and use them, and offering assurances that neither the trust nor the knowledge will be abused. One cannot walk into this
knowledge as one walks into a library, and the fact that Fry is African American has much to do with her ability to gather it. These "weak" facts, weak
only because the social formation with access to them is disempowered, are effective because their truths are functional. They warn African Americans
of their vulnerability and lack of protection in white cities; the rubber shoes and muffled wheels command a vividness that, in turn, evokes a shudder
from the body of the listener, recalling the fear within the Black body in the street. One is also operating here within the realm of a situated logic: body
snatchers disguise their approach-not being able to hear or see them does not mean that they are not there. Equally, the knowledge of McKeever
mistakenly killing and selling his own wife carries the prophetic truth that Black people who collaborate with whites for selfish and short-term rewards
will inevitably end up not only harming their race but themselves. The

effective history of McKeever's nighttime

occupation counters not only the documented truth about McKeever, that he was an ordinary
Black citizen, but it challenges the production of that truth and the hierarchization of evidence
involved. Some facts, which are documented by white information collectors, editors, and
publishers, are made "strong" by being technologized into books or journals, and
institutionalized into the archive. They, then, contrast and overpower the "weak" facts that are
circulated orally among Black people. The strong white facts emerge independent of the social
formation experiencing them as events. In a white knowledge system, this exteriority guarantees
their objectivity, but in a Black one, it guarantees only their inadequacy: for in this knowledge,
whites can know only what Blacks allow them to know. The knowledge of those occupying the
same social formation as the object of that knowledge will know truths that are necessarily
invisible to the outside observer. Equally, effective history actively demonstrates that official
history represses knowledge whose truth would challenge the social interests of the power bloc
that produces and validates it. To document McKeever's nighttime work would be to give it
credibility that would, in turn, hinder white power; the repressive and self-interested effects of
power are best secured when its benign and productive side is the only visible one . Thus, the exclusion of
McKeever's nighttime work from white documentation contains the truth of how whites can write history. This history cannot, therefore, be used to
invalidate a Black effective history, in which his night job is thoroughly and accurately articulated, as opposed to simply documented. Collecting,

recording, and documenting information is an urgent concern of the power bloc, as information
remains essential to its social control. Selectively documenting others while excluding
them from the process of documentation is a strategy of disempowerment against
which effective history struggles. The knowledge of the power bloc, with all its technologies and institutionalization of
literacy and numeracy, of information collection, storage, and retrieval, necessarily produces more socially powerful truths than those of
disenfranchised social formations who are historically and systematically denied equal access to those technologies and institutions of knowledge.
Power is always two-faced, always both productive and repressive, benign and selfish; it is most effective, however, when it puts forward its productive,
benign face and hides its repressive, selfish one. The benignity with which Boyd's Directory makes its facts open and freely available to all hides the

embodied
experiences, which strong knowledge systems overlook, that carry the effective truths of the
disempowered.
repression by which it denies other events, such as McKeever's nighttime job, the status of fact. Contrarily, then, it is these

The fragmented, unsettled telling of our counterhistory performs the

impossibility of narrating a past that has been lost to us our
embrace of both hope and defeat allows us to reckon with the violence
of representation and the precarity of lives rendered disposable
Hartman 8 (Saidiya, Associate Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley.
Venus in Two Acts (June 2008), Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, pp. 13-14)
History
pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties
are produced by terror. I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of historythe
rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible
metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be
said about the past. I longed to write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal
documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which comprised my strategy for
disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements
and which enabled me to augment and intensify its fic- tions. Finding an aesthetic mode suitable or adequate
to rendering the lives of these two girls, deciding how to arrange the lines on the page, allowing the
narrative track to be rerouted or broken by the sounds of memory, the keens and howls and dirges
unloosened on the deck, and trying to unsettle the arrangements of power by imaging Venus and her friend
outside the terms of statements and judgments that banished them from the category of the
human and decreed their lives waste31all of which was beyond what could be thought within
the parameters of history. The romance of resistance that I failed to narrate and the event of love
that I refused to describe raise important questions regarding what it means to think historically
about matters still contested in the present and about life eradicated by the protocols of
intellectual disciplines. What is required to imagine a free state or to tell an impossible story?
The Reprise I chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive.

Must the poetics of a free state anticipate the event and imagine life after man, rather than wait for the ever-retreating moment of
Jubilee? Must the future of abolition be first performed on the page? By retreating from the story of these two
girls, was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the manufactured certainties of their killers, and by doing so,
hadnt I sealed their fate?32 Hadnt I too consigned them to oblivion? In the end, was it better to leave them as I found them? A
History of Failure If

it is not possible to undo the violence that inaugurates the sparse record of a
girls life or remedy her anonymity with a name or translate the commoditys speech, then to
what end does one tell such stories? How and why does one write a history of violence? Why revisit
the event or the nonevent of a girls death? The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This
violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about
slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power. 33 The archive yields no exhaustive
account of the girls life, but catalogues the statements that licensed her death. All the rest is a kind of
fiction: sprightly maiden, sulky bitch, Venus, girl. The economy of theft and the power over life, which defined
the slave trade, fabricated commodities and corpses. But cargo, inert masses, and things dont lend themselves to
representation, at least not easily? In Lose Your Mother I attempted to foreground the experience of the enslaved by tracing the
itinerary of a disappearance and by narrating stories which are impossible to tell. The goal was to expose and exploit the
incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history, by which I mean the requirements of
narrative, the stuff of subjects and plots and ends. And

how does one tell impossible stories? Stories about girls

the words exchanged between shipmates that never acquired any
standing in the law and that failed to be recorded in the archive, about the appeals, prayers and
secrets never uttered because no one was there to receive them? The furtive communication that might have
bearing names that deface and disfigure, about

passed between two girls, but which no one among the crew observed or reported affirms what we already know to be true: The
archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain. And this
knowledge brings us no closer to an understanding of the lives of two captive girls or the violence that destroyed them and named

Is it possible to exceed or
negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments
the ruin: Venus. Nor can it explain why at this late date we still want to write stories about them.

and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts,
wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a
critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to
tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional
temporality of what could have been, according to Lisa Lowe, symbolizes aptly the space of a
different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with
twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history
and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods .34 The
intention here isnt anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming
the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This
double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a
cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing
the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration. The method guiding this writing practice
is best described as critical fabulation. Fabula denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A fabula,
according to Mieke Bal, is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors. An
event is a transition from one state to another. Actors are agents that perform actions. (They are not necessarily human.) To act is to
cause or experience and event.35 By

playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by representing the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have
attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account,
and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By
throwing into crisis what happened when and by exploiting the transparency of sources as
fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave
trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe the resistance of the object,36 if only by first
imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity. By flattening
the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hoped to illuminate the
contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierar- chy of discourse,
and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. The outcome of this method is a
recombinant narrative, which loops the strands of incommensurate accounts and which
weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girls story and in narrating the time of slavery as
our present.37 Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a
requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise the shrieks, the moans,
the non- sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and
which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and
antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.38 The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the
slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between
two zones of deathsocial and corporeal deathand to reckon with the precarious lives which
are visible only in the moment of their disappearance . It is an impossible writing which
attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak). It is a history of an
unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history
written with and against the archive. Admittedly my own writing is unable to exceed the limits of
the sayable dictated by the archive. It depends upon the legal records, surgeons journals, ledgers, ship
manifests, and captains logs, and in this regard falters before the archives silence and reproduces it
omis- sions. The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories
that we cannot know and that will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive
impossibility defines the parameters of my work. The necessity of recounting Venuss death is
overshadowed by the inevitable failure of any attempt to represent her. I think this is a
productive tension and one unavoidable in narrating the lives of the subaltern, the
dispossessed, and the enslaved. In retelling the story of what happened on board the Recovery, I have

emphasized the incommensurability between the prevailing discourses and the event, amplified
the instability and discrepancy of the archive, flouted the realist illusion customary in the
writing of history, and produced a counter-history at the intersection of the fictive and the
historical. Counter-history, according to Gallagher and Greenblatt, opposes itself not only to dominant
narratives, but also to prevailing modes of historical thought and methods of research. 39 However,
the history of black counter-historical projects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts
have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive
narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they ever gain a footing. If this story of Venus
has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to hers. A relation which
others might describe as a kind of melancholia, but which I prefer to describe in terms of the afterlife of property, by
which I mean the detritus of lives with which we have yet to attend, a past that has yet to be
done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril. For these reasons, I
have chosen to engage a set of dilemmas about representation, vio- lence, and social death, not
by using the form of a metahistorical discourse, but by performing the limits of writing history
through the act of narration. I have done so primarily because (1) my own narrative does not operate outside the economy
of statements that it subjects to critique; and (2) those existences relegated to the nonhistorical or deemed
waste exercise a claim on the present and demand us to imagine a future in which the afterlife of
slavery has ended. The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to
pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our
knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future . My effort to
reconstruct the past is, as well, an attempt to describe obliquely the forms of violence licensed in
the present, that is, the forms of death unleashed in the name of freedom, security, civilization ,
and God/the good. Narrative is central to this effort because of the rela- tion it poses , explicit or
implied, between past, presents and futures.40 Wrestling with the girls claim on the present is a
way of naming our time, thinking our present, and envisioning the past which has created it.
Unfortunately I have not discovered a way of deranging the archive so that it might recall the content of a girls life or reveal a truer
picture, nor have I succeeded in prying open the dead book, which sealed her status as commodity. The random collection of details
of which I have made use are the same descriptions, verbatim quotes, and trial transcripts that consigned her to death and made
murder not much noticed, at least, according to the surgeon.41 The promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, but
none that are capable of resuscitating the girl. My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet
another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a
hope for history. We

all know better. It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other
deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes. But in the
meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and
the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girls in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom. In the
meantime, it is clear that her life and ours hang in the balance. So what does one do in the
meantime? What are the stories one tells in dark times? How can a narrative of defeat enable a
place for the living or envision an alternative future? Michel de Certeau notes that there are at least two
ways the historiographical operation can make a place for the living: one is attending to and
recruiting the past for the sake of the living, establishing who we are in relation to who we have
been; and the second entails interrogating the production of our knowledge about the past. 42
Along the lines sketched by de Certeau, Octavia Butlers Kindred offers a model for a practice.43 When Dana, the protagonist of
Butlers speculative fiction, travels from the twentieth century to the 1820s to encounter her enslaved foremother, Dana finds to her
surprise that she is not able to rescue her kin or escape the entangled relations of violence and domination, but instead comes to
accept that they have made her own existence possible. With this in mind, we must bear what cannot be borne :
the image of Venus in chains. We begin the story again, as always, in the wake of her disappearance and with the wild hope that our
efforts can return her to the world. The

conjunction of hope and defeat define this labor and leave open its
outcome. The task of writing the impossible, (not the fanciful or the utopian but histories
rendered unreal and fantastic44), has as its prerequisites the embrace of likely failure and the
readiness to accept the ongoing, unfinished and provisional character of this effort, particularly

when the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue. 45 Like Dana, we
too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with the recognition that
some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement.

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team who best reads
emancipation into history otherwise the judge becomes a privileged
spectator
Arrianna Marie Conerly Coleman, 12/9/2010, M.A. Candidate @ University of Chicago, B.A.
@ UC-Berkeley, Camera-Ready Society: Exploring Our Complicity in a Surveilling Society,
aconerlycoleman, https://aconerlycoleman.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/speculative-fictionsurveilling-society/
I saw this tweet and was prompted to think. I own a computer with a webcam, with which I frequently videochat. On my laptop,
there is a program for that webcam through which I can take photographs. At the moment, I have about 300 photographs of myself
on that program. And when I go on Facebook, I have 486 pictures of myself tagged by friends and family. All told, Ive taken
thousands of photographs in my lifetime, and whenever I attend a social event, I carry the consciousness of the fact that there will be
a camera. On social media- particularly Twitter, I

find myself in complicity with a surveilling society every

time I post a picture or a link. File-IAO-logo.png Additionally, the fact that I live a few miles from a US
air force base means that I live under constant surveillance. I live in a nation where civil rights
movements are crushed from the inside out via the likes of COINTELPRO and free agents like
Julian Assange are hounded by so-called democratic states. Having said all of this, it should not
surprise me that the constant presence of cameras and other forms of surveillance is normalized .
I really should not. When you look at the two famous works of speculative fiction Aldous Huxleys Brave New World and George
Orwells 1984, you have to wonder how right were they? We

live in an age where IP addresses are tracked, ISPs

can be pressured by politicians into shutting down websites that challenge dominant political
viewpoints and cellphones can be legally tracked by local police. Weve come a long way
from the days of the FBI wire-tapping leftist activists phones. A few years ago, I had the
disturbing revelation that I was comfortable under constant surveillance. I exist in relative privilege as a middleclass woman without a criminal record. I am not criminalized like my Black male counterparts. I
held the notion that it fostered accountability on a social level, but I never questioned the right
of public officials, policemen, military officials to watch me . Who holds them accountable? Who holds
government assassins who kill possibly treacherous citizens accountable? Who watches the watchmen? And even in this age
of advanced surveillance, we still see the by-stander effect whereby the more spectators there
are, the less likely a victim of a violent attack is to get help . The assumption is that every onlooker
is someone else who could help, because the responsibility you have to your fellow man is abdicated to
other members of the group,and said group lacks cohesion. By no means is surveillance
government or civilian a guarantee of safety. It seems that somewhere along the line some
part of our social structures broke down and we lost the sense of interdependence- particularly in communities in the
United States. Individualism excuses casual apathy in the face of danger. Bad things always happen to somone else. Lets take the
United States as a case study: the US comprises 5% of the world population and 25% of the global incarcerated. Every 14 seconds, a
residence in the United States is being robbed. One in 3 women in the US will be a victim of rape/sexual assault [the numbers are
more damning when you account for race, class and location], yet less than 5% of those rapists ever see the inside of a jail cell [see
also: Some Links on the Subject of Rape, Race and Disability: ]. Lets also consider police brutality- a person lving in the US is 8 time
more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist [see also: What happened in Detroit happens in Kingston: Aiyana Jones &
Robert Kentucky Kid Hill ]. Case in point, the

United States has the highest crime rates in the WORLD.

Evidence also suggests that the police forces in urban centers in the US are becoming more and more like
paramilitary forces. In Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, East St. Louis, the police move in military-like
precision leaving thousands of brown bodies behind. Tracing the Roots of the US Surveilling Society
The increased need for force can be traced to the days of legal slavery and overt government-

sanctioned genocide in the United States. Enslaved Africans posed a threat because despite
being property, they were wholly human. In the face of dehumanization, enslaved Africans
retained their personhood, expressing their right to freedom in ways various and subversive. The police
forces in the South served to protect and retain property, not people . And even the classist
structures designed to retain the property of wealthy slaveowners in the South recognized the
necessity of the use of force against these stubbornly human slaves . [Antebellum Class Differentiation:
Property Ownership within the White and Black Elite Classes, Thoughts on Slavery in America in the 17th and 18th Centuries: ] In
the case of the First Nations, genocide, theft, broken treaties, and the denial of custodial rights
to children all resulted in the scattering and de-culturation of Indian societies . The United States
armed forces acted as informal police on reservations and at boarding schools for Indian children. Since the
arrival of the first Western European settlers in the 15th century, the use of force and surveillance has been to the detriment and
oppression of people of color. This

history is not taught in state-funded schools because there

is no benefit in truth-telling from the perspective of the hegmony. In this context, it is
easy to divorce oneself from the violence of ones own apathy within a surveilling society . In fact,
we learn to partake in the voyeurism- particularly in entertainment. Case in point: shows like Law and Order
SVU, CSI Miami and Bones casually show violence against human beings- particularly women. Violence in entertainment is so
casual. In a puritannical political climate, the depiction of violence [possible exception: rape] on television is more heinous than the
depiction of consensual sexual activity. Turn on the television during primetime hours and what do you see? The formulaic
introduction that depicts a person suffering potentially deadly violence at the hand of an aggressor, and a loud introduction.

voyeurism has a desensitizing effect on how consumers of media perceive

violence. Can you really call yourself a pacifist when you regularly take in the
deaths of ficticious protagonists in the guise of entertainment ?

This

Case

COINTELPRO

Cover Up (BPP)
FBI suppressed COINTEL program filesBlack Panther raid
Taylor 14founding partner of the Peoples Law Office (G. Flint, 12/03/2013, The FBI
COINTELPRO Program and the Fred Hampton Assassination, Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-flint-taylor/the-fbi-cointelpro-progra_b_4375527.html)

On December 4th it will be 44 years since a select unit of 14 Chicago Police officers, on special assignment to Cook County State's
Attorney Edward Hanrahan, executed a pre-dawn raid on a west side apartment that left Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred
Hampton and Mark Clark dead, several other young Panthers wounded, and the seven raid survivors arrested on bogus attempted
murder charges. The

physical evidence soon exposed the claims of a "shootout" that were made by
Hanrahan and his men to be blatant lies, and that the murderous reality was that the police fired
nearly 100 shots while the Panthers fired but one. But those lies were only the first layer of a
massive cover-up that was dismantled and exposed over the next eight years -- a cover-up
designed to suppress the central role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its
COINTELPRO program in the assassination. In the wake of the raid, the Minister of Defense for the Illinois Chapter
of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Rush, stood on the steps of the bullet riddled BPP apartment and declared that J. Edgar Hoover
and the FBI were responsible for the raid, but at that time there was no hard proof and it was dismissed by the media as mere
rhetoric. The first documentation that supported Rush's insightful allegation surfaced in March of 1971 when the Citizens
Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small FBI office in Media Pennsylvania and expropriated over 1000 FBI documents .

These documents exposed the FBI's super-secret and profoundly illegal COINTELPRO program
and its focus in the 1960s on the black liberation movement and its leaders. Citing the assassinated
Malcolm X as an example, Hoover directed all of the Bureau's Offices to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise
neutralize" African American organizations and leaders including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King, Stokley Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown. In Chicago,
the first major breakthrough came in 1973 when U.S. Attorney James Thompson revealed that Chicago Black Panther Party Chief of
Security William O'Neal was a paid informant for the FBI. At that time I was a young lawyer working with my colleagues at the
People's Law Office on a civil rights lawsuit that we had filed on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the
December 4th raid. We

quickly subpoenaed the Chicago FBI's Black Panther Party files and a grand
total of 33 documents were produced. However, an honest Assistant U.S. Attorney included in those documents an
FBI memorandum that incorporated a detailed floor plan of the interior of the BPP apartment which specifically identified the bed
on which Hampton slept. The face of the memo also revealed that the floor plan, together with other important information designed
to be utilized in a police raid, was based on information communicated by O'Neal to his FBI control agent who later supplied it to
State's Attorney Hanrahan before the raid. We

then focused on unearthing more details about the FBI's

involvement in the conspiracy, identified the FBI conspirators, joined them as defendants in the
lawsuit and sought the Chicago office's COINTELPRO file in order to establish a direct link
between the FBI's illegal program and the raid. When the Government refused to produce the
file and the Judge refused to compel them to do so, we turned to Senator Frank Church's Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations. The Committee, which was created in the aftermath of the
Watergate scandal, was investigating rampant abuses by all U.S. Intelligence Agencies, including the FBI. In late 1975 a Church
Committee staffer informed us that there were several Chicago documents which definitively established the link. Armed with the
content of the still secret documents, we were able to embarrass the Judge, who had privately reviewed the documents and
previously declared them irrelevant, into ordering the FBI to produce the file. Among the documents provided were several that
revealed the FBI's efforts to foment violence against Fred Hampton and the Chicago Panthers, and one dated December 3, 1969 that
claimed the impending raid as part of the COINTELPRO program. In January of 1976 we embarked on what would turn out to be the
longest civil trial in federal court history. Two months into the trial, O'Neal's FBI control agent blundered on the witness stand and
inadvertently established that the FBI had not produced all of the Chicago Black Panther files, and the Judge, not knowing what was
about to happen, ordered that they do so. The

next day a shaken Justice Department supervisor wheeled

into court shopping carts on which were stacked 200 volumes of FBI BPP files that had been
suppressed by the Chicago office since we had first requested them three years before. The Judge
commenced a hearing on the FBI's misconduct and the Government produced several sanitized volumes of documents each day for a
month. The produced files contained directives to destroy the Panther's Breakfast for Children Program and disrupt the distribution
of the BPP newspaper, evidence that the charismatic Hampton was a targeted BPP leader, and massive wiretap overhears, including
conversations between BPP members and their attorneys. At the very end of its month long document production, the Government

produced O'Neal's control file. In it was yet another smoking gun -- memos to and from FBI headquarters and the Chicago office that
requested and approved payment of a $300 bonus to reward O'Neal for the floor plan. According to the memos, O'Neal's
information was of "tremendous value" and, in the words of O'Neal's COINTELPRO supervisor, made the raid a "success." That
same month, on April 23, 1976, the Church Committee released its Final Staff Report on the FBI and CIA's rampant domestic
illegalities which included a chapter entitled "The FBI's Covert Action Plan to Destroy the Black Panther Party." The chapter
concluded by highlighting the Hampton raid as a COINTELPRO operation and quoting from the bonus documents that we had
obtained only weeks before.

The Judge, an ardent supporter of the FBI, exonerated the FBI and its
Justice Department lawyers of any wrongdoing in suppressing the documents and later
dismissed O'Neal and the other FBI defendants from the case. In April of 1979 the Seventh Circuit Court of
Appeals, in a landmark decision, overturned the trial judge, finding that the FBI defendants and their government lawyers
"obstructed justice" by suppressing the BPP files. Most significantly, the Court of Appeals also concluded that there was "serious
evidence" to support the conclusion that the FBI, Hanrahan, and his men, in planning and executing the raid, had participated in a
"conspiracy designed to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its members," thereby suppressing a "vital radical Black
political organization." The

Court further found there to be substantial evidence that these defendants

also participated in a post-raid conspiracy to "cover up evidence" regarding the raid, to "conceal
the true character of their pre-raid and raid activities," to "harass the survivors of the raid," and
to "frustrate any legal redress the survivors might seek." This decision withstood a challenge in the U.S.
Supreme Court, and stands today as judicial recognition of outrageous Federal and local conspiratorial criminality and cover-up.

Cover Up (General)
FBI tried to smooth over COINTELPROrepackaged into new FBI
and cover-ups
Glick 90lawyer, teacher, writer and activist who founded the Law Schools Community
Economic Development Clinic (Brian, Mar. 1990, The Face of COINTELPRO, South End
Press, http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Cointelpro_Papers.pdf)

By discontinuing use of the term "COINTELPRO," the Bureau gave the appearance of acceding
to public and congressional pressure. In reality, it protected its capacity to continue precisely the
same activity under other names. Decentralization of covert operations vastly reduced the
volume of required reporting. It dispersed the remaining documentation to individual case files in diverse field offices,
and it purged those files of any caption suggesting domestic covert action. The Bureau's "sensitive techniques and operations" have
since been further insulated from public scrutiny. Scheduled

congressional hearings into the Bureau's mid1970s campaign against AIM were squelched by means of what turns out to have been yet
another FBI covert operation. The FOIA has been drastically narrowed, with thousands of files reclassified "top secret."
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act now makes it a federal crime to disclose" any information that identifies an individual as a
covert agent." This

careful concealment of post-COINTELPRO domestic counterintelligence action

is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate the U.S. political police. Central to that effort has been a
sophisticated campaign to refurbish the public image of the FBI. The Bureau's egomaniacal, reactionary, crudely racist and sexist
founder, J. Edgar Hoover, died in 1972. After interim directors failed to restore the Bureau's prestige, two federal judges, William
Webster and William Sessions, were recruited to clean house and build a "new FBI." The new directors have cultivated a lowvisibility managerial style and discreetly avoided public attack on prominent liberals. Anticommunism - the time-honored rationale
for political police work - has been augmented by "counter-terrorism" and "the war on drugs," pretexts that better resonate with
current popular fears. The old myth of the FBI as crime-busting protector of democratic rights has been revived in modern garb by
films like Mississippi Burning and the television series, Mancuso FBI. This

repackaging seems to have sold the

"new FBI" to some of the most prominent critics of earlier COINTELPRO . University professors
and congressional committees that helped to expose the domestic covert action of the past now
deny its persistence in the present. Because of their credentials, these respectable "objective" sources do more damage
than the FBI's blatant right-wing publicists. Left uncontested, their sophistry could disarm a new generation of activists, leaving
them vulnerable to government subversion. The introduction to The COINTELPRO Papers refutes one such academic expert, Athan
Theoharis, in his preposterous claim that the FBI's war on AIM during the 1970s was not a COINTELPRO-style "program of
harassment." Equally treacherous is The FBI and CISPES, a 1989 report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence." This is
nothing more than a whitewash of the Bureau's covert and extralegal effort to wipe out domestic opposition to U.S. intervention in
Central America. That FBI campaign was first made public by a central participant, Frank Varelli. The Bureau admits it paid Varelli
from 1981 to 1984 to infiltrate CISPES. Varelli has testified that the FBI's stated objective was to "break" CISPES. He recounts a
modus operandi straight out of the annals COINTELPRO - from break-ins, bogus publications and disruption of public events to
planting guns on CISPES members and seducing CISPES leaders in order to get blackmail photos for the FBI.' Alerted by Varelli's
disclosures, the Center for Constitutional Rights obtained a small portion of the Bureau's CISPES files and released them to the
press. The files show the U.S. government targeting a very broad range of religious, labor and community groups opposed to its
Central America policies.They

confirm that the FBI's objective was to attack and "neutralize" these
groups" Mainstream media coverage of these revelations elicited a flurry of congressional
investigations and hearings. Publicly exposed, the FBI tried to scapegoat the whistle blower . Its
inhouse investigation found Varelli "unreliable" and held his false reports of CISPES terrorism responsible for the entire FBI
operation. The

Bureau denied any violation of the constitutional rights of US. citizens or

involvement in the hundreds of breakins reported by Central America activists. A grand total of six
agents received "formal censure" and three were suspended for 14 days. The FBI moved its CISPES file to the national archives and
Director Sessions declared the case dosed, a mere "aberration" due to "failure in FBI management."' The Bureau's slander of Varelli
gave the congress an easy way out. The

single congressional report, The FBI and CISPES, endorses the

FBI's entire account, without any reservation or qualification. It legitimizes a cover-up of
current covert operations by exploiting the past reputation of the Senate Intelligence
Committee.

COINTELPRO interferences were covered upwithholding of files

and silencing of officials
Glick 91lawyer, teacher, writer and activist who founded the Law Schools Community
Economic Development Clinic (Brian, 1991, War at Home, South End Press,
https://archive.org/stream/War_At_Home#page/n1/mode/2up, p. 8-9)

The crisis was eventually resolved through what historian Howard Zinn describes as a complex
process of consolidation, based on the need to satisfy a disillusioned public that the system
was criticizing and correcting itself.18 In this process, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) was amended over President Nixons veto to provide some degree of genuine public
access to FBI documents. Lawsuits under the FOIA forced the Bureau to release some
COINTELPRO files to major news media. By 1975, both houses of Cognress had launched formal
inquiries into government intelligence activities. The agencies under congressional
investigation were allowed to withhold most of their files and to edit the Senate Committees
reports before publication.19 The House Committees report, including an ac-count of FBI and
CIA obstruction of its inquiry, was suppressed al-together after part was leaked to the press.20
Still, pressure to promote the appearance of genuine reform was so great that the FBI had to
divulge an unprecedented, detailed account of many of its domestic covert operations. Many
important files continue to be withheld, and others have been destroyed.21 Former operatives
report that the most heinous and embarrassing actions were never committed to writing.22
Officials with broad personal knowledge of COINTELPRO have been silenced, most notably
William C. Sullivan, who created the program and ran it throughout the 1960s. Sullivan was
killed in an uninvestigated 1977 hunting accident shortly after giving extensive information to
a grand jury investigating the FBI, but before he could testify publicly. 23 Never-theless, a great
deal has been learned about COINTELPRO.

Current Surveillance

General
Marginalized communities are disproportionately targeted by
surveillance
Eubanks 14 -- professor in the Department of Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, and fellow at
the Rockefeller Institute of Government (Virginia Eubanks, January 15, 2014, Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities.,
http://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities), acui

A decade ago, I sat talking to a young mother on welfare about her experiences with
technology. When our conversation turned to Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (EBT), Dorothy*
said, Theyre great. Except [Social Services] uses them as a tracking device . I must have looked shocked, because
But I wasnt surprised.

she explained that her caseworker routinely looked at her EBT purchase records. Poor women are the test subjects for surveillance technology, Dorothy told me ruefully, and you
should pay attention to what happens to us. Youre next.

Poor and working-class Americans already live in the

surveillance future. The revelations that are so scandalous to the middle-class data profiling, PRISM, tapped cellphonesare old news to millions of low-income
Americans, immigrants, and communities of color. To be smart about surveillance in the New Year, we must learn from the experiences of marginalized people in the U.S. and in

Surveillance is a civil rights issue.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, we are targeted for digital surveillance as groups and
communities, not as individuals. Big Brother is watching us, not you. The NSA looks for what
they call a pattern of life, homing in on networks of people associated with a target . But networks of
developing countries the world over. Here are four lessons we might learn if we do. Lesson #1:

association are not random, and who we know online is affected by offline forms of residential, educational, and occupational segregation. This year, for example, UC San Diego
sociologist Kevin Lewis found that online dating leads to fewer interracial connections, compared to offline ways of meeting. Pepper Miller has reported that sometimes, African
Americans will temporarily block white Facebook friends so that they can have open, honest discussions about race with black friends. Because of the persistence of
segregation in our offline and online lives, algorithms and search strings that filter big data looking for patterns, that begin as neutral code, nevertheless end up producing race,

Groups of like subjects are then targeted for different, and often unequal,
forms of supervision, discipline and surveillance, with marginalized communities singled out for
more aggressive scrutiny. Welfare recipients like Dorothy are more vulnerable to surveillance
because they are members of a group that is seen as an appropriate target for intrusive
programs. Persistent stereotypes of poor women, especially women of color, as inherently
suspicious, fraudulent, and wasteful provide ideological support for invasive welfare programs
that track their financial and social behavior. Immigrant communities are more likely to be the
site of biometric data collection than native-born communities because they have less political
power to resist it. As panicked as mainstream America is about the government collecting cellphone meta-data, imagine the hue and cry if police officers scanned
class, and gender-specific results.

the fingerprints of white, middle-class Americans on the street, as has happened to day laborers in Los Angeles, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Marginalized
people are in the dubious position of being both on the cutting edge of surveillance, and stuck in its backwaters. Some forms of surveillance, like filmed police interrogations, are

marginalized people are subject to some of the

most technologically sophisticated and comprehensive forms of scrutiny and observation in law
enforcement, the welfare system, and the low-wage workplace. They also endure higher levels of
direct forms of surveillance, such as stop-and-frisk in New York City. The practice of
surveillance is both separate and unequal. Acknowledging this reality allows us to challenge
mass surveillance based on the 14th Amendment, which provides for equal protection under the
law, not just on the 4th Amendment, which protects citizens against unwarranted search and
seizure. Surveillance should be seen as a collective issue, a civil rights issue, not just an invasion
of privacy. Lesson #2: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We can intuit the shape of surveillance-to-come by keeping an eye on developing countries, as well as
exploring its impacts on marginalized communities here in the United States. The most sweeping digital surveillance technologies
are designed and tested in what could be called low rights environmentspoor communities,
repressive social programs, dictatorial regimes, and military and intelligence operationswhere
there are low expectations of political accountability and transparency. Drones that deliver Hellfire missiles, Long
undoubtedly positive for poor and working-class communities and racial minorities. But

Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) that send pain-inducing tones over long distances, and stun cuffs that deliver 80,000 volts to detainees via remote control allow users to avoid
direct responsibility for the human suffering they cause. Many of these technologies are first developed for the U.S. military to deploy in the global south, and later tested for
civilian purposes on marginal communities in the United States. LRADs, for example, were developed by San Diego-based military contractor American Technology Corporation

Technologies
designed for the military carry expectations about the dangerousness of the public, and can be
in response to the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and then famously used to disburse G20 protestors in Pittsburgh in 2009.

used over-aggressively in community policing and crowd control. To a technology designed for
counter-terrorism, everyone looks like a bad guy.

Blacks and minorities are disproportionately surveilledexpansive

leeway of data profiles
Gangadharan 13Senior Research Fellow at New America's Open Technology Institute
(Seeta Pena, June 19, From COINTELPRO to Prism, Spying on Comm. of Color, New America
Media, http://newamericamedia.org/2013/06/from-cointelpro-to-prism-spying-on-comm-ofcolor.php)
Revelations of a massive cyber-surveillance program targeting American citizens holds
particularly chilling consequences for immigrants and communities of color. Given the history
of such programs, going back to the pre-digital age, these groups have reason to fear. Who is mined, who
is profiled, and who suffers at the hands of an extensive regime of corporate and government
surveillance raises issues of social and racial justice. PRISM, the National Security Agencys
clandestine electronic surveillance program, builds on a history of similar efforts whose impacts
have affected racial and ethnic minorities in disproportionate ways. The Federal Bureau of Investigations
Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), established in 1956, represents one of the forbearers of
PRISM. Created at a time when political decision makers worked to promote the idea of national security in the public
consciousness, the program targeted first Communist sympathizers and later domestic dissenters under a broad remit which allowed
COINTELPRO to monitor and interrogate groups that threatened social order at the time. Though

COINTELPRO
targeted whites and nonwhites, journalists and researchers have shown that some of the
programs most controversialand life-threateningtargeting focused on African Americans, or
what the FBI categorized as Black Nationalist Groups. The lions share of COINTELPRO
targeting fell upon the Black Panther Party. The agency also targeted mainstream civil rights groups, like the
NAACP, Congress for Racial Equality, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as mainstream civil rights leaders like
Martin Luther King Jr. Other minority groups, including those representing Arab Americans, Filipino Americans, Latinos, and
Native Americans, also found themselves under COINTELPROs watch. Though

COINTELPRO was eventually

dismantled and held up as an example of overbroad, abusive exercise of government
surveillance, subsequent administrations have expanded government surveillance programs,
including most recently with the aid and abetment of digital technologies. Former Attorney
General Ashcroft, for example, amended guidelines to permit the FBI to purchase data profiles
from commercial data mining companies (e.g., Axciom) without cause for suspicion. Ashcrofts
guidelines also permitted the FBI to store such information for an indefinite amount of time. For communities of color,
this expansive, digitally enabled form of surveillance has had particular dire consequences. For
example, the availability of big data has facilitated government efforts to map and monitor Arab
American populations. As reported in Wired Magazine, the FBIs analysis was extensive: it included and tracked ordinary
Arab Americans, suggesting that the FBI suspected and classified all Arab Americans as potential terrorists. Moreover, as the ACLU
(which was responsible for surfacing FBI mapping and monitoring documents) has argued, the commercial data purchased by the
FBI and other agencies is riddled with errors, which once stored indefinitely become truth. Using a set of indicators that correlate

That is, flawed

data become part of routine analysis and reanalysis that wrongly targets individuals. Despite the
Obama Administrations attempts to define PRISMs consequences narrowly, it is fair to
speculate that the burden will fall unfairly on communities of color. Like domestic surveillance under
Ashcroft, PRISM collects electronic communications and also stores information indefinitely, a
process which again risks wrongly classifying and targeting communities of color. In fact, little is
with terrorist activities, analysts compute the likelihood that a person represents a threat to national security.

known about the parameters used to define algorithms that search PRISM data or a combination of PRISM and other commercial
data. As privacy advocates have argued, characteristics that define everyday behavior of some ethnic and racial minorities the use
of cash versus credit, purchase of a pre-paid cellphone, or mobility (e.g., moving residence frequently) may also be used as
parameters to identify likely terrorist activity. Until there is greater transparency in the nature of data analysis, including the

possibility to examine and assess the accuracy of the analysis of telecommunications records, email communications, and other
commercial data, ethnic and racial minorities will remain at risk of discriminatory data profiling.

Blacks/minorities are surveilled strictly due to their race both now

and during cointel pro
Cyril 15founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice (Malkia, April 2015,
Black America's State of Surveillance, Progressive,
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance)

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell
anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding
against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that
they would be watching her. They didnt get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My mother was not the only black
person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a
requirement for being subject to spying. Files

obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed

that African Americans, J. Edger Hoovers largest target group, didnt have to be perceived as
dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy
is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement
agencies across the United States. Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the
revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mothers visit from the FBI
reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other
people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. Its

time for
journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are
targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress
dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished
underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance
technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and
policies have not caught up to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting
privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived
as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The

trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the

indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any
crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or
corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect
us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which spying,
from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the
streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of
the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every
member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago. Predictive policing, also known as
Total Information Awareness, is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes
trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This
model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In

a racially discriminatory
criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination,
predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de
facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates,
sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control
by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing
approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimeslike selling loose
cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights,
predictive policing is just high-tech racial profilingindiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As
local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on
specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police

departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three .

They will use technologies like license

plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in
communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition,
biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for
any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward
accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear.
They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance
device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and
identifying information. When used to track a suspects cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless
bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to
conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remotecontrolled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They

will use fusion centers. Originally

designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have
instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation,
there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed
as official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other
criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody
whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected
is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive

policing doesnt just lead to racial and religious profilingit

relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and
people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious
activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One
review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people
of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably
doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or
advocating in the halls of power. One

of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the

invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies
and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials
uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable
donations by Muslims as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be destroyed if
terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful
and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile
all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors
of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented

migrant communities enjoy

few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal
surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people
incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by
far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of
those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some
misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent
more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime.

Ferguson
Cointelpro still exists and was heavily involved in Ferguson
King 14Professional activist and prominent contributor in Black Lives Matter (Shaun, Oct.
20, Echoes of COINTELPRO in Ferguson, Daily Kos,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/20/1337083/-Echoes-of-COINTELPRO-in-Ferguson)

When Mike Brown was killed by Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson on Saturday, August 9, in Ferguson, Missouri, the outrage
from the community was palpable and started within seconds of the shooting. Not only did dozens of people see or hear the
shooting, which took place at the peak of a hot, sunny day, but hundreds of gathering people witnessed Brown's lifeless body laying
in the middle of the street for four more hours. Protests of raw grief and despair didn't come a few days later, but started that very
day on Canfield Drivevery much fueled by the horrific wails from Brown's parents, friends, and relatives. As soon as the protests
began, something else happened and it has devolved into a much uglier narrative than one could have imagined over two months
ago when Brown was killed. It's as if we've gone back in time. Police and government tactics to intimidate, criminalize, humiliate,
and undermine activists started on Day 1 in Ferguson and have only gotten worse, and the tactics used echo those of an earlier era.
Officially started in 1956 by the FBI, COINTELPRO (short for counterintelligence program)

subversively investigated
and undermined virtually every prominent African-American leader in the country for 15 years.
A veritable Who's Who of leaders, ranging from Malcolm X to Fannie Lou Hamer to Jackie
Robinson to Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King were investigated and interfered with on the
deepest levels. Undercover agents spied on leaders, federal informants were planted inside of
their organizations, disinformation was often deliberately spread with the intention of sowing
discord and strife between leaders and organizations. To this day, huge volumes of the
COINTELPRO documents are redacted, fueling speculation on just what they may be hiding 40 years later. While the
program was officially ended in 1971, echoes of COINTELPRO are reverberating in Ferguson, Missouri,
today and leaders on the ground and supporters around the world report feeling the attempts to
discredit them are constant. Read on for more ....While rumors of FBI involvement in Ferguson
existed for weeks, it wasn't until this Reuters report was released that the FBI was actively
meeting with St. Louis officials "two to three times per week " that it was fully confirmed. Since
then, instances of COINTELPRO-like activities by local police and government officials appear
to have had a dramatic uptick. What you will see below is a regularly updated list of documented cases of police abuse,
humiliation, misinformation, outright lies, coercion, informants, plants, and more. This list will be updated regularly. August 9
Just hours after Brown was killed, angry police dogs, in a throwback to the civil rights movement, were brought to the site of the
shooting to intimidate protestors. August 10 St. Louis Police Chief John Belmar, the day after Mike Brown's death, holds a press
conference about the shooting and tells a fundamental lie about how far Mike Brown's body was found from Darren Wilson's SUV.
In his press conference, on two separate occasions,

Chief Belmar said Mike Brown's body was found 35 feet

away from the SUV, but it was actually found over 100 feet away - a significant difference. August
12 When asked to justify the use of military-grade equipment and weapons, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson,
speaking to the press said, referring to the protestors, "people are using pipe bombs and so
forth." To this very day, not one shred of evidence exists that any protestor ever set off a single
pipe bomb. August 15 At the press conference in which Ferguson Police Chief Jackson first planned to announce
the identity of the officer who killed Brown, he instead released a packet of information with
photos and a link to a video, against the explicit request of the Department of Justice, showing
Brown in a local convenience store allegedly stealing cigars the day he was killed. His implication
throughout the press conference, as he then pivoted to identifying Darren Wilson, was that Wilson was aware that Brown committed
what Jackson was calling "a strong-armed robbery" and that the shooting was related to the "robbery." Later that day, after the
damage was already done, Jackson held a small press conference to clarify that Wilson was unaware of the convenience store
incident when he confronted Brown. Later, changing his story for the third time, Jackson said Wilson "may" have known about the
incident after all, but that he wasn't sure. When

asked why he released the video footage from the

convenience store at the exact moment he planned to release the identity of Wilson, Jackson
claimed that the department was "forced" to do so after repeated Freedom of Information Act
requests were made for that specific information. When asked to produce documents proving

the requests were made, he said they were made verbally and that the department didn't
document them. Not one media outlet to date has reported pressing a request for access to this footage. August 18 The
St. Louis County medical examiner decided not to release its autopsy report on Brown to the
public, but did choose to leak that traces of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, were found
in his system. Not only can traces of THC remain in the body for over 40 days, but marijuana is usually recognized as a calming
agent and not something that makes someone more aggressive. In spite of the reality that its presence in Brown's body could be
completely irrelevant, this basic fact was released anyway. - Christine Byers of the St. Louis Dispatch claims a police source told her
that twelve eyewitnesses have backed up Darren Wilson's story of being attacked. It's her most shared tweet ever. Conservative
media across the country, including Rush Limbaugh, take her tweet as the truth and run with it. Her tweet on this is still live today.

Activism
Activists have reported a modern day Cointelpro
Moore 6/3 -- Senior Editor at Mic and co-managing editor of The Feminist Wire (Darnell L. Moore, June 3, 2015, Why Some Black
Activists Believe They're Being Watched by the Government, http://mic.com/articles/119792/why-some-black-activists-believe-they-re-beingwatched-by-the-government), acui

The home of activist Patrisse Cullors was raided twice last year by law enforcement in Los
Angeles. During one raid, officers told Cullors they were looking for a suspect who had allegedly fled in the direction of her house.
But neither time did Cullors believe the officers had a strong rationale for invading her home. Instead, Cullors told Mic, she
believed the raids were devised by police in response to the public campaigning of Dignity and
Power Now, a grassroots organization Cullors founded that advocates on behalf of incarcerated
people in Los Angeles. She also believes similar surveillance methods are used to monitor many
black activists today. "Surveillance is a huge part of the state's role. Surveillance has been used
for a very long time, but some of the means, like social media account monitoring, are new,"
Cullors, who is also a cofounder of Black Lives Matter, told Mic. "Local enforcement surveils by
tracking the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which allows law enforcement to show up at actions
before they begin." Mic has reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department for comment. Recent statements by FBI
deputy director Mark F. Giuliano may give credence assumptions like Cullors that black activists are being watched. During a press
conference on May 21 prior to the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a white Cleveland police officer involved in the shooting death of two
unarmed black people, Giuliano addressed the potential for continued protests in response to the verdict. "It's outsiders who tend
to stir the pot," Giuliano said. "If we have that intel we pass it directly on to the [Cleveland Police Department]. We have worked with
Ferguson, we've worked with Baltimore and we will work with the Cleveland PD on that very thing. That's what we bring to the
game." Mic has reached out to the FBI's Office of Public Affairs for comment. A history of black surveillance: The "game" Giuliano is
referencing namely, the intricate workings of what some law enforcement units, like New York Police Department, employ in
response to counterterrorism and protests is not novel. Black

movements have historically been watched by

the state, and black activists have long been surveilled in response to their organizing. Half a century
ago, J. Edgar Hoover used his powers as the FBI director to spy on black activists; as part of the counterterrorism
COINTELPRO program in the 1960s and '70s, the FBI tapped phones and embedded spies in
organizations and movements, including the Black Panthers. It is also now well-known that Martin Luther
King, Jr. was extensively monitored by the FBI. "American history explodes with examples of state
surveillance of black people and black activism," Harvard University historian Tim McCarthy
told Mic. "From the Fugitive Slave Law and prohibitions on abolitionist 'propaganda' to black
codes and wiretapping and the militarization of the police, the state has always employed
diverse mechanisms of control in a deliberate effort to derail the long black freedom struggl e.
"Even the notion of U.S. citizenship itself has been a site of policing based principally on race, from the birth of the nation to the age
of Obama." FBI files on black activists like James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Lucille Clifton, W.E.B
DuBois and Louise Thompson Patterson have recently been made public, as part of the FB Eyes Digital Archive. But despite the
preponderance of evidence regarding state surveillance of activists in the past, it can be difficult to prove the existence of actions
many activists assume are taking place in the present. Potentially supporting their claims, however, are current surveillance
protocols of security firms and local police departments. In March, for example, the Intercept obtained documents revealing that
security members at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, monitored local Black Lives Matter activists by using a fake
Facebook account to "befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge." Mall of
America has previously declined to comment on the Facebook monitoring. Mic has reached out to Mall of America's public affairs
department for comment. While unconfirmed, measures that some activists assume are currently taking place, such as using
activists as informants in movements, have been reported before. The New York Times reported the FBI used an Austin-based
activist as an informant to provide details about potential protests leading up to the 2008 Republican National Convention in
Minnesota, for example, though the FBI has yet to confirm or deny the allegation. Personal

stories: Some activists

across the country, such as Ash-Lee Henderson, a black organizer from Tennessee, have
personal testimonies of surveillance. Last year, Henderson participated in a series of direct actions in her hometown of
Chattanooga led by Concerned Citizens for Justice, a grassroots organization that fights for black liberation and an end to police
crimes, criminalization and mass incarceration. The actions were designed to bring attention to various forms of state-sanctioned
violence, including police abuse, affecting black people across the country. Henderson was arrested while participating in a protest

on the National Day of Protest to End Police Brutality in October 2014. After her arrest, she recalled learning about a private
Facebook group created by police officers in Tennessee and those supportive of police called "Police Lives Matter." "Police and their
family members were constantly making threats and mean-spirited jokes [aimed at activists] on their page," Henderson told Mic.
She said one police officer made a meme of her, which meant her image had been shared among other officers and that they would
now know her by name and likeness. She obtained another meme of a different image of herself shortly after, and became more
convinced that activists were being watched. Henderson

suspects she'd been targeted for speaking publicly

about police abuse a suspicion exacerbated by a series of events following her arrest. "During
a day of action in December, my mother and 3-year-old niece were followed by the police from
our church to my house (about a 30-minute drive), because they were in my car." Henderson said she
believed "the police were attempting to see where our next action was. In the month of December alone, members of our leadership
team were pulled over and harassed by police officers at least once a week in two different states." The Chattanooga Police
Department told Mic, "While we do not routinely follow specific hashtags, we do review all forms of publicly available information
when current or anticipated events warrant it. We will continue to make every attempt to stay informed of potential exercises of free
speech in an effort to supply activists, marchers, organizers and citizens with a safe environment to express their views."

Interference: The public must consider the long history of state surveillance and suppression of
black movements as a specific problem of anti-black state violence and racial profiling. At stake
is the extent to which state surveillance measures, whether they mean social media monitoring
or following specific activists' actions, violate activists' First Amendment Rights, particularly the
right to peacefully protest. Keegan Stephan writes at AlterNet, "For the FBI to interfere with civic act through their
information-gathering techniques and by passing that information to police forces that cannot be trusted to use it without infringing
on people's First Amendment rights is a clear violation of the FBI's own mandate." Despite potential surveillance, activists are
determined to continue their work. Their continued quest for liberation should encourage contemporary activists following their
example. "These allegations will not curtail the movement and only provide further evidence of the embedded institutional
inequities," Monica Dennis, an organizer with Black Lives Matter in New York City, told Mic. "Furthermore, our

movements
are rooted in the black radical traditions of resilience and creative resistance which simply
means we are capable of quickly adapting and shifting despite external efforts to disrupt our
organizing."

The undermining of activism continues to the presentNSAs

domestic surveillance
Kayalli 14B.A. from UC Berkeley, with a major in Cultural Anthropology (Nadia, Feb. 13,
The History of Surveillance and the Black Community, Electronic Frontier Foundation,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/history-surveillance-and-black-community)

Government surveillance programs, most infamously the FBIs COINTELPRO, targeted Black
Americans fighting against segregation and structural racism in the 1950s and 60s.
COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program, was started in 1956 by the FBI and
continued until 1971. The program was a systemic attempt to infiltrate, spy on, and disrupt
activists in the name of national security. While it initially focused on the Communist Party, in
the 1960s its focus expanded to include a wide swathe of activists, with a strong focus on the
Black Panther Party and civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI papers show
that in 1962 the FBI started and rapidly continued to gravitate toward Dr. King. This was
ostensibly because the FBI believed black organizing was being influenced by communism. In
1963 FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan recommended increased coverage of communist
influence on the Negro. However, the FBIs goal in targeting Dr. King was clear: to find
avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader, because the FBI
was concerned that he might become a messiah. The FBI subjected Dr. King to a variety of
tactics, including bugging his hotel rooms, photographic surveillance, and physical observation
of Kings movements by FBI agents. The FBI's actions went beyond spying on Dr. King, however.
Using information gained from that surveillance, the FBI sent him anonymous letters

attempting to blackmail him into suicide. The agency also attempted to break up his marriage
by sending selectively edited personal moments he shared with friends and women to his wife.
The FBI also specifically targeted the Black Panther Party with the intention of destroying it.
They infiltrated the Party with informants and subjected members to repeated interviews.
Agents sent anonymous letters encouraging violence between street gangs and the Panthers in
various cities, which resulted in the killings of four BPP members and numerous beatings and
shootings, as well as letters sowing internal dissension in the Panther Party. The agency also
worked with police departments to harass local branches of the Party through raids and vehicle
stops. In one of the most disturbing examples of this, the FBI provided information to the
Chicago Police Department that aided in a raid on BPP leader Fred Hamptons apartment. The
raid ended with the Chicago Police shooting Hampton dead. The FBI was not alone in targeting
civil rights leaders. The NSA also engaged in domestic spying that included Dr. King. In an eerily
prescient statement, Senator Walter Mondale said he was concerned that the NSA could be
used by President 'A' in the future to spy upon the American people, to chill and interrupt
political dissent. The Church Committee was created in response to these and other public
scandals, and was charged with getting to the bottom of the government's surveillance
overreach. In response to its findings, Congress passed new laws to provide privacy safeguards,
including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But ever since these safeguards were put in
place, the intelligence community has tried to weaken or operate around them. The NSA
revelations show the urgent need to reform the laws governing surveillance and to rein in the
intelligence community. Today were responding to those domestic surveillance abuses by an
unrestrained intelligence branch. The overreach weve seen in the past underscores the need for
reform. Especially during Black History Month, lets not forget the speech-stifling history of US
government spying that has targeted communities of color.

Fusion Centers
Fusion center surveillance regimes disproportionately monitor black
students.
Monahan 11Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill (Torin, The Future of Security? Surveillance Operations at Homeland Security
Fusion Centers , Social Justice/Global Options, Vol. 37, No. 2/3 (120-121), Imperial Obama: A
Kinder, Gentler Empire?, 2010-11, pp. 88)//FJ
Given the secretive nature of fusion centers, including their resistance to freedom of information
requests (German and Stanley, 2008; Stokes, 2008), the primary way in which the public has
learned about their activities is through leaked or unintentionally disseminated documents. For
instance, a "terrorism threat assessment" produced by Virginia's fusion center surfaced in 2009
and sparked outrage because it identified students at colleges and universities- especially at
historically black universities- as posing a potential terrorist threat (Sizemore,
2009). In the report, universities were targeted because of their diversity, which is seen as
threatening because it might inspire "radical ization." The report says: "Richmond's history
as the capital city of the Confederacy, combined with the city's current demographic
concentration ofAfrican- American residents, contributes to the continued presence of racebased extremist groups. .[and student groups] are recognized as a radicalization node for almost
every type of extremist group" (Virginia Fusion Center, 2009: 9). Although the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) and others have rightly decried the racial-profiling implications of such
biased claims being codified in an official document, the report itself supports the interpretation
that minority students will be and probably have been targeted for surveillance. The
report argues: "In order to detect and deter terrorist attacks, it is essential that information
regarding suspected terrorists and suspicious activity in Virginia be closely monitored and
reported in a timely manner" (Ibid: 4). Other groups identified as potential threats by the
Virginia fusion center were environmentalists, militia members, and students at Regent
University, the Christian university founded by evangelical preacher Pat Robertson (Sizemore,
2009).

Jurisdictional overlap and exemptions from freedom of information

laws allow fusion centers to racially profile black people.
Monahan 11Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill (Torin, The Future of Security? Surveillance Operations at Homeland Security
Fusion Centers , Social Justice/Global Options, Vol. 37, No. 2/3 (120-121), Imperial Obama: A
Kinder, Gentler Empire?, 2010-11, pp. 91)//FJ
One important issue here is that fusion centers occupy ambiguous organizational positions.
Many of them are located in police departments or are combined with FBI Joint Terrorism Task
Forces, but their activities are supposed to be separate and different from the routine activities
of the police or the FBI. A related complication is that fusion center employees often occupy
multiple organizational roles (e.g., police officers or National Guard members and fusion center
analysts), which can lead to an understandable, but nonetheless problematic, blurring of
professional identities, rules of conduct, and systems of accountability. Whereas in 2010 DHS
and the Department of Justice responded to concerns about profiling by implementing a civil
liberties certification requirement for fusion centers, public oversight and accountability of
fusion centers are becoming even more difficult and unlikely because of a concerted

effort to exempt fusion centers from freedom of information requests. For example,
according to a police official, Virginia legislators were coerced into passing a 2008 law that
exempted its fusion center from the Freedom of Information Act; in this instance, federal
officials threatened to withhold classified intelligence from the state's fusion center and police if
they did not pass such a law (German and Stanley, 2008). Another tactic used by fusion center
representatives to thwart open-records requests is to claim that there is no "material product"
for them to turn over because they only "access," rather than "retain," information (Hylton,
2009).

The racial profiling that occurs in fusion centers is reminiscent of the

COINTELPRO program.
Monahan 11Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill (Torin, The Future of Security? Surveillance Operations at Homeland Security
Fusion Centers , Social Justice/Global Options, Vol. 37, No. 2/3 (120-121), Imperial Obama: A
Kinder, Gentler Empire?, 2010-11, pp. 91-92)//FJ
Although it may be tempting to view these cases of fusion center missteps and infractions as
isolated examples, they are probably just the tip of the iceberg. A handful of other cases has
surfaced recently in which fusion centers in California, Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania, and
Georgia have recommended peace activists, Muslim-rights groups, and/or environmentalists be
profiled (German, 2009; Wolfe, 2009). The Texas example reveals the ways in which the
flexibility of fusion centers affords the incorporation of xenophobic and racist beliefs.
In 2009, the North Central Texas Fusion System produced a report that argued that the United
States is especially vulnerable to terrorist infiltration because the country is too tolerant and
accommodating of religious difference, especially of Islam. Through several indicators, the
report lists supposed signs that the country is gradually being invaded and transformed:
"Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis refuse to carry passengers who have alcohol in their
possession; the Indianapolis airport in 2007 installed footbaths to accommodate Muslim prayer;
public schools schedule prayer breaks to accommodate Muslim students; pork is banned in the
workplace; etc." (North Central Texas Fusion System, 2009: 4). Because "the threats to Texas
are significant," the fusion center advises keeping an eye out for Muslim civil liberties groups
and sympathetic individuals, organizations, or media that might carry their message: hip-hop
bands, social networking sites, online chat forums, blogs, and even the U.S. Department of
Treasury (Ibid). Recent infiltration of peace groups seems to reproduce some of the sordid
history of political surveillance of U.S. citizens, such as the FBI and CIA's
COINTELPRO program, which targeted civil rights leaders and those peacefully protesting
against the Vietnam War, among others (Churchill and Vander Wall, 2002). A contemporary
case involves a U.S. Army agent who infiltrated a nonviolent, anti-war protest group in Olympia,
Washington, in 2007. A military agent spying on civilians likely violated the Posse Comitatus
Act. Moreover, this agent actively shared intelligence with the Washington State Fusion Center,
which shared it more broadly (Anderson, 2010). According to released documents, intelligence
representatives from as far away as New Jersey were kept apprised of the spying: In a 2008 email to an Olympia police officer, Thomas Glapion, Chief of Investigations and Intelligence at
New Jersey's McGuire Air Force Base, wrote: "You are now part of my Intel network. I'm still
looking at possible protests by the PMR SDS MDS and other left wing antiwar groups so any
Intel you have would be appreciated.... In return if you need anything from the Armed Forces I
will try to help you as well" (Ibid:. 4). Given that political surveillance under COINTELPRO is
widely considered to be a dark period in U.S. intelligence history, the fact that fusion

centers may be contributing to similar practices today makes it all the more
important to subject them to public scrutiny and oversight

Welfare
Disengagement is privilege those on welfare dont have a choice
Eubanks 14 -- professor in the Department of Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, and fellow at
the Rockefeller Institute of Government (Virginia Eubanks, January 15, 2014, Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities.,
http://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities), acui

If people remain concerned about the impact of surveillance on their lives they may voluntarily withdraw from the digital world.
Gilliom suggests we might even see a hipster social trend where disengagement becomes a form of cache. But digital

disconnection can simply be an excuse for maintaining ignorance; many people dont have the
option to disengage. For example, public assistance applicants must sign a personal information
disclosure statement to permit social services to share their social security number, criminal
history, personal, financial, medical and family information with other public agencies and
private companies. Technically, you can refuse to sign and withhold your social security number.
But if you do not sign, you cannot access food stamps, transportation vouchers, cash assistance,
childcare, emergency housing assistance, and other basic necessities for survival, or even talk to
a caseworker about available community resources.

Islamophobia
(1AC Card?)Surveillance regime relies on the constant construction of
racial threatsthe logic that caused surveillance of black radicalism
has been imposed on surveillance of Muslims.
Kumar, Professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies @
Rutgers University, 15
(Deepa, and Arun Kundnani, who teaches at New York University, Race, surveillance, and
empire, International Socialist Review Issue 96, http://isreview.org/issue/96/racesurveillance-and-empire)
The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux published another story for The
Intercept, which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people on the
National Counterterrorism Centers no-fly list had increased tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified
documents showed that the NCC maintains a database of terrorism suspects worldwidethe
Terrorist Identities Datamart Environmentwhich contained a million names by 2013, double
the number four years earlier, and increasingly includes biometric data. This database includes
20,800 persons within the United States who are disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn,
Michigan, with its significant Arab American population.2 By any objective standard, these were
major news stories that ought to have attracted as much attention as the earlier revelations. Yet
the stories barely registered in the corporate media landscape. The tech community, which
had earlier expressed outrage at the NSAs mass digital surveillance, seemed to be indifferent
when details emerged of the targeted surveillance of Muslims. The explanation for this reaction
is not hard to find. While many object to the US government collecting private data on
ordinary people, Muslims tend to be seen as reasonable targets of suspicion. A July
2014 poll for the Arab American Institute found that 42 percent of Americans think it is
justifiable for law enforcement agencies to profile Arab Americans or American Muslims.3 In
what follows, we argue that the debate on national security surveillance that has emerged in the
United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place
questions of race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for
the ways national security surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped
up to legitimize this surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted
racialized groups that have been most effective in making sense of it and organizing opposition.
This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the
history of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national security surveillance in
the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire. The argument
is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of moments in the history of national
security surveillance in North America, tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital,
from the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is on how race as a
sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in the United States through
systems of surveillance. We show how throughout the history of the United States the systematic
collection of information has been interwoven with mechanisms of racial oppression. From
Anglo settler-colonialism, the establishment of the plantation system, the postCivil War
reconstruction era, the US conquest of the Philippines, and the emergence of the national
security state in the post-World War II era, to neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era,
racialized surveillance has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire. It is, however,
important to note that the production of the racial other at these various moments is

conjunctural and heterogenous. That is, the racialization of Native Americans, for instance,
during the settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of African
Americans. Further, the dominant construction of Blackness under slavery is different from the
construction of Blackness in the neoliberal era; these ideological shifts are the product of
specific historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at various moments, determine who
will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and for how long. In the second part, we
turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape
national security surveillance practices. The intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has
been carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident
movements such as Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a
threat to the neoliberal order. This is not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a
constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s
were passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French
Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied for Washingtons army in the
American Revolution. State surveillance regimes have always sought to monitor and penalize a
wide range of dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no
means all of these cases. Our focus here is on the production of racialized others as security
threats and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations. Further, the current system
of mass surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of
racialized security surveillance that feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the
Obama administration and that disproportionately target African Americans, contributing to
their mass incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as the New Jim Crow.4 We
argue that racialized groupings are produced in the very act of collecting information about
certain groups deemed as threats by the national security statethe Brown terrorist, the
Black and Brown drug dealer and user, and the immigrant who threatens to steal jobs. We
conclude that security has become one of the primary means through which racism is
ideologically reproduced in the post-racial, neoliberal era. Drawing on W. E. B. Duboiss
notion of the psychological wage, we argue that neoliberalism has been legitimized in part
through racialized notions of security that offer a new psychological wage as compensation for
the decline of the social wage and its reallocation to homeland security.

A discussion of post-9/11 Muslim surveillance is inseparable from the

larger history of racial surveillance in the US.
Kumar, Professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies @
Rutgers University, 15
(Deepa, and Arun Kundnani, who teaches at New York University, Race, surveillance, and
empire, International Socialist Review Issue 96, http://isreview.org/issue/96/racesurveillance-and-empire)
Discussions of the surveillance of Muslim Americans usually begin with 9/11 and make little
attempt to locate them in the longer history of racial surveillance in the United
States. Yet the continuities are striking, particularly for Black Muslims, who have been seen as
extremists and subject to national security monitoring since the 1940s. Already in the late 1960s,
Arab American student groups involved in supporting the Palestinian national movement had
come under surveillance and, in 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives known as Operation
Boulder that enabled the CIA and FBI to coordinate with the pro-Israel lobby in monitoring Arab activists.
By the 1980s, but especially after 9/11, a process was under way in which Muslimness was racialized

through surveillanceanother scene of the states production of racial subjects. Since all racisms are socially and politically
constructed rather than resting on the reality of any biological race, it is perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with
Muslimness (forms of dress, rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers.58 This

signification then serves to

indicate a people supposedly prone to violence and terrorism, which , under the War on Terror,
justifies a whole panoply of surveillance and criminalization , from arbitrary arrests, to
indefinite detention, deportation, torture, solitary confinement, the use of secret evidence, and sentencing for crimes that we
would not be jailed for, such as speech, donations to charitable organizations, and other such acts considered material support for
terrorism.

The construction of the surveillance state not only legitimizes

Islamaphobic violence at home but abroad as well.
Kumar, Professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies @
Rutgers University, 15
(Deepa, and Arun Kundnani, who teaches at New York University, Race, surveillance, and
empire, International Socialist Review Issue 96, http://isreview.org/issue/96/racesurveillance-and-empire)
Significantly, the

racial underpinnings of the War on Terror sustain not just domestic repression but
foreign abusesthe wars vast death toll in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere
could not be sustained without the dehumanization of its Muslim victims. As before, racism at
home goes hand in hand with empire abroad. Counterinsurgency thinking that informed the strategies
used in Iraq and Afghanistan in the face of popular insurrection are also brought home to be deployed in relation to Muslim
American populations. Winning hearts and minds, the counterinsurgency slogan first introduced by British colonialists in Malaya,
and then adopted by the US military in Vietnam, reappears as the phrase that state planners invoke to prevent extremism among
young Muslims in the United States. Counterinsurgency in this context means total surveillance of Muslim populations, and building
law enforcement agency partnerships with good Muslims, those who are willing to praise US policy and become sources of
information on dissenters, making life very difficult for bad Muslims or those who refuse (in ways reminiscent of the good and
bad Indians). It is a way of ensuring that the knowledge Muslims tend to have of how US foreign policy harms the Middle East,
Africa, and Asia is not shared with others. The

real fear of the national security state is not the stereotypical

Muslim fanatic but the possibility that other groups within US society might build alliances with
Muslims in opposition to empire. The various measures that the US national security system has
adopted in recent years flow from an analysis of Muslim radicalization , which assumes that certain lawabiding activities associated with religious ideology are indicators of extremism and potential violence. Following the preventive
logic discussed above,

the radicalization model claims to be able to predict which individuals are not
terrorists now but might be at some later date. Behavioral, cultural, and ideological signals are assumed to reveal
who is at risk of turning into a terrorist at some point in the future.59 For example, in the FBIs radicalization model, such things as
growing a beard, starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and becoming alienated from ones former life are listed as indicators,
as is increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause.60 Thus,

signifiers of Muslimness such as

facial hair, dress, and so on are turned into markers of suspicion for a surveillance gaze
that is also a racial (and gendered) gaze; it is through such routine bureaucratic
mechanisms that counterterrorism practices involve the social construction of racial others .

Surveillance of Muslims relies on the same logic of COINTELPROthe

two cant be separated from one another.
Kumar, Professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies @
Rutgers University, 15
(Deepa, and Arun Kundnani, who teaches at New York University, Race, surveillance, and
empire, International Socialist Review Issue 96, http://isreview.org/issue/96/racesurveillance-and-empire)

Official acceptance of the model of radicalization implies a need for mass surveillance of Muslim
populations and collection of as much data as possible on every aspect of their lives in order to try to spot the
supposed warning signs that the models list. And this is exactly the approach that law enforcement agencies introduced. At the New
York Police Department, for instance, the instrumentalizing of radicalization models led to the mass, warrantless surveillance of
every aspect of Muslim life. Dozens of mosques in New York and New Jersey and hundreds more hot spots, such as restaurants,
cafs, bookshops, community organizations, and student associations were listed as potential security risks. Undercover officers and
informants eavesdropped at these locations of interest to listen for radical political and religious opinions. A NYPD Moroccan
Initiative compiled a list of every known Moroccan taxi driver. Muslims who changed their names to sound more traditionally
American or who adopted Arabic names were investigated and catalogued in secret NYPD intelligence files. It is clear that none of
this activity was based on investigating reasonable suspicions of criminal activity. This surveillance produced no criminal leads
between 2006 and 2012, and probably did not before or after.61 As of 2008, the FBI had a roster of 15,000 paid informants62 and,
according to Senator Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the bureau had 10,000 counterterrorism intelligence
analysts in 2013.63 The proportion of these informants and analysts who are assigned to Muslim populations in the United States is
unknown but is likely to be substantial. The

kinds of infiltration and provocation tactics that had

been practiced against Black radicals in the 1960s are being repeated today . What
has changed are the rationales used to justify them: it is no longer the threat of Black nationalist
subversion, but the threat of Muslim radicalization that is invoked. With new provisions in the Clinton
administrations 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the FBI can launch investigations of a suspected individual or
organization simply for providing material support to terrorisma vague term that could include ideological activity unrelated to
any actual plot to carry out violence. While

COINTELPRO violated federal laws, today similar kinds of

investigation and criminalization of political dissent can be carried out
legitimately in the name of countering terrorism. For Muslim populations on the
receiving end of state surveillance programs designed to prevent radicalization, everyday life increasingly
resembles the patterns described in classic accounts of authoritarianism. There is the same sense of
not knowing whom to trust and choosing ones words with special care when discussing politics,
and of the arbitrariness and unpredictability of state power.64 With the 2011 leaking of some NYPD
intelligence files, individual Muslims have had the disturbing experience of seeing their names
mentioned in government files, along with details of their private lives . Numerous businesses, cafs,
restaurants, and mosques in New York are aware that the NYPD considers them hotspots and deploys informants to monitor them.
And the recent outing of a small number of NYPD informants has meant some Muslims in New York have found that relationships
they thought of as genuine friendships were actually covert attempts to gather intelligence.65

Method

Genealogy/Counterhistory Good
Counterhistory is key the constitutive unraveling of modernity
requires that we understand how to navigate the contradictory,
unsettled narratives we are presented with
Brown 1 (Wendy, First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Politics Out of History (2001), Princeton University Press)
What, other than anarchy or free fall, is harbored by the destabilization of constitutive cultural or
political narratives? When funda mental premises of an order begin to erode, or simply begin to
be exposed as fundamental premises, what reactive political formations emergeand what
anxieties, tensions, or binds do they carry? These studies examine political theoretical practices in an era of
profound political disorientation. They are concerned with how we navigate within the tattered narratives
of modernity, and especially of liberalism, in our time. Working from the presumption that
certain crucial collective stories in modernity have been disturbed or undermined in recent
decades, they presume as well that such stories remain those by which we live, even in their
broken and less-than-legitimate-or- legitimating form. I do not argue that the constitutive
narratives of modernity are be hind us, nor that they have been superseded by other narratives.
Rather, in casting certain critical features of modern regimes as trou bled yet persistent, I suggest that their troubled condition has
signifi cant political implications for contemporary practices of political jus tice. For example, while

many have lost

confidence in a historiography bound to a notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have
coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and
where we are going. Similarly, while both sover eignly and right have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced t hem as sources of political agency and sites of justice claims.
Personal conviction and political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level epistemological ground, hut we have not jettisoned
them as sources of political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have ceased to believe in many of the constitutive
premises undergirding modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if these premises
still held, and as if the political-cultural narratives based on them were intact. Our attachment to these funda mental modernist
preceptsprogress, right, sovereignty, free will, moral truth, reasonwould seem to resemble the epistemological structure of the
fetish as Freud described it: I know, but still . . .M l What happens when the beliefs that bind a political order become fetishes?

From each of the narratives, considered more fully below, that have grown unstable in our time, certain
key political signifiers emerge that provide the terms through which the chapters of this book are orga nized:
morality (as the basis for political values and judgments), desire (as potentially emancipatory in its aim), power (as logical in its
organi zation and mechanics), conviction (as the basis for knowledge and political action), and progress (as the basis for political
futurity). My purpose with these terms is not simply to counsel their rejection or replacement; rather the aim is to

develop a
critical understanding of their binding function in a certain political and epistemological story,
of how this function has been disrupted as the story itself begins to stutter and fragment, and of
what kinds of troubling political forma tion such a disruption provokes. However, this undertaking is not
only retrospective and critical: these studies also consider what political and intellectual possibilities might be generated from our
current predicament. When

a disintegrating political or cultural narrative seems irreplaceable,

panicked and reactionary clutching is inevitable; when this perceived irreplaceability refers to a
narrative or formation actually lost, melancholy sets in. So these analyses seek to attenuate
reactionary and melancholic responses by considering possible alternatives to what has been
destabilized: I ask how we might conceive and chart power in terms other than logic, develop
historical political consciousness in terms other than progress, articulate our political
investments without notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political judgment in
terms that depart from moralism and conviction. These speculations do not, of course, result in
comprehensive or stable substitutes for their predecessors. Rather, they mark partial and
provisional orientations for a different inhabitation of the political world; they limn a different
genre of political consciousness and political purpose. And I heir wellspring is not simply redress of
incoherence; rather, they issue from an appreciation of the need for reprieve from a low-lying despair in late modern life, a despair

about the very capacity to grasp our condition and craft our future. Two

seemingly opposite effects attend the

emancipation of history (and the present) from a progressive narrative and the dispossession of
political principles and truths from solid epistemological and onto logical grounds. On the one hand,
there is certain to be a wash of insecurity, anxiety, and hopelessness across a political landscape for merly kept dry by the floodgates
of foundationalism and metaphysics. On

the other hand, out of the breakup of this seamless

historiography and ground of settled principles, new political and epistemological possibilities
emerge. As the past becomes less easily reduced to a single set of meanings and effects, as the
present is forced to orient itself amid so much history and so many histories, history itself
emerges as both weightier and less deterministic than ever before. Thus, even as the future may
now appear more uncertain, less predictable, and per haps even less promising than one figured
by the terms of modernism, these same features suggest in the present a porousness and
uncharted potential that can lead to futures outside the lines of modernist pre sumptions. This
book lives in those paradoxessimultaneously tak ing the measure of our anxieties about what we have lost and kindling possibility
from what those losses may release us to imagine. The

stories constitutive of modernity are many, complex,

and vary significantly by time and place; those that more narrowly undergird die doctrines and practices of liberalism
are no tidier. But a few stories crucial to both, generating both the building blocks of the political and
its temporality, may be capturable in a few broad brush strokes . Teleological and Progressive History. The
conviction that history has reason, purpose, and direction is fundamental to modernity. This be- lief has a temporal dimension:
modernity itself is imagined to have emerged from a more primitive, religious, caste- and kin-bound, in egalitarian, unemancipated,
bloody, unenlightened, and stateless time. And it has a corresponding geographic and demographic dimension: Europe is presumed
to be at the heart of this emergence, with other parts of the globe (to various degrees) lagging behind. Modernity is incoherent
without both of these dimensions, as is liberalism, the sig nal political formation that operationalizes each dimension as a foun
dational political truth.

By piecing together fragments of black survival and resistance, our

counterhistory slips through the cracks of knowledge-power regimes
Fiske 96 (John, Professor emeritus of Letters and Science/Communication Arts at Cutin
University. Black Bodies of Knowledge: Notes on an Effective History (Spring 1996), Cultural
Critique, no. 33)
The effective history, constituted by the interplay of these fragments, has characteristics
that clearly differentiate it from official history and that official history might use to discredit it.
Its motivation is not objective but explicitly political. It knows that the truth that it seeks is not
merely lying overlooked and unnoticed by official history, but rather that the truth has been
deliberately hidden, and that hiding it is another application of the racial power that would
cultivate the AIDS virus in a Black woman's body. The effectiveness of a genocidal strategy
depends directly upon the success of it remaining hidden. The stolen fragments,
forming the material of this history, effectively render the hidden visible. There is no need to understand
them in terms of their explicit contextual relations-the rest of the documents from which they are extracted are discarded as
valueless. In fact, in general, the document as a whole is not interpreted and not included in the counterhistory. Occasionally, when
the discards are "included" in the counterhistory, they are typically treated as "evidence" of a white cover-up. The London Times
report detailing the coincidence of AIDS and the WHO's vaccination campaign in Africa pointedly includes the statement that "no
blame can be attached to the WHO." When Zears Miles reads this out over the radio, Kantako's laughter is both delighted and
skeptical. The

lack of direct evidence of the WHO's intention to spread AIDS may indicate either
that the intention did not exist or that it has been successfully hidden. Black Liberation Radio
has no doubts about its position in this dilemma. Interpretation depends upon the construction
of relationships. Events, objects, statements do not carry their own meaning but are made to
mean by the relations in which they are involved. I am here referring to the double process of articulation that
Stuart Hall identifies as central to the making of meaning in "On Postmodernism..." The one side of articulation is a process of
flexible linking while the other is that of speaking or of disseminating the meaning that is produced by the linkage. The fact that
white civilian hospitals use Black bodies for research may be linked to medical science, in which case, the Blackness of the bodies

does not mean anything; or, on the other hand, it may be linked to the Chemical and Biological Warfare Department's search for an
"ethnic weapon," in which case, it means everything. For instance, one of the "facts" of the Tuskegee experiment was the observation
that Blacks appeared to be more susceptible than whites to syphilis, and there was interest in discovering if this was the case, and if
so, why. Articulated

with and in the humane discourse of medicine, this "interest" easily leads to
the conclusion that such a physiological difference could be used to devise treatments for Blacks
and, thus, minimize the relative difference in the health of Blacks and whites. However, when this
is articulated with the facts that "health differences" between whites and Blacks are increasing ,
not decreasing-the differential spread of AIDS is joined, for example, by differences in life expectancy, infant mortality, and
hypertension-and when these linked "facts" are articulated within a knowledge of genocidal strategy, the original "fact" means
something very different. Facts

never exist independently or in isolation but rather in articulation with

others. Their very facticity is a function and product of their discursive relations. Reusing them,
therefore, involves disarticulating them from one set of relations and rearticulating them into
another. They are never simply inert, like pebbles on a beach, waiting to be picked up by whoever finds them first. While no
fact has any essential existence or meaning of its own, it always has the potential for dis- and
rearticulation. Evaluating a fact's significance, which always involves assessing both how much
it matters and what it means, is, thus, a matter of evaluating its potential articulations, their
social location and pattern of interests, and their predicted or interpreted effectivity. The
constitution of a historical fact is an articulation. Stealing facts, therefore, involves
disarticulation. Writing a history through and of stolen fragments may also be understood by de
Certeau's metaphor of poaching as described in The Practice of Everyday Life. The terrain of knowledge is
owned and controlled by the enemy; the poacher darts in and out, taking what he or she needs ,
extracting it not only from the physical territory of the landowner, but also from his social relations-ownership,
legality, exclusivity. The researcher as poacher has to avoid being caught by the
articulation or ways of knowing of the owner; he or she has to guard against being
captured by the discursive and social relations within which the quarry is already held.
Producing an effective history, then, is necessarily a practice of social antagonism; it is a
counterpractice. Poaching information from the Times involves avoiding capture by the knowledge that the WHO is not to
blame for the explosion of AIDS in Africa and by the knowledge that the intention of the WHO is to improve the life expectancy of
Africans.

Only broken, non-linear narration can approach the way that slavery
continues to rupture into the present
Coleman 13 (Taiyon Jeanette, Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Minnesota. Out of
the Frying Pan and into the Fire: Narrative Past-Time as a Temporal Site of Racialized Identity
Deconstruction (May 2013), University of Minnesota)
Racialized, foundational, and cumulative, cultural, and social identities and their arbitrary signs and symbol relationships of
meanings were established in the past and continue to act upon the present. If

the legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade

and slavery in the Americas still has a direct impact on the present day lives of its descendants,
viewing the past as over and done with and as inaccessible is not possible. Because this past
along with subsequent events has so determined racialized identities, it is hard to place those
events autonomously in the past. Consider current and contemporary legal challenges to past-time historic Civil Rights
legislation and ideals in America that worked to not only racialize American identities but also worked to promote legalized equity,
which many thought at one time were (the Civil Rights laws) unchangeable: Voting Rights Act, a new Jim Crow, re-segregation of
public schools, Affirmative Action, housing and lending laws.33 Just as a viewer can deconstruct the narrative meanings of the
photograph of Rodney Kings location (read space) of his accidental and tragic death with a detoured narrative to past events that
constructed Kings identity and influenced his choices and death, a

non-linear narrative is an oppositional act to a

dominant, traditional, and Western narrative. These oppositional and non-learning narratives create a breach
when they return to a past moment. I define breach as a space or a rupture in identity
experience, where an opportunity for witnessing, understanding, self-reflection, and reaching

new, different meanings can occur. Consider the breach in the African American Diaspora subject context: the Atlantic
Slave Trade, the institutions of slavery in the Americas, Jim Crow, segregation, violence and repression, legacies of difference,
notions of inferiority, and any type of experience which denotes otherness.34 These

breaks of returning to the past,

like repetition in hip-hop (a musical form of the African Diaspora), have a rhythmic complexity [that]
breaks [and suspends] time, which Christopher Small notes dissolves the past and the future into
one eternal present.35 Utilizing past-time as a critical reading of narrative structure and as methodology of ascertaining
and comprehending marginalized identities and experiences of African and African American Diaspora people. The following
literary review shows the epistemological function of past-time at the same time as it works to define and shape these past-time
moments or breaches, which are but not limited to the spatial, the spiritual, the physical (the body), the emotional, the political, the
sexual, and the social. For example, Phillis Wheatleys earliest poem, On Being Brought from Africa to America is a first person
narrative where the speaker looks back to the past-time outside of the poem in order to convey an understanding of the speaker
(Wheatley) and her realities. The poem reference the horror of her kidnapping from Africa and from her family as a young girl. To
understand the full significance of the present poems meaning in 1773, the reader had to understand Phillis Wheatleys past
narrative as a kidnapped African child at the age of seven or eight who is losing her teeth.36 Consider

the early slave

narratives. All of them are written after the act of slavery itself for its subjects (authors) but
create a delay or temporization of the experience that allows readers to consider their narratives
and their arguments for the abolition of slavery and freedom. Most of the African American
slave narratives, like Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, are started in a present
moment before shifting the narrative to the past in order to affect how readers view the
institution of American slavery and the humanity of those enslaved in the present moment.
African American literature post slavery also subverts time in order to convey identity and experiences. In James Weldon Johnsons
The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, the preface tells that the reader is given a glimpse behind the scenes of this racedrama."37 Johnsons novel, written like an autobiography, works to show readers how race in America at the turn of the century is
constructed. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston starts the novels action at the end of the story by the
protagonist, Janie, telling her best friend, Phoebe Watson, about what happened to her and Tea Cake while they were away; the
entire novel is a retelling of events in the past. Beloved, Jazz, and the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison all enter into past historical and
psychological events to explain current tragedies and psychological conditions. Flight to Canada by Ismael Reed uses a timetraveling, neo-slave narrative to subvert traditional notions of linear time in order to express a literary breaking with social and
racial identities and paradigms constructed by Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin. Corregidora by Gayle Jones urges the
protagonist to use memory and the past and evidence to anchor identity. John Edgar Widemans Philadelphia Fire revisits fictional
breaches of the real Move bombing in 1985 through the character Cudjoe who is fleeing the past. The Known World by Edward P
Jones is historical fiction set in antebellum America, and its plot is centered to the views and identities of African Americans who
own slaves. Ultimately, Jones

novel asks readers to reconsider the very systemic and raced notions of
the motivations and methods perpetuation the institution of American Slavery, its participants,
and its tie to an American racial identity and past that actively defined, at one time, successful
US citizenship. Critical work in this area is interdisciplinary and groundbreaking in its
scholarship and structural format, being oppositional not only in its topic but also in its
formation when considering these breaches in the African and African American Diaspora
identities and experiences. These breaks are systemic to the very experience of African peoples
in the Diaspora of the Americas, and the interdisciplinary aesthetics of the Africa and African
American Diaspora has always disrupted constructions of identity, reality, and time,
especially when dominant narratives of national identity have rendered Africans
and African Americans historically and generationally invisible. My project contributes to
these discussions through arguing that the formation of non-linear time in a novel of the African Diaspora
is simultaneously a structural device for textual analysis and a methodology of ascertaining and
comprehending marginalized identities and experiences outside of the text. The
breaking of time in the text and the subjects of breaching metaphorically and allegorically
represents the physical, mental, and spatial events that affected, collectively, African and African
American people.

Information is not neutral the 1AC counterhistory is an explicitly

political contestation to bring what the state hides to the surface
Fiske 96 (John Fiske, Spring 1996, Black Bodies of Knowledge: Notes on an Effective History, Cultural Critique No. 33 p. 203 205),
acui

The effective history, constituted by the interplay of these fragments, has characteristics that
clearly differentiate it from official history and that official history might use to discredit it. Its
motivation is not objective but explicitly political. It knows that the truth that it seeks is not
merely lying overlooked and unnoticed by official history, but rather that the truth has been
deliberately hidden, and that hiding it is another application of the racial power that would
cultivate the AIDS virus in a Black woman's body. The effectiveness of a genocidal strategy
depends directly upon the success of it remaining hidden. The stolen fragments, forming the
material of this history, effectively render the hidden visible. There is no need to understand
them in terms of their explicit contextual relations-the rest of the documents from which they
are extracted are discarded as valueless. In fact, in general, the document as a whole is not interpreted and not
included in the counterhistory. Occasionally, when the discards are "included" in the counterhistory, they are typically treated as
"evidence" of a white cover-up. The London Times report detailing the coincidence of AIDS and the WHO's vaccination campaign in
Africa pointedly includes the statement that "no blame can be attached to the WHO." When Zears Miles reads this out over the
radio, Kantako's laughter is both delighted and skeptical. The lack of direct evidence of the WHO's intention to spread AIDS may
indicate either that the intention did not exist or that it has been successfully hidden. Black Liberation Radio has no doubts about its
position in this dilemma. Interpretation

depends upon the construction of relationships. Events,

objects, statements do not carry their own meaning but are made to mean by the relations in
which they are involved. I am here referring to the double process of articulation that Stuart Hall identifies as central to the
making of meaning in "On Postmodernism..." The one side of articulation is a process of flexible linking
while the other is that of speaking or of disseminating the meaning that is produced by the
linkage. The fact that white civilian hospitals use Black bodies for research may be linked to medical science, in which case, the
Blackness of the bodies does not mean anything; or, on the other hand, it may be linked to the Chemical and Biological Warfare
Department's search for an "ethnic weapon," in which case, it means everything. For instance, one of the "facts" of the Tuskegee
experiment was the observation that Blacks appeared to be more susceptible than whites to syphilis, and there was interest in
discovering if this was the case, and if so, why. Articulated with and in the humane discourse of medicine, this "interest" easily leads
to the conclusion that such a physiological difference could be used to devise treatments for Blacks and, thus, minimize the relative
difference in the health of Blacks and whites. However, when this is articulated with the facts that "health differences" between
whites and Blacks are increasing, not decreasing-the differential spread of AIDS is joined, for example, by differences in life
expectancy, infant mortality, and hypertension-and when these linked "facts" are articulated within a knowledge of genocidal
strategy, the original "fact" means something very different. Facts

never exist independently or in isolation but

rather in articulation with others. Their very facticity is a function and product of their
discursive relations. Reusing them, therefore, involves disarticulating them from one set of
relations and rearticulating them into another. They are never simply inert, like pebbles on a
beach, waiting to be picked up by whoever finds them first. While no fact has any essential
existence or meaning of its own, it always has the potential for dis- and rearticulation.
Evaluating a fact's significance, which always involves assessing both how much it matters and
what it means, is, thus, a matter of evaluating its potential articulations, their social location and
pattern of interests, and their predicted or interpreted effectivity. The constitution of a historical
fact is an articulation. Stealing facts, therefore, involves disarticulation.

Information is not neutral it has been used to oppress communities

for decades our critique is key to challenge the dominant system
Cyril 15 poet, activist, co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice
(Malkia Amala Cyril, April 2015, Black America's State of Surveillance, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance), acui

Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by

Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mothers
visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white
civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for
centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. Its time for
journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are
targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to
repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished
underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies,
law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet
legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance . Concerned advocates see mass
surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the

For targeted
communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate
surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialects
inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime.

in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a
recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally

Predictive policing, also known as Total

Information Awareness, is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to
preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is
deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In a racially
discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of
reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the
New Jim Crowa de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police
practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more
as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York
will give to every member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago.

City, the predictive policing approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner

predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling

indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices . As local law enforcement agencies
was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights,

increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data
trends. Police departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be
disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national
system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on
the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive
cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspects
cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct
routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use
fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic
Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation of observed behavior

As
anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a federal
or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true . Predictive policing
doesnt just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized
an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom
turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of
fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles
shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in
America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the
issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the
invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance
reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism.

technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to
view charitable donations by Muslims as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and
beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims. At
the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented
migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million
people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities.

Black people alone

represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in
slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of
greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more
likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a
system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on
millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants . As
surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies
today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell
the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism . Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, its a sexier read. To me,
freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too.

Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial
hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, Everything we see is a shadow cast
by that which we do not see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked
deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible.

We can help black lives matter by

ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people
like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers . Together, we can
change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by
ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can
change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that aint been
heard yet. Lets birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century
create equity and justice for allso all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow
surveillance state exists no more.
But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century.

Genealogy requires us to engage with the impossibility and

unknowability of the past thats crucial to an ethical relationship
with the present
Kokontis 11 (Kate Menninger, Ph.D. in Performance Studies from University of California,
Berkeley. Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in
the American racial state (2011), UC Berkeley)
Through these analyses, I posit that the three works in question constitute a heated dialogue in which the political ramifications of

By attending to the
differences in approach across these works, I develop a polyvalent definition of genealogy, arguing that
the political and theoretical implications and differences of each approach hinge on several
interlinked things. First, they hinge on whether slavery is historicized as the cornerstone of an essentially racist and unethical
genealogical practices and the perceived ontology of contemporary American blackness are at stake.

state, or an aberration within an America that is essentially democratic in its conception and essence, if deeply flawed in its
practices; and consequently, whether the project espouses an investment in the assimilation of African Americans into a normative,
middle-class American dream of progress.24 However, the works in which slavery is figured as an aberration lean heavily, if
implicitly, on deep-seated black Christian narratives that promise a telos of redemption in the form of racial justice and harmony;
thus, Hartmans work, which emplots slavery as constitutive and ongoing, confronts and rebuts a long intellectual and theological
tradition that chooses America.25 This confrontation correlates with the quest for certainty, which manifests in the African
American Exodus narrative as a deep faith in Gods alliance with enslaved black Americans and their progeny as well as the
inevitability of their ultimate redemption in the Promised Land of the future. But this quest for certainty seems to be displaced, in
more secular contemporary African American performative returns, by faith in legitimate scholarly or empirical methods to reveal

of each approach
hinge on how deep the belief is in the possibilities of empirical access to, and certainty about, the
ancestral past for purposes of rewriting the narratives of impossibility and loss that
emerge from the rupture of the Middle Passage, they also hinge on the faith each author has for
redemptive and implicitly theological teleology. This question, in turn, folds into the way that the
a hitherto unknowable past and thus to present the potential to discern it. Thus, secondly, if the implications

knowability of the past and inevitability (and thus knowability) of the future are conceived 24
This distinction might also be articulated as a disjuncture between ways of conceiving of
slaverys relationship to temporality: the aberration view of slavery I describe tends to conceive of slavery as an
historically discrete event, while the cornerstone view tends to articulate it as a temporally fluid
paradigm that bleeds into the present in various psychic and socio-political-economic structures
to circumscribe black life. 25 See Glaude 2000 pgs 97-98 and 164-65. I suggest that Hartman may well see this
choice as being one between American hegemony and the well-being of actual black Americans.
29 in each project. The three works diverge with respect to how genealogy, a means of furnishing evidence and filling gaping blanks,
is construed: as a mechanism to facilitate successful reconstruction, or a processual investigation that points to the fundamental but
generative nature of impossibility and loss. I develop my discussion of this divergence into definitions of genealogy as an object and
genealogy as a process. Ultimately I argue that the projects that exhibit strong conviction in certainty and knowability tend to reflect
conservative values and normative yearnings that contain some potentially antiblack undertones, while performative, critical race
studies methodologies that acknowledge and seek to render productive absence and loss and suspect notions of inevitability and
teleology altogether lean toward a more rigorous analysis of the persistence of antiblack racism, as well as of black liberation
struggle, its failings, and its urgent necessity. I demonstrate in this chapter that the

formal structural resonances

between the idea and practice of genealogy and the theoretical framework of performativity,
defined most basically as repetition with revision, help us to understand both the radical
possibilities embedded in inclusive visions of freedom and futurity and the oppressive reification
of exclusionary discourses of authenticity. These qualities in turn characterize origin myths, lending them their
seductive appeal and constitutive power in variously racialized Americans efforts to negotiate their fraught relationships to America
and the terms of their racialized marginalization, in this case antiblack racism and the legacy of slavery.26 Although as many
different approaches to genealogical projects exist as there are individuals undertaking them, nonetheless each group to which I
attend in this dissertation has a specific history of racialization that underlies and, to some degree, unifies at least, as a discourse
the efforts of individuals who identify with that subject position. Genealogical

undertakings by African-Americans
take place against the backdrop of the Middle Passage, slavery, limited access to citizenship, Jim
Crow, Civil Rights and Black Power, and systemic anti-black racism, as well as the histories of
other groups and there is a lengthy, multifaceted, and deeply entrenched history of
institutional and state-sanctioned meddling in and compromising black Americans
subjecthood: their legal and citizenship statuses; their sociallyand legally-recognized degree of
humanity. This occurs by way of law, medicine, public policy, science, and common sense,
among other arenas, and affects a multitude of issues ranging from reproductive freedom, to
the documentation of enslaved people as nameless property, to, quite simply, the powerful
collective awareness of this past all of which results in a deeply intertwined, highly
fraught relationship between blackness, the state, and genealogy projects that take
both literal and conceptual forms. These performative returns are undertaken with the goal
of being able to stake a claim that feels concrete, legitimate, and personal on ones
heritage. And place plays an important role; frequently a central objective is to establish a connection with the relevant
homeland, in this case Africa, that is often configured as a kind of return to this point of mythologized origin. In Middle
Passages, James Campbell examines a genealogy of literal journeys to Africa taken by African Americans over nearly two and a half
centuries. He argues that these

journeys illuminate African American history in two seemingly

contradictory ways. Most obviously, they highlight Africas abiding presence in black political,
intellectual, and imaginative life. Even as direct memories of the continent faded [] African Americans continued to
look to Africa, seeking in its dim outlines a clue to the meaning of their often bitter, bewildering history. Needless to say, they
discerned different things. [] Yet whatever the individual motives and aspirations, every African American has confronted the
question that Hughess contemporary, Countee Cullen, posed so eloquently in his 1925 poem Heritage: What is Africa to me? []
As paradoxical as it may sound, Africa has served historically as one of the chief terrains on which African Americans have
negotiated their relationship to American society. To put the matter more poetically, when an African American asks What is Africa
to me? he or she is also asking What is America to me? (Campbell 2006, xxiv). These journeys entail excavations of the hyphenated
space between African and American; a sustained meditation on the contemporary ramifications of the long-ago circumstances of
arrival: the process by which one/collectively has gone from being African to being American and the distance between those
categories; the distance that that particular hyphenization leaves between full and partial American-ness. Campbell illuminates the
enormous variations in African-Americans visions of Africa, which are usually directly correlative to their visions of their own and
their fellow African-Americans role and possibilities in the present and future as Americans.

Other Method Cards

We conduct guerilla raids on institutions of power
Fiske 96 (John Fiske, Spring 1996, Black Bodies of Knowledge: Notes on an Effective History, Cultural Critique No. 33 p. 193), acui
The differential power of competing knowledge systems is determined partly by the social
evaluation of their epistemological structure, logo-rationalism versus oral "logic"; partly by their material instrumentality,
logo-rationalism having more immediate, visible, and measurable effects; partly by the social, economic, and political power of the social formation that
uses them; and partly by their access to technology and institutions. Depriving

a social formation of knowledge involves

limiting access to technology and institutions. The fact that the socially weak are denied equal
access to society's technologies and "institutions of truth" does not mean, however, that they are
totally excluded from them. The Rodney King case demonstrates that video technology can be used to circulate a truth involving the
weak; Black Liberation Radio does much the same with radio technology. As knowledge has to be stored and circulated for
its power to be realized, it is inherently vulnerable to guerrilla raids, much as a raid upon an
armory would equip those whom the weapons were intended to subdue. The practice of effective
history involves not only the recovery of excluded or overlooked materials but also guerrilla
raids upon the dominant knowledge system; both the archive and the armory are valuable targets for the guerrilla.

Off Case

CP

Perm
Purely legalistic solutions fail to address the fundamental narrative of
deviance
Cunningham and Browning 4 Chair of Department of Sociology at Brandeis University, Ph.D. in Sociology from
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializes in the legacy of racial contention and Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University, respectively,
(David Cunningham and Barb Browning, September 2004, The Emergence of Worthy Targets: Official Frames and Deviance Narratives within the
FBI, Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No.3, p. 348 350), acui

official
frames emerging from within policing agencies have tangible consequences for those perceived
as challengers to the status quo. Noakes (1998) importantly notes that such power-holding agencies are "active
signifying agents engaged in the construction and maintenance of official frames," and we use
the case of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) counterintelligence program
(COINTELPRO) against the New Left between 1968 and 1971 to show how intraagency processes served to constitute
and reproduce these frames as bases for action. Specifically, our analysis of the FBI demonstrates how official frames are negotiated and
acted upon within power-holding organizations. To the extent that they are employed to maintain the political status quo, these official frames contain
implicit or explicit narratives of deviance that serve to demonize actors and organizations
engaged in counter-hegemonic activities. But these frames, even when explicitly articulated by
visible authorities, are not static, nor do they necessarily translate directly into predictable forms
of action, repressive or otherwise. The key is that the frames are constructed and negotiated
within the repressing agency and shaped by the specific interests and motivations of
organizational actors, which in turn are tied to the structure of the organization itself. Focusing on these
While recent studies (Noakes, 2000; Zuo and Benford, 1995) have examined how these frames are constructed and promoted, we extend this work to analyze how

intra-organizational processes moves us beyond the assumption of a simple relationship between frame construction and subsequent action, thereby strengthening our

Central to such processes is the construction of

deviance narratives within organizations. Studies of institutions whose functions include the
formal regulation of deviance have long described the classificatory schemes, or "typifications,"
employed by organizational actors to carry out institutionally defined ends (Bowditch, 1993; Frohmann, 1991).
These schemes enable workers to routinize their activities to manage outcomes by reducing
uncertainty, thereby maximizing their achievement of organizationally defined goals . In the case of
understanding of how official frames operate to reproduce the status quo.

policing agencies, such strategies have significant implications both for workers (whose upward mobility within the organization is often a function of their performance) as well
as for those consequently targeted as criminal or otherwise deviant (Waegel, 1981). In the following sections, we analyze how such intra-organizational processes played out
within the particular case of the FBI's COINTELPROs. Following Wilson's (1978) study of the FBI's investigative mission, we assert that the bureau's counterintelligence tasks
were shaped by the organizational priorities and procedures defined by its central actors, whose established mandates created incentives for agents to successfully carry out this

The ability to reproduce centrally defined official frames was especially important in
counterintelligence work, where, in contrast with criminal investigations that focused on perpetrators of specific criminal acts, agents
needed to identify a steady stream of suspects that matched often-nebulous classes of subversive
threats. Here, we demonstrate how the hierarchical structure of the bureau created a context where field
agents subject to organizational controls were "encouraged" to validate the countersubversive
frames constructed by central actors within the FBI. In the absence of political activity (subversive or otherwise) by New Left targets,
work.

field agents were able to reproduce the frame by drawing upon observable signals of deviance that could serve as a basis to act against a wide range of New Left adherents. In

we examine the structure of the FBI itself to understand the goals and functioning of its
COINTELPROs, and then illustrate the emergence of two central official frames-subversion and
hate-that shaped the selection of COINTELPRO targets and actions. Finally, and most
important, we demonstrate that the looming threat of organizational sanctions provided
incentives for agents in the field to reproduce these official frames. Using the case of the FBI's counterintelligence
the next section,

activities against the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), we show how field agents drew upon particular culturally resonant signals of deviance to
demonize and subsequently act against SDS members even in the absence of threatening political activity.

Kritiks

Cap K
Cap and race are intertwined but not causal perm is best
Cunningham and Browning 4 Chair of Department of Sociology at Brandeis University, Ph.D. in Sociology from
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializes in the legacy of racial contention and Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University, respectively,
(David Cunningham and Barb Browning, September 2004, The Emergence of Worthy Targets: Official Frames and Deviance Narratives within the
FBI, Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No.3, p. 356 - 357), acui

This hate-based frame was employed again 3 years later against individuals and organizations
tied to the civil rights and black power movements. As discussed above, various members of the
civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., had been surveilled and harassed since
the 1950s, though such actions were always justified within the bureau's traditional
communist/subversiveness frame. In this sense, the civil rights movement had been
characterized within the FBI as threatening to the status quo through its ostensible
connections to communist interests, which in the absence of tangible evidence,
was justified through a racist assumption that intellectually deficient black
activists would be easily manipulable by the presumably more savvy Communist
Party (O'Reilly, 1989; Powers, 1987:324). Civil rights activity, therefore, became subversive through its susceptibility to
exploitation by established subversive (e.g., communist) threats. The framing of black activists as subversive shifted considerably

individuals
and groups tied to the civil rights and black power movements were now worthy
counterintelligence targets through their ostensible engagement in, or advocacy of, "hate"
activities. As with the treatment of white hate groups after 1964, no mention was made of communist connections; instead,
with the initiation of COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist/Hate Groups in 1967. Consistent with the program's title,

members of the movement were targeted "to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder" due to their "pernicious
background,... duplicity, and devious maneuvers" (FBI Memo from Director to 23 field offices, 8/25/67). Note the continued role of
race in the narrative driving this particular frame. While

black activist threats no longer required connections

to a larger communist conspiracy, the same assumptions about black susceptibility were at
work. Rather than racial deficiencies making black activists easily manipulated by outside
agitators, such weaknesses played into their personal motivations for political activity, which
inevitably drove their actions in illegal or immoral directions. Such ideas were reproduced by
field agents' characterizations of "Negroes" in reports to the directorate . One agent derided the "animal
reactions" of Black Panther Party members with regard to sex (FBI Memo from Director to Boston, 7/9/69), and another SAC
similarly felt that the bureau needed to account for the fact that foremost in the militant Negro's mind are sex and money. The first is
often promiscuous and frequently freely shared. White

moral standards do not apply among this type of

Negro. You don't embarrass many Negroes by advertising their sexual activity or loose morals.
Money is not as freely shared and any Negro organization which attracts the black nationalist
revolutionary will fail sooner or later because the members and leaders will as quickly seek
power over and steal from each other as they will from Caucasians. The temptation to seize
power and thus get control of the money and the other perquisites of leadership will always be
strong, and thus offers a continuing opportunity to sow seeds of distrust and suspicion (FBI Memo
from San Francisco to Director, 4/3/68) These assumptions, reflecting the pervasive culture of racism
within the Bureau,8 provided a context within which political organization by nonwhites
effectively constituted subversion, and race could thereby serve as a key variable defining
"worthy" targets.

Perm do bothforcing anti-capitalist movements to engage in racial

politics solves best.
West 88an American philosopher, academic, activist, author, public intellectual, and
prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. (Cornel, TOWARD A SOCIALIST

THEORY OF RACISM, Race and Ethnicity, http://race.eserver.org/toward-a-theory-ofracism.html)//FJ

It should be apparent that racist

practices directed against black, brown, yellow, and red people are an
integral element of U. S. history, including present day American culture and society. This means not simply that
Americans have inherited racist attitudes and prejudices, but, more importantly, that institutional forms of racism are embedded in
American society in both visible and invisible ways. These institutional forms exist not only in remnants of de jure job, housing, and
educational discrimination and political gerrymandering. They also manifest themselves in a de facto labor market segmentation,
produced by the exclusion of large numbers of peoples of color from the socioeconomic mainstream. (This exclusion results from
limited educational opportunities, devastated families, a disproportionate presence in the prison population, and widespread police
brutality. ) It

also should be evident that past Marxist conceptions of racism have often
prevented U. S. socialist movements from engaging in antiracist activity in a
serious and consistent manner. In addition, black suspicion of white-dominated political
movements (no matter how progressive) as well as the distance between these movements and the daily
experiences of peoples of color have made it even more difficult to fight racism effectively .
Furthermore, the disproportionate white middle-class composition of contemporary democratic
socialist organizations creates cultural barriers to the participation by peoples of color. Yet this very
participation is a vital precondition for greater white sensitivity to antiracist struggle and to white acknowledgment of just how
crucial antiracist struggle is to the U. S. socialist movement. Progressive

organizations often find themselves going

around in a vicious circle. Even when they have a great interest in antiracist struggle , they are
unable to attract a critical mass of people of color because of their current predominately white racial
and cultural composition. These organizations are then stereotyped as lily white, and significant numbers of people of color
refuse to join. The only effective way the contemporary democratic socialist movement can break
out of this circle (and it is possible because the bulk of democratic socialists are among the least racist of Americans) is to
be sensitized to the critical importance of antiracist struggles. This conscientization cannot
take place either by reinforcing agonized white consciences by means of guilt, nor by presenting another grand theoretical analysis
with no practical implications. The former breeds psychological paralysis [inaction] among white progressives, which is
unproductive for all of us; the latter yields important discussions but often at the expense of concrete political engagement. Rather

what is needed is more widespread participation by predominantly white democratic socialist

organizations in antiracist struggles--whether those struggles be for the political, economic, and cultural
empowerment of Latinos, blacks, Asians, and Native Americans or antiimperialist struggles
against U.S. support for oppressive regimes in South Africa, Chile, the Philippines, and the occupied West Bank. A major focus on
antiracist coalition work will not only lead democratic socialists to act upon their belief in genuine individuality and radical

Bonds
of trust can be created only within concrete contexts of struggle. This interracial interaction
guarantees neither love nor friendship. Yet it can yield more understanding and the realization of two
overlapping goals-- democratic socialism and antiracism. While engaging in antiracist struggles, democratic socialists
democracy for people around the world; it also will put socialists in daily contact with peoples of color in common struggle.

can also enter into a dialogue on the power relationships and misconceptions that often emerge in multiracial movements for social
justice in a racist society. Honest and trusting coalition

work can help socialists unlearn Eurocentrism in a

self-critical manner and can also demystify the motivations of white progressives in the
movement for social justice. We must frankly acknowledge that a democratic socialist society will not necessarily
eradicate racism. Yet a democratic socialist society is the best hope for alleviating and minimizing racism, particularly institutional
forms of racism. This conclusion depends on a candid evaluation that guards against utopian self-deception. But it also
acknowledges the deep moral commitment on the part of democratic socialists of all races to the dignity of all individuals and
peoples--a commitment that impels us to fight for a more libertarian and egalitarian society. Therefore

concrete
antiracist struggle is both an ethical imperative and political necessity for
democratic socialists. It is even more urgent as once again racist policies and Third World intervention become more
acceptable to many Americans. A more effective democratic socialist movement engaged in antiracist and antiimperialist struggle
can help turn the tide. It depends on how well we understand the past and present, how courageously we act, and how true we
remain to our democratic socialist ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Capitalism cant account for the oppression experience by the black

body.
Woods 12Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime & Justice Studies, University
of Massachusetts (Tryon P., Surrogate selves: notes on anti-trafficking and anti-blackness,
Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, Social Identities, 2013 Vol. 19, No. 1, pg. 129,
EBSCOHost)//FJ
Wilderson shows that the

black subject manifests an ontological disarticulation of Marxian

categories work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony. In his terms, the result is a radical incoherence
for the assumptive logic of left critiques of human trafficking and other features of twenty-first century global
capitalism: the black subject implies a scandal (Wilderson, 2003, p. 225). The fungibility and social death of
blackness, essential to the structure of the modern world, distinguishes the fundamental deracination of the
enslaved even from the displacement and oppression of the colonized , whose status obtains in a network
of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things (Sexton, 2010a, p. 14). We need to
consider the contemporary anti-trafficking and anti-slavery campaigns (and more broadly, even, globalization itself)
through the analytic lens of black existence and beyond the assumptive logic of
exploitation via the intensification of work and the extraction of surplus value.

Fore-fronting capitalism relegates issues of race to the background.

Ross 2kAssc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich 2000
Professor of English (Marlon, Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW
LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000;
pp.827-850.)
Although in his contribution Eric Lott targets Professor Michaels's comments and his own recent feud with Timothy Brennan (who
unfortunately is not included in this volume) rather than Ken's argument, what Eric says about "left

and liberal
fundamentalists" who "simply and somewhat penitently" urge us to "'go back to class'" could also be directed at
Ken's conclusion. Ken writes, "Crafting a political left that does not merely reflect existing racial divisions
starts with the relatively mundane proposition that it is possible to make a persuasive appeal to the given interests of working and
unemployed women and men, regardless of race, in support of a program for economic justice." On this one, I side with Eric, rather
than Tim and Ken. Standing on the left depends on whose left side we're talking about. My left might be your right and vice versa,
because it depends on what direction we're facing, and what direction depends on which identities we're assuming and affirming.
Eric adds, "Even in less dismissive [than Tim's] accounts of new social movements based not on class but on identities formed by
histories of injustice, there is a striking a priori sense of voluntarism about the investment in this cause or that movement or the
other issue--as though determining the most fundamental issue were a matter of the writer's strength of feeling rather than a studied
or analytical sense of the ever-unstable balance of forces in a hegemonic bloc at a given moment." I agree, but I'll risk mangling what
Eric says by putting it more crassly. Touting

class or "economic justice" as the fundamental stance for left

identity is just another way of telling everybody else to shut up so I can be heard above the fray .
Because of the force of "identity politics," a leftist white person would be leery of claiming to
lead Blacks toward the promised land, a leftist straight man leery of claiming to lead women or
queers, but, for a number of complex rationalizations, we in the middle class (where all of us writing
here currently reside) still have few qualms about volunteering to lead, at least theoretically, the
working class toward "economic justice ." What Eric calls here "left fundamentalism," I'd call, at the risk of
sounding harsh, left paternalism. Of the big identity groups articulated through "identity politics,"
economic class [End Page 840] remains the only identity where a straight white middleclass man can still feel comfortable claiming himself a leading political voice , and thus
he may sometimes overcompensate by screaming that this is the only identity that really matters--which is the same as claiming that
class is beyond identity.

Politics

K of Politics
Focus on hyper-commercialized political spectacle effaces the
complexity of social problems and sanctions ongoing violence
Karlberg 6 (Michael, Department of Communication at Western Washington University.
Western Liberal Democracy as New World Order? (2006), The Bahai World,
http://www.bahai.org/documents/essays/karlberg-dr-michael/western-liberal-democracynew-world-order)
Perspective Exclusion and Issue Reduction In addition to the problem of money, political

competition does not

provide an effective way to understand and solve complex problems because it reduces the
diversity of perspectives and voices in decision-making processes. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, political competition yields an adversarial model of debate which generally defaults to the premise that if one perspective is
right then another perspective must be wrong. In

theory, the most enlightened or informed perspective

prevails. This assumes that complex issues can adequately be understood from a single
perspective. However, an adequate grasp of most complex issues requires consideration of
multiple, often complementary, perspectives. Complex issues tend to be multifacetedlike many-sided objects that
must be viewed from different angles in order to be fully seen and understood. Different perspectives therefore reveal different facets
of complex issues. Maximum

understanding emerges through the careful consideration of as many facets as

competition militates against this process because it assumes the oppositional
rather than the potentially complementary character of diverse views. One cannot gain political capital at
possible. Political

the expense of ones opponent unless there is a winner and a loser. As a result, political competition reduces complex issues into

This
problem is exacerbated by the hyper-commercialized media sectors that are emerging in most
Western societiesproducts of the political economy discussed above. These are driven by the logic of
manufacturing mass audiences in order to sell them to advertisers. The cheapest, and therefore
most profitable, way to manufacture a mass audience is through the construction of spectacle
including partisan political spectacle. Political coverage is thus reduced to a formula of
sound-bite politics in which emotionally charged sloganeering becomes the ticket into the public
sphere. As a result, simplistic political mantras echo throughout the public sphere, distorting the
complex nature of the issues at hand, constraining public perceptions, and aggravating partisan
divisions. In such a climate, it is virtually impossible to solve complex, multidimensional, social, and environmental problems. A closely related consequence of this
competitive model is the exclusion and inhibition of diverse voices who avoid or withdraw from the
arena of public service because of its simplistic and hostile atmosphere. Such an atmosphere does not
binary oppositions in which only one perspective can prevail. This is what Blondel calls the curse of oversimplification.25

attract individuals who, by nature or nurture or some combination of the two, are neither inclined toward nor comfortable with
simplistic adversarial debateeven though they may have important contributions to offer. Partisan mudslinging aside, adversarial
debate does not elicit the best reasoning even among the most confident individuals. Such conditions can entirely silence less
confident and less aggressiveor simply more thoughtful and caringindividuals.

Partisan politics short-term focus cant do justice to the gratuitous,

temporal violence of antiblackness
Karlberg 6 (Michael, Department of Communication at Western Washington University.
Western Liberal Democracy as New World Order? (2006), The Bahai World,
http://www.bahai.org/documents/essays/karlberg-dr-michael/western-liberal-democracynew-world-order)

The Time-Space Problem Partisan

politics is also inherently incapable of addressing problems

across time and space. Complex social and environmental issues generally require longterm planning and commitment. Competitive political systems, however, are inherently
constrained by short-term planning horizons. In order to gain and maintain power, political
entrepreneurs must cater to the immediate interests of their constituents so that visible results
can be realized within relatively frequent election cycles. Even when long-term political
commitments are made out of principle by one candidate or party, continuity is often
compromised by succeeding candidates or parties who dismantle or fail to enforce the programs
of their predecessors in order to distance themselves from policies they were previously
compelled to oppose on the campaign trail or as the voice of opposition. The focus of campaigns and
political parties on constituencies-in-the-present therefore undermines commitment to the interests of future generations.
Prominent among the interests of future generations is environmental sustainability. As we degrade our environment today, we
impoverish future generations. Many

social problems, from poverty to crime to drug dependency to domestic abuse, also
require long-term strategies and commitments. Sustained investments in education, the strengthening of families,
the creation of economic opportunities, the cultivation of ethical codes and moral values, and other approaches that yield results
across generations, are required. Yet the

competitive pressure to demonstrate visible actions within

frequent election cycles tends to lead instead toward investments in things like new prisons and
detention centers to hide the growing social underclass in many countries; new mega-schools to warehouse
increasingly alienated and anonymous children and youth; and new shopping malls to distract citizens with short-term material
enticements.

A ranked priorities political model delegitimizes minority rights and

skews decision-making
Ruby-Sachs 11 (Emma, studied law at the University of Toronto and the University of
Chicago. Ranking the Issues: Gay Rights in an Economic Crisis (5/25/11), Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emma-rubysachs/ranking-the-issues-gay-ri_b_146023.html)
On Friday, the Washington Times reported that Barack Obama will be waiting until 2010 to push for the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

At
first brush it seems like smart politics: avoid a Clintonesque botch and give yourself some time
to get support before taking on the gay issues. In fact, as a person as well as a lesbian, I find myself worrying more
about health care and the economy than the ability of LGBT people to serve openly in the military. But just how should we
be ranking identity politics in this grab bag moment of crisis and transition? The classic
approach to politics is to rank priorities and measure the finite bowl of political capital. If
Obama pushes hard on a green new deal, he likely won't have much left for universal health
care. If he backs off of serious economic regulation, then he might get more support for social
programs from Republicans. Because gay civil rights struggles affect fewer individuals and relate
to less quantifiable harms, it's hard to justify putting them at the top of the list. The
alternative is to reject the ranked priorities political model altogether. There is little evidence
that sway and support is finite in the American political system. Political capital relates to the
actions of the leader, yes, but can be infinitely large or non-existent at any point in time. In some
ways, the more you get done, the more the bowl of capital swells. Ranking America's
problems to conserve political influence is a narrow minded approach to solving
this crisis. Putting banks at the top of the list avoids the plight of large employers (like car companies - as much as we love to
Obama staffers say the delay is necessary to allow for consensus building. The move raises a number of questions and concerns.

hate their executives). Sending health care and other social programs to second or third place, leaves those immediately affected by
the crisis with nothing to fall back on. Finally, ignoring

the disenfranchisement of a segment of the

population breeds discontent, encourages protest, boycotts (a definite harm in this economy) and
violence. It divides families (especially those who are still unable to sponsor their partner into the United States), imposes higher

tax burdens on gay couples, denies benefits to gay spouses in many employment situations and polarizes social conservatives and
social liberals in a time when consensus is essential. The first years of the Obama presidency cannot be about determining who and
what matters and who and what doesn't. There should be no ranking of political promises and political objectives. As President of
the United States, we expect Obama to be able to multitask. As LGBT people, we should not stop fighting for the end of DADT, but
also the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and the implementation of hate crime legislation that recognizes LGBT victims.
Identity politics do not need to fall to the back burner just because times are tough. Working towards full LGBT rights should, and
hopefully will, remain a priority for all of us.